The parents were pleased with the program, too. They were all just so happy. They volunteered in huge numbers, because it was something their kids looked forward to, to go and play organized sports and be a part of something bigger. There were no after-school programs for them, no organized summer camps in the park. Nobody had given them something like this before. After the riots, this program was needed so badly. The spirit of Liberty City had been broken down by all the crime and the unemployment. There was a lot of anger and frustration. Nothing was being done by the city to bring that spirit back.
This program, like hip-hop, was ours. We started it from nothing, built it from the ground up into a major presence in Miami. Everybody in town knew about the Liberty City Warriors and what a great program it was. The kids on these teams were playing for everybody in Liberty City. Their success was everyone’s success. They became a symbol. They brought so much pride to the community, which in turn brought out our competitiveness, our will to work hard and not give up. It brought us together toward a common goal: keeping these kids off the streets, keeping them alive, and showing them what they could achieve by working hard and believing in themselves.
The biggest challenge in running the program was that there was still so much violence. Sometimes, a kid would go home and not come back the next day. Their high school got shot up, their older brother was killed, something happened to them. We prayed every day that our kids would make it home safe. Our program created a safe space in Liberty City. Thanks to the Warriors, Charles Hadley Park was sacred ground. There was a lot of killing going on, but nothing ever happened at the park. It was always a place where everybody could go and enjoy themselves and know that their kids were protected. During that period, Miami had one of the most notorious gangs in the world: the John Does. They were responsible for a lot of the violence and killing that was going on in the neighborhood. But they knew not to start trouble at the park. You didn’t even have to have a conversation with them about it. There was an understanding: don’t go out there with that bullshit at the park.
A majority of those kids in these gangs, they knew me. They grew up fans of the Ghetto Style DJs. When we used to drive around in our rap van with the shorties following us and jumping in the back of the van, half of the gangsters had been the crazy kids jumping on the back of the truck. They knew me, and they had too much respect for me and the music to bring that nonsense around the park. A lot of these gang members, they had little brothers and nephews on the teams, and when they came out to watch the games, that would be a time of peace. If anybody from outside the neighborhood came around trying to start trouble, the gangs took care of it and kept them away. That was their park; it was their little brothers and sisters out there.
We had a lot of cops coaching teams, but the cops and the gangs left each other alone at the field, never bothered each other when they were out there. The gangs protected the park while police officers coached the kids. It was a strange arrangement, but it worked. The crazy part was that these gangsters were betting on the kids, laying down thousands of dollars to bet on youth football games. The coaches would be shaking in their boots; they didn’t want to lose for fear they were going to get killed. But nobody ever got hurt. There were no shootings, no fighting, none of that.
The success of the Liberty City Optimist Club had a ripple effect that went far beyond Charles Hadley Park. The demand for youth football in Miami had always been big. Now it exploded. You had all these inner-city neighborhoods where organized sports were needed the most, but there had never been resources to put together the teams. We showed other parks how it could be done. We started inspiring other teams. We were having babies all around us. The police union wanted to sponsor a team. The longshoremen wanted to sponsor a team. The first program to follow ours was in Gwen Cherry Park. They were the Gwen Cherry Bulls. Then came the Overtown Rattlers and the Inner City Jaguars. A lot of coaches who came through our program went to those parks and built teams over there. Everything started to spread out.
Northwestern, Central, and Jackson were the three main high schools serving the black community. Back when I played for Miami Beach High, we used to beat the crap out of them. It was a joke when we played them. Their athletic programs were a joke because the suburban teams were taking all their good players and the inner city had no feeder system of youth leagues to teach kids the fundamentals of the game. The players didn’t have the background of playing real organized football. They played sandlot ball, no pads, no tackles, a lot of reaching and all that.
