by Mark Bowden
“Stella!”
Richie goes over to her and lays his hand on her wrist. It’s cool to the touch.
“Oh, my God. Stella!” he shouts.
Then, downstairs, Liz hears him bellow, “Call 911!”
7
HAMMER TIME!
Three days later, the day after his mother-in-law is laid to rest, Richie is back at work, getting his team ready for the Saints in the season opener.
He’s edgy.
When one of the local TV stations decides to snoop on practice by pulling its van up to the tarp-draped fence, setting its camera on top of the van, and shooting down, the coach explodes.
“Get the fuck outta heeyaah!” he says, red-faced with rage, chasing the crew off the lot, sending renewed ripples of indignation through the Pack, prompting protests from the local NBC affiliate— and stirring things up for the PR types upstairs.
Can’t we be a touch more diplomatic about these things, Rich?
But Coach is adamant. His turf is his turf. Hey, what do these guys want from him? Richie makes time to answer questions from the Pack after every game and every fucking weekday in his office after practice. Still, Richie is unpopular with the Pack. Oh, how they pine for Buddy’s old bite. Richie, by comparison, is a compendium of coaching banalities: The Saints are an excellent football team, without question, it’ll be a tough football game, and so on. Every once in a while, with the one or two hounds he feels he can trust, Richie will drop his professional reserve—We’re off the record now, right? Completely off?—and then disappointingly deliver exactly the same sentiment: This is a great football team we’re playing … you hear what I’m saying?
He never lets down his guard, never lets the hounds get a whiff of doubt, concern, or subtlety. The secret of winning over the Pack, of course, is to occasionally and selectively allow them a peek behind the tarp, let them at least feel like insiders. Richie doesn’t have time for it. He can’t understand their need to keep trying.
He’s still fuming in his Caddy later that week, driving out the Schuylkill Expressway to tape the first of his weekly in-season TV shows. The car is about the only place you can get him to sit still for a few minutes to talk about himself.
“I’m a friendly person,” he says, defensively. “My best friends are cabdrivers, waiters, waitresses, busboys … and I try to help people and everything, but what I can’t stand is when somebody has a big set of balls and pushes all the time.”
Coach Uptight is off and running in his second season, and nothing, not Stella’s sudden death, not the annoyance of pushy TV crews, nothing is going to throw him off stride. Richie prides himself on this. If you’re sick, if somebody dies, if you win, if you lose—whatever— you don’t break stride. He has often told with pride the story of how, four or five years back as an assistant with the Jets, he had repeatedly promised his daughter that he would attend her school play, only to get stuck with some blocking-scheme crisis or other on the appointed evening and miss it. “She took it like a trooper, and she was only eight or nine!” he would say, proud Papa—until someone pointed out, Gee, Richie, that’s just an awful thing to have done to your kid! So he dropped that anecdote from his repertoire. But, hey, this is the NFL. Richie can’t help it if people don’t understand the pressures the way Liz and Alexandra do.
The season is a race down a track with sixteen hurdles. Each game on the schedule is a jump. Like all good hurdlers, the coach has the steps between each one counted—Monday, review game tapes and critique; Tuesday, game plan (players off), first-down and seconddown plays; Wednesday, introduce players to first- and second-down game plan, work up third-down and plus-twenty plays (plays twenty yards or less from the opponent’s goal line); Thursday, major team practice sessions, running through the game plan (drive out and tape “The Rich Kotite Show”); Friday, light practice and more classroom work, drilling home the plan; Saturday, walk-through in the morning and either travel or sequester the team in a New Jersey hotel to prepare for: Sunday, game. The idea is to maintain stride, whether you clear the hurdle clean or trip, whether you win or lose.
“The important thing in this profession is avoiding the highs and lows,” says Richie, balancing his cigar between two fingers over the steering wheel. “Regardless of how you feel inside, you’ve got to stay level, stay focused.”
Richie’s going to need that approach to survive in this city, where fans are every bit as rabid as those Richie grew up with in New York, except—at least right now, September ’92—football is the only game in town.
