The Legend of Jesse Smoke (19 page)

“Yeah, well, it’s not true.” We were having coffee outside Redskins Park. I hadn’t seen her since the Dallas game and it was the Friday before we played the Giants.

“Of course it’s not true,” I said.

She shrugged, a knowing grin creeping over her face. “Maybe if Coach Engram thinks I’m really a man, he’ll let me play.”

I chuckled. “I don’t know, Spivey looked pretty good last week.”

“I know.”

“It’s a long season, though.”

A few curls had dropped into her view, and she brushed the hair out of her eyes. She frowned. “You think I’ll have to prove I didn’t have a sex change operation?”

“How would you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Far’s I’m concerned, somebody’s going to have to prove you
had
one, not the other way around.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Why?”

“People already believe it.”

“Yeah, well.”

She was right of course. People don’t need very much in the way of persuasion to believe a lie; and once they do believe it, they’ll hold fast to it in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I’ve never understood this phenomenon. There ought to be a name for it. I know. Let’s call it “Moon Landing Ignorance.” You know how, after the slightest challenge to the 1969 moon landing, thousands of people believed it had all been filmed in a studio; that it never really happened? There is an entire world of evidence, concrete evidence, to the contrary, and yet, even after being presented all of that evidence, these people would still prefer to believe the lie—because they saw a documentary film or read it on the Internet. Think about it. This is what they believe: A conspiracy was launched by more than a thousand people, all of them committed to maintaining a huge, earth-changing, science-affirming lie. Television technicians, film editors, special effects designers, gaffers, key grips, studio staff, sound engineers, Foley artists; all those hundreds of folks in Houston; all the astronauts; the astronauts’ families; the news media and all of their staff—a list of people longer than any single article on how the thing was faked—and
all
of them kept the secret;
all
of them refused to leak a single bit of information to anyone outside their vast conspiracy that might tip off the rest of the world about it. More than a thousand people, in other words, kept a secret of that magnitude and are, for some reason, still keeping it even after the landing has been so endlessly challenged. As for the “evidence” that the landing was faked? This comes from observations concerning the flag and the shadow it made on the moon in the pictures that were sent back, the direction of the shadows on the landing craft in relation to the location of the sun.

Yet, here’s the thing. Hundreds of thousands of people believe this—believe the moon landing was faked! In spite of the impossibility of more than three people keeping a secret of any scale; in spite
of six other missions to the same place. I mean, does anyone wonder if any if those subsequent missions were faked? Whether the photographs taken on those missions had the right sort of shadows? And if all the others were faked, did the same conspirators get in on the act, too, or did they have to enlist new participants in the lie? All seven missions lined up and faked with the same people and they all kept the secret? And did all those people finally decide it was better to fake a failure? Was Apollo 13 faked as well?

You see how utterly stupid some people insist on being?

And so: Moon Landing Ignorance.

The rumors about Jesse didn’t hurt her immediately; but then we did not foresee the effect they would have on her endorsements. First, some of the women’s products sponsors started pulling back. No reason was ever given; she just suddenly wasn’t so important to some of the perfume people or the clothing manufacturers. With the training shoe company she had a one year contract, so those ads continued. But a hair salon dropped out, and then an appliance store. Mostly local people, but … you could see what was going on. And all of them would be damn sorry later on, I can tell you.

How could I change anyone’s mind about Jesse? For hundreds of thousands of people, she was now a man who had played college football and developed into a great player there, only to then realize he was a woman and get a sex change operation. And who was this mystery man, anyway? That’s what the press began to wonder. No one ever posed the question: If this guy played college football so well, why wasn’t he famous
before
the operation? And where had this mystery man played college football, anyway?

All of that hoopla and all she’d done for us was kick the ball—and, of course, thrown and completed a
single
pass during a fluke play of an exhibition game. Through everything, Jesse didn’t care. “I just want to think about the next game,” she’d say.

