Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  Special teams captain Ken Rose (55, center, clutching the ball) is congratulated by punter Jeff Feagles (5) and his teammates after blocking a punt by Giants kicker Sean Landeta, recovering the ball, and returning it for a touchdown on November 22, 1992, at Giants Stadium.

  Seth joyner (59) sprints to the end zone after picking off a pass by Minnesota Vikings quarterback Sean Salisbury on December 6, 1992, at Veterans Stadium. The fourth-quarter play clinched a 28-17 home victory. He’s being trailed by cornerback Eric Allen (21).

  In classic form, Randall Cunningham takes flight over Seattle safety Robert Blackmon in a December 13, 1992, marathon game at the Kingdome, which the Eagles won in overtime 20-17.

  Seth joyner (59) drags down Redskins quarterback Mark Rypien in a pivotal December 20, 1992, game that the Eagles won 17-13 at Veterans Stadium, clinching a play-off spot.

  Also on December 20, Eric Allen (21) lands just a split second after a game-saving, season-saving play. He had just dived and slapped the ball away from the outstretched hands of Redskins receiver Gary Clark (84), kneeling in the end zone. Otis Smith (30) was beaten on the play. John Booty (42) celebrates.

  Buddy even thawed a little. In their regular one-on-one, end-of-season chat, the coach was uncharacteristically complimentary. He told Wes he had squarely won back the starting job and that his comeback had been impressive. He said the Eagles had big plans for Wes in ’90, his seventh year as a pro.

  So the first months of that year were secure and happy ones for Wes and Erika. They had climbed together out of the hole. The Eagles were now a top NFL contender, his agent was negotiating a new contract that would up his annual salary to $655,000, plus incentives, and Wes could envision topping his football career with four or five more seasons as one of the better-paid players on the team, and maybe even grabbing a Super Bowl ring or two. Wes was excited. His years as a ghost, the collapse of his finances, his marriage, his baby daughter had all changed him. He wasn’t as cocky as he had been when he first came up. Having glimpsed how fickle and insubstantial Team was as family, he had carved out a family of his own, one that would outlast his career. He was careful with his money—he was now driving a little Dodge sports car (an Eagle), not the Porsche, and he and Erika were living in a conventional, two-story Cape Cod on a postage-stamp lot in a workaday New Jersey development.

  Playing pickup basketball with his teammates that winter, Wes found that his left knee even started feeling normal again, for the first time in three years. He told Erika and his teammates he felt that he had another Pro Bowl season in him—Wes was back!

  Then Buddy drafted Ben Smith.

  Free safety is a prize role on any football team. Lined up behind the other ten defensive players, often without direct responsibility for covering a specific zone or receiver, the free safety is “free” to observe and react to an unfolding play. On passing plays he is the last line of defense and often the defender with the best chance of intercepting the ball. On running plays, he is, again, the last line of defense, but the player with the best opportunity to lower the hammer, preferably with a swift running start. Given this responsibility for hitting, most free safeties are bigger than cornerbacks, whose job it is to go one-on-one against small and speedy wide receivers. Ideally, though, a free safety should combine the speed and agility of a cornerback with the size and strength of a linebacker. Wes had an extraordinary feel for the game, and, brother, could he bring the heat, but his deficiencies in speed and quickness had always kept him suspect in Buddy’s eyes— with reason.

  Buddy’s 46 was a swarming, all-out attack on the quarterback that stranded cornerbacks and the free safety on a high wire without a net. The system turned linemen and linebackers into legends, and pass defenders into goats. Now that he had Byron and Seth plugging holes on the line, he was looking for a man at free safety who was smaller and faster than Wes, which is why Hoage was thrown in on passing downs even after Wes regained his starting job. Of course, Wes bought none of this logic—not that Buddy ever tried explaining it to him. The way Wes saw it, no matter how well he did, Coach seemed determined to get rid of him.

