“Now that’s a tough guy!” Chris shouted, after Isaiah bumped another boy off his feet.
Then it was Chaka’s turn. On Chaka’s first attempt holding the shield, the blocker easily drove him backward, clearing a wide path for the ballcarrier. “Again, Chaka, again!” Chris ordered. And on the next go, Chaka again was driven backward. To Chris, it looked like he’d barely put up a fight. “You gotta get tougher!” Chris shouted. “Do it again!” The third go was worse than the second, and this time, after getting driven back three or four yards, Chaka dropped the shield and walked off the drill. “Yo! Stay on the bag!” Chris shouted. But Chaka kept walking toward the line of teammates at the edge of the drill. “Back on the bag!” Chaka kept walking, past the line of teammates, past the coaches standing behind them, and it became clear that Chaka could hear the orders and was ignoring them.
The Pee Wees watched in silence. They watched Chaka walk slowly toward the gate on the far side of the park. They watched Coach Chris follow, march right up next to him, lean into his ear and say, loud enough for all the boys to hear, “You gon’ quit?” They watched Chaka keep his eyes straight ahead and say nothing. Then they watched him pull off his purple mesh jersey and throw it on the ground. “So you quitting?” Chris said. “This ain’t babysitting camp!” Chris turned from Chaka and marched back to the drill, hands on his hips, shaking his head.
Isaiah, his mouth open and his eyebrows raised in shock, turned to Marquis and whispered, “What happened?”
Still watching Chaka with wide and worried eyes, Marquis shrugged.
THE ANGER BOILS and cools. At the next practice, two days later, Chaka was in good spirits, as if nothing had happened. The other boys didn’t bring it up. The coaches didn’t bring it up. They all understood. “Chaka must have had something going on in his life,” Coach James said. “It got to him, and he just needed to vent it out.” They didn’t know the details, and they didn’t ask. Chaka tried to keep a hard front, but he was a sensitive boy. When he saw old friends drop by Betsy Head, he leaped over the fence to greet them on the track. When somebody extended a left hand for a high five, he called him out with, “Other hand, man. Supposed to be the right hand. It’s rude to use your left.”
His father was in prison, he lived in the housing projects where a 1-year-old had been killed months before, and he was a 12-year-old boy, on the verge of puberty and in the midst of middle school’s social pressures. To his coaches and teammates, the precise source of his anger at that particular moment on Thursday afternoon was his business, and the important thing was that he was back on Saturday.
He remained in good spirits when practice ended and a dozen boys gathered for a pickup football game.
“Yo, is it tackle or touch?” Chaka asked.
“It’s tackle,” said Oomz.
“Nah, watch when somebody get hurt!”
“We playin’ tackle!”
As the game began, four preteen girls, passing through Betsy Head, parked themselves along the fence to watch. They shared a bag of chips and a bag of sunflower seeds. They watched several boys dive after a football bouncing on the ground, and they gasped at how the boys jumped on top of each other, forming a pile of bodies.
“It’s so crazy the way they go for that ball!” one girl said.
She pointed at Chaka, who had stayed out of the pile.
“See that boy in the black shirt?”
“Yeah.”
“He good.”
“Oh yeah?”
“He like a basketball star, right?”
“He hot.”
“I like that other boy, with the long hair,” said another girl, pointing at a 10-year-old named Masiah.
“Oh, Masiah?”
“Yeah. He’s 10. And it’s weird ’cause usually I like older guys.”
“He’s 10?”
“Yeah. I’m 12.”
And the girls giggled.
The boys knew the girls were watching, of course, but they didn’t stare. Instead, they trash-talked louder among one another. “Go, ugly!” Chaka shouted at Donnie. “You slow!” Oomz shouted at Chaka. The boys tried to play it cool. When Chaka caught the ball, he held it in the palm of his hand—like a loaf of bread, a coach would have grumbled—and jogged up the field nonchalantly, smiling wistfully as if the sport were just so easy, and then, when a defender got near, he sprinted past him for a touchdown. Then he peeked over at the girls, just a quick glance, before strutting back for the next play.
