Seth Joyner, Monday night hero, architect of the turning point, is still in the training room hours after the Dallas victory, getting treatment for his injured knee, when in walks his wife, Jennifer, and his daughter, Jasmine.
Jasmine is a perfect blend of her interracial parentage: she has skin of soft beige, with a wild thick halo of frizzy blond hair. She and Jennifer haven’t seen Seth for about three weeks, since catching up to him in Phoenix before the Cardinals game.
The linebacker turns on his baleful, stone-faced stare—blank brown eyes, a crease of scar tracing the ridge of his left cheekbone, black stubble outlining full lips. His features fall naturally, even when he’s not angry, into a scowl. Jennifer recognizes the expression, of course.
It’s just Seth being Seth.
He asks, “What are you doing here?”
JENNIFER POPPING UP like this is just the latest thing to go wrong this season for Seth. Nothing he does seems to work out as intended.
Seth is really getting on people’s nerves.
He plunged into a funk so deep after Jerome’s death that it scared those who knew him best. He got the word when he was out in Los Angeles taping the television show “American Gladiators” and flew back home to El Paso before flying east for the funeral. Jennifer had never known how important Jerome was to Seth. It was like he had lost his brother, or his mother! She encouraged him to call Buddy.
“You need to talk to somebody who cared as much about Jerome as you did,” she said. But Seth wouldn’t pick up the phone. It was not his way to reach out to anyone.
And now, having dedicated the season to his fallen buddy, Seth feels an obligation to produce a Super Bowl win, to make it happen. If the team needs somebody to step up, fill that leadership void, who better than Seth himself? Only, the idea scares the hell out of everybody else. Anybody who knows Seth knows he’s the wrong person to shoulder Jerome’s leadership role.
Seth’s motivational methods are … well, crude. Take the Skins game at the end of the ’91 season. The Eagles were down 10-7 at halftime, and the offense hadn’t done squat. The touchdown had come on an interception by defensive back Otis Smith. Resilient Eagles backup quarterback Jeff Kemp was getting hammered like one of those round-bottomed punching dolls that keeps popping back up with a grin. In the first two quarters, the Eagles had advanced the ball only twenty-six yards. They were averaging just over one yard per play.
So in the locker room at halftime, as the offensive line huddled around a blackboard to watch Dave Alexander draw up some new blocking strategies, Seth stepped in, in one of his glowering fits.
“You sorry sons of bitches!” he growled at them. “Why don’t you guys learn how to block? You guys couldn’t block my grandmother. You’re a bunch of pussies!”
The big linemen were momentarily taken aback.
“Just a goddamn minute!” said Ron Heller. “Seth, that’s not fair. You have no right to accuse us. You don’t have any idea what’s involved here. We’re not pussies, we’re just trying to straighten things out. You worry about your own goddamn side of the ball!”
Seth retreated, grumbling.
As it happened, the Eagles came back to win that game in the second half, 24-22. Kemp threw a slew of big passes, including two for touchdowns. Seth’s insults were forgotten in the general good feeling after that win, until Ron, Dave, and the others read the next morning’s newspaper. In it, the linebacker bragged about how his pep talk to the offensive linemen at halftime had straightened them out and made them play like men!
That was the final game of the season, and most of the linemen caught the quotes on their way home. They grumbled over this affront for a few days at home, and the whole matter would have been forgotten by the following summer, except that Seth, in training camp, picked up right where he had left off. Puffed up with this new leadership thing, he was huffing around West Chester like the badass master of the ball field. Richie had named Seth a team captain, which just sanctioned this conduct. Seth as captain began to infect the whole squad with his dark aura.
For instance, when the other team captains—Reggie, Keith Byars, and Ken Rose—go out for the coin toss before preseason games and shake their opponents’ hands in the time-honored football tradition of good sportsmanship, Seth stands conspicuously about ten yards off in a black funk, asserting his malice, subverting the ritual, embracing bad sportsmanship. This isn’t just theater either, like the promotional posturing of heavyweight fighters at the prefight weigh-in. Seth has his own perverse rationale. “The other team is the enemy, man,” he says. “I ain’t shakin’ hands with nobody before a football game. Why would I want to do that? I’m getting ready to go to war against these people.”
Another of the newer irritating things about Seth is his insistence that his grief over Jerome is more profound and heavier than everyone else’s—walking around all season with “#99” shaved out of the hair on the back of his head. Clyde Simmons is the only other player on the team whom Seth acknowledges as having been “as close to Jerome,” although there are plenty of others who could, if they chose to, dispute that. For his part, Clyde maintains a dignified silence that becomes real sadness. But Seth stakes out the high grieving ground as though laying claim to the soul of the team, which isn’t itself so bad, except he uses that vantage point to hurl dark thunderbolts.
He criticizes teammates who failed to attend Jerome’s funeral. He lambastes the club for not helping out with Jerome’s camp last spring, which turns out not to be true—the team had quietly made a thousand-dollar donation for the event and is already making plans to carry out Jerome’s plan for a similar event in New Jersey. When Seth learns of his mistake, he faults Harry for not keeping him informed. “It’s the same old story,” he says. “They never think of us. If they had let us know what was happening, I never would have said anything.”
Back in the preseason games, he and the rest of the defense defied league restrictions on altering their uniforms by drawing black outlines around the silver wings on their helmets and penciling in Jerome’s number 99. When the league objected (with millions invested in worldwide merchandising of NFL products, the league takes graphics very seriously), the team came up with a memorial patch for the players to wear on their uniforms—only Seth then blasted team management in the papers and on TV for not making the patch bigger and more ornate. “It looks like something you’d get down at K-Mart,” he growled. The patch was redesigned.
It’s hard to believe so much trouble can be caused by one man’s mouth.
In practice, Seth would strut over when the offensive line was doing one-on-one pass-blocking drills with the defensive line. He’d grab Clyde or Reggie as they prepared to tangle with Antone and say, “Let me do it, I’m gonna make Antone a man”—apparently oblivious to the insult thus given to both blocker and blockee.
Dennis McKnight, the formidable veteran backup lineman with a badass biker image of his own, got fed up.
“Seth, you are the angriest man I have ever met,” he said after one training-camp practice. “I’ve never met a man with more hate than you. I don’t understand it. I’ve tried … but, hey, you’re on your own. I don’t want anything to do with you. Whatever your problem is, it’s not my fault, and you better leave me the hell alone.”
More and more, as the season progressed, teammates resented the linebacker’s attitude. With Jerome around, Seth’s forbidding intensity had been a plus. His brooding persona lurked in the background, helping to set the defensive squad’s menacing tone. Jerome would make everybody laugh, Wes and Eric would analyze things, Reggie oozed respectability and excellence, and Andre lent a kind of spooky voodoo strain. Seth had just glowered in the back of the room, an automatic rifle with the safety on … until he entered the field. This year the safety is off all the time. With his mouth locked in firing position, Seth has become a danger to his own team, and to himself. Teammates aren’t openly critical of him, but there are enough nods, winks, and rolls of the eyes for the Pack to know how most of them feel.
The contrast with Jerome formed a study in leadership. Jerome didn’t try to lead and never really saw himself as a leader. Joy just radiated from that dancing, cast-iron-furnace frame and neon grin. Jerome made you feel as if he were on a ride that was just so damned terrific that nobody would want to get left behind. Seth, on the other hand, made you feel like he was slogging through some sort of awful crusade; you could join him if you had the stuff for it, and if you didn’t? Well, fuck you.
The way he acted, it made them almost feel like losing sometimes, just to spite him. On the field, Seth was a great player. No doubt about it. But after making an interception and running it in for a touchdown, or after brutally sacking the quarterback, he’d trot back toward the bench with his face set in cement as he passed the offensive players. Some would pat him on the back or helmet—Randall always made a point of running out to congratulate him—and more often than not, Seth would coldly ignore all but his defensive teammates, avoiding even eye contact with offensive players, conveying the sense that they were unworthy to stand with him on the same field.
Ron, who’d had some of the more vocal clashes with the line backer, went out of his way to bridge this divide. When one of his brothers attended a home game and happened to sit near Seth’s mom and sister and brother, he’d snapped pictures of the linebacker’s family watching the game. When the film was developed, he sent Ron prints to give Seth, and Ron was delighted. Maybe this would break the ice. He cheerfully crossed the locker room with the photos in an envelope.
“Hey, Seth, my brother took some pictures of your family.”
Seth eyed him flatly. “What do I want them for?”
“I just thought you might like them.”
“All right, put ‘em down.”
And that was that. No thanks, no nothing. Who wants to join the crusade of a guy like that?
Seth can feel the bad vibes he’s created. But he isn’t about to back down. Like him or not, these guys are going to play up to Seth’s expectations—or there’ll be hell to pay.
JENNIFER SMIT was a twenty-four-year-old senior at UTEP (University of Texas, El Paso) when she met Seth Joyner. They were both living in the dorm for scholarship athletes. Jennifer had been recruited by UTEP from the world track-and-field circuit, where she was a promising heptathlete, which is track and field’s seven-event female version of the decathlon, a demanding two-day competition testing all-around athletic ability—distance running and sprints, high and long jumps, shot put, and javelin. Years of strict training had given the impressive female contours of her body an Amazonian edge, an uncustomary hardness and definition, and little about Jennifer’s personality softened the effect. There was nothing at all soft about her. She had the courage and self-possession of one who has traveled far and embraced big changes in her young life, and she was fiercely competitive—the kind of person who seeks out challenge and confronts conflict head-on. She spoke an emphatic and highly original English, which she learned first in school in Holland, and then refined on the casual rhythms of African-American dialect mixed with some easy West Texas drawl. She was a true exotic out in the taco desert, strong, fit, bold, and opinionated, and despite her smashing blond good looks, Jennifer was a loner. In this sunny, Freon-addicted, stripmalled, Alamo Republican corner of America, she came off, frankly, as kind of a kook.
