Before ‘Black Hawk Down,’ Mark Bowden covered the Eagles like no one else

One in an occasional series. The Eagles will wear throwback kelly green uniforms twice this season, starting with Sunday’s game against the Dolphins. These are some essential stories from the Birds’ kelly green era.

The basement of Mark Bowden’s home, in southern Chester County, doubles as his writing room. He and his wife, Gail, have furnished it in warm and cool tones — beige carpeting, a rich brown semicircle desk, a billiards table — but it is the artwork adorning the slate gray walls that tells the story of his career working with words.

Above his desk looms a hand-drawn, color rendering of Saddam Hussein, whose inner life Bowden revealed in a 2002 profile for The Atlantic. On another wall are two framed cartoons, drawn by The Inquirer’s Tony Auth, that accompanied Bowden’s beat coverage of SEPTA for the newspaper in the late 1980s. And in a nook near the television and the couch, peeking behind Bowden’s left shoulder as we talked about his three years covering the Eagles like no one had covered them before, hangs a gift from one of his sons: a black-and-white print, rimmed in kelly green, of Reggie White.

“A nice reminder,” he said, “of a time in my life.”

Before Black Hawk Down sold more than 3 million copies, spawned an Academy Award-winning film, and made him a giant in the world of narrative nonfiction, Bowden acted as the variable in an experiment in Philadelphia sports journalism. From 1990 through 1992, he mostly ignored the picayune transactions, position changes, and press-conference quips that to this day make up so much of daily NFL reporting. Instead, he mined those Eagles teams for detailed dives into how the athletes and coaches lived and played, his tenure culminating in the 1994 publication of Bringing the Heat, his chronicle of that period in the franchise’s history and the second of his 16 books.

Professorial in his mien, so diligent (or obsessive, depending on how you look at it) about his research that he has saved and digitized reporting notebooks that are more than four decades old, Bowden, 72, had come to Philadelphia in 1979 from a dead-end reporting gig at the Baltimore News-American. The Inquirer had flickered on his career radar screen thanks to his friend Richard Ben Cramer, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and was wowing everyone at the paper with dispatches that read like mini Russian novels and his circus-tent-sized personality whenever he happened to saunter back into the newsroom. Cramer got Bowden an interview. Bowden got a job in the paper’s Wayne bureau. “That was the most important professional break of my career,” he said. “I’m thinking, ‘This is the place.’ ”

» READ MORE: Wes Hopkins punished receivers for the Eagles’ great kelly green defenses. Life returned the favor.

It didn’t take him long to advance at The Inquirer. Wayne was quite rural at the time, and while paging through a farm magazine, Bowden came upon an advertisement for “cow bras.” His ensuing story about the use of artificial insemination in the dairy industry won him a national award. It also led to what was arguably the most notorious project of his career.

Curious after going on safari and learning that the black rhinoceros was in danger of extinction, Inquirer executive editor Gene Roberts told Bowden, now the paper’s lead science writer, to travel wherever and spend whatever was required to investigate the poaching and extermination of “a creature,” Bowden wrote, “that once walked with the dinosaurs.” The result — after Bowden ricocheted from Kenya to Zambia to South Africa to Zimbabwe to Yemen on chartered flights — was a four-part series, “RHINO,” that ran in February 1982, totaled nearly 22,000 words, and symbolized the ambition and extravagance of an era when newspapers were overflowing with advertising and circulation revenue and could set thousands of dollars on fire if they so chose.

“So many people made fun of it because it was so vast,” Bowden said. “Even then, that was an outrageous thing to have done.”

Still, the series vaulted Bowden into a new role, one he’d long sought: writing for the paper’s Sunday magazine, taking months to produce longform pieces and book-length serials, both for The Inquirer and for publications such as Rolling Stone and Esquire. Feeling too removed from the newsroom, though, he in time went back to being a general-assignment reporter, then the paper’s transportation beat reporter, then a deputy city editor. Two weeks into the gig, he realized he hated being an editor — trapped in the newsroom for 12 hours a day, writers ticked off at him — and was desperate for a way out.

» READ MORE: Wes Hopkins punished receivers for the Eagles’ great kelly green defenses. Life returned the favor.

He got one. David Tucker, The Inquirer’s sports editor at the time, approached Bowden with the idea of covering the Eagles. The overture was part of a trend in which writers from outside the department were assigned to cover the city’s professional franchises in a non-traditional way. Already, Michael Bamberger had moved over from the Metro section to handle the Phillies beat; after that 1990 season, political writer Dick Polman replaced him. Sal Paolantonio had tracked Frank Rizzo’s final mayoral campaign and the 1992 presidential campaign before succeeding Bowden on the Eagles and, eventually, jumping to ESPN.