Only Oomz had the nerve to acknowledge the girls, and as they watched the boys line up for the next play, he turned to them and shouted, “Brittany! You playin’?”
The four girls smiled.
“No!” she shouted back.
“Brittany don’t wanna lose!” Oomz teased, grinning at the girls.
The girls left the park long before the boys finished playing. When the boys tired out, more than an hour after practice had ended, they slapped hands and dispersed. Oomz took a puff from his inhaler, changed out of his cleats, and headed toward his grandmother’s house. He went inside and lay down on the living room couch. Soon his grandma and father arrived. They watched ESPN. There was a report on about retired NFL players demanding more information from the league about long-term brain damage. Oomz asked his grandma and his father what was going on. “Players are getting concussions,” his grandma said, “and when they retire, they don’t do so well.” She told him that there had been cases of depression, that some players had killed themselves, and that scientists had linked the suicides to the brain damage. To Oomz, though, those concerns seemed distant. These men had played for many years and had played until they neared middle age, he assumed. He didn’t think these reports had much to do with him. The thought of not playing football didn’t enter his mind. He had always played football. His father had always played football. Most of the adults he had looked up to all his life had always played football. He remembered when he was young, and his uncle’s friends came over to the house. One of his uncle’s closest friends was their neighbor, Poppa, who had been Mo Better’s star quarterback. He remembered how cool he thought Poppa was, this well-dressed, big-shot young man who took the time to play with him. And Oomz remembered how he wanted to be a football star one day, just like his dad, just like his neighbor Poppa.
NATHANIEL “POPPA” GRAVENHISE was killed on July 3. He was shot walking down the street in Crown Heights at around 7:45 p.m. Coach Chris got word early the next morning. He went to Poppa’s mother’s house and gave his condolences. He knew the family well. Poppa was Coach Gary’s nephew. Five of Poppa’s brothers and cousins had passed through Mo Better. Poppa had played on Mo Better for nearly a decade, just about half his life. He had listened to hundreds of Chris’s speeches.
On July 5, Chris arrived at practice dispirited. The summer morning was cooler than normal, with clouds blocking the sun and a breeze blowing in. Chris leaned back against the fence and watched the boys warm up on the dry grass. He made efforts to know what went on in the boys’ lives beyond the field. He asked questions, about school, about who they’d been hanging out with, about what seemed to be bothering them. The older a boy got, the less he opened up. The older boys, the 11- and 12- and 13-year-olds, preferred one-word answers and shrugs, or scripted lines that fit their perception of what Chris wanted to hear. This was a constant frustration for Chris. He wondered what lay beneath the hard shells of these boys. He knew the statistics: a black boy born in 2001 had a one-in-three chance of going to prison, while a white boy born that year had just a 6 percent chance; that murder was the top cause of death for black boys and men from age 15 to 34. His best efforts had failed many times before, and he wondered whether maybe it was all just fate and chance, whether maybe his own pull could not compete with those forces.
The boys gathered under the tree when practice was done. Chris told them the news about Poppa.
“How old was he?” one boy asked.
“He was 19.”
He told them P
oppa had helped lead the program to league championships. He nearly led the team to Florida for a shot at the national championship in his Junior Midget season. With 40 seconds left in the regional championship game, his teammate returned a kickoff for what appeared to be the game-winning touchdown, but a referee called a holding penalty, negating the score, and the team lost. “Everybody still talks about it,” Chris said. He told the boys that Poppa was generous and popular. He told them that Coach Gary would be taking some time off to grieve and spend time with his family, and that if they saw him around the neighborhood they should show him some love. Chris spoke softly and slowly at first, but then his voice grew louder and turned forceful. He had lost kids before and it hurt more and more each time, he said to the boys. He didn’t want to lose any more.
“When you go to high school, you can pick the path that goes to Harvard, or what?” he said.
