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CHAPTER 1
Jerome
A colossus, Jerome Brown strides the sun-soaked playing fields of his youth beset by children.
Dozens of children, all ages, sizes, and colors, the bigger and bolder ones shouldering in close, clutching, hollering "Me, J'rome! Me, J'rome!" while the smaller and more timid hop at the fringes, waving, begging.
"Please, J'rome. Me! Me!"
"Sit Down!" bellows the beleaguered big man.
He is weary, but patient. He knows exactly where these kids are coming from. The millionaire star defensive lineman of the Philadelphia Eagles knows all about the Gimme! Gimme! instinct. He and the rest of his teammates are enthusiastic adherents to the MEAT (Maximize Earnings at All Times) principle. Asked what it meant to him the first year he was elected to the NFL's Pro Bowl, the year he was first acknowledged by his peers to be the very best at what he does, Jerome didn't go all mushy. He rolled his eyes, flashed his trademark shiteating grin, and sang out, "Mo' money! Mo' money! Mo' money!"
Jerome is big and black and wide as an old cast-iron stove, only instead of heat he gives off noise. "Even as a little boy, we always heard him comin' before we seen him," says his father, Willie, a big, wide man, though not as formidable as his son. Everything about Jerome is wide. His head widens from the temples to the place where his neck joins his shoulders. Inside this frame his deep-set brown eyes are set wide over a broad, flat nose and even wider mouth, thick lips closing over big white teeth, perfectly straight, even, amazing teeth, teeth that jump out of that broad dark face like one of those blazing electric marquees that line the Strip in Vegas. Wide chin, wide neck, wide shoulders, wide chest, wide belly, wide butt, wide thighs, wide calves, wide ankles — why, even Jerome's posture is wide; he stands with his feet set on a line with the far reach of his shoulders to provide secure undergirding for the bulwark above. You would expect someone so large to move slowly, but not Jerome. He's always bouncing on that wide-open stance, always on the move or ready to move, like a motor with its idle set too fast. Jerome is hardwired for fun and action, and there isn't a calculating neuron in his brain.
"I mean it!" he warns the children.
He's here in his hometown of sleepy Brooksville, Florida, to host the First Annual Jerome Brown Football Camp — you know, trying to give something back. It ain't easy. Jerome has had the idea now for several years. His teammates Keith Byars and Byron Evans do it, hold a weekend football clinic for kids from their hometowns. But he'd put it off. The details of staging Camp Jerome were daunting — reserving the field, advertising, coordinating the date with all his teammates' schedules — who has time for that shit?
"Pay attention!" he pleads.
To no avail. Cradled in Brown's massive arms are T-shirts, Eagles pins and pens, color team portraits, travel bags, all manner of goodies, icing on the cake for these kids after a morning of autographs and football drills led by real NFL football players — Jerome, Reggie White, Randall Cunningham, Seth Joyner, Wes Hopkins, Clyde Simmons, Andre Waters, Ron Heller, and others. But instead of setting up some kind of system for handing these things out, Jerome just scoops up armfuls and wades in, provoking this kiddie riot. It's like trying to line up a swarm of bees single file with a bucket of honey under one arm.
But hey, planning ahead has never been Jerome's way. Thinking things through, organizing, taking things one step at a time, heeding caution, slowing down for yellow lights — none of this is Jerome's way. Jerome's way is to feel the itch of impulse and act, throttle wide, cylinders afire, wind in his hair. Speed and daring are Jerome's friends. And don't knock it. Jerome's way, after all, has served him astonishingly well. Just a decade back Jerome was one of these shirtless, back-country Florida homeboys, dusty and scraped from playing ball on these very fields. Now his barrel-ass methods have sped him to the dizzying pinnacle of American pro sports, made him a millionaire at age twenty-seven, awarded him with fame, his pick of beautiful women, the admiration of family, friends, and football fans everywhere — given him so much, in fact, that every once in a while it all becomes a strain.
Of course, off the football field, Jerome's way sometimes makes for trouble.
In just six weeks, it will make big, bad, lovable Jerome dead.
But there is no shadow on this day in early May, the day Jerome gives something back. It hadn't been as hard to arrange as he had feared. A couple of days before this weekend event, Jerome had roared his big black motorcycle up to his buddy Tim Jinkens's bar, the Red Mule, and sauntered into the cool with an empty yellow legal pad and a pen.
"Okay, Tim. What do we do?"
From behind the bar, his chubby old friend was brought up short. "Tell me it isn't true, G."
"What?"
"You haven't done anything yet?"
"There's time!" Jerome complained. "You're gonna help me, right, Tim?" with the big, soulful grin.
"Jerome! This all should have been done two months ago!"
"Mr. Worrywart," sneered the football star.
Of course, Tim knew what this meant. It meant he and his mother and brother, Jerome's support team, were going to be working their asses off day and night to make sure that this idea of Jerome's got off the ground. Jerome would get all the credit, of course. But that was okay. Tim understood. How was a big star like Jerome supposed to know how to get kid-sized T-shirts printed up? How to set up a Coke-and-hot-dog stand to serve a crowd like that? And how was Jerome going to keep that many kids moving through a long morning of activity without its degenerating into chaos?
