Next Man Up Read online

  Copyright © 2005 by John Feinstein

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-316-02811-0

  Contents

  Also by John Feinstein

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Unexpected Good-byes

  Chapter 2: Meet the New Boss

  Chapter 3: Ozzie Transcends Us All

  Chapter 4: The T.O. Caper . . .

  Chapter 5: The Draft

  Chapter 6: Camps and More Camps

  Chapter 7: Ray and Jamal

  Chapter 8: The Love Boat

  Chapter 9: The Games Begin

  Chapter 10: Getting Serious

  Chapter 11: The Turk

  Chapter 12: Crossing the Street

  Chapter 13: Sucker Punch

  Chapter 14: Must Win

  Chapter 15: God and the NFL

  Chapter 16: Warning Signals

  Chapter 17: Make Mine Vanilla

  Chapter 18: Making a Move

  Chapter 19: The T.O. Dance

  Chapter 20: Second Chance

  Chapter 21: Stacking

  Chapter 22: Best Record Ever

  Chapter 23: Mud Bowl

  Chapter 24: Roadblock

  Chapter 25: Crisis

  Chapter 26: Almost Perfect

  Chapter 27: Crash

  Chapter 28: The Final Hours

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY JOHN FEINSTEIN

  Let Me Tell You a Story

  (with Red Auerbach)

  Caddy for Life

  Open

  The Punch

  The Last Amateurs

  The Majors

  A March to Madness

  A Civil War

  A Good Walk Spoiled

  Play Ball

  Hard Courts

  Forever’s Team

  A Season Inside

  A Season on the Brink

  Last Shot

  (A Final Four Mystery)

  Running Mates

  (A Mystery)

  Winter Games

  (A Mystery)

  This is for Martin Feinstein, my dad,

  who has always read what I have written—

  even when the subject isn’t opera.

  Introduction

  FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, the National Football League has had an aura around it.

  When I was a boy in New York, tickets to see the New York Giants play in Yankee Stadium were as coveted as a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. No one I knew could remember when Giants tickets had been sold to the general public. What’s more, if you lived in New York, there was no way to see Giants home games on television because Commissioner Pete Rozelle’s blackout rules forbade broadcast of games within a seventy-five-mile radius of the stadium where they were played. I knew New Yorkers who drove to Connecticut on Sundays so they could watch the Giants game on the CBS affiliate in Hartford. Even then, in the 1960s, every NFL game was a big deal.

  I grew up listening to Marty Glickman, Al DeRogatis, and Chip Cipolla broadcast the home games on WNEW radio. In that sense, I was fortunate, because Glickman was a genius and I loved listening to him say, “Take it, DeRo,” when it was time to break down a play. At the same time, I became a fan of the New York Jets, who had a flashy young quarterback named Joe Namath and, most important, tickets available. My friends and I would buy $3 standing-room tickets and almost always find empty seats in the corporate boxes in the downstairs sections of Shea Stadium, especially late in the season when the weather got cold. I still remember my dad getting tickets from a friend to see the Jets play the Houston Oilers in 1965, two days after I’d had eight teeth taken out in preparation for orthodonture. I couldn’t eat much at the game, but Namath threw four touchdown passes and the Jets won, 41-14.

  On the day that the Jets played the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III—January 12, 1969, a date I never have to look up—I paced up and down in front of the television set as the game began. That had become my superstition. When I paced, the Jets won. By the fourth quarter the Jets were leading, 16-0, and my father came home from a concert, walked in, and asked me the score. When I told him, he was shocked and sat down to watch. “Stop pacing,” he said. “You’re making me dizzy.”

  The lead seemed comfortable enough. I sat down. Don Shula put Johnny Unitas into the game and he immediately took the Colts the length of the field to cut the margin to 16-7. “Go ahead and pace,” my father said, knowing I would never forgive him if the Colts somehow pulled the game out. They didn’t, of course, and history was made. The Jets haven’t been back to the Super Bowl since. Maybe I should have kept pacing.

  I always knew pro football was a big deal when I was a kid. After all, there were only fourteen regular season games, so they all mattered. But it wasn’t until my parents moved to Washington during my senior year of high school that I understood how it can become an entire town’s obsession. My parents’ move coincided with George Allen’s second season as coach of the Redskins. I was finishing high school in New York, but I went to Washington most weekends and I was amazed by the Redskins’ hold on the entire city. As I watched television, listened to the radio, read the sports section of the Washington Post and the Washington Star, it was as if nothing else existed. I still remember going to the Safeway one Sunday afternoon during a Redskins game and feeling as if I had wandered into a ghost town. The guy behind the counter looked at me strangely, as if to say, “If you don’t have to be out, why are you?” He had a radio tuned to the game, naturally.

  When the Redskins went to the Super Bowl that season, the story seemed only slightly more important than the impending end of the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon was sending plays to Allen from the White House. When the Redskins lost the Super Bowl to the Miami Dolphins, the entire city went into an extended state of depression.