The Liberty City Warriors changed everything. All of our kids had been coached in the fundamentals, how to tackle the proper way, how to play with pads on, how to run an offense. It took a few years for those kids to trickle up through the system, but once they did, they turned Northwestern, Jackson, and Central from jokes into national powerhouses. The whole center of gravity of high school football in Miami shifted. After we started the Warriors, the football program at Miami Beach fell apart, and it hasn’t come back since, because they could no longer take our kids. College recruiters started looking more closely at Northwestern, Jackson, and Central, always looking to get a kid who played for the Liberty City Warriors. When we founded the club, we didn’t know what we’d started. But once we started slaughtering the teams at Palmetto Bay, Kendall, and Miami Beach, we started realizing we were getting good and the kids were really understanding what we were trying to teach them. The effect of us starting that program was huge. We changed the whole athletic landscape of south Florida.
In 1998, the club won its first national championship in the Junior Pee Wee division at the Pop Warner Super Bowl in Orlando. It was such a great feeling. It was better than a gold record. It was one thing to galvanize the community and beat a bunch of other local teams in your area, but you go win a national championship? That’s a hell of a deal. It showed the world that kids from Liberty City could compete at the highest levels.
They weren’t writing about the Optimist Club giveaway turkeys at Thanksgiving or toys at Christmas, because that didn’t fit their agenda. They were going to write that I was this misogynistic pig, that I hate women. Fine. If people are ignorant enough to believe certain newspaper stories, then that’s on them.
Once the Optimist program took off, I stopped performing in Miami entirely. I don’t think I set foot on a stage in Miami for over twenty years. I separated those two parts of my life completely, because I didn’t want the image of me from the national media overshadowing the work I was doing with these kids. On the road I was Uncle Luke, the Black Hugh Hefner, the King of Dirty Rap. In Liberty City I was Luther Campbell, local businessman and community leader. I kept both sides going for over a decade, but eventually I reached the point where I had to decide which of those guys I wanted to be my legacy. Did I want to be remembered as the guy with the dirty lyrics, or as a guy who did his part to leave the world better than he found it?
COACH LUKE
I never expected my music career to last forever. If you’re Bruce Springsteen or the Rolling Stones, you can play stadiums well into old age, but for everyone else in that industry, fame comes and goes.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, guys like Jay Z and Kanye and Pitbull, they were the new voices, and the stage belonged to them. After that last obscenity charge in South Carolina and working on that porn film, I knew the whole Uncle Luke thing had played itself out. It wasn’t a challenge anymore. It wasn’t fulfilling. After fifteen years of being the villain, the nasty rapper, the freaky bad boy of hip-hop, I was just as tired of that persona as the public was. I had a best-of album I was working on. It would be my last record, a look back at my career, at my favorite collaborations with Trick Daddy and Pitbull, but other than that it was time for me to start the next chapter, to dedicate myself full-time to the thing that was really important: my community.
Football had always been a big part of my life, and my son Luther Jr. had inherited the same passion for the game. Once he was old enough for
Pop Warner, he wanted to play. He and his mother lived near me in Miami Lakes, and she didn’t want him playing in Liberty City. She felt it wasn’t safe. I knew that it was; Charles Hadley Park was probably the safest place in Miami because of the football program, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. I also wanted my son to be able to play the game as himself, not as “Luther Campbell’s son,” which is exactly how he would have been seen in Liberty City. In the fall of 2003, we registered him with the Miami Lakes Optimist Club. It couldn’t have been more different from Liberty City. These were suburban kids, a mixed group of white and black, most of them from pretty well-off families.
At first, my attitude as a father was that as much as I knew football, I wasn’t going to get involved in any official capacity; again, I didn’t want my celebrity or my role in Pop Warner having any influence on the way my son was treated, for good or for bad. I’d coach him one-on-one at home, I cheered from the sidelines, but I resolved that I wasn’t going to be one of those parents yelling at the ref, or always complaining to the coach about playing my son. I just wanted to go to the games and watch from the bleachers and be a proud dad.
