by Mark Bowden
So in the locker room at halftime, as the offensive line huddled around a blackboard to watch Dave Alexander draw up some new blocking strategies, Seth stepped in, in one of his glowering fits.
“You sorry sons of bitches!” he growled at them. “Why don’t you guys learn how to block? You guys couldn’t block my grandmother. You’re a bunch of pussies!”
The big linemen were momentarily taken aback.
“Just a goddamn minute!” said Ron Heller. “Seth, that’s not fair. You have no right to accuse us. You don’t have any idea what’s involved here. We’re not pussies, we’re just trying to straighten things out. You worry about your own goddamn side of the ball!”
Seth retreated, grumbling.
As it happened, the Eagles came back to win that game in the second half, 24-22. Kemp threw a slew of big passes, including two for touchdowns. Seth’s insults were forgotten in the general good feeling after that win, until Ron, Dave, and the others read the next morning’s newspaper. In it, the linebacker bragged about how his pep talk to the offensive linemen at halftime had straightened them out and made them play like men!
That was the final game of the season, and most of the linemen caught the quotes on their way home. They grumbled over this affront for a few days at home, and the whole matter would have been forgotten by the following summer, except that Seth, in training camp, picked up right where he had left off. Puffed up with this new leadership thing, he was huffing around West Chester like the badass master of the ball field. Richie had named Seth a team captain, which just sanctioned this conduct. Seth as captain began to infect the whole squad with his dark aura.
For instance, when the other team captains—Reggie, Keith Byars, and Ken Rose—go out for the coin toss before preseason games and shake their opponents’ hands in the time-honored football tradition of good sportsmanship, Seth stands conspicuously about ten yards off in a black funk, asserting his malice, subverting the ritual, embracing bad sportsmanship. This isn’t just theater either, like the promotional posturing of heavyweight fighters at the prefight weigh-in. Seth has his own perverse rationale. “The other team is the enemy, man,” he says. “I ain’t shakin’ hands with nobody before a football game. Why would I want to do that? I’m getting ready to go to war against these people.”
Another of the newer irritating things about Seth is his insistence that his grief over Jerome is more profound and heavier than everyone else’s—walking around all season with “#99” shaved out of the hair on the back of his head. Clyde Simmons is the only other player on the team whom Seth acknowledges as having been “as close to Jerome,” although there are plenty of others who could, if they chose to, dispute that. For his part, Clyde maintains a dignified silence that becomes real sadness. But Seth stakes out the high grieving ground as though laying claim to the soul of the team, which isn’t itself so bad, except he uses that vantage point to hurl dark thunderbolts.
He criticizes teammates who failed to attend Jerome’s funeral. He lambastes the club for not helping out with Jerome’s camp last spring, which turns out not to be true—the team had quietly made a thousand-dollar donation for the event and is already making plans to carry out Jerome’s plan for a similar event in New Jersey. When Seth learns of his mistake, he faults Harry for not keeping him informed. “It’s the same old story,” he says. “They never think of us. If they had let us know what was happening, I never would have said anything.”
Back in the preseason games, he and the rest of the defense defied league restrictions on altering their uniforms by drawing black outlines around the silver wings on their helmets and penciling in Jerome’s number 99. When the league objected (with millions invested in worldwide merchandising of NFL products, the league takes graphics very seriously), the team came up with a memorial patch for the players to wear on their uniforms—only Seth then blasted team management in the papers and on TV for not making the patch bigger and more ornate. “It looks like something you’d get down at K-Mart,” he growled. The patch was redesigned.
It’s hard to believe so much trouble can be caused by one man’s mouth.
In practice, Seth would strut over when the offensive line was doing one-on-one pass-blocking drills with the defensive line. He’d grab Clyde or Reggie as they prepared to tangle with Antone and say, “Let me do it, I’m gonna make Antone a man”—apparently oblivious to the insult thus given to both blocker and blockee.
Dennis McKnight, the formidable veteran backup lineman with a badass biker image of his own, got fed up.
