Never Ran, Never Will

by Albert Samaha

  Coach Chris assured everybody that Mo Better would be fine, but privately he considered the possibility of merging with another program. He began discussions with the coach of a well-respected team in Staten Island. He hadn’t yet figured out where practices would be held, where games would be played, or how coaching responsibilities would be divvied up—it was too soon for all that. But Mo Better had drawn barely enough kids to fill three teams, and if participation continued to dip, Chris needed a fallback plan. Numbers were down at many, if not most, youth football programs, and Chris allowed for the possibility that the landscape had permanently shifted. He’d spoken with coaches at other programs who admitted that they too were nearing the point where their only options were to fold or merge. Yet none of those other programs had Mo Better’s history. This had been a down year, but Chris believed the program’s reputation had bought him the right to an occasional down year and, surely, widespread trust that he would turn things around. He had to turn things around. He couldn’t afford two bad years in a row. It was a thought he pushed out of his mind. “We won’t let that happen,” he said.

  It was not yet winter, and already Chris was eager for the next season to come. He was giddy at the year-end banquet in the Brownsville Recreation Center auditorium, where kids and parents feasted on a barbecue buffet and coaches gave out awards to standout players. He declared to kids, parents, and coaches that better times were coming. He had reason to be optimistic. In the unofficial scrimmages in the latter half of the year, 11-year-old Isaiah had emerged as one of the Junior Midgets’ best players—even though he was often the smallest and youngest boy on the field. Chris had a grand plan for next season. Since Mo Better couldn’t fill every age group, he’d channel his top talent onto a 9-to-12-year-old Pee Wee team, allowing Isaiah to join forces with Hart, Oomz, and the other Junior Pee Wees. “That team got a chance to go far, maybe even make it to Florida,” Chris said in November, four months before the first practice and 10 months before the first game. “Next year’s gon’ be a big year for us.”

  Indeed, that next year got off to an eventful start. A few weeks into January 2014, Chris got word of some news from Oomz’s family. Big Oomz was out of jail and Oomz was quitting the team.

  5

  CROSSROADS

  January 2014

  THERE WAS NEVER ANY QUESTION OOMZ WOULD PLAY football, never any question he’d play for Mo Better, and, once he was on the field, never any question he’d play running back. In his earliest memories, he was waddling around on his grandmother’s hardwood floor with a toy football in his arms. “Just like his daddy,” relatives and family friends might have said, or perhaps they would have kept the thought to themselves, because by then Big Oomz was freshly incarcerated––a sad and sore subject, the small boy who carried his name a constant reminder of the father’s absence.

  While Oomz played many sports, and was very good at basketball, football was always his favorite and best sport. As an 8-year-old on that Mitey Mite playoff team under Coach Vick, Oomz was named most valuable player. Everybody in the program assumed he’d go down as a Mo Better legend one day—one of those much-talked-about high school stars who often came back to the park to speak with the youngsters before practice about keeping your grades up and listening to your coaches.

  Mentally and physically, he was suited for the tough game. He was a rough boy, but not recklessly so. He controlled his ferocity, channeled his anger, compartmentalized his internal turmoil about as well as can be expected of any 10-year-old. He was not particularly big like Hart, not especially fast like Isaiah, not athletically dominant like Gio. But he was, in every sense of the term, a football player, as Coach Chris would put it—the rare boy who understood the nuances, embraced the violence, and, as a result, excelled with an overall ability that was greater than the sum of his natural gifts.

  Unlike other boys who careened across the field looking for the closest opponent to hit, Oomz operated within the confines of his assignment. As a middle linebacker on defense, he kept his patience at the snap, processing the chaos in front of him, identifying the ballcarrier and anticipating his movements, before shooting forward and crashing bodies. On offense, his patience was even more impressive. Most boys, when they got the ball, impulsively ran forward at full speed and then, upon finding a wall of defenders, looped backward in search of some miraculous opening that exists only in video-game fantasies. Oomz ran the ball like a chess grand master. Three steps ahead of everybody else on the field, he waited for gaps that he knew would emerge, his pace steady, his mind running, calculating. Rather than try to force himself through the muck, he flowed with the wave of bodies like a surfer, shifting and turning, accelerating and slowing. He ran the ball artfully, played with a cerebral grace. In truth, his game was almost nothing like his father’s.

