The Legend of Jesse Smoke (18 page)

“So what’s the matter with the offense?” Flores said now, and I knew what he was doing there. My heart sank a little. He really was one of the best owners, because most of the time he left us alone to do our jobs. But every now and then, he’d suddenly take a little more interest than any of us liked. And on that day, he was interested in the offense, which made me squirm. For one thing, it was always my fault when the offense faltered. I helped Coach Engram come up with the game plan, after all, and I usually called the plays.

“There’s nothing wrong with the offense, sir,” I said. “Nothing, anyway, we can’t fix.”

“We’re going into the fourth game, Granger, and we’ve scored all of twenty-six points this year.”

“We’re working on it, sir.”

“Why haven’t you called for more deep balls?”

I said nothing.

“It looks like you only shoot for five-yard gains, you know? You never go for the works.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t about to defend myself. Nor would I start complaining about Ambrose or Coach Engram’s sway over the game planning or anything else.

“I want to see more creative play calling in the Dallas game. All right, Granger? Go for broke.”

I folded my arms and studied Mickens out on the field as he practiced grabbing pitchout after pitchout. I didn’t know if Flores was looking at me or not. I didn’t care.

“You think you can do that?” he said, finally.

I looked at him. “Sir, we’ve put together the best damned game plan we can possibly think of; we’re practicing it today and tomorrow and in the morning on Friday. We’ll walk through it at the stadium again on Saturday. By Sunday at four, we’ll be ready to play.”

He thought about what I said for a beat, then he said, “I knew a bartender once, and every time he made a Bloody Mary, he’d say, ‘That’s the best damn Bloody Mary I ever made.”’ We were both silent a moment. “You think he was telling the truth every time?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“No, but seriously—every time? You think?”

“Maybe
he
believed it,” I said.

Flores neither smiled nor frowned. He just watched the practice for a bit, then sort of moved off slowly toward the other side of the field. No way he wasn’t going over to complain about me to Engram. I’d hurt his feelings again. Only, it always irked me when he’d start talking football as if he knew anything about it. Because if he
had
known anything, he’d have seen that when we tried the deep ball it either sailed wildly over the receiver’s head or fell short and forced the receiver to fight like hell to knock it down. Darius Exley almost broke his hip in the Lions game. As it was, he took a deep bruise that forced him to miss practice all the next week.

I really didn’t think that Ambrose’s problems “played right into my hands,” as Colin Roddy later reported in that book he wrote about all this. He said I believed if I worked at it, “I could get Jesse into a game and then we’d see what our offense was capable of.” Another writer for ESPN has said that I was aware that I needed Flores to be pretty pissed off and “putting pressure on Coach Engram before I could engineer” anything like that; that I was “glad that Ambrose was showing his age.” So I want to set the record straight right here: I
hated
what was happening to Corey Ambrose. I’m a former quarterback myself. The only person back then who thought of Jesse and what Ambrose’s troubles meant for her was Justin Peck.
He
claimed to see the writing on the wall.
He
started hanging around the complex, chatting with reporters about his young client and how great she was going to be.

The truth is, I was just too busy with the day-to-day operations of the offense in the heat of a season to be considering such things. That sort of thing I left up to Charley Duncan and Coach Engram. No, Terry Fonseca came in and I was busy working to get him prepared. I didn’t do any lobbying for Jesse. Had what happened that season depended on my foresight and planning, we might have ended up at the bottom of the pile.

But football, like life, is unpredictable. And something completely unexpected happened. Coach Engram benched Ambrose, and we had a really big win with Ken Spivey at quarterback.

The Dallas game is something special in Washington. Seems like it always has been. And not just since the old George Allen days either. That was a whole decade after the rivalry first got going. Allen salted it maybe, got it even more solidly into the football lore of the city, but the rivalry between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins originally got going in the early to midsixties, way before I was born. Anyway, it was as hot back then as at any time, even though the Redskins were perennial losers and the Cowboys had long since become winners. No matter how good the Cowboys got, or how bad the Redskins seemed to be, they still beat up on each other; the Redskins still came back and beat them enough times, and vice versa, that neither team ever felt entirely safe stepping on the field to play the other.

