Sports in Hell

by Rick Reilly

  Cody, meanwhile, was good and properly tanked. And so it began.

  The two women opened with Paper and tied. The jeweler stuck with Paper again and Cody beat it with Scissors to take a one-throw lead. Figuring it worked once, why not twice, Cody stuck with it and the jeweler topped it with Rock. Tie game. Then Cody stuck with it again and lost again. Game one to the jeweler. Odd fact: The jeweler hadn’t thrown a single Scissors and Cody hadn’t thrown a single Rock. But Cody got predictable with the Scissors—throwing it three out of four—and the jeweler carved her up for it.

  In game two, they opened with two Scissors. Tie. Cody won the next with a very nice Paper over the jeweler’s Rock to take a one-throw lead. But she didn’t stick with it, switching to her weakness, dreaded Scissors, which hadn’t won her a single throw the entire match, and the jeweler clobbered it with Rock. Now Cody was one throw from elimination.

  I was thinking: “This would be a very good time for somebody to throw Fire.”

  Maybe the jeweler was thinking: “This pink Marge Simpson bitch is never gonna throw Rock!” Because she hadn’t thrown one yet, not in seven throws. So the jeweler threw Scissors—knowing it was safe—and Cody threw Paper. And suddenly a woman who had never even heard of the RPS world championship until yesterday was your new world champion.

  “I know it sounds weird,” the jeweler told me afterward, holding a huge novelty check and picking confetti out of her hair, “but I can read people’s faces. I’ve always been able to do it. I can totally tell when my husband’s lying. On that final throw, I just read her face and I knew she would throw Paper. I just knew it! I don’t know how to explain it.”

  So you didn’t realize that your opponent had thrown five out of six Scissors at one point and never once threw a Rock?

  “No,” she said. “She did?”

  Turns out Cody didn’t know it, either. “I didn’t throw Rock? Never?”

  Sigh.

  And then TLC pointed to her hair, where there were scissors and paper, but, fatefully, no rocks.

  “Next year,” Cody said, “I’m coming as a rock.”

  I decided I was coming back, too, only this time with a mind emptier than Britney Spears’. And I’m going to enter TLC, who will probably win.

  But there’s one question I never got answered, despite all my months of reading, practice, and competition, and it’s a question that plagues those of us who pursue this sport with the passion and obsession it deserves.

  How does a piece of paper beat a rock?

  6

  Women’s Pro Football

  Call me Stunt Monkey.

  That was the name the SoCal Scorpions—the women’s pro-football team—gave me, Stunt Monkey. Once a year or so, some unsuspecting male moron like myself will march in and want to suit up and try to tackle one of them or run through them, and the girls go out of their way to try to permanently separate him from his family ties.

  “Stunt Monkey!” they’ll holler, which basically translates to: Let’s hit this guy so hard snot bubbles come out of his nose!

  And you’re thinking: Wait a minute. How hard can a girl hit, anyway?

  And I’m here to tell you: about as hard as a recently tuned 2004 Nissan Xterra.

  Sadly, I now know this from firsthand experience. It was my first day on the team. We’d warmed up and stretched and then, before I knew it, they’d suddenly formed a circle and started yelling, “Oklahoma! Stunt Monkey! Oklahoma! Stunt Monkey!” with the same lust in their larynxes as you might hear cannibals yell, “Boiling water! Fat guy! Boiling water! Fat guy!”

  Soon I was being dragged into something called the Oklahoma drill, where the point is to drill somebody so hard they wished they were somewhere else, perhaps Oklahoma. This involved, on this day, one forty-nine-year-old rather lanky male (me) lining up against two twenty-something linewomen (them), each about the size of a Starbucks drive-thru. One was named Lela Vaeao, a Polynesian-American of about six feet and 280 pounds, a cousin to ex–San Diego Charger legend Junior Seau. The other was a young African American damsel who went about five-eight, 260, and seemed to have muscles everywhere up to and including her ovaries. A quarterback handed me the ball and light-footed it out of the way, which left me to try to run past these two front-end loaders on my own. That’s hard enough, but the “field” I had to run through was only three yards wide—lined on each side by huge pads—which meant the two of them could pretty much fling their heft at me like great sides of catapulted beef.

