The Legend of Jesse Smoke (31 page)

While we were playing the Jets in New York, the Giants were going to Dallas to play the Cowboys, who had split their last two games but were starting to execute very well—they were talented and they’d had to play some really solid teams. Oakland barely beat them, 17 to 13, following which they beat Cleveland 27 to 10. They were healthy, too. Whereas the Giants were hurting in the secondary, having lost their starting free safety and their weak-side linebacker for at least six games each. They had to bring in a new punter because their starter broke his leg. Their best wide receiver had suffered a slight ankle sprain, but he was due back for Dallas. Sometimes, the league schedule was so good I set my DVR to record several of the games so I could watch them later. I really wanted to see how the Giants did against Dallas. And not just as a coach either. As a fan.

We would have to go to Dallas and play on Thanksgiving Day, and even during the week before the Jets game, we were already beginning preparation for that. It would be a real grudge match, especially if Dallas beat the Giants. Then again, if the Giants won, Dallas might even be a tougher place to play, with the Cowboys that much more desperate. We’d beaten them pretty handily in Washington, of course, so either way, we figured they’d be about ready to kill when we got down there.

In practice that week, Jesse still had a very slight limp when she walked from the huddle to the line, but once the ball was snapped you couldn’t notice it. She finally admitted that she’d twisted her ankle slightly, but an MRI showed no structural damage. Still, we let her rest it on Wednesday and Spivey practiced with the first team. It didn’t really matter to Jesse—who was always ready to play—and since practices were closed, nobody noticed Jesse wasn’t in there.

Back then, as you may remember, the Jets had one of the few open-air stadiums left in the league—we still had one in Washington—and even the Jets themselves complained about how bad the weather could be there. We went to New York on Friday and had a walk-through practice on Saturday. Both days the air was still and the
weather only crisply chilled—like the best kind of fall day. Sunday by noon the field was frozen solid and wind slashed across it so hard and fast it looked like it would pick the whole surface up and send it out over the Hudson River. Snow started swirling in the air just before kickoff. It swept in white churning clouds along the hard surface and made the whole field look like the yard lines and hash marks were yielding up their whiteness to the wind.

It was almost impossible to pass the ball in those gusts of wind. Jesse’s arm was strong enough to throw a few tight spirals 10 or 15 yards downfield, but anything deep got blown so far off course you couldn’t be sure where it would land, or in whose hands. I hated it down there on the sideline, freezing to death in the icy blasts of air. Coach Engram kept calling running plays and sweeps, trying to wear down the Jets. I might have insisted that we take advantage of their pass defense, but I understood what was going on. In those conditions, Coach didn’t want to risk it with Jesse. She was wearing gloves for the first time, and twice she almost fumbled the ball on the snap from center. When she took the gloves off, her hands froze so quickly her fingers got stiff and she couldn’t grip the ball then either. She kept her hands in front of a heater on the sideline and pulled the gloves on each time she had to take the field. Jesse’s got big hands for a woman—not man’s hands either. Just a young woman’s hands, a little bigger than normal, with long, wide fingers. She usually didn’t have trouble gripping the ball in bad weather. But this day was something else.

It was a hell of a time. We couldn’t move the ball. The defense played well enough, but we just couldn’t sustain a single drive. I don’t know how many times the offense went three and out. At the half we trailed 10 to 0.

In the middle of the third quarter, trailing 10 to 3, Andre Brooks, our right guard, went down. He was small for a guard, 6′ 2″ and around 290 pounds, but he was one of our best blockers, run or pass, and he was devoted to Jesse. Trying to push off on a defensive lineman charging at Jesse, he tore a muscle in his right forearm. He
didn’t want to come out, but he couldn’t play with only one arm. The backup at that position was a fellow named Dave Busch. He was much bigger than Brooks, 6′ 6″ and 334 pounds; he was strong and we liked him for the position, but he was not the blocker or athlete that Brooks was.

