“Ain’t that the truth,” Gary said.
“Because the closer you get, that’s when it gets real, and reality don’t feel sorry for nobody.”
“Ain’t gotta tell these boys,” Gary said, glancing back at the field.
With the game decided and the clock ticking down, Esau handed the offense over to Oomz, with carry after carry. He muscled forward each time, for three or four or five yards. Then he broke through a pack of defenders and plowed ahead for eight yards.
“Told you!” Big Oomz shouted.
Those watching thought it was now a near certainty that the father would not allow Oomz to return to Mo Better. Big Oomz had big plans. But, as it turned out, they were soon upended. A month after this game, Big Oomz was pulled over while driving with a friend in Ithaca, New York, and arrested after police found $1,500 worth of heroin and crack cocaine in the car.
BESIDE THE BLEACHERS, in a forgotten corner of the stadium, nearly every one of the 16 boys cried as they gathered around Esau after the game. Clouds had moved in and the afternoon was dreary. The stands filled up with different parents, and two different teams now collided on the field. The sizzle of the cheers and the pops of the hits drowned out the boys’ sniffles and whimpers. Naz and Dorian shook as they sobbed. Donnie wiped the tears from his eyes and said, “I swear to God, I wish we could replay them.” Hart buried his face in his hands. Marquis and Isaiah kept their helmets on, their visors shielding their eyes, but their tears dripped down to their chins. Chaka kept his helmet on too, but he was not crying; his face was angry and stoic. Oomz also looked angry, and through his tears he said, “They got Junior Midgets on their team!”
“We’re not making excuses,” Esau cut him off. “Listen, it was a hell of a season. This happens in football. This happens in life.”
Just like that, it was over. Parents shook hands. Coaches collected equipment. The boys stripped off their pads and tossed their jerseys into a pile on the grass. They dropped their helmets into the big garbage bag. They found their rides and headed back home.
In his mother’s car, Oomz wiped his tears and dried his face. He’d already decided to return to the team despite his father’s objections. He didn’t want to lose what he and the other boys had built. “Next season gon’ be better,” he said. “We got a good future coming.” He felt his anger beginning to fade as he stared out the window at the birds gliding through the gray sky, high above the people, the concrete, and the noise.
20
BLESSINGS
December 2017
THREE YEARS LATER, CHRIS LEGREE STEPPED OFF THE 3 train at the Saratoga stop on a cold evening in December. His Con Ed badge still hung from his neck. He was 61 now and walked with a limp, his knees worn down from years of football and manual labor. The crowd of commuters rushed past him as he hobbled down the stairs, one hand gripping the railing, the other holding a cell phone to his ear. A high school football coach from Canarsie was on the other end, and Chris was hoping to send him some of his boys, to build a new bridge.
“I’m calling you not just to win championships but about opportunities for young black men,” he said, his voice loud enough to rise above the thunder of the departing train.
He paced in a circle on the sidewalk as he finished the call, then stepped into the barbershop on Livonia, half a block from Betsy Head. It was warm inside, fluorescently bright and humming with clippers and chatter. The middle-aged owner slapped hands with Chris. Several of his nephews had played for Mo Better, including two—Poppa and Hakeem—who had been murdered. But Chris hadn’t come by to rehash old memories. He was here for neighborhood intel. As the barber faded up a teenage customer’s hair, Chris asked whether the district’s state committeeman, Anthony T. Jones, had passed through the block to campaign. He was up for reelection in 2018.
“Yeah, he been by,” the man said.
“Oh, OK,” replied Chris. “You know, I haven’t told a lotta people yet, but I might run for that seat. Might.”
The man nodded slowly, gave a small smile, then shifted his focus back to the cut. He’d heard Chris float political ambitions before: for this city council race, for that state assembly spot. It had never gotten further than talk.
But this time, yes, this time Chris was certain the moment was right. He did, after all, have a habit of turning to optimism in the aftermath of setbacks. The greater the setback, it seemed, the greater his optimism for the imminent future. As he stepped out of the barbershop, back into the cold night, Chris was brimming with hope.
HE STOPPED AT the corner store next, to pick up sliced pineapple and a quarter-cut of watermelon, as was his routine on the way home. A strict diet and an intensified walking regimen had helped him lose more than 50 pounds in recent months, leaving him slim as he’d looked in decades. Just in time for the campaign, he thought. Beside the register, on the counter, a stack of 2018 calendars bearing Anthony T. Jones’s face and name caught his eye.
“Who brought this here?” Chris asked the shopkeeper, whom he’d known for many years.
“Anthony.”
Chris let out a chuckle, then said, “I might be running against him.”
“Who, you?”
“Might.”
“He not gonna like that,” the shopkeeper said with a playful grin.
Eyes still on the calendars, Chris said, “When he bring that in, recently?”
