After my two trips to Orlando, I started getting frustrated with the Pop Warner organization. The whole league was becoming commercialized. If you went to the national championship, Pop Warner required you to stay at Disney hotels on Disney property at astronomical Disney rates, and inner-city programs like ours didn’t have the money. I was talking to guys from Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, all over the place, and they would say, “It’s hard, man. We need somebody like you to step out there and start something where we won’t be getting licked by Pop Warner.”
I started a new league, the National Youth Football League, in affiliation with the Orange Bowl Youth Football League, which is the main competitor to Pop Warner. We set up branches mainly along the East Coast, North Carolina, Virginia, Baltimore, and the Washington area. I used my leverage to bring a lot of rappers and professional athletes in to help. I called P. Diddy, Rick Ross, Nelly, T.I., Trick Daddy, Flo Rida, and Snoop Dogg. I enlisted NFL players like Chad Johnson, Warren Sapp, Vernon Carey, Edgerrin James. A lot of those guys have children in youth football, too. They all agreed to coach teams, donate money, make appearances, do whatever was necessary. A lot of teams left Pop Warner to join us. We always have the championship game in Miami, and all those teams come down here to play at Dolphin stadium. We didn’t become as big as Pop Warner, but we have thousands of kids in south Florida alone, players and cheerleaders, and we’ve made it into an affordable alternative for parents and groups who can’t foot the bill for a trip to Disney World.
The success of the National Youth Football League capped off nineteen years of strong community work with the Optimist Club. I was proud of what so many kids had accomplished, and proud of the work we’d done.
CHAMPIONS
On January 23, 2009, a bunch of kids in Liberty City were doing what they always do on Friday night, hang out on the corner. They were out in front of a grocery store at NW Seventieth Street and Fifteenth Avenue with a dice game going on. One of the kids out there that night was Durell Eskridge. Even with all the mentorship we’d given him with the Optimist program, he was still struggling, falling under some bad influences. He’d stopped playing football and had skipped around to a bunch of different high schools because of his mother’s unstable living situation. He wasn’t into any trouble, but he was out on the corner when he should have been home with his schoolbooks.
Durell and his buddies were hanging out when, out of nowhere, this dude came up, pulled out an AK-47, and fired into the crowd, spraying bullets everywhere. Everyone screamed and scattered, bodies dropped, and the shooter turned and ran. Police found forty-five shell casings on the sidewalk. Two dead and seven wounded. Six of the nine victims were high school students. Durell, just a scared, frightened teenager, survived by diving and clutching the pavement behind the dead bodies of two of his best friends.
That shooting was so horrible that I made a public statement about it: that this had to change, that we had to fight on the front lines of this problem, and that I was personally going to do something about it. My frustration had been building up for months. We worked hard at Charles Hadley Park to keep kids safe and to put them on the right path. Some were doing well. They were starting to graduate, to go to college. But we were losing too many of them when they went to high school. The year before one of Liberty City’s star running backs got picked up on a murder charge. Then one of our cornerbacks got picked up on a gun charge. When those two boys were in the park, they were the nicest kids in the world, respectful, well behaved. Something had gone wrong.
Devonta Freeman had started working weekends at Richardson Funeral Home, which is owned by Dwight Jackson, one of the coaches in the neighborhood. Devonta worked as an usher, carrying flowers and escorting the families to their seats, but he also saw the bodies laid out on the slab, being embalmed and stitched back together for the open caskets—the bodies of people he knew, of kids his own age. Devonta wasn’t mixed up in anything, but he narrowly escaped some close calls himself. Running away from one shooting, he had one bullet clip his sneaker—not good for a running back counting on his feet to earn him his way to college.