When Brooks came to the sideline Coach Engram looked at me and the serious expression on his face said a lot. He was thinking what I was thinking. Jesse might be in trouble out there with a weak spot on the line.

We couldn’t get anything going in that wind, and now Jesse had to throw in more of a hurry. The first time she tried something deeper than 20 yards the wind blew the ball up and away from Anders and the safety intercepted it. It was early in the third quarter, and it didn’t cost us anything but the end of another promising drive. The whole game it just seemed like every time we got something started, the Jets would find a way to stop it. They didn’t sack Jesse, but they hurried her, and she was not used to throwing a football with gloves on. I don’t think she wanted to admit the gloves were a problem, but you could see the flight of her passes had a little too much arch—they were too susceptible to the wind.

On the third play of the fourth quarter, with the wind in our faces and the ball on our 15-yard line, Jesse rolled a bit to her right and tried to fire it in between two defenders to hit Gayle Glenn Louis on a quick slant. Dave Busch had been fighting his heart out and he blocked well for her, but on that play he got pushed flat by the defensive tackle and the cornerback blitzing from that side leaped over him to hit Jesse just as she threw. She went down in a heap on the hard field and the corner landed on top of her. The ball sailed high, Louis barely tipped it into the air, and the same safety grabbed it out of the air for his second interception. This time, he ran it the 15 or so yards to our end zone and made the score 17 to 3.

Jesse was good and angry as she went out after the kickoff. The steam rushing out of her mouth might just as well have been smoke.
Dan Wilber told me she got into that huddle and said, “We are not going to lose this game.” She was something to see right then, he said. She told me before she went in, “I want pass plays now. We got to pass.” I could tell from the strain in her voice that she’d hurt her ribs when she hit the field with the cornerback on top of her.

Coach Engram started feeding her what she wanted. She threw two quick-out passes to Exley, one for 8 the other for 11 yards. Each time he stepped out-of-bounds to stop the clock. We were down to less than 2 minutes, so on the next play she dropped back, looked left at Exley, let her hand move with the ball, up and down—lots of Jets players left their feet—then she turned to the right and fired it to Anders moving up the sideline. He caught it without breaking stride and ran 35 yards before he got knocked out-of-bounds on the New York 18-yard line. It was so noisy nobody could hear Jesse at the line. She started using our silent count and the team performed it to perfection. (With a silent count, everybody watches the ball. If the quarterback says it’s on “three,” the center counts to himself, “one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three,” and snaps the ball. The quarterback counts too, everybody else watches the ball; when it moves, they do.) On the next play, she hit Anders on a quick post just over the goal line. It hit him right between the numbers and she threw it so hard it actually moved him in the air. He’d left his feet to catch it and the film showed that when the ball hit him he got propelled at least a foot farther downfield—just enough to cross the goal line when he came down. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ball thrown that hard.

We were down 17 to 10 now. There was 1:30 left and the special teams knew what they had to do. We needed the ball back. We tried an onside kick and Talon Jones almost recovered the ball. It bounced high in the air and a lot of folks fought over it—for a second I thought Jones had it, but after the referees sorted out the pile, they gave the ball to the Jets.

We still had a chance if the defense could stop them. The ball was on our 44-yard line. We had two time-outs left. The Jets ran two
running plays and gained a total of 7 yards. We called a time-out after the first run, but let the clock go for the second one. Now it was third and 3 on our 37-yard line. The clock ticked down and down but we knew they had 30 seconds before they incurred a 5-yard penalty, so they’d have to snap it with about 50 seconds left. If we stopped them on third down, even if they used up another 5 seconds, we could call our last time-out and still have about 45 seconds to try to move the ball. In that wind, with people running around and hollering on the sideline, our defense getting ready to stuff another running play, the Jets did something pretty amazing. Their quarterback faked a handoff to the fullback then threw a 5-yard pass for a first down to the tight end breaking out of the line on the right. He ran with the ball for another 14 yards before anybody brought him down. The game ended with the Jets taking a knee at our 18-yard line.

We lost 17 to 10.

