by Mark Bowden
Norman and Harry—and Richie!—were desperate for a big offensive tackle that year. Buddy had neglected to build a first-rate offensive line in his five years as head coach. Again, it reflected his philosophy. To Buddy, an offensive lineman was a big body without fire in his eyes. The true thoroughbred linemen were the flashy hard chargers on defense, and Buddy had outdone himself there, inheriting Reggie but drafting Jerome and Clyde and picking up Mike Pitts and Mike Golic. But instead of using top draft picks to build an offensive line, Buddy was always trying shortcuts. He traded to get Ron Heller, Ron Solt, and Mike Schad, players other teams had found wanting (only Heller had really panned out), drafted Dave Alexander in the fifth round, a move that had paid big dividends, but otherwise Buddy kept trying to plug the big holes up front by taking guys who couldn’t cut it on the defensive side of the ball and trying to turn them into blockers.
The approach showed Buddy’s basic lack of respect for the position. In fact, in recent years offensive tackle had become one of the most important specialties on the field. There were ever-shifting trends on the pro gridiron, and one of the big movements in the eighties had been the emergence of blazingly quick pass-rushing linebackers and defensive ends—the prototype being the Giants’ Lawrence Taylor. Players like Taylor, the Saints’ Pat Swilling, the Packers’ Tim Harris, the Bills’ Bruce Smith, and the Eagles’ Seth Joyner weighed in fifty to seventy-five pounds less than an offensive tackle, but combined extraordinary quickness and strength with power surprising for their size. They could often just blow right around the slow-moving big men trying to block them or use sudden cutback moves to throw the big men off balance and then club them out of their way. If rushing the passer required remarkable physical skills combined with wild abandon, blocking these fire-breathers demanded comparable physical skills and a calm, disciplined demeanor. The modern offensive tackle had to have not only size and strength, but quick feet, tremendous balance, a solid grasp of blocking (and holding) fundamentals, and an overabundance of poise. Buddy’s efforts to turn slow, earnest former defensive lineman Reggie Singletary, and lately a towering, eyepoppingly muscular but stiff former pass rusher named Cecil Gray, into offensive tackles condemned these poor players to years of agonizing frustration and had kept the Eagles near the top of the NFL in sacks allowed for several seasons. At some point, the Eagles knew they had to stop trying to make a premier offensive tackle and draft one.
So the first order of business this draft day was to land a bluechip offensive tackle. Joe had two big tackles topping his list, Antone Davis and Charles McRae, two young giants who had been so overpowering on either end of the Volunteers’ offensive line in the ’90 season that they’d been dubbed “the Tennessee Valley Authority.” Most teams had the same two names at the top of their tackle list, with McRae listed first, but Joe liked the twenty-seven-inch vertical leap Antone demonstrated at the scouting combine and the almost comically dainty way Davis moved—like the toe-dancing hippos in Fantasia.
But the way things shaped up that afternoon, the Eagles wound up eleven picks away from their turn, with at least three or four other teams ahead of them interested in a big offensive tackle.
Norman told Joe, “Call Green Bay.”
The Packers had the eighth pick. Norman wanted to trade up.
Joe got Packers’ vice-president Tom Braatz on the line and asked what it would take to buy his number-eight slot.
“We’ve been offered two number twos,” said Braatz.
“Hold on a minute,” said Joe. He relayed this information back into the room. Joe knew something drastic was required. If Green Bay had turned down two number twos (some team offered them not only their second-round pick in this draft, but next year’s, too), then there was only one better offer to make.
“Only chance we’ve got is to give ‘em next year’s number one,” he said.
Norman, Harry, and Richie all immediately agreed, just like that … one, two, three.
“Go,” said Norman.
Joe turned back to the phone.
“Would you switch places with us for our number one next year?”
“Hold on,” said Braatz.
They waited in silence while Joe held the phone. He turned on the speaker so everyone could hear the response. For once the Eagles’ war room was silent.
Then came Braatz’s amplified voice, “We’ll do it.”
Moments later, Tampa Bay, as expected, snagged McRae, and the Eagles got their man.
