It was the toughest practice the 7-, 8-, and 9-year-old Mitey Mites had had all season. First they ran wind sprints. Then they did push-ups with their legs propped up on the red cement steps for added difficulty. Then they did 100 or so yards of crab walks, scurrying on all fours from one end of the park to the other. They did up-downs, dust billowing as they chopped the ground with their feet and flopped to their chests. They ran around the track, over and over. When they didn’t follow Vick’s directions fast enough, he ordered push-ups. Less than an hour into practice, the Mitey Mites were exhausted. Their legs churned as if they were in water. They bent over, hands on knees, at every break. They sucked air and their faces looked pained.
Standing out of Vick’s earshot, the other Mitey Mite coaches, James and Oscar, wondered aloud if he was pushing the boys too hard, if he was perhaps taking out his own frustrations on them. But who were they to tell him how to coach his team? The man was a legend at this park. If Mo Better had a Mount Rushmore, Coach Vick’s face would be on it. He had coached at this program far longer than they had and he was, without doubt, its most widely respected figure. The assistant coaches let Vick do his thing.
Vick believed his boys needed a jolt. After opening the season with a win, they’d lost the next two games. Vick had never lost three games in a row.
“I got a reputation to maintain,” he said.
He sensed his reputation was slipping, and he was right. Across the program, his former players whispered that Vick had lost some of his fire. Hart and Oomz both said that Vick had calmed down in recent years. Vick’s son, Vick III, said that he didn’t see the same passion his father once had. Coach Vick missed practice more often. Coach Vick didn’t demand as many push-ups. Coach Vick didn’t yell as frequently or as loudly. Simply, Coach Vick didn’t care as much. The string of losses had shocked Vick into realizing it. He hadn’t been his old self this season, he now believed.
“I’ve been distracted,” he said. “Very distracted.”
He’d been laid off from the warehouse job and was back on unemployment checks, looking for work. But now, as his players sprinted across the field, he felt his spirits rising. He observed 9-year-old Puerto Rico, chubby and slow, pumping his legs harder than anyone else, busting his ass for a team that might not win two games this season. After the loss in East Orange, as he lit a postgame cigarette, hand cupped to block the wind, Vick had said, “Only one that came to play today was Puerto Rico.”
PUERTO RICO WAS always smiling, even though he was not ignorant to the turmoil around him. His mother, Alicia, had hoped to move the family to Miami before the school year started, but the plan fell through. The boy was familiar with stumbling blocks. He’d been born a sick child, with a kidney disease that caused intense pain in his abdomen and sometimes kept him from peeing for days at a time. He’d had six surgeries in his young life. Alicia had canceled the move to Miami because her son’s ailment had worsened during the summer, keeping him in bed.
Because of his early health complications, Puerto Rico couldn’t walk until he was three and didn’t talk until he was three and a half. He seemed so fragile. His mother hovered over him everywhere he went, and whenever he stumbled she would catch him before he hit the ground. But she worried that her instincts to protect him would only hold him back further. She did what she could to help him catch up. She signed him up for swimming and karate classes. She read to him every night and taught him to read herself, and by the time he was in kindergarten, he was the smartest kid in his class. When he was in third grade, he was reading at a sixth-grade level.
When he was six, he asked his mother to let him play football, and she agreed only because she assumed he would quit after a few weeks. As she watched the first practice, she was even more sure that he would quit. Alicia’s brother was in the Air Force, and the practice reminded her of a military boot camp. Puerto Rico had never been yelled at before and had never done anything so physical and exhausting. She was sure he would cry. Instead, he was smiling when he ran off the field after each practice, and before practice he would urge Alicia to hurry up and get ready because he didn’t want to be late.
During one practice, Puerto Rico collapsed. At the hospital, the doctor told Alicia that there was a clog in his system preventing oxygen from getting to his brain. They performed emergency surgery. The following week, Puerto Rico begged Alicia to let him go to practice and kept begging until the doctors cleared him to play three weeks later. During the last game of that season, Puerto Rico played on the offensive line and was getting beat up by a boy nearly twice his size. Every play, Puerto Rico would drive into the boy and, nearly every play, Puerto Rico would end up on the ground. On a snap late in the fourth quarter, though, Puerto Rico drove into the boy once more, and this time he drove so hard that he toppled the boy onto his back.
By Puerto Rico’s second year on the team in the fall of 2013, he and Vick were close. Alicia sometimes asked Vick to speak with her son whenever she was especially worried about him. Usually it had to do with Puerto Rico’s relationship with his father. After a practice that season, Puerto Rico told Vick he was upset that his father’s girlfriend was pregnant with a boy who would be named after his father. He wondered if his dad was ashamed of him because of his disease—if that was why his father was not among the fathers at Betsy Head to watch practice. This was an emotional period for the boy. When teammates or classmates bothered him, he tried to fight them. He cried more than he ever had. Many days he didn’t want to go to football. He made excuses, said his back or stomach hurt. He talked back to his mom and acted up at home.
Over those months, he had many long conversations with Coach Vick after practice, and by the following spring, the anger that seemed to overcome him had faded and he was again a playful, obedient, optimistic boy. His temper had been tested that spring. One day at school, a classmate punched him in the face in the hallway, and Puerto Rico refused to hit him back. A teacher saw it happen, and the boy was expelled. When Alicia asked Puerto Rico why he didn’t swing at the boy, he said that his martial arts instructor had told him to avoid fights. He ended the school year with perfect attendance and the highest mark in his third-grade class.
Yet the boy couldn’t catch a break. On Labor Day 2014, his favorite uncle, the one in the Air Force, died. Puerto Rico took the news hard. Mother and son flew to Florida for the funeral a few days later. There, Alicia learned that her brother had been accused of attempted rape and locked in jail. He had gotten into a fight with another inmate and been sent to solitary confinement, where he killed himself. She didn’t tell Puerto Rico these details. He was back at practice as soon as they returned to Brooklyn.
WATCHING PUERTO RICO, Vick felt a pang of shame for his spell of self-pity. In his head, he repeated to himself the words he’d said to countless kids: Toughen up… Be a man… Losing’s a part of life… Don’t like how it feels, you gotta do something about it. He recalled a day that summer when a small boy at his first practice started crying because the drills were too hard. “You not no boy anymore,” Vick had said to him. “Suck it up. You not no boy. You’re a big dog now. Say, ‘I’m a big dog.’” “I’m a big dog,” the boy said, meekly and through sniffles. “Say, ‘I’m a big dog!’” Vick repeated, his voice stronger, more self-assured. “I’m a big dog!” the boy shouted, wiping his tears on his sleeves then heading back into the mix.
The Mitey Mites were running laps now, a single-file line with Puerto Rico at the head. Vick jogged beside them. When they finished the lap, the coach led them back onto the field and told them to get into a circle. He counted to 10, and when he reached 10, the attempted circle looked more like a horseshoe. Vick ordered them back to the track.
The Pee Wee parents, standing along the fence at the edge of the track, looked on with approval, smiling to one another and joking about “ol’ Coach Vick bringing that Mo Better discipline back.” But Coach Chris, watching from the other side of the field, was anxious. He walked to James and Oscar and said, “H
e gotta calm down. I gotta talk to him.” At the next water break, Chris went to Vick and told him to “turn it down.”
Vick gathered the team and told them he appreciated their hard work today. This would be a hard week, he said. This was Brick City week. It was also homecoming week. The teams would play at South Shore High School, Chris’s alma mater, and Chris had invited every former player he could think of. It was the biggest, most anticipated game day of the year, and Vick didn’t want to get embarrassed. “They coming,” he said. “I’m tellin’ you right now—they coming to Brooklyn, and one of the worst feelings in the world is getting beat up at home.”
IN 18 YEARS, Chris had never before told Vick to calm down. It was a sign of the times, Vick believed. He’d noticed a shift in how parents expected their kids to be treated. “Used to be, ‘Coach Vick, do what the fuck you want,’” he said. Nearly every week, parents and players from those days dropped by Betsy Head to tell Vick how big of an impact he’d had, instilling work ethic and discipline.