Beyond the Id-people, whose neuroses have no rational basis, impatience and vexation rule the pro sports scene in Philly. Maybe it is the thirty-year wait between Phillies World Series trips (’50-’80), or the thirty-one-year wait for the Eagles to win a league championship (since ’60). Some local pundits say it’s a legacy that dates back to the British occupation during the Revolutionary War, or to Philadelphia’s losing its status as the nation’s capital afterward, bequeathing lasting municipal insecurity, aggravated today by the city’s location between Washington, the power center, and New York City, the money (hence style) center, and the way most traffic on the interstate highway system manages to bypass Philly completely on the three-hour drive back and forth. Whatever the source, the citizens of this fifth-largest of American cities “love” their sports teams like overbearing parents, who, disappointed with their own lives, place unrealistic demands on their children—and are, consequently, forever frustrated.
No amount of success is enough. The Phils have been to the Series twice in the eighties (and would make it again in ’93), the Eagles played in the Super Bowl in ’81 and have been a solid, exciting, and improving team now for six years, basketball’s ‘Sixers and hockey’s Flyers have both been in their league championships three times in the eighties—the ‘Sixers won it all in ’83—but Philly fans still seethe with discontent.
In a perfectly balanced sports world, a fan could fairly expect their team to play in the Super Bowl or World Series once every thirteen or fourteen years. In Philadelphia, they expect annual contention and success at least once every three or four years. By this standard, their pro franchises are forever falling short. Booing is a civic art form. Mike Schmidt, the greatest third baseman in baseball history, three-time National League MVP and easily the best player ever to wear a Phillies uniform, was routinely booed at the Vet. Ron Jaworski, the quarterback who led the Eagles to the Super Bowl, who played so hard he used to sustain (on average) three concussions a season, was hooted unmercifully, including once as he was being carried off the field on a stretcher, bleeding from the mouth. Philly fans have razzed presidents, mayors, opera stars, pop singers, small children—you name it. They even booed Santa Claus at a ’68 Eagles halftime show—although, in fairness, players remembered “it was a pretty horrible Santa.” Combine this rude tradition with the Id-people and the cold-weather ritual of getting tanked up in the parking lot before games—drunkenness at the Vet had gotten so out of hand in recent years that the team had stopped selling beer in the second half—and you had a weekly prescription for riot. The most enduring image of World Series victory in ’80 wasn’t relief pitcher Tug McGraw leaping for joy off the mound after the final out, it was the cordon of snarling police dogs and mounted police who hustled out to prevent the melee in the stands from spilling out on the field.
Of all the athletes who are paid to wear Philadelphia uniforms, football players find this prevailing public mood hardest to take. Football players are used to coaches being hypercritical, but not fans. They grow up playing before adoring crowds. High schools and colleges don’t turn on their teams in defeat. But in the City of Brotherly Love, it’s win or else.
GAME ONE OPENS with an orgy of sentimentality over poor Jerome. Television viewers catch a video tribute to the fallen tackle on “The Randall Cunningham Show” (slo-mo shots of Jerome in action to the plaintive strains of Madonna’s hit “This Used to Be My Playground”), then catch another tribute on “The Rich Kotite
Show” (Jerome in slomo action narrated by Reverend Reggie with intermittent strains of the lively gospel singing at the funeral), then again on CBS’s “NFL Today,” where they show portions of the pregame memorial to Jerome, complete with tearful speeches from Reggie and Seth and another tearjerk tribute video up on the big stadium screen (the Madonna one), followed by the retirement of Jerome’s number, which is presented to Willie and Annie Bell with Norman standing stiffly alongside in the rain. By the time all this is done the mood in the Eagles’ locker room is as wet with emotion as the field is with rain.
“Don’t get your heads down now,” barks Seth. “We need to get up and get ourselves together and get ready to play! It’s too quiet, we have a game to play! Jerome is gone, we honored him, and we can’t bring him back. He’d want us to go on and play, play hard and win this game.”
All the Jerome stuff distracts from the return of Randall, who is starting his first regular-season football game at the Vet in more than a year and a half, wearing a knee brace. He drives the team downfield against one of the league’s best defenses for a seemingly sweatless opening touchdown. The drive instantly dispels some of the biggest doubts about the offense. Just about every one of Richie’s plays works. Herschel sprints off Antone Davis’s shoulder into the right flat for eight yards; Randall completes a quick six-yard hitch pass for a first down; another hitch route the other way for eight more yards, and Herschel plows to another first down. Moving now into the Saints’ half of the field, Randall takes off across the slick green carpet for ten more yards, high stepping out-of-bounds (brace and all!); Herschel breaks through the left side this time, hurdling his own blockers and throwing off tacklers for a thirty-two-yard run (that’s forty-three yards for the Eagles’ prize acquisition in the first six minutes of the season— who says this guy is washed up?); Randall runs again, leaping heedlessly into two tacklers just short of the goal line (so much for any hesitancy because of the knee); and then Randall fakes a handoff, spins, and floats a two-yard touchdown pass to—Herschel!
Wait, it’s not over. The rattled Saints now fumble the kickoff right in front of the big Archangel Jerome banner. They recover the ball, but in three straight plays manage to move it only three yards. They’re forced to punt from the back end of their own end zone; the stadium is a maelstrom of glee.
Then things settle down.
Randall fumbles the ball away on the next offensive play. He goes on to fumble the ball away two more times. Herschel fumbles it away once more. Placekicker Roger Ruzek misses two normally automatic extra-point tries—a collection of mistakes that would doom most efforts. But Herschel goes on to bash out seventy-two more yards, and Fred Barnett catches a twenty-yard touchdown pass in the fourth quarter. He falls over backward theatrically in the end zone, both arms held high. This, coupled with their stubborn and nasty defense, gives the Eagles a two-point lead, which they are still clinging to in the final three minutes of the game.
Ball control is central to Richie’s philosophy—they can’t score if you don’t give them the ball—so the idea here is just to hang on, grind out first downs, and let the clock run out. If New Orleans gets the ball back, even with less than a minute on the clock, all they need is a pass or run that puts them within fifty yards of the goalposts for their superb placekicker, Morten Andersen, to boot the winning three points. Richie is pacing the sidelines in a fumble-prevention frenzy, gesturing to Randall and Herschel and Heath, cradling his arms, begging them to hang on to the ball. But the offense, once again, looks inept. Randall is sacked for a six-yard loss on the first play from scrimmage (the sixth time he is sacked this game), and Herschel is swarm tackled in the backfield on the next play. But having attained the critical third-and-long advantage, the Saints now doom themselves with two consecutive penalties—offside and pass interference—that spare the Eagles’ having to earn first downs.
At the two-minute mark Keith Byars clinches the win when he catches a screen pass and chugs his tanklike frame downfield twentyone yards, fending off five Saints tacklers fighting to push him out-of-bounds to stop the clock. The play consumes nearly fifty seconds, gives the Eagles a final first down, and allows them just to fall on the ball for two plays until time runs out.
So they narrowly win a game it would have been discouraging to lose, after the emotional Jerome homage and dedication. Even Richie, ordinarily deeply reserved about inflating his team’s prospects, had bought into the JeromeQuest. After the video tribute on his own pregame show, the coach had said, in what for him was a moment of daring self-revelation, “We want to go to the Super Bowl; I’m not afraid to say that. I think Jerome Brown is going to have a lot to do with that.”
WHEN THE FINAL gun sounds, offensive line coach Bill Muir heads for one person in particular. He meets and embraces 330-pound right tackle Antone Davis.
On Keith’s big run, Antone’s block had cleared the way. Pulling out from his slot at right tackle, he was charged with flattening the first tackler in his path, who happened to be Saints linebacker Sam Mills. Mills is smaller and a lot faster than the massive tackle, and appeared to have already raced far enough upfield to nail Byars. Antone, showing remarkable agility for a man his size, had dived at Mills’s feet and, catching just the lower half of the linebacker’s left leg, sent him flying.
