Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  He escaped that way after the Eagles’ last exhibition game that summer, a Thursday night game, taking off with a group of his buddies for a long Labor Day weekend at the beach. Andre felt good about having lasted through the summer, and he spent the weekend convincing himself that he should be happy with that.

  Come Monday morning, he saw Harry standing outside the locker room and, trying to postpone fate, slipped silently across the hall hoping not to be seen. Harry said nothing. Next he went to his locker, and his things were still there, everything as he had left it after the game. His name tag, a slip of cardboard with WATERS#20 scrawled on it, was still in place on top. Moving tentatively, he undressed and pulled on sweats for that morning’s weight-lifting session. As he walked into the weight room, tortured with anxiety, he approached strength coach Tim Jorgensen.

  “Tim, I don’t want to get started lifting weights if I ain’t made this team,” Andre said. “How do I know if I made the team?”

  “Aren’t you dressed?” asked Jorgensen.

  Andre nodded.

  “Did anybody say anything to you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then go lift weights,” Jorgensen said. “Until somebody says something to you, you’re on the team.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be in here lifting weights and have somebody come in and pull me out of there in front of everybody,” pleaded Andre.

  Jorgensen grinned. “Go ahead in there, kid. You’re all right.”

  None of the Eagles’ draft picks that year amounted to the kind of football player Andre Waters would become over the next eight years. Wide receiver Kenny Jackson, their number-one pick, hung on in the NFL for a decade, primarily as a backup receiver and special teams tackler. Cooper lasted for three seasons, as did placekicker Paul McFadden, but all twelve of the draft picks deposited in West Chester that summer by the Pigskin Sluice are well into Life after Football eight years on, as Andre camps down in his Tampa condominium waiting for the Eagles to come to terms on what is likely to be his last contract, the one he hopes will finally pay him what he deserves.

  Fat chance.

  The peculiarities of the NFL’s salary structure ensure against it. Inside pro football, the laws of supply and demand get distorted like a three-hundred-pound tackle in a fun-house mirror. For instance, Siran Stacy, the Eagles’ top draft pick in ’92, who will conclude this season without once carrying the ball in a regular season game and get cut from the team the following summer, will make more money than Andre, one of the team’s established veterans, a starter for six consecutive seasons, one of the top tacklers in team history, a player easily ranking among the top-ten safeties in pro football.

  That’s because the Sluice not only selects out blue-chip talent for the pros, it determines the baseline value of a football player before he ever plays a down of pro ball. To sign first-rounder Kenny Jackson in ’84, the Eagles gave him a $1.5 million bonus and a four-year contract with a first-year salary of $175,000 and an ’87 salary of $300,000. As an unknown free agent, Andre began life in the NFL that same summer grateful to sign for the NFL’s minimum wage of $60,000. Of course, Kenny had been a star receiver at Penn State and was a much brighter prospect than Andre, so his potential value was greater. The problem is that no matter how mediocre Kenny turned out to be, and how terrific Andre turned out to be, they would continue to negotiate from the same baseline salary—Kenny, $175,000; Andre, $60,000. Kenny the millionaire played in eleven games and caught twenty-eight passes in his rookie season and scored one touchdown. Andre played in all sixteen games, made twenty-two tackles, and also scored a touchdown—a thrilling eighty-nine-yard kickoff return. Kenny got a 14 percent salary increase the following year, bumping his salary to $200,000. Andre got a 16 percent increase and collected $70,000.

  It took Buddy to bring out the full potential in the kid from Pahokee. The new coach and Andre (whom teammates dubbed “the Dré Master”) were made for each other. Andre’s Pahokee tough-guy reputation suited Buddy perfectly. “I’m an animal, I admit it,” Andre told one reporter. “If people are afraid of me, that’s good.” He started all sixteen games in ’86, playing shoulder to shoulder with players earning five to ten times his $85,000 salary and has held on to the starting job ever since.