With Kelso gone and Ambrose nursing a sore shoulder and arm, Jesse got to throw more than a few balls in practice. In fact, during
the week we prepared for the Giants, she played quarterback on the practice team—the offense that our defense practices against. I was really busy working with our offense, all the way over on another field, but I heard from a few of the guys on defense that she handled herself like a pro. “Those guys scored on us,” Orlando said after practice one day. “No shit.”

“Really?”

“She can throw the thing a mile,” he said.

Our two backup wide receivers—a kick returner named Jeremy Frank and a quick little speedster named Sean Rice—played especially hard against our defense. Rice frequently got in games with the first-string offense whenever we had three-receiver sets, but in practice he was the one who imitated the opposing team’s number one receiver, so he played on the right or left side. It was always a gas for the second stringers to beat the number one defense in the league, which, after four games, is what we had.

“Who’s she throwing the ball
to
?” I asked. We were walking on the track, toward the locker room.

“Mostly Rice,” Orlando said. “He caught six balls today. Two for touchdowns.”

“Really?”

“She hit Jeremy with a few balls, too. She can throw it.”

“I know.”

“If she
is
a she,” Orlando said.

“She
is
, goddamn it.”

He looked hard at me, which required that he nearly bend over. I looked up at him with what I hoped was a scowl on my face. “Don’t believe any of those lies, Orlando,” I said. “Okay? It’s just folks who can’t accept the fact that a woman might actually play this game as well as a man.”

“Well she do,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know what might happen if she ever get hit really hard, but … she quick on her feet and move just like a pro.”

“And she’s got a killer release,” I said.

“Sure do.”

“Tell Coach Engram about it,” I said.

He nodded, a half smile on his face.

“It’s all on film, right?” I said.

“Sure is.”

“Well, I’ll mention it to him, too.” Then I told him he was having a great year.

“I got a long way to go,” he said. “A long way.”

He, too, talked like a champion. Walking up to the locker room, I couldn’t help feeling like maybe my job was safe after all, at least for another year. And even if we were just 2 and 2, I was pretty sure we would knock off the Giants.

The Giants came out running the ball and ran right at Orlando Brown. Their first drive went from their 28 to our 1-yard line on thirteen runs and only one short pass around midfield to their tight end on a third and 2 play. The Giant right tackle was a huge, strong man named Edward Engel who’d been watching film of Orlando all week. On the first play, and many thereafter, Engel stood up like he was going to pass block, only to duck down in front of Orlando’s charge. The rookie would put his hands down to get ready to jump over what looked like a roll block, then Engel would hit him square in the gut and just push him out of the way. The fullback and tight end took out the linebacker and the cornerback on that side. The Giants also pulled their guard and their tackle from the left side, the center would take out anybody who followed them, and both of those huge blockers would just smash around the right end. Our cornerback, a very good player named Jerry Walls, who was supposed to force the play back inside on runs around the end, was no match
for that herd of blockers coming around that side. The Giant running backs would get to the outside and just dance through the bodies. They averaged 7.9 yards a carry, and the longest run of the day was 18 yards, so you have some idea how many times they wiped us out on that side. Even putting both safeties up close to the line in what is called “the box” was no help.

And all of it was because Orlando got handled so completely. He just wasn’t there to clog things up. He got pushed so far back, in fact, he sometimes got credited for the tackle downfield. He just never gave up. It wasn’t that Engel was stronger, or even better, than Orlando; he just knew more, had more experience, and could outplay him with that experience. You knew others would try his technique on our prize rookie, but eventually he’d learn how to counter it. By the fourth quarter of that game, in fact, he could already stall that move a little better. He was learning even as we watched him. But it was too late for our game plan.

We scored two touchdowns. Jesse made the two extra points. She never got to try a field goal, though. The Giants drove on us all day, using up most of the clock and racking up a commanding 24 points.

