Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  With fifty-three seconds remaining, they are stalled at fourth and fifteen on the twenty-five-yard line. Richie confers with Randall on the sidelines and the coach calls a 17-X-corner, which gives the quarterback three do-or-die targets: Fred on the right side streaking for the endzone corner, Calvin on the left side cutting across the field just past the first-down marker (under the 49ers’ deep zone), and Herschel in the right flat. On the snap, Randall checks off Fred, who is covered, and then fires a pass at Calvin, who leaps between two defenders, catches the ball, and lands on the ten-yard line. The first-down marker is also at the ten-yard line.

  Calvin reaches out and sets the ball down inside the ten. A first down stops the clock. There’s time to run at least three more. But the back judge, arriving moments after the catch, slides the ball back outside the ten-yard line, to compensate for Calvin’s hopeful spot. Players mull around the ball, the 49ers arguing that the ball belongs farther back, Calvin and Randall and other Eagles pleading that it should be farther forward. The line judges trot across the field with sticks and chain, and very deliberately stretch the measuring device from the line of scrimmage to the ball. At first, it appears as if the Eagles have it. San Francisco players reel with disappointment. But then, on closer inspection, the referee, on his hands and knees, finds space between the ball and the post. He stands and extends one arm. Niners’ ball.

  Randall flings his helmet across the grass.

  “The 49ers won that game by a spot,” laments John Madden in the CBS-TV booth upstairs, disappointed that an exciting finish has been ruined for millions of network home viewers. “I think they [the Eagles] got a bad spot. To me the officials didn’t hustle … when he [the back judge] got down there, how does he know where to spot the ball?”

  What Madden sees as laziness and bad luck, the Eagles, of course, see as further evidence of a leaguewide official plot.

  “Everybody on the field thought it was a first down, including the 49ers defense,” complains Dave Alexander. “They were hanging their heads. Everybody on the offense was jumping up and down.”

  “I saw where they marked it, and it was just crazy,” says Randall.

  “We were robbed,” says Wes.

  “He leaned the stick,” insists Antone.

  See, this is Oz and these are the 49ers. And the Eagles? They’re those rabble-rousing, braggadocio Bad Boys from Philly, Buddy’s old team, the guys who try to hurt people, the team the League loves to hate. Isn’t it obvious? Wasn’t it obvious last month when the stripedshirts kept throwing flags, giving the Cardinals extra shots at the end zone on that goal-line stand? When they flag Antone for holding three times a game but never see the other team’s tackles hanging on to poor Reggie? When there was no flag after that blatant forearm to Calvin’s head?

  Seth packs his bag, wrapped in dark, silent fury, good to his vow of silence, but when Andre, who watched the game on the sidelines wearing a Cheyney University sweatshirt, says, “Same old, same old,” Seth nods with a room-chilling scowl.

  “It’s getting painfully difficult for us to play a game and have it called evenly,” adds Wes.

  But Richie takes a different and typically upbeat message from this loss, which once again puts his team’s chances of making the playoffs in jeopardy. He’s excited about what he saw from Randall and his offense.

  When he gets the gloomy team together in the locker room immediately after the game, instead of lamenting the bad break in the final seconds, the coach shouts, “We’re back!”

  ONE OF THE THINGS defensive tackle Mike Golic does to prepare for the upcoming Minnesota Vikings home game has nothing to do with studying film, knocking heads in practice, or taking notes in team meetings. The big defensive tackle dons a horned helmet, a thick paisley cape with a shaggy collar of bright orange, a brown smock, tights, and boots, and, clutching a broadsword and round shield, spends about four hours on his day off standing in a cold drizzle in the prow of a dinghy on the Schuylkill comically ranting at the varsity crew team from La Salle University.

  “Row, you scurvy dogs, row! … Lean on those oars!”

  The crew team is also sporting horned helmets for the occasion.

  “I’m getting in that Nordic frame of mind,” shouts Mike, waving the broadsword wildly. “If I can maneuver through the Schuylkill, I can surely maneuver through that Minnesota offensive line. Now I know what it is to be a Viking! What it takes to be a Viking!”

  He turns to the camera in the boat alongside and drops the sword and shield to his sides.

  “And I don’t like it!”