  He finished the ’91 season as the team’s leading tackler for the fourth consecutive year and was named first-team all-NFC strong safety by UPI. Statistically, Andre had a better year than the Bears’ Shaun Gayle, who started in the Pro Bowl. His pay had grown steadily. Andre’s salary that year was $510,000, and by meeting incentive goals in his contract, he was paid $625,000, which was about what the Eagles paid Jesse Campbell, a rookie safety drafted in the second round to be groomed as an eventual successor to Andre. Campbell spent most of the season on the injured list and practice squad and would be cut early in ’92 before ever playing a down in an Eagles uniform.

  In the spring of this year, the Eagles had offered Andre a contract with a base salary in the first year of $550,000. He was insulted.

  “They could at least start with what they paid me last year,” he told his agent, Jim Solano, a local accounting professor who represented about a half-dozen Eagles players. Solano, a chubby, curlyhaired man who wore nice suits, drove an expensive foreign car, and spent most of his time baby-sitting his clients—he showed up every Thursday at the practice field with bags of candy and gum—had been through hundreds of contract negotiations with the Eagles, enough to see contract issues from both sides. He knew that the team would probably come up from the $550,000—probably to about $600,000— but he knew that number would still seem fundamentally unfair to his client.

  “Andre Waters is a very good safety,” argued Bob Wallace, the club’s lawyer and chief negotiator. “We’re willing to make him one of the top-ten best-paid safeties in the league.”

  Solano told Wallace that Andre deserved to be ranked among the top-five safeties in the game and had the stats to prove it. Besides, he told Wallace, Andre was due for a break.

  “This guy has a history,” he told Wallace, who had just joined the Eagles in ’91. “His first contract he was underpaid. Second contract he was underpaid. Third contract, fourth contract underpaid.”

  It was the old free-agent dilemma. Because Andre hadn’t been drafted, his earnings were forever stuck in a lower caste. Of course, the way the club saw it, that was the idea. The Eagles, who were no different than any other NFL team, readily admitted they were overpaying some players and underpaying others. Unfairness was central to the system. For every overpriced draft pick who flopped, there had to be an unheralded free agent who excelled. The system demanded six- and seven-figure bonuses for top draft picks, and of the team’s top twenty-four draft picks since Andre signed on in ’84, only six would be starters this year. That’s a lot of bonus money out the window. You made up the difference down the road when free agents and low-level draft picks, players like all-pros Seth Joyner (eighth round) and Clyde Simmons (ninth round) panned out. Just as the fans loved to see an unknown free agent step out to become a star, so did the club. The fact that the Eagles had gone out and discovered the inimitable Dré Master on their own would work to Andre’s detriment, and the team’s benefit, till the last game of his career.

  So Andre’s holdout is pretty much pro forma. Just as Solano predicted, the club ups its offer to $600,000 before training camp starts. Andre goes golfing in Tampa.

  He is making more than a half-million dollars a year. He has built a beautiful modern home for his mother in a swank Palm Beach development, where Willie Ola now lives alongside doctors and lawyers and other professionals (and still goes off at age fifty-seven to pick celery and corn in the fields). Andre has gotten his college degree and has saved and invested enough money, with Solano’s help, so that he will most likely never have to worry about supporting himself again— but he still feels, at least symbolically, that he hasn’t moved off the Muck.

  “I want to be traded; I’m fed up!” Andre shouts into t
he phone to a reporter one day after Byron Evans signs for $825,000. By almost any measure (except maybe Byron’s agent’s) Andre is the more valuable of the two players—more experience, more tackles—but the Eagles are still offering him $225,000 less than Evans, a fourth-round draft pick in ’87. Andre’s goal in this negotiation is to be paid with the top-five safeties in the league and on a par with his backfield partner Wes Hopkins (who will earn a $750,000 base salary this season). Andre has played as Wes’s equal or better for six full seasons now, but Hopkins was a second-round draft pick back in ’83 who made the Pro Bowl in his second year. Whenever Solano brings up the Hopkins comparison, the Eagles’ negotiators point out, “But Wes made the Pro Bowl.”