  Big Oomz was a tornado, whipping across the field with force and abandon, guided by instinct, it seemed, because he moved with such speed and intensity. Indeed, father and son were different in many ways. Unlike his father, Oomz liked school, was a strong student, and had tested into a gifted-and-talented middle school. While his father had spent much of his free time outside on the streets with friends, Oomz preferred to decompress with an evening of video games. Oomz was more sensitive than his father had been as a child. The Junior Pee Wees’ disappointing season had taken a toll on him. He often became frustrated during games, slouching his shoulders and shaking his head when the contest began to go the wrong way, going quiet and despondent at the moments when his team needed his leadership the most. His teammates looked up to him, took after him, and his body language was contagious. The coaches recognized that Oomz was more than partly responsible for the team’s consistently sluggish fourth quarters.

  It got worse as the season wore on, a vicious cycle of losing and frustration, frustration and losing. Oomz didn’t hide his aggravation. He became increasingly bored. His favorite response to most questions was a sharp and harsh “So?” He missed more practices than usual and half-assed it when he was there. He seemed angrier than his coaches had ever seen him. He was angry at the losing. He was angry at the growing sense that the program his father helped build was now fading. He was angry that he couldn’t turn it around.

  The coaches tried to pull Oomz out of his gloom, sometimes with gentle encouragement, sometimes with harsh shouting, sometimes with stern and brief commands like “Step it up, Oomz” or “Take control of your team, Oomz.” The breaking point came in October. During a late-season game, Coach Esau’s assistant, Andrell, gave Oomz a good dressing down. It wasn’t the loudest chiding Oomz had ever taken, nor the most unjust, but after it happened he began to think about quitting. He told a few teammates he wasn’t coming back next year. He pouted at practice, and the evenings at Betsy Head turned darker as the season neared its end. That week, there was a gunshot at the park, like an omen. It was loud, close. Everybody inside the park looked to where the sound came from. A young man sprinted up the track. He tossed a gun to the ground and ran through the basketball courts out of sight. A police officer chased him. Oomz watched, barely fazed.

  THE NEWS CAME out of nowhere. Just as suddenly as his father had been taken away from him, he had been given back. Big Oomz said he was back for good this time. Prosecutors had dismissed the charges. Oomz was excited, of course, and over that winter he spent a lot of time with his father. They caught up, talked football. Big Oomz, eager to make up for lost time, unloaded a deluge of familiar lessons onto his son. When to run through a defender and when to run around him. How to properly hold a football when bulldozing through traffic. Which types of boys to avoid in the neighborhood.

  Free and breathing easy for the first time in years, Big Oomz felt like a new man. He applied for jobs. He tracked down old friends. He decided, after some thought, to start his own youth football program. Oomz had not committed to quitting Mo Better at the end of the season. He hesitated to leave the friends he’d played with for years, and he wasn’t convinced that he’d h
ave a better chance to win and to play well at any other program in the city. But his father’s new ambition swayed him. The team would be built around Oomz. His father would personally work on improving his skills. Oomz would learn the tricks of the position from the legendary running back.

  Oomz’s mother, Tasha, was not fully on board with this plan. She liked Chris, Esau, and Vick, and she still believed in them. But Oomz was now adamant. And anyway, nobody was quite sure that Mo Better would recover from its downslide—or that the program would even still exist by the fall. She called Esau to break the news. The coaches were heartbroken.

  More than once that winter, Vick rode his bike over to PS 156 to check on how Oomz was doing. Oomz was shy and embarrassed. He’d give a small smile and shrug his shoulders. Vick was the last person he wanted to disappoint. The coach sensed the boy’s concern. He knew Oomz was in the midst of a complicated time in his life, and he had no intention of pressuring him to come back. “You don’t have to hide,” Vick told him. “There’s an open gate policy at Mo Better and you’re welcome back anytime.” But, he added, even if Oomz didn’t return, Coach Vick still had his back.