“Seth, you are the angriest man I have ever met,” he said after one training-camp practice. “I’ve never met a man with more hate than you. I don’t understand it. I’ve tried … but, hey, you’re on your own. I don’t want anything to do with you. Whatever your problem is, it’s not my fault, and you better leave me the hell alone.”
More and more, as the season progressed, teammates resented the linebacker’s attitude. With Jerome around, Seth’s forbidding intensity had been a plus. His brooding persona lurked in the background, helping to set the defensive squad’s menacing tone. Jerome would make everybody laugh, Wes and Eric would analyze things, Reggie oozed respectability and excellence, and Andre lent a kind of spooky voodoo strain. Seth had just glowered in the back of the room, an automatic rifle with the safety on … until he entered the field. This year the safety is off all the time. With his mouth locked in firing position, Seth has become a danger to his own team, and to himself. Teammates aren’t openly critical of him, but there are enough nods, winks, and rolls of the eyes for the Pack to know how most of them feel.
The contrast with Jerome formed a study in leadership. Jerome didn’t try to lead and never really saw himself as a leader. Joy just radiated from that dancing, cast-iron-furnace frame and neon grin. Jerome made you feel as if he were on a ride that was just so damned terrific that nobody would want to get left behind. Seth, on the other hand, made you feel like he was slogging through some sort of awful crusade; you could join him if you had the stuff for it, and if you didn’t? Well, fuck you.
The way he acted, it made them almost feel like losing sometimes, just to spite him. On the field, Seth was a great player. No doubt about it. But after making an interception and running it in for a touchdown, or after brutally sacking the quarterback, he’d trot back toward the bench with his face set in cement as he passed the offensive players. Some would pat him on the back or helmet—Randall always made a point of running out to congratulate him—and more often than not, Seth would coldly ignore all but his defensive teammates, avoiding even eye contact with offensive players, conveying the sense that they were unworthy to stand with him on the same field.
Ron, who’d had some of the more vocal clashes with the line backer, went out of his way to bridge this divide. When one of his brothers attended a home game and happened to sit near Seth’s mom and sister and brother, he’d snapped pictures of the linebacker’s family watching the game. When the film was developed, he sent Ron prints to give Seth, and Ron was delighted. Maybe this would break the ice. He cheerfully crossed the locker room with the photos in an envelope.
“Hey, Seth, my brother took some pictures of your family.”
Seth eyed him flatly. “What do I want them for?”
“I just thought you might like them.”
“All right, put ‘em down.”
And that was that. No thanks, no nothing. Who wants to join the crusade of a guy like that?
Seth can feel the bad vibes he’s created. But he isn’t about to back down. Like him or not, these guys are going to play up to Seth’s expectations—or there’ll be hell to pay.
JENNIFER SMIT was a twenty-four-year-old senior at UTEP (University of Texas, El Paso) when she met Seth Joyner. They were both living in the dorm for scholarship athletes. Jennifer had been recruited by UTEP from the world track-and-field circuit, where she was a promising heptathlete, which is track and field’s seven-event female version of the decathlon, a deman
ding two-day competition testing all-around athletic ability—distance running and sprints, high and long jumps, shot put, and javelin. Years of strict training had given the impressive female contours of her body an Amazonian edge, an uncustomary hardness and definition, and little about Jennifer’s personality softened the effect. There was nothing at all soft about her. She had the courage and self-possession of one who has traveled far and embraced big changes in her young life, and she was fiercely competitive—the kind of person who seeks out challenge and confronts conflict head-on. She spoke an emphatic and highly original English, which she learned first in school in Holland, and then refined on the casual rhythms of African-American dialect mixed with some easy West Texas drawl. She was a true exotic out in the taco desert, strong, fit, bold, and opinionated, and despite her smashing blond good looks, Jennifer was a loner. In this sunny, Freon-addicted, stripmalled, Alamo Republican corner of America, she came off, frankly, as kind of a kook.
