by Mark Bowden
JENNIFER, SEE, just doesn’t get it.
Football players, and athletes in general, learn early the importance of not looking back. It’s a discipline that is drilled into them from the first week of organized play: Forget about what just happened, that’s in the past. If you catch three touchdown passes and break a school record … that’s in the past. If you drop the winning touchdown … hey, that’s in the past. If you hammered the Dallas Cowboys the last time you played them, or if they ran cleat marks up and down your spine … forget about it quickly. Things that happened in the past, good things, bad things, whatever, they could only hurt you. They were done, kaput, of no further significance. The important thing is to leave them behind. Unburden the mind and unleash the senses. Think only positive thoughts. Forget value judgments, critical analysis, self-doubt, worry; it’s just next play, next game, next season. That’s the cold logic of pro sports—You’re only as good as your next game—and that is how you had to proceed. It is a valuable discipline in sport. If you let yourself get too far up, you’re that much easier to bring down. If you let yourself get too down, it is that much harder to get up. The pressures of the game are heavy enough without carrying mental baggage with you out on the field. At its ideal, it’s like practicing Zen. You live entirely in the moment, fully alive and open to new opportunity, unmuddied by the past, unformed in the future.
That’s in the past is a powerful mantra. So powerful, in fact, that pro athletes find all kinds of uses for it. If you are arrested for drunk driving or beating up your girlfriend or throwing a small explosive out a car window at a group of fans, you get yourself a good lawyer, call a press conference, and when the bastards turn on the lights and point the cameras and microphones at you, all you have to say is, yeah, it happened, that was me, but… hey, that’s in the past, and then scowl ferociously at those who persist in questioning you about it. One of the true rarities in sportswriting is a feature story about the player who blew the game. Sure, there are plenty of soulful accounts from players reminiscing in retirement about the pitch that blew some longago World Series game, or the field goal that might have been, but not many show up as part of the daily report, looking back at the game just lost. It isn’t because the Pack is too timid or sensitive to probe a fresh wound—hell, no—it is because questions about the crucial mistake are nearly always greeted by the mantra that’s in the past. End of story. ‘Nuff said. It’s the niftiest concept since Confession: In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, and voilà! Clean slate. You can reinvent yourself over and over and over again. It can apply to all phases of your life, too, like, girlfriends, like wives. Almost all these guys had left behind whole former worlds when they made the leap from high school to college and then to the pros, every step a big change, a shedding, a rebirth. Just invoke the mantra.
See, what Jennifer doesn’t realize about her relationship with Seth, what is so obvious that he doesn’t even feel the need to explain, what is also so appropriate and clearly right that he wastes not a moment of regret or sentimentality or any discernible emotion on it, is that Jennifer, who just keeps popping up, demanding explanations, wondering what the hell is going on, is already inalterably in the past.
She accompanies Seth that night to Methodist hospital for his IV drip, and once on the table, he promptly falls asleep. She just sits there watching the fluids shifting in the tube.
Can’t she see it?
JENNIFER PERSISTS for the rest of the week, living in Seth’s apartment. He spends most of the week ducking her, leaving early and coming home late, frustrating her efforts to understand, to reconcile, to part … to confront and resolve whatever it is that has sprung up between them. It’s in this frame of mind that Jennifer decides the following weekend, when Seth flies off with the team to Kansas City for game five, to phone Wanda. Since Seth won’t tell her what’s going on, maybe his Puerto Rican dulcinea will.
It’s quite a scene, in its own way more than equal to the drama and violence (emotional, that is) waiting on the field for Seth and the Eagles the following afternoon, and with far more lasting consequences.
They meet at the Bennigan’s Restaurant on Route 73. Erika accompanies Jennifer, high officers in the Association of Eagles’ Wives. As they enter the place, Erika recognizes Lisa, one of Jerome’s old harem, at the bar with this fragile Puerto Rican doll face who just has to be Wanda.
Jennifer learns her husband has been living another life. Wanda has been seriously involved with Seth for more than two years now. She was with him on all those road trips in the off-season of ’91, at Jerome’s camp, at Keith Byars’s camp in Dayton, golf tournaments; she had been with him in L.A. taping the “American Gladiators” competition when he got the news of Jerome! The only reason Wanda hadn’t flown down to Brooksville for the funeral, she says, was that Seth had told her how Jennifer had insisted on going along.
