Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  They started off using Randall only on third downs. Ron Jaworski, the old veteran, would steer a conventional offense on first and second down, and on third down, in would trot the kid and the defense would start scratching its head— How do you defend against this guy? Randall was electric. He was easily the most exciting player the league had seen in years. He started five of the last six games of the ’86 season, and in ’87 he was the Eagles’ offensive MVP and was named to the Pro Bowl. Randall started in the Pro Bowl in ’88, won multiple player-of-the-year honors, and took the team to their first play-off game of Buddy’s tenure (along with Buddy’s defense, that is). He had become such a valuable player that Norman didn’t even wait for his contract to expire. The club renegotiated and re-signed him to a fiveyear deal early in the ’89 season, staking the franchise on him. By the end of that season, Plumb was letting Randall call the plays himself in some situations. Scat quarterbacking had arrived. No doubt about it, Randall, age twenty-six, was the Man.

  It was a strategy that played dangerously to Randall’s self-obsession. Doug Scovil’s mantra, You’re the Man, placed the quarterback above criticism on the squad. His central place in the offensive scheme, his huge new contract, it all fed a growing public perception that the team was Randall. In postgame analyses, Plumb and Scovil would lavish praise on Randall’s clever moves and crisp passes— You’re the Man— and excuse or roll right past his mistakes. The other guys had never seen anything like it. There would be a play, for instance, where Randall ignored open receivers downfield and ran for a small gain. On the screen you could see the open guys jumping up and down, waving their arms, pleading for a pass. And instead of slamming Randall for ignoring his checkoffs, Coach would say something like, “Uh, you might want to note, for the future, Randall, these other options on that play.” And that was it! On to the next play! When the team lost, in the absence of any fair assessment of blame by the coaches, the locker room assessed its own blame in whispers and grumbled asides. Like any sore left to fester, it grew. Key players on defense would stay late after practice every day to bone up on opposing teams and prepare themselves to the hilt. And where was Ran-doll? Off at some public appearance or taping his TV show or radio show or participating in some fashion show or flying out for an appearance on Arsenio, for Crissakes!

  Norman began to lose patience with the quarterback after the second opening-round play-off loss in ’89, to the Rams. The impatient owner was hearing whispers from the temple: Buddy’s winging it with that kid … that’s fine for the regular season, but not the big games. The best teams are too smart, too fast, too well coached. They’re not going to get beat with that improvisational bullshit, they’re not going to let themselves get Randallized. Buddy didn’t agree. Hell, they were gettin’ so close he could taste it. But Norman wanted a smart guy running his offense. He wanted a solid, dependable, structured offensive attack that employed Randall, but didn’t lean on him. Doug Scovil had died of a heart attack late in the ’89 season. After the Rams loss, Buddy bowed to the pressure from above and let go of his low-key offensive coordinator Ted Plumb. It had been Harry, of course, who came up with the name Richie Kotite.

  And so, in the late winter of ’90, Randall the Man was introduced to his new handler, and the days of rump-pat, high-flying scat quarterbacking ended.

  Which is not to say Richie wasn’t impressed. The Eagles’ new offensive coordinator was, simply, amazed by Randall. Talking to a friend in the summer of ’90, the new offensive coordinator was genuinely in awe of the quarterback’s talent. “His ability to create something on his own because he’s had to … sometimes I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It’s just tremendous. I’ve always known how dangerous he could be when he’s in space, when he starts running with the ball— he’s one of the most dangerous pure runners in the league—but I never realized until I started working with him every day what an accurate passer he is! I’ve seen him throw passes on the run that no other quarterback I’ve ever seen could have thrown, and right on the fucking dime.”

  But right from the start, these incredible talents were to Richie, the Silverback, strictly peripheral. Richie believed in running the same twenty or so plays over and over and over again until the offense could do it blindfolded and in a trance. He disguised the plays by running them out of a shifting pattern of formations, making it tough for teams to guess exactly what was coming, but the Richie offense was high Gregorian all the way, an eleven-man choir working in a limited tonal range, scripted to the max.

  “The premise we’re going by is to be fundamentally sound, to be as disciplined as possible,” he said the summer he arrived. “The thing you try to do is get them where they are believing in themselves, synchronized, and regardless of what happens during the ball game they keep working hard and pecking away and eventually good things will happen.”

  Fundamentally sound? Synchronized? Pecking away?

  Nobody in the NFL had a squarer hole than Richie, and Randall, the remarkable round peg, was going into it.

  Randall told Richie that he liked to call his own plays.

  “I’m calling the plays,” said Richie.

  Randall said there was a core group of plays that he and the Keiths particularly liked, that worked well for them—couldn’t they just add them to Richie’s offensive scheme?

  No go.

  “Whatever you were doing before, there are similar things in the scheme we’re going to put in. Relax, you’re going to like it.”

  Randall didn’t like it.

  As for being the Man, Richie’s line was, “Randall, you’re not out there alone; you do your job and let everybody else do theirs.”