He felt good about his chances. He was a workingman, like most of his potential constituents, and his record of community service spoke for itself––all those boys he’d helped push to success. Most recently, he’d been thrilled by Hart’s achievements. After the 2014 Pee Wee season, Hart kept getting bigger and better and more serious about football. By eighth grade, he’d proven to be one of the country’s top players in his age group. In January 2017, he played in a youth football all-star game at the Dallas Cowboys’ massive stadium, with his mom and sister cheering in the stands. He played in another all-American game in May, this time in Virginia Beach, Virginia. His team won the game and Hart won the event’s sportsmanship and academic awards.
At his eighth-grade graduation, Hart wore a white tuxedo under his shiny blue gown. Around his neck lay the gold stole given out to students who’d achieved academic honors. By Chris’s memory, Hart’s score on the specialized high school exam was the highest of any boy who’d passed through the program. In the fall of 2017, he began his freshman year at Poly Prep, just as Chris had envisioned. The school granted him a hefty financial aid package. Every adult who knew him believed that Hart could grow up to do whatever he wanted—lawyer, doctor, engineer, president of the United States. He was open to all those options, but in the meantime, his football dreams still seemed within reach.
Hart was the only boy from that 2014 Pee Wee team to end up at Poly Prep. Isaiah didn’t apply. He preferred to choose from one of the public schools his friends were going to. He picked Erasmus Hall High School, where Curtis Samuel had gone. Isaiah had put much thought into the decision. Several high school football programs tried to win him over. Grand Street High School “was too far,” he said. South Shore’s team wasn’t good enough. “I didn’t feel I could win a chip there.” As for Lincoln, where his brother had gone to school, Isaiah believed that its head coach wasn’t doing enough to help his players get college scholarship offers. To Isaiah, it was all about getting that full ride. “I just felt Erasmus would give me the best chance to get a scholarship,” he said. Erasmus still had one of the best football programs in the city. The school was in Flatbush, where it shared a block with a bank and a sneaker shop, a short bus trip from Brownsville. Many of Isaiah’s friends went to Erasmus. In his first high school football game, in the fall of 2016, his junior varsity team won 42–0. Isaiah scored a touchdown. Chaka joined him at the school a year later, and in September 2017, the two sophomores took the field together for the first time since their Mo Better days.
The football gods hadn’t bestowed them with equal blessings. While Chaka had enjoyed a
recent growth spurt, pushing him to nearly six feet just as his muscles were beginning to fill out his frame, Isaiah remained nearly the same size he was at 12 years old. He was usually the smallest boy on the field. His speed, which he had used to dominate Mo Better’s opponents, was now merely a tool for survival. But he was still the fastest kid out there.
AS FAR AS Chris knew, none of the boys on that 2014 Pee Wee team had been lost. This was what progress was supposed to look like. There were other visible signs. In the summer of 2016, the city announced that it would dedicate $30 million to renovating Betsy Head Park, where the field lost grass and gained dust each passing year. Chris was among the community leaders invited to advise on how exactly the money should be spent. A year later, the mayor’s office unveiled the Brownsville Plan, a proposal to infuse the neighborhood with one billion dollars in public and private funding to build affordable homes and health-care facilities, repair infrastructure, support new businesses, and create additional public spaces and recreational centers. Cell-phone chargers would be built into park benches and new trash cans placed around the neighborhood. One rendering of the plan’s vision showed a bustling street corner beneath the elevated subway tracks, with patrons sitting at sidewalk tables outside the hypothetical “Café Livonia,” shoppers browsing at the hypothetical “Fashion Designs,” and construction workers installing plate-glass windows into a hypothetical new grocery store called “Livonia Market.” Around the corner was a hypothetical “Food Co-Op.” Every person in the illustration had a brown face.
Residents were split on what this meant for the neighborhood moving forward. They all welcomed the investment, but would rents rise too high? The mayor’s office assured locals that Brownsville would remain a welcoming place for working-class and low-income families. “We’ll see,” more than one resident said. In big cities across the country, space was becoming limited, exponentially valuable, and frequently at the center of clashes between longtime residents and new arrivals over the use of public grounds, proposals for housing developments, and the cultural insensitivity exhibited by businesses popping up to serve the gentrifiers. In one instance, the owner of a new bar in Crown Heights joked that she had left “bullet holes” in the wall to commemorate the neighborhood’s violent past. To the new arrivals, that past was almost invisible. Crime rates continued to decline through Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first term. In 2017, the city had its lowest tally of murders since the 1950s.
In the toughest of years, locals had found stability and solace in the neighborhood’s tight-knit community, a collective investment and unspoken understanding of one another, a sense that we’re all in this together. When the struggles got too heavy to bear for one person, there were others to share the load, watch the kids, cover the rent, fix a plate, or offer a couch to sleep on. It was this community pride that fed the current of nostalgia that ran through Brownsville. Most locals had seen too many tough years to assume any change was for their benefit.
