Books
Long Bomb
Excerpt
Chapter One: Exploding The Formula
There is no failure like televised failure. It’s the most public failure. The most humbling failure.
So it was odd when two men who had assembled the biggest bomb in TV history began high-fiving on the sidelines of a football field. Yet they were, clutching cigars and each other, casting back in laughter like the winning quarterback-receiver duo. This was hardly a show of humility. They hugged, released the hug, and then hugged again, as though there were something to celebrate, something that demanded ceaseless glee. They sucked on their cigars. It was as if they had just won the million bucks on “Survivor.”
To Dick Butkus, their display was as crass as a juggler at a funeral. But the face of pro football managed to hold it together. Quietly, he shuffled away from Dick Ebersol and Vince McMahon.
Dick Butkus was so gifted a football player that, to borrow the parlance of NFL Films, “to talk about him is to drain the vocabulary of superlatives.”? When opponents talked about him, they drained of color. Butkus was the meanest man ever to play pro football. It just happened to be his misfortune to endure six straight losing seasons with the Chicago Bears. He never made the playoffs. And he never asked for a trade. He knew how you were supposed to act when you got your butt whipped. It didn’t involve complaints and demands. It certainly didn’t involve bear hugs and high fives.
The two men standing near him on the Los Angeles Coliseum field had it all wrong with their grinning and chortling. As Butkus beheld them from the corner of his eye, he knew that the only thing tougher to accept than losing was a teammate unaffected by loss. What did the XFL mean to Dick Ebersol and Vince McMahon? Was it really just another TV pilot in an endless line of “projects”? For Butkus, the XFL was football, and its demise was like getting blown out in the biggest game of the year. He looked like he was passing a stone. Or riding out a mistake.
Butkus and the XFL had always seemed a curious match, football’s Prometheus joined with men who dealt in mirage. Nevertheless, the whole venture seemed to teeter on his shoulders, still prodigious decades after he snapped his last quarterback like a wing bone. When you got down to it, the XFL’s fortunes could not have settled upon a more fitting barometer. Butkus also knew his way around Hollywood. He lived in Malibu. Had he been the type, he could have bragged about appearing on MacGyver three times. If Butkus okayed the thing, then the thing was good.
Butkus was better dressed than his superiors in his double-breasted gray suit to their grubby sweatpants and pleather sleeves. He was more mannered and discreet, just trying to get through the XFL championship game with a modicum of decency, waiting to put the experience in the fish-eye mirrors of his RV as he peeled out of the stadium parking lot one last time. He’d never say as much. But all you had to do was look at that face of a thousand fulfilled threats, of not a single veil, with its many wrinkles and scars folding indistinguishably into one another, and realize that Butkus was accustomed to communicating without words.
You wouldn’t guess the meaning by locating the XFL’s big-time announcer, who dutifully rumbled from the broadcast position but simmered with the inexpressible rage of a patsy. You wouldn’t know it from spying Dick Ebersol and Vince McMahon, who continued a yearlong pageant of public romance, their close conversation cascading above the play on the field. You wouldn’t know it if you polled the fans, a twenty-five-thousand-person colony of the lonesome and the die-hard. But you could read it in Dick Butkus’s sodden face. The XFL wasn’t just a confused flop. It was the kind of embarrassment that made you want to smack yourself for not knowing any better.
For the men in the mesh, selectivity had nothing to do with it. What else were they going to do? Trained to realize the exaltation of the individual, these football players couldn’t so easily dissolve into a world of thankless professions where no one called your name on the PA. And why should they, when a league as steeped in hype as this one came begging for their efforts? The XFL was supposed to be much more than a football league. It was a shot at extending the dream, and one of several jackpots awaited—Hollywood, pro wrestling, the NFL—if only the players performed. The XFL promised as much to them as it did to its viewers. And so did recent history.
Driving through the swelling midsection of Las Vegas, a town of winking promises, an XFL quarterback heard a single name, and a story’s many details tapped with familiarity along the encoded compartments of his memory. It was the story of a guy with few prospects who spent his weekdays working in a grocery story and his weekends playing quarterback in a pro league that once paid its players in fast food. The story was of victory’s essence, of winning when they said all you could do was lose. It was the story of Kurt Warner, the stock-boy quarterback who went from the Arena Football League to the NFL, where he won the MVP trophy. How it happened and why it happened, none of that mattered to the castoffs jacked up on Warner’s mythology. The main thing was that it happened, and that it could happen again.
A thousand players stood on the outside of the NFL looking in, toiling like ranch hands in one third-rung league or another, watching the dream fade slightly with each passing day. When the XFL blessed them with its creation, it was a reprieve not unlike an eleventh-hour phone call from the governor. Kurt Warner’s departed minor-league ghost assumed a very real presence, and XFL players referenced his story only half as much as they dreamed it. They had faith. And they had license. They had another chance at being big shots.
A guy with a nappy head of hair busting out in a parabola, Rob Smart corralled the ladies at the Drink, a meat locker off the Strip in Vegas, telling them what they wanted to hear. His pockets busted out with digits written in flowery script. He was the XFL’s poet laureate, and his recognized riff won him bounty of one sort but not another. Attention was his only denomination, and he gladly accepted it.
Kelvin Kinney had done all that was asked. In some kind of perpetual pain, he sat at the plastic bar of a papier-mâché casino, his left foot a similarly lifeless plank. He ordered a glass of Louis XIII cognac, having approached refinement through years in the NFL’s chocolate-on-pillow hotels. No matter how swell he drank, nothing could shake a sense of betrayal. He earned almost $1 million for his last season in the NFL. Now he played for less than $50,000. It wasn’t the money that compelled him to further cripple himself. Kinney had given the NFL all he had, and they treated him like a draft-dodger, some kind of traitor. He was after something else in the XFL.
Ryan Clement rode through Vegas, talking and talking about Kurt Warner, with whom he shared a position and a fallow period, if not a personal relationship with God. They marked Clement for greatness while the fuzz was still on his face. He was supposed to be the one who made the rifle passes and the fat paychecks. Somewhere it all derailed, and his head grew foggy to forget. Instead of leading the Broncos downfield, he was pinching toes to check the customer’s fit.
The car glided under the bulbs of the Strip, which consumed Clement in a blaze of white light. A billboard hung up ahead, standing out in the morass. It was a picture of a man in an oxford shirt holding a check in his hand, smiling broadly. He had good reason. GEORGE HANOVER WON $250,000 AT OUR SLOTS, read the ad copy. In a haze of exhaust fumes and fat, wavy desert air, Hanover’s smile existed in a facsimile of motion. He appeared to smile in real time. He was nobody made somebody, loser then winner. Lost in the gestures of his story, Clement didn’t notice the resemblance. As it was for several hundred others, the XFL was Clement’s slot machine, his land rush, his best shot at following Kurt Warner’s act with one starring himself.
The players weren’t the only ones taking chances—the higher ups were calling for a Long Bomb.