The boys looked on silently. Oomz wore a look of indifference, fiddling with the bottom of his T-shirt, but he felt badly hurt by Poppa’s death. It’s not right that that could happen, he’d thought the day before, after his grandmother told him the news. To memorialize his friend, Oomz changed his Facebook profile picture to a photo of Poppa. He was vaguely aware of Poppa’s ties to the streets, and after his grandmother explained how Poppa died, his father gave him a fresh lecture about staying off the streets, about veering away from the paths he and Poppa had taken. Big Oomz knew well how swiftly and completely a boy could be swept up by the neighborhood’s crews and beefs. His son understood it too. During Oomz’s first practice back with Mo Better that summer, four boys on bikes had rolled up to the field. They were Oomz’s age and they knew him and a few other Pee Wees from around the neighborhood. A couple of them had been on the team in years past. The boys parked their bikes beside where the players were standing. They greeted Oomz, Time Out, and Chaka. Oomz had been holding a football; one of the boys called for the ball, and the two of them played catch. Oomz engaged the boys, but coldly. He kept an eye on the field, trying to pay attention to practice, but they didn’t seem to get the hint. The coaches, with their strict open-gate policy, didn’t ask the boys to leave or get mad at the players who spoke with them.
Chris watched the interactions warily. Eventually, after a few minutes, he turned to Oomz, Time Out, and Chaka and said, “Ay, come over here,” as if he had some new play or strategy to show them, though his only aim was to pull them away from the boys with the bikes. The three players slapped hands with the visiting boys, then jogged over to Chris. One of the boys said condescendingly, “Oh, they got you like that?”
Oomz knew the boy was calling him a sucker. In some communities, boys face a social pressure to play football: The sport is a ticket to popularity and validation. It makes life easier––maybe some teachers give you a passing grade because you’re good at football, maybe other boys look up to you because you play. For Oomz and his peers, the pressure was reversed. “The easy path is the one where you stop playing sports and go out with your friends after school. Sleep in on weekends. Too cool to be taking something so seriously,” Vick said. Or as Chris put it, “This neighborhood, it can suck you up like a vacuum.” Like in any community, the pressure picked up as a boy approached his teens, developed a self-consciousness, and started thinking about the clothes he wore and who was cool and who wasn’t cool and who the girls were hanging out with. “It’s a turning-point age,” said Justin Cotton, who coached at Mo Better for 15 years.
The neighborhood pressures affected every boy. TJ, an 11-year-old who’d played on the Junior Pee Wees the previous year, came from a stable family in Brownsville that spent many hours every Saturday at a Seventh-day Adventist church. He was enrolled in a big brother program. He joined an African dance group. He attended a top-notch charter school in East New York, where he pulled As and Bs. He’d already made a list of his top three college choices. When an adult asked him one day if he was going to stay off the streets, he said, “Yes.” Then, after a beat, he added, “Probably.” He paused. “I’ll try.” Another pause. “I don’t know. Just probably. Because, I just… I might, like… I’m trying to see a way to put it.” He contemplated for a few seconds. “I might, like, one day get in trouble,” he said. “I know people that get in trouble. Like I got into a situation when my cousin, he got in trouble, and the people he got in trouble with were looking for me. My cousin told me, ‘Watch your back.’ I tried to tell him, like, stop being in a gang and stuff. I dunno. He said probably, probably not.”
The pressure derailed the football careers of Big Oomz, Dajuan Mitchell, Vick Davis, and many others. “Stay off them streets,” boys like Oomz and Gio and Isaiah heard all the time. But staying off the streets required skill and finesse; navigating the gauntlet meant understanding it. “Knowing where to walk and where not to walk,” said Ellis, a 19-year-old Brownsville native. “Knowing how to act and how not to act.” The boys internalized the necessary survival tactics. Which is why Isaiah walked home quickly and with his eyes straight ahead, and why Oomz shoved a forearm into the chest of a boy who disrespected him. It took a hardness to stay ahead.