Eighteen-year-old Seth, however, had his own priorities where women were concerned. Observing the forbidding long-legged blond track star moving alone through the dining hall every day, he had bragged to his teammates, “She will be mine.” This got back to Jennifer, as these things are supposed to in school, and the senior track star’s response was, “Yeah, right. Dream on.”
But she was intrigued. She started noticing Seth more. He stood out from the other freshman football players because he seemed lost at all times in a dark cloud of lonesome gloom. His gravity and singularity appealed to her. She had been around UTEP for four years now, and the blacks, especially the black football players, moved everywhere in loose, joshing homeboy herds. She learned that this Seth Joyner, a hardship recruit from someplace in New York—a place distant and harsh—was considered mean and a little crazy. One of the senior football players told her that they hadn’t dared subject Seth to the usual hazing rituals inflicted on freshmen—the guy was too scary.
Seth was the second son of Pattie Cooper, a North Carolina sharecropper’s daughter who had left the farm after high school and followed a friend north to take a job as a practical nursing aide at the Rockland Psychiatric Center in Spring Valley, New York. She would end up working at the center, about a half hour’s drive north of New York City, for thirty-five years before retiring in ’90, raising her two boys and a daughter, Samantha, by herself. Her oldest, Eric, and Seth were sons of a man she met at church and was involved with for about six years. They had split before Seth was born in ’64. Her daughter, by a different man who also did not stay in her life, came six years later.
There was always something, right from the start, rather stark and arresting about Seth. Even as a toddler, Pattie says, he was a peculiarly solitary and independent child. He seemed precociously capable. Most mothers in the low-rent neighborhood where they lived were afraid to let a two- or three-year-old outside by himself to play, because unsupervised older children would bully the babies and sometimes get rough. But this was not a problem with Seth. He more than held his own. Growing up, he spent many hours by himself, developing a dour, silent, proud personality that even as a small boy he wore like an outsized suit. He had a violent temper and was fearless. Pattie would often repeat the story about Seth, the one that she felt defined him best, of how his father had come for a rare visit one day, and how Seth had found him, a large man, sitting on Pattie’s bed.
Seth was only six years old, but when he confronted the big man he became fiercely protective, threatening, “Get off my mama’s bed!”
“Boy, do you know who you’re talkin’ to?” asked his father.
“My mama says you’re my daddy, but no man sits on my mama’s bed.”
At church, where Seth worked as an usher when he grew older, people would compliment Pattie on what a fine, big, strong boy she had, but would complain, “He looks like he’d bite your head off!”
“Oh, no!” Pattie would say. “That’s just Seth being Seth”—in other words, you either accepted Seth the way he was, sourpuss and all, or you could go fry spit. He damn sure wasn’t going to walk around forcing himself to smile just to make other people happy. If people thought he was mean … well, that was their problem—Want to make something of it?
In school, he walked the halls masking whatever insecurities he harbored with hair-trigger aggression, picking fights with anyone who even looked at him for too long— Who you lookin’ at? He remembers fighting almost every day. It was who he was; he was just being Seth. The absolute worst side of Seth’s being Seth was on display in any kind of competition. With him, there was no such thing as a friendly pickup game of anything, whether cards, bowling, pool, basketball, baseball— even miniature golf. With some people competition was do or die; with Seth, it was do or kill. He had to win. If he didn’t, it was somebody’s fault—referees, teammates, opponents, coaches; it didn’t really matter. His temper was like napalm, splashing and burning everything in a wide moving radius. It got so that people were afraid to play not only against Seth, but even with him, at anything.
He had a caring side, though it was well hidden. His mother leaned on him at home, especially when her widowed mother, Emma Cooper, suffered a stroke and came to live with them. Seth was about eight years old then and was handed much of the responsibility for helping his ailing grandmother. When his older brother graduated from high school and moved away, Pattie depended on Seth to handle household chores while she worked, and he didn’t let her down—Seth never let Pattie down—cooking, cleaning, and caring for both his little sister and his grandmother. By the time Emma died, at age eighty-five, teenage Seth had grown extremely close to her. He would recall years later how his grandmother prepared him for her death, telling him that she had lived long enough, and that she was tired. “I’ve seen all my children grown, and I’ve seen my grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. It’s my time.” When she passed, Seth missed her and grieved, but he also felt the rightness of it.
Shouldering household tasks at an early age, becoming the man of the house, caring for his grandmother in her years of decline, and watching her die—these are the things Pattie feels shaped Seth into such a serious young man. Sometimes too serious.
“Boy, can’t you smile sometime?”
“Mama, this is the face I was born with, I can’t help it,” he’d say. “I can’t be walking around forcing myself to smile all the time just to make other people happy. I can’t be somebody else. I’m Seth.”
