The Legend of Jesse Smoke (34 page)

We never looked back. In the last 4 minutes Jesse threw two touchdown passes so that we ended up winning the game 35 to 21. Jesse had completed 18 out of 26 passes, for 256 yards and 3 touchdowns. She’d kicked two field goals in the bargain, while Mickens rushed for 113 yards and scored a touchdown himself. All in all, we were feeling like a pretty powerful team again.

At the end of the game, too, some of the opposing players came over and shook Jesse’s hand. This in spite of the bitterness of our rivalry, in spite of how much those guys hated losing a game to us. She smiled and nodded to folks. I was so damn proud of her. I guess you could say I was proud of myself, too. Not that I said any of these things out loud, or even thought about them much in those days, but right then I was on top of the world. I had found Jesse, you see, and I had helped her make it in the toughest sports league on earth. It’s sometimes not even so humbling as it is exciting when you know you are going to go down in history.

Of course, everybody knows what took place after that Thanksgiving game. But at the time we were pretty well blindsided by it. Not one person, except for a few bastards in the league office and the head of the players’ union, expected the law to step in the way it did and threaten everything we were building.

We came back from Dallas Thanksgiving night to a huge crowd of fans at Redskins Park. For people to leave their homes on that kind of night—it was windy and cold, with occasional salvos of bullet-sharp rain, and on Thanksgiving no less—well, that tells you something about your fans. They all carried signs with Jesse’s likeness on them and cheered her when she came off the bus. “We want Jesse! We want Jesse!” they chanted. Then they began to shout, “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!” She waved and smiled that brilliant, open smile, which somehow was only enhanced by the cut on the right side of her head just below the hairline. (Before we got on the plane from Dallas an internist had put four stitches in it and bandaged her up.) When the crowd saw the small white bandage on her head they cheered even louder. The rest of the players surrounded her. It was such a happy time. The players had Friday through Monday off. They would get a good, long, well-earned Thanksgiving vacation.

On the plane ride back from Dallas, Coach Engram addressed all of us about what we might hope for if the Eagles beat the Giants. “We take care of the rest of our schedule, and we’ll have them in our house, with our fans, for the division title.” And then on Sunday afternoon in New York, again on a frozen, windswept field, the Giants lost to the Philadelphia Eagles 16 to 14. We were 9 and 4 and the Giants 10 and 3. We trailed them by only one game. I was beginning to think this was going to be our year.

Only on Monday morning after Thanksgiving, this happened: In New York, the league office announced that the Third Circuit Court of New York had issued a temporary restraining order against the Washington Redskins prohibiting us from playing a woman in the National Football League. Jesse would be allowed neither to practice with the team nor to participate in any team meetings or coaching sessions. We were, according to this lawsuit, destroying the “integrity” of the game.

The day the news broke you’d have thought the U.S. had declared war on Canada. We didn’t find out about it until around one in the afternoon on Monday. Edgar Flores sent for Coach Engram and the entire coaching staff. I didn’t hear anything until it dropped out of Flores’s mouth, but Engram heard it on the radio on the way to Redskins Park. It was the most incredible thing I ever saw, the media frenzy at Redskins Park. I mean, I only wish I could describe the confusion and anger that day.

Flores had a sheaf of blue papers in his hand when I walked into the meeting. The room was full. Mostly with guys wearing suits and dark ties. Engram and the rest of the coaching staff and I were in our practice sweats. It was a cold, bright, sunny day, and light cut through the windows in sharp angles. I saw Engram sitting at the end of the table and sat down next to him, still wondering what was going on. The way he looked at me, I thought Flores had sold the team or something.

“What the hell’s going on?” I said to Engram.

Then Flores sprang the news on us.

That business about the “integrity of the game,” in particular, got me really sore. “She
improves
the integrity of the game,” I said. “She improves it every time she steps on that field.” Engram put his hand on my arm. I must have gotten pretty loud about it.

“The players claim they cannot go all out against her,” Flores said.

“
Who
claims that? Which players?” Engram said.

“It’s part of the restraining order. They don’t name names.”

