The Legend of Jesse Smoke (29 page)

So we worked out exactly what we wanted to do against the Browns. They had a running game like ours—a big offensive line and a running back named Delroy Lincoln who was as good as anybody in the game. Strategy here was key, but we were kidding ourselves if we thought the distractions were over.

The following week, when everybody was back for practice, the press got wind of Liz. Colin Roddy cornered Jesse in the parking lot after the first day of practice and said, “Jesse, are you gay?” Others had asked her the same thing, but I’d always thought Roddy was above that. Jesse just looked at him and kept on walking. “How long have you
known
your mother was a lesbian?”

“Leave her alone,” I said. She was walking a little ahead of me, and when I spoke up she looked back at me and stopped. Roddy stood there with his pad and a pen in his hand. “Do you have a comment, Jesse?” he asked her.

“I don’t.”

“Did your mother teach you how to play quarterback?”

“My mother didn’t teach me anything,” she said, and started moving away.

“Come on, Jesse, talk to me,” Roddy said. “Put all the rumors to rest.”

“Look, anything I say …” she started to say, but seemed to think better of it. “I don’t have any comment, okay? Gimme a break here.”

She disappeared into her Mercedes and drove off. Roddy walked back toward the compound with me. “What’s going on, Skip?” he asked.

“Getting ready to play the Browns, that’s what’s going on.”

“Come on, what’s the story with Jesse’s mother?”

“Who the hell have you been talking to?” I asked, stopping to face him. I couldn’t imagine how he could have found out in so short a time. Was it Flores? Engram? Somebody in the café? How on earth did he already know?

“Can’t reveal sources,” he said.

“That’s a lot of horseshit, Roddy. I’m no judge and this is no courtroom.”

It was a beautiful day for early November. I remember thinking how the warm air felt almost balmy. We walked along the path toward the practice field a while and I admired the smell of pine needles, determined to say nothing more. But then Roddy said, “We’ve been talking to Liz Carlson nonstop for the last two days, if you really want to know. And well, she’s given us so much, I just thought Jesse might want to give
her
side of it.”

“Her side?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a side?”

“Liz says she tried to keep in touch but Jesse would have nothing to do with her.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“What does Jesse say?”

“Jesse would rather have had a phone call, as I understand it.”

“See? That’s what I mean. Tell me about that.”

“Nothing to tell. They didn’t have anything to do with each other for, I don’t know, something like twelve years.”

“Because Jesse disapproved of her mother’s lifestyle?”

“I didn’t say that, Colin. That’s not it at all. And, I mean, what
is
that, anyway? What is a ‘lifestyle?’ Would you say your ‘straight’ life is a kind of style?”

He pretended not to hear my silly question. “I need to talk to Jesse.”

“You
don’t
need to talk to her
or
her mother. You’re a sportswriter, why don’t you write about sports, for god’s sake.”

My voice must have got a bit loud there because this stopped him. He studied me a moment, then smiled. “Look, I’ll do my job, Skip, and you do yours.”

“Really? Cause you never fail to tell me how to do mine.”

“Well then, now we’re even, I guess.”

The week of the Browns game, the
Washington Post
printed an interview with Jesse’s favorite wide receiver on the Divas, Michelle Cloud. Michelle was not gay, but she said she had been approached by Jesse at a Washington hotel. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” she said. “Hell, a lot of the players in this league are gay.” She claimed that she never could get used to the idea and resisted Jesse’s advances. Then an “unnamed player on the Washington Redskins confirmed” that Jesse had engaged in sexual activity with at least two players. This “source” was, he said, “defending” Jesse. But of course all this news did was fan the flames about Jesse and her sexuality.

The news that Jesse’s mother was in town, that she was a lesbian and was anything but reticent on the subject of her sexuality, well, it made things even more complicated. Suddenly Jesse was not only the most famous woman in the world; she was at once the most revered and hated woman in the world. The conservatives and the Christian right (which phrase, as a matter of fact, has always interested me; I mean, is there a Christian left? And if so, do they ever say anything to offset the stupidity of the Christian right? Why do they let the Christian right give the entire faith such a bad name?) immediately called for Jesse’s dismissal from the league. “A woman like that exerts just too much influence,” said one. Another called for her endorsements to be pulled across the board. “The very idea that this woman represents Modesty Perfume,” one commentator said, “when she, herself, is an example of sexual promiscuity and largesse, is beyond the pale.”