Being Seth was, of course, something Pattie could understand and even admire, but where his mother saw just great seriousness, others saw ever-burning sulfur unconsumed, an unappeasable anger that spilled into every part of his life. He found a legitimate outlet for that fire on the football field, but even there he had a hard time fitting in. As a sophomore, he had latched on to an assistant coach at the high school named Jimmy Pinkston, who had played college ball at the University of Miami. Seth had decided he was going to play pro football—his mother remembers him boasting quietly, seriously, as a young teen, “Mama, see these hands? These hands are going to make you a fortune. These hands are going to play in the NFL.” It was a common boyhood dream, but there was nothing common about the way Seth set to work at it. Other boys played high-school football for the fun of it, for the status it afforded them at school, for the camaraderie of Team. Seth enjoyed those things, too, but the football part for him wasn’t just fun; it was very serious business. He would pump Pinkston for information about the game, practically moving into his house in his early years of high school. It wasn’t the kind of attachment Pinkston had felt with other boys growing up fatherless, looking for a substitute. There were plenty of boys like that. Seth was different. He wasn’t looking for a father figure; he was looking for a mentor, a guide. He knew where he wanted to go and figured Pinkston could show him the way. Sometimes Pinkston felt the kid was trying to suck him dry. “He damn near worked me to death,” the coach recalls. Seth couldn’t learn enough about tactics and game planning, about how to study films for clues about an opponent’s (and his own) tendencies and weaknesses, and how to exploit what he had learned on the field. He wanted Pinkston to tell him everything he knew about how high-school players landed college football scholarships, and how the pros scouted and recruited from colleges. Pinkston would have to chase Seth away many nights: “Look, son, I’ve got to go to bed. Either you’re going home now or you can go upstairs and find a bed here.”
But Pinkston was transferred to another high school, and in Seth’s senior year he had to play for coaches he didn’t know well, and whom he didn’t respect. Even at that point, Seth felt he knew more about the game than they did—certainly more about how to best use himself. Seth thought he was the best player on the team, and probably was, and it burned when the coaches put other players ahead of him. Of course, his resentment just worsened the situation. He started being Seth in a big way. When his coaches reprimanded him, Seth just bur rowed more deeply into his hole of grudge. He would still complain about it more than a decade later, as a millionaire Pro Bowl NFL linebacker, at a time when dropping old and petty differences would seem both easy and wise. Asked to recall his high-school playing days, something sure to provoke gaudy sentiment and grateful memories in almost any other pro football player, Seth would grouse angrily about ignorant coaches who “treated me like a flunky.” He was convinced that he was not allowed to excel as a running back in high school because the coaches preferred other players and had given Seth the ball only when they were in a tight spot and desperately needed yardage. He would pull their nuts out of the fire and come grumbling back to the bench, shrugging off their praise and thanks, having proved his point once again to no avail, wrapped in a cloud of disgust. That’s how Seth saw himself as a football player—someone whom coaches disliked and would prefer not to play, but whose talent would not be denied. His attitude, his mother says, was “If you let me play, I’ll show you how good I am. If you don’t, your loss.”
He took the same grudging approach with him to UTEP, where Bill Young, the head coach, had taken a gamble on him. At 185 pounds, Seth was well under the expected playing weight for a Division I college linebacker, and he lacked the academic standing to enroll. But Pinkston had sold Seth’s potential to Max Bowman, a coach at a nearby New York junior college, whom Young then hired to help him at UTEP. So Seth was brought in as a grant student, part of the university’s outreach efforts to the underprivileged. Young figured that under his guidance, Seth and the other academically underqualified boys he had shepherded into his program could be taught discipline, manners, and work habits to see them through college and life. In return for playing father/adviser, the coach got talented players capable of turning around UTEP’s struggling football program. If things worked out, that is.
Seth rewarded the coach’s gamble with aggression—on and off the field. Young was an authentic Texas old-school, my-way-or-the-highway, football coach, whose methods borrowed heavily from the military. For instance, he expected his boys to address him and the other coaches with a crisp “Yes, sir!” or “No, sir!”—standard fare on scholastic football fields in that part of the country. Well, it wasn’t going to be standard fare for Seth. At an early practice as a freshman, Seth responded with an innocent civilian New York “yeah” to some coachly inquiry and found himself on the receiving end of a whole raft of good ol’ boy drill-sergeant-style outrage in front of the whole team. Nothing serious or personal was meant by this, of course. Seth was just the first recruit to give Young the opportunity to hammer home this particular point, but fresh off the plane, still uncertain about how homey was going to play out here in redneck Cowpokeland, Seth took the chewing out as a personal affront, and—Seth being Seth— there was no way short of a six-gun to his temple that he was ever going to cough up a respectful “sir” to anyone again.
It started there and just worsened. Used to a high degree of freedom as a teen in Spring Valley, and unused to any kind of paternal authority, Seth balked at the stern efforts Young made to mold his charges into both successful football players and students. The coach enforced a 10:30 p.m. lights-out policy in the dorm, strict curfews with bed checks on game weekends, mandatory study halls—real basic these were, too, such as “Men, see this book in my hand? Any of you ever seen one of these before? This here is a dictionary. Today we’re gonna learn how to use it.”
