Sports in Hell (13 page)

It's not easy for the husbands, either. The husband of Andrea Hubbard-Grant, a lineman, attests. “When we first started going out, I'd tell people, ‘Yeah, I'm dating a football player!' Then they'd look at you real weird. I had to sort of watch it.”

The MVP of last season's Pro Bowl was the Scorpions tailback Desiree (Dez) Weimann, who doesn't have a boyfriend. “I get the question all the time, three years out of four: ‘You're gay, then, right?' The only year I don't get it is in a Summer Olympics year. Then they understand … But, I mean, I gotta be a guy's dream! Go have a beer and talk football with a girl you dig!”

It might also be her day job: mortician's assistant. She picks up dead bodies all day and takes them back for embalming, etc. “Death doesn't scare me at all,” she says. “But it does make me want to get out and enjoy life. Football is in my blood.” Literally. Her mom is president of Pop Warner Football and her dad is a coach in it. She must want it bad. She broke her neck playing it three years ago. After she recovered, she stopped for a while, but then decided life wasn't worth living without it. “It makes my heart sing.”

She's a slasher, like a Warrick Dunn, Intel-chip fast and tiny. If she's not the best in the league, she's in the photo. I reckon she'd be a decent high school back if they let her play. “I think I'd
maybe
be able to play for a lower-division high school team,” she says. “At
best
.”

I don't know. She looked harder to tackle than Trig 501 to me. There were maybe three or four Scorpions I think could've started somewhere for a decent-sized high school boys' team. A receiver named Isis was big and fast and high-kneed. She was catching balls and then literally looking for people to knock over. Luckily, I was on offense, so I got to enjoy it. “Damn,” I said to the girl standing next to me. “Nobody can stop her.” And the girl went, “Oh, yeah,
everybody's scared to tackle her.” Been covering pro football for over thirty years and don't think I'd ever heard that before. I'm sure guys have felt like that before, though, but they've never said it.

There were a few exceptions—players who were clearly out of shape, too fat, too slow, scared—but mostly they were solid and fundamental football players. “They're
so
much smarter than men,” says Tovar. “They pick things up much quicker than men. I give them a play sometimes and they have it on the first run-through.”

The offense is called Hustle and Flow and, I have to admit, we're hustling and flowing our little women's pro asses off tonight. Not me personally, of course. I'm being bottled up at tight end by this tiny little cornerback named Priscilla Flores who can't be much taller than my umbrella. But she's eyeball quick and all hands and strong for a midget. In between plays, I asked her if maybe she wouldn't do me the favor of choosing another profession so I could get open once.

Turns out she was a medical assistant. Her parents hated the idea of her trying out for the women's pro team, which is partly why she did it. “My dad said I'd never make it. My mom just hated the whole thing.” But she'd played j.v. ball in high school and liked it. “Some guy tried to kiss me after practice,” she admits. “Kinda weird. A teammate wanting to kiss you.”

Making the team is just about the proudest she's ever been in her life, she said.

“Good,” I said. “Now you've had your moment, go do something else.”

Very few of them had any team football experience. We once had a female nanny who played starting quarterback for her eight-man
high school team. It made for awkward neighborhood conversations.

How many thousands of girls out there would love to play football but are told not to? Melissa is stocky, smart, and has a signal bark that sounds just like John Elway, yet her mother wouldn't let her go out for any kind of youth football. “She said the boys were too big.” Just the opposite for Lela. She knew she'd be too good. “All my brothers were the stars of their high school teams. I didn't want to take that from them.”

One linebacker, Tarrah Phillpot, got into it as a way of getting closer to her dad, which was odd, since he'd been dead for sixteen years. He was Ed Phillpot, the fine linebacker for the New England Patriots in the '70s who died of cancer when she was sixteen. “By the time I was born, he was done playing,” says Tarrah, who sells Dodges during the day. “I kind of lost touch with him. This kind of keeps me close with him. I get to live now by the principles he taught me. Like, ‘There's always somebody badder than you, so you have to give it your all.'”

Tarrah, a three-car-pileup sort of blonde, may also be the only former stripper in professional football. She was part of one “shoe show” or another for five years, from San Diego to Miami.

Any similarities between football and stripping?

“Well, yeah,” she said. “The same locker room bullshit goes on in both. A lot of giving each other shit. And a lot of drama. Like when the other girls hate a stripper because she's taking all the tips. So they throw fruit punch on her best costumes.”

Fruit punch?

“Yeah, fruit punch stains and ruins all your clothes.”

I guessed that the big
difference
between stripping and football is that in stripping, when you pull groins, you generally make
more
money.

One woman joined the team to prove a point, that she could do it on one leg better than a lot of women on two. Born without the lower part of her left leg, right tackle Lindsay Hood came to the tryout and impressed the coaches but worried the ever-fretting owner, Ann. She remembers it like this:

Again, stuff you just don't hear in the NFL.

Having tried to run through them, tackle them, and escape them for two days, they really are pretty good, two legs or one. I guarantee, if you happened to be driving by the naval base one day and saw this team scrimmaging you'd go,
Hey, high school football!
“My favorite thing,” says Dez, “is to pop in a DVD of us playing—not say anything to anybody about who it is—and then see guys' reactions when we take off our helmets and all that hair falls out. They're shocked!”

