Even with Tarell, the Mitey Mites were two players short of the minimum 16. Another forfeit loss to cap off the worst season of Coach Vick’s career. But Vick and the opposing coach didn’t tell their young boys that Mo Better had forfeited. Instead, the two teams played on as if the game counted. By the time he stepped onto the field, Tarell was wide awake and giddy, darting around like a pinball from his safety position in the back of the defense. He was the smallest boy on the field, yet the hardest hitter. He earned awed shouts from the crowd on three big hits within the first 10 minutes of the game. Late in the first half, he drilled a tall running back so hard that the boy flew two yards out of bounds before smacking the ground.
Donnie cheered the loudest, and all through the game he ran up and down the stands telling whoever was listening that the little boy making the big hits was his brother. “You know why he so strong? ’Cause I’m always bothering him,” he said. “I’m always hitting him and pushing him. That’s why he strong. When I was his age, I wasn’t hitting like that. I wasn’t as strong. My big brother never hit around on me like that. He didn’t hit on me like I hit on my brother. That’s why he got strength.”
After the game, Tarell ran up and down the stands, excitedly babbling about how his team had won the game. A parent from the opposing team stopped him and corrected him: “The game didn’t count,” she said to him, in the sweet voice an adult uses when breaking sad news to a child. “You guys lost because you didn’t have enough players.” Tarell’s face turned hard and he ran over to Donnie and told him what happened.
“But we won, right?” he said in an urgent tone. “That lady was wrong, right?”
“Yeah, y’all won,” Donnie assured him. “That lady just jealous.”
An adult who overheard the whole thing gave Donnie and Tarell a few dollars to buy food from the concession stand. Donnie got Skittles, cookies, potato chips, a Twix bar, and sunflower seeds, then counted the change the man behind the counter gave him. “Ain’t these supposed to be ninety-nine cents?” he said, holding up the sunflower seed bag, which had a big yellow label on it that said 99 cents. The man behind the counter laughed.
“You a smart little guy, ain’t you?” he said. “You are right. But we gotta make money here, too.” Then he tossed Donnie a second bag, on the house. On the bus, Donnie offered a share of his snacks to all the boys seated around him. When a boy declined, Donnie countered, “Come on!” and pushed the Skittles bag closer to the boy’s face until he agreed and fished out two Skittles. “Take more!” Donnie said.
IT HAD BEEN a good year, the fathers agreed. The Pee Wees had finished the regular season with seven wins and just one loss, the second-best record in the conference behind the undefeated East Orange Jaguars. The team had lived up to, even surpassed, their expectations, and the fathers stood along the fence on this blustery Monday night reminiscing over the season and savoring Mo Better’s return to the playoffs.
But even this long-awaited moment brought frustrations. The conference was split up into two divisions: Mo Better, Brick City, Orange, and the East Orange Jaguars were in the red division; Elizabeth, Union, Rahway, and the East Orange Wildcats were in the blue division. Traditionally, the two best teams in each division competed in the four-team playoff tournament. But league rules stated that only teams with more wins than losses qualified for the playoffs. Only the East Orange Jaguars, Mo Better, and Brick City, which finished 5–3, met that standard. Mo Better’s coaches had never encountered such a situation. League officials decided that the reasonable solution was to include Brick City, the third-ranked team in the blue division, in the playoffs, and to eliminate all the red division teams from contention. From the officials’ eyes, this was a fair setup: the league’s second- and third-ranking teams, Mo Better and Brick City, would compete in a semifinal game for the chance to play the league’s top team in the championship.
The fathers at Betsy Head saw it another way: while East Orange benefited with a free pass through the semifinals and Brick City benefited with a trip to the playoffs, Mo Better was stuck playing against a strong team that they’d already beaten to snag the coveted second-place playoff spot.
To make matters worse, unlike in the regular season, when programs kept the profits from concessions, in the playoffs Pop Warner got the profits. Without the concession money, Chris and his staff didn’t have the funds to rent a field and pay referees, which meant that they had to relinquish their home-field advantage. Instead, the game would be played in New Jersey, on a field much closer to Newark than Brooklyn. Mo Better couldn’t even afford a bus. The boys and their families would have to carpool.