  He took to calling Randall “Arsenio,” an unsubtle dig at the quarterback’s celebrity status and a backhanded reminder that he was supposed to be part of a team. As for kicking up his heels, making things happen, Randall’s on-field genius for escape and action … well, that was okay, said Richie, but only when all else fails: ‘‘Take the snap, do your drop, step up in the pocket, check off your receivers, and if there’s nothing there, then take off!”

  Sure, that sounded great, like Johnny Unitas with a surprise fifth gear. Only everybody knew that by the time Randall did the traditional quarterback thing, he’d either have to throw the ball or get knocked on his ass.

  The conflict between Randall and Richie was, at heart, the standard clash between talent and experience, between the chaotic rumble of the action and the calm wisdom of the playbook. Players believed they were the only ones who could win football games. The Game wasn’t some dry abstraction, X’s and O’s on a blackboard or the silent overhead camera of the Coach’s-Eye View. It was a the thrill of action, of making sense fast out of a jumble of hurtling bodies, sensing which direction to turn, where to throw. It was easy to see, later, projected on a screen from afar, all the options and obvious pathways. Randall’s special genius was living in that chaotic, instinctive moment, on the field. He wasn’t some programmed warrior acting out a script prepared by computer-assisted Coach. He was an artist!

  When Richie arrived, Randall was at the top of his game. Before Richie ever signed on with the Eagles, Randall had started fifty-three games. He’d led the Eagles to victory in twenty-one of his last thirtytwo starts. After just five seasons, he was the fifth-leading rushing quarterback in NFL history, behind only players who had played the game twice and three times as long as he had. He had been to three Pro Bowls.

  Richie insisted his offensive system was an opportunity for Randall, a chance to make even more of his skills. Randall saw it as a threat and an affront. Who was this guy? A failed tight end from the olden days (Were they still wearing leather helmets then?), a former assistant with the Jets? What could Richie Kotite possibly teach Randall Cunningham about making things happen on a football field? And Richie was neither tolerant nor tactful. He had more than the usual coaching tendency to treat players as interchangeable parts.

  Then things got worse. Buddy picked Jimmy Mac off the
waiver wire and signed him to a one-year contract. Randall and Jimbo made a big show of togetherness at first, but no single thing could have done more to shatter the mantra. Jimbo completed the scenario Randall could see shaping up. First comes Richie with this Neanderthal offense that demands a windup, pocket-passing quarterback, and they bring in Buddy’s old pal from the ’85 Chicago championship team to run it. Jimbo was everything Randall was not. Skip the fact that he was white. He was an acknowledged master of running a conventional offense, reading defenses, making adjustments on the field before the snap, and hanging in the pocket until the last possible microsecond before releasing the ball. Jimbo was also an immediate hit in the locker room, popular with all the guys, whether it was dominating the bowling league, playing golf on his day off, maintaining the constant running game of Bones, playing a practical joke—Jim, the traditional, honky, tested quarterback with the Super Bowl ring on his finger was, face it, exactly the kind of player Richie needed to pilot his synchronized offense.

  Randall did the only thing he could do. With Buddy acting as a buffer (the head coach still preferred his “five big plays” theory, but Norman had demanded a change), the scat quarterback and the Gregorian choirmaster got along. Randall still cut loose pretty much when he felt like it, and when he failed … well, Buddy would intercede to protect him. And Richie tried to accommodate Randall with lots of rollouts and half rollouts, which he called waggles. The quarterback’s game hardly fell apart. He had the best season of his career. With two extremely talented new receivers, Fred and Calvin, and with everyone running the crisper, more predictable pass routes Richie scripted, the offense (and Randall) posted its best performance in years. They finished the season ranked third in the league.

  But it wasn’t enough. The offense was shut down again in the first-round play-off game, the infamous Redskins loss that prompted Buddy’s firing. Randall was just awful. Injuries had shredded the Eagles’ offensive line, and the quarterback, with the experience of two consecutive play-off losses behind him, was leaning more heavily than usual on Richie’s script at precisely the time he needed to cut loose.

  It was after this game that the festering resentment of Randall spilled out. The vehicle, of course, was Seth. After that game, standing half-naked in front of his locker, bitterly disappointed, the linebacker vented a long tirade against an unnamed teammate, whom he blamed for the defeat. Of course, anybody who knew this team knew exactly whom he was talking about:

  You commit yourself to something; you commit yourself to winning. You commit yourself to achieving your goals. And don’t half-ass commit. Put everything you got into it. If you don’t want to do it, fine, then find something else to do. Because there’s a lot more guys here than to just, you know, be selfish. If you want to be selfish, if you want to think about yourself, go be a damn ice skater, run track or something or play golf or something. People just have got to take into consideration that they’re not the only person on the team…. Until guys realize that, until guys grow up and realize that this is your job, sure you make great money at it, but at the same time, if you don’t love the game and you’re not playing to become the champion, then you just really shouldn’t be in it. I just think that certain areas, you know, certain guys, they just need to grow up and realize you either commit, do something 100 percent, or just get out of it, because it’s more than just themselves that they’re hurting. There’s nothing you can do. The coaches can sit there and say, you need to study, you can take a horse to the water but you cannot make the horse drink. That’s all it comes down to. It’s desire. You either want to be a champion, you either want to be the best at what you do or you don’t.

