“Man, I love number two,” Chris said to Esau. “Number two could get to the outside. They catch him, we can tip our caps. He could put fear in people.”
“Every time outside, they ain’t gon’ catch him,” Esau said. “Ain’t nobody in Pop Warner faster than him. He’s too fast.”
Yet Chris and Esau harbored a fear about the season that they kept from players and parents. None of Isaiah’s talent mattered if the team wasn’t able to suit up at least 16 players every game. Youth football participation was down across the board, they knew. Just that week, they’d learned that two prominent non–Pop Warner Brooklyn programs, the Warriors and the Chiefs, had decided to merge because neither had enough players. Many of the Pee Wees had friends on those teams. Some Pee Wees had played for them previously. The news surprised the boys but not Chris. Each week at practice, he checked with Esau about numbers.
“How many you got?” he asked him on the last day of Hell Week.
“Sixteen,” Esau replied.
Chris pursed his lips and nodded silently, nervously.
13
STOP DANCIN’ AND RUN SOMEBODY OVER
August–September 2014
IT WAS A MILD SUMMER, MUCH DIFFERENT FROM THE previous one, which had been very hot and violent in Brownsville. This summer, through June, July, and early August, the days had been mostly warm and breezy, and there was mostly peace––fewer shootings than locals anticipated. The NYPD set up temporary lights near the street corners and housing projects most known for violence. More uniformed officers and marked cars patrolled the streets at all hours. “Since they’ve been posting the police like that, you haven’t been hearing gunfire as much,” Coach James said.
But he didn’t give all credit to the police. There had been a greater, singular force behind the scenes in the weeks after Poppa’s death. James, like many locals, gave the majority of the credit to Coach Gary. From the minute he learned about his nephew’s murder, Gary set out to prevent retaliation. He met with Poppa’s crew and tried to calm them down. He told them he understood their anger, but controlling it meant they had the power to control whether or not another one of them would be killed. This talk wasn’t always enough.
Gary knew the streets, and those who ran them respected him and his family. Over the years, he’d taken scores of neighborhood boys under his guidance. “I don’t have sons,” he said. “I have daughters. I always wanted sons. So many kids don’t have a father figure and that’s why they fail.” The only way to prevent more violence, he believed, was to target and influence the boys most likely to continue the cycle of revenge shootings. It was a strategy community leaders across the country were using. Rudy Corpuz in San Francisco’s Hunters Point, James Clark on Saint Louis’s north side, Ameena Matthews in Chicago, Andre Mitchell in Brooklyn’s East New York, and others elsewhere intervened when emotions ran highest in the hours and days after a murder. Gary missed many practices over the summer, but now, with the season a week away, he was back at Betsy Head.
He arrived at the park around 7:30 a.m. on this Saturday in late August, before most of the players. Mo Better’s three teams had an early bus trip to Teaneck, New Jersey, for their third and final preseason scrimmage. Gary paced in front of the long green bench, greeting boys and parents as they arrived. He owned a catering business and wore a Bluetooth earpiece even early on a weekend morning. Some boys strolled into the park munching on breakfast sandwiches from the corner store down the street. Most arrived with nothing other than cleats, a helmet, and football pads.
“Who hasn’t eaten anything this morning?” Gary asked the boys gathered by the field. More than half raised their hands. Gary turned to the other coaches and whispered, “We gon’ have to stop by the store and get them something, otherwise they might not have nothing in their stomachs ’til we get back here in the evening.” The coaches often pooled their money to feed their players. Sometimes, Gary paid the whole bill himself, which is what happened the previous week, following Mo Better’s trip to New Jersey for their first scrimmage of the year.