  Yet Wes survived. Experience worked to his advantage, because Buddy’s defensive backfield had to think on its feet, often shifting position rapidly two and even three times between the opponent’s break from huddle and the snap of the ball. With all these players shifting around, the backfield relied heavily on the free safety to direct traffic, which wasn’t easy on the floor of a concrete bowl with sixty to eighty thousand fans screaming for blood. Wes was pretty good at it. He excelled at another part of Buddy’s system, too. In some formations, Buddy’s free safety had to step up and effectively play linebacker, colliding with 300-pound linemen and 250-pound running backs. Wes’s 215 pounds and fabled mean streak enabled him to do both with some success.

  So when Buddy named a 183-pound rookie to replace him, it took not only Wes but the team’s coaches and players by surprise.

  Wes had heard about Ben Smith. Playing for the University of Georgia, Ben was one of the premier college safeties in ’89, and everyone projected him as a first-round pick that spring. But he was regarded as too small to be an effective free safety in the pros. Even Ben was looking forward to playing cornerback in the pros; he saw himself as a cornerback. When Buddy faced the cameras and microphones to announce Smith as his first pick, one of the hounds remarked, “Well, Buddy, I guess you’ve got your new starting corner-back.”

  The coach said, “No, I’ve got my new starting free safety.”

  Those involved in selecting Ben assumed he’d play left corner. And even if Buddy was determined to play him as free safety, the way to do it would be to bring him along slowly, groom and educate him, especially at such a key position ... unless you were desperate. The Eagles were hardly desperate. Wes was regarded as one of the best in the league. He got the word from a reporter by phone at home and felt ill, as if he had been kicked in the stomach.

  It was not just a matter of wounded pride either. Buddy’s announcement had immediate practical consequences for Wes and Erika. Wes was looking for a salary of more than $655,000 that year. The Eagles’ initial offer had been $550,000, but when summer rolled around, and the team ticked through its signing priorities, the amount would surely come up—Wes knew the dance. Only, when Buddy drafted Ben, the step changed.

  Harry Gamble knew the difference between a second-string player and a first-string one. Instead of improving on the initial offer, Harry told Hopkins’s agent, Harry Himes, that unless Wes signed before June 1, the day league rules required the team to make an offer, $100,000 would be withdrawn.

  Himes didn’t believe it. This was not the way the game was played. The initial offer was always just a formality.

  But Harry was as good as his word, and on the appointed day, the Eagles lowered the offer to $450,000—literally the minimum NFL wage for a player of Wes’s experience.

  Wes stayed up late that night and made a call to Norman Braman’s villa in southern France. The club’s maneuver had shaken Wes’s faith in the basic fairness of things; surely Norman, who had always been so cordial with him and Erika, wouldn’t approve of such a thing! And Norman was gracious. He told Wes that he tried not to involve himself in player negotiations, and that any decision on the matter would have to be made by Harry, but he did promise to look into it and see what he could do.

  And the next day, the $100,000 was back … but with a contingency. The club offered to pay Wes $6,250 extra for every game of the ’90 season in which he played in at least 50 percent of the defensive plays. Of course, Wes had no control over that. Buddy decided who played and who didn’t.

  The Eagles wouldn’t trade Wes, so under the existing NFL rules restricting free agency, he was stuck. After passing a disgruntled training camp, he was given an ultimatum by Buddy. He could either agree to suit up as Ben Smith’s backup and keep his mouth shut about it, or he would be cut from the team. Wes swallowed his pride and assumed his place on the bench. />
  The Eagles lost three of their first four games. Two of the losses came against teams considered to be among the worst in football, the Cardinals and the Colts. In a game as complex as football, no one player makes the difference between victory and defeat, but to veterans in the Eagles’ secondary, one major problem was obvious. The proof was right there on tape: cornerbacks waving with frustration at Ben in the center of the field, waiting in vain for the call that would tell them what coverage to play; Ben lining up in the wrong spot on the field; Ben wasting an opportunity to slow down a sprinting running back in the open field by trying to bowl over a blocker to make the tackle himself, only to be knocked flying by a 280-pound lineman. These were all rookie mistakes, the kind even the best young football player makes, and Ben was doing a lot of things right, but his inexperience was making Gang Green look bad.

  Buddy clung tenaciously to a decision once he had made it. Having made such a show over replacing Wes with the rookie, how would it look for him to back down now? He’d be admitting a mistake, and mistakes were what those damn fools on the other side of the field made.