“They don’t want us to win this thing,” Repo said.
“It ain’t fair, man,” Mr. Hart said. “It’s us against the world. But I like our chances.”
Despite the circumstances, the men at the park were all confident. They discussed travel plans for Florida; after their boys won the league championship, and then the regional championship, they would be off to the Pop Warner Super Bowl in Orlando. How much were plane tickets? How long was the drive? Was Pop Warner covering the costs? What part of the country would their opponent come from? Texas, maybe, where the boys were big and tough? Or California, where the quarterbacks could throw the ball long? Or maybe they’d take on some track-star kids from Miami?
Their boys had beaten Brick City and grown as a team in the weeks since the East Orange game. Esau had crafted new plays specifically designed to slice through East Orange’s defense. He’d spent many practices working with his boys on defending East Orange’s passing attack.
“We gon’ beat them this time,” Esau told the fathers, who had no doubt this was true.
THE NEXT EVENING, Tuesday, Isaiah and Coach Chris were at the park early.
“How you doin’ in school?”
“I’m doin’ good.”
“You gotta be doin’ excellent. Your standards gotta be high if you gon’ do what you wanna do.”
Isaiah stood on his toes, heels hardly touching the grass, arms at his side, chiseled and motionless like a statue. Thick veins popped along his forearms and calves, and his biceps bulged from under his T-shirt. The season had honed his body, his teammates often pointed out. They squeezed his arms, poked his abdomen, and joked about how he was already faster and more muscled than some of the high school athletes they saw. He took care of his body. He did dozens of push-ups at home, lifted his brother’s barbells on occasion, and avoided any physical activity that might lead to freak injury. Like so many boys before him, he’d come to realize his body was a ticket to the life he wanted. Not just any ticket but perhaps the best ticket he’d ever have. A year and a half ago, he and his family hadn’t even considered the possibilities that Chris was now telling them were all but assured.
“Now, if you had the choice, would you rather go to Poly Prep for football or Xavier for rugby?” Chris asked him.
Isaiah shrugged.
“I mean, they both good schools,” he said. “Gym teacher, he wants you to go to Xavier. But Poly Prep, that’s another level. I know you like to play football. You go there, you do well, you’ll end up at Notre Dame.”
Chris patted him on the back and walked toward the red cement steps, where a woman in a gray suit was sitting. She was a social worker waiting to meet with Chris. He walked with purpose, nodding at the locals jogging around the track, pointing to the teenager who used to play for him strolling by the park, waving at the fathers standing along the fence. A good year, he thought. The rumors of Mo Better’s demise had vanished. His crop of superstar Pee Wees had astounded the high school coaches. Word was spreading, he said, that Mo Better was back. He flashed a big, warm smile at the social worker, patting her shoulder as he shook her hand. “A nice night, huh?” Chris said, hardly containing the excitement that had been coursing through him all week. “Thought it might rain tonight, but this is nice.”
The social worker, Jasmine, had heard about Chris. She hoped the renowned Brownsville foo
tball coach would take under his wing some of the troubled teenagers she worked with. She was here today for one particular 15-year-old who’d punched a classmate who he said had bullied him. The classmate’s mom pressed charges. The boy was suspended for a year and sent to an alternative school. “He’s a good, quiet kid,” she said to Chris. “But this one thing could really set him down a path that…” She paused to search for the right words.
“No, I know,” Chris jumped in. “I’ve seen it too many times.”
“I’ve heard about Brownsville,” Jasmine said.
“What you hear?”
“Nothing good.”
Jasmine had gotten the job in Brownsville just months ago, fresh out of New York University. People warned her about the neighborhood, she said. She’d grown up in a rough part of Youngstown, Ohio, and yet even she was intimidated by Brownsville’s reputation. She took a cab to work on her first day, “for safety,” she said. Her knowledge of the neighborhood to that point had mostly come through depressing and horrific news reports.