The coaches, focused on making sure every kid was on the bus and collecting the $10 fare from their parents, hadn’t thought about breakfast on that first trip. One boy had only a handful of sunflower seeds. Two other boys split a Snickers bar. Another boy said, “I didn’t eat anything for breakfast, but I drank this whole bottle of Sprite, so that’ll keep me energized.” Many took the field later that morning without having eaten anything since the previous night’s dinner. Despite that, Mo Better’s three teams beat up their competition. They played several Pop Warner programs that day, in a rotating “jamboree” format. Among the dozens of teams across multiple age groups, Mo Better’s Pee Wees emerged as the most impressive bunch. The defense didn’t allow a single touchdown. The offense scored on nearly every possession. And Isaiah lived up to the hype. “They never seen speed like that before,” Dorian’s dad Dwight said. “Just hit the corner and was gone. Nobody could catch him. He made it look like a video game. They showed they’re a force to be reckoned with.” The dominance brought back memories of the program’s golden age. During one of Isaiah’s long runs to the end zone, the announcer exclaimed into the microphone, “Mo Better’s doing their thing!” When the boys retuned to Brownsville, Gary got them burgers, pizza, and chicken wings from the store.
Memories from the golden age came rushing back again a few days later, during Mo Better’s second scrimmage, a Thursday-night affair at Betsy Head against Brooklyn United, a new program in Brownsville. The coaches had taken the matchup personally. Brooklyn United had sprouted up in Mo Better’s territory and recruited kids who would’ve played for Mo Better. “When we play somebody around here, we need to dominate them,” Chris told the boys before the game. “I’m gon’ put it in street terms: I wanna kick they ass. They coming in our house. They coming with that talk, that bravado, that swag. It’s like you gotta kick everybody’s ass on your block. People feared coming to Betsy Head when we played here. They didn’t wanna come to the pit. The way they came in was not the way they came out.” Brooklyn United had posted information about the scrimmage on the program’s Facebook page. “They thought Mo Better was slippin’ and they wanted to show that they were the real king of Brooklyn youth football,” said one Brooklyn United parent, Jason. “Our people were doing a lot of talking.” Hundreds of locals showed up. Like the old days, fans circled the field and, when the games got started, the dust kicked up and seemed to swallow the park whole. “The dust was everywhere,” Naz’s father Repo said. “I was chewin’ dust.” Brooklyn United didn’t play in Pop Warner but in a league without weight limits. The running back on their Pee Wee team was more than 200 pounds; one of his teammates, around 185. Mo Better’s heaviest boy was less than 140 pounds. “They were bigger but our boys didn’t care,” said Repo. “They wasn’t scared. They just ran around them. They tore that team up. Tore ’em up!” The Pee Wees scored five touchdowns and allowed none.
As the boys lined up in front of the yellow school bus on this Saturday morning, they were still talking about that dusty Thursday night.
“I didn’t expect much,” Isaiah said. “They talked a lot and they thought they were nice ’cause they beat local teams. But we was way better.”
“I thought they was gonna be good ’cause they was big,” Chaka said. “But they was mad slow. They came in thinking they was gonna be a dog, but they came out like a cat.”
“Everybody was bigger than us,” Isaiah said with a smile.
“That one dude, I can’t even get my arms around him,” Oomz said. “But I ain’t need to ’cause I just hit him so hard he fell over—boom!”
The boys chuckled.
“Isaiah, ’member that one run?” Hart said.
“When I chucked somebody?” Isaiah said.
“That was baaaaad!” Hart said, bringing his fist to his mouth like he’d just heard a dope line in a rap battle.
“You said—doooggggg!” said Oomz, lowering his shoulder to mi
mic Isaiah’s run. “And the guy fall back!”
“You a power back and a speed back,” Hart said.
“I coulda cut it back, though,” Isaiah said, shrugging his shoulders. “If I cut it back I woulda scored.”
THE BUS WAS loud and every seat was filled. The Pee Wees took up the first few rows, the Junior Pee Wees sat in the middle, and the Mitey Mites were in the back. It was loudest in the back.
Mo Better had only enough money to rent one school bus this week. It barely fit all of the players, and left no room for the coaching staff. Chris, Esau, Gary, and most of the others carpooled with parents. When the bus driver turned on the engine, Elsie was the only coach on board. She sat at the front, her hands over her ears and a look of horror on her face. “Where is Vick?” she said. “We have all this noise, and if Vick ain’t on this bus, I’m getting off.”
To her relief, he stepped onto the bus a few minutes later. A chorus of “Shhhhh!” rippled through the rows as the boys noticed his presence. Vick was grimacing as he dragged up the steps, and his eyes, unusually shifty and downcast, suggested his mind was elsewhere. Then, as if waking from a dream, he quickly shifted his demeanor. His face straightened and his eyes locked in on the boys before him.
“Quiet down!” Vick boomed, and the boys all went silent. The bus rolled forward, onto Saratoga Avenue headed north. Vick stood in the aisle, his hands on the seat backs. A tan bandage was wrapped around his right palm. “Dear God,” he said, “put a shield around this bus, around all the cars trailing behind us. We ask that you get us there safely with no hurt, harm, or danger. All in agreement?”
“Amen!” the boys shouted.
“One, two, three—“
“Mo Better!”
“Mitey Mites, you should be eating, because in five minutes, you will be reading,” Vick said, as he made his way down the aisle, before taking his seat in the last row. And five minutes later: “Mitey Mites! Start reading! I don’t care what you reading, just start reading.”
Vick had started making his Mitey Mites read on bus trips nine years ago. “The talking was driving me crazy,” he said. “If they reading, they not talking. My mother told me the day you stop reading is the day your brain starts to deteriorate.” The Mitey Mites all knew how seriously Vick took this policy, and those who’d forgotten to bring books had improvised to avoid punishment: several boys were reading the Amsterdam News, a free local newspaper they’d picked up from the corner store next to Betsy Head. The front page of the paper featured a photo of a protester in Ferguson, Missouri, holding up a sign that said, “Don’t Shoot.” The thick headline read: “UNREST”
By the time the bus reached the highway, the Mitey Mites were calm and quiet. Some whispered and giggled in their seats, but most had their eyes on their reading material.
Vick leaned back against the window and stretched his legs into the aisle. He closed his eyes and sighed deeply. Twenty minutes later, he was back on his feet. He stopped at each row of Mitey Mites.
“What are you reading?” he asked a boy, who looked up at Vick with big, scared eyes.
“I’m reading Charlotte’s Web.”
“What’s the spider’s name?” Vick said.
“Wilbur.”
“Wilbur is the name of the pig. What’s the spider’s name?”
“Charlotte.”
“Very good.”
He turned to the next boy.
“Puerto Rico, what did you read?”
“Goosebumps,” Puerto Rico said with a big grin and excited eyes.
“What is it about?”
“There’s a boy named Chris and he likes puppets and the puppet is alive and—”
“OK,” Vick interrupted, nodding his head. “Very good.”
A few rows later, a boy held up a thin hardcover book. Vick opened it and read the first page. His shoulders slumped and an exasperated look came over his face.
“Don’t get on my bus with this baby book,” he said to the boy. “It says right here: age two to six. How old are you?”
“Eight.”
“You see how big the words are? Don’t be getting on my bus with this baby book. You shouldn’t be reading these big words.”
In his mind, though, Vick did not blame the boy. The boy’s book choice, Vick later said, “goes to show you that nobody’s pushing this kid.” Yet Vick didn’t fully blame the parents either. Perhaps they were doing their best. Perhaps they couldn’t afford to buy him new books and didn’t have time to take him to the library. Perhaps they were overwhelmed by their circumstances. Vick had eight kids and he believed that he’d tried his best with each of them. Two of them were in college. One was an accountant. Another worked for the city. But those were only the success stories. A few days earlier, his 23-year-old son Donte had called him from Tulsa County Jail in Oklahoma. He had been arrested on armed robbery charges. “He asked if I could help him make bail. He said, ‘Dad, my bail is four hundred thousand dollars.’ I said, ‘Nigga, I ain’t got four dollars.’”
Vick’s life was unraveling. A few months before Vick was scheduled to graduate, his vocational school, Micropower Career Institute, shut down. Federal authorities charged school administrators with fraud, accusing them of issuing illegitimate visas. Vick hoped to transfer his credits to another school, but he wasn’t sure if any other school would oblige. He had been in the process of getting an internship, a requirement for his degree, but he learned that many hospitals didn’t want to work with students from his school anymore. “I’m worried I have to start over from scratch,” Vick said.