Right from the start, however, the team had problems. The guy who was supposed to coach the team had pulled out at the last minute, and they’d started the season without a real coach, just a couple of dads and assistants trying to keep the team together. They lost their first game. The team was a mess.
The other parents knew I’d started the Liberty City Optimist Club, and they asked me to step in. Reluctantly, I told them I’d help out until a regular coach signed on. Everybody looked at this team like they were the Bad News Bears, and nobody wanted to coach them. I ended up coaching this team for the entire season. To prove there would be no favoritism toward my son, I worked him as hard as any of the other kids. I put him on the second team to make him earn a starting spot. I benched him when he needed to be benched. I made him do what everybody else had to do.
Same way I am with everything, once I was out there, I was out there 100 percent. Practice was every day from 6:00 to 8:30. I always got there early and I always stayed late. I learned a lot that year, about how to coach and how not to coach. The guy before me, who’d put the team together, he’d recruited a lot of really good players from outside the neighborhood, but the parents of the kids inside the neighborhood were complaining: they felt that all these kids from outside the area were playing while kids from the neighborhood were sitting on the bench. I heard about that from the parents sitting out there in the bleachers, and it made me mad. My feeling was that every kid who came out deserved to be coached and deserved a shot to play. Winning is great, but the focus should be on the kids learning. If they came every day to practice and if they came to every game to play, my job as a coach was to get them ready to be a good player.
There was this one kid in particular. He was overweight, kind of a nerdy kid with glasses. Some people were ready to go ahead and kick him off the team, because he couldn’t make the weight. When I eventually took over, I did the opposite. I refused to cut him. I went and told the kid and his mother, “Look, you gotta make the weight, because it’s a weight-driven league. But you stay on the team, I’ll work with you on conditioning, and you’ll make the weight and you can play.”
I gave him a goal and made him work for it. The kid ended up losing the weight. He made the cut, and became eligible to play. It was one of my all-time favorite moments of coaching, seeing that kid get on the field. He was a smart kid, a 4.0 student. Teaching him the techniques and fundamentals of the game wasn’t difficult, and once the weight issue was dealt with, he became a great player. He went from being the last guy you wanted on the team to the first guy you wanted on the team. After nearly every game his mother told me, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
The kid inspired me. He made me see what kind of impact I could have if I really put my heart and soul into coaching. After a rough start, I worked the team hard, we won the last five games of the season, and we secured a berth in the playoffs. We ended up losing in the first round, but every kid on the team made progress during the year. They all made valuable contributions to the team, and in youth football that’s the definition of a great season. It’s not your win-loss record. It’s how much you help each kid grow and improve. What was really great was that, even though this was a suburban team, I never heard a single complaint that a “dirty” rapper was coaching the kids. All the parents, white and black, looked past that. They only saw my dedication to the team and to the kids.
I’d tried to keep my coaching gig quiet; I didn’t want any media attention for it, because I knew the media was going to put their spin on it, comparing my music to my being a coach. But some reporter at the Miami Herald heard I was doing this and came down wanting to do an article. I said, “Yo, I’m not out here for that. This is about the kids.” They did the article anyway. Once the people at Liberty City Optimist found out I was coaching for another team, a few of them got really upset. They called me up to complain. I knew if I was going to keep coaching, it had to be for the Warriors. I talked to my son’s mother, she agreed to let him start playing in Liberty City, and at the end of the season with Miami Lakes, I went to coach for my own club.
I became a coach the same way I became a record executive: by accident. I was frustrated that the job wasn’t being done right, so I stepped in to do it myself. I was trying to stay on the sidelines, but once I got into it I was hooked. The best-of album I was working on, I put it on the shelf. It wouldn’t come out for another two and a half years. It could wait. I wanted to focus on what was in front of me. I am a perfectionist. In the music business, I was responsible for other people’s lives, careers, and dreams, and if I wasn’t going to be the best, I didn’t need to be doing it. It was the same thing with football. I couldn’t ask the kids to do their best if I wasn’t prepared to do the same.