  About three years ago the producers of “The Randall Cunningham Show,” Mitch Goldstein and Mark Jordan of the CBS affiliate in Philadelphia (WCAU-TV, channel 10), recruited Mike to do an occasional two- or three-minute comedy bit for the weekly program. Mike is something of a born clown, and unlike some of the other funny men on the team, his humor is mostly G-rated.

  With 280 pounds distributed haphazardly on a six-five frame, Mike’s body looks like something patted together with Play-Doh, topped off with a pudgy potato face and a cheerful, whazzup? grin. He’d tell reporters that he was born “on the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth of December” or, after knocking down a pass, explain, “I was crouched behind the line ready with my amazing five-inch vertical leap.” “I’m just as good as these guys,” he’d say of the more acclaimed members of the Eagles’ defensive line (Reverend Reggie and Clyde). “They just have more foot speed, more strength, better moves … and more sacks.” Grin. And, he might have added, more money.

  On TV, he’s golden. Like all natural comics, something about the face and body make you want to laugh. And Mike is willing to do just about anything, which the show exploits by having him make a fool of himself every week in some crazy stunt related to the upcoming football game. Before playing the Redskins’ famous offensive front, nicknamed the “Hogs,” Mike goes splashing around a muddy pigpen grappling with real porkers; before tackling the Packers, he steals a page from the movie Rocky and pounds on frozen carcasses in a walkin meat locker. Before meeting the Cowboys, he tries his hand at cowpunching, dressed in chaps, boots, Western shirt, and what must be a thirty-gallon hat, wrestling, with some difficulty, a steer to the ground by the horns. “This is hard!” he says, in one straightforward aside to the camera, hanging on to the annoyed animal with a trace of fear in his (Mike’s) eyes. In one bit, he pokes fun at his own lumpy physique, showing off the fleshy roundure of his own chest (“I was so ashamed when I saw it on tape,” he confesses later. “What a nasty body! I’m never taking my shirt off in public again!”), climbing into a sweatbox and emerging with a perfectly defined upper torso (loaned, in a close-up shot that left his head out of the frame, by safety Rich Miano). The comic bits are sophomoric and unscripted, which just adds to their charm. The “Golic’s Got It!” spots were so popular last season that Mike won a local Emmy. That led to more offers and, as it happened, some trouble.

  When Reggie grows tired of his weekly radio call-in show, he recommends Mike as his replacement, so Mike starts doing that. Then McDonald’s comes looking for an Eagles player to act in a series of comical commercials. These are a little more slick than the “Golic’s Got It!” spots, but in a similar vein.

  The idea is that each week the ads will feature an as-yet unchosen Eagles player boasting about the upcoming game, dressed up in an appropriately silly costume—for the Raiders, a pirate; the Redskins, war paint and feathers; and so on. Then the player will tape two alternate postgame spots, one showing him glorying in victory, the other in some ridiculous posture of defeat. He might be shown with an arrow through his head after the Redskins loss, for instance, or trampled by a stampeding herd after the Cowboys defeat.

  Eric Allen, Seth Joyner, and Mike try out for the spots, and choosing Mike is kindergarten math. Seth clowning around in a funny hat is like Charles Manson leading a Christmas sing-along. Eric is charming and smooth, but there’s a natural dignity about the man as ill suited to slapstick in it
s own way as Seth’s malevolent visage. Anyway, with the Randall show spots, the radio call-in show, the McDonald’s ads, and a host of product endorsements—on top of the normal saturation Pack coverage (Mike is a favorite locker-room interview)—by midseason, you can hardly open a newspaper without reading a Golic oneliner, turn on the radio without hearing Mike kidding around with call-in fans, or, on TV, seeing that Play-Doh face mugging on screen. Mike has become one of the top-three most readily identifiable characters on the football team (behind Reggie and Randall), a big, lovable galoot. His high profile just leads to even more speaking engagements, public appearance requests, postseason cruises, all of the goodies waiting at the end of the rainbow of big-time NFL celebrity.

  Not everyone is amused. All these extras began dropping in Mike’s lap before he was even a starter. The Eagles’ front four at the time consisted of Reggie, Mike Pitts, Jerome, and Clyde Simmons. Golic was used as a rotating fifth, inserted to allow Jerome and Pitts a breather. As a backup, his approach to his work—”Yo, guys, lighten up. This is a game!”—was a little easier to take. Reggie, Pitts, Jerome, and Clyde would kid him about being an “honorary black guy.” “Only, Mike, you gotta git yo’self a personal trainer this off-season and get to work on developing some butt, man,” Jerome would say. “You can’t be no brother with a flat little honky ass like that!” Mike could cheerfully accept playing behind these guys. It was second string, but not exactly. Mike actually played a lot. Buddy used to call Mike “one of the best fifth defensive linemen in the league.”

