The Legend of Jesse Smoke (39 page)

“Yes, Your Honor. But I wanted to address this new issue, as regards the original contract.”

Lorenzo nodded. “Go ahead, but I won’t take it kindly if you waste any of our time here.”

“All I wanted to say was, even though Ms. Smoke was pretending to be a man, no damage pursued from her deception.”

Judge Lorenzo said to Jesse, “How did you get through the physical exam?”

She looked at me first, which only would have told her that I wanted to know that myself.

“A friend,” she said, quietly. I’d never heard her voice sound so timid.

“Speak up,” Lorenzo said.

And suddenly, she was Jesse again. She sat straight up and looked at him directly. “The Alouettes did not have a full-time team doctor, Your Honor. They had a nurse. She gave me a physical and then promised not to tell anyone. Far as I know, she kept her promise.”

Zabriskie, the players’ union lawyer, said he had a question for Jesse.

“Go ahead,” Judge Lorenzo said.

“Did you
pay
this nurse anything to keep quiet?”

“No. Like I said, she was a friend.”

“You knew her beforehand?” Zabriskie said.

“No.”

“She just
became
a friend.”

“Yes.”

“Just like that.”

“She was a woman,” Jesse said, as if that explained something.

“And she did this for you, even though it meant she might be fired.”

Jesse shrugged. “I knew I could trust her. She seemed to like the idea, actually. Said she hoped I could make it work.”

“And how did you know you could trust her?” Zabriskie said. “Was this some sort of fellowship of the womb?”

“Like men don’t have their own good ol’ boy networks?” Jesse snapped.

Judge Lorenzo leaned back in his chair. “Point well taken.”

“Your Honor,” Frail said, “I think the contract the Alouettes gave Jesse to sign should not be at issue. She never deceived them once she signed it. She did not play. She accepted no money. In what way, then, is it a valid contract that bears any level of scrutiny?”

“And I said: We’ve been over that.”

“She signed it,” Zabriskie said. “The Alouettes have a signed contract.”

“No money changed hands,” said Frail.

Judge Lorenzo looked at Jesse. “Did you expect you could dress in the locker room? That somehow none of the other players would see you? How on earth did you imagine you’d get away with it?”

“Well, I came to see I couldn’t,” she said. “That’s why I just—that’s why I
left
the team.”

Judge Lorenzo shook his head in what seemed like wonder. “Remarkable,” he said.

Crook, the Alouettes’ lawyer, said, “You still signed a contract to play for two years with—”

“I don’t want to hear any more about that contract,” Judge Lorenzo said, sharply.

“Your Honor,” Frail said. “I only want to make it clear that the contract Ms. Smoke signed with the Alouettes—”

“The one she fraudulently signed as Robert Ibraham,” Zabriskie said.

Frail ignored him. “I just don’t think it would be fair for them to make an issue of this new information, since that contract was never fulfilled, regardless of
whose
name was on it.”

Lorenzo said nothing, but he nodded in agreement. I realized what Frail was up to. He wanted to limit any damage that might accrue from Jesse’s original dishonesty—which is how the Alouettes characterized it. I was a little worried about what the league would do about it. More than any other sports league—or even any other corporation for that matter—the NFL monitors and disciplines players for off-the-field behavior. Regular drug testing is only the tip of the iceberg.
If you’re going to work for the NFL, you’d better have a spotless history, no question. They would not like what Jesse had done. Our only hope was that it would be overlooked because of the special circumstances. At best, we hoped the league wouldn’t discipline her until next year.

Now Frail began to present our side of things concerning the integrity of the game. According to Charley Duncan his questions and reactions all week to the allegations of the other side had been brief, to the point, and sharply defined. So he didn’t have much to say. But the video he put on spoke for itself.

First, he showed players seeming to pull up as they approached Jesse—using many of the exact same plays that the other side had used as their evidence—only he let the film run a bit longer now, to show that one of the things they were pulling up from was an oncoming block from one of our behemoths on the offensive line, or from Walter Mickens, who could flatten just about any player he wanted to. Several of the players who had claimed to “pull up” got flattened.

