A bunch of boys nodded, some hummed “mm-hmm,” several raised their hands, and Marquis said, “My dad works at Rikers Island!” Chris quickly waved his hands, holding in a laugh as he realized the boys hadn’t recognized that his question was rhetorical. “Don’t put your hands up,” he said. “Don’t say anything. I’m not trying to put your business out there.”
The whole time Chris spoke, Oomz stared out the window, impatient to get moving.
AS THE BUS crawled through thick traffic, the boys took in the sights out the window, keeping up a steady commentary. Prospect Park. Barclay’s Center. “Do you think Jay-Z is in there?” “He probably don’t even stay in Brooklyn no more.” Tall, unfinished towers, steel beams exposed, cranes and scaffolding hanging off the side, men in hard hats and orange vests gathered at the base preparing to begin the day’s work. Brooklyn Bridge to the left. Statue of Liberty beyond it in the distance. Lower Manhattan rising high above the choppy waters. Packs of Canal Street pedestrians seeping around unmoving cars like floodwater. Old men smoking cigarettes leaning against light poles. Refrigerated transport vans, hazard lights flashing, double-parked on narrow one-way side streets. Young men in hoodies unloading crates from the trucks, stacking them on dollies, and rolling them into stores. Old Chinese men and women hawking fresh fish and vegetables on the sidewalk. Rhythms many generations old, through changing skylines, clothing styles, and car models.
Soon the bus escaped the slog of the city’s streets, zipping through the Holland Tunnel and popping out onto the clear highways of New Jersey, passing lush parkways and quaint towns with clapboard houses and brick churches with sharp steeples, then winding through dark green swamps and waterways, over a rusted bridge, barges in the river, smokestacks in the distance, tractor trailers and gravel mounds on big lots, warehouses and refineries beside railroad tracks. The boys cringed at the fishy smell that wisped in through the open windows.
IT WAS ANOTHER easy win. The Pee Wees were in no rush to get back to Brooklyn. Their pads were off, their sweat had dried, and their stomachs were full from the hot dogs and sunflower seeds the adults had bought them after the game. They walked slowly, with much swagger and laughter, across the stadium’s cement concourse and onto the parking lot, where the bus waited. Big Oomz stopped his son and a few of his teammates for a photo. Their wide smiles disappeared. They posed with hard faces tilted back and their hands holding up peace signs. After Big Oomz got the shot and put his phone back in his pocket, the smiles returned. The team marched together in a long, strung-out pack and began filing onto the bus.
“That was Oomz!” Donnie shouted from the back of the group. “That was Oomz that put somebody in an ambulance! That was Oomz!”
Naz leaned his head out the bus window and yelled, “Brotha, how you break that boy leg?”
Oomz shrugged.
The Pee Wees congregated in the back of the bus, which quickly filled with the musty scent of sweat-soaked socks and undershirts. A dozen of them huddled around Isaiah, who had the game recorded on his mom’s iPad. They knelt backward on seats and leaned across aisles. Isaiah held the screen out so all could see.
“Yo, watch me on this,” Oomz said, as the screen showed the opening kickoff.
The boys burst into cheers when Oomz knocked an opponent to the ground with a powerful block.
“Yo, Oomz, what you do to that kid?” Hart said.
“I said put ’im in a coffin!” Oomz said. “Did y’all just see that hit?”
The boys were giddy seeing themselves on screen. Here was a record of their hard, unnoticed work. Here was Dorian beating the runner to the outside, forcing the runner towards the mass of Dorian’s teammates in the middle of the field. Here was Hart driving a defensive lineman back nearly 10 yards. Here was Chaka sprinting 30 yards downfield and laying a block on the only defender left between Isaiah and the end zone.
“Oh, we out! We out!” Naz said as Isaiah broke into the open field.
“Oh, Isaiah gone!” Time Out said.
“That was my block!” Chaka said.
“Yeah, good blocking,” Isaiah said. “That was real good blocking.”
Chaka, beaming now, leaned in closer to the screen.
“Took it to the crib!” Chaka said.
“To the house!” Isaiah said.
Isaiah had been dominant again. During a punt return, he picked up the ball with four defenders just a few yards in front of him, then stiff-armed one defender, ran around the rest, and raced 80 yards. On one defensive play, Donnie grabbed the quarterback and Isaiah ran up, snatched the ball from his hands, and went the other way for a touchdown.
The bus ride home was a din of jokes, horseplay, and music. As the bus crossed the Manhattan Bridge and the city skyline began to light up in the encroaching dusk, Isaiah danced in his seat, rocking his shoulders side to side, raising his voice over the wind flapping through an open window, rapping with his teammates, “Bitch caught a body bout a week agoooooo!”
“Week ago!” echoed Oomz, standing, arms swaying, the volume all the way up on the phone in his hand.
The boys danced and laughed all the way to Brownsville. Counting the forfeit, the team was 3–0. The hardest games were yet to come, but those matters were for Monday.
15
EAST ORANGE
Mid-September 2014
THEY HAD DONE EVERYTHING RIGHT THAT WEEK.
The coaches didn’t need to remind the boys what was at stake. The East Orange Jaguars beat them soundly last season. The Mo Better boys missed tackles and blocks. They kept the game close for two quarters, then fell behind, and when they fell behind, “they had terrible body language,” Esau said. “They looked like they gave up.” The East Orange Jaguars were tall and fast, the boys remembered. But looking back, the Pee Wees still believed they had been good enough to beat them—they just didn’t have the heart to do it. “Last year we did bad,” Time Out said. “I learned a lot of lessons from that loss and the other losses: don’t put anybody down; lift everybody up. We all pointed fingers. This year, though, I think is gon’ be my favorite year. We got every skill—defensive, offensive, speed, agility, passing. We all know these two games coming up. We really wanna kill them. The playoffs is coming and we gotta make it in.” The East Orange Jaguars and Brick City Lions were their next two opponents. As Coach Chris had trumpeted all year, the Pee Wees had to get past Brick City and East Orange if they hoped to reach the regional championship game. East Orange had won the league title in Oomz’s and Hart’s age group last year and looked even better this year. Some Mo Better parents had heard that a few players from last year’s second-place Brick City team had jumped to East Orange.
The boys arrived at the week’s first practice serious and eager. For the first time all season, they had full attendance. They put on their pads in silence—no joking around, no proclamations about how badly they’d beat their opponents. Around them, the sounds of the park played on, like any other day, as if oblivious to the gravity of their endeavor. The train rumbled by. Children shouted in the distance. A basketball bounced. A bicycle chain spun. A car stereo thumped. Sneakers pounded the hard rubber track. A boom box bumped a Kendrick Lamar song. Stroller wheels squeaked. A dirt-bike engine hummed. Metal hooks on shoulder pads and metal buttons on helmets clicked and snapped. And soon, those helmets and shoulder pads were colliding, adding to Betsy Head’s symphony.
Practice was hard and physical. The linemen crashed into each other with game-day intensity. Hart and Donnie set the pace. Donnie threw his body into the offensive line full throttle on every play, driving through the blockers even after Esau blew his whistle. Within the first hour of practice, Donnie had gotten into three fights. At one point, after he grabbed Oomz’s neck in an attempt to tackle him, Oomz threw him to the ground, then Donnie hopped up and the two boys traded swings, both missing on right hooks before teammates pulled them apart. Hart, meanwhile, slammed a teammate to the ground on nearly every play. It was easy to identify the boys who were linin
g up against Hart because the backs of their jerseys were brown with dust.
The boys competed with such intensity that Esau had to tell them, “Yo! We’re not trying to kill our teammates! Linemen, you hear that? Save that for Sunday.” But Esau knew this was a good problem to have, and he couldn’t keep from smiling when he saw the boys getting after each other. His team, he could tell, was taking this game as seriously as he was. He had thought up new tactics. He taught the Pee Wees a new trick that he called “polar”: the offense lines up and the quarterback loudly calls “Go!” a few times in an effort to get the defense to jump offside. It was the sort of thing college and NFL teams did, but it required a level of discipline beyond what most Pee Wee teams had. The first time these Pee Wees attempted it, Chaka took off when Naz called “Go!” His teammates looked over at him. “Come on, Chaka!” Oomz said. “Hold your water, man!” But by the end of practice they had mastered the trick, as well as its strategic partner, the “quick snap”: the center hikes the ball to the quarterback on the first sound—on “Ready!” instead of after “Ready, set, go!”—and the quarterback sneaks through the sleeping defense.