It’s staggering. Apart from the emotional blow, my God! A woman has to start wondering about her health. If there is this much about Seth’s life over the last two years she hadn’t known, how much else was there? Exactly how vast and colorful is the sweep of human sexual history that her husband invited into her body? There are more revelations—this Wanda is too much—enough to just freezedry Jennifer’s soul and blow it away. She feels numb. She honestly feels more like laughing at this point than crying. It’s the emotional equivalent of having just stepped off one of those monster carnival rides that spins your top and bottom in separate directions simultaneously. Suddenly, her whole understanding of her life for the last two, three—hell, the last decade—is up for grabs.
And Wanda is just bubbling over with information. She knows Amy, of course, Wes’s squeeze. Both Lisa and Wanda roll their eyes at the mention of Amy, as if to say What a bimbo that one is, and she dresses so tacky! Wanda is just adamant that Seth is a dog and that they are through. “I put my career on hold for Seth!” laments Wanda. Oh Christ, she’s looking for sympathy now! Among other things, Jennifer learns that Seth is planning to build Wanda a house in Florida—see, because then, that way Wanda would be close to Puerto Rico and she would be located strategically between his daughter in El Paso and his mom, after he built his mom a DHM in North Carolina, where Pattie has decided she’d rather retire (more news for Mrs. Joyner). Jennifer thinks, The poor son of a bitch never did study his geography.
The more she listens to Wanda, the more she wonders if she has ever known Seth at all.
WHEN SHE GETS BACK to El Paso she gets a phone call from a Philadelphia jeweler, a man they had both gotten to know over the years, a friend. Seth had a thousand-dollar bill outstanding for some bauble he purchased months ago.
“What did he buy?” she asks.
“I can’t tell.”
“Was it for me?”
“No.”
“Was it for his mother?”
“No.”
“Was it for his brother or his sister?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t need to tell me anything else, do you?”
She decides, what the hell.
The woman who spent hours each week clipping food coupons goes out and buys herself the most expensive BMW she can find.
11
INTO THE BELLY OF THE WHALE
Luck is the hand of God in football. Preparation, talent, momentum, motivation—all of which the ’92 Eagles had in excess five games into the season—can all explode in a moment. A great season is as fragile as a blimp in a field of flak.
As a coach or player, you do everything you can to be successful, and after that it is up to a higher authority. Nobody is more keenly aware of this than Andre Waters.
One thing you took with you, growing up on the Muck, was an abiding sense of the divine. Part of it was the culture of poor working black families, who practiced a Baptist brand of Christianity flavored by ancient African and island traditions, and part of it was just the all-embracing eminence of sky, a landscape that made you feel elevated and exposed, so that,
on balmy days, you might feel like the coddled firstborn of creation and, on days when the tropical storms boomed, like a helpless offering on a grand ceremonial plate. If Reverend Reggie’s Baptist Bible taught a muscular evangelical Christianity, and Randall Cunningham’s offered an esoteric (one might even say chummy, you know, like, celebrity to celebrity) rapport with the Almighty, then Andre’s experience was more like Jonah’s— hie thee on that path to Nineveh or beware. It taught him to … watch out.
You couldn’t be too careful. Andre, with his shaved head and Fu Manchu mustache and wide-set squinty gaze, lives in a world where even the most minor of daily activities is fraught with significance and peril. Luck depends, of course, on God’s grace, and that depends on not only trying to live the right way, doing good works, resisting temptation, all that, but also getting dressed in the correct sequence, changing lanes on the expressway on the way to work at the right moment, invoking heavenly tolerance with the exact right words— keeping things regular. There are obviously no guarantees; you can do everything exactly right and God might still smite you—and that was for your own good, too—but you can minimize the chances by making the right moves.
It isn’t always easy finding them either. The Lord’s path may be plain to the righteous, but Andre makes no such claims for himself. God knows, Andre has slipped up now and then. There is, for instance, the fact of his being widely feared and reviled in the NFL for trying to hurt people on the football field.