Ken Spivey played well enough but couldn’t get it done when it counted. Twice, he had Exley wide open down the sideline. One of those times he threw it out-of-bounds, and the other he threw it clear over Exley’s head. He finished with 16 completions out of 28 attempts, for 155 yards and 2 touchdowns. No interceptions. It wasn’t a bad performance. But those two missed opportunities hurt.

Nobody was happy on the ride back to Washington. We were now 2 and 3 and in second to last place in the division. And our next opponent was the Oakland Raiders, who in our first exhibition game had already made us look like a high school junior varsity team.

The good news? We’d be playing at home.

The bad news? We’d been playing at home when the Raiders kicked our asses the first time. We’d been shown to be the weaker team, then, and it was only clearer now. The Raiders were undefeated—5 and 0.
And the mystique surrounding Jesse had pretty much worn off. She was our kicker and that was that. Given how badly they’d licked us before, and the way we were playing, it wasn’t likely to be a packed house. And nothing irritated Mr. Flores more than seeing empty seats at home.

Not that he didn’t always make money; technically, we were always sold out. All the tickets to the stadium were season tickets, and the Redskins had sold out every game since the early 1970s. But folks didn’t always come to the games, and empty seats are very bad for publicity and future sales of team paraphernalia. Empty seats mean fewer sales of food and beer and other assorted souvenirs on game day and much less in parking revenues. So it was never good to have them.

We were not looking forward to Sunday afternoon.

In fact, the night we got back from New York, Coach Engram called a meeting.

He wanted all the coaches, but it was clear we were going to be working on the offensive game plan for the Raiders. We were going to run the ball, he said. The passing game was going to be limited. He respected the way the Giants dominated the field, pushed our vaunted, league-leading defense out of the way with old-fashioned sweeps and runs up the gut. “That’s football at its most basic,” he said. “And we’re going to do the same thing to the Raiders.”

“I’d like nothing better,” I said.

“Dan Wilber asked for it,” Engram said. “On the ride home.”

“He did?”

“The whole offensive line wants to stick it down somebody’s throat.”

“You think they can do that against Oakland’s guys up front?”

“They think they can.”

We talked about the poor showing on the left of our line—the way the Giants continued to run around their right side.

“Orlando was starting to correct at the end there,” Engram said.

Our defensive coordinator was a tall, puffy guy named Greg Bayne. He’d been a safety in his playing days, but now you wouldn’t put him anywhere but nose guard. He was the one who begged us to draft Orlando Brown and was particularly upset with his prize rookie’s play that night. When Engram said he thought Orlando was getting a little better by the end of the game, Bayne said, “Only because Engel got tired of pushing him around.”

“Well, he’s got a lot to learn yet,” Engram said.

“A lot. I think I’m going to play him only when we think Oakland’s going to be passing.”

“It’s your call. Your defense,” Engram said. “But I wish you wouldn’t do that to him.”

“On first and ten,” Bayne said, “Oakland runs the ball sixty-eight percent of the time. That counts as a running down. So does second and under five yards to go. They run a lot then, too. When they’re third and long—eight to ten or more, Orlando will play to rush the passer. If I think they’re going to run the ball, he’s coming out of there.”

We were sitting around a big table under long, hanging neon lights in the biggest meeting room at Redskins Park. The lights looked like the kind you see dangling over pool tables. Cigar smoke used to fill that room when I first started coaching here, but these days, this evening and every evening, the air was as clean and clear as spring water. Anybody who wanted to smoke had to go outside, or step into Engram’s office.

“What will that do to Orlando’s confidence?” I said. “Won’t take long for him to figure out what you’re doing.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Bayne said. “He’s not happy with what happened against the Giants either, believe me. But the Raiders will see what the Giants did to him on film. They’ve got a guy over there—Ruggins, or whatever his name is—who will eat Orlando alive.”

It was true. The Raiders had a right tackle who had been All-Pro and who made the Pro Bowl every year since he came into the
league. He was almost as tall as Orlando, weighed forty pounds more, and could lift a dump truck. His name was Jon Ruggins.