They also learned the new plays Esau had created in recent weeks: a reverse pitch to Isaiah, an option pitch to Marquis, a deep pass to Chaka after a fake handoff, a run up the middle on a direct snap to Oomz. The boys practiced these plays with urgency. “Everybody, get set!” Isaiah shouted when they broke the huddle. “Get set! Hurry up!”
The parents along the fence cheered on the offense’s evolution.
“Esau pulling out all the plays!” Repo shouted. “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!”
“They look like they wanna do something this year,” Mr. Hart added. “They lookin’ sharp. Focused.”
“We’ll find out what they’re really about this week,” Ramsey said.
The intensity kept up through the week. On Thursday, the team’s day off from practice, Time Out and Marquis set up a video chat on their phones and did push-ups and sit-ups together in their respective bedrooms. Oomz and Donnie played tackle football with other boys at the park. Isaiah re-watched footage of the previous week’s game. Hart worked on his defensive line moves with his father in their cement backyard. For this important week, the coaches were able to pull together enough funding for two buses, which was a relief to the Pee Wees because it meant that the Mitey Mites, scheduled to play at 10 a.m., could leave earlier on their own bus while the two older groups followed after another hour of sleep.
Friday’s practice was perhaps the best they’d had all year, Esau said to Andrell. When Esau had the boys line up for sprints, not a single one complained. Not even Oomz. “Y’all run hard!” Oomz shouted to his teammates. “Let’s go! Everybody run hard!” The park was nearly empty by then. Just a few Mitey Mites waiting for their parents to pick them up, four men kicking around a soccer ball, and these 16 middle schoolers and their two 20-something coaches remained on the field past 7:30 p.m. The sounds of football, of hitting and shouting and cleats thudding on hard dirt, carried across the park until practice was done and the players gathered around their coaches. Esau felt good about his team’s chances.
“They running back, he’s a strong little guy, but y’all strong too,” he told the boys. “Y’all should fuck him up.”
“He ain’t been hit like y’all gon’ hit him,” Andrell said.
“They got athletes just like us but not better,” Esau said. “Y’all gotta make plays. Football comes down to who makes plays. Ain’t gonna be no clowning when they on the field.”
He sensed that his Pee Wees had matured much since last year. He saw in them more resilience and confidence. But he knew their resilience and confidence had not yet been tested this season.
“Ain’t nobody scored on us yet,” he told his team. “If somebody scores on us—it’s OK. It’s OK. I’m gon’ yell at you, ’cause it’s what coaches do. But it’s gonna be all right. People gon’ score on you in football. Don’t drop ya heads. Don’t drop ya heads. Come back and get it back.”
He paused as the train rumbled by.
“Listen, I wanna tell y’all something,” he continued. “Chris gon’ say all this and make this a big deal about East Orange. But they nowhere near better than y’all. I get upset when I think that they beat us last year. They cocky—they similar to us but they not better than us. We gotta punch ’em in the mouth. We should block them the fuck up. We should not lose to this team.”
THEY HAD DONE everything right that week, but when game day dawned, everything seemed to go wrong.
The Pee Wee team’s school bus was supposed to leave Betsy Head at 7:30 a.m., but it didn’t pull up to the park until 9:00, after an hour of frustrated coaches making frantic phone calls and restless players, like Oomz and Donnie, letting off steam by punching one another on the arm to see who could hit harder or racing to snag a bouncing football. “Stop playing!” Esau said more than once. “Y’all playin’ too much!” Twenty minutes into the trip, as the boys gawked at the gold-plated columns of the Brooklyn Public Library, Esau noticed that the bus was making a wrong turn on the Grand Army Plaza roundabout. “Yo, bus driver, where you going?” Esau said. After a brief exchange about which way to go on Flatbush Avenue that left Esau rolling his eyes, he directed the driver, “Bridge is that way. You gotta go north.”
An hour later, the bus reached East Orange, a suburban town with a familiar story: mostly upper-middle-class and white half a century ago and now mostly black and working class thanks to years of white flight and racist housing policies. The bus rumbled through tree-lined streets and past houses with short fences and long porches before turning into the parking lot of Paul Robeson Stadium. Many boys were looking out the window. They watched a group of East Orange Jaguars step out of a maroon van parked next to the bus. The talking stopped, and the boys on the bus stared silently. Heartbeats accelerated.
