For Fredericksburg Generals, second chances

How Redskins legend Mark Moseley helped lead a ragtag minor league football team to redemption.

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Fredericksburg Generals teammates, from left, Carlton Raymond, Eric Bates, Rufus Robinson, coach Jamie King, former Redskins kicker Mark Moseley, Dustin Buckley, Joby Coakley, David Hughes and Levi Frye. The team played in the Mason-Dixon Football League from 1994 through 1996, with two championship seasons. With the addition of Moseley after the first season, the Generals never lost another game.

John McDonnell / THE WASHINGTON POST

Moseley made a record-breaking 21 straight field goals as a Redskin, but his NFL career got off to a rocky start. He was cut by Philadelphia after his first season and rejected in New Orleans going into his second training camp before playing with the Houston Oilers. Then he was without a kicking job for two years until the Redskins signed him, reviving his career. Years later, the Generals offered another chance to take the field. “I didn’t feel like I finished my career enjoying the game,” says Moseley, who retired from the NFL in 1986. “And when I came back and started playing for Fredericksburg, immediately I started having fun again. I was like a kid again.”

John McDonnell / THE WASHINGTON POST

Moseley on the sidelines during a Generals game. Former teammates say Moseley had a unique way of inspiring them. Defensive back Jason Lee says: “He would tell us, ‘Get your [expletive] together. You guys are living a dream.’ Most of us lived for moments when he would start a speech with, ‘Back in the Super Bowl, when we were down by 10, we had to strap it up.’ ”

Mark A. Rolland

Moseley with Generals coach Jamie King. King played backup quarterback at North Stafford High School, in Stafford, Va., then played quarterback in a semi-pro league for three years. After that, he co-hosted “The Mark Rypien Show” on local cable during the Redskins’ last Super Bowl run in 1992. He paid the rent by substitute teaching, running a summer football camp featuring Redskins players, and working in a call center that sold student-loan consolidations.Then, in 1994, he got a phone call: “Would you like to coach my football team?” asked Hal James, co-founder of the Generals. “He had heart, I remember that — he just sparkled in that interview,” James says of King.

Mark A. Rolland

Quarterback Mark Ryhanych (No. 16) during a Generals game. At the start, the team practiced in spartan conditions and took long road trips to away games. After the first season, the team struck a deal with the city to use the old Maury Stadium, and a buzz began. By the second season, the Generals had a real place to play, new uniforms and a year of experience.

Mark A. Rolland

A mud-covered Jason Lee and Kenny Nestor. Lee had last played defensive back in high school in Allen Park, Mich., and afterward tried to walk on at Eastern Michigan but, ruefully, became a “practice dummy.”

Mark A. Rolland

Teammates celebrate a victory. Few outside the semi-pro community had heard of the Generals. But on Dec. 22, 1996, during the final Redskins game at RFK Stadium, Moseley was interviewed by Pat Summerall and John Madden, who had seen a video clip of Moseley starting a melee. “So, you guys do get tougher with age?” Madden said as Moseley laughed. “Tougher or dumber, one or the other,” Moseley said. At the sound of “Fredericksburg Generals” on national TV, Generals players watching the game let out a roar.

Mark A. Rolland

The team after winning the 1996 championship game — their second title. The Generals had shut out six of their 13 opponents and outscored teams 374-129 that year.

Mark A. Rolland

Frank King, Jamie King’s stepfather, with whom Jamie had a painful relationship. Though his stepfather came to all the games, he barely acknowledged Jamie and made it clear he was there to support Jamie’s mom. “When you’re told you’re a loser — that that’s all you’ll be — when you get called that all your life, you want to be considered a winner,” Jamie says. Frank King died in 1996; many of the Generals players came to his funeral.

Courtesy of Jamie King

Jamie King with his mother, June, now 84. She says Frank, who was an accomplished cabinet-maker, may have resented Jamie because he didn’t take to the manual labor Frank lived his life by.

John McDonnell / THE WASHINGTON POST

The Generals revisit their old home field at Maury Stadium. In 1996, the team won its second straight league title, then the Eastern Regional championship. The next month, the American Football Association declared the team the national champion. King received the association’s Gold Ball Award, given annually to the national coach of the year.

John McDonnell / THE WASHINGTON POST

Running back Eric Bates, left, and fullback Levi Frye, who played together at Ferrum College in southwestern Virginia. When the two were on a losing team there, Frye recalls, “we just looked at each other and said, ‘That’s a wrap. That’s it.’ And then Jamie shows up and starts making me feel like I could be a special player again. I knew this was my chance for closure to a career that didn’t end the way I wanted. I knew it might be my only chance. I know most us felt the same way.”

John McDonnell / THE WASHINGTON POST

Moseley laces up his square toe football kicking shoe, propping it up on a Generals helmet. He joined the Generals on one condition: that he be allowed to use the same, single-bar face mask helmet he wore with the Redskins. But that posed a problem. The Generals’ colors were blue and gray with silver stars on the helmets.“Cowboys colors?” he says, shaking his head at the idea of looking like the Redskins’ arch rivals. So the single-bar face mask was left gold. It broke in the Generals’ 1995 league championship game.

John McDonnell / THE WASHINGTON POST

Mark Moseley‘s two championship rings: one celebrating a Generals title, left, and the other commemorating the Redskins’ 1983 Super Bowl XVII win.

John McDonnell / THE WASHINGTON POST

“What a time that was,” Moseley says of his seaons with King and the rest of the Generals. “If I didn’t have Jamie and that team at that place in my life, I don’t know where I’d be.”

John McDonnell / THE WASHINGTON POST

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