  Then Izel Jenkins, the cornerback everyone had earlier assumed Ben was drafted to replace, popped his hamstring and gave Buddy a face-saving solution. Ben moved to left corner against the Redskins in the sixth game, and Wes returned to his familiar spot. He responded with eleven tackles and was named the defensive player of the game. Despite missing most of those first five games, Wes went on to lead the team with five interceptions that year and averaged seven tackles per game. The Eagles won eight of their last eleven games.

  Still, Buddy stubbornly refused to admit his mistake or give Wes credit (which would have amounted to the same thing). Wes finished the season as starting free safety, and the club even coughed up the full $100,000 in incentives, although Buddy hadn’t allowed Wes to earn it. Toward the end of Buddy’s tenure, Wes felt he had won a measure of grudging respect. At a team meeting before the Redskins’ play-off game, the coach made a comment, in passing, to the effect that they had “one of the best free safeties in the league.”

  He didn’t elaborate, just pressed on with his remarks, but a few of Wes’s teammates turned around with wide eyes. When Buddy was fired three days later, Wes wasn’t among the Eagles’ players shouting imprecations, venting anger, and predicting doom. He heard it on the car radio on his way into the Vet and felt like rolling down his window and shouting for joy.

  THE INFIDELITY Erika endured was an occupational hazard of NFL marriages. More of the other wives she knew had been through it than had not, white, black, newlywed, or long hitched. Her best friend, Jennifer Joyner, was going through it now with Seth.

  Jennifer’s nightmare had started in February, when Seth flew both her and his Puerto Rican girlfriend, Wanda, to Honolulu for the Pro Bowl. Jennifer discovered Wanda when she kept phoning their hotel room the night before the game. The phone rang right in Jennifer’s ear, on the table next to her pillow. Wanda called again before sunrise.

  Seth, alongside Jennifer, took the phone and held it to his ear. Jennifer could hear the woman on the other end complaining loudly, rattling on and on, with Seth just nodding—”Uh-huh … no … uh-huh.”

  “Who is this woman?” Jennifer demanded. “She must be pretty important if she has the nerve to call you and yell at you in your own hotel room at five o’clock in the morning with your wife in the room and your child sleeping in the next bed!”

  Seth was now getting it in both ears.

  He handed the phone back to Jennifer and rolled over silently, an inert black mountain. Jennifer had high hopes for this trip. She and Seth had gotten in a huge fight over his mother the summer before, and he had left her and his daughter behind in El Paso when he flew back to Philly for the season. He had sworn to her that he wasn’t seeing anyone else, that he just needed some space. When he made the Pro Bowl, he had invited Jennifer and her parents out for the game. Her parents were going to take Jasmine, their four-year-old daughter, back to El Paso at the end of the week, and then she and Seth were planning to spend a week together on Maui. She saw it as a time to heal their marriage … long afternoons on the Wailea sands, luxurious dinners, champagne nights … just what the doctor ordered to rekindle romance.

  Now this.

  When Seth woke up at dawn, he pulled on his clothes silently and made for the door. He knew Jennifer was angry, and, with her at least, avoidance was Seth’s major tactic in interpersonal conflicts. Jennifer had spent many long days and nights seething alone over some issue like this, waiting for Seth to phone or return home. This time, she thought, by God, I’m not going to sit around wallowing in anxiety all day. She scooped up Jasmine from the next bed and ran out into the hall after him.

  “You are going to talk to me,” she said.

  She was in her nightgown, her blond hair all tangled and pillow tossed, their child in her arms.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, and kept on walking.

  “I’m right behind you,” said Jennifer. “You are going to talk to me!”

  He stopped at the elevator.

  “Go back to the room,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  “I’ve got to talk to you right now.”

  “You’re embarrassing me!” said Seth.

  “Oh, you don’t know yet what real embarrassment is like.”

  She followed him into the elevator, and they rode down silently. Seth wouldn’t look at her. When the doors slid open, he headed straight out across the lobby, apparently assuming Jennifer wouldn’t follow farther. There were men working in the lobby, spraying plants, buffing floors, getting ready for the day. Jennifer plunged on behind Seth, stepping gingerly in her bare feet over the hoses and wires. When he saw she was still behind him, Seth turned and glowered.