  I wasn’t a Redskins fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I loved reading the Post’s saturation coverage of the team. Leonard Shapiro, the Post’s Redskins beat writer, became one of my first heroes in journalism, as did Ken Denlinger, their primary Redskins columnist. When I joined the Post after college, I got a close-up look at how important the Redskins were to the newspaper, to the local media in Washington, and to the entire city. During my first year at the paper, I was sitting at my desk on the first day of the NFL draft—this was so long ago, it was before the draft was on TV—when Ben Bradlee, the Post’s legendary executive editor, came bouncing back to the sports section.

  “Hey, George,” he yelled at sports editor George Solomon, “who’d we get?”

  I was twenty-one and even more of a wise guy than I am now. “Jeez, Ben,” I said, “I didn’t realize the Post had a pick in the NFL draft.”

  Bradlee whirled around, pointed a finger at me, and said, “Listen, Feinstein, if you don’t like the Redskins, you can get the f —— out of town right now.”

  Those of you who have read or seen All the President’s Men know I’m not exaggerating about the profanity. What’s more, he wasn’t smiling when he said it.

  I learned my lesson: don’t joke about the Redskins around the brass.

  Twenty-five years later, little has changed in Washington or any other NFL city. The NFL team is the big news in town almost year-round. Those of
us who still try to make the claim that baseball is the national pastime get laughed down in most quarters. Not only does the NFL have its own network—so does the NBA—people actually watch it. As I’m writing this paragraph, the NFL Network is providing in-depth coverage of the NFL combine. Think about this: people are sitting glued to their television sets, listening to scouts and general managers analyze the 40-yard-sprint times of wide receivers, the bench press of offensive linemen, and the arm strength of quarterbacks. Washington finally had a baseball team to cheer for in 2005 after thirty-three years without the sport, but there was far less speculation around town about the Nationals’ starting rotation than about the Redskins’ number one draft pick. A few miles up I-95, the acquisition of a solid wide receiver named Derrick Mason by the Ravens was at least as important to most people in Baltimore as the trade that brought Hall of Fame home run hitter Sammy Sosa to the Orioles.

  I was never an NFL beat writer during my years at the Post, but I was assigned early on to write sidebars at Redskins games, then to cover big games in other cities. I always wanted to write a book about the NFL. What fascinated me about the league was that aura, the ability to do things that no other professional league can do. For instance, most professional sports make their players available to the press often. Almost every NFL team severely limits access to its players. There are limited times each week when the locker room is open to journalists, but most players simply stay out of the locker room during that time. Most practices are off-limits, except perhaps for a few minutes of stretching at the start of the day. Coaches are paranoid and secretive about everything. During his first stint in Washington, Coach Joe Gibbs once accused a friend of mine of writing a story about the weaknesses of an 0-5 Eagles team in order to get the Eagles fired up to beat the Redskins. He was completely serious.

  And the NFL has clout with television far beyond other sports. NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who had the good fortune to follow Pete Rozelle, undoubtedly the greatest commissioner in the history of sports, is professional sports’ Last Don. Two years ago, when ESPN began airing a fictional show called Playmakers, based on the off-field lives of NFL players that depicted virtually all of them as womanizers, drug users, liars, and all-night partiers, Don Tags was horrified. He informed the ESPN people that he wasn’t at all happy with the content of the show. It is worth remembering there may be no organization in sports that fancies itself more omnipotent than ESPN. The assumption among ESPN executives is that they are the most important people in sports. In fact, the Sporting News last year dubbed ESPN president George Bodenheimer number one on its list of the 100 most powerful people in sports.

  They were wrong. Don Tags offered Bodenheimer and ESPN a deal they couldn’t refuse: get the show gone, or we might just take our Sunday night games (and the Monday night games that air on corporate sister ABC) elsewhere. ESPN couldn’t afford to take a chance on ending up with network TV’s version of a horse head in the bed: no NFL football. Even though the show’s ratings were very good and the reviews better than most of ESPN’s so-called original entertainment offerings, they canceled the show. Pure coincidence, everyone on both sides said. The NFL would never tell ESPN what to do. Of course it wouldn’t. It didn’t have to. The message was clear.

  Last year, with ABC’s Monday Night Football ratings reaching record lows in part because of weak games that are placed on the schedule months before the season begins, Tagliabue decided it was time to strengthen the prime-time package—or packages, since the league has talked about possible Thursday and Saturday night games when its new TV deal begins in 2006—by cherry-picking key games late in the season and moving them from Sunday afternoon to Monday night. Such a move couldn’t possibly make Fox and CBS, who carry the Sunday games, very happy. And yet both willingly signed new deals in November of 2004 in which they agreed to pay more money—a total of $8 billion between the two of them, as opposed to $4.2 billion under terms of the current contract—in return for a weaker schedule. Only the NFL could sit at a negotiating table with two powerful networks and say with a straight face, we’re giving you less and in return we want more.

  Then this spring the NFL renegotiated its prime-time packages. ESPN took over Monday Night Football, paying $1.1 billion a year, about double what ABC paid for a package that had been absolutely bleeding money the past few years. NBC, desperate to get back into the NFL after a few years of the XFL and Arena football, paid $600 million for the Sunday night deal—the same money ESPN had been paying for Sunday night games. At these prices it is almost impossible for any of the networks to actually make money on the NFL. They don’t care. They just want to have the NFL on their air.