Then, using a split-screen technique, Frail showed those same players against Ken Spivey and Corey Ambrose—in films not only from this year but also from the previous one. (This was something Charley Duncan arranged that I wasn’t even aware of.) On each play, the players in question looked exactly the same. Frail paused several of the clips at the same moment and showed that each time a player claimed he had “pulled up,” his motion was not pulling up at all, but in fact bracing for a hit, or jockeying for better position on the quarterback.

Finally the film went to the hits Jesse herself had taken, including that first one that bruised her back, knocked her helmet off, and resulted in a touchdown for the other side. All the evidence was there. Frail presented a chart that showed roughing the passer penalties against the Redskins were roughly equivalent to the rest of the league. He showed film of each one of those penalties and pointed out how each infraction occurred.

Looking over at Charley Duncan, I gave a thumbs-up. Much as the guy always irritated me, I had to admit, that video was a masterpiece. I’d given him literally hundreds of hours of film—virtually every passing play Jesse was involved in, not to mention Spivey and Ambrose—and he and Harold Moody had edited the thing perfectly, and added some of their own. Working through the night, they had put it all together, and then they presented it to the lawyers in New York so they could prepare to manipulate it to the best advantage.

When we were done, the folks on the other side of the table visibly started to squirm. Judge Lorenzo said he wanted to hear from Jesse.

“Yes, Your Honor?” Jesse said.

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

She looked across the table. “Well, to the players’ union, I don’t have anything to say,” she said. “Maybe they have something to say to me. To the Alouettes, though, I do apologize.”

“You think you could have gotten a chance to try out if you’d just admitted you were a woman?” Lorenzo asked.

Jesse fixed the man with a stare now, but then seemed to think better of it. “No, Your Honor. I do not.”

“The Alouettes wanted him under contract,” Crook said. “That’s why they signed him for two years.”

“Did the Alouettes know they were signing a woman?”

“We did not consider it, Your Honor.”

“Well, you got the paper,” Lorenzo said. “But you didn’t pay her, like her counsel says. So it wasn’t in fact an active contract, was it?”

It got real quiet in the room. Judge Lorenzo looked around at everyone, then took off his glasses and rubbed his hands over his eyes. Somebody on the other side started shuffling papers. The judge put his glasses back on and sighed, heavily. “Gentlemen,” he said. Then he paused, looked at Jesse. “And lady.” Jesse nodded. “I might have taken some time with this. In the past I have always given myself at least a day between hearing a case and rendering a decision. But here, I’m afraid I don’t have much to consider.”

Now everybody leaned a bit toward him. My heart thrummed along with everybody else’s. This was going to be it.

Judge Lorenzo put his hands out flat on the table in front of him. “This case is brought before me in this jurisdiction in an attempt to cause the Washington Redskins to refrain from employing one Jesse Marie Smoke. The arguments advanced—that she is under contract to another team as a man, that she is a detriment to the integrity of the league because of the inability of some players to hit a woman as hard as they might hit a man—have been … subtle and persuasive.”

Uh oh
, I thought, but then he went on.

“They also happen to be frivolous. I cannot think of a single legal case in our whole history where one side sought to limit an individual’s right and ability to play a game. Nor do we have a very healthy or happy history when one side seeks legal means to prohibit a person from a particular field of endeavor because of gender or sex. It is frivolous. The claims of the plaintiff are clearly unreasonable and not worthy of consideration by this court or any other court in this land. My ruling is that I will not allow this case to go forward. The temporary restraining order is hereby revoked.” Then he looked at Zabriskie. “You fellows ought to be ashamed of yourselves. This is the twenty-first century, by god.”

We started celebrating, while the other side began putting their papers in briefcases and folders. I gave Jesse a big hug. She wrapped her arms around my neck and as we were standing there gripping each other, she whispered in my ear, “This means I can play, right?”

“It sure does,” I said. “Maybe even this weekend.”

The commissioner came around to our side of the room and congratulated Edgar Flores. “Really am glad it turned out this way,” he said in a low voice. “She’s good for the game.”