Eighteen-year-old Seth, however, had his own priorities where women were concerned. Observing the forbidding long-legged blond track star moving alone through the dining hall every day, he had bragged to his teammates, “She will be mine.” This got back to Jennifer, as these things are supposed to in school, and the senior track star’s response was, “Yeah, right. Dream on.”
But she was intrigued. She started noticing Seth more. He stood out from the other freshman football players because he seemed lost at all times in a dark cloud of lonesome gloom. His gravity and singularity appealed to her. She had been around UTEP for four years now, and the blacks, especially the black football players, moved everywhere in loose, joshing homeboy herds. She learned that this Seth Joyner, a hardship recruit from someplace in New York—a place distant and harsh—was considered mean and a little crazy. One of the senior football players told her that they hadn’t dared subject Seth to the usual hazing rituals inflicted on freshmen—the guy was too scary.
Seth was the second son of Pattie Cooper, a North Carolina sharecropper’s daughter who had left the farm after high school and followed a friend north to take a job as a practical nursing aide at the Rockland Psychiatric Center in Spring Valley, New York. She would end up working at the center, about a half hour’s drive north of New York City, for thirty-five years before retiring in ’90, raising her two boys and a daughter, Samantha, by herself. Her oldest, Eric, and Seth were sons of a man she met at church and was involved with for about six years. They had split before Seth was born in ’64. Her daughter, by a different man who also did not stay in her life, came six years later.
There was always something, right from the start, rather stark and arresting about Seth. Even as a toddler, Pattie says, he was a peculiarly solitary and independent child. He seemed precociously capable. Most mothers in the low-rent neighborhood where they lived were afraid to let a two- or three-year-old outside by himself to play, because unsupervised older children would bully the babies and sometimes get rough. But this was not a problem with Seth. He more than held his own. Growing up, he spent many hours by himself, developing a dour, silent, proud personality that even as a small boy he wore like an outsized suit. He had a violent temper and was fearless. Pattie would often repeat the story about Seth, the one that she felt defined him best, of how his father had come for a rare visit one day, and how Seth had found him, a large man, sitting on Pattie’s bed.
Seth was only six years old, but when he confronted the big man he became fiercely protective, threatening, “Get off my mama’s bed!”
“Boy, do you know who you’re talkin’ to?” asked his father.
“My mama says you’re my daddy, but no man sits on my mama’s bed.”
At church, where Seth worked as an usher when he grew older, people would compliment Pattie on what a fine, big, strong boy she had, but would complain, “He looks like he’d bite your head off!”
“Oh, no!” Pattie would say. “That’s just Seth being Seth”—in other words, you either accepted Seth the way he was, sourpuss and all, or you could go fry spit. He damn sure wasn’t going to walk around forcing himself to smile just to make other people happy. If people thought he was mean … well, that was their problem—Want to make something of it?
In school, he walked the halls masking whatever insecurities he harbored with hair-trigger aggression, picking fights with anyone who even looked at him for too long— Who you lookin’ at? He remembers fighting almost every day. It was who he was; he was just being Seth. The absolute worst side of Seth’s being Seth was on display in any kind of competition. With him, there was no such thing as a friendly pickup game of anything, whether cards, bowling, pool, basketball, baseball— even miniature golf. With some people competition was do or die; with Seth, it was do or kill. He had to win. If he didn’t, it was somebody’s fault—referees, teammates, opponents, coaches; it didn’t really matter. His temper was like napalm, splashing and burning everything in a wide moving radius. It got so that people were afraid to play not only against Seth, but even with him, at anything.