Seth felt he was being treated like a child, and he didn’t work at disguising his contempt. He had come to play college football, a necessary step on his inevitable trajectory to the pros, and he didn’t need or expect a lot of character-molding bullshit from Coach. One of the reasons Jennifer often saw him alone was that the more conscientious players knew that hanging around with Seth (at least until he began to prove himself on the field) wasn’t exactly the short path to success on Bill Young’s football team. The fact that Young came to see him as a bad apple (actually, this was mostly in Seth’s mind, Young would later insist) didn’t bother Seth one bit—If you let me play, I’ll show you how good I am. If you don’t, your loss.
Young played him, and Seth showed how good he was. He took over as a starting outside linebacker in his freshman year and grew stronger and more ferocious every season. Young rewarded his efforts by taking him off the grant program and writing him a full scholarship. Despite Seth’s surly demeanor, Young discovered that the young man from New York had work habits—at least where football was concerned—that put the rest of his squad, even his starting seniors, to shame. Seth set a whole new standard of intensity, although the coach found the attitude troublingly grim. He’d see Seth slumped in joyless repose at his locker and ask, “What’s wrong?” But there was nothing wrong, at least nothing Seth cared to discuss. Just Seth being Seth.
When he finally met Jennifer, he made good on his old cafeteria boast, and that, too, became a problem. Jennifer went on the European track tour the summer after she graduated, and when she returned to take an assistant coaching job at the school and to resume her training, she and Seth started seeing each other often. Both had found it hard adjusting to the social circles in the athletic dorms, and both had gone through periods of feeling lonely, isolated, and far from home. In short order, they were inseparable, and what a striking couple they made. Hand in hand, black on blond, ebony and ivory, the emerging young linebacker with the grim look on his face and the stern Dutch wonder woman six years his senior—not everyone on campus had horizons wide enough for the view. Some thought the match wasn’t good for the image of the team or the school. Young worried that Seth’s romance would distract him from his studies and from football, which had, in fact, happened more times than he could count. And the interracial aspect, that was worrisome, too. Young was infected with that educated and sensitive good ol’ boy kind of racial outlook, the sort of second-generation, well-bred, kinder and gentler racism that said, Hey, kids, this kind of thing don’t bother me, y’understand, but everybody ain’t as lib’ral as I am. In fact, Young had seen quite a few of these black player-white girlfriend pairings in his coaching years, and in his experience they nearly always ended up badly. So in his father/adviser role, he pulled young Seth aside one afternoon and tried to warn him away from Jennifer, telling him that chances were better ‘n even that there was heartache and a heap o’ trouble jus’ waitin’ for him down the road.
This, of course, pissed Seth off, and when he told Jennifer that night, he touched off a Teutonic typhoon. Jennifer wasn’t attuned to the subtleties of American racial politics; as far as she was concerned, Coach Young’s warning might as well have come dressed in white sheet and noose. Raised in one of the world’s most liberal and tolerant cultures, having competed all over the world with women of all races and backgrounds for more than a decade, she was appalled by the small-mindedness of rural America … and now it had come knocking on her door! No way she was going to let what she saw as backward, provincial crackerism interfere with her pursuit of happiness. The next morning, she barged past the secretary in the football coaches’ suite to confront Young.
“Have you ever met me?” she demanded.
“No,” said the startled coach.
“Well, my name is Jennifer Smit.”
“Oh, sure, I’ve heard of you.”
“Oh, you’ve heard of me? But do you know me?”
“I’ve seen you around. I’ve read about you in the paper.”
“Oh, that’s great. So you’ve read about me in the papers. But do you know me?”
“No.”
“Well, then, I’d appreciate it if you would stop telling your players bad things about me. Because I have nothing bad in mind for Seth. I’m going out with him. I really like him. And it’s not your business who I go out with and who he goes out with!”
And that was that. During those college years, Jennifer would recall later, with some wonder, that Seth was devoted to her. She helped tutor him through his classes, worked out diet and training programs in the off-season to bulk him up and increase his strength, flexibility, and endurance. She gave him a twenty-dollar weekly allowance from her paycheck as a track coaching assistant so he could go out to the bars after practice with his teammates. Apart from being his lover, Jennifer became the kind of mentor and partner to Seth that Young could not possibly have been to all of the young men on his squad. Seth rubbed it in by bringing her out to watch practice now and then, which was fun, underscoring his defiance of Coach and, face it, showing off a little. That blond hair and those long internationally competitive legs made it tough sometimes to concentrate on the ol’ pigskin.
But Young continued to let Seth play, and Seth continued to show how good he was. By his senior year he had built thirty more pounds on his frame, most of it in the upper torso. He led the team in tackles in his junior year as an outside linebacker, and when Young shifted him inside to middle linebacker in his senior year, he led the team in tackles again.
None of which meant Young had to like Seth. Years later, the coach claimed to have no memory of this, but the linebacker recalled being voted one of UTEP’s team captains in his senior year, only to have Coach abruptly do away with the policy of having three or four elected team captains in favor of designating two himself, one for offense and one for defense. He did not appoint Seth.