The biggest difference I noticed between men and women's pro football is that women just laugh a lot more playing it. They're not quite as afraid of the coaches, not all gung-ho about everything. They chat and gossip when it's not their turn to run a play. None of them are trying to get to the NFL. They're not even trying to get to the CFL. They're just playing for the pure fun of it because they love the game and somebody finally gave them a chance to knock boobs, as they say.

The biggest similarity? They both hate having their real weights printed in the program. Guys lie heavy, women lie light. “One time, I put down ‘210 pounds,'” Lela admitted. “Everybody giggled. They're like, ‘OK, Little Miss 210.' Because they all know I'm at least 280. My friend said, ‘Why don't you just list 280?' And I said, ‘'Cause there's cute guys who read the roster!'”

Halfway through that first practice, I asked Monty if she thought I'd be good enough to play for them, if I were indeed a woman.

“Are you kidding?” said Lela, who hadn't been asked in the first place. “You looked just like a girl at first. I've been laughing at you all night. I'm like, this dude has no ass!”

“Seriously!” added Monty. “Your ass is all bony.”

I'll take that as a no.

The more I played with them, the more I was starting to believe them. We'd been scrimmaging—offense vs. defense—for over thirty minutes and I didn't have a single catch. My hammy was hurting and my chest was still in the state of Oklahoma, and my back was getting tight. The practice was about to end. I was desperate. And that's when I had an idea. An awful idea. The Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea. I realized that the tiny, lovable cornerback Priscilla had probably not played much backyard football. Me, I'd played it my whole youth, teen years, college life, and every Easter, July Fourth, Thanksgiving, and, if possible, Christmas in the Cheating Is the Whole Point Reilly Backyard Football Classics. I asked for a time-out and huddled with my O.

“I gotta have one catch,” I said to Coach Ring. “Can I call a play?”

He let me.

I came out of the huddle hangdog, looking like I'd been shot down, and ran to a lone wideout position on the left. I took a big sigh at the line and put my hands on my hips like I was going to pout the rest of the practice. But at the snap, I suddenly took off on a very quick two-yard buttonhook. It surprised my tormentor to see such a thing, but not much. Melissa looked at me, cocked back her arm, and brought it forward, just as Priscilla timed her step to intercept it and take it for a touchdown.

Only Melissa didn't let go. It was a fake. On her arm pump, I spun clockwise, being careful to hook our little Miss Priscilla with my right arm, tossing her forward—à la Michael Jordan on Utah's Bryon Russell to win the 1998 NBA Finals. No flag.

Don't cry, Young Priscilla. Your mascara will run
.

I went long. When the little medical assistant realized she'd been bamboozled, her pulse must've stopped.
Doctor, Code Red!
I was five yards past her before she could even turn around. I might as well have been at an anthrax cupcake sale, I was so alone. Melissa tossed up a beautiful little spinning egg that nestled happily in my greedy hands a half second before the dreaded Deuce could race over to help. I high-stepped my way into the end zone—in the manner of a marching band major—leapt high and flushed it backwards over my head.

I really shouldn't have done that.

When I landed, something in my back began screaming, “You cretin!” TLC called a chiropractor that night and told him it was an emergency. He said he'd see us in the morning. Only Macallan whisky got me to sleep. Turns out I'd thrown my pelvis out. He reset it (first-ever expense report item: Pelvis, misplaced, $65), and said I was not to run, jump, or run pump-fake-hook-and-go's for three days.

Man, was it worth it.

I got razzed more than somewhat for not being able to practice the second day. I took all the meetings and hung out in the huddles, but I didn't suit up.

“Figures,” Lela said when I told her I'd jarred loose my pelvis. “No ass.”

But Monty admitted that I had a place of honor in Scorpion history. “You're the only Stunt Monkey who's stayed the whole practice.”

And, thanks in large part to the example I set as a blocking sled and a cheat, the Scorpions had their greatest season ever. They won their final seven games, made the play-offs, finally knocked out hated, despised Dallas (spit!), and then gave the Houston Energy watt-for, 14–7, to win the whole WPFL enchilada. Quiche. Whatever.

Dez rushed for over 1,300 yards—including 172 in the title game—and was named the league MVP, for which she got a trophy of a guy. “Guess they don't make a lot of trophies with ponytails coming out the back,” she observed. Melissa Gallegos—by far the shortest passer in the league—became the first QB in league history to throw for over 1,000 yards (1,520). And the whole team made it places no women football player had ever been: the sports section of the
San Diego Tribune
and the ten o'clock sportscasts. They each got a ring and Tovar got an unheard-of $500 bonus.

And then the league folded.

There was talk of till-dipping and misappropriation and lawsuits, but none of bringing it back. The Scorpions are now and forever the defending champions of a dead league.

“We're all going through bad withdrawals,” says Dez. “Four or five of us went up and worked out for [the] Orange County [Breakers, a team in another league], but we just couldn't do it. It was just so—mediocre.”

So Dez went back to normal life. She got a boyfriend and got a promotion, all the way up to crematorium manager. Still, she now has a moment that precious few men ever know: She is a world champion. And that can make a girl feel very alive indeed.

T
here is a sport—chess boxing—that sounded just so deliciously dumb I almost didn't want to know what it really was. I just liked saying it, “Chess boxing.”