  When they hit me there was a happy whoop of “De-cleat!” from the rest of the Scorpions, which basically translates to: We just hit this guy so hard both his cleats went straight up in the air in front of him while the rest of him went straight backward! But that was not enough for these two. No, instead, when they hit me they kept me suspended in air, carrying me over the pads, outside the “field” another five yards, then pile-drove their 540 pounds into me and the ground at the same time. Their teammates roared and hooted and whistled like sailors at a strip show.

  Definitely not the kind of threesome I’d dreamed about.

  Lela was on top of me and not getting up. “Oh, geez, I guess we didn’t hear the whistle!” she tittered into the earhole of my helmet and therefore directly into my right eye.

  “Ngggh,” I replied, since only one-third of my lung capacity was available.

  This is the moment when most Stunt Monkeys pack up their cameras and their sound guys and go home. Did I go home? No. Did I give up? No. Why? Because I need thirteen full chapters, that’s why. But when I stayed, a lot of the players looked at me in a whole new light, with a look on their faces that seemed to say: You mean we get to clobber Stunt Monkey for two full days?

  When I told my buddies that I was going to play for a women’s pro-football team, their first question was not, “What are you inhaling?” Their first question was, “Women play pro football?”

  Yes, ma’am. Women’s pro football has caught fire in this country like wet sponges. And to call it “pro” isn’t quite accurate, since the Scorpions don’t get paid to play, they pay to play—$500 each. Yet the team loses money like AIG stock. The owner, Ann Begala, had spent $500,000 of her husband’s money the year before and took in $180,000, and that’s driving the team equipment van herself. Hell, just having the required ambulance next to the field every game costs her $650. The coaches, manager, and publicist all do it for bupkus. They play on a crummy little field without goalposts at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, and it’s free because their coach, Dan Tovar, is a computer engineer there. Seven Scorpions made All-Pro the year before and had to take the bus to the game.

  “You know what?” concluded cornerback Julie Beltz. “I’d play this game for free if I had to …Oh, wait. I do.”

  Every SoCal Scorpion has a day job, which can cause headaches, too. Sometimes, one of them will get pulled aside and taken into Human Resources, where there will be a grave panel of three people, who will sit her down and shut the door and whisper earnestly, “Is there trouble at home?”

  And the player will go: “No, why?”

  “Are you being abused? Because there are places you can go to be safe.”

  “Uh, noooo. What’s up?”

  And one of the board members will go, “Well, we see the bruises on your body. We see new ones all the time. And we just want you to know: We’re here for you.”

  My new team generally handed out more bruises than they took. They’d gone 7–3 the season before in the WPFL (one of three pro leagues in America that year), made the play-offs, and gotten eliminated from them by the hated Dallas Diamonds, who wound up champions. We Scorpions really hate Diamonds. We hate Diamonds the way the French hate deodorant.

  My two-day stint as a Scorpion tight end was scheduled two weeks before their season was going to start. The team’s tireless handler, Jody Taylor, told me to just show up at the field and she’d have gear for me. She did. It almost fit.

  “Where do I change?” I said
.

  “You’re looking at it,” Jody said.

  So it was that we Scorpions proceeded to put on our gear right in the parking lot, over compression shorts and sports bras. And right away, I noticed how different it was from all the football I’d been around my whole life and also how much the same. So I started making lists on a little pencil and paper I hid in my sock:

  THINGS YOU HEAR WOMEN PRO-FOOTBALL PLAYERS SAY WHILE GETTING DRESSED THAT YOU NEVER HEAR MEN SAY:

  1. Is my makeup smudged?

  THINGS YOU HEAR WOMEN PRO-FOOTBALL PLAYERS SAY WHILE GETTING DRESSED THAT YOU ALSO HEAR MEN PRO-FOOTBALL PLAYERS SAY:

  1. Don’t forget to take off your earrings.

  2. Hell, yeah, I’d do her.

  THINGS I HEARD WOMEN PRO-FOOTBALL PLAYERS YELL THAT I NEVER HEARD MEN YELL:

  1. “Hit her like she stole your Cabbage Patch doll!”

  NICKNAMES I HEARD ON THE SCORPIONS THAT I’D NEVER HEARD ON ANY TEAM BEFORE:

  1. Queenie

  2. Whore

  3. Bitchass

  And that’s about when I lost the stupid pencil.

  There really was a girl on the team called Whore, by the way. She just enjoys sleeping around and isn’t ashamed of it. “Look, everybody has to have a talent,” said Whore, who asked that I not use her name or (cough-cough) position. “Mine is being able to deep-throat an entire summer sausage.”

  So there’s that.

  Lela only dates crackers. “They’re cute!” says Lela, who, were she in the NFL, would be Tony Siragusa: large, crazy, and only stops talking long enough to crush spleens. “Besides, I can’t date Samoan guys. I might be related to them.” She’d like to date more, but there are obstacles. “When I tell them what I do, they seem sort of shocked. ‘Oh, my God, I’m dating a pro-football player!’ It’s not easy.”

  A lot of the players get around these difficulties by simply sleeping with each other. The quarterback, Melissa Gallegos, sleeps with her center, Chris Carrillo. Sadly, since their offense is shotgun, she never takes a direct snap from center. That’s another sentence you don’t hear in the NFL much. The QB and the center are lovers.

  There’s just slightly more hooking up on a women’s pro-football team than at a Sandals Caribbean. The second-string QB, Aisha Pullum, sleeps with a fierce little cornerback with a crew cut, Deuce Reyes. They both spit and swear and sit open-legged. In other words, they would both kick your ass. Deuce climbs poles for the phone company—(don’t say it. Yes, the joke is there, but don’t say it.). Aisha drives a cherried-out dark-tinted Chrysler 300 with the license plate QB7 (her number). Wide-eyed guys will drive up alongside her on the freeway and yell, “Sweet ride! Who’s your boyfriend play for?” And she always yells back, “A—I’m gay, and B—I’m the QB!” Tends to end highway chat pretty quickly.

  “Sometimes, it can be awkward,” says tackle Katrina (Monty) Walter, a big, happy midwestern blonde. “Two girls break up and then there’s a kind of riff about who’s supporting which side. Men’s teams don’t have to go through that.” Says Lela: “Like with Melissa and Chris. Maybe they’ll have had a fight or something and Melissa will say, ‘She’s not snapping it right.’ And Chris will say, ‘Well, maybe she wants to play both QB and center. Is that it?!’”

  You might ask, “What’s lesbianism got to do with football?” And I’d say, “A lot.” Just in my short time on the team, it mattered. For instance, in the scrimmage, QB Gallegos, who used to date Aisha, had on a yellow jersey, which meant nobody was supposed to touch her. That was a good thing for your reporter, because my man, a Marine named Crystal Stokes, was blowing past me like a roadside Cracker Barrel. Knowing that the defense couldn’t really hit her, Melissa kept running these keepers that would get first downs. Deuce screeched, “Not fair!” and started yelling at the coaches about it. And everybody knew Deuce hates Melissa because of the whole Aisha thing. So Deuce started hollering at her, “Come across that line again and you’re mine!” just loud enough that the coaches couldn’t quite hear it. Then Melissa threw an out and Deuce picked it off for a touchdown, taunting Melissa afterwards.

  “A lot of times it’s like a divorce,” says assistant coach Mark Ring. “There’s some tense moments. I don’t think Bill Belichick has to deal with stuff like that.”

  Sometimes, Tovar, who coached high school boys’ football in Virginia, will be trying to discipline a player and the girl she’s dating will get in the middle of it and start giving it back to Tovar. You know: Why are you yelling at her so loud? It’s not like she meant to do it! And who cares anyway? Vince Lombardi would have a difficult time with it.

  It gets worse. Melissa’s new girlfriend, center Chris, used to be married to the Scorpions’ old coach, a guy. But somehow, according to the players, he ended up with the backup quarterback, which convinced Chris to switch sides altogether and start dating women, namely Melissa. How would you like to be the newspaper beat guy on that team?

  Good Lord, we’re both thinking it, so we might as well get all the questions you have over and done with now. Go ahead.

  Q: OK, on the road, do they have to, you know, share beds and stuff?

  A: Yes. They sleep four to a room, two in each bed. Monty, who’s straight, slept with a gay girl all season, no problem. “Not me!” says Lela. “I’m already trying to make sure I get a straight girl every road game this year.”

  Q: Do they all shower together, naked and stuff?

  A: Yes, but they say it’s absolutely not sexy. In fact, sometimes it can be downright disgusting. “We’re trying to get a rule: You gotta shower in your bra!” says Monty. Lela: “I know! I mean, I’m big, but damn, you got to put that stuff away!”