Despite everything we did at the Optimist Club, the violence and the shooting didn’t stop, and these kids kept getting caught up in it. Sam Johnson and I would sit and talk about the change in the kids when they went to high school. These kids were getting to high school and they started dealing with so many different things: girls, sex, dealers, gangs, guns. They were struggling with their identity and losing their way. I was hearing story after story of kids being picked up by the cops. Kids getting shot. These were my kids and I didn’t want to lose them to the streets. I decided I was going to follow them all the way to the finish line and make sure they crossed over it.
My record in Pop Warner was strong, with back-to-back trips to the national championships in Orlando. Word got out that I was looking to move up to the high school level. I had interest right away. Coach Telly Lockette at Central reached out to me. Of the three high schools serving black Miami—Northwestern, Jackson, and Central—Central was by far the worst. It was a failing school on every level. The building had gone up in 1959 and was in disrepair. In athletics, the Central Rockets were the perennial stepchild to the Northwestern Bulls. Northwestern won all the titles, and Central could never get over the hump to even get in the playoffs. In academics, Central was rated an F school by the state. It was in danger of losing its accreditation and being closed down. Where kids were in the most trouble, that’s where I wanted to go. I arrived in the fall of 2009 at the same time as the new principal, Doug Rodriguez. Coach Lockette had come over the year before from Northwestern, where he’d been the offensive coordinator who helped bring home two state championships in consecutive years. There was a sense of a breath of fresh air in the place, of things beginning to turn around. Lockette respected my knowledge of the game and liked the analytical, tactical way I had of looking at the game, always making players watch tape and memorize playbooks. He called me “Information Man” because my head is full of everything anyone would ever want to know about the game.
Lockette hired me to be an assistant defensive coordinator. I was going to be a position coach, running the linebackers. All of the coaches and teachers in the Miami-Dade school district have to have certification from the state. They’re the only county in the state that requires it; in all the others you can be an assistant coach just by volunteering. In Miami-Dade you can hire guys like me who aren’t professional teachers, but there’s a three-year certification process. You’re given a temporary certification, and at the end of the three years, the state decides whether or not to award you a permanent certification. I took my temporary certification and got to work.
Moving to the high school level, I really had to humble myself. I was starting at the bottom in what was basically a volunteer position. I hadn’t worked for anyone else since I’d left the kitchen at Mount Sinai hospital twenty-five years before. I was always the boss, and whenever I hired employees, I always expected them to be team players and work up under me. If I had an employee with no respect for the business, no respect for the boss, I’d fire him. So when I went into high school football, I couldn’t be a hypocrite. I was very aware that I was working up under another guy’s business. I just wanted to be a good Indian and play my part. I’d set up the field for practice. I’d clean up gear in the locker room. Anything the team needed.
My first day on the job I saw exactly what was going wrong with our kids. They’d changed. They behaved differently. They’d been the nicest, sweetest boys in the world when we had them in the park, but now they were in this high school environment, trying to act like men, and their ideas of what it meant to be a man were all about being tough, acting like thugs and hard-ass gangsters. I’ll never forget, I was in the locker room that first week and this kid, a good kid who’d been in the Optimist program, was mouthing off to the wide receiver coach, being disrespectful, cussing, using every profane word imaginable. I was in shock.
This was a kid, I’d never seen him act that way in my life. I walked right up to this kid and looked him in the eye, like, Are you serious? When he saw me he just shut down, because he knew. All those kids knew. Coach Luke don’t play. If they stepped out of line with me, they were going to see me at their breakfast table the next morning, telling their moms about the problem. I still had the respect of these kids, because I’d brought them up. I put it out to all the other coaches: if there’s a problem kid, send him to me. I jumped on them, got that kid back on the straight and narrow.
That first season at Central had its ups and downs. Devonta had transferred to Central from Miami Edison High School. He was coming off a broken ankle that had sidelined him for most of sophomore year, but he’d rehabbed it and bulked up to two hundred pounds. Durell had transferred in, too, to join his friend. The same night of that shooting back in January he’d resolved to get back to football, to stay off the corner. Devonta was running back and Durell was at wide receiver. Charles Gaines, the kid who’d picked up the gun violation, he was at wide receiver. He’d been proven innocent of the charges and, like Durell, had been scared straight by how close he’d come to losing everything.