This is true, certainly in reputation and partly in fact, and sometimes even Andre will admit it. Even as kid back in Pahokee, his unofficial assignment on defense was to rough up the other team’s star player. Playing safety in the pros (for Buddy) gave full license to this approach, since in many formations Andre’s job was just to move to the ball. And Andre would make it his business to get in one good hammer—late, low, unnecessarily high, it didn’t matter—sufficient to send a message. The message was You could get hurt out here.
He had perfected the violent alter ego he had begun imagining before games back at Pahokee High. It had started as a vague notion, an alter ego bigger, stronger, and faster than his poor undersized self. In college, when his teammates called him Batman, the vision was still just half formed. Now, in his ninth pro season, at age thirty, the creative visualization had become very real. When Andre suited up to play, he was no longer Andre Waters, the loving Christian gentleman who greeted callers on his answering machine with gospel music and a sweetly intoned “God bless you,” he was someone else, his Overman, someone known to him and his teammates as the Dré Master.
His friend Mike Flores, a second-year defensive end with a flair for comic-book artistry, had drawn the Dré Master just right, a brooding, Dr. Doom—like caped villain. To become this “Dread Master,” Andre has to work himself into the right mind-set, and he has an elaborate ritual to help. It starts days before the game, when he comes up with a motivational slogan for for the week, something like “Nothing nice” or “Let’s do it” or “I’m for real” or a phrase from the Bible, or maybe the name of someone near and dear. He writes the phrase on the pages of his game plan and meditates on it at every opportunity. On game days he arrives at the stadium two hours before kickoff, gets a massage and treatment for any aching muscles or joints, soaks in the Jacuzzi, anoints a troubled limb with some oil blessed by the pastor of St. Paul Church of God in Christ, Willie Ola’s church back in Belle Glade, pulls on his shorts before picking up his lucky shirt—a limp, lightweight cotton pullover with blue sleeves that doesn’t quite match Eagles’ green, but that Andre has worn for games ever since an ’88 victory over the Rams that triggered a season-saving seven-game winning streak. Then Andre inscribes this week’s slogan on a hand towel and on a piece of white masking tape. The towel gets draped from his belt, the tape he affixes to his forehead. Only then will Andre kneel to pray, not just as Andre anymore, but as the Dré Master, invoking God’s help for the game, to protect his opponents, his teammates, and himself from injury. He concludes with an incantation, tried and true, which goes, “and when the dust has settled, may the team that has worked the hardest and deserves it the most emerge victorious.”
Then, after invoking heaven, Andre primes himself to raise hell. He looks for reasons to hate his opponent. Say, if he had given up a touchdown against this team in the past, that would suffice, or if some player on the other team had taunted him, or said something in the newspapers. Before the Broncos game, for instance, that safety Tyrone Braxton had dared to compare his team’s defense favorably with the Eagles’— We’ll see about that! Andre could always find something. He enters the arena girded, anointed, sanctified, psyched, and … transformed!
In this mode, part hero, part villain, Andre plays possessed, so darkly focused that his own teammates will sometimes clap him on the helmet to make sure he doesn’t lose himself completely in the dark fantasy. When the game ends, all traces of evil and heroic excess fall off with the gear, and he becomes the sweet man he was before.
To Andre, the division between real self and Dré Master is so complete he’s startled when real people, in the real world, confuse the on-field antics with him. He’s brought some of this on himself, actually, like when he boasted that time—one of these things uttered in an instant to the Pack that assumes a life of its own—”I’m an animal, I admit it.” That had been a mistake. Because then the press box pontificators started keeping score, replaying Andre’s more questionable shots in slo-mo, where a third-degree misdemeanor looks like premeditated assault. In fact, the decision to hit or not to hit was made in an eye blink, often when running at full speed or airborne, and it was made, not by Andre, but by the merciless Dré Master. One of his most notorious shots was a low, out-of-bounds body chop in ’86, aimed at then-Falcons quarterback (now teammate) David Archer. Arch was unhurt, but the shot was so flagrantly late and out-of-bounds that it caused leaguewide uproar. Andre felt compelled to admit he was in the wrong and wrote a letter of apology to Arch—the first one the veteran quarterback had ever seen. But no act of contrition could undo what those slo-mo replays fed into gazillions of American living rooms had done. Andre became an icon of bad sportsmanship, a symbol and scapegoat for every pro player’s fear of the career-ending injury. When Pro Football Weekly had polled players in ’90, asking them to name the “dirtiest” players in the league, Andre topped the list— not the Dré Master, mind you, but Andre Waters—which, besides hurting Andre’s feelings, garnered still more scrutiny. Dan Dierdorf, the capable color man of “Monday Night Football,” leaped on the bandwagon during the Vikings game that year, singling out the safety for such a severe tongue-lashing that Andre was fined ten thousand dollars by the league—for plays that hadn’t even been flagged on the field!