  “I liked that ‘one of,’” Mike would say, chuckling. “Like there’s a ton of ‘fifth’ linemen in the league.”

  Guys like Seth and Eric are not just starters, they are legitimate stars. Each has been to the Pro Bowl. And here’s this glorified backup—go ahead, say it— white guy hogging the commercial sidelights! Mike is making about $520,000 from the Eagles this season, and his outside work isn’t just fun, it’s lucrative. He gets paid $15,000 for one day of work on the McDonald’s commercials.

  Midway through this season, Mike and his wife, Chris, start noticing that their relationships with some of the other guys and their wives have grown cooler. Richie and most of his coaching staff, a generally humorless bunch, are sometimes mildly put off by the fun Mike pokes at himself and the team. In one case, Mike was busy taping a segment at a New Jersey hotel, trying to coax a few laughs out of Richie’s decision early in the ’91 season (quickly reversed) to do away with the tradition of herding players into a hotel the night before local games. Mitch Goldstein got a call on the set from someone in the Eagles’ organization.

  “Is Golic there? Rich Kotite wants to speak with him.”

  Richie told Mike some of his friends from the hotel called and told him what they were doing, and he didn’t like the idea. Sounded a little bit like they were fixin’ to make fun out of him. Plans for the shoot had to be revamped on the spot to keep Mike from crossing his boss.

  Mike’s outside success has bypassed the status hierarchy of Team. Public recognition, commercial deals, fame, and fortune—these are things that are supposed to flow from excellence on the field. Mike is, make no mistake, one fine football player, but he’s no Clyde, Eric, or Seth, which he is unfailingly first to admit. Mike’s success off the field is disproportionate. There are subtle hints, like when Mike is singled out in the film room for some blunder the day after a game, and Coach says, “Put that on your TV show.” Or when a teammate on the practice field says, “Some of you guys might think this is just a big joke, but …,” looking right at Mike.

  He laughs. Everybody laughs. But he also feels the stab.

  He’s a little mystified when folks fail to see the humor in the McDonald’s ads that air after a loss.

  “Hey, it’s not like I rush out to the studio after the game and tape the spot,” Mike protests to a call-in complainer on his radio show. “We taped all those spots at once earlier in the season, one in case we won, another in case we lost. It’s just a joke. Look, I hate to lose just as much as anybody!”

  Actually, Mike probably doesn’t hate to lose as much as most of the others, which is not to say he doesn’t try just as hard to win. It’s just… well, Mike isn’t a brooder. Everyone mouths the mantra that’s in the past and does his best to live by it, but there is a protocol after defeat. You mope around for about twelve hours. Many of the players are used to being indulged by family and friends through at least one long night of grumpy remorse.

  Well, suffice it to say, there is none of that for Mike, who has a hard time extinguishing that happy glint in his eye even after the most atrocious pasting. It is a good thing, too, because Chris doesn’t have the patience for it. After being home all day with their two boys, the tiny titans, Mike’s arrival fresh from some thrill or agony means Chris finally gets a break.

  “Boy, you guys sure got your butts kicked today,” she’ll tell him.

  “You’re all heart,” Mike will complain.

  And it is time to bounce a kid on his knee. “Mikey and Jacob, they don’t have a clue if I won or lost,” says Mike, happily.

  And everybody knows this about Mike, which makes the McDonald’s ads somehow harder to take. They are unseemly, like blowing a kazoo in a funeral procession.

  It is irksome, too, because his ascension to the starting role was the first and most tangible team consequence of Jerome’s death. Dreadful as it sounds to say it, Jerome’s ultimate demise was Mike’s main chance, clear and simple. With training camp starting up just a week or so after the funeral—Mike had been one of the pallbearers—he spent a lot of time grimacing and shrugging and saying the right things: “I feel terrible, but all I can do is do my best to fill those shoes”; “Sure, it’s something I’ve always wanted, but it goes without saying, you know, I hate for it to happen this way”; et cetera. It was an awkward role, but Mike pulled it off ably. He struck just the right note of guilty eagerness, conceding he wasn’t the player Jerome was, but that maybe, if he played waaay over his head, the NFL’s best defense wouldn’t go completely in the toilet.