“Well, who filed the suit?”

“The players’ union and the league,” Charley Duncan said

“The league is in on it?” I said.

“Yes.”

I know I must have cursed pretty loudly right then. Not that it would have bothered anyone. The room never really quieted down for anybody. We were like a band of nitwits discussing our procedures for making coffee on a sinking ship. There was a lot of yelling. Meanwhile, the press was collecting outside. They’d be all over Jesse, too, I knew.

“What does the suit
say
, exactly?” Engram asked.

Flores sat at the head of a long table, but Engram and I were only a few seats away from him. He looked down at the blue papers in front of him and waited for it to quiet down. “The suit asks that she be prohibited from playing any more games for the Redskins.”

“Even as a kicker?” Somebody said.

“No playing of any kind.”

It got really noisy again, but Engram raised his hand to quiet everybody. “Why?” he said. “What do they mean they can’t go all out against her?”

“Players will testify that they have been forced to compromise their game because of her,” Flores said. “They say they will produce film of men pulling up before they collide with her, and they will claim this is for fear of hurting her. They also claim the referees give her an unfair advantage. When they
do
hit her, they get penalized for it.”

I couldn’t believe it. In all the films of our games that we’d studied, I never noticed anything like that. And as far as I could see, the referees had made good calls when they penalized teams for roughing the passer. “That’s a lot of horseshit,” I said.

“They will
further
claim,” Flores went on, “that having her on the field, directing our offense, is a distraction from the intricacies of the game because players are so intent on watching her perform.”

This almost made me laugh.

There were three lawyers in the room, right then, but the one who mattered was a short, slightly puffy fellow named Benjamin Frail. He had little fat fingers and an iron gray beard along his jaw, and he was soft-spoken, calm, and polite, and he twirled a yellow pencil in his hand like a little baton. I don’t remember the names of the other two, because until registering Ben Frail’s name, I referred to the three of them as Curly, Larry, and Moe. Charley Duncan, our general manager, was a former lawyer, too, so I guess we really had four of them in the room. Anyway it was Frail who did most of the talking. He went through the entire legal ramifications of what he called a temporary restraining order, or “TRO.” He emphasized the word “temporary.” He talked about how things usually moved pretty swiftly with this kind of order. We’d have little time to prepare, and we’d have to show significant reason to have the order quashed.

“But we can get it squashed, right?” Flores said.

“The word is
quashed
, not squashed. The burden of proof is not just on the league office and the players’ union. We’ll have to do a certain amount of homework, too.”

“Why the hell does a court in New York get to tell us what to do?” Engram wanted to know.

“The league is based in New York,” Frail said. “It’s a suit filed by the league and enforceable because we are part of the league. It’s binding.”

“Jesus Christ on a crutch,” I said.

“There’s something else,” Flores said.

Now the room got really quiet.

Flores nodded at Frail and he went on. “The suit claims that she’s actually a man named Robert Ibraham and that he’s in breach of a contract he signed to play in the Canadian League.”

Engram looked at me. “For Christ’s sake,” I said. “She’s not a fucking man.”

“Well, it’s part of the suit,” Frail said. “They claim she had a sex change operation. So … we’ll have to deal with it.”

“Why is it even relevant?” Engram asked. “I mean, if she’s really a man, then doesn’t that tend to eliminate the first part of the complaint?”

“That’s a very good point,” one of the other lawyers said. “One we may take up in our brief.”

“That’s not the only problem with that, however,” Frail said. “See, the parties contend that she signed a contract to play for the Montreal Alouettes.”

“Goddamn,” Engram said. He pushed himself away from the table. His chair made a screech on the floor. Everybody was looking at him and he turned to me. “Do you know anything about this?”

“What?”

“This Canadian thing.”

“Of course not,” I said. “And if
she’s
a man, then …
I
must be gay, because …
I
think she’s beautiful.”

Somebody let out a little snicker.

“It’s not funny,” I said. “All right, dammit. Jesse Smoke is
not
a man.”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds, then Charley Duncan turned to Flores. “I certainly never thought the commissioner would stoop this far to get at you,” he said.