It’s the kind of play the team hoped Antone would make when they used two first-round picks to get him last year, only up till now the investment hadn’t exactly paid off. Nobody knows this, of course, better than Antone, a sad-faced giant with quizzical eyebrows, a deep horizontal furrow permanently creasing his brow, a tiny voice, and a manner so retiring he seems ever ready to apologize for taking up so much space. In the year and a half Antone has been with the Eagles he has gone from cocky to angry to stone miserable.
Up until this block, Antone has stood as a kind of on-field martyr to Norman’s and Richie’s impatience. He was obtained by the Eagles in the ’91 draft, three months after Buddy got the boot, in just the kind of bold Bramanesque move that Buddy would never have allowed.
Without Buddy to inhibit him, Norman showed up for draft day that spring with an entourage of family and friends, threw open the bar, and put on a show.
The NFL college draft is a twenty-eight-team conference call, with coaches and owners holed up in war rooms all over America before blackboards listing all the top college players available, broken down by field position (quarterback, tackles, guards, centers, cornerbacks, linebackers, safeties, et cetera). The rankings of the players under each category differ slightly from war room to war room; it’s the end result of each team’s yearlong scouting effort. The Eagles’ personnel director, Joe Woolley, had written in players under each category ranked according to his and the coaching staffs appraisal of their potential. With the worst club choosing first and the best club last, the draft rolls a dozen times through all twenty-eight teams. The whole process is spread over two days and grows increasingly confusing to the casual observer when clubs start wheeling and dealing, swapping choices, or trading up.
Wheeling and dealing is, of course, Norman’s thing. It taps that old-entrepreneurial strain in him, the desire to move-move-move, make things happen, worry about tomorrow tomorrow, seize the day! In ’91, coming off their 10-6 season, the Eagles weren’t scheduled to choose in the first round until eighteen other teams had taken their pick. This hardly rattled an old-timer like Joe. He had been to about twenty of these, enough to know that the hard part isn’t making the first three or four picks—every team in the league knows who are the two or three most likely prospects at each position—it’s knowing whom to choose down in the middle or lower rounds that proves a scout’s mettle. The pace of the day seems frenetic to those watching ESPN’s coverage of draft central in New York, but to the men at work in each war room, the day unfolds slowly, with long waits punctuated by brief flurries of action when their fifteen-minute turn comes up.
Norman was fine during the brief flurries of action; it was the long waits in-bet
ween that were the problem. Joe found the guy annoying. For one thing, there was the party atmosphere the owner introduced to what was, frankly, the most serious and important day of the year for Joe and his staff. All their efforts, all their traveling and interviewing and thousands of hours of squinting at videotapes, all of it built toward these two days—and here was this car dealer with his drink in one hand, his wife, Irma, daughter Suzi, and her husband, all yukking it up loudly with Harry and George and Richie.
Throughout the long day, Norman would insist:
“Make a deal!”
“Move up!”
“Do something!”
Or he would shout, the way he did to his executive assistant in Miami with the little office outside his door, “Get me Jerry Jones on the phone!”
In the past, Buddy was the buffer. He’d spend most of his time huddling with Joe and the scouts, and Norman didn’t interfere. If he tried, going off about how he wanted to do this or that, Buddy would listen quietly and come over and whisper to Joe, “Don’t pay any attention to him. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”
Now Joe felt like he was working in the middle of a fucking cocktail party.
He was on the phone with the war room in Detroit, and the guy on the other end complained, “Jesus, what in the hell is going on in the background?”
And Joe, who had just about had it by then himself, pulled his six-six frame out of his chair, cupped his hand over the phone, and shouted, “Men, we cannot operate like this! I can’t hear what’s going on on the phone.”
The room went coldly silent. Norman turned a stare on Joe that raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck.
“Don’t you ever talk to me like that again,” the owner said, and then strode out the door, muttering, “I don’t know why they can’t do it here like they do it in Miami.”
Slowly the room emptied, and Joe sat down uneasily and went back to work.