Growing up in suburban Baltimore, having put himself through Loyola University by working as a cashier in a supermarket, Bowden liked football and had played it in high school. But he had aspired to be the next Tom Wolfe, not the next Will McDonough or Chris Mortensen — a New Journalist and prose stylist, not an NFL insider and certainly not a grunt grinding away on a local beat.

“Although the other Eagles writers never said anything to me directly, I imagine they saw me as somebody who hadn’t earned the job in the way they had — smaller papers, covering sports,” Bowden said. “I was somebody who hadn’t paid his dues.”

OK, cards-on-the-table time: Bowden and I have been friendly acquaintances for a few years. I’m a rabid consumer and deep admirer of his work — in a bookcase in my home, there is a “Bowden shelf” filled with 11 of his titles — and he was kind enough to give me a back-cover blurb for my most recent book. I also count as colleagues, coworkers, and close friends several of the writers who worked alongside and competed with him. They were an eclectic crew of beat reporters and columnists, and within that tiny subset of the population, there were even tinier subsets.

There were the guys who were solid and smart and told it straight. There were the guys with barbed-wire senses of humor. There were the esteemed columnists. All of them were territorial. All of them were battling to break news, to mine the locker room for the splashiest quote, to deliver the best take on the big victory or the crushing loss or the daft coaching decision.

Bowden wasn’t there to do any of that. He was playing a different game. He saw the job as a grand opportunity. “My first thought was, ‘I can write a book,’ ” he said. “I thought it was fertile ground.” Still, he worried that his lack of experience as a sports reporter would hinder him. He asked Roberts, “Will people take me seriously if I cover sports?”

“Yeah, they will,” Roberts told him. “And a million more people will read you.”

Bowden’s directive from Roberts and Tucker was clear, though: He should pay no attention to what the other writers were doing. And if he did, he should do pretty much the opposite of what they were doing. If they regarded certain aspects of football as inconsequential or ordinary, he should consider exploring those aspects in depth. If there were issues or matters that the beats felt they had to treat as verboten so they could maintain their good standing with the team’s officials, coaches, and players, Bowden should risk his access to tackle that thorny reality, to show fans and readers what these famous athletes were really like.

Everyone else was zigging. Bowden’s mission was to zag.

His first day covering the Eagles was the first day of training camp, and he zagged so hard that, when Keith Jackson, the team’s star tight end, didn’t show up — he was holding out over a contract dispute — Bowden didn’t write a word about it. No big deal, Tucker told him. We can use a wire-service story.

The Inquirer added another writer to the Eagles beat, Dave Caldwell, to handle those daily news items that hard-core fans prized. And there were always plenty of items, because those teams were loaded with talent and personality: White, Jackson, Randall Cunningham, Jerome Brown, Seth Joyner, Clyde Simmons, Fred Barnett, Byron Evans, Mike Golic, owner Norman Braman, head coaches Buddy Ryan and Rich Kotite.

“I have been doing this for 42 years,” Caldwell, now a freelance writer who has contributed to The Inquirer and The New York Times in recent years, said in an email interview, “and those Eagles teams were the best teams I’ve covered, because they were so unbelievably colorful. … The players provided so much good stuff — every day — that someone could cover the team without getting into the football part much at all.”

» READ MORE: Jerome Brown has been gone for 30 years, but his joy endures for this former Inquirer Eagles writer

At its best, Bowden’s work on the Eagles unpeeled the layers of NFL life until he was as close to the core as anyone could hope to get. He watched Erika Hopkins, then the wife of safety Wes Hopkins, brawl with one of her husband’s mistresses in the stands at Veterans Stadium, then later interviewed Erika to write a blow-by-blow of the incident for The Inquirer Sunday Magazine and Bringing the Heat.

He noted, as a throwaway line in a story about the macho culture around the Eagles, that “the only pornography in evidence” spilled from the corner stall of backup quarterback Jim McMahon. When Ron Howard, the Eagles’ public-relations director at the time, admonished him for including that detail and accused him of violating the supposed sanctity of the locker room, Bowden told him, “Ron, he’s got it hanging from the wall. That’s what I’m here for!”

For his recurring column, “Inside the Game,” Bowden would focus on a particular player each week, then sit down with that player the day after a game so he could understand, and help readers understand, exactly what was happening on the field — a revelation, given that coaching film wasn’t readily available. The athletes, in turn, let their guard down around him. Here was this bespectacled fellow who asked basic questions in a calm, deliberate manner and who seemed genuinely interested in how they did their highly specialized jobs.