Taking the other tack,
Out
magazine named Jesse the most admirable woman on earth.

All the talk shows made jokes about her; innuendos, intended, one hoped, to poke fun more at the rampant disapproval of Jesse than anything else. Still, it brought her name to the fore in so many venues and in so many ways that after a while even jokes that were in support of her ended up hurtful and sad. (“Where there’s Smoke there’s a ‘flame”’—that sort of thing.) There is no such thing as “enough is enough” in the media. Only when public interest itself wanes, when the money starts to dry up, do they back away from a feeding frenzy, and that’s what this was.

You must remember how hard it was back then to pick up a magazine or a newspaper that didn’t have a picture of Jesse and/or her mother on the cover. It would go on, I knew, for the rest of the season, and I wondered how long Jesse could withstand it before it started to wear her down. How could she or anyone keep playing through it all? Even Harold Moody, our public relations director, stopped taking calls.

She came to practice every day with her head high, but you could tell it was all in her mind, simmering. Nate started appearing to pick her up after practice, and he, Dan Wilber, and Orlando Brown ran interference for her through the nest of reporters waiting outside the park. Those three guys formed a pretty big offensive line to block for her as she tried to make it to the parking lot and her Mercedes.

Charley Cross of ESPN wanted to interview her just before the game in Cleveland. He was a former protégé of Bob Costas and, like Costas, about the only educated, intelligent sports reporter in the business. It also helped that, like Costas, he had a soul. He wanted to talk to Jesse about the sport, not the “scandal” concerning her sexuality and her background. She asked me what she should do, and I told her, “He’s been doing this for almost a decade. Cross is the best there is. Doesn’t play games, and he doesn’t go for anything but the truth. He’s a human being so … if you’re gonna talk to anybody, talk to him.”

She promised him an interview after the Browns game.

That Sunday morning the
Washington Times
speculated that Jesse had been brutalized by her father, which was what drove her to “lesbianism.” He’d forced her to be “the son” he always wanted; forced her to learn football, and made her into the “anomaly” or, “in some circles,” the “freak” she was. She was described as a “tortured, driven woman” so confused about her own sexuality that she was almost predatory toward other women, and probably “fairly promiscuous with men” as well. The
Times
worried about the “unity” of the Redskins.

Jesse, she took it all out on the Browns.

In the first half she completed 16 straight passes. Four went for touchdowns. The Browns were down by 28 before scoring a single point. Just before the end of the half, they got a field goal. We enjoyed such a big lead they’d stopped trying to run the ball and went strictly to their passing game. (We stopped Delroy Lincoln, who rushed for only 16 yards on 12 carries. That was part of it.) Orlando Brown had four sacks. Nick Rack and Zack Leedom had two each. The only unfortunate thing that happened in the game was that Drew Bruckner strained his knee pretty badly. We had to plug in a rookie there named Talon Jones who was a strong special teams player but essentially untested at middle linebacker. He’d practiced there with the second team, and Coach Bayne liked him, but you never know with a rookie. He was 6′ 2″ and weighed around 230—fairly light for a linebacker in those days—but he was strong and smart. Just the same, Bruckner was a hell of a player to lose.

In the second half, Jesse was no less effective. It really was something to watch her drift back, find a receiver, and whip the ball right to him, laser sharp with every pass. She went 11 for 13 in the second half. (Gayle Glenn Louis dropped one, and Rob Anders turned the wrong way on a play and the ball sailed over his shoulder before he
realized it.) For the game, Jesse completed 27 of 29 passes, for 340 yards and 6 touchdowns. Walter Mickens ran for 103 yards and scored the other touchdown. We won the game 49 to 3.

Not only was it Jesse’s first 300-yard game, she tied a Redskins record for touchdowns with six. Only Sammy Baugh (two times) and Mark Rypien had ever done that.