I was elated to hear him say that. It gave me hope that he wouldn’t discipline her for what she did to the Alouettes. Though, in truth, I
couldn’t see why he would want to do anything about that. All she did was use up a little practice time and convince them she could play. It was their fault that her sex, and their ingrained attitude about it, caused her to withdraw and prevented her from giving them exactly what they’d wanted.

I couldn’t wait for the press conference.

I begged Flores to release Charley Duncan’s video to the media, but he didn’t want to embarrass the league or the commissioner any more than he had to. No, he was gracious at the press conference in the grand ballroom of the hotel. We walked out, all of us—Duncan, Flores, Benjamin Frail, Jesse, and me—onto a sort of stage with a bank of microphones in front of us and the usual assortment of bright lights and cameras, Liz Carlson stepped up to join us. She and Jesse embraced, and the crowd gave a cheer.

At first, Flores went to the microphones and spoke for all of us, answering each question with patience and sincerity. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so serious. He said he was glad it was over, glad we could get back to what we were all about, which was playing football. Our goal was still, as it always had been, to win our division first and then go from there. No, he had no hard feelings toward the commissioner,
or
the players’ union. In any unprecedented event, in any sea change to what has been, you had to realize there would be
disturbances and upheavals until people had a chance to get used to the new circumstances.

“Jesse,” he said, “may be a groundbreaker. She may not be. Who knows if there’ll ever be another like her? She may be just an anomaly—a onetime phenomenon that we should all enjoy and revel in. Delight in. Either way, I’m awful proud to be a part of it.”

It would have been a terrible mistake, he went on to say, to end what promised to be “one of the wonders of our time.” It was the closest he came to criticizing the league or the players’ union.

Finally, he said he would like to show everyone a home movie of Jesse, if she would allow it—a home movie of her, at age nine, winning the Punt, Pass, and Kick competition in Guam. He turned to her, and Jesse nodded. It was just the right thing to do for making peace with the league office. The whole room broke into loud cheers.

The hotel staff, clearly prepared for this, set up a large screen at the back of the room, and as the press conference went on, the film ran for everyone to see. Within twenty-four hours, every TV in the country had that film of the young Jesse—standing all of five feet six inches, already—kicking the ball high and far; throwing it almost as far as she could kick it; punting it high and deep. As many sportscasters pointed out, even at age nine, she was as good as any high school player. Had there been any room left for her legend to grow? You wouldn’t have thought so. But it did. I think the whole country was in love with her.

Flores narrated as the film played. He talked of her athletic skill and prowess even at such a young age. You’d have thought it was Flores himself who had taken the footage, that he’d been there from the beginning, helping her compete. He spoke like a proud father.

Finally, he let Jesse herself step up to the microphone. Blinking those deep blue eyes in the lights, she gave that innocent, childlike smile of hers, just as the film looped back to the beginning and started playing again. Jesse leaned over to the microphone. “I’m just happy this is all over,” she said.

Questions flew at her now. “Are you ready to get back to playing?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think you can play this Sunday?”

“I haven’t practiced,” she said.

“Ms. Smoke, have you cheated anyone, do you think?”

“Not the Redskins.”

“But you cheated the Alouettes?”

“No. Not really. I cheated them out of telling me I couldn’t play, maybe. The two-year contract I signed, though, that didn’t count because I never took any money.”

“What were you doing for those two years?”

“Traveled a lot. Then, as some of you know, I spent a year in the Independent Women’s Football League.”

Behind her, in the film, (they let it play over and over again during the press conference) she kicked a ball high into the white sky. It was quiet for a minute while everyone in the room concentrated on the grainy image of Jesse Smoke taking a ball into her hands and throwing it high and far. Everybody clapped.

“What would that little girl say about the woman you’ve become, Jesse?” somebody asked.

Jesse just smiled. “You know, it’s funny,” she said. “Sometimes, even now, I feel like I’m only nine years old.”

Then Colin Roddy stepped out of the crowd, carrying a microphone. There were as many cameras on him as on Jesse. “Do you think the players’ union should apologize to you, Jesse?”