But how is he supposed to jettison the Dré Master? How can he stop playing the game his way? It has brought him from a mud-stained shack on the Muck to annual earnings in the upper six figures. It has raised his hardworking mother from poverty. It has allowed Andre to do good works—unlike many of his teammates, Andre donates not just money to good causes, but his heart and his time. Besides, Andre’s mean streak is by now part of the Eagles’ mystique. “If the other team is afraid of you, your battle’s half-won,” says Seth, who knows a thing or two about intimidation.
Andre couldn’t change even if he wanted to. He is successful because of the Dré Master, not in spite of him. So no matter how much his agent Jim Solano polishes Andre’s off-field image, the Dré Master will undo it in games. Take the Saints game in ’91. The Saints were winning, and Andre was upset. Losing fired up the Dré Master like little else. Andre could feel himself getting sucked deeper and deeper into the vortex, so much so that it scared him. There was one play where he torpedoed the knee of tight end Hoby Brenner, trying to hurt him. Brenner had dived over a pile of players and hit Andre after the whistle on an earlier play, which often happened, no big deal, except he had then pushed Andre’s face into the turf. So when a spontaneous instant of opportuni
ty presented itself later, the Dré Master did his thing (he made contact, but Brenner was unhurt). After he did it, Andre felt weird. He didn’t approve of what he had just done, but it really, totally, wasn’t him!
All that afternoon he’d been putting up with the taunting of Saints receiver Eric Martin. The Dré Master was just aching to take a shot at the guy, but the right opening hadn’t come along. When the gun went off, and New Orleans had the victory, and Andre was standing dejected on the field near the Saints’ bench and saw Martin trotting happily off the field, he felt himself crossing back over to the dark side.
“Eric, pull me in! Eric, pull me in!” he pleaded with his teammate, Eric Allen.
Actually, later, he wasn’t sure whether he had really called out to Eric or if it was just his good side crying out from deep inside. What happened next was … the dark side just took over.
Before the thousands remaining in the stands, and nearly every player, coach, and official on the field, the Eagles’ safety tore down the sidelines and leaped on Martin’s back, blue arms flailing. Martin fell, and as his teammates ran to his aid, his attacker fled. Minutes later, in the locker room, his Dré Master gear spilled at his feet and the spell broken, Andre looked incredulous when the Pack mobbed him and asked about the postgame assault.
“Nothing happened,” he said.
The Pack had lots of fun with that the next day, running Andre’s denial under the caption of the photo, the one showing Andre climbing up Martin’s back. There was no way Andre could make people understand, you know, about the Dré Master, and the trance. Certainly not the NFL, which slapped him with a $7,500 fine.
No, Andre knows the Lord’s path to be demanding and fraught with danger, so he is cautious. Like, say, with women. Andre enjoys the bounty on the Sis-Boom-Bimbo trail. He sees what happens to many of his teammates’ marriages, and he knows why, so he avoids serious commitment with women. He is living the life and enjoying it. Responsibility is waiting down the road, and he’ll be ready for it, but while he’s living the dream, not getting tied down is fundamental. Independence suits him. Sometimes Andre gets in a mood where he doesn’t want to be bothered. That’s what killed the one serious fling he had, with a woman from Atlanta to whom he had been briefly engaged. She kept getting upset—and Andre could understand this— about the other women in his life, even though he went out of his way not to rub her nose in it. But keeping things from her only fueled her suspicions. Then Andre got in one of his go-it-alone moods and didn’t talk to her for, oh, about two or three months. Women, he learned, were real touchy about that.