  And it doesn’t. By the thirteenth game of the season, the defense ranks fifth in the league at stopping the run and has allowed only two rushing touchdowns. Mike feels secure in his new role. Even though he has (now) only that one sack, he’s leading the D-line in tackles. His quarterback hurries are respectable. Mike has knocked down five passes with his long reach and forced and recovered a fumble. He’s a having a good year.

  Against the Vikings, however, Mike faces an old nemesis. Back at St. Joseph’s High School in Cleveland, in his senior year, he went into the Ohio state wrestling tournament as the favorite to win the heavyweight division. In the first round he went up against a smaller but tenacious opponent from Salem Senior High in Canton named Kirk Lowdermilk, and lost. Lowdermilk went on to win the heavyweight division, and Mike finished third.

  Now Lowdermilk is starting center for the Vikings, like Mike a seven-year NFL veteran, and in the five or six times they’ve met on the pro field, Mike never feels as though he’s come out on top. Needless to say, the Vikings’ center never misses an opportunity to remind Mike of the wrestling championship. Blocking to Lowdermilk’s right is Randall McDaniel, one of the best guards in football. Frequently double-teamed by these two, sometimes by Lowdermilk and left guard Gary Zimmerman, Mike has a long, dark day against Minnesota in the trenches. It’s a frigid afternoon at the Vet, the turf feels like prickly concrete, and he just can’t seem to work up any momentum. Running backs Terry Allen and Roger Craig rush for nearly one hundred yards in the first half alone.

  Nothing Mike does seems to help. On the field he’s regarded as a clever player, one who frequently makes up for any deficiencies in speed and strength by correctly guessing plays and putting himself in the right spot. There have been times, for instance, when Mike has been able to read the opposing quarterback’s lips in the huddle and tip off his teammates to the general drift of a play in advance. Or he’ll sometimes notice lit
tle patterns in the way the center or guard sets up, clues to the coming play. But today all his guesses seem to be wrong. At third and goal early in the second quarter, Mike’s assignment is to hunker down low and drive forward, push the center or guard backward a foot or two. Only he notices that the guard lined up opposite him, Brian Habib, is set lower than usual, which means it will be virtually impossible to get underneath him. So instead, Mike decides he’s going to attack the gap to Habib’s right. He knows from the formation the Vikings are in—they’ve put the lineman McDaniel in the backfield as a lead blocker—that if the run comes to that gap, the lead blocker’s assignment is to hit the linebacker. Mike figures he’ll surprise ‘em, shoot the gap uninvited.

  Except McDaniel spots him and delivers the full force of his 270-pound frame right at the crown of Mike’s lowered helmet, driving the hopeful defensive tackle straight backward, into the linebacker, and clearing a clean hole for the touchdown run—make that three rushing touchdowns against the Eagles this season.

  Mike is momentarily woozy, as he gazes up into McDaniel’s smiling face.

  “Surprised you, didn’t I?” gloats the Vikings’ blocker.

  “Jesus,” Mike complains. “You’re supposed to hit the backer! Don’t you study the plays?”

  IT’S A PECULIAR GAME. For one thing, for the first few minutes of it Randall looks shaken and confused. There’s a reason for that.

  It seems the Scrambling One was discovered to have sneaked out of the New Jersey hotel the night before. Now, Randall may be a subversive in the way he plays football, but he’s practically a Goody Two-shoes when it comes to toeing the club line—as anyone getting paid his salary might be expected to be. But this time, the felicitous lure of his newly betrothed had gotten the better of his usual punctiliousness. It was an understandable lapse, and probably would have gone unnoticed, except a security guard posted in the hotel hallway read something else into Randall’s departure. He saw Randall walk into Jimmy Mac’s room, heard Jimbo shouting and cursing, and then saw Randall furtively exit the room, come down the hall, and leave the hotel … and not come back. Lots of the veterans cut out of the hotel after meetings the night before games. They live nearby, think the whole hotel routine before home games is bullshit, and can easily afford the thousand-dollar fine if they get caught. A handsome tip to the security man once or twice a year can generally ensure against discovery.