I was confident about the talent we had on the field, but I felt like, as a team, we weren’t living right with the football gods. You have to live right by the football gods or else there’ll be a reckoning. We were letting discipline issues and morale problems get in the way of success. I didn’t agree with a lot of the coaching decisions being made, but I was the new guy and could only assert myself so much.
Even with all the talent we had, when we got to the home stretch and we needed these kids to perform at a high level, they simply couldn’t do it. We had a solid season and made it to the playoffs. We even beat Northwestern in the quarterfinals, but we lost to Miramar High School in the semis, even though we were the stronger team. We lost that game inside the five-yard line. We kept driving all the way down, and then the offense just couldn’t punch through. We went down 21–14. The state championship should have been ours, and we blew it. The thing was, it was pouring down rain the whole game, only somehow it only rained when we had possession. Miramar would get the ball and the skies would clear. We’d get it back and it would pour again. It happened every possession. We were staring at each other in disbelief. It was the craziest thing. We weren’t living right with the football gods, and that was their way of letting us know.
The disappointment of that first season was tough, but we managed to put it behind us because there was so much excitement for the next. Despite the problems, we’d gone further than any Central team had before. For the 2010–11 season, the expectation was that we’d go undefeated and win the state championship, maybe even be national champions. USA Today ranked us the No. 2 high school team in the country on the strength of our roster. We had twelve returning starters, including Devonta and Durell, and we had four all-star players transferring in, including Rakeem Cato.
I’d been keeping my eye on Rakeem through the years. He was over at Miami Springs, and he wasn’t doing well. He wasn’t getting the support he needed on or off the field. He was struggling academically, and Miami Springs was close to kicking him out. Even though Rakeem’s numbers at varsity quarterback were good, the team around him wasn’t performing, so he wasn’t getting the chance to show his stuff to recruiters. That summer I told Rakeem, “If you really want to come to Central, you need to come right now before the season starts. But there’s going to be a lot of discipline over here. We’re going to work you and you need to be ready for it.”
It didn’t take much convincing. Rakeem wanted to be with his buddies Davonta and Durell, and he wanted to play for Coach Luke. We brought him over from Miami Springs to start at quarterback and we got him set up with a tutor to pull up his grades. For the preseason we cracked down on all the kids. We ran them hard, pulling two-a-day practices in the August heat. My goal that year was to root out all the favoritism and lack of discipline. There was no doubt that these kids were all incredibly talented players, but they still needed to learn how to play together as a team, and the coaches needed to learn how to get them there. It was the only way to fix the mistakes of the season before.
Despite the high expectations, or maybe because of them, we stumbled out of the gate. We lost our first away game in Kingsland, Georgia, against the Camden Wildcats, the previous year’s state champions. Rakeem played beautifully, but those Georgia boys were beasts. Their defensive line was a wall of pain, and they were shutting down Devonta and our running game on nearly every play. Rakeem wanted Durrell in at wide receiver, but there was one coach refusing to play Durrell. Durell is six three and runs the 440 under fifty seconds, but this coach was playing another kid who was five five and who, in my opinion, couldn’t even carry Durrell’s jock strap. Georgia kept answering every touchdown and Rakeem had to watch Durell just sitting there on the bench with a towel over his head, begging to get in the game. We lost the game 45–42. There went the chance of going undefeated and winning a national championship.
I decided I had to stick up for my kid. I went to the head coach’s office and laid it out. “Look, I think you guys are showing some favoritism in not giving Durell enough opportunities.” Telling a coach something like that is like spitting in his face, accusing him of doing his player wrong. “I’ll tell him to leave and go play for Jackson if you guys keep doing this to him, because it makes no sense.” I gave them an ultimatum: either they play Durell at wide receiver or I send him to Jackson or: they could give him to me on defense.