Vick knew not every parent liked him. Specifically, there was a certain type of father he always seemed to come across—an absent, or sometimes absent, father who didn’t show up to a single game or practice but heard all about Coach Vick from his son or, worse, his son’s mother. The father, hard with envy, would usually show up at the year-end banquet and mug at Vick, and then Vick would ask the man to step outside and say something like, “Don’t let this suit fool you. I don’t appreciate this disrespect and I’ll do what I gotta do.” Or, instead of mugging at him, the father would greet him with over-the-top graciousness, hearty back slaps, and big promises. These men annoyed Vick more than the ones who mugged at him. “They come up to me and say, ‘Coach Vick, I appreciate what you’ve done. I just wanna tell you I’ma be around more and let me know if you need my help,’” Vick said, before adding with a tone of disgust, “If I need your help?”
This came with the territory, and Vick expected it. What he did not anticipate was the type of parent that had emerged in recent years: present, active, loving ones who couldn’t stand to see their sons wincing in pain and heaving for air during a tough practice. These days, Vick heard that parents were complaining about him, telling Chris, “Coach Vick is too mean.” “These parents pacify their kids more,” Vick said. “It’s a generational difference.” He wondered if some of them had threatened Chris with lawsuits, if maybe that was why, after all these years, Chris felt the need to tell him to calm down.
Vick respected the parents who let their kids struggle, who understood the value of pain and resilience. In the long run, Vick believed, their kids would be the ones who navigated past Brownsville and past college and rose up through the cold, hard professional world. And in the short term, he knew, their kids would be the ones who won football games. To Vick, the parents of the Pee Wee boys were a good example. “Look at all those fathers over there,” he said, gazing across Betsy Head the evening before the Brick City game. As always, the fathers stood along the fence watching their boys, cheering their hits, chiding their mistakes, demanding effort and improvement. The evenings were darker now, and the park lights were on. A cold and vicious wind kicked up the dirt and blew thick clouds of dust all across the park. The fathers covered their faces with their hands, hats, or shirt collars. “It’s hoodie weather right now,” Dorian’s father, Dwight, said.
These fathers were of the same mind as Vick. All week they’d been discussing the headline NFL news: star running back Adrian Peterson had been indicted on child abuse charges for hitting his 4-year-old son with a switch.
“It’s bullshit,” Marquis’s father, Ramsey, said. “I don’t think he did anything wrong. I just whooped Marquis ass the other day.” Marquis had talked back at home, he said, so he got the extension cord. “He begged me not to use it,” Ramsey continued. “No! No! Please! Please!” His wife told him not to use the extension cord—“Too much. Too rough,” he recalled his wife saying. “Use the belt instead.” And when he got the belt, Marquis let out a relieved sigh before bracing himself. “You see,” Ramsey said to his wife. “He ain’t even scared of this!”
Fear was the whole point, Ramsey said to the other fathers. “I’m trying to put the fear in him,” he said. “If he don’t fear this, it ain’t do nothing.”
Not all the fathers agreed with corporal punishment. Mr. Hart said that he didn’t hit his children, but he respected a parent’s right to decide how to best discipline his child. His own father had hit him, and he believed that it helped keep him in line. “But it was a different time,” he said. Dwight said that he didn’t hit his kids either, but he understood “that to a man who was disciplined that way, that’s how he will discipline his own kid. If you exposed to only one thing, you’ll stick to what you know.”
The fathers nodded in unison. This was a sensitive topic, they all knew. It was a personal, in-house philosophy, the men believed, and they were hesitant to criticize how another man raised his son. Four years old was probably too young, the fathers along the fence agreed—especially these days.
“From the outside, it looks really bad,” Dwight said.
“It’s a different time,” Ramsey said.
Ramsey’s mother began beating him when he was around 4, he said. They lived in Far Rockaway, Queens, in a neighborhood filled with distractions. “Drugs and girls and criminals,” he said. He remembered getting into the shower after beatings; the soap burned his wounds. “The scars helped me remember not to fuck up,” he said. “It built my character.”