He didn’t have enough money to start over. He had already invested all he had in his schooling. With that in limbo, he went back to looking for work. He picked up some temporary gigs with a former Mo Better parent who worked as a construction contractor. It was enough to pay the bills. In recent weeks, Vick had worked on a warehouse project in lower Manhattan. While soldering pipes, he scorched his hand. The jackhammering wore on his back, which was now in constant pain. “I’m too old for manual labor,” he said. “But I don’t know what else I can do.”
Meanwhile, Vick’s girlfriend had kicked him out of her apartment. He’d been looking for a new place to live for several weeks now, which was not easy in New York City, not even in east Brooklyn—especially for a renter unable to afford even $500 a month. He was now staying at a classmate’s house.
The stresses weighed on Vick’s mind. Back in his seat in the last row of the bus, he slept for the rest of the ride.
THE PEE WEES leaned their foreheads against the bus windows. “Yoooo, look at,” said Oomz. The field’s artificial grass was a lush green with bright white lines. The building behind the field, which housed a basketball gym and locker rooms, shone with fresh blue and cream paint. A forest thick with pine trees stood on one side of the field. Train tracks ran along the other side. “This is beautiful,” said Hart.
The Pee Wees marched off the bus. Many of them wore their freshest pair of sneakers: Isaiah in LeBron XIs, Oomz in Air Jordan IIIs, Chaka in Air Jordan VIs. They lined up on a paved path that snaked through the woods and onto the field. Birds chirped. A woman in black tights jogged past. Oomz’s eyes followed her. “She got that badonkadonk,” he said with a mischievous smile.
The morning was windy. Many of the boys had their hoods over their heads and their hands stuffed into their pockets. Chris walked beside the line of players like a general assessing his troops.
“Take the hood off ya head,” he said. “When we travel we take the hoods off our heads.”
“But we from Brownsville!” Oomz shouted sarcastically.
“We ain’t in the hood,” Chris said. “We out the hood. This is not hood activity.”
On the field, the Pee Wees slipped on their pads and formed a circle for stretching. A freight train chugged beside the field with a low rumble. The boys reached down to stretch their hamstrings, pulled their legs up to stretch their quads, sat down and twisted their torsos to stretch their backs, and brought
their feet in and leaned forward to stretch their groins. They counted to 10 in unison for each stretch. The train chugged on, its front end and back end out of sight. Donnie had started counting the cars but gave up after 20.
“Yo, how long is this train, though?” Hart said.
“What if it never ends?” Chaka said.
“Nah, man, it’s gotta end,” Oomz said. “Everything got an end.”
“Isaiah, you think you faster than that train?” Time Out said.
“Isaiah faster than you, though,” Hart said, and the boys laughed.
“See, it’s different kinds of speed,” Time Out said. “I’m zero to forty real quick. Isaiah zero to sixty real quick.”
“Isaiah zero to one hundred real quick!” Hart said. “For real, though, we gon’ give up less than twenty yards today. They not going nowhere.” He paused for a second, then added, “All right, I’ma stop being cocky. We gon’ give up less than thirty yards.”
As the boys spoke, they stopped counting out loud and some ended their stretches early before the whole group reached 10.
“C’mon, we gotta do it as a team!” said Oomz, suddenly serious, his voice loud and sharp.
“Now you wanna talk about the team?” Time Out jabbed. “Now you wanna talk about the team? Now you wanna talk about the team?”
“’Member when you quit?” Naz joined in.
“But now we a team, huh?” Time Out said.
“Why’d you quit anyway?” Hart asked.
“He couldn’t take how Andrell was yelling at him,” Time Out said.
Oomz sat quietly, frowning, looking at the ground, shaking his head.
ISAIAH GOT THE ball on the offense’s first play. He ran toward the middle of the line, then hopped outside around the edge. A defender met him 10 yards upfield and Isaiah accelerated, lowered his shoulder and bucked the boy onto his back, and his teammates and parents let out a collective “Wooooo!” He raced down the sideline and dove into the end zone. On the next possession, Isaiah got the ball again, on a sweep to the outside. He sprinted around the corner and ran 50 yards, untouched for another touchdown.
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