Little energy at UTEP, needless to say, went into promoting Seth to NFL scouts, and, even at 215 pounds, Seth was considered too small to play linebacker at the game’s next level. When he wasn’t invited to the national scouting combine, his pro prospects didn’t look good.
Again, Jennifer proved helpful. The kind of things scouts could quantify about football players, she noted, were track-and-field skills— mostly running and jumping. And these things were her forte. So she altered Seth’s normal training regimen to improve those skills, to build better explosive power in his legs for sprinting and leaping.
Still, on draft day, Seth was disappointed. He watched the first two rounds on TV, without really expecting to be chosen—he had excelled as a college player, but had played on a losing team, and he was undersized. His hopes rested in rounds three through six. When his name wasn’t called in those rounds, he just left the house in a nuclear funk. Seth was nowhere to be found when he was taken in the eighth round by the Eagles, and that news, relayed by friends, couldn’t chisel a smile in the stone face. His friends and family wanted to celebrate, but not Seth. Big fucking deal. Eighth round. As far as Seth was concerned, in those lower rounds teams were just rolling the dice. The Eagles had chosen two linebackers ahead of him and had some quality veterans already on the roster. What kind of chance would he have? He was being Seth all out when he flew back to the East Coast for rookie camp with the Eagles’ new head coach.
But if there was one coach in the whole Pigskin Priesthood built to appreciate Seth being Seth, it was Buddy Ryan, who never met a sociopathic linebacker he didn’t like. Seth epitomized the defensive player Buddy was looking for to fill out what was going to become (just ask him) the best defense the game had ever seen. On the one hand, Seth was a grind, a workaholic, with the intelligence and grim determination to master Buddy’s complex and shifting on-field stratagems. On the other, Seth’s lifelong surly mien expressed exactly the image Buddy was after. It was an image that played unconsciously on an American racial myth, the stereotype of the intimidating black male, the myth that black men are inherently more virile and violent than white men. Shit, that’s exactly the defense Buddy was after! Scare the nut hairs off them pretty little white-boy quarterbacks. So blackness itself became an essential part of the Eagles’ defensive character. Reggie, Jerome, Clyde, Seth, Byron, Andre, and Ben all were cut, at least outwardly, from the same mold, Buddy’s mold. The fact that Buddy, the Okie drill sergeant, played a classic overseer role … well, none of the guys seemed to mind that. Playing defense for the Eagles became a distinctly black thing. Together in their far corner of the locker room, their blackness seemed to suck light right out of the room. The Pack (which was overwhelmingly white) would enter casually and drift down about halfway and then stop, the way white folks would cross the street to avoid a group of black men strolling together up the sidewalk, or the way white motorists would roll up their windows and lock their doors entering that part of town. The spell was deliberate. To drive home the message, Buddy’s Boys wore black shoes and draped black towels from their pants. They hung out together on and off the field. No one played the role with more enthusiasm than Seth. He loaned his stone face to the whole squad.
Yessir, Seth and Buddy were soul mates. Buddy had to let Seth go at the end of the summer, juggling his forty-seven-man roster and relatively certain that Seth—the eighth-round pick—would not be picked up by another team. He promised Seth he would be back in Philadelphia shortly. Seth flew back out to El Paso and nearly wore out his new green-and-silver sweat gear; when Jennifer washed it, he’d fish it out of the dryer to put it back on the next day. Buddy re-signed him in time to play in the Eagles’ third game that season. After a standout year on special teams, Seth was Buddy’s starting left outside linebacker for ’87.
EVER SINCE THE SCENE in Honolulu over Wanda, Jennifer and Seth had been estranged. He had flown back alone to Philly for the ’92 season, leaving unresolved once more plans for his wife and daughter to move back east with him.
By October, Jennifer is through waiting. There are positive signs. Seth is even pleasant on the phone once or twice. When one of the Philadelphia Pack decides to write a big profile of him, the man who had stepped up and taken a leadership role since Jerome’s untimely demise, Seth gives the hound her number—what can he be thinking?
Jennifer plays the game like a champ, telling what a great, loving, sweetheart of a guy Seth really is beneath the laser stare, nuclear temper, and apocalyptic gloom … well, yes, he is hardheaded enough to play the game without a helmet and he does hate to lose, but all in all a model NFL superstar husband and daddy underneath.
She flies to Philly the day before the big Monday night Dallas game, D-Day, and, planning to surprise him, she and Jasmine spend Sunday night with Erika, who is still coping with Wes’s betrayal. Jennifer watches the glorious win, wincing as Seth tries to keep playing after hurting his knee, cheering when he makes his big play. She and Jasmine sit with Erika and Sandra Simmons, two other members in good standing of the fabulous sorority of Eagles’ wives whose husbands no longer lived at home. Wes’s girlfriend Amy is back, too, over in that other section in one of Wes’s guest seats, prompting much clucking and scorn among the outraged official women. Erika has gotten out of her system any need to confront Wes’s shameless blond sweetie, who now before the players’ wives stands for the whole sleazy, preying culture of Sis-Boom-Bimbohood. Lynn Allen can’t resist walking Jasmine and Montana over and presenting them to Amy—I just want you to see who else you’re hurting!
