The Legend of Jesse Smoke (10 page)

“I didn’t sign anything that says I can’t play for somebody else,” she muttered.

“How do you know? Did anybody mention it to you?”

“No.”

“You read this? All of it?”

“No, not really. Nobody does that.”

“Lawyers and agents do it, that’s for damn sure. You have an agent with you?”

“Nate was there.”

“Did he read it?”

She shook her head.

I continued paging through it, looking for the rights clause. Finally, on the last page, I found it. “Here it is.”

Jesse got off her stool and sat on the arm of the chair, looking over my shoulder. The contract did say that Jesse was obligated to the Divas for four years and that playing for any other team during the life of the contract was strictly prohibited. Later in the same clause, however, it defined “team” as “any entity in the various women’s professional football leagues, to include other women’s teams that might be initiated or formed in the future.”

“And right there’s our loophole,” I said.

“What?”

“It seems to define ‘team’ as a ‘women’s’ professional league entity. See here?” I read the line to her again. “Nothing in the contract specifies that you can’t play for a men’s team.”

She went back to her stool and sat down, letting her long arms dangle between her legs. I did not like the look on her face.

“Sure this isn’t just stage fright?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She was frustrated. “I just …
don’t
know.”

“Come on—I’m just as good as any pro scout,” I said. “I’m telling you, Jess. This can be done. You just have to believe in yourself. And pay more attention to the dreams you have when you’re awake. I mean, haven’t you dreamed of this, even a little bit?”

“I know I’ve got the talent,” she said.

“Damn straight, you do.”

She leaned forward and rested her chin in the palms of her hands, her long capable fingers flat against each side of her face, as if she was trying to recall something she had certain knowledge of but could not remember. “They’ll just laugh at me, though,” she sighed. “That’s the thing.”

“No, they won’t, Jess. I’m going to make this real simple. I’ll arrange a session with just Coach Engram. I’ll ask Darius Exley, Rob Anders, and maybe our center to join us. They will see you throw the ball. And I
promise
you, no one will laugh.”

One brow lifted and her eyes widened a bit. “You think so?”

“Honey,” I said. “I know it completely.”

Maybe I
was
going crazy. But here’s the thing: I knew what I saw. I’d watched her flick a ball sixty yards in the air with a motion that was so natural it looked like she was a machine and not a human being at all. I’d seen her in game circumstances, rushed and harried, knocked to the ground with incredible force. Look, a 240-pound female lineman running at you full speed makes about the same impression on your chest as a 315-pound male lineman, because 240 can run faster than 315. I had no reason to believe she couldn’t take it. She’d need special equipment in certain forward areas to protect her, sure, but she wore a pretty hard-shelled set of pads in the women’s game and seemed to hold up well enough. She was six feet two inches tall and built wonderfully, with the quickest release I ever saw; the only thing she didn’t happen to have was a goddamn penis.

Some days I couldn’t get her out of my mind; no matter what I was involved in, I kept seeing that ball sailing off Jesse’s fingertips, the
way she carried herself while we threw footballs at her, the uncommon poise she demonstrated in games. I felt not only completely sane but truly excited about showing her off. I was, and remain, perfectly happy taking the credit: I was the one who discovered her.

A lot of what we do in the coaching profession starts with respect, and to be respected you have to have credibility. Players will listen to a coach if they think he knows what he’s talking about, if he’s straight with them. Unless you’re the head coach, you don’t often have to work with all fifty-three men, but you certainly know them all, and they know you. As the offensive coordinator, I’d had to earn the hope and belief of every single man on the offense. That’s twenty to twenty-five men. (There are about the same number on the defensive team. The kickoff and punt teams, the so-called special teams, take many of their players from the offense or defense.) So I began wondering now what I’d say to Darius, Rob, and Dan to get them to help me out. But then something happened that set the whole thing in motion before I could even begin to manage it.
The Washington Post
got involved.