I didn’t give a damn about her personal life. She was the best quarterback, the best pure passer, I ever saw.

Coach Engram had taken over the play calling during the Browns game, and Jesse ran the plays he told her to call. It was like he knew what she needed. I kept waiting for him to tone it down, to go more completely to the running game, but he kept feeding Jesse those passing plays. He must have read the
Times
article himself, and been as pissed off as Jesse was. Twice, I saw her nod toward him when I told her the play he’d called. Coach Engram stood there, carrying his clipboard like he was a third-string quarterback, not the coach, his face inscrutable, saying nothing except what the next play should be.

The Browns were supposed to be championship material, but we made them look like a badly coached high school team. The papers said the next morning that we’d “humiliated them.” Nothing they tried worked, on offense or defense. Nothing. While for us, it was the opposite. At the end of the game, Dan Wilber, Orlando Brown, and Darius Exley picked Jesse up and carried her off the field.

I was so proud of her right then. I understood, maybe for the first time, what it meant to be “brimming.” Hell, I thought I might sprout wings and lift up like something attached to a hot-air balloon. I bet I didn’t weigh more than twenty pounds or so at the end of that game. Talk about walking on air.

Jesse, though, she had a look on her face as though she’d just plundered a village, or pulled off the most perfect, most massive heist. Something in her, something in her soul, was being fed by frustration,
anger, resentment, even hate. That kind of thing can’t last for long, but … while it does? People move mountains.

I wish love had the same power. It’s the better thing, love, don’t get me wrong. I truly believe that. Hatred is potent, see, but it’s small and finally constricting—even suffocating. Man, though, it sure can feed skill and will for a little while. Yes it can.

In her ESPN interview with Charley Cross, Jesse did not appear even slightly nervous. She was just Jesse: sweetly ironic, not too forthcoming, but blunt and willing to laugh at herself. As usual, she was conservatively attractive, in a white blouse with a thin gold necklace around her neck. Cross, a broad-nosed, raspy-voiced man who came off a little like Bill Clinton, wanted the world to see her as a “woman.” He opened the interview by saying he was going to be giving America its first true glimpse of an “extraordinary young woman named Jesse Marie Smoke.”

Throughout the interview, the camera shifted from a close-up of Jesse’s face as she answered questions to highlights of her throwing the football. At one point, the film showed her getting hit from behind in her first pass attempt against the Raiders. Even in slow motion it looked like her head had been knocked off when her helmet flew up.

Cross asked, “Did that hurt?”

Jesse gave a broad smile. “A little.”

“Were you injured on that play?”

“No. I didn’t really feel it until later, actually.” In the studio light, Jesse’s curly hair glistened, looking almost wet.

Cross spoke to her gently throughout the interview. “Talk about what it feels like to be the only woman on a field with such violence.”

“It’s not violence to me, you know? It’s competition.”

“Pretty violent competition.”

“I think it can be violent, but … It’s all controlled,” she said. “Violence is chaotic, like, mostly random. I know it looks chaotic on the field, especially during the heat of a play, but most of the people in a play—they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing; and the force you see, that’s just part of that.” She got this thoughtful look on her face then, and Cross let her think for a second. Then she picked up where she left off. “A football play starts with what I know
looks
like confusion and chaos, all the players struggling and pushing and running to specific places, but then one player begins to emerge in the distance and another one lofts the ball over a crowd, in a perfect arch, to that one player breaking free and the ball and the player come together like some … some elegant
fact
of the universe. You know? It turns out all that confusion is really precision. Artistry.”

“Artistry?”

“To me, it is. There’s no other word for it.”

“Do the players on other teams ever talk to you on the field?”

“Sometimes. They say things when they can’t get to me. But the blocking is always so good. I’ve only been sacked twice this year.”

“You’ve been knocked
down
, though, quite a few times.”

“Not that many. Anyway, I’m usually watching the receiver I’ve thrown the ball to. I don’t even notice it.”

“You don’t notice it?”

“Not really.”

“But you say sometimes players say things to you.”