The Legend of Jesse Smoke (25 page)

Besides, it was bad enough getting Jesse’s chords to the level where everybody could hear her on the field. Coach Engram joked that the “high pitch of her voice would blow the little transmitters all to hell.”

Still, Moody was using her for all she was worth. And you couldn’t blame him. Jesse brought in fans unlike any other player in the history of football. Everybody from the beer-drinking macho crowd that wanted to see her get her head knocked off to the real aficionados of the game, who wanted to see her play. And women from every walk of life wanted to get in and see her. What had once been a sport in which lots of women were interested up to a point became a national phenomenon that interested virtually every woman.
The Atlantic
, the
New Yorker
, and
Vanity Fair
ran articles about nearly all aspects of Jesse’s existence. She was the “mystery girl from the Far East.” The “legendary daughter of an unknown coach.” There were no pictures of her as a young player, smiling at the camera, holding a football helmet under her arm; no pictures of her with her father, or in the uniform of any high school team. But the American high school on Guam released a transcript of her grades (except for Cs in golf and calculus, she was almost a straight-A student) and old newspaper articles about her prowess on the field when she played in a women’s league there. There were a few published pictures of her in action in the women’s league, and
Vanity Fair
ran those, only she looked exactly like a young man in a uniform, running with or throwing a football. You couldn’t tell it was her, except maybe for the
long legs and that whiplike arm moving so fast it only registered as a blur in the photos.

Ladies First
magazine did an article about her presence in the locker room. On the road she frequently had to dress in a hotel room then ride to the game in a cab provided by the team. After games, she’d walk out of the stadium and take a cab back to her hotel room. It didn’t take long for the press to realize they could talk to her immediately after the game on the field, or in the lobby of the hotel after she’d showered and dressed. At home games, I gave up my office in the locker room of the stadium. There was a shower in there, so she could clean up, get dressed, and then meet the media in the press room. So she never had to enter the locker room where the men showered and dressed, either at home or on the road. The magazine ran detailed pictures of her equipment—the flak jacket she wore that protected her upper body, for instance—explaining that you could pound on it with a baseball bat and she wouldn’t feel a thing. The piece showed her knee pads, her thigh pads, her shoulder pads, the headset she wore inside her helmet so she could hear Coach Engram or me.

Sport
magazine ran her vital statistics, 6′ 2″, 175 pounds; her score in agility drills; her speed in the 40-yard dash. (At 4.33, she was the third-fastest player on the team—a virtual tie with Rob Anders. Her feet were so quick she could outdo all of them, even Darius, in the agility drills.) All of that was very plainly laid out for the world to see and know. Still, there were stories on the Internet about how she walked around the locker room naked. How the men ogled her after a victory. How they held her up, naked, and celebrated with her in the shower. If you believed what was being said on the web, Jesse had daily sex with Coach Engram, me, Dan Wilber, Darius Exley, Orlando Brown, and even Rob Anders. She was Edgar Flores’s secret lover in one tabloid that ran a picture of Jesse’s bright-eyed face inside a bright yellow oval border and next to it, Flores, standing by a small plane with a cigar in his mouth. He flew her to exotic places of the
world, the story had it, so they could have their “romantic trysts” in private. Everywhere she went, somebody was taking her picture.

I did what I could to protect Jesse from all that, but the tabloids are right out in the open on supermarket aisles where you check out. Pictures of Jesse and everybody she was supposed to be involved with. It made me sick.

There was even a story about a former husband who wanted to reconcile with her, but whom she was coldheartedly ignoring.

The funny thing was, nobody mentioned a single thing about a long-lost mother.

We went to Mexico City to play the Aztecs. The Aztecs had a pretty good defensive line and not a bad group of linebackers. The thing was, they’d blitz more than a few times with a cornerback, a safety, and all three linebackers at once, and they were very good at disguising when and how they were going to do that. You could never predict when it was going to happen and where it was going to come from. To protect Jesse we installed a game plan that called for her to roll out more—usually to her right since she was right-handed, but we put in a few to her left too. That kind of play is called a “quarterback waggle.” We had her throw short passes to the backs and wide receivers on some plays, trying to set up deeper balls later on. We weren’t going for anything deep right away, and we planned on running the ball a lot.