That hardness didn’t always play well outside the neighborhood. Erica Mateo, a 25-year-old from Brownsville, remembered her first day in the cafeteria at Bard College, a liberal-arts school in upstate New York. A girl next to her reached across to grab the saltshaker, accidentally brushing her elbow on Erica’s arm. Erica blew up at the girl, got in her face and shouted her down. The whole cafeteria went quiet. “And everybody was just judging me, and they were all probably thinking I wasn’t smart,” she said. “It’s a tough adjustment. Because you’ve been thinking one way for so long, and then suddenly you’re out in the world and it takes a minute to realize that the rest of the world doesn’t work like that.” Some boys, like Isaiah and Oomz, learned to operate successfully in both worlds, to code switch. Some, like Donnie, wore their hardness at all times.
When everyone and everything is hard, there is no room for mistakes. Poppa’s death was a reminder of that. It saddened the community and injected fear. Brownsville locals remembered what happened after Poppa’s brother had been gunned down a few years before. “It was a war going on outside,” Erica said. Locals worried the cycle of retaliation would begin again. As Chris left Betsy Head after practice, his mind was already on Poppa’s memorial service in a few days. “Gonna be like Al Capone’s funeral,” he said. “All those cops.”
THE TRAGEDY PUT Oomz into a reflective state. He left practice that night thinking about his future. His younger cousin, Tymeke, walked with him toward their grandmother’s house up the block from the park, dribbling a basketball while he reassured Oomz that his future was bright.
“You good at football like your dad,” Tymeke said.
“I wanna be like him, but I could do better. I wanna play like him, but I wanna go farther than him.”
“He teach you anything?”
“He told me keep my head up, get low, make a move, but don’t make too much moves. One cut and go.”
“You think you’ll play in the pros?”
“I wanna be a football or basketball player, but if that don’t work out, I wanna be a scientist I guess.”
“Why?”
“Everybody got a point in life when they got death,” Oomz said. “I wanna make people live as long as they want to.”
They crossed the street outside the park and turned onto Strauss Street. Oomz slapped the ball out of Tymeke’s hand and took over the dribbling responsibilities, keeping it away from the bumps and potholes in the sidewalk. Some of the houses he passed had neat lawns and potted flowers on patios that were caged in by iron bars. Other houses had weedy yards and patios cluttered with rusty furniture. A few looked vacant, with boarded-up windows and broken doors. Oomz had lived in Brownsville his whole life, and he didn’t like it.
“I wanna move outta this neighborhood,” he said. “Because there’s too much violence. I don’t know where I wanna move to, but outta here.”
POPPA’S MEMORIAL SERVICE was on July 10 at Grace Funeral Chapels in East New York. An NYPD van parked on a grassy field across the street, lights flashing, two cops watching from the front seat. Threats of revenge had popped up within hours of Poppa’s murder. That night, one former Mo Better player, who was now a star wide receiver for his high school team, posted on Facebook: “hahaha ya took pop fuck y’all think imma do now lols #ripmyrealbropop.” Another teen commented on the post: “Owe BigTime.” Another: “Dead ass.” Another: “Facts I got da perfect plan.”
Anger filled the funeral home. In the second row of the chapel, three teenagers, all in white T-shirts and jeans, cried behind sunglasses. One boy stood over the casket, a pack of Newports in his hand, looking down at Poppa, who was dressed in a blue shirt. Silver balloons floated above the casket. The boy then turned around, his face anguished and holding back tears, and stormed down the aisle. Three more boys followed him, their fists balled, their faces hard. Two adults quickly stood up. “I’ll go that way, you go that way,” one woman said to the other, and they hustled out of the chapel and into the hallway and corralled the boys around a set of couches. One boy collapsed on the couch and began sobbing. A woman put her arm around him and whispered into his ear, slowly rocking him back and forth. Another boy leaned back and looked up at the ceiling, tears dripping from his eyes. Two others leaned forward, their faces in their hands, their bodies shaking.
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