  “Will you just sit down and tell me what is going on?” she asked.

  “Go upstairs,” he said. “You’re embarrassing me!”

  “Okay, Seth. Today is Pro Bowl day, right? When’s that? Three o’clock? If you don’t talk to me right here, right now, you’re gonna see embarrassment on national television.”

  There was just enough resolve in her voice to break through. He shrugged, and they sat on a couch in the lobby. Seth insisted the phone calls were just a misunderstanding. It was some girl he had met a long time ago, and she knew he was in Honolulu for the Pro Bowl with his family, and she, this girl, was obviously just calling to try to stir up trouble for him.

  “Oh, the hell with you,” said Jennifer. “This is the reason you didn’t want us to come up to Philadelphia.”

  Seth spent most of that off-season traveling to golf tournaments and public appearances, and when the ’92 season started that summer, he came back to Philadelphia by himself again, his issues with Jennifer still unresolved. She and Erika talked on the phone almost every day. Seth was out with Wanda all the time. Everybody back in Philly knew Wanda.

  Erika knew of dozens of other similar cases with players on this and other teams. The women all lived in fear of it happening to them. They coped with all sorts of rationalizations. The temptations were ever present; men like Seth, Wes, and others had grown up without fathers, without normal family structures, so they didn’t understand how to keep a family together; the game and its sophomoric fraternity atmosphere, hanging out with guys who were mostly single, the travel, the bars, the money, the celebrity, the Sis-Boom-Bimbos, it went to the men’s heads—or pants. With the single guys, the stories were of paternity suits or of lewd parties where two or three women entertained and ministered to the star’s (presumably heroic) sexual needs at the same time. Jerome was the champ, but he had lots of competition. Siran Stacy, the team’s top draft pick this year (and something of a disappointment) was in the process of being successfully sued by two women, a former high-school girlfriend and a former college girlfriend, each of whom had borne him a child. The college girlfriend, a white from southern Alabama who had become estranged from her family as a result of the relationship, had
recently flown north to confront Siran at his new Philadelphia condo with the baby, provoking a scene that led to the rookie’s arrest on assault charges—he had faced similar charges in Geneva, Alabama, where the local police called him “Siren” Stacy for his frequent run-ins with the law. Clyde Simmons was living in his own apartment in Philly, about a fifteen-minute drive away from his wife, Sandra, and their children, yet still picked them up every Sunday to bring them to the Vet for games, as if everything were hunky-dory.

  No, marrying into the NFL was a hazardous step. And it wasn’t just the Sis-Boom-Bimbos either. Even if your husband was loving and faithful, in many cases an equally vexatious problem was Mom.

  Wes and Seth, like so many of their brethren, had especially close ties to their single moms, ties bound to cause serious trouble when they married or started living with a woman. A successful pro player, having rescued himself and Mom from the projects and spread a little good-feeling money around among siblings and stepsiblings and other various family members, overnight became Shahanshah, Lord Bountiful, hero and chief home buyer.

  The DHM (Dream Home for Mom) is often more than just a nice house or condo on the posh outskirts of whatever community bred the fledgling NFL star; it is also a kind of shrine to the upper-middle-class dream family he never had. In it, Mom preserves an ideal of the former fantasy life; only, for Mom, it becomes reality. She lives there every day, usually in a house three or four times bigger than what she needs, kind of waiting for her boy to come home. Wes’s mother, for instance, lives in a big suburban rancher with wooden shingles and a spacious deck out back, a Jacuzzi, a swimming pool, a complete bar and rec room in the basement, the walls and shelves loaded with her son’s pictures, plaques, trophies, helmets, game balls, et cetera—only, see, Maggie doesn’t know how to swim, so the pool stays covered year-round, and she doesn’t drink, so the bar stands empty. Like most young men a year or two out of college, the busy young NFL star comes home to visit a few times a year, leaving Mom alone in the DHM like some kind of well-dressed, well-fed prop in a tricked-up Natural History of Suburban American Childhood diorama.