After the game, Jennifer waits in the Wives’ Lounge for Seth, who is staying late for treatment. Erika stays with her.
“You might need the ride,” she says knowingly.
After an hour or two, with the stadium drained of its loud and deliriously happy fans, Seth’s older brother, Eric, comes in the lounge and ignores her. Then Clyde Simmons walks in, again without a word to Jennifer and Erika, crosses the room to speak with Eric in a hushed tone, and then the two men start back out together.
That’s when Jennifer takes Jasmine by the hand and follows. She can’t stand waiting around anymore. She has to confront him.
Eric turns as he steps through the door, startled.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“I’m going in,” says Jennifer, in her clipped Dutch accent, a blush of that Teutonic blood in her pale cheeks.
“You can’t go in. It’s only for men. Here, I’ll take Jasmine in,” he says, taking the little girl by the hand.
“If women aren’t allowed, then Jasmine can’t go either. I’m going in.”
“Suit yourself,” says Eric.
Jennifer follows them into the nearly empty locker room, and then into the privileged enclave of the training room, where (as she would later remember the scene) she now returns Seth’s scowl.
“What’s your problem?” she says.
“What did you come here for? You know the deal.”
Hunched on the trainers’ table, the massive plates of his chest and shoulder muscles bunched forward and his long, heavy arms resting on his thighs, Seth looks like some brooding heavy in a gladiator movie. The postgame high of the locker room is gone. He is weary and bruised.
“Tell me, Seth. What is the deal?” Jennifer asks.
“You know the deal between you and me.”
Seth is clearly embarrassed, being confronted like this in front of the trainers, on his own turf.
“I don’t know. That’s just it! Are you still seeing that girl?” Jennifer is getting upset now, starting to feel choked up, which makes her angrier.
“No. That has nothing to do with it.”
“Then why are you so upset that we’re here? Any normal man would be happy to see his wife and child.”
“I thought you and I had a better relationship than this.”
“Than what? I just came out to see my husband play a football game!”
“You show up unannounced, sneaking around behind me.”
“I’m your wife! I didn’t think I had to be announced. And I was not sneaking. It was supposed to be a surprise.”
That had been the idea. But Seth had been tipped off, of course, by his mother, ever protective of her millionaire son.
“If something has you this upset,” Jennifer says, “then maybe there’s something you need to tell me.”
“Like if you’re involved with somebody else. Maybe you should let me know right now. Is there somebody in your life? If you’re so bent out of shape, there must be!”
“I told you, there’s nothing going on.”
“Then why are you so upset?”
“I told you why I’m upset! I just thought we had a better relationship, that you wouldn’t do things behind my back.”
“Look,” says Jennifer, wanting to cut this short now, sobbing. “Please tell me right now. You want me to leave, I’ll leave. Jasmine and I will leave, right now, and we won’t be coming back.”
“Do whatever you want to do, Jennifer,” he says, with that cold unfeeling stare. She hates it when he does this, this in particular, implying that their marriage, their family, their future, all of it is her decision alone. And him, with his stone face on, with his regal posture that nothing touches him, he’s Mr. Pro Bowl Linebacker Superstar, Seth being Seth, and she can flit around further in his blazing aura if she likes, or leave, or whatever; it doesn’t matter to him. The mighty trajectory of Seth Joyner’s career will just maintain its cool and magnificent arc in the heavens.
JENNIFER, SEE, just doesn’t get it.
Football players, and athletes in general, learn early the importance of not looking back. It’s a discipline that is drilled into them from the first week of organized play: Forget about what just happened, that’s in the past. If you catch three touchdown passes and break a school record … that’s in the past. If you drop the winning touchdown … hey, that’s in the past. If you hammered the Dallas Cowboys the last time you played them, or if they ran cleat marks up and down your spine … forget about it quickly. Things that happened in the past, good things, bad things, whatever, they could only hurt you. They were done, kaput, of no further significance. The important thing is to leave them behind. Unburden the mind and unleash the senses. Think only positive thoughts. Forget value judgments, critical analysis, self-doubt, worry; it’s just next play, next game, next season. That’s the cold logic of pro sports—You’re only as good as your next game—and that is how you had to proceed. It is a valuable discipline in sport. If you let yourself get too far up, you’re that much easier to bring down. If you let yourself get too down, it is that much harder to get up. The pressures of the game are heavy enough without carrying mental baggage with you out on the field. At its ideal, it’s like practicing Zen. You live entirely in the moment, fully alive and open to new opportunity, unmuddied by the past, unformed in the future.