Tim and his mom sort of adopted Jerome way back, when Tim coached him on the junior-high football team, and they're used to their big friend dropping by with tall orders on short notice. They moan, but they love being included. They love Jerome's unswerving loyalty and affection. Jerome calls Mrs. Jinkens his "white mom" and delights in making a big fuss over her when he runs into her in public places, a black giant embracing this slight Irish woman, sweeping her up off her feet, and planting a big kiss on her cheek, greeting her with "Hi, Mom!" loud enough to turn every head — this still being a community where white moms with black sons raise an eyebrow or two.
The support team had done the best job it could with the limited time remaining — four hundred T-shirts, hot dogs, buns, condiments, Cokes, applications, tickets, advertising. On Friday night, as hundreds queued up outside the Hernando High School gym for the weekend's kickoff event, a celebrity basketball game between the Eagles and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Tim had no tickets to sell. He called around and found out that the tickets were in the backseat of Jerome's Bronco, which was parked back at Jerome's house, and, of course, nobody was quite sure where the big guy was. So Tim drove over, found the tickets, and got back in time to avoid unpleasantness.
But things like this are just part of Jerome's charm, evident again in the slapdash course of this whole rowdy day.
"Y'all gonna make me pass out right here!" Jerome pleads as the children press closer.
The mob giggles. The giant isn't feared at home. Everybody down here knows Jerome. He's the most famous kid Brooksville ever produced, and he hasn't changed a bit — white Nike cap worn backward, baggy denim shorts hanging to his dusty knees, oversized ankle-high leather sports shoes worn sockless and untied. Money and fame may have overtaken Jerome Brown, but age hasn't put a dent in him. Down here they used to call him Freight Train for his heroic collisions with fences while playing outfield for the Hernando High state baseball champs, or maybe it was for the way he used to scatter the ordinary schoolboy opponents trotted out during football season to try to block him — nobody remembers which. They would all remember how they had never seen anyone so big, so fast, so strong, whose personality was as outsized as his accomplishments. "We'd just give him the ball sometimes and watch him drag three or four kids over the goal line," says Tim. "In one baseball season, he stole twenty-four bases in ten games. Whatever he did, there was just no stopping him." And for Jerome nothing's changed! Ol' Freight Train just keeps barreling down the rails, his life tracing a path that keeps pushing on and on, farther and farther, faster and faster. He has yet to hit a wall he can't move. Today he's even bigger, quicker, and stronger; hundreds of hometown fans have become millions; the cheers from the high-school grandstands have become the blood roar of tens of thousands, a stage more magically grand than Jerome or his family (lots of family) or friends (lots of friends) could have ever imagined.
But Jerome is still just Jerome. Why change? Just like back in high school, he's still breaking the rules, staying out late, skipping class, juggling girlfriends, drinking too much, driving too fast in any of his six (that's right, six!) custom sports cars and souped-up cycles, blasting his music through the center of town, playing poker for stakes higher than any annual wage ever brought home by his truck-driving daddy, vanishing off into the thick Florida veld to loosen up his collection of high-powered automatic weapons, and partying, partying, partying, rolling in snatch. Just watch Jerome for three days on his home turf and you come away wanting to eat hearty, swagger, laugh, boast, stay up late, talk a mile a minute, banish petty worry, and squeeze every sweet moment of life dry. To be Jerome is to practice the art of always making a joyful noise.
"Y'all ain't lis'nin'!"
But now Jerome is beat. "I quit," he whines at a cameraman, here at Jerome's invitation to tape the event so the fans back in Philly can see JB give something back. "I don't want to see another kid! I am tee-totally tired."
Hell, he's got all his teammates in town for this. All he wants, all Jerome ever really wants, is to get down to some serious partying, get back to Home Jerome for some backyard barbecue, cold beer, and cards on the shaded deck out by the pool, a chance to show off his race cars and his new sleek fiancée, a fashion model from Miami. His friends have already started back to the house. Out on the high-school playing field you can see Jerome's motor smoking as he tries to finish things up with these kids. They all think his exasperation is an act, but it's not. Jerome has had about enough of this Role Model shit for one day.
"That's it! I quit! Y'all gwan home!" And, abruptly, he hurls fistfuls of the goodies up in the air, divests himself in one grand gesture, and as the little mob falls on it, Jerome struts off with relief, moving fast. Let them fight it out ... the timetested Jerome method proved once again. And not a minute too soon. Because back at the house, just a few miles away, things are growing edgy.
Out on the screened-in patio, muscular giants in colorful, state-of-the-art sports gear are draped all over the deck, wisely forsaking the patio furniture, which looks Lilliputian in this crowd. Home Jerome is a suburban rancher ballooned out about four times normal size, finished off with white stucco and painted with purple trim. It sits about two miles north of Brooksville's city limits on a sullen, green ten-acre patch cut out of flat, fly-infested Florida fruit groves — a certified DHM (Dream Home for Mom), the mandatory first major project for every homeboy who gets the million-dollar payday in the big city.