  I had several thoughts on how to go about writing an NFL book. One way was to use an approach I had enjoyed in writing about the pro golf tour, the pro tennis tours, and Major League baseball: just follow the sport for one season, from the draft through the Super Bowl. Certainly it would have been interesting to watch different teams, players, and coaches at critical times during the course of a season. But I knew doing such a book on the NFL wouldn’t be at all like golf or tennis, because those sports are covered year-round by only a handful of people and are in the consciousness of most of the public only during those few weeks a year when their major championships are being played. Baseball is covered like a blanket, but unlike football, there is constant access to the players, coaches, and managers, allowing someone like me to develop relationships and follow stories. I knew I wouldn’t get that opportunity in football, working with nothing more than a media credential.

  The better route, I decided, was to find one team that could serve as an example of what life in the NFL is like. Each of the thirty-two teams is entirely different, of course, run by different people with different personalities and stories to tell. But the pressures are the same: the violent nature of the sport makes every game and, to a lesser degree, every practice an adventure. Every football team suffers serious injuries during the course of a season. No one knows when those injuries will occur or who will be hurt, just that someone will. There are no guaranteed contracts in the NFL. There may be no phrase in sports more meaningless than “Joe Smith signed a seven-year contract today” with an NFL team. The only thing the player is guaranteed is his signing bonus. A team can cut him five minutes later if it wants to and not pay him another cent. That’s why, every spring, star players are cut or have their contracts restructured for less money. Almost anyone can get cut if a team doesn’t think he is living up to the money he is being paid or if he is injured and not able to perform at the level expected when he was signed.

  What’s more, the NFL season is seventeen weeks (including the bye) of intense pressure and scrutiny, and I thought following one team, up close, through the highs and lows of their season would be infinitely more dramatic than following an entire league or conference. Because there are only sixteen games, each one is viewed as something just short of life-and-death by everyone involved. One loss in football is the equivalent of a ten-game losing streak in baseball. There are few places on Earth more miserable than an NFL team’s training facility on the Monday morning after a loss. People talk in whispers, no one dares tell a joke or laugh out loud. Is that over the top? Sure. But livelihoods are at stake. Just look at how frequently coaches change jobs. Last year, when Brian Billick completed only his sixth season as coach of the Baltimore Ravens, he was tied for fourth place in longevity among NFL head coaches, behind only Bill Cowher (thirteen years in Pittsburgh), Jeff Fisher (ten years in Tennessee), and Mike Shanahan (ten years in Denver). The résumé of most NFL assistants reads like that of a career military man. Consider Mike Nolan, who left the Ravens at the end of last season to become the head coach in San Francisco. Nolan’s travelogue goes like this: Oregon; Stanford; Rice; LSU; Denver Broncos; New York Giants; Washington Redskins; New York Jets; Ravens. That means the move to San Francisco will be the tenth for his wife, Kathy, and their four children. Of course, Nolan’s a grizzled coaching veteran—h
e turned forty-six this past March.

  In essence, I was looking for one team that would lift the NFL’s cloak of secrecy and let me inside. The Baltimore Ravens struck me as ideal for a number of reasons—one of them, in the interest of full disclosure, being that their training facility is only an hour from my home, so I could spend a lot of time there easily. But there was far more than that. The franchise has a fascinating history, first as the Cleveland Browns of legend, then as the controversial Ravens, their first controversial moment coming on November 6, 1995, when owner Art Modell announced his intention to move the team to Baltimore. In Brian Billick and Ray Lewis and Jamal Lewis they have a coach and players who have climbed the heights of the game and dealt with serious issues along the way—Billick’s being how he dealt with the murder charges against Ray Lewis following a horrific incident in Atlanta on Super Bowl Sunday night in 2000. The Ravens have been a very good team under Billick and Ozzie Newsome. They won the Super Bowl in January 2001, then went through a salary cap purge during the 2002 season that forced them to start almost back at square one as a franchise. They recovered quickly to win a division title in 2003 and entered 2004 with high hopes, believing they had the ingredients to be a Super Bowl team in February 2005. Why that didn’t happen makes for, I believe, a compelling story of dealing with injury and letdowns, controversy and dashed hopes. When I first approached the Ravens with the idea of making them the focus of a book about the NFL, I had no idea that I would get Deion Sanders as a bonus.

  What also drew me to the Ravens was their reputation for stepping outside the box where media access is concerned. In 2001 they allowed HBO and NFL films total access to their training camp for the series Hard Knocks. Interestingly, Billick’s willingness to allow camera crews complete freedom in areas normally off-limits to any media was his belief that going through the experience might help his team. “We were the Super Bowl champions, so we were going to spend the entire season under the microscope,” he said. “Plus, we were Super Bowl champions who attracted a lot of off-field attention whether we wanted it or not, because of Ray, because of me getting the media upset at the Super Bowl when I defended Ray, because we were considered a team with a lot of bad boys and swagger. I figured if the guys spent training camp being trailed by cameras and microphones everywhere they turned, it would be easier for them to handle whatever came after that during the season.”