That’s in the past is a powerful mantra. So powerful, in fact, that pro athletes find all kinds of uses for it. If you are arrested for drunk driving or beating up your girlfriend or throwing a small explosive out a car window at a group of fans, you get yourself a good lawyer, call a press conference, and when the bastards turn on the lights and point the cameras and microphones at you, all you have to say is, yeah, it happened, that was me, but… hey, that’s in the past, and then scowl ferociously at those who persist in questioning you about it. One of the true rarities in sportswriting is a feature story about the player who blew the game. Sure, there are plenty of soulful accounts from players reminiscing in retirement about the pitch that blew some longago World Series game, or the field goal that might have been, but not many show up as part of the daily report, looking back at the game just lost. It isn’t because the Pack is too timid or sensitive to probe a fresh wound—hell, no—it is because questions about the crucial mistake are nearly always greeted by the mantra that’s in the past. End of story. ‘Nuff said. It’s the niftiest concept since Confession: In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, and voilà! Clean slate. You can reinvent yourself over and over and over again. It can apply to all phases of your life, too, like, girlfriends, like wives. Almost all these guys had left behind whole former worlds when they made the leap from high school to college and then to the pros, every step a big change, a shedding, a rebirth. Just invoke the mantra.
See, what Jennifer doesn’t realize about her relationship with Seth, what is so obvious that he doesn’t even feel the need to explain, what is also so appropriate and clearly right that he wastes not a moment of regret or sentimentality or any discernible emotion on it, is that Jennifer, who just keeps popping up, demanding explanations, wondering what the hell is going on, is already inalterably in the past.
She accompanies Seth that night to Methodist hospital for his IV drip, and once on the table, he promptly falls asleep. She just sits there watching the fluids shifting in the tube.
Can’t she see it?
JENNIFER PERSISTS for the rest of the week, living in Seth’s apartment. He spends most of the week ducking her, leaving early and coming home late, frustrating her efforts to understand, to reconcile, to part … to confront and resolve whatever it is that has sprung up between them. It’s in this frame of mind that Jennifer decides the following weekend, when Seth flies off with the team to Kansas City for game five, to phone Wanda. Since Seth won’t tell her what’s going on, maybe his Puerto Rican dulcinea will.
It’s quite a scene, in its own way more than equal to the drama and violence (emotional, that is) waiting on the field for Seth and the Eagles the following afternoon, and with far more lasting consequences.
They meet at the Bennigan’s Restaurant on Route 73. Erika accompanies Jennifer, high officers in the Association of Eagles’ Wives. As they enter the place, Erika recognizes Lisa, one of Jerome’s old harem, at the bar with this fragile Puerto Rican doll face who just has to be Wanda.
Jennifer learns her husband has been living another life. Wanda has been seriously involved with Seth for more than two years now. She was with him on all those road trips in the off-season of ’91, at Jerome’s camp, at Keith Byars’s camp in Dayton, golf tournaments; she had been with him in L.A. taping the “American Gladiators” competition when he got the news of Jerome! The only reason Wanda hadn’t flown down to Brooksville for the funeral, she says, was that Seth had told her how Jennifer had insisted on going along.
It’s staggering. Apart from the emotional blow, my God! A woman has to start wondering about her health. If there is this much about Seth’s life over the last two years she hadn’t known, how much else was there? Exactly how vast and colorful is the sweep of human sexual history that her husband invited into her body? There are more revelations—this Wanda is too much—enough to just freezedry Jennifer’s soul and blow it away. She feels numb. She honestly feels more like laughing at this point than crying. It’s the emotional equivalent of having just stepped off one of those monster carnival rides that spins your top and bottom in separate directions simultaneously. Suddenly, her whole understanding of her life for the last two, three—hell, the last decade—is up for grabs.
And Wanda is just bubbling over with information. She knows Amy, of course, Wes’s squeeze. Both Lisa and Wanda roll their eyes at the mention of Amy, as if to say What a bimbo that one is, and she dresses so tacky! Wanda is just adamant that Seth is a dog and that they are through. “I put my career on hold for Seth!” laments Wanda. Oh Christ, she’s looking for sympathy now! Among other things, Jennifer learns that Seth is planning to build Wanda a house in Florida—see, because then, that way Wanda would be close to Puerto Rico and she would be located strategically between his daughter in El Paso and his mom, after he built his mom a DHM in North Carolina, where Pattie has decided she’d rather retire (more news for Mrs. Joyner). Jennifer thinks, The poor son of a bitch never did study his geography.
The more she listens to Wanda, the more she wonders if she has ever known Seth at all.
WHEN SHE GETS BACK to El Paso she gets a phone call from a Philadelphia jeweler, a man they had both gotten to know over the years, a friend. Seth had a thousand-dollar bill outstanding for some bauble he purchased months ago.
“What did he buy?” she asks.
“I can’t tell.”
“Was it for me?”
“No.”
“Was it for his mother?”
“No.”
“Was it for his brother or his sister?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t need to tell me anything else, do you?”
She decides, what the hell.
The woman who spent hours each week clipping food coupons goes out and buys herself the most expensive BMW she can find.