  COACH VICK RODE his bike around the neighborhood to check on his boys and to clear his mind. His Mitey Mites had had their worst season in Vick’s 17 years. Was he no longer the coach he used to be? He certainly wasn’t shouting as much. He found that he wasn’t as angry about losses as he used to be. Was his passion dimming? Those 17 years had worn him down, no doubt. Seventeen years of caring for others’ struggles. Bad grades, court appearances, mom or dad on drugs, abuse in the home––you name it, Vick had seen it. He’d dealt with those struggles many times over as a coach. He understood his boys’ problems. He knew the answers. He was good at this. It was his own problems that left him lost and confused.

  Shortly after the 2013 season ended, he got laid off from his security job. His girlfriend, the mother of his 4-year-old son D-Lo, worked for the city’s housing department and her salary was not enough to cover all the bills. The early months of 2014 were rough on Vick, and he wondered whether he’d ever be able to take care of his family. His mind kept returning to the one job that had made him good money. He knew the streets, and more than once he thought, “You know what, fuck it. Lemme go get a package. I can’t pay my bills, I’m not working, whatever. And I start saying, ‘Shit, I could go out here, make this money real quick.’” But one thing held him back from going down that path again. “How could I sell drugs, when if I was standing somewhere selling drugs, they’d see me out here, be like, ‘Yo, what up Coach Vick’?” he said. “I’m identified as a coach. That right there saves me from the streets. So it’s like, damn, I can’t do that.”

  For the first time in his life, he decided to apply for welfare.

  FOOTBALL, IT SEEMED, had always kept Vick Davis from going too far down the wrong path. Back in his day, he was a savage on the field. He played for a youth team in the Bronx because there were no programs in his area, and he brought his neighborhood’s reputation with him. He was never very big, but he was fierce. “Little but Deadly,” one coach nicknamed him. He played cornerback, and when a ballcarrier came his way, he dove hard at his legs. “In any other sport, height and weight is really, really important,” said Vick. “In football, it’s the legs. I had a coach tell me the only uncovered part of a player’s body is his shins.” One year, when he was 11 or 12, he broke four kids’ ankles, he said. Word spread around the league, and by the end of the season no coach dared send the ball to his side of the field.

  To compensate for his size, he threw his body around recklessly. Opponents knew him to be a roughneck, a hard kid who hit like he had nothing to lose and played dirty when he had to. He threw quick punches into the guts of the bigger boys who tried to block him and struck them with shoulder bumps after the whistle so they knew not to fuck with him. But back in Brownsville, among his circle of friends, he had the opposite reputation. He was the good kid. He didn’t spend much time on the streets. When his friends gathered to smoke weed and drink beer and bump Whodini on a boom box after school, he was on a two-hour train ride to the Bronx for practice. His coach was no-nonsense and didn’t allow players to walk while they were in uniform, not even when they were off the field. After practice, the rest of his teammates, who all lived nearby, ran straight to their buildings. Vick, though, had to get to the train station a half-mile away. He’d run, in full pads, up the blocks, his coach slowly rolling in a car beside him. When they hit a red light, he’d stop and do up-downs, dropping chest-first to the ground and popping back up over and over until the light turned green. By the time he got back to his apartment high up in the Atlantic Towers, after the two-hour return trip and more stairs than he chose to count, all he wanted to do was fall into bed and sleep.

  “I didn’t get the chance to indulge in all they was doing, ’cause I was always involved in sports,” Vick said. “If I wasn’t playing football, I was playing basketball or baseball. I got friends that have been incarcerated twenty-five years, thirty years, and these are the same guys that I tried to hang out with but didn’t get the opportunity to. I’m one of the success stories out there.”