Under my charge, I put Durell at strong safety, and he did well there. The bigger problem was Rakeem. Rakeem was stubborn. He was a hard case. He’d been living pretty much on his own since he was thirteen. He didn’t deal well with discipline. He was so desperate to prove himself a man, to be the leader of the team, that he started acting out. Rakeem wanted Durell at receiver. When this coach wouldn’t play Durell at that position, Rakeem started going off on him, launching into him with profanity. I agreed with Rakeem’s position, but no player has a right to go off on a coach like that. No player can be bigger than the team, even the quarterback. Some of the coaches wanted to kick Rakeem off the team. I put my foot down. I knew Rakeem had too much potential to waste, not just as a player but as a young man. I understood his background, the trouble he’d been through. I knew what he needed. I told the other coaches, “No, I’ll take Rakeem and he’ll be with me. I’ll handle him. I’ll coach him. If he does anything else wrong, you can fire me. I’ll take responsibility for it.”
For the rest of that season I took Rakeem under my wing. Even though I was the defensive coordinator, I’d take him through his quarterback drills every day, and then he’d run over to the offense when it was time to scrimmage. I worked him hard. A word out of line or the slightest bit of attitude and I’d punish him. Extra drills, extra sprints, extra conditioning. When I punished him, I was teaching him. “I’m doing this because one day you’re gonna have a kid and you’re going to have to discipline him, too. You can accept it and take it like a man, or you can rebel. But if you do, that ain’t tough, that ain’t character, that ain’t taking it like a man.”
After a couple weeks, his rebel posture started to drop. He wanted the discipline. He wanted the structure. He needed it. He needed a parent to show him that tough love. Pretty soon he was coming to me and saying he wanted more punishment. He said, “I want punishment every day.” He knew the extra hardcore coaching was making him better. It was rough. He would be cramping, running drill after drill, flipping tires, but he knew the hard work would pay off when he was in the pocket or scrambling around a crumbling offensive line.
The team started to pull together. We were living right, and the rest of the season we just slaughtered everybody. In Desoto, Texas, we killed Dallas Madison 48–6. We beat my old team Miami Beach 41–6. We destroyed Miami Springs 70–0; Hialeah, 42–0; Miami Lakes, 63–0. Devonta and Rakeem were rushing and passing at record-setting
levels. Durell was returning punts 85, 90 yards for touchdowns. We blew past Miami and Northwestern in the early rounds of the playoffs and faced off against Cypress Bay in the semifinals. It was the roughest game we’d played since Camden mauled us at the beginning of the season. Devonta ran for 354 yards with three touchdowns, and it was still neck and neck going into the fourth quarter.
We were down by three with two minutes left and we drove down to the five-yard line. We were in the exact same spot where we’d been against Miramar the year before. I went to the head coach. “Hey, just give me a time-out to talk to these guys.” I went into the huddle. “Remember what happened to us last year? We couldn’t punch it in on the goal line. That’s why we did not go to the state championship! Don’t let that happen again!” The kids ran out there on that field and pushed that team to the back of the end zone. We scored the touchdown and advanced to the state championship. Everybody was crying, the kids, the coaches, all of us.
For the state championship game we went up against the Phillips High School Panthers out of Orlando, one of the best teams in Florida. They came out strong, and suddenly we were down 17 points just minutes into the game. Rakeem and Devonta stepped up, together scoring three unanswered touchdowns before the half. From that moment on, it was all over but the shouting. Devonta had 36 carries for 308 yards in the game. With the numbers Rakeem put up that day, he became the top passer in the history of Dade County football, with 9,412 yards in his high school career. We beat the Panthers 42–27, capturing Central’s first-ever state championship trophy.
For most coaches, winning that game would have been the pinnacle of their careers, but not me. My goal was to see Devonta, Durell, and Rakeem on their way to a better place, and now that they were I didn’t waste any time turning my attention to the next group of kids coming through.
The Book of Luke Page 27