What a lot of people missed because of all the attention on Jesse was the great year Walter Mickens was having at running back. He rushed for more than 250 yards against the Aztecs and we won the
game pretty easily, 24 to 10. The most spectacular play for me was a hurried field goal that Jesse kicked with only seconds left in the second quarter that made it 17 to 0. Up to that time in the game we’d been running the ball so successfully she hardly threw a single pass. Mickens kept slicing through the line for good yards and we owned the clock. But near the end of the first half we had to get down the field in a hurry, so we started passing it more. Jesse drove us up the field on quick passes to Mickens and the wide receivers. She could get back, set up, and release the ball so fast, I don’t know why Coach Engram was so worried about Mexico City’s pass rush. She hit Darius with a quick slant that went for 15 yards. On the next play she rolled a little to her left and flipped a nice quick-out pass to Anders. Then she hit Darius again for 18 yards. In five plays, and less than 30 seconds, she drove the team all the way to the Mexico City 36-yard line. Then, with no time-outs and the clock running, she stood back while the kicking team raced onto the field and got into place. She waited for the snap and then, as the time reached 0 on the scoreboard, kicked the ball high and far and right through the uprights. Fifty-three frigging yards. The ball cleared the crossbar by at least five or six feet. As we were trotting off the field, Coach Engram said, “That would have been good from sixty-three.”

“I know,” I said.

In the second half, we opened it up a bit more. Or I should say Jesse opened it up. She kept changing the play at the line. We’d call an off-tackle run, and she’d get the team up to the line and change it to a pass play. She kept the offense moving with short, quick passes—as we had set up in the game plan. But on one play she dropped back 10 yards behind the center into what is called the “shotgun” formation. She took the snap and drifted a bit to her right, and the Aztecs had a double blitz from the corners. They came at her fast, and she planted her foot, looking downfield. Darius was streaking down the right
sideline, and she released the ball just as one of the cornerbacks slammed into her lower legs. The ball sailed high and Darius leaped for it but it was out-of-bounds. Jesse’s legs got knocked from under her and she went forward onto her face. I thought I saw her knees buckle in the wrong direction and all of us sort of gasped when she went down. Even the folks in the stadium seemed to take a deep breath. But she got up, pulled a little on the pads at her knees, and then walked back to the huddle.

There was no flag. On the next play she read a corner blitz on the right side and hit Anders with a quick 15-yard pass, and when the safety missed him he went for another 10 yards or so. Jesse, walking up the field after that gain, pointed right at the cornerback who had hit her in the knees. It was like she was saying, “That’s what you get.” He started talking back to her, bad-mouthing her and everything. She ignored it. She came out of the huddle and changed the play at the line again. “Run what’s called, Jesse,” I hollered into my mike. But she called another pass play, this time a quick out to Exley on the left. She fired the ball to him so quickly, the Aztec linemen barely got out of their stance before the ball was on its way. Darius snatched it out of the air and ran for 11 yards. Again, Jesse pointed to the cornerback on that side. She was not listening to me with her headset, that much was clear. I looked at Coach Engram, and he called time-out. Jesse came to the sideline and I asked her what she thought she was doing.

“I’m having fun,” she said.

“Are you hurt?”

“I said I was having fun.” But the look in her eyes was as dead calm as a bank robber’s. And the cut on her nose, I saw, had started bleeding again. She took her helmet off and one of the medical staff put a better bandage on it.

As she was putting her helmet back on, Engram said, “Run what’s called.”

She shook her head a little I think, so he said it louder.

“We’re hot,” she said.

“I know it’s working,” Engram said. “But run what’s called. That’ll work too.”

“I want those people good and embarrassed,” she said.

I’d never heard such vehemence in her tone before and it surprised me. “You
are
hurt, aren’t you. They hurt your knees.”

“I’m all right.” She wouldn’t look at me. It was noisy as always, but it seemed like we were the only ones making noise; like the only conversation was between me and Jesse and Coach Engram.