The only newspaper left in town that still had a print issue also had several sportswriters covering the Redskins. The venerable old man of the group was a sixty-year-old, pipe-smoking Irish paunch named Colin Roddy. Roddy hung around Redskins Park every day, even in the off-season. Everybody knew him—the secretarial staff, scouts, coaches, equipment men, medical staff, conditioning coordinators, and so on. Everyone talked to him. It was almost as if he was his own department at Redskins Park.

The only people who regularly avoided him were Charley Duncan and me. Charley didn’t like him because he was always criticizing the Redskins organization for letting Coach Engram have the last word on players, and Charley resented being referred to as a general manager “in name only.” Me, I stayed away from Roddy because I
didn’t think he could write a damn story without looking for the worm in the apple. His angle was always such that something is not what it seems, you know? Something is rotten in Denmark. He didn’t often find much to exploit along those lines, but he was always looking, and it was the angle of just about every question he’d ask. A young player would be striving to catch on with the team and another player would get injured and rather than ask the young player how he felt about getting an opportunity to play, Roddy would wonder if it wasn’t a cause for secret celebration that the other player got hurt. He once asked Coach Engram if he thought I’d make a good replacement for him; if it wasn’t pretty clear that I wanted to supplant him and manage the team
my
way. That kind of thing.

One other fellow, it turned out, didn’t like Roddy much either. Our number one draft choice, Orlando Brown, said to me one day that he had to avoid all members of the press, and Roddy especially, because reporters seemed to incite his natural homicidal tendencies. “If I have to listen to that dude for five minutes, I’ll kill the son of a bitch,” Orlando said. I believed him.

But everybody else at Redskins Park tolerated Roddy; some even enjoyed having him around. He was easy to tease and he had a kind of charm and humor that put a lot of people at ease. Coach Engram said he was harmless enough and I think he even got a kick out of having Roddy there at his press conferences. He told me once that he sometimes called on Roddy for a question simply because he knew it would be fun to answer and would be sure to distract everybody from the day’s hot issues.

Anyway, Roddy wrote in the Sunday
Post
, in a column he called “It Has Occurred to Me,” that the Redskins might be interested in a new quarterback who not only threw the ball better than anybody on the roster but could also probably charm the opposing players into letting the Redskins have their way. “I’m talking real charm,” he wrote, “the kind that causes Trojan Wars and Greek tragedies. In short, I’m talking about a woman.” Then he named me. He wrote,

I have it from a good source that offensive assistant Skip Granger is working with a young phenom who is
really
phenomenal: the starting quarterback for the Washington Divas, a (believe it or not) women’s professional football team. This source also says that Granger is working behind the scenes to sign this player and bring her to Redskins training camp late this summer. Except somebody ought to tell Coach Granger that women are not allowed to play in the National Football League, charm or no charm.

I knew I had Andy to thank for that one. He really was looking out after his own interests, and clearly didn’t care if he hurt Jesse or me in the process.

The funny thing was, Coach Engram just thought it was a joke; he didn’t call me in or anything. We were in a meeting with one of the offensive-quality-control guys, looking at film of all our offensive plays from the year before and mapping out our tendencies in various down and distance situations, when he seemed to recall it suddenly. Stopping the video machine midplay, he looked over at me. “You see Roddy’s column Sunday?”

I nodded. I’d been toying with the idea of bringing it up myself, uncertain how to handle this latest development.

“What the hell happened to that guy? Has he lost his mind?”

“No.”

It was quiet a moment as he reached over to reset the video back to where we’d just been. Then he said, “That son of a bitch’ll write anything to get attention.”

I was silent, couldn’t think quite how to begin.

Then Coach Engram laughed. It was a good solid laugh, as though he remembered a great joke. “I swear,” he said, “you don’t let anything bother you, do you? He wrote something like that about me, I’d kick his ass.”

“Only it’s true,” I said.

But that just got him laughing harder. He really thought I was kidding. He pressed play and started studying our offense again.

