“Nah, Miss Elsie,” Oomz said. “I’m coming back.”
Elsie let out a cheer and shot her arms into the air in excitement, then hugged him even tighter. The Pee Wees were all looking over there now as they rounded the track. Hart figured out what was happening, and behind his facemask a smile widened. Later, after practice, he said to anybody who’d listen, “Nobody beating us this year.”
BIG OOMZ’S PLAN to form a team hadn’t worked out. Not enough kids had joined, and the logistics of organizing a staff, ordering uniforms, and scheduling opponents required more time than he was able to find. Instead, he sent Oomz to another program, the Brooklyn Saints. Some of Big Oomz’s favorite coaches from his Mo Better days were on the Saints. They’d left Mo Better to start their own program a few years back, and Big Oomz felt closer to these men than to the current Mo Better staff. Oomz’s new team began practicing late in the spring. Progress was slow. Their numbers remained low when summer hit, and the talent was limited. Many of the boys had never played before. The result was that Oomz had to play quarterback. No other boy was capable enough to handle the position’s responsibilities. Oomz didn’t like playing quarterback. He didn’t like having to take the snap from between the center’s legs every play. He didn’t like throwing the ball and didn’t have an accurate arm anyway. And he damn sure didn’t like handing the ball off to someone else, someone weaker and more hesitant, only to see the boy get dragged down by hits he could’ve handled. Oomz wanted that action. Oomz was a running back. So, Oomz became unhappy. “The kids just wasn’t good like they were at Mo Better,” he said. “I didn’t want to be there no more.”
He tried to hide this unhappiness when he ran into his old Mo Better coaches around the neighborhood. He’d see Vick or Esau in the hallways of his school, and they’d say what’s up, ask him how he was doing. Some days, Oomz would run into Coach James on the streets. They lived a few blocks from each other. “We want you back Oomz,” James would say to him. “When you coming back?” And he’d give Oomz a handshake and a big hug. The coaches all showed him a lot of love, even when he said he wasn’t coming back. He appreciated that. He missed them and missed practices at Betsy Head. He told his father he wanted to go back to Mo Better. “I was thinking about how I been playing here for so long, and then I bailed out on them,” he said. At first, his father resisted. But his father was no fool and understood where Oomz was coming from. Soon, he gave in, and there was Oomz strolling into Betsy Head.
The Pee Wees gathered around him. He slapped hands with nearly all of them. He grinned, and the attention seemed to fuel his confidence further.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m back, I’m back,” he said, nodding his head.
He arrived early at the next practice, joked with his teammates by the light post, ran the two laps with them, and lined up shoulder to shoulder facing Esau, who assigned them one by one to their position on the offense.
“Oomz,” said Esau, looking away from the team and toward some invisible formation he was imagining, piecing together, on the empty and dry grass. “Go to—”
“It’s Javuan,” Oomz cut in.
“Huh?” said Esau, turning his head back to the team.
“My name’s Javuan.”
“OK. Javuan,” Esau said, smiling now. “Why don’t you like the name Oomz?”
“It’s a gang name.”
And just then a teammate next to Oomz turned to him and shouted, “Oooomz!”
Oomz shoved his forearm into the boy’s neck and pushed him backward.
“What’s Oomz, my father or me?” he said forcefully, anger in his voice.
“All right, all right,” the boy said.
“Oom—I mean, Javuan!” Esau said, and Oomz backed off the boy. “Go to running back.”
With his father back home, Oomz had felt a stronger sense of how much his nickname did not belong to him. People on the street or coming over to their house were not calling his father “Big Oomz” or “Oomz Sr.” but simply “Oomz.” Oomz wondered if perhaps he should earn his own name, though his distaste for his long-held moniker didn’t last more than a couple of weeks. While he was glad to have his father around, it was an adjustment. “They butted heads not long after his father got back,” Oomz’s grandmother, Monique, said. Big Oomz, who now lived with his girlfriend in Marcus Garvey Village and was still looking for a job several months after his return, was strict with his son, banning him from video games and TV if he scored poorly on a test or talked disrespectfully to adults. “Oomz was used to his grandmother spoiling him,” Monique said. The son had inherited his father’s strong personality and stubborn tendencies, and so the two clashed—nothing major, but an ongoing state of frustrating disputes.
His father wanted to play an active role in his life and resisted anything that might get in the way of that. Specifically, he wanted Oomz to continue his education in Brownsville, at the gifted-and-talented school where he had been an honor student, where he was a short walk from his grandmother’s house and his father’s apartment. Oomz’s mother, Tasha, was making moves to get Oomz into a new charter school opening up in Fort Greene, where she now lived, a gentrified but racially diverse upper-middle-class neighborhood near downtown Brooklyn. Monique supported the decision. She believed that a boy growing up in Brownsville didn’t get enough exposure to society and its different cultures, and that that could set him back as he got older. Crucially, she believed, he wasn’t exposed to enough white people. She believed that understanding how to deal with white people was key to success.
“Our children need to see a little diversity,” she said. “As they grow up in the world, they need to be able to relate to different types of people. When you don’t understand other people, that’s when ignorance starts to creep in.”
Monique’s great-grandfather had arrived in New York City from Jamaica in the 1920s. He raised his family in the nearby neighborhood of Bed-Stuy through the Great Depression. In the postwar boom, he got a good factory job, and his kids grew up and found decent work. By the time Monique was born in 1969, the neighborhoods had begun to change. Heroin had emerged on the streets, crime was rising, and New York City’s darkest time was dawning. Her family moved to Brownsville, and she watched the crack epidemic begin its destruction. When she was 15, as the city’s murder rate reached new highs and the country ramped up its War on Drugs, she had a son. She got him through the worst of the years, when murder numbers were at their highest, and by the time he reached high school, the city’s crime rate had begun to drop. The social and economic conditions in Brownsville, however, hadn’t changed much otherwise.
The circumstances pulled down her son, and she worried the same would happen to her grandson. “The pressures are even greater for my grandson than they were for my son,” she said. “With the Internet and social media and all that. People putting their lives up for everybody to see, all these influences coming at them that you don’t know about. Those social influences are so important.”
She’d heard about boys repping their crews online, starting trouble, talking trash, and sometimes turning to violence. She believed that those boys and their influence were not much different from the boys in nice sneakers and gold chains out on the streets a generation earlier—only now their jeans fit a little tighter and they favored dreadlocks over cornrows.
“You gotta keep them away from that pressure as best you can,” she said. “If not, the streets will get them, the system will get them, and then there’s nothing you can do about it.”
This was why she had supported Tasha’s efforts to pull Oomz out of Brownsville, away from its pressures. Big Oomz, though, didn’t like this plan. He had pride in his longtime neighborhood and believed Brownsville taught lessons Fort Greene couldn’t, especially with him there to guide his son away from wrong paths he knew well. Over the months since he had come back from jail, Big Oomz had given his son many lectures about “staying off the streets,” Oomz said, “and telling me what’s going on out there.” Big Oomz plead
ed his case about keeping his son in Brownsville, but Tasha had the final say on the matter. If the new charter school in Fort Greene accepted Oomz, he’d attend in the fall.
Oomz wanted to go to Fort Greene. Before one summer practice, as Oomz and his teammates put on their cleats by the light post, they overheard a parent tell another parent about a nice restaurant he and his wife had gone to in Fort Greene over the weekend.
“Fort Greene,” Oomz said to his teammates. “That’s where I live.”
MONIQUE WATCHED THE boys line up shoulder to shoulder. She leaned her elbows on the fence around the field, just as she had two decades before, when her own son ran across this field. “He’s not as good as his dad yet,” Monique said, eyes on her grandson. “Not yet. I think he will be. He got to get a little more aggressive. When his dad was growing up, those boys were so much more aggressive.” The fathers and mothers alongside Monique had not seen those Mo Better days, only heard about them. They were younger than Monique and their sons had come to the program in more recent years. They didn’t expect the 60–0 dominance of a past generation. But they did expect a league championship and maybe a regional championship and, if they were truly blessed, a trip to Florida for a chance at the national championship. They had been very disappointed by last year’s struggles, but they believed that the losing had made their boys stronger, had made them hate and fear the feeling of losing so much that they would dedicate themselves to avoiding it. They would run harder during workouts and stay focused throughout practice. The parents were optimistic. They saw much talent out on the field.