  But that was eight years ago. Andre can’t help the fact that he wasn’t elected to the Pro Bowl. He can’t help it if his menacing reputation has made him less than popular around the league—players and coaches elect the Pro Bowl team, and they let offensive players vote, too.

  Solano points out that Byron has played three years less than Andre, has also never made the Pro Bowl, and did not even become a starter until ’89, yet he has settled for hundreds of thousands more than they were offering Andre.

  Andre blows like a force-nine tropical gale, words rushing out so fast he hasn’t time to completely form them.

  “I mean it. I’m fed up! I think I’ve proved myself over the last six years. I’ve led the team in tackles over the last six years. Me and Wes were the best two safeties in the league last season. I think our stats prove it. … I mean, I know they say this is a business and you’re not supposed to take it personal, but at some point in time you have to take it personal, business when you get down to it is personal, and what they’re offering me, and the things Bob Wallace has been saying about me are degrading to me, and I do take it personal; honestly, I don’t think I want to play again in an Eagles uniform anymore.”

  Two days later, Andre signs. The Eagles up their offer by $85,000 and include another $100,000 in incentives—an additional $50,000 if Andre makes the Pro Bowl and additional dollars for tackles, interceptions, fumbles caused, fumbles recovered, and touchdowns, that could total another $50,000. He will finish this season earning $714,000, or about $100,000 less than Wes, $250,000 less than Byron, and less than half of Herschel’s salary.

  Boy, you still on the Muck.

  POOR MARK MCMILLIAN figures he’s blown it after the Rookie Show. Whose idea was this anyway?

  It’s an annual end-of-camp ritual, a chance for the poor schmucks at the low end of the roster to poke fun (supposedly with impunity) at their tormentors. Earlier in the week, the veterans had held a meeting with them to explain how the Rookie Show is supposed to go.

  “Everybody is fair game,” explained tackle Mike Golic. “Coaches, owner … even us!”

  The club rents the second floor of a local bar for the night, the doors close to the press and fans, the beer flows, and the laughs come easy and loud as the rookies entertain. The highlight of this year’s show is twelfth-round draft pick Brandon Houston’s cunning impersonation of Richie. They’ve set up the stage like an episode of “The Dating Game,” with Pumpy Tudors, a goofy little punter from Tennessee, all dolled up in a blond wig, balloon boobs and a dress, and Houston (as Kotite) playing one of three bachelors on stools separated from the prize date by a partition. He’s perched on the stool, waving an oversized cigar, doing a Texan’s best approximation of brazen Brooklynese—it isn’t so much the things Houston says as the way he says them, bragging of his sexual prowess in language punctuated by plenty of Richie’s pet phrases: “Without question!” and “Am I right?” and “Okay?” and calling everybody “kid,” until the slightly juiced audience is rolling in the aisles. Casey Weldon attempts a disastrous number, trying to lure Richie onstage for a “magic trick” that’s supposed to end up with the coach unknowingly smearing soot on his face, but Richie, of course, won’t step on stage and sends his buddy Matty, who has already seen this one (like, back when he was maybe nine), so it flops. Weldon is booed off stage.

  Next comes Mark, with professorial clipboard and pointer, in a skit poking fun at Bud Carson. Mark is a tiny (five-seven, 162 pounds) tenth-round draft pick from Alabama whom people tend to mistake in the locker room for somebody’s little brother—on Mark’s first day, Reverend Reggie had actually asked, “Who are you here with, son?” Despite his size, Mark has been impressing coaches all summer with his pilot-fish genius for staying with receivers, even though Bud Carson tells him almost every day, “You played like shit today. You’re gonna get cut.” “Don’t worry,” assures Wes Hopkins. “Bud says worse things than that to the other guys.” Chosen to play Bud now because of his diminutive size (the elderly Carson is dwarfed by the players he coaches), Mark does his best to imitate the professorial fussiness and virtual deafness of the veteran defensive coach and pokes fun at Bud’s obvious fondness for the still-missing Eric Allen, who is portrayed by one of the other rookies as an obsequious teacher’s pet. Exaggerating (but not by much) the typical evening meeting with Bud, the class tumbles comically out of control. The skit gets some laughs and polite applause, but not from Bud, whose pale complexion flushes pink— and it’s not just the beer.