“It’s not the commissioner,” Flores said. “He had no choice but to join the suit. It’s labor peace he’s concerned with, not peace with me. He’ll take
me
on. It’s the players.”

“It’s not the players either,” I said. “It’s this goddamned benighted culture.”

“And the lawyers,” Bayne said.

Eventually we got around to what we were going to do about it.

“I’m going to handle the legal end of things,” Flores said to Engram. “How about you?”

“I’ll talk to Jesse,” I said.

Engram turned to me. “You’re going to have to do a whole lot more than that, Skip. I’ve got to get this team ready to play the Cincinnati Bengals.”

“I can work out a game plan for the Bengals. They’re not a serious threat.”

“I’ll take care of the game plan,” Engram said. “What I need from you is help working with Spivey.”

“Sure,” I said, which is when it hit me that Spivey would be our new starting quarterback. “Only …”

“Talk to Jesse first.”

“You want
him
to do it?” Flores said.

Engram paid no attention to Flores. Still looking earnestly at me, he said, “Let her know we’re doing everything we can to fight this thing, that we still want her on this team.”

Flores asked, “Is Corey Ambrose still our player representative for the union?”

Engram nodded.

“You think he knew this was coming?”

“Probably. I don’t know how he could
not
know it.”

“Motherfucker,” Flores said. “I don’t want that bastard on the field for any game the rest of this year.”

“He’s washed up anyway,” Engram said. “Arm’s shot. I wouldn’t play him anyway.”

This seemed to disappoint Flores. It got quiet for a moment, then he shrugged. “I want film of every play involving Jesse,” he said. “I want you to find out about this Canadian thing, too. Somebody get a birth certificate from Jesse, or her mother. We’ll meet back here tomorrow morning and see where we are.” He and the lawyers got
up and started filing out of the room. Engram stopped Charley Duncan. “I might need another kicker. I don’t know if Dever is up to it.” Duncan nodded and went out.

Engram turned back to me. I was still sitting there, still only half believing everything. I had a million questions. “Talk to Jesse, first thing,” he said. “Go there now. Prepare her. Drill her about the media thing and ask her about Canada.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

He looked at me, considered something, then rejected it.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What? We shouldn’t keep things back now, man.”

“If we can’t get a birth certificate, do you think you can get her to make an appointment with a gynecologist?”

“A gynecologist?”

“Legally we can compel it, but I’d rather she went on her own.”

“You mean to prove she’s a woman?”

“If she can’t produce a birth certificate, we may have to,” he said. “Just to prove she hasn’t—er, you know—that she’s not … transgender. It should be easy enough. We have to put to rest all this bullshit about her being a man, or, hell, under contract to somebody else. It’s going to be one of the first things the lawyers will want. Fact, I can’t believe they didn’t mention it today.”

“I’ll talk to her,” I said.

“And then get a hold of Spivey.”

“You want to see him today?”

“You’re going to be studying film. Lots of it.”

I must have looked puzzled, because he got this impatient look on his face. “What?” I said.

“You’re going to collect the film. Every time Jesse’s dropped back to pass. Study the rush. Isolate every time she got knocked down. She hasn’t been sacked much, but she’s been knocked down enough after she let go of the ball.”

“They’ve almost killed her on more than one occasion,” I said.

“Which is how we’ll prove she wasn’t treated any different from any other quarterback in the league.”

“We don’t have to do that,” I said. “We got film of Ambrose and Spivey in there.
They
didn’t get sacked very much either, right? So … all we have to do is show that all of our quarterbacks got the same treatment on the field.”

I wasn’t worried overmuch about that business of players not going all out when they faced her. I didn’t see how that could be her fault, nor how that could impact the “integrity” of a game that regularly touted the “success” of coaches and players who didn’t get caught bending the rules. Our main concern was that business about her being under contract to the Montreal Alouettes. It didn’t matter if she was really a man, if she’d had a sex change operation or not. What mattered was that alleged contract. If it was true, Jesse’s career in the NFL was over.