344 - The Greatest Show on Turf

"If we have a choice, I'd like to work with New Line," Lisa said.

Nolan could understand the appeal. New Line had a strong history in horror, especially with A Nightmare on Elm Street, its distribution of The Evil Dead, and Blade. In the future he remembered, its catalog would grow to include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, the Conjuring universe, Final Destination, The Butterfly Effect, and, on a completely different scale, The Lord of the Rings.

It knew how to sell horror and was willing to try other genres. With the resources of the Time Warner group behind it, it looked like a good fit.

"I sent Robert Shaye a rough cut," Lisa said. "He's interested. Asked who put up the money and said he liked the script."

That sounded promising.

Lisa knew New Line's founder through The Basketball Diaries, which the company had distributed. Her work with Leonardo had brought her into contact with Shaye, and the relationship had grown from there. All of that had happened since she'd met Nolan.

The script was Mia's achievement. He'd only done his best to recount a movie he remembered.

He didn't pretend to understand the film business. That part was Lisa's.

"We could have a distributor settled next month."

That evening, Nolan called the women who hadn't been at the viewings to tell them about the house.

McKenna was cautious. She wasn't ready for that step, she said, meaning she wasn't ready to move in with him. Compared with the others, her Alabama upbringing had left her more conservative. She was in Los Angeles now, and he took her answer as a matter of time rather than a permanent refusal.

Penny reacted the opposite way. She wanted a transfer back to Los Angeles tomorrow, before someone took her room. Nolan told her to keep her career first for now.

Charlize, usually the one who kept her distance, sounded eager. Then she demanded to know why he hadn't invited her to see the houses.

"You never think of me," she said with an exaggerated sigh.

"You didn't tell me you were in L.A." He ran his fingers along the sole of Kelsey's foot, which was resting against his chest. She squirmed and tried not to laugh.

"I'm not in L.A. That doesn't mean you couldn't have told me."

"What's the difference?"

"The difference is that you'd have thought to ask!" Her answer came a little too quickly.

He knew this argument. Apparently, it didn't change much from one relationship to another.

He'd been tempted to dismiss it as an attempt to keep him in line. Listening more closely, he thought she sounded anxious.

Sure enough, her next question concerned the Angels' cheerleaders. News of the squad had reached her on location. Their publicity was working.

He tried to explain why he was promoting them so heavily. He understood about as much about making movies as Charlize understood about running an NFL club.

"They're one of the few extra revenue streams we can build right now. It isn't the ideal solution, but it's what we've got."

"Then tell me something. Is there a cheerleader with you right now?"

'Did you put a camera in my house?' He motioned for Kelsey to stay quiet.

"It's work, honey."

There was a two-second silence on the line.

"When I get back, will you show me the house? I want to move in. With the baby."

"Of course."

After they hung up, Lisa came in. She'd decided to stay the night.

"We'll need more furniture," she said, settling beside him and leaning into his arms. "And a good horse."

He still hadn't discovered the pleasure wealthy people took in owning horses. He'd grasped the expense quickly enough.

He changed the subject to Charlize's sudden interest in the household.

"I think she's more worried about her career than your cheerleaders," Lisa said.

"She's left Harris. I've found her plenty of work, opposite some very recognizable men, but most of those pictures haven't done much business. A hit like The Matrix shows what the right project can do. She hasn't had enough of those."

"She's afraid she's already had her moment."

Nolan remembered Charlize on the cover of Vanity Fair in January and Playboy in May, clothed on the cover. That hardly looked like a career in decline.

Lisa shrugged. "That's Hollywood. There are always more beautiful women. If the investment doesn't pay off, they move on to the next one."

It wasn't so different from the NFL.

Most players didn't get the ending they'd hoped for either.

...

"This could be your toughest game all season." Reid paused the film and turned toward Nolan.

Rhodes got up to turn on the lights.

The sudden brightness left Nolan blinking.

Reid had said Nolan's toughest game, not the team's. That distinction came from the goals they'd set at the start of the season.

A playoff berth would make the Angels' first year a success. Offensive Player of the Year for Nolan would be a bonus. Even being recognized as the league's best quarterback would be something.

For a while, things had seemed to be heading that way.

Six games in, the Angels and Oakland were both 3-3. Kansas City, coming off its bye at 3-2, led the AFC West on winning percentage. Denver had fallen to 2-4 after John Elway's retirement. Nolan's passer rating was among the best in the league.

Then there was the man on the screen, making the picture a great deal less clear.

Few had expected the Rams to rise like this. Fewer still had imagined Kurt Warner could be the reason.

St. Louis was 6-0.

An unbeaten start wasn't unprecedented. Minnesota and Green Bay had both put together long winning runs last season.

The way the Rams were winning was different. They'd scored twenty-seven points in one game and more than thirty in every other, topping forty three times. Only San Francisco had managed twenty against them. Most opponents had hovered around ten. Atlanta and Dallas hadn't even reached double digits. The Cowboys had scored three.

Dallas had been booed by its own fans before that game, still feeling the anger over Stephen's remarks. Afterward, the hostility had been worse. Nolan couldn't remember seeing the Cowboys' home crowd turn on them so completely.

Six games made a strong case for the Rams on both sides of the ball. Still, Minnesota had looked formidable last year too.

Warner was the difference that demanded a closer look.

Both Holmgren and Reid had been in Green Bay when he tried to make the Packers in 1994.

"I cut him," Holmgren said. "First quarterback we let go. He took it hard."

"He looked slow," Reid recalled. "Wasn't completing enough throws, wasn't comfortable with the offense. He had so little time to show us something, and nothing really stood out."

Warner had gone undrafted. Then Green Bay released him before he could earn even a practice-squad spot.

For most men, that would have been the moment to ask whether professional football was ever going to happen and look for another line of work.

Warner kept believing he could play.

With no NFL team interested, he went home to Iowa and worked as a graduate assistant at Northern Iowa. He also stocked shelves at Hy-Vee for five dollars and fifty cents an hour to pay the bills.

In 1995, the Iowa Barnstormers gave him a chance in the Arena Football League. It was indoor, eight-man football, a long way from the NFL stage he'd wanted.

Over the next few seasons, relentless work made him one of the AFL's best quarterbacks. The money was modest, but NFL coaches began to notice him again.

Before the 1997 season, he arranged a tryout with Chicago. This time, he thought he had a real chance.

An insect bite left his throwing elbow swollen and cost him the opportunity before he could take the field.

It was the sort of setback no amount of preparation could prevent. He might have been ready to despair. He still didn't quit.

He kept working and training for another opening. Late that year, the Rams signed him. At last, there was a route back.

He was older now, stronger, more composed, better able to handle the situations that had overwhelmed him in Green Bay. He didn't need to be the starter. A place among the backups would have been enough.

Even then, his route wasn't going to be direct.

The Rams sent him to NFL Europe rather than straight into a playing role in St. Louis.

After years of getting close without arriving, it would have been easy to decide the NFL was only a dream, always just beyond his reach.

Maybe it was time to wake up.

Instead, another coach's advice offered a way forward.

"You've got something. Go to Europe. Play. There's still time."

In the spring of 1998, Warner played for the Amsterdam Admirals. He led NFL Europe in passing yards and touchdown passes.

He returned to St. Louis as a backup. In 1999, the Rams exposed him in Cleveland's expansion draft, but the Browns passed on him and took Scott Milanovich instead. Warner stayed with the Rams, behind Trent Green.

Then Green tore his ACL in a preseason collision.

"You're starting the opener," Dick Vermeil told him.

The chance he'd wanted for years had finally arrived. Warner didn't celebrate. He nodded.

Somewhere along the way, he'd become ready for it.

He worked even harder.

Against Baltimore in the opener, he threw three touchdown passes in a 27-10 win.

He threw three more the next week against Atlanta, helping the Rams beat the Falcons for the first time in four years. He was named NFC Offensive Player of the Week.

In his third start, he threw another three. Nine touchdown passes in his first three NFL starts. Nolan remembered that mark lasting until Patrick Mahomes surpassed it in 2018.

In the fourth game, St. Louis ended a seventeen-game losing streak against San Francisco that stretched back to 1990.

Two more emphatic wins followed, another against Atlanta and one over the defending Super Bowl champions, now struggling without their starting quarterback and buried in bad publicity.

All those years of work were finally showing.

It was hard to argue that even Nolan had made a more startling entrance last season.

"We might be about to play the best Rams team there's ever been," Holmgren said.

For once, Reid didn't immediately disagree. When he did speak, it was to challenge Holmgren's reading of their offense, not the quality of the team.

Warner's story could have been a movie. Around him, the Rams had assembled an offense full of players reaching their prime.

Last year's fourth-round pick, Az-Zahir Hakim, had been a bargain. This year they'd taken Torry Holt sixth overall, while Ricky Proehl was already there on an inexpensive contract. Alongside Isaac Bruce, they formed a deep, reliable receiving corps at a price few teams could match.

Then there was Marshall Faulk, the second overall pick in 1994, acquired in a trade this year. And Orlando Pace at left tackle, the first offensive lineman taken first overall in nearly thirty years when the Rams drafted him in 1997. They'd paid heavily to move up for him.

Pace made it look like money well spent. Rushers trying to get around him found an enormous, brutally difficult obstacle.

Vermeil was the last essential piece. He'd coached in the NFL and taken Philadelphia to a Super Bowl, then spent years in broadcasting while a new generation of coaches came through. The Rams had brought him back in 1997.

Even he could hardly have known what his 1999 team would do to the league.

Nolan remembered the change it would come to represent, an offensive shift discussed alongside Bill Walsh's West Coast offense. Reid was sharp, Holmgren experienced, but neither could yet know how far the ideas on that screen would spread.

In the future Nolan remembered, the Rams would help push the Dallas dynasty into the past and briefly rule the league around the turn of the century, until a new quarterback ended their run in the Super Bowl following the 2001 season.

People would remember this offense by a name that captured exactly what made it different: the Greatest Show on Turf.

In a few days, the Angels had to stop it.