Camp Jerome is really a reunion. The Eagles' '91 season ended badly back in December, short of the postseason play-offs for the first time in four seasons, and most of these teammates haven't seen one another since. That's the way it goes. From July through December they are together night and day, then for six months they go home to heal, step out of the spotlight, and work at being real men in a real world: husbands, fathers, sons, lovers; men with family and friends, with responsibilities, with a future beyond next weekend — what a pain! Gatherings like this one are a welcome respite. Jerome is picking up his teammates' airfare and hotel bills, but most of them would have paid to come.
Once the team is together again, however, it doesn't take long for the old tensions and rivalries to surface. When Jerome is around, these things tend not to get out of hand, mostly because when Jerome is around it's tough paying attention to anyone other than Jerome. But today Big G — as in a raucous "Gee-rome" — is delayed, and the usual teasing banter has turned a touch raw. Predictably, it's that Seth Joyner picking on Randall Cunningham again. The team's fierce linebacker can't stand the star quarterback, a fact he's been taking fewer and fewer pains to hide in recent years. And Randall (or "Randoll" to the less enthralled) has given Seth an opening.
He's done something new with his hair.
"Check out the weave!" shouts Seth. Randall is standing just inside the patio door, his rented white monster Mercedes coupe glistening out on the lawn like a sun chariot. He is tall and unusually lean for a football player, especially coming off surgery and months of rehab after blowing out his left knee. He cuts an elegant figure, but his face is rugged; he has uneven skin and a vicious scar on his nose, which earned him the college nickname "Hook," high forehead, blank liquidbrown eyes, moustache, and an underbite that juts his wide, flat lower lip into a natural pout. His hair is shaped in the stovepipe coiffure de rigueur this spring for fashionable young African-American men, the back and sides cropped skull close but with the pillbox top jutting up a good three inches and leveled off clean enough on top to shoot pool. Of Ran-doll, who counts "dressing up" among his favorite off-field activities, one expects nothing less. But arching from the dimple at the base of Randall's skull, sprouting from the bump of his first cervical vertebra, the inimitable Scrambling One has this ... this ... tail! He's let a few strands of hair grow out about four inches, and he's had the spindly thatch twisted into a tight braid that extends the length of a crooked index finger from the back of his long, graceful neck. The tiny braid is fed through nuggets of gold to make this unbearably cute toy ponytail! This is just too, too precious for stone-faced Seth, who has been eyeing the thing all day with disbelief, waiting for a chance to pounce. He begins by clowning, miming wonder, shaking his head. This starts his teammates giggling, but Cunningham, the orphan prince, ever cool and aloof, tunes out the ridicule. He's used to it.
You have to understand. We're diving into the green dragony depths of envy, rivalry, and grudge that lurk beneath the surface of a pro football team.
There's a history here that goes back years.
The way Seth has it figured, he and the Eagles' superb defense have been carrying Ran-doll's skinny, sweet ass now for about four seasons, and whenever they're on the verge of getting somewhere, like at the end of the '90 season when they faced the Redskins in the NFC Wild Card game, their franchise quarterback folds up like one of those life-sized cardboard stand-ups in front of candy racks back in Philly that offer the new chocolate-covered, caramel-and-peanut-scrambled Randall Bar.
But it goes deeper. Randall is odd. There's something about the guy, something so pliant, so sensitive, so ... artistic that somehow he seems not even to belong on a football field. This is the kind of kid usually weeded out in the Pop Warner League (No offense, ma'am, but are you sure your boy here is cut out to play football? Gits a mite rough out there). And yet here he is, the highest-paid player on the team and one of the most acclaimed in the league, which, frankly, irks the hell out of many of his teammates.
And Randall doesn't help himself either. He walks around the locker room and practice sessions sometimes for weeks at a time like a man in a fog, saying bizarre things to the press, doodling and daydreaming his way through coaching sessions, then trying to finesse things on the field come Sunday.
"Being confused has a lot to do with my personality," he says, and if you don't believe him, just listen to what pops out of his mouth over the course of a football season. Randall's soft voice emerges from the labyrinth of his psyche in constant lamentation; he's never happy with himself, he trusts no one, and in the wide silence between Randall and the rest of the world he hears voices: "There's an evil spirit and a good spirit; I lean toward the good spirit all the time, because that's where my heart is, and I know I can be tricked." Just having a wiftbrain like this calling signals for the offense troubles Seth, who is as spiritual as a hand grenade. Seth is a player who has built a terrific career without overwhelming athletic talent, who makes up for what he lacks in finesse with dogged preparation and an on-field intensity that borders on sociopathic. But every time he and his brothers on defense have stomped some opposing offense flat, he has to stand on the sidelines, helmet in hand, and turn the game (his game!) over to this fruitcake — who's making triple most of their salaries.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bringing the Heat"
by .
Copyright © 1994 Mark Bowden.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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