Some of the parents sat in lawn chairs and others leaned back against the chain-link fence that separated the field area from the basketball and handball blacktops. It was Saturday morning in the summer. The handball courts were alive with middle-aged women in sneakers, tights, and T-shirts, dancing to the R&B music blaring from a boom box as a woman with a megaphone led them through exercise movements. On the basketball courts, a group of teenagers played two-on-two, the sound of their dribbling drowned out by the music. On the field, Coach Esau’s voice pierced through the noise.
“Run the play!” he said to the boys lined up on offense. Naz, the quarterback, took the snap and turned to hand the ball to Isaiah, who took a smooth hop step to the side, like a cheetah recoiling before a chase, then snatched the handoff and ran up the field.
“Ohhhhkaaayyy, you got that bounce to it!” Esau said to Isaiah. “He been watching ESPN. Got that bounce to it. Ohhhhkaaayyy!”
Esau smiled. He scanned the field and nodded his head. This was maybe the most talented team he’d ever coached, he thought. There was Isaiah, of course. But there was also Chaka, the tall and fast wide receiver from Marcus Garvey Village, who Coach Chris predicted would be the most prized college football prospect out of this bunch. There was Naz, from Bed-Stuy, who, at 11 years old, could throw a football farther than some high school quarterbacks. There was Hart, from Queens, the smart and solid core of the team’s offensive and defensive lines. There was Dorian, the sturdy linebacker from New Jersey, and Lamont, the big and quiet lineman, and Time Out, the tiny but quick Swiss Army knife, who over his several years at Mo Better had played quarterback, running back, tight end, defensive end, cornerback, safety, and linebacker.
The Pee Wees had gained new talent, as well—two players in particular. Donnie had impressed coaches throughout the spring with his strength and instincts, and though Donnie was small for his age and didn’t know much about the rules of the game, Esau believed he’d make a good defensive tackle with a couple more months of practice. He was raw, with no finesse in his moves. Many of the Pee Wees already knew this from the pickup tackle football games they’d played with Donnie at the park in recent weeks. When he had the ball, he bulled forward in slow, choppy steps until enough defenders piled on to bring him down. When he didn’t have the ball, he collided with the nearest opponent, thrusting his shoulder like he was trying to bust open a door.
The other player was a boy named Marquis, who joined them at the start of the summer. He had drawn stares from his teammates at his first practice. While the rest of the boys wore just T-shirts and basketball shorts, Marquis fitted his look with the full range of accessories: Nike gloves, a white Nike towel hanging from his shorts, a camo-patterned sleeve on his right arm, knee-high yellow-and-white striped socks, and black leg bands just above his shins. One boy joked that he looked like a customized create-a-player from the Madden football video game. But at that first practice, Marquis backed up his loud look with loud skills and quickly won the respect of his new teammates. Marquis lived in South Jamaica, Queens, and had played running back for a program in a Nassau County youth football league on Long Island. His coach had named him the team’s MVP three straight years. He’d been much better than the boys around him and had become bored at practice. “That’s when you gotta throw ’em to the wolves,” his father, Ramsey, said. Ramsey and Marquis decided he needed to play with and against better players in order to keep improving his skills, in order to become good enough to earn a scholarship to a private high school. “I can’t afford private school, but I’m definitely not sending him to a public school,” said Ramsey, a bus driver at the Rikers Island jail facility. He heard about Mo Better and decided to make the 40-minute commute to Betsy Head.
Ramsey was impressed by what he saw: the speed, the focus, the discipline, the toughness. He sat on a lawn chair, among the other fathers and mothers, as Coach Esau excused the boys for a water break. Oomz and Chaka raced to the water fountain, then raced back, snickering as they joined the rest of their teammates sipping water bottles and Gatorade around the light post, where several fathers had walked over to talk to their sons.
“Oomz!” said Dorian’s father, Dwight, with a smile.
Oomz smiled back bashfully. Dwight extended a hand and they slapped palms.