  On the practice field the next morning, the defensive coach strides up to his tiny rookie cornerback and tells him he didn’t appreciate the humor.

  “You ought to work that hard at playing football if you expect to make this team,” he says.

  Mark is dismayed. Just a couple days earlier, he had seen a newspaper story in which Bud was quoted as saying “Mark McMillian is the best cover man I’ve ever seen.” He was starting to think things were looking up.

  “Man, don’t worry so much,” counsels Mark’s new buddy, the returned Andre Waters. “At least you was drafted.”

  ALL DAY THURSDAY, August 27, Richie’s mother-in-law, Stella, had been complaining about the heat. It was a disgustingly damp late summer day. She and Liz and Alexandra had driven down from Staten Island, as they always did, for the Eagles’ game that night, the team’s final preseason game. But it was so unpleasant outside the air-conditioning that Liz understood when her mother said she didn’t want to go this time.

  Liz left the TV on in the den, tuned to channel 3—Stella hated fooling with the remote control—and as she left the house she shouted upstairs, where her mother was lying down, “I’ll call you after the game. Make sure you get something to eat.”

  The team loses, which is no big deal, since the exhibitions are more a testing ground for personnel than a contest. Richie has a few tough decisions to make, so he’s preoccupied, as usual. It has been a rough summer for him. His parents, Eddie and Alice, have been terribly ill now for months. Richie has flown down to Miami four times this summer, and every time he’s just jumped in a cab at the airport and gone straight to the hospital. Out on the practice field, he’s often off to one side talking intently on his portable phone, nodding his bald head slowly, gesturing with the cigar in one hand as he speaks. The Pack assumes he’s cooking up some kind of deal for a big-name defensive lineman, but it’s just Mummy checking with Eddie for an update.

  Now looms the final cuts, decisions Richie hates to make. Among other things, it looks like he is going to have to cut Jesse Campbell, his second-round pick the previous season. Bud doesn’t like the way Campbell moves on the practice field, and he really wants to keep the little cornerback—nice kid—McMillian.

  Richie is always trying to placate Bud, but the old man is all knotted up like a fist. Bud gets like this before every season. How’s he supposed to win football games with this defensive line? He’s lost a Pro Bowl tackle (Jerome), veteran starter Mike Pitts is out with a bad back, and second-year tackle Andy Harmon, who’s being thrown in over his head as it is, has a broken hand. His middle linebacker has only been in camp a little more than a week, and his Pro Bowl cornerback is still unsigned. And they’re opening against the Saints in just over a week! Richie, of course, always sees the glass half-f
ull. But he respects Bud, and he heeds him. So the defensive coordinator’s worries become Richie’s worries. He’s monitoring frantic efforts to land a solid defensive lineman, accepting Harry’s assurance that a deal with Eric Allen is close. On his own side of the ball, he’s checking the waiver wire for a backup tight end (there’s little hope of Keith Jackson’s returning anytime soon)….

  Still, this is family night. The plan is usually to head out for a late dinner together with Liz and Alexandra, give it a rest for a few hours.

  But Liz has changed her mind.

  “I’ve been calling, but there’s no answer at home.”

  “Maybe she turned off the phone,” says Richie.

  Liz said she didn’t think her mom would do that. She knew it was probably silly, but she was worried. Stella hadn’t been feeling well all day.

  “Let’s just go home and check on her,” she says.

  So they cruise in Richie’s Caddy across the Whitman Bridge and back home to Mt. Laurel. The house is dark. When they come in the front door the only light they see is the TV still on in the family room. Stella isn’t in there.

  “Why would she leave the TV on?” says Liz.

  “Stella!” booms Richie’s big voice.

  No answer.

  He walks upstairs, still calling, “Stella!”

  She lies clothed and perfectly still on the bed.

  “Stella?”

  No answer.