Ramsey took off his sunglasses and wiped them on the white T-shirt under his hoodie.
“If a kid is disrespectful, disobedient, acting up, I’d rather he get a few scars now than end up committing a crime later, end up in jail or dying, because what can you do then? Can’t take that back. You only get one try. Like a lion raises its cubs to make it in the jungle, a man gotta raise his son.”
Ramsey considered himself a man of initiative and action. He had big dreams for his son and he knew the margin of error was thin. Marquis was competing—for a spot in a private high school, admission to an elite university, a white-collar job offer—with rich white kids whose parents had the money and connections to bail them out of jams and hook them up with fast-track opportunities. To keep up with those more privileged, Ramsey was always thinking ahead, always making moves. In the spring, he’d sent his son to this youth football team with pipelines to some of the city’s top high schools. In the summer, he’d signed his son up for football camps at some of those high schools.
It was his nature to try to take control of situations, and the Pee Wees’ loss to East Orange had prodded this aspect of his character. “That shit bothered me,” he said. “It bothered me.” Another loss would likely doom their playoff chances: Brick City was also 3–1, having lost to the same opponent, and jockeyed with Mo Better for the second of two playoff slots in the division they shared with undefeated East Orange. On Monday morning, the day after the game, he sent Esau a long text message—a “love letter,” Ramsey called it—saying that he appreciated Esau and everything he was doing, and then asking if Esau would allow him to help out. He volunteered to work with the linemen. Ramsey had played on the line back in high school, and the line had been the team’s weak point against East Orange. Esau accepted the offer, and that evening he told the team that Marquis’s father would be joining his coaching staff.
“I know y’all don’t know me,” Ramsey told the team. “I don’t know y’all. But I watched the game, and discipline is one thing y’all need.”
Ramsey’s impact was immediate and loud. When one boy was slow to put his pads on before practice, Ramsey said to him, sarcastically, “Wassup, boss, long day at work?” When the boys did their warm-up jog around the track too lackadaisically for his taste, Ramsey shouted at them to speed up, and when they still weren’t going fast enough, he joined them, setting the pace at the front of the line. With Esau’s approval, he devoted the first half hour of practice to conditioning
. He had the boys do bear crawls across the field. Oomz, Donnie, and Chaka sucked their teeth and half-assed the drill, moving slowly and then, when Ramsey wasn’t looking, standing up and running forward a few yards, then dropping back down before Ramsey caught them cheating. When Ramsey did catch them cheating, he yelled at them, and when Oomz talked back, Ramsey yelled even louder and Esau yelled at him too, demanding that Oomz show Ramsey respect. It was a hard practice, focused on blocking and tackling. The boys did full-contact hitting drills for the first time since Hell Week. They finished the night sore and dirty.
Now it was Friday, the evening before the Brick City game, and the boys were in full pads, still blocking and tackling. Usually, practice was relaxed the day before a game. Players usually wore shorts and T-shirts and jogged through plays. Tonight, though, they were smacking one another to the ground, dust billowing into the air and floating up into the lights above the field. When a boy made a mistake, Ramsey called for push-ups. Fifteen push-ups. Twenty push-ups. Twelve push-ups. Forty push-ups. And then, one time, Ramsey kept shouting “Down-up!” as the boys counted past 50, then 60. He kept shouting “Down-up!”––even as the boys were barely able to lower themselves more than a few inches and barely able to push themselves back up––until they reached 100. And then it was back to hitting. It was the toughest, most physically demanding practice of the year. If a boy didn’t hit the ballcarrier hard enough, Ramsey told him to go again. “My man, soccer season is over,” he said to one boy.
“You better be ready for war!” he shouted at the boys. “You better be ready for war!”
Chaka didn’t hide his frustration. He wasn’t always in the mood to hit, and when he went up against Oomz during a tackling drill, he weakly threw his arms around Oomz’s waist, slipping off as Oomz powered through.
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