He’s six-four and, fully padded and shoed, weighs more than two ordinary men—much of it centered toward the rear. With the explosive power provided by that million-dollar ass (Eagles teammates would nickname him “Twin Cheeks”), Antone looked like a sure thing. Richie proudly told the Pack, “He’s a prototype…. The guy was at the top of our list—the top of our list.”
Pro teams often boast about their exhaustive scouting methods, all the clever ways they have of ensuring their picks are sane, solid, and superior. But ten minutes of candid conversation with the guy they just spent two number-one picks (and soon a few million bucks) to get would have told the Eagles they were drafting trouble. Antone, see, has this problem. He doesn’t seem to like playing football. He’s learned the mandatory mean face of the pro blocker, and he’s big enough and quick enough on his feet to do the job if he has to, albeit reluctantly. With lots of enthusiastic hard work, Antone could even turn out to be a great blocker. But one long look into those brown eyes, soulful as a calf’s, and one long listen to that soft, intelligent voice talking about going for his master’s in education, and it’s clear that while Antone’s mind is impressive and highly active, it’s elsewhere. Leave him alone and he’ll hack away on his home computer, hang out with his adoring young wife, read a book on urban planning, fly his nifty remote-control model planes and helicopters around a parking lot, or whip up a gourmet meal—he’s a great cook. Football is way down on his list of preferred activities. But when the Great American Cult of the Pigskin happens on a Goliathan teenager who’s amazingly light on his feet … well, it can have a mighty and smothersome embrace. Particularly with a boy growing up aimlessly in a sleepy rural backwater like Fort Valley, Georgia.
He was the last of Daisy Davis’s eight children. She had seen to that. She had watched her own mother bear sixteen and then die trying to bring forth one more, so after her Tony was born in ’67, she took steps to halt the assembly line. Daisy grew up on the “colored” side of the tracks in Fort Valley, a small shopping and banking center deep in the heart of Peach County, Georgia, about one hundred miles south of Atlanta. Her father had worked as a night watchman and jack-of-all-trades at nearby Fort Valley State College—he had literally helped build the place—and spent his life trying to build a bridge to a better life for his brood. He bought a four-bedroom house from a family in Fort Valley proper, disassembled it, and then rebuilt it on a woody plot east of the Georgia Central Railroad tracks, the town’s color line. The dirt road that led to the house was called Davis Street because theirs was the only house on it.
Heeding their father’s promptings, most of Daisy’s brothers and sisters made it out of Fort Valley and into a different way of life. Her older brother Richard was a member of the famous black squadron of Tuskegee pilots during World War II. Another brother became a lawyer, another a school administrator, another an accountant. But Daisy fell into the cycle of child rearing that had captured her mother—she calls herself, with weary resignation, “a fast breeder.” Much to her father’s disgust, she bore three children when she was still an unmarried teen. She met Milton Trice in the early sixties, and with him went on to have five more.
Times were hard for Milton and Daisy as they struggled to raise their large family. Milton learned brick masonry and helped build houses when he could, but he was afflicted with the sleeping disorder narcolepsy, which few foremen understood. They’d find him sleeping and he’d find himself out of a job. Daisy did some sewing and now and then took work at a local textile plant, but th
ere were nights Antone remembers going to bed hungry. He grew up bitter about his predicament, about the way his mother and father failed to measure up to the rest of his impressive extended family.
He remembers picking peaches for thirty-five cents a bucket— the fuzz would stick to his skin and itch—and doing odd jobs at his uncle’s store. He was a skinny, eager thirteen-year-old when Dave Rowell opened the R&R Quik-Stop out on Route 341, about fifty yards down from where Daisy and Milton were living on Fagen Street. The job became Antone’s second home. He started as a floor sweeper and in time was virtually running the place. He quit school to tend the cash register, stock shelves, and cook up the barbecue chicken, ribs, and sandwiches they sold from a counter in back—one of the store’s biggest attractions. Being underage, Antone earned less than the legal hourly minimum, but it was more money than he had ever seen—he earned enough to buy himself a twelve-speed bike!—and he was allowed to eat. Boy, could the kid eat! Rowell would remember the skinny kid attacking heroic portions, three or four plates full of barbecue, sausage dogs, crackers, potato chips, whole boxes of cookies. He ate while he worked and he ate some more after he worked.
And he started to grow. He grew so fast that one day he complained to his mother about a painful swelling around his nipples.Daisy spent her last thirty dollars on an appointment with the white doctor in Fort Valley, who examined Antone and determined that the swelling was just the boy’s glands working overtime.
“It’s nothing to worry about, he’s just growin’,” he told Daisy.
Working behind the counter, slinging burgers, ribs, and beans, Antone just kept on growing. “Folks around here blamed it on the barbecue,” says Daisy, chuckling. “They said he must be eatin’ more than he was sellin’.” But Daisy had some size on her side of the family, and several of Milton’s brothers and sisters were exceptionally tall. Still, nobody was as big as her Tony. Before long, Barbecue Tony behind the counter at the Quik-Stop was a local legend. By the time he was fourteen, Daisy was handing up the clothes her Tony outgrew to his older brothers.
In time, Antone realized the Quik-Stop was a dead end. He would sometimes sit with the fruit pickers and unemployed who gathered daily outside the store drinking cheap wine. One day, one of the men sighed and said he wished he could go back to school, which got Antone thinking. After missing a year of high school, he decided to go back. He liked the idea of playing for the Peach County High School football team, but the coach, while admiring Antone’s size, told him that he couldn’t because he hadn’t come out for the summer tryouts and practices.
Antone didn’t bother with football for a long time after that. He went to school and worked afternoons and weekends at the QuikStop, getting bigger and bigger. It wasn’t until the summer before his junior year, after a friend teased him about not being able to make the football team—”A boy your size!”—that Antone got mad and showed up for summer practice. He played center for one season, as a junior, but was too old to play for the team in his senior year. Still, word had gotten out. There were college recruiters in the stands for a few of those junior-year games, and when a football player from the University of Tennessee stopped in the Quik-Stop one day to check out the local legend of Barbecue Tony—Antone was six-four now and closing in on three hundred pounds—he remarked, “Boy, you that big? I’m gonna tell my coach ‘bout you.”
An assistant coach from Tennessee came knocking on Daisy’s door. He recommended a year at the Tennessee Military Institute, where Tony could play on the school’s football team and shore up his academic credentials. If he did well, on and off the field, there would be a full four-year scholarship waiting at Tennessee. The boy wasn’t sure. He wasn’t really dying to play football. He had already decided to join the army. Daisy, remembering her father’s admonitions, encouraged him to give school a chance.
“Just try it for a little while,” she said. “If you don’t like it, you can come home.”
He went and he never looked back. He endured the year at TMI—he remembers it, unkindly, as “a private school for rich derelicts”—and then moved up to Chattanooga—and a new life. He excelled on the field and in the classroom. Barbecue Tony became Antone, the star lineman with a degree in city planning and an adoring coed girlfriend named Carrie, whom he would marry after graduation. He was already taking graduate courses when the Eagles made him a high first-round pick and a millionaire. Antone wasn’t really any keener on playing football than he had been six years earlier, but how does a twenty-five-year-old recent college grad turn down the milliondollar payday, and the promise of lots more, just to keep on doing what he’d grown accustomed to? His size and agility had made him overpowering in the All-Southeast Conference; there was no reason to expect he wouldn’t continue to dominate opponents in the pros. Certainly the NFL thought so. Antone had been contracted by just about every team in the league, and he had some of the biggest player reps in the country begging to handle his affairs. Richie Kotite had called him a “prototype.” On draft day, he pulled out a book of floor plans for new houses he had been leafing through and dropped it on Daisy’s lap.
“Start looking them over,” he told her. “You can have any one you want.”
Now, as Antone is starting the second year of his pro career, Daisy and Milton are living full-time in the DHM (Dream Home for Mom), an L-shaped brick house with about ten times more space than they know how to use. They tend to live mostly in the kitchen and den off to one corner of the place, as if unable to inflate their lives to such grand dimensions. Daisy doesn’t turn the air-conditioning on because she’s not sure how to work it and isn’t convinced it’s healthy. On a typical summer afternoon you will find her parked on a worn couch (from the old house) in the den, fanning herself with a magazine, the head of a sleeping grandchild in her broad lap. In the corner, a TV provides a splash of color, a bright window on a distant world. The satellite dish outside brings in all of her Tony’s games, which she watches without full appreciation or understanding. Mostly she just watches her son and prays he doesn’t get hurt.