“You’re acting like Spivey,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Don’t lose your cool.”

“I’m fine,” she said. She couldn’t see the fire in her eyes, but I could.

Coach Engram said, “Stick with the game plan, Jesse.” It was an order.

I told her to run Mickens at the corners. “Take it at both of them, one after another. It embarrasses them just as much to get flattened on running plays.”

She nodded, then trotted back onto the field. On the very next play, she faked a handoff to Mickens and threw it 30 yards to Anders on a quick post. The ball went on a flat, straight line to him—like a rocket—and he caught it in stride and kept running up the seam for a 55-yard touchdown.

When she came back to the bench after kicking the extra point, she stayed away from Engram and me. I wasn’t really angry, and probably Engram wasn’t either, but it was a problem both of us didn’t want to have. This was not the kind of discipline that either one of us liked. It was one thing to have her calling plays when it was clear to her that what we’d called wouldn’t work, but she was just doing whatever she wanted out there, calling her own plays like she was one of the old-time quarterbacks; like a real field general.

Coach Engram didn’t like field generals.

I know it sounds kind of petulant and adolescent—the coach wants his own plays called and not somebody else’s—but the truth is, a football game in those days was a fully practiced and rehearsed series of perfect performances. You prepared for every contingency, but you also made sure what you designed was employed to its fullest potential; it’s the coach’s plan put into action in the exact sequence that the coach has scripted it. There’s always a little wiggle room, but if the quarterback takes the plan away, the coach ends up standing on the sideline not knowing what is going to happen or what is called on the field. He gets to be like the guy playing a video game who sets the game so the CPU plays itself, and then stands back and lets it unfold without using the controls. He just watches the game do what it’s going to do. Nobody likes that. Least of all a head coach in the National Football League.

And once Jesse started calling her own game, a lot of things broke down. We should have won that game going away—we could have scored 50 points—but we started getting a lot of penalties on offense. Five false starts in the second half alone. The offense started milling around on the field and didn’t always know what was happening. I realized Jesse had started calling plays from the playbook that were not in the game plan and that we hadn’t practiced. I liked it that everybody tried to execute, though—they were listening to her. That’s a very good thing. The problem was she wasn’t listening to Coach Engram or me. And that’s a big problem.

At the end of the game, as we were walking off the field, Coach Engram looked at me with real concern and sadness on his face. “We need to have a serious talk with Jesse.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.”

“She keeps that up, I don’t care
how
famous she gets or how good she is, I’ll sit her right down.”

He’d do it, too. Football is teamwork to the highest degree humanly possible. Everybody has to be disciplined; they have to move exactly as planned, with absolutely unerring precision at exactly
the same time. It’s a clockwork human community that explodes into action and struggles against itself for brief moments of gorgeous fight and flight, and you can’t have one maverick deciding to change the pattern or direction of the flight seconds before takeoff. Not all the time.

You just can’t have that.

The Monday after the game, I told Jesse I wanted to take her out to dinner and celebrate her continued success. What I really wanted was to talk to her with no other person around. I wasn’t just going to address the problem at hand either. We hadn’t talked about anything but football since the big meeting, and I didn’t know if she’d accepted the insurance policy or what was going on with her mother or how she was managing her time now that she was an international celebrity.

We agreed to meet at a place in Herndon, Virginia, called Rally Round that served steaks and good beer. I met her outside the place, expecting she’d show up in her usual jeans and sweatshirt. She came up the street wearing low-heeled black shoes and a long low cut black dress. She was wearing a deep auburn shoulder-length wig. It looked like she had a great mane of hair, curled just right down both sides of her face and down her back. She wore deep-blue sapphire earrings that almost matched the color of her eyes and a necklace
with blue stones in it. I didn’t recognize her until she walked up and held out her hand. She was wearing eye makeup, which she didn’t need, and some sort of foundation that covered the brown freckles across her broad face. I could still see the dark line of what was left of the cut on her nose. Dark red lipstick made her teeth look as white as pearls.