Gunslinger Read online

  There were plenty of other statements that would have made far more sense. We need to send a student to Mercury. We need to purchase Scott Baio’s slippers. We need to reunite the original members of Pseudo Echo. We need to change our university’s name to Bob’s Souvlaki Palace.

  But . . . a Heisman campaign? “Southern Miss ain’t gonna win no Heisman,” snapped Bill McLellan, the fourth-year athletic director. “No fucking chance in hell. Why even bring it up?”

  This was during a staff meeting in the spring of 1989, shortly after Favre wrapped a season that saw him set school records for touchdown passes (16), passing yards (2,271), and total yards (2,256). Bennett had watched as other mid-level schools mounted fruitless campaigns on behalf of their players. Just one year earlier Tulane spent thousands of dollars promoting the candidacy of quarterback Terrence Jones, who lacked Favre’s skill and charisma. The result: tons of media attention, including a (highly coveted) Sports Illustrated photo shoot. So, who cared if no Southern Miss player had ever placed near the top of Heisman voting? Who cared if Houston had Andre Ware and West Virginia had Major Harris and Notre Dame had Tony Rice and Florida had Emmitt Smith and Michigan State had Percy Snow and Penn State had Blair Thomas? Who cared if a solid 70 percent of college football fans couldn’t properly pronounce Brett Favre’s last name?

  “We’re Southern Miss!” Bennett replied. “To be mentioned, or even to just be considered, would be huge to us. Just in terms of getting attention for our program . . .”

  “How much?” said McLellan.

  “How much what?” asked Bennett.

  “How much money do you need?”

  Though he’d never actually kick-started a Heisman campaign, Bennett suggested $10,000 to begin. Begrudgingly (and shockingly), McLellan acquiesced. Within days, Bennett ordered 100,000 1989 football-schedule cards featuring Favre’s photograph, 500 slick Favre photographs for the media, 5,000 posters featuring a full-length Favre image, and 5,000 FAVRE4HEISMAN bumper stickers. John Cox, the school’s director of sports broadcasting, was enlisted to write a letter on the quarterback’s behalf . . .

  To Whom It May Concern:

  Let me take a few moments to introduce you to Brett Favre (Farv) the junior quarterback at the University of Southern Mississippi.

  Over his first two seasons with the Golden Eagles, Favre has established himself as one of the top young quarterbacks in the nation and a legitimate All-American and Heisman Trophy candidate.

  Enclosed you will find a ¾ inch video that will give you some idea of what type of player Favre is. Please take a few minutes (the tape lasts only four and a half minutes) to watch this tape. I think you will enjoy it. I also believe the tape will be useful in order to provide you with some file footage on this young man to use for whatever purpose necessary.

  Thanks for your time and should you need any further information or video footage on Favre or Southern Miss, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

  Warmest regards,

  John Cox

  Director of Sports Broadcasting

  The efforts paid dividends. A CNN anchor held one of the bumper stickers on air and said, “Here’s the best player you have never heard of.” The Sporting News’s nationally syndicated radio show highlighted five players to follow, and selected Favre for a Tuesday profile. The idea of Brett Favre actually winning the Heisman Trophy was laughable, but when asked by Van Arnold of the Hattiesburg American whether his quarterback had a shot, Hallman did not hesitate. “When you talk about the top players in the country and what the Heisman Trophy stands for,” he said, “you’ve got to add his name to the list.” Why, as soon as his team wrapped the Independence Bowl, Hallman was plotting an even greater 1989 season. With 14 starters returning from the 10-win Golden Eagles, there was hope of a Top 10 finish and maybe—just maybe—a chance at a top-shelf bowl game.

  To make the dreams reality, Hallman and his staff spent the winter months beating the Southern Miss players into pulp. When he first arrived at the school, many mistook the coach’s casual demeanor for softness. They were terribly mistaken. Hallman’s money line was, “I’m here to make you do the things you don’t wanna do so you can be who you wanna be.” If one missed a class, he paid Hallman back in “Curley Bucks”—aka: run the stadium steps at 4:30 a.m. The “winter workouts,” as they were called, began every morning at six o’clock in the campus gym. If you were late, you were punished. If you were on time, you were also punished. Every Southern Miss player was gifted a cotton yellow sweatshirt and cotton yellow sweatpants, as thick and warm as a polar bear’s fur. Hallman would turn the thermostat to 90 degrees, drag a garbage can to the middle of the room, then drop it—Thud! “If y’all need to use a bathroom,” he’d yell, “here you go!” With that, the players spent the hour running, jumping, sprinting, pushing. “The hardest workouts imaginable, at the hardest time of day,” said Leon Anderson, an offensive guard from Grapeland, Texas. “You’d have guys leaning over the can, puking up everything inside.”