As we were walking off the field, the Jets quarterback stopped Jesse and congratulated her. Other Jets players crowded around her and shook her hand. I hadn’t noticed before that day, but it seemed like she was earning a fair amount of respect among some of the players. A professional football player is a special kind of person, and having the respect of a foe, especially concerning the way you play this game, is as good as it gets between players of opposing teams. Jesse had tears in her eyes and her face betrayed nothing but disappointment and bitter defeat; still, I think she noticed too that she was being given something right then, something precious.

The following Tuesday, after practice, I agreed to meet Jesse for dinner again. This time we went to a restaurant in Fredericksburg, Virginia, called La Rosetta International Cuisine. It was a spacious, pleasant place far away from Redskins Park and Washington. The restaurant was on the corner of one of the main streets in the town. Jesse said she just wanted to have dinner, but I knew something was
up. It was a long drive south and east of Ashburn, where Redskins Park is located, so she wanted to get pretty far away from the place. Even at eight in the evening, the traffic down I-95 was pretty thick. I knew it would be bad, so I left myself plenty of time and got there early. It wasn’t hard to find but when I arrived, Jesse was nowhere in sight. I was a bit apprehensive that night standing in front of the restaurant waiting for her.

A man emerged from the shadows and walked toward me. He was wearing a business suit and dark glasses. I thought he was maybe a cop. He walked right up to me and stopped.

It was Jesse, standing in front of me, frowning. “Well?” she said.

“Now
that
is a better disguise.”

“I can’t be talking to strangers tonight,” she said, gravely.

We sat in the back, at a small table lit by a single candle. “How’d you discover this place?” I asked.

“Dan Wilber and Darius recommended it. They come here a lot.”

“He bring you here?”

“No. It’s far from the city, and they said the food is wonderful.”

A waiter came to the table with menus and asked us if we wanted something to drink.

“I’ll have a bourbon and water,” she said, a slight rasp in her voice.

I ordered one, too. When the waiter left the table, I said, “He didn’t recognize you.”

“Or you.”

I nodded. I’m about two inches taller than Jesse and, I have to say, when I saw our reflection in the glass as we approached the front door of the restaurant, I thought we looked pretty good together, even if she
was
dressed as a man.

“I didn’t know that was you until you were right in front of me,” I said.

“Good.”

“You weren’t limping, either.”

She smiled. A fine gift. I was beginning to relax.

When we got our drinks and had sipped a bit, Jesse said, “How you think I’m doing?”

She was doing wonderfully, I told her. “Were you in any doubt about that?”

“The last two games I was awful.”

“We won in Philly, Jesse. You played as well as anybody against the Jets.”

“I was wobbly and stupid. Couldn’t hit anybody.”

“Nobody could. Worst wind I’ve ever seen.” I thought she was above this kind of self-doubt, so it seemed really odd that she was not only talking to me about it, but that it had grown so acute in just two games. I told her what her play meant to the team. “We’re all in this together, Jesse, all right? Every time you get knocked down, the offensive line falls all over itself to get better—they’ve been playing so hard and so well, they may break the record for the fewest sacks ever allowed by an offensive line. We had a line here—years ago now—that gave up just nine sacks in sixteen games. This team? We’ve given up only five, and since you started playing, only two. These guys play hard for you.”

She nodded.

“You saw the film on Dave Busch. He played like a man possessed when Brooks got hurt. You think they go all out like that for somebody who lets them down? Come on, Jesse. You haven’t let anybody down.”

“How bad is Brooks?” she asked.

“We’ll know more on Wednesday. But … I think he’s done. I don’t know. Maybe if we get into the playoffs.”

She looked away, and there was an awkward pause. With her hair combed straight back like that, and the tie gripping her throat, she did look like a young man, actually. And oddly kind of homely. With that broad splash of freckles across her face, she looked like a gangly
kid, too afraid of his own coordination to lift a glass without letting his hand tremble. “What’d you think of my interview with ESPN?” she asked.