  Q: Do women do the same kind of horrible things to each other at the bottom of the pile that men do?

  A: And worse. “One time a girl pinched my nipple!” Lela says. “My pads are too small and they came off in the pile, and a girl just pinched it! Hard! I grabbed her and took her down. I’m like, ‘Do it again, bitch!’” (It might surprise you to know that Lela is a nanny during the day to a fourteen-month-old.)

  Q: Do their boobs get hurt? I mean, can you hurt a boob?

  A: Yes, and yes. A rookie tight end told me that once she turned around a little late on a pass and it hit her square in the right breast. “I had a bruised boob for, like, a week.”

  Q: How much of the team were lesbian? A lot?

  A: The players I canvassed guessed it was between half and just over half, and it bothered some of the straights that people think all women’s pro-football players are gay. “Look, we’re trying to sell this sport for men to come and see,” says Julie Beltz, an attractive straight cornerback, “and the people we send out to sell it are these crew-cut-haired, two-hundred-pound lesbians. I don’t think that helps sell the image. Like, every time I’m in a bar with my friends, they tell guys I play pro football and every time the guy goes, ‘Are you gay?’”

  It’s not easy for the husbands, either. The husband of Andrea Hubbard-Grant, a lineman, attests. “When we first started going out, I’d tell people, ‘Yeah, I’m dating a football player!’ Then they’d look at you real weird. I had to sort of watch it.”

  The MVP of last season’s Pro Bowl was the Scorpions tailback Desiree (Dez) Weimann, who doesn’t have a boyfriend. “I get the question all the time, three years out of four: ‘You’re gay, then, right?’ The only year I don’t get it is in a Summer Olympics year. Then they understand … But, I mean, I gotta be a guy’s dream! Go have a beer and talk football with a girl you dig!”

  It might also be her day job: mortician’s assistant. She picks up dead bodies all day and takes them back for embalming, etc. “Death doesn’t scare me at all,” she says. “But it does make me want to get out and enjoy life. Football is in my blood.” Literally. Her mom is president of Pop Warner Football and her dad is a coach in it. She must want it bad. She broke her neck playing it three years ago. After she recovered, she stopped for a while, but then decided life wasn’t worth l
iving without it. “It makes my heart sing.”

  She’s a slasher, like a Warrick Dunn, Intel-chip fast and tiny. If she’s not the best in the league, she’s in the photo. I reckon she’d be a decent high school back if they let her play. “I think I’d maybe be able to play for a lower-division high school team,” she says. “At best.”

  I don’t know. She looked harder to tackle than Trig 501 to me. There were maybe three or four Scorpions I think could’ve started somewhere for a decent-sized high school boys’ team. A receiver named Isis was big and fast and high-kneed. She was catching balls and then literally looking for people to knock over. Luckily, I was on offense, so I got to enjoy it. “Damn,” I said to the girl standing next to me. “Nobody can stop her.” And the girl went, “Oh, yeah, everybody’s scared to tackle her.” Been covering pro football for over thirty years and don’t think I’d ever heard that before. I’m sure guys have felt like that before, though, but they’ve never said it.

  Ray Lewis: Damn, that LaDainian Tomlinson. Nobody can stop that guy.

  Brian Urlacher: Oh, yeah, everybody’s scared to tackle him. It looks like it might hurt.

  There were a few exceptions—players who were clearly out of shape, too fat, too slow, scared—but mostly they were solid and fundamental football players. “They’re so much smarter than men,” says Tovar. “They pick things up much quicker than men. I give them a play sometimes and they have it on the first run-through.”

  The offense is called Hustle and Flow and, I have to admit, we’re hustling and flowing our little women’s pro asses off tonight. Not me personally, of course. I’m being bottled up at tight end by this tiny little cornerback named Priscilla Flores who can’t be much taller than my umbrella. But she’s eyeball quick and all hands and strong for a midget. In between plays, I asked her if maybe she wouldn’t do me the favor of choosing another profession so I could get open once.

  Turns out she was a medical assistant. Her parents hated the idea of her trying out for the women’s pro team, which is partly why she did it. “My dad said I’d never make it. My mom just hated the whole thing.” But she’d played j.v. ball in high school and liked it. “Some guy tried to kiss me after practice,” she admits. “Kinda weird. A teammate wanting to kiss you.”