He had a caring side, though it was well hidden. His mother leaned on him at home, especially when her widowed mother, Emma Cooper, suffered a stroke and came to live with them. Seth was about eight years old then and was handed much of the responsibility for helping his ailing grandmother. When his older brother graduated from high school and moved away, Pattie depended on Seth to handle household chores while she worked, and he didn’t let her down—Seth never let Pattie down—cooking, cleaning, and caring for both his little sister and his grandmother. By the time Emma died, at age eighty-five, teenage Seth had grown extremely close to her. He would recall years later how his grandmother prepared him for her death, telling him that she had lived long enough, and that she was tired. “I’ve seen all my children grown, and I’ve seen my grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. It’s my time.” When she passed, Seth missed her and grieved, but he also felt the rightness of it.
Shouldering household tasks at an early age, becoming the man of the house, caring for his grandmother in her years of decline, and watching her die—these are the things Pattie feels shaped Seth into such a serious young man. Sometimes too serious.
“Boy, can’t you smile sometime?”
“Mama, this is the face I was born with, I can’t help it,” he’d say. “I can’t be walking around forcing myself to smile all the time just to make other people happy. I can’t be somebody else. I’m Seth.”
Being Seth was, of course, something Pattie could understand and even admire, but where his mother saw just great seriousness, others saw ever-burning sulfur unconsumed, an unappeasable anger that spilled into every part of his life. He found a legitimate outlet for that fire on the football field, but even there he had a hard time fitting in. As a sophomore, he had latched on to an assistant coach at the high school named Jimmy Pinkston, who had played college ball at the University of Miami. Seth had decided he was going to play pro football—his mother remembers him boasting quietly, seriously, as a young teen, “Mama, see these hands? These hands are going to make you a fortune. These hands are going to play in the NFL.” It was a common boyhood dream, but there was nothing common about the way Seth set to work at it. Other boys played high-school football for the fun of it, for the status it afforded them at school, for the camaraderie of Team. Seth enjoyed those things, too, but the football part for him wasn’t just fun; it was very serious business. He would pump Pinkston for information about the game, practically moving into his house in his early years of high school. It wasn’t the kind of attachment Pinkston had felt with other boys growing up fatherless, looking for a substitute. There were plenty of boys like that. Seth was different. He wasn’t looking for a father figure; he was looking for a mentor, a guide. He knew where he wanted to go and figured Pinkston could show him the way. Sometimes Pinkston felt the kid was trying to suck him dry. “He damn near worked me to death,” the coach recalls. Seth couldn’t learn enough about tactics and game planning, about how to study films for c
lues about an opponent’s (and his own) tendencies and weaknesses, and how to exploit what he had learned on the field. He wanted Pinkston to tell him everything he knew about how high-school players landed college football scholarships, and how the pros scouted and recruited from colleges. Pinkston would have to chase Seth away many nights: “Look, son, I’ve got to go to bed. Either you’re going home now or you can go upstairs and find a bed here.”
But Pinkston was transferred to another high school, and in Seth’s senior year he had to play for coaches he didn’t know well, and whom he didn’t respect. Even at that point, Seth felt he knew more about the game than they did—certainly more about how to best use himself. Seth thought he was the best player on the team, and probably was, and it burned when the coaches put other players ahead of him. Of course, his resentment just worsened the situation. He started being Seth in a big way. When his coaches reprimanded him, Seth just bur rowed more deeply into his hole of grudge. He would still complain about it more than a decade later, as a millionaire Pro Bowl NFL linebacker, at a time when dropping old and petty differences would seem both easy and wise. Asked to recall his high-school playing days, something sure to provoke gaudy sentiment and grateful memories in almost any other pro football player, Seth would grouse angrily about ignorant coaches who “treated me like a flunky.” He was convinced that he was not allowed to excel as a running back in high school because the coaches preferred other players and had given Seth the ball only when they were in a tight spot and desperately needed yardage. He would pull their nuts out of the fire and come grumbling back to the bench, shrugging off their praise and thanks, having proved his point once again to no avail, wrapped in a cloud of disgust. That’s how Seth saw himself as a football player—someone whom coaches disliked and would prefer not to play, but whose talent would not be denied. His attitude, his mother says, was “If you let me play, I’ll show you how good I am. If you don’t, your loss.”