She’d heard about the 26-year-old man shot dead at a barbecue in June. The child struck by a bottle tossed out the window of an apartment in July. The 48-year-old woman dragged out of her home nearly naked by the police who stormed her building. The apartment complex on Rockaway Avenue that had turned into a rotting, boiling husk after the landlord shut off electricity, gas, and hot water and stopped throwing out the garbage bags in the middle of summer. Within just the past few weeks, she’d heard about the 22-year-old man beaten to death by a dozen men under the 3 train tracks on Livonia Avenue and about the three people shot in broad daylight near Thomas S. Boyland Street.
On her trips into the neighborhood that summer, she’d seen the police cruisers circling the blocks and the pairs of officers stationed on the corners. But it was fall now, the days shorter and colder, and the police presence had decreased. On this night, just one cop stood outside the bodega on Saratoga and Livonia.
ON WEDNESDAY, IT rained.
It was a miserable day, windy and dark and near freezing. The lights were on at the park when Donnie and Tarell arrived. Chaka sat shivering on the green bench.
“Cuz, it’s way too cold,” he said to Donnie while throwing a football to him. The ball thudded off Donnie’s hands and fell to the ground.
“My fingers hurt so bad,” Donnie said.
He and Tarell had stayed home from school that day “’cause it was raining,” he said. The field was muddy and dotted with puddles. The harsh wind knocked leaves off the trees, pinning them against the chain-link fence. When Ramsey arrived, Donnie asked, “We still gon’ practice?”
“Yeah, it’s playoff week,” Ramsey said. “Whatchu thinkin’, man?”
“Are we gon’ tackle today or nah?” Donnie said.
“My man, it’s playoff week,” Ramsey said. “We doin’ everything!”
“Aw nah, man,” Chaka said. “It’s too cold!”
“We gotta play East Orange and Brick City again, huh?” Donnie said.
“Uh-huh,” replied Chaka.
“But not if we lose, we don’t play East Orange,” Donnie added.
“We not gon’ lose, boy,” Chaka declared, looking at Donnie like he was crazy. “We goin’ all the way.”
Once all 16 Pee Wees had arrived, Coach Esau, as he did at the start of every practice, ordered them into two lines for their lap around the track. The boys, cold and stiff, half-heartedly shuffled into the lines. A quiet and stout 10-year-old named Jacob stood at the front of one of the lines, and Donnie had a problem with this. He marched up to him and said, “Yo, Jacob get in the back of the line! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
Jacob, caught off guard, shot back, “No!”
“Move!”
“No!”
Over the weeks of the season, as he grew more confident as a player, Donnie had increasingly taken it upon himself to serve as one of the team’s leaders, alongside Oomz, Isaiah, and Hart. This impulse would sprout randomly, at this practice or that practice, and never with any sustained effort. Donnie would volunteer to lead stretches, even though he hadn’t memorized all the stretches they had to do. He would order boys around, even though he didn’t always know what to order. His teammates would usually roll their eyes and indulge him, go along with what they saw as his make-believe. But Jacob wasn’t having it on this evening.
“Move!”
“No!”
Donnie pushed Jacob. Jacob responded with a right hook that caught Donnie on the chin, beneath his facemask. The punch sent Donnie into a rage. He unloaded on Jacob, shouting nonsensically and swinging furiously with both fists until their teammates pulled them apart.
“Donnie, calm down!” Esau said.
Donnie kept shouting.
“Calm down or go home!”
“I don’t care! I’ll go home!”
His eyes were angry and staring at the ground. His fists were balled at his sides. He stomped his foot as he shouted.
“If you go home, you gon’ have to quit, and if you leave, we gon’ have to forfeit.”
“I don’t care!”
Donnie pulled off his helmet and his pads and handed them to Esau. As he walked off the track, the rest of the Pee Wees began their lap, unsure if their season had just unraveled. But Donnie did not go home. He sat down on the long green bench and cried. For an hour and a half, he watched his 15 Pee Wee teammates practice. He tucked his arms inside his hoodie. He breathed deeply, just as his therapist had taught him. Slowly, he calmed down. “I was thinking, if I quit, how would the team feel?” he said later. “How would it be like? If I quit, we gon’ have to forfeit. Without me or without anybody, we can’t play. If one person leave or get injured we gon’ have to forfeit ’cause we don’t have enough people. I was gonna quit, but then I didn’t.”