So it was terribly important to Flores that we win this first confrontation of the new season at home.

In the first quarter, on their first possession, Orlando Brown sacked the Dallas quarterback and knocked the ball loose. Drew Bruckner,
our middle linebacker, picked it up and ran it 28 yards to the end zone. The new holder was Terry Fonseca, who’d practiced all week with Jesse and promised her a perfect hold every time. He did just what he said he’d do and Jesse kicked the extra point. It was 7 to 0 before the end of the first minute.

On their next possession, Orlando swept into the backfield and knocked the Dallas running back down for a 6-yard loss on third and 2. Brown was playing like a man in a crowd of children. He was so tall and rangy and fast, nobody could stop him. By the end of the first quarter they had a tight end, a fullback, and a tackle trying to block him. This set up some other things on the other side of the line. For the game, our other defensive end—a big, happy-faced nine-year veteran named Elbert James, who was lucky to get to the quarterback five or six times in a year—had four sacks. Bruckner had two. Orlando had two and the forced fumble.

On our first possession, Ambrose drove us down inside the 20-yard line, but then threw an interception in the end zone. We stopped Dallas again, then Ambrose completed two short passes to Mickens and a good over-the-middle toss to Exley and we had first and 10 at the Dallas 18-yard line. On the next play, Ambrose tried to drop it over Mickens’s shoulder and the ball sailed on him. A Dallas linebacker picked it off and it was a hell of a race to stop him from taking it all the way back. Mickens caught him at our 33. The first quarter was winding down and Dallas was in business, or so they thought.

At the beginning of the second quarter, driving inside our 20, Dallas lost 16 yards on two successive plays. Brown got his second sack for a 6-yard loss, then Bruckner got one for another 10-yard loss. Our fans went wild.

On third and 26 from our 34, they got called for holding. (The tight end tried to tackle Orlando.) Now it was on our 44. They tried a deep pass in the middle, but our safety knocked it down and they had to punt. That was as close as Dallas got to scoring all day.

On the next series, Ambrose threw two short passes to Anders in the slot, and we had a third and 2. He gave it to Mickens off tackle and he just barely got the first down. We were on our own 28. I remember a cloud passing over the top of the sky and a shadow racing over our huddle, as though god was trying to tell us something. I called a play that had what we call “deep potential.” Anders would cross over short, about 10 yards down the field, with the tight end cutting out behind him in the opposite direction. Mickens would block and then fade out on the same side. Exley would stop and then fly up the right sideline. If he was open, we’d hit him; if not, we had Anders or the tight end, or Mickens. Ambrose dropped back, Exley made his move and the defensive back fell down. There was no one within 10 yards of Exley. Ambrose stepped up, looked as if he saw it, but then he went for the tight end who was also wide open, only about 10 yards downfield, and overthrew him by about 10 yards.

That was it. Coach Engram called time-out. Engram said Ambrose was really upset when he got to the sideline. “What’d you call time-out for?”

“You’re done,” Engram said. “Sit down.”

No quarterback can stand words like that. I was in the booth, as I always was, but I heard the exchange through Coach Engram’s mike. He doesn’t like attitude, and when Ambrose came at him and challenged the move, he really tore into him. “You’ve completed five of sixteen not counting the two to the Cowboys.”

“I’ve had bad days before.”

“Not like this. I’m not waiting for you to come around.”

“This is my team!” Ambrose shouted.

“Like hell it is!” Coach Engram was shouting too. “Now sit down.”

And so he sent Ken Spivey in. Erratic, emotionally tender, Spivey.

The first thing he did was throw a 44-yard pass, on a line, to Anders, who ran it all the way to the Dallas 5-yard line. Then Spivey flipped it to the tight end in the corner and in two plays we had another touchdown. Jesse kicked the extra point, and we took off after that.

I have to admit, Spivey played a great game. Everything I called worked. It’s always a pleasure to see it from up in the booth, when a play you’ve designed gets run exactly as you designed it and the ball is fired quickly and accurately to where it’s supposed to go.

We won going away. Anybody looking at the score—we won 31 to 0—might suppose Dallas had a terrible defense and we had a great offense, but that would not really be accurate. Our defense just shut the Cowboy offense down with the help of our twelfth man—the home crowd, that is, who made so much noise even our own players had trouble hearing our signals. Dallas must have had a half a dozen three and outs—they punted on almost every possession—which meant our offense enjoyed all kinds of time to play out there. The Dallas defense, out on the field most of the game, just got tired, while
our
defense played very well when they had to.

I didn’t want our guys to develop overconfidence from that game, though. Dallas had a hell of an offense and their defense was damn good, too. We’d see them again in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day.

I could see already that Orlando Brown was going to be All-Pro. So completely did he dominate, he forced other teams to compensate by putting extra blockers on him. That took players out of the other team’s offense and left other defenders on our defense free, and that meant we would have a few other All-Pros on our defense. For the first time in his career, Elbert James got a nickname—they called him “El Train James” because he was getting to the quarterback now as he never had before. Other teams could not put two men on him, they had to block Orlando. Same thing with our defensive tackles, Zack Leedom and Nick Rack, who were stopping the run and breaking the middle of the pocket on passing plays. Our defensive backs could take more chances because opposing quarterbacks had so little time to set up and find a receiver. And all of it started with Orlando Brown. He really was exciting to watch. Even with three men on him, he’d force his way into the play and make things happen.

The day after the Dallas game, Mr. Flores came up to me and said, “One hell of an offense, Coach.”

“It wasn’t the offense, sir,” I said. “It was the defense.”

He stopped, seemed puzzled about something. “Well, sure, the defense played well, too.”

“And that’s why our offense was so good,” I said. “Believe it.”

He looked at the floor and then wandered up toward his office. No doubt, I’d managed again to offend the man who signed my paycheck.

So we came out of the Dallas game with 2 wins and 2 losses. Dallas was 3 and 1. The Giants, our next opponent, were undefeated. And we would be going up to their home field to play them.

By that fifth game, the fuss about Jesse had pretty much calmed down. She was just our kicker, and folks, well, they got used to it, not to mention her reliability. She was 7 for 7 on field goals and had made all of her extra points. With her uniform and helmet on, you couldn’t tell she was a woman either. Taller than Kelso or Ambrose, Jesse carried herself on the field like the professional athlete she now was.

As I’ve already said, I couldn’t spend a lot of time with her after opening day. I did try to keep up, though, with what was happening in her life. I am not the fatherly type, but I guess you could say that I was trying to help her in the same way that a father helps a daughter. The press, for one thing, wanted so much more from her than she was willing to give. Roddy hung around like a forlorn lover. He waited for her after every practice, sought her out after games and even during warm-ups. She would not talk about her family, except to say that her father had taught her how to play and that he was dead. She would not talk about her childhood or anything in her personal life. Several in the press thought that she was my girlfriend, or Nate’s girlfriend, or even Andy’s girlfriend. She was seen with all of us—the other two a lot more frequently than me once the season got started.
Except for us three, she did not seem to have friends. She was completely into football and the team and her endorsements.

Of course, no celebrity in this culture is safe. I don’t know how actors do it. Everywhere you go, people know who you are, or think they do. And the things that get printed in magazines and on the Internet, the claims people get to make in print, are sometimes downright harmful.

The one claim about Jesse that wouldn’t go away was that she was a transgender woman—a man who’d had a sex change operation. I don’t know where this story first appeared. It’s possible some clown wrote it in a blog and then somebody with a pea brain picked it up and forwarded it to somebody. Everybody claims to want the truth, but the “truth” they embrace turns out to be the first bloody lie they hear. Ironic, isn’t it?

Roddy had already asked Jesse about it, of course. To which she just laughed. She told me she looked at him like he must be crazy and then laughed.

“He probably believes it,” I said.