  By the time the players reported back for fall workouts, football expectations were as high as they had ever been at the school. In Favre, there was a Heisman-worthy quarterback. In Michael Jackson and Darryl Tillman, there were a pair of top-flight wide receivers. The offensive line was experienced and skilled, the defense (a question mark at the end of 1988) looked phenomenal. Southern Miss’s annual spring football game—normally a showcase for the offense—ended with a 14–6 score. The Hattiesburg American headline: DEFENSES DOMINATE USM GAME. “There was no reason to think we couldn’t be a terrific team,” said Reggie Russell, an offensive lineman. “If you look at all we had going for us.”

  The Golden Eagles merely had to survive their opener.

  Back in the spring of 1987, when he was a junior at A. Crawford Mosley High in Lynn Haven, Florida, Keith Loescher signed a letter of intent to play college football at Florida State University.

  Although he had actually grown up rooting for the University of Florida Gators, playing Division I for a national power was a dream come true. Plus, with the commitment, Loescher—a highly recruited six-foot, 220-pound linebacker/fullback—could relax and enjoy his senior season. “I was really excited to be a Seminole,” he said. “So was my family.”

  In the final game of his high school career, however, Loescher was carrying the ball when a defensive tackle for Pensacola’s Washington High charged forward and pushed Craig Harris, A. Crawford Mosley’s halfback, into Loescher’s left leg. “It just snapped,” Loescher said. “I knew immediately. I rolled over, and everybody was reaching down to help me up. But I wasn’t getting up.”

  Fortunately, he had the security of the scholarship.

  “On National Signing Day [Florida State defensive coordinator] Mickey Andrews came and got me out of English class to tell me they wouldn’t be keeping their word,” Loescher recalled. “I was devastated. I remember he said, ‘Are you going to be OK? You should be home with your family tonight.’ Yeah, like I wanted his advice.”

  Loescher was, in fact, home that night when the phone rang.

  “Can I speak to Keith?” the strange voice said.

  “This is him,” Loescher replied.

  “Keith, this is Curley Hallman at Southern Miss. I’ve never heard of you, I’ve never seen you play, and don’t know anything about you. But you’ve got a full ride to my school if you want it.”

  Loescher and his parents visited Hattiesburg the following weekend, and committed on the spot. With that, the Golden Eagles added a player who would become one of their best linebackers, and Florida State added a lifetime enemy. “All I wanted to do,” he said, “was beat them.”

  When Loescher initially learned Southern Miss faced Florida State most every year, he was thrilled. Especially when he looked at the future schedules and saw that, in 1989, the damned Seminoles were slated to come to M. M. Roberts Stadium. That elation, however, was lessened when McLellan took a call from C. W. “Hootie” Ingram, Florida State’s athletic direct
or. He wanted to know if the Golden Eagles would consider changing the location of the game from Hattiesburg to the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. McLellan said he would have to take the request to Hallman.

  “Curley,” McLellan said, “Florida State wants the game to be in Jacksonville, but they say we’ll still be the home team.”

  “That’s crazy,” Hallman replied. “Are they offering anything?”

  “Yes,” said McLellan, “$525,000.”

  “OK,” said Hallman. “Book it.”

  Click.

  “Did I prefer the game be at our place? Of course,” said Hallman. “But our entire athletic department budget was only $2.7 million.”

  Coming off of an 11-1 season that concluded with a Sugar Bowl victory over Auburn, Florida State was a 22-point favorite. The Seminoles had outscored the Golden Eagles 110–23 in wins the previous two years. Three of the team’s quarterbacks (Peter Tom Willis, Brad Johnson, Casey Weldon) would play in the NFL, and a fourth (Charlie Ward) would win the Heisman Trophy. Three of its running backs (Edgar Bennett, Dexter Carter, Amp Lee) also played professionally. “They were more talented than we were,” said Hallman. “And it wasn’t close.”