  As Randall collected his pile of postseason honors in early ’91, he was far from a happy man. Doug Scovil, Ted Plumb, and Buddy were gone. His teammates’ resentment had spilled into the open.

  Randall told one hound that off-season that he felt like he was in a coffin, pushing up to keep the lid from being closed on him. He saw it all as a trial, a test of his faith and mettle. He sat stoically through a painful preseason meeting with his teammates, who one by one stood to dump on him their suspicions, envy, and disappointed expectations. Seth accused him of not preparing hard enough for games and for caring more about himself than his team. Keith Byars said he needed to forge a better relationship with his teammates, invite the guys out to dinner now and then at the Fortress of Solitide. Keith Jackson complained that he didn’t check off his receivers—that is, he didn’t throw Keith Jackson the ball often enough. Much of it was petty, selfserving, and unfair, but Randall just took it. Afterward, he thanked everybody for trying to make him a better quarterback and person. It ended the session on a weird passive note.

  Worst of all, the scat revolution was over. Despite all that production in ’90, much of the joy had gone out of Randall’s game. When Richie said, “You’re not out there alone, kid,” the coach meant it in a nice way; he was trying to take some of the pressure off Randall. What Richie didn’t realize was that Randall liked being all alone out there, at least figuratively speaking. He liked the pressure. He liked being the Man. But now no one would stand for it. His teammates had risen up against him. He knew that Richie would have little patience if he tried to make something happen on his own and failed—and failure was necessary! To succeed with this head coach, Randall would have to don the traditional robe and take his place in the choir. Richie had no feel for Randall’s game. And if Randall didn’t sing the right notes on cue? Waiting in the wings was Jimbo, just dying to do exactly what Richie wanted.

  So long as the team kept winning, this was all okay. Randall entered the ’91 season professing his loyalty to Richie and his enthusiasm for the offensive system. He looked terrific in preseason games that summer, running the offense according to Richie’s script. Then he blew out his knee in the first game of the year. After he had battled back from surgery and rehab, his start in ’92 had been unsteady, but the team was winning. It was only when things started going bad, as they had now with four flat outings in a row, losses to the Chiefs, Redskins, and Cowboys, and the narrow escape from the Cardinals, that Randall had a chance to air the old chestnut “They won’t let me be me!”

  With all that it entailed.

  IT STARTS in the clutter, bustle, and steam of the Dallas locker room after Randall’s benching.

  The Pack crowds in around the quarterback as he stuffs his travel bag. Randall is glum.

  He complains that he just hasn’t been able to get in sync. He waves off a suggestion that maybe playing with the knee brace is hindering him, or maybe there’s something wrong with his arm.

  “I’m fine,” he says.

  “Is it something mental?” a hound asks.

  “It’s not me, man. It’s not me. All I can do is go out and do what I’m told, it’s that simple. I’m going with the structure of the offense, trying to make it work the way they want it done. It’s that simple. That’s why I’m here. I don’t run this football team. This is Richie’s team and you’ve got to do it his way.”

  Then as the Pack drifts off, Randall asks one reporter who lingers nearby, “You tell me what you think the problem is.”

  “No joy,” says the hound. “You’re not having fun playing the game anymore.”

  “You saw it,” says the quarterback, nodding. “Jim went out there and did the best he could, still, he couldn’t do anything. They did get that one touchdown, but not much else. I just can’t get in sync with this. I haven’t been in sync for three or four weeks. As much as I want to just take off and run and do all that stuff, I’m confined. I can’t do what I want to do.”

  There you have it.

  Richie makes things worse the next day, when he announces he’s changed his mind about starting Randall next week against the Raiders. He’s giving the superstar a week off. Suddenly, the main action with this football team is no longer on the field; it’s in the locker room.

  Randall arrives at his locker every morning this week to face t
he full national Pack. O. J. Simpson, whose autograph a nervous nine-year-old Randall once requested in the USC locker room, is covering this for NBC. The other networks are represented, as is ESPN, HBO, the wire services, New York press, visiting reporters for L.A…. All of them supplement the full normal Pack of locals, who elbow in closer with handheld tape recorders to catch his every soft-spoken word, camera lenses zoom in close to capture any small sign of distress (Is that a tear?), anger, frustration, or—blessed chance!—insubordination. Richie has handed the hounds one of the staples of the pro football reporting genre, a quarterback controversy! And with Randall, there’s no telling where the thing might lead.

  And Randall doesn’t disappoint.

  “It’s started, man,” he says. “The quarterback controversy has started, so let’s get it going.”

  The following week is a running seminar in Randallisms. He tells the Pack he’s a team player, and he’ll abide by what the coach says, and in the next breath hints that if Richie keeps him on the bench, he’ll quit. He says he can learn a lot from watching Jimbo play, and in the next breath says he won’t learn a thing from sitting on the sidelines, and that if Richie believes it will fire him up again, “Then Richie doesn’t know me very well.” He says he’s “a humble person” whose ego can take the benching, and that the coach has every right to sit him down, then he points to the bulletin board where the NFL rankings are posted every week and makes sure everyone notices his quarterback ranking there, second on the list.