The Pee Wees pretended not to look at the East Orange players standing by the maroon van, and the East Orange players pretended not to look at the Brownsville boys walking into the stadium. Two 30-something men, with dreads and blue-and-red East Orange Jaguar shirts, leaned against the fence encircling the field. As the Mo Better Pee Wees walked past, one of the men said, “Y’all ready?” They ignored him and made their way to the empty far end of the bleachers. “There ain’t no room for errors today,” Hart said to his teammates, their eyes all on the field. The Mitey Mites had lost badly, and the Junior Pee Wee game was already off to a bad start for the Mo Better side. It was overcast and blustery. On a patch of grass behind the end zone, right in front of Hart and his teammates, their imminent opponents, the East Orange Pee Wees, lined up in front of a photographer for portraits—on a knee, football in arm, the customary pose.
“They look mad big,” said Chaka.
“I’m nervous,” Time Out said. “I just wanna see how they hit.”
“If we lose this game—I’m not saying—but if we lose this game we gotta beat Brick City to get in the playoffs, huh?” Chaka said.
“If we lose this game, we gotta win the rest of our games,” Time Out said.
East Orange’s Pee Wees were bigger because more than half of them qualified as “older/lighter.” While 9-, 10-, and 11-year-olds had to begin the season at 130 pounds or less to play Pee Wee, 12-year-olds were eligible if they weighed less than 110 pounds. Successful Pop Warner teams usually relied on a core group of older/lighters—their experience, skill, and strength. Every middle schooler knew how much of a difference one year could make during this prepubescent stretch, how seventh graders were so much more physically mature than sixth graders. It had been a group of older/lighters who had carried Mo Better’s greatest teams to championships. This year’s East Orange Pee Wees, an East Orange parent told Hart’s father, had 14 older/lighters. Mo Better’s Pee Wees had three: Chaka, Time Out, and Isaiah.
As if the Pee Wees hadn’t been shaken enough that morning, they encountered near catastrophe less than an hour before kickoff when H
art realized that he was missing a cleat. He’d left it on the bus, but the bus was no longer in the parking lot. Panic spread through the boys and their parents as it occurred to everybody that the team would have to forfeit if one of their 16 players didn’t have two cleats. After a nerve-rattling 30 minutes, by some miracle the bus pulled into the parking lot with barely two minutes to spare before the weigh-in cutoff time. With everybody in purple and yellow already on edge, the first big game of the year got started.
IT WAS A hard-hitting game from the start. Mo Better opened on offense, and the East Orange defense swarmed Isaiah eight yards behind the line on the first play, then stuffed him for no gain on the second play. On third down, Naz threw a pass and East Orange intercepted it. Mo Better’s defense responded by knocking the East Orange offense back several yards on their first two plays. On third down, the East Orange quarterback threw a pass to a receiver deep down the field. The ball wobbled high in the air, floating slowly down toward Chaka, who seemed in position for an easy interception, but he jumped too early and the ball breezed over his fingertips and into the arms of the receiver, who jogged into the end zone. 6–0.
This would be a game of turning points, and here was the first one, decided by inches, filling East Orange with confidence and affirming the anxiety and dread that had hovered over Mo Better all day. Chaka slapped his thighs and brought his face to his hands.
“Keep ya head up!” Oomz said to his teammates as they jogged to the sideline. “Keep ya head up!”
The teams traded big hits, and both defenses held firm. Mo Better’s offense clawed forward, fighting hard for each yard. Oomz up the middle—loss of one yard. Marquis around the edge—loss of five. Isaiah on a pitch to the outside, stiff-arming a defender in the backfield then sprinting past two more before getting drilled into the sidelines—a tough three yards. He wasn’t used to getting manhandled like this. Neither were Oomz and Hart. But here they were, getting knocked backward, unable to move their opponents the way they wanted to. It was a humbling, discouraging feeling being physically overpowered like this, especially for those accustomed to doing the overpowering. These East Orange boys were strong, athletic, and tough. When Isaiah, Oomz, or Hart hit them, they hit back harder on the next play. For the first time all season, their opponents didn’t fear them. Hart noticed some of his teammates turning hesitant. He saw some of them wide-eyed and stiff in the huddle, far from the casual cool they usually projected. The sense of dejection seemed to carry from the boys on the field to their parents in the stands, who weren’t used to seeing their offense struggle.
Never Ran, Never Will Page 24