  On the morning of the biggest game of their lives, the Southern Miss players were terrified. Lehman Braley, a backup offensive lineman and long snapper, was stretching alongside Renegade, the horse that served as one of Florida State’s mascots. He’d never seen a stadium this enormous, and his blank facial expression oozed terror. Hallman looked at the sophomore, slapped him on the rear, and said, “Welcome to Division I football, son!”

  The clash would be broadcast nationally on TBS—a first for many of the Golden Eagles. The night before, Favre dreamed of Southern Miss winning in the final seconds. Now he strutted onto the field with a broad smile plastered to his face. The stadium seated 80,126, and when the Golden Eagles came out for initial stretching and warmups, the seats were only about a tenth filled. Favre was standing alongside Ben Washington, a junior cornerback, when he looked up to gauge the atmosphere. “Man, there ain’t a lot of people here,” Favre said, grinning. “But that’s all right. Fuck them.” When he returned to the field a half hour later, 48,746 spectators—nearly all Florida State supporters—were watching. Many held signs reading ONE DOWN AND 11 TO GO. “Still,” Favre cracked, “fuck ’em.”

  “Players were sweating as they put on their shoulder pads,” Mark McHale, the offensive line coach, recalled. “One of our managers asked a trainer to find out the temperature. He came back and told us it was 110 degrees. I’d never coached in a game where it was that hot. The locker room was getting stuffy. There was no air flow. We heard the crowd noise muffled through the walls and the national anthem began to play.”

  When Southern Miss’s Chuck Davis launched the opening kickoff, the temperature inside the stadium was 107 degrees. The Seminoles were wearing white uniforms. The Golden Eagles were dressed in black jerseys and gold pants. “The first thing I thought was that we’d wear them down in the all-black,” said LeRoy Butler, one of Florida State’s starting cornerbacks. “Black uniforms, black helmets? In the heat? Forget about it. They were dead.”

  On its first series of the day, Southern Miss drove to the Florida State 26 before halfback Ricky Bradley fumbled away the ball. The Seminoles scored a touchdown two minutes later on Dexter Carter’s 11-yard run, then added a 24-yard field goal to lead 10–0 late in the first quarter.

  It was the beginning of an inevitable rout. “To us, Southern Miss was like playing a junior college,” said Butler. “A fly on our shoe—that was Southern Miss.”

  “We knew they had this quarterback who was very good,” said Willis, the Seminoles’ starter. “But I don’t think any of us knew how to pronounce his name.”

  Then—Boom! On the Golden Eagles’ third series of the afternoon, Favre dropped back and found Darryl Tillman for a 64-yard completion. Four plays later Davis hit a 22-yard field goal, and the score was 10–3 at the end of the opening quarter. “After the long pass we were on the 3-yard line, and Brett’s under center, and the fans are screaming so loud that we can barely hear anything,” said Leon Anderson, an offensive guard. “We have all these checks, and for us linemen, once he started barking, ‘Blue 58! Blue 58!’—the check is coming. Well, his call to check off was ‘Easy! Easy!’ And in this heated moment in time, with all the pressure in the world and the linemen just ready to fire off the ball, he’s barking, ‘Easy! Easy!’ with all the command in the world. We didn’t score, we just kicked the field goal. But it was his team.”

  Southern Miss’s Gerald Blake recovered a fumble on the kickoff that followed, and within two minutes the underdogs scored again, this time on a nifty 3-yard touchdown scamper from Eddie Ray Jackson. With 13:43 remaining in the second quarter, Florida State and Southern Miss were tied at 10.

  Wait. Florida State and Southern Miss were . . . tied?

  “It’s all about sticking around,” said Simmie Carter, the defensive back. “When you play teams like Florida State, you need to destroy their confidence. You do that by taking their best punches and not fading.”

  When Jackson entered the end zone, the Gator Bowl went quiet. Moments later, it went dead. The football was coated in a grotesque brew of collective perspiration, and Dexter Carter—the sublime Seminoles halfback—took a handoff from Willis, swept to his left, and dropped it when Simmie Carter charged from the opposite side of the field and slammed into his arm. Free safety Kerry Valrie recovered on the Southern Miss 39, and Favre hit Eugene Rowell for 43 yards, Reggie Warnsley for 11, and, lastly, a lob to Alfred Williams in the end zone, who burst past Butler for the 4-yard touchdown completion. A scan of the Florida State sideline showed 60 young men in collective shock. A team predicted by many to challenge for the national championship had reached halftime trailing Southern Miss, 17–10.