  Even on days when he didn’t have something to occupy him, his mom, Miss Elsie, “kept her foot on my ass.” She was a single mother and he was her oldest son, and he learned the virtue of discipline from her. “I couldn’t get away with little things that other kids could get away with. It wasn’t happening,” he said. “If my mom said be in the house at seven o’clock, if I was in the house at seven oh five, I got an ass whoopin. With an extension cord, a belt, a stick, a shoe, whatever was closest to her was what I got beat with. Not only did I get a behind whoopin, I was on punishment and my punishment was written assignments, as well as behind whoopins.”

  Miss Elsie worked as an assistant at a law firm and kept a stack of long yellow legal pads. One punishment was that Vick had to write “I will listen to my mother” over and over, filling a sheet front to back. Another punishment was that Vick had to take all the dishes out of the cabinet, wash and dry them, then stack them back in the cabinet. To make sure he didn’t cheat, Elsie slid sheets of paper between some of the plates. If the papers were still there when Vick said he’d finished, it meant he didn’t do all the dishes, and he had another week of punishment tacked on.

  By the time he got to high school, he didn’t have much interest in joining his friends around the neighborhood smoking weed and sipping beer. “I realized it was fuckin’ boring,” he said. “You stand there, drink, you get drunk, you stand on the corner, you end up fighting with your friends. To me it didn’t make any sense. Once I got to that age there, I realized that girls like athletes. So to me, to hang out on the corner—it wasn’t no girls at the corner. All the girls was at the games. So I didn’t want hang out on the damn corner.”

  If teenage Vick did have a vice, it was girls. Girls were his focus from the time he got to school in the morning to the final bell in the afternoon. He put little effort into his studies, and his grades were bad. He was a smooth talker, charming as hell, and handsome. He had plenty of girls, but he didn’t stop chasing. Being an athlete was one thing, he concluded when he was 17, but having money was where it was really at. This was the ’80s. Crack was booming, and the dudes he knew with the most money were drug dealers, so he got into the drug game. “I thought having the money, I could get all the women,” he said.

  He was so scared of his coaches finding out about his business endeavor that he made a point to never slang in New York City. He’d travel upstate, as far as Rochester, to sell his product. It was risky, working so far from his turf and his people, but he made good money. He quit playing football before his senior year, and over the next few years he hustled. He had his first kid, then his second, and then another. Then he got arrested. His mom bailed him out of jail. He kept hustling. One day, in his early 20s, on a business trip to Rochester, somebody shot him. He took six bullets. On the hospital bed, he thought about what h
ad become of his life. “I got caught up,” he said. “Seeing my friends die. Ended up getting shot. Like, yo, I like the other life better, with the sports.”

  His oldest son played youth football for a program in northeast Brooklyn, and so he and Elsie volunteered as coaches. In 1997, two of the program’s coaches, old friends of Chris Legree, jumped over to Mo Better, and Vick and Elsie joined them. Vick impressed Chris with the way he worked with the youngest kids, how he won their attention and instilled discipline, and within a few years, Chris put him in charge of the Mitey Mites.

  The drug game behind him, Vick took a series of menial jobs but had trouble holding steady work. His role as coach helped, though. Parents hooked him up with jobs when they could. He worked construction for one father’s company. He took shifts as a security guard for another’s. He made enough to eat and help support his kids, but not enough to get his own place, so he stayed with girlfriends. He’d always dreamed of having his own place, and as he reached and passed 40, he still kept that dream. But things were getting tougher.

  His mind cluttered and stressed, Vick rode his bike often in the mild fall and cold winter after the 2013 season. On too many of those bike rides, he spotted Gio outside with friends.

  GIO DID NOT wear any gang colors, did not flash any gang signs, did not appear to be dealing drugs or committing any crimes. The boy was simply out, in front of takeout joints and apartment buildings. But to Vick’s eyes, simply being out was sometimes a bad sign. It was still cold, after all. Too cold for real trouble. The streets were calm and sparse, speckled with shivering people trying to get to and from subway stations and bus stops as fast as possible, a biting wind rustling their coats.