Tony doesn’t come home much anymore. One whole wing of the big new house is for him, and it’s empty.
With the million-dollar bonus and $3 million-plus salary over four years, Antone’s got it made. He and Carrie divide their time between a lovely suburban home with a pool in New Jersey, a place in Knoxsville, and a condo down in Chattanooga. When Antone isn’t playing football, he and Carrie have nothing to do but relax and travel and plan. He has been playing with a new computer program called Atlas that calls up maps and demographic information for anywhere in America. He and Carrie are searching for the perfect place to eventually settle down, build a big house, and raise their own family.
So far none of the places they’re considering is near Fort Valley. Antone finds it increasingly difficult to go home.
“I don’t even call it home anymore,” he says with pride.
Not all the players on the Eagles’ roster have risen rapidly from the depths of poverty. Many, like Randall, Dave Alexander, Mike Schad, Ron Heller, and Ken Rose, were raised in comfortable homes. But the conventional image of the black kid rising from urban projects or stubborn rural privation to a six- and seven-figure salary holds true for quite a few, players like Antone and Andre, Seth, Byron Evans, Herschel Walker, Ben Smith, Calvin Williams, Mark McMillian, Siran Stacy, and others. Sudden financial success at a young age sometimes makes it awkward for even the formerly middle-class players to relate to their parents, siblings, and hometown friends. Ron Heller, for instance, has brothers who did far better than he had in school and who have gone out and found good jobs after graduation. They are in their early thirties now, raising families, paying their bills, doing fine by any conventional measure, but they are all making maybe one-tenth or less of the $661,000 Ron will earn this year playing football. Did you offer them money or would that offend their pride? If you invited them down to go fishing with you on your cabin cruiser was that showing off? If you started givin
g away money, where and how did you stop?
For players escaping real poverty, the problem magnified a hundredfold. Many had large extended families, parents, siblings, half siblings, stepsiblings, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, cousins, and second cousins. Add in old high-school teammates, college teammates—once the big payday arrived the size of a player’s “intimate” circle exploded. “People come up to me, and they say, ‘Remember I did this for you?’” says Ben Smith, who was the team’s number-one draft pick in ’90. “And I say, ‘Gee, I always thought you helped me because you liked me, or because you were a nice person, not because you’ve been waiting around for me to pay you back.’” And it isn’t just money. It’s the life players now lead. After four or five years away at college, several years of living the life in the social circle of a pro football team, travel, marriage … the boundaries of a players’ world enlarge beyond the comprehension of those trapped in the old life.
Part of what had made Jerome unique was his ability to keep his hometown connections, although even Jerome, in an interview shortly before he was killed, said he did not intend to eventually settle back down in Brooksville, citing the usual complications. For Antone, the gulf between then and now has become too wide to comfortably bridge.
“People are always telling me to remember where I came from,” he says. “Well, I remember.”
A man finely attuned to the smallest slight, Antone remembers the way his supposed “friends” and extended family treated his parents, him, and his siblings—the store that milked interest payments from his poor mother for nearly a decade for a tricycle she bought him on credit, the relatives who ignored Daisy when she couldn’t feed her children, the man in the neighborhood who made a show of feeding his dog steak, yet would say no when Antone and his brothers came down the street offering to wash his cars for five dollars, the college weekends when Antone couldn’t find anybody to drive him back up to Chattanooga, so he would be forced to drive up with his father, which was dangerous, because then Milton would have to drive back alone, and he couldn’t stay awake on the long stretches of country road. There was the man who gave Milton a truck (or so he thought) upon hiring him to build a house, which Antone’s father did, virtually at cost, only to have the new homeowner demand the truck back when the work was done—even though Milton had understood it was the main part of his payment. This same man, fallen on hard times, stopped by the house on one of Antone’s first trips home after signing with the Eagles. He asked for some help in meeting a mortgage payment so he wouldn’t have to forfeit the house.