Others, though, did believe it. A few reporters asked me if it was true—I said I had no comment—and worse, some tried to get in touch with Jesse herself. It wasn’t like hundreds of them descended on her. One reporter telephoned her on Monday afternoon. He wasn’t even a Redskins beat reporter. He worked for the
Post
, though, helped write some sports stories as well as interviews and features for the Style section. He wanted to know if she was the starting quarterback of the Washington Divas. She talked to him for a few minutes and then, since he appeared only to be interested in the women’s professional football leagues, Jesse agreed to an interview, at which a photographer would be present. It never occurred to the reporter that Roddy was telling the truth. He didn’t even try to talk to me. I just horned in on the interview when I heard about it. Not that I forced myself on Jesse that way. She asked me if I could be there for it and it turned out I could.

The interview was on Wednesday night at a restaurant in Washington called Iron Mike’s. I got there a little early, carrying Jesse’s Redskins contract in my coat pocket.

Jesse was sitting at the bar sipping on a beer, dressed in a long blue dress and blue sandals. She wore a white pearl necklace and pearl earrings. She had a small, black purse in her lap. Leaning slightly forward on the stool, one long leg sort of crossed over the other, she looked like a fashion model. I sat down next to her. She flashed a bright smile and said she was glad to see me.

“Where’s Nate?” I said.

“I didn’t invite him.”

I ordered a glass of bourbon. Jesse kept watching over my shoulder at the door and front windows. It wasn’t so noisy in the place that you couldn’t talk, but music was piped in through speakers in the corners
and people were talking fairly loudly. “You know this is Andy’s doing,” I said.

“Well, it wasn’t Nate, I know
that
. I asked him if he told anybody.”

“Are you sure of him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think maybe he wants to be your boyfriend.”

She laughed. “No. We’re just friends. Nate’s got a girlfriend. He’s engaged to be married.”

I took out the contract. “Here,” I said. “I want you to sign this.”

She took the contract from me and unfolded it on the bar in front of her. She set her drink down and studied it, looking as if she planned on reading the damned thing cover to cover. The print was pretty compact and there wasn’t a lot of light. “It’s a standard contract,” I said. “Promises a $70,000 bonus. Which you get to keep no matter what. And it pays you $515,000 a year, prorated for however many weeks you stay with the team.”

She looked at me. I wanted her to sign it before the reporter got there, and I told her so.

“Why?”

“Don’t be suspicious, Jess.”

“I’m not.”

“I’m trying to give you a lot of money here, okay? But I don’t want the reporter to know you’ve signed it until after your audition.”

“That’s what you’re calling it? An ‘audition’?”

I handed her a pen.

“So this is some big secret, then?”

“It’s the best day of your life so far,” I said. “
That’s
what it is. I know plenty of young men who would give everything they have for this one little moment in their lives.”

Her eyes looked misty in the low light of the bar; like lake water on a windless morning. I don’t think she was sad, or tearing up, but she seemed then just as moved as I’d hoped she would be. She gazed
into my eyes, and I could see her thinking, wondering … Perhaps she didn’t yet fully trust me.

I took out a check from the team, wrote it out for $70,000, and slid it over to her. “Starting today, you will be paid $9,903 a week. You get to keep that, too. As long as you’re on the roster.”

“Nobody has to approve this first?”

“I have the authority to make this decision, Jess, and I’ve just made it.” I sipped my bourbon, raised my glass slightly toward her. “Congratulations.”

And then she signed the thing—the original agreement and all four copies—and gave it back to me. I handed her back one and put the rest in my pocket. “Put that in your purse. This is a famous day. A remarkable day,” I said. “I feel good.”

“Me too.” She stuffed the check and the contract into her purse, laid it up on the bar, then took a big drink of her beer. “When do I report?”

“You can’t tell anybody yet.”

“I can’t?”

“The time will come, don’t worry, but for now this has to be our secret a little while longer.”

“How long do I have to wait for the money?”

“You don’t. That check right there is good. Put it in the bank. Your salary won’t begin for at least two pay periods, but they’ll make it up with the first check.”

The music stopped just then, and people quieted down a bit, before it picked up again. I ordered another glass of bourbon.