He got up and walked meekly onto the field. He went over to where the linemen were doing drills with Ramsey and he stood several yards behind them with his arms crossed. He feared that the coaches would not let him back on the team. Ramsey called him over. He bent down so their faces were level. Donnie kept his eyes on the ground.
“I’m talking to you like a man, look at me like a man,” Ramsey said, and Donnie brought his eyes up to him. “Listen, I don’t want your nonsense out here. Go over to Coach Esau and apologize, then go run your four laps.”
Donnie walked, still slowly and meekly, to where the backs and receivers were running through plays with Esau. Once more, he stood several yards behind them, his arms crossed. Esau ignored him. Minutes passed. Embarrassed and bashful, Donnie walked back to Ramsey.
“So what’s up?” Ramsey said.
Donnie said nothing.
“Go run your laps,” Ramsey said.
Donnie went to the track, picked up his helmet and shoulder pads where Esau had left them, and strapped them on. As he ran, he watched his cleats splash the puddles on the torn-up rubber and he felt a wave of gratitude. How close he’d been to throwing away everything he and his friends had done all year. How close he’d been to letting his anger ruin everything. But this time, he’d beaten his rage. He felt gratitude and pride as he ran through the cold, windy night.
BY FRIDAY NIGHT, the field had dried, and the dust returned after the hitting began. It covered the purple mesh jerseys of the Pee Wees, who stood in two lines, facing each other, forming a stage for the tackling drill. It also coated the jeans of the tall, lanky, stone-faced man standing beside the coaches. The Boogeyman.
He’d begun showing up at practice a few weeks earlier, after he returned home from prison. He kept his distance at first, perched on a bicycle on the track for 10 or 15 minutes before riding off, waving to the coaches who called out to him. He had missed the game and the hard, dusty field. When he returned to Betsy Head for the first time in many years and saw the purple jerseys and the dust clouds, the memories rushed back. “It was blowouts,” he said, his arms resting on the handles of his bike. “Forty, fifty, sixty to zip blowouts. Everything
was zip. All season. Nobody scored on us. Went a whole season nobody scored on us.” He had a bony face, piercing eyes, and wore a black do-rag, a white T-shirt, and blue Adidas track pants. Three of his friends, also on bikes, posted up around him. “This is everything right here,” he said, as he watched the hitting drills. “Everything you want is here.” And then, after a long silence, he added, “I miss the hitting.”
“You hit hard—boom!” said one of his friends, a young man in a camo hat. “And you was fast, too. Remember that ring y’all got? Purple and gold. With ruby. That shit was big. You could play, man.”
He returned to the park on a few more evenings. Sometimes, he perched on his bike beside his crew. Other times, he watched practice while jogging around the track. Once, he sat alone on the red cement steps, seemingly basking in the anonymity he had lacked as the most feared man in Brownsville. But tonight, a crisp evening in October, the last practice before the playoffs, he decided to cross the gate, greet the coaches, and take in the action up close.
His facial expression was blank, serious and studious, until there was a big hit, and then the Boogeyman’s smile widened and he nodded his head.
“All right, all right,” he said.
Then came another big, crunching hit, the dust blooming into the air.
Coach Chris looked over at the grinning Boogeyman and said, “That sounds like a Mo Better football hit that time!”
The Boogeyman nodded some more and kept up his smile. He didn’t speak to the players, didn’t pass on any of the hard-learned lessons he’d picked up over the years. He didn’t want to make a scene. He only wanted to watch. The world, he knew, had moved on without him, had humbled him, and he was the one trying to catch up, trying to brush off the history that clung to him like the dust on the purple mesh jerseys. In this new world, the grinding wheels of progress seemed destined to erase both the sport he loved and the community he called home. This was a time of transition, and he wondered where he might fit in the chaos. The boys in front of him had no such concerns. This was their world, and they had no memory of any other.
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