“You a leader on this team,” Dwight said. “You gotta lead this year. You got too much talent to throw it away. You got a lot of talent. Lead by example. Go hard in practice. You see somebody slacking, give ’em a tap. You a leader out here.”
Oomz nodded, a proud and serious nod, and they slapped hands again. Oomz was starting to embrace his role as a leader. He was a different sort of leader from Isaiah, who was older but quieter. Isaiah led by his actions, with work ethic and discipline that others strove to meet. Oomz was loud. Oomz called people out. He pointed out when he saw boys jump offside and told them to do push-ups. He yelled at boys who were whispering to each other while Coach Esau was talking. He yelled at boys who were walking off the field when they were supposed to be running. When a boy slowed down before the finish line during end-of-practice sprints, Oomz said to him, “You didn’t listen! He said run all the way and you slowed down!” He made sure he was at the front of the line during warm-ups and again when the boys lined up in two columns to walk off the field at the end of practice. “Stay in two lines!” he ordered, before leading the march one afternoon, and when he saw that the columns were crooked, he said, “Stop, stop, stop!” and told Isaiah to go down the line and straighten everybody up.
His teammates respected him, in part, because he didn’t set such a high standard of work ethic and discipline. While the Pee Wees looked up to Isaiah, they saw Oomz more as one of them. He was occasionally late to practice. He sometimes walked off the field when he should have been running. He goofed around. Yet his teammates didn’t consider his leadership hypocritical. Instead, his faults gave him more credibility. When he got serious, his teammates followed.
Oomz was the team’s center of gravity, the one who loosened the mood, the one the others looked to for judgment on style. He offered tips on how to talk to girls and decided what game they all played after practice. Isaiah was the team’s wise statesman. Oomz was the homecoming king. Together, the coaches believed, they could lift the Pee Wees to become one of the program’s best teams in recent years. Oomz had always been charming and popular, but in the past his anger and gloom had overs
hadowed the rest of personality. The Oomz they were seeing this summer was different. He smiled more. He seemed to take practice more seriously and enjoy it more. The coaches observed Oomz hold court with his teammates one early summer afternoon. They stood too far away to hear, but they watched Oomz crack a joke and saw the other boys break into laughter, their young faces carefree, their hands making lively gestures.
“He was arrogant last year,” Chris said. “He was lazy too, and he didn’t follow directions.”
“He thought he could do all that ’cause he was the star running back,” Esau said.
“He had a lot of anger in him,” Chris said.
“He’s a lot different now, ain’t he?” Elsie said. “He looks so much more happy.”
“Mm-hmm,” hummed Chris. “It’s probably ’cause his father’s back.”
The coaches had seen many times the way anger could overwhelm a boy, could hang over him endlessly like thickening smog and poison every piece of his essence. They had seen it cause indifference and apathy. They had seen it drive boys to violence. They had seen it turn sweet and warm boys into hard and cold young men. The coaches saw the anger take root at its earliest stages, before boys were able to recognize it themselves and perhaps learn to control it. The coaches felt helpless in the face of that anger. They could try to give a boy space to get his mind off of it. They could show him a love to compete with it. They could help a boy channel it into the controlled violence of football. But they could do little to strip him of it. The sources of the anger—the turmoil in the household, the bloodshed on the streets, the unrequited wants of poverty, the vague sense of being trapped in a world of struggle, or the convergence of all of these forces and more—floated through Betsy Head like the dust kicked up from the dry dirt.
The anger simmered beneath the laughs and smiles on this overcast Thursday afternoon. The Pee Wees, in T-shirts and shorts, formed two parallel lines, facing each other, for a blocking drill. On the stage, between the lines, two boys went on offense and two on defense. One of the boys on offense carried the ball and the other, his blocker, had to clear the way for him. The boys on defense held large foam shields, with which they tried to hit the boy carrying the ball. It was a physical drill even though the boys weren’t wearing pads. On the first run-through, Isaiah hit Donnie so hard with the shield that he knocked him over. The coaches and the other boys cheered, and Donnie laughed as he pushed himself back onto his feet. Isaiah’s shield landed with a loud smack! each time he went, and Coach Chris made sure to harden all of the team’s best players with a round against Isaiah.
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