Once, Golic, one of the team’s defensive tackles, described to Bowden his struggles against Minnesota Vikings guard Randall McDaniel. Angered by Golic’s public admission that “on some plays I got my ass kicked,” Dale Haupt, the Eagles’ defensive line coach, benched him the following week.

“I’m going to surprise you with what I’m about to say: Mark was the best big-picture writer I’ve ever read in sports,” Mark Eckel, who covered the Eagles for 32 years for The Trenton Times and NJ.com, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think there’s ever been a better writer covering the Philadelphia Eagles. He knew what he didn’t know, and he didn’t act. He said, ‘I’m here to tell stories.’ He helped me in my career. He showed me, ‘You know what? A guy getting signed to the practice squad isn’t that big a deal.’ ”

At its worst, Bowden’s work could come off as insufficiently skeptical of the front office’s decision-making, especially when it came to evaluating players. He lauded the team’s selections of running back Tony Brooks and quarterback Casey Weldon in the fourth round of the 1992 draft, for instance, even though neither Brooks nor Weldon was a highly rated prospect or would go on to benefit the Eagles all that much. That naivete was a natural byproduct of his approach to writing about the intricacies of football; he was fundamentally deferential to his subjects.

“The people I interview are the experts,” he said. “They’re professionals. They know their job better than I ever could. So if I wanted to understand their world, I needed to listen to them.”

As far as Bowden was concerned, he had been given license to wander around for as long as he wanted in an alien world — and he could talk with the aliens, learn about them. What actually happened when Eagles defensive coordinator Bud Carson called a blitz? What did the linebackers do? What did White and Simmons do? When a 20-year-old athlete signs a multimillion-dollar contract, how does his new wealth change him?

He was stunned that more writers and media members didn’t care to explore those topics, and throughout Bringing the Heat, he did little to hide his contempt for their priorities and methods. Tell that, he wrote, to Philadelphia’s know-it-all sports writers and columnists, paid sadists, who scour the wreckage of every Eagles loss for scapegoats and mount their heads on pikes. … Tell that to the ignorant gabfest harpies who play host on Philly’s sports-talk station, the aptly named WIP, who flog the town’s pro athletes (particularly the Eagles) 24 hours a day, 12 months a year, with razor Lilliputian lashes. He referred to the cluster of Eagles beat reporters as The Pack, painting them as a homogenous organism, as if all of them thought, carried themselves, and went about their jobs in exactly the same way.

“What I found about the sports writing establishment,” he said, “was that they set themselves up, many of them, as critics of the game. In other words, they were self-appointed experts. The newspaper appointed them experts, and then they were entitled to write critically of the performance of guys who know s--loads more about what’s going on than they do. They were doing what I considered to be the biggest mistake a journalist can make, which is pretending to know more than they do. They were doing things routinely that, I think, made coaches and players look at them like, ‘You don’t have any idea.’ ”

The sprawling project of covering the Eagles for The Inquirer, then turning all that raw material into Bringing The Heat, he said, prepared him well to report and write Black Hawk Down.

Having been around the Eagles throughout the regular season, Bowden would spend each offseason traveling to the hometowns of various players and coaches, interviewing their families and friends so he could flesh out their backstories and enrich his narrative.

He applied the same techniques in reconstructing the Battle of Mogadishu, fought in October 1993, and the circumstances that led to the deaths of 18 American soldiers, and he applied them to his later books: about the hunt for drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, about the 1958 NFL Championship Game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, about the North Vietnamese’s assault on the city of Hue in 1968.

“When I say, ‘You wander around in a world that’s unfamiliar to you,’ you have to recognize that the people who live in that world are your most valuable tools,” he said. “You need to get to know them. You need to listen to them. You need to ask good questions. And yeah, it gave me confidence writing about a battle and knowing that it’s OK that I don’t know what an AR-15 is.”

When I interviewed him, he had recently returned from a week in Sweden, reporting a piece for The Atlantic. Our meeting had coincided with the kind of news story that, once, would have been grist for the typical Bowden treatment: That morning, just a couple of hours before our interview began, just a few miles from Bowden’s home, federal, state, and local law-enforcement authorities had captured escaped fugitive Danilo Cavalcante.

But Bowden told me he’s not certain that he will write another book. The Sweden trip had reminded him how exhausting the process is. With Bringing the Heat, he had set out to write a great football book, because he was in his late 30s and ambitious and believed that only three or four great football books had ever been written.

“Nor is that a great book,” he said, nodding toward a copy on the coffee table in front of us. He regards it now much as he does the Reggie White print on his wall: a nice memory from that time in his life and his career when the most important thing to him was to do something, anything, to break away from the pack.