When I started coaching in the Liberty City Optimist program, I went to Sam Johnson. “Give me the team that doesn’t win. I don’t want some ready-made group of kids. Give me the worst team you got out here.” I wanted the kids who needed the most help, because I wanted to be able to have an impact in their lives.
I took over the Junior Midget team, which was the ninety-pounders, about ten-to-twelve-year-olds. As a coach, on the field, I wanted to be Jimmy Johnson. I wanted to be the absolute best. I used ten position coaches for my team, the maximum allowed by Pop Warner, because I wanted each kid to get as much attention as he needed to excel. I went to all the guys from the neighborhood who were the best high school players when I was a kid. Some of them had kids on the team like I did. I went to those guys and said, “Hey, look, let’s get together and coach this team on a higher level. Let’s get them ready for the next ten years of football.” And that’s what we did.
First thing I did was go down and visit my friend Randy Shannon, the defensive coordinator at the University of Miami, to ask him for drill tapes to give the kids. My guys were a bunch of middle school kids, but I was determined to teach them some college-level football.
These young black boys from the inner city, a lot of them don’t do well in school because they’re not given the support they need, at the institutional level or at home. So people write them off. Nobody challenges them, and they fail. But kids are smart. Their minds are like sponges. If they’re exposed to the wrong information at a young age, it gets more difficult to root out bad habits and plant good habits later. If you challenge them and support them, they can do anything. At that age they know nothing, so whatever we instill in them, they’ll take it and learn fast.
I’d sit and talk X’s and O’s with Randy. My coaches and I would get together before the season. We would talk about the drills and what we wanted the kids to do both in training during the summer and as the season went on. Once the season started, we watched tape and ran those drills with the kids religiously. I made them memorize playbooks. They had to know the Power 1, the Cover 2, the Gap 8, and the Split Back. Randy
would come down to the park and watch my practices and correct me if I got something wrong. I learned a lot from him.
I ran a controlled practice that would end with an eleven-on-eleven scrimmage. After the scrimmage, we had conditioning: sprints and drills and calisthenics. I was hell-bent on conditioning, and they took it like champs. I’d condition more than anybody. When the kids would protest, “Man, Coach. Why you doing this?” I’d tell them, “I have to set the bar high for y’all. I’m not getting you ready for JV. I’m getting you ready for varsity. I’m not getting you ready to be redshirted. I’m getting you ready to start.”
They came to accept my philosophy and work ethic. By the time they went off to high school and college they were running the other teams into the ground. To this day my players come back from college and say, “Coach, you ran us to death. Everything in high school and college is a piece of cake compared to playing for you.”
Along with the conditioning, the other thing we provided was quality food. We practiced nearly two hours a day, four times a week, and many of these kids were undernourished. A lot of them were coming from families where there was no good food in the house, or not enough food to feed everyone properly, so we always had food at practices and pregame meals. These kids were young and growing and needed as much as we could possibly offer.
My responsibility to the kids on the field was nothing compared to my responsibility to them off the field. Part of being a coach is mentorship. Even during the off-season, you have to be a phone call away at all times, especially in Liberty City. Down here, that means more than just giving the kid a ride home because his mom works late. Some of these kids are coming from terrible situations. I’ve had players who can’t afford cleats or a decent meal, players who’ve seen their relatives sent to prison, who’ve seen friends die. A lot of them need a father figure because they don’t have a father at home. Some of them don’t have any parental figures at all: Dad’s gone and Mom’s in jail and they’re staying at a cousin’s house. I’ve had kids sleep at my house on nights where they literally have no other place to go. One time a player came over and he stayed for days. He’d seen a dead body in the street near his house and was afraid to go home. Coach Luke’s house was the safest place he could think to be.
The Book of Luke Page 25