  “They didn’t have a ton of talent,” said Willis. “Really, they didn’t.”

  The Golden Eagles’ locker room was quiet, but no longer in a nervous way. Confidence is infectious, and the Seminoles seemed neither big nor bad. Toward the end of the half, Florida State’s linemen were often bent at the waist, gasping for breath. Eric Hayes, a 300-pound star defensive tackle, could barely make it back to the huddle. Many of the Florida State players spent halftime attached to IV tubes. “Their guys were leaving the field with cramps,” said Hallman. “I wouldn’t even let our players take a knee during time-outs. It’s all about body language. So while Florida State’s guys were on the ground, my players were standing, looking at them.”

  “We endured our days running and running and running in the Mississippi heat,” said Toby Watts, a Southern Miss defensive end. “We wore Florida State out.”

  Not completely. The Seminoles refused to give up, and with 6:57 left in the game found themselves winning, 26–24. It was time for Brett Favre—Heisman Trophy candidate—to announce himself. Before jogging back onto the field, the quarterback spoke via headset with Jeff Bower, the offensive coordinator, who urged him to stay calm, stay in control, make nothing approximating a dumb toss toward anyone wearing white. Across the line of scrimmage, Butler glanced at No. 4 and inhaled deeply. Earlier in the game, on the scoring pass to Williams, the cornerback came off the edge on a blitz and barely missed slamming into Favre. “I remember Brett giving me that look,” Butler said. “It was like, ‘Dude, these black jerseys and this heat—they ain’t making me tired. I’m here all day.’”

  By now, everyone was exhausted. Long-ago dry uniforms were hot water pillows. Cleats spouted liquid through the lace holes. Some players vomited, others merely dry-heaved. It was the 15th round of Apollo Creed vs. Rocky Balboa I, and the upstart lug from nowhere had an opportunity to land the knockout punch.

  The Golden Eagles took over on their own 42-yard line. “Their fans were stunned,” said Tony Johnson, a Southern Miss wide receiver. “I just remember stunned silence.” Favre glanced toward Butler and Corian Freeman, the Seminoles cornerbacks. Both appeared dra
ined. The safeties, Dedrick Dodge and Bill Ragans, were normally fast and tough and hard-hitting. But now, with the pressure on, they looked meek. It had not been the absolute best of times for Favre. He rushed some throws, had two passes intercepted. But with the game on the line, he was smiling, laughing, ribbing teammates, humming “Candy Girl” by New Edition. With a methodical brilliance, Favre marched the Golden Eagles down the field, using 12 plays to reach the Florida State 2-yard line. There were 27 seconds remaining, and only a field goal was needed to capture the lead. It was third down. Hallman called for a running play that would conclude (he presumed) with the ball centrally placed for a short Davis kick. Which made perfect sense, save for the fact that Davis was an erratic walk-on freshman who had taken off two years of football after high school (he would conclude the season by making only 9 of 21 field goal attempts). From the booth, Bower pleaded with Hallman to change the play. “I just figured that FSU would be jamming down the middle and some kind of rollout pass would be wide open for the touchdown,” he said. “I wouldn’t have called a pass with another quarterback, but I felt Brett could pull it off.”

  Hallman refused to budge. Bower insisted. Hallman still refused to budge. Bower insisted. Bobby Bowden, the Florida State coach, signaled for a time-out. Favre wanted the game to rest with him, not a first-year kicker. He pleaded his case to Hallman, who finally nodded and pushed his quarterback back onto the field. The Golden Eagles lined up in a power formation, with three running backs positioned behind Favre. He took the snap, faked a handoff to Bradley, and rolled five steps to his left. Butler, the Seminoles All-American cornerback, wasn’t tricked, and came charging full speed at the backpedaling quarterback. With an inch separating him from Butler, Favre—standing on the 8-yard line—spotted tight end Anthony Harris crossing the end zone. A six-foot-two, 230-pound junior from Tuscaloosa, Harris was the absolute wrong man. One season earlier, he went 11 games without a single reception. “Harris was just a terrible tight end,” said Ben Washington, the Southern Miss defensive back. “He couldn’t catch.”