As he strolled home on this December night, Chris liked the changes he was seeing. He walked below holiday lights that brightened blocks and passed storefronts that had sprung up over the past year or two. A chic restaurant, owned by three local women, served sandwiches named after local heroes, including the “Mr. Richard,” which honored a community activist who had been one of Chris’s childhood mentors. Further up the block, a fondue restaurant franchise managed by a local man shared a large, high-ceilinged, big-windowed space with the Brownsville Community Culinary Center, where 12 neighborhood residents enrolled in a job-training program cooked the food for the café at the front. Chris stopped in for a coffee and a biscuit, chatting with the manager as he waited for his order, which was on the house. Paintings hung on the walls, and white-hatted aspiring chefs darted around in the open kitchen. Two weeks earlier, Chris had hosted his mother’s 80th birthday party in the building, turning the culinary center’s classroom into a banquet hall, with a buffet set up and a big TV showing college football.
So many of the hopes he’d carried had become reality. More and more of his boys were doing well. Donnie was a freshman in high school, staying out of trouble, still playing football, and in better control of his anger. His brother Tarell continued to follow his lead. Their family moved out of the Castle and into a quieter apartment nearby. Chaka was passing his classes, impressing his coaches, spending much of his free time with his girlfriend, and thinking about college. Even Gio had found his way back onto a promising track. After his summer in Saint Lucia, his mother brought him back to Brooklyn. His conflict had cooled by then, and Gio, too, seemed calmer. He hadn’t erased all his habits or totally cut himself off from the streets, and Chris understood that any day might bring bad news. He mostly had the same friends, but he stayed out less often and began to accept his mother’s rules. He joined the football team in high school and was a good student. His motivation for acting right hadn’t changed since those early months in Brooklyn: “Chasin’ my dreams,” he still told people.
It was often hard to tell what separated the ones who made it from those who didn’t. The margin for error was smaller for black children growing up in working-class communities, and any youthful mistake could be the one that sent a boy down an irreversible path to destruction. For all Gio’s troubles, and despite whatever toll all that danger and stress had taken on him, he had avoided being shot, arrested, or otherwise permanently damaged. It easily could have gone differently—if the wrong boy had access to a gun on the wrong day, or if the wrong cop came at Gio the wrong way and got angry and scared upon seeing this muscular, stone-faced boy show anything less than deference.
If there was a lesson boys got from football’s violence, Chris hoped it was this: Keep your head on a swivel, your body braced, and your mind focused, because the smallest slipup often brought painful consequences—
Pop!
And there you were on your back, staring at the blue sky, ears ringing, the stakes clearer than ever.
The men who seemed to most value this lesson, and the other virtues intrinsic to football—toughness, resilience—were the men who’d clawed their way out of poverty in large part thanks to these virtues, men who understood the stakes and the historical reality that a black boy had to overcome injustice after injustice on the climb to success. Surely, there were other ways to pass on these virtues, but this was the method they knew and understood. It was a great luxury to not need these virtues hammered in, but these men had not come from places of great luxury. The stakes were too severe to stray from what they knew. In America, the cost of progress is high but inexact, and the more desperate a person, the more he is willing to risk and sacrifice.
Fewer and fewer parents were willing to have their children risk the dangers of tackle football. High schools in several states had shut down football programs. Some professional football players, even old-school tough guys like Harry Carson and Mike Ditka, had said they wouldn’t let their sons play. More NFL players were retiring early, during their physical prime, in hopes of avoiding the life-altering brain damage that had become almost expected. Previously unknown risks became clear, and American society began to shift accordingly. Leagues at every level, from Pop Warner to the NFL, were banning certain kinds of hits, limiting full-contact practices, and eliminating the sorts of plays that are most likely to result in violent collisions. Nobody was quite sure whether any of it would make a difference, whether any of it could save football.
The fathers at Betsy Head heard talk that youth football was in its dying days. There were good reasons to ban the game at least until high school, if not further. It was not so much that the fathers resisted this oncoming reality. Rather, they were concerned first with what they saw around them—a world in which football talent is still an exceptionally valuable commodity, a ticket to private high schools and four-year universities. The virtues of football appealed to the fathers, but these rewards were what made the sport essential to them. Boxing, by comparison, also teaches toughness and resilience, but it
is decidedly a poor man’s game, reserved for those desperate enough to pay a high physical cost for modest purses and the very, very slim chance of riches. Whatever might happen to football in the future, it was here now to help their sons. The country’s commitments to football and racial oppression made the sport’s danger seem to them a worthwhile risk.
When the sons of these men grow to have their own sons, perhaps they will pass on the philosophies of their fathers. Perhaps football will have remained America’s favorite sport, and Brownsville will have remained a hardscrabble neighborhood, and Mo Better boys will have gone on kicking up dust at Betsy Head Park. But these sons came of age at a moment of immense change, straddling eras, attuned to the shifting collective values of their society. These were worldly, modern boys, the first generation to know only the Internet age, only a black president. The fading, old world was one they never knew, a rumor. Amid discussions over the long-term prospects of football, Hart often seemed far more curious and thoughtful than the fathers at the park about the scientific research on brain injuries. Isaiah and Oomz, raised in Brownsville from birth, didn’t carry the neighborhood pride common in previous generations: Oomz had claimed Fort Greene; Isaiah had repped Crown Heights. These were boys focused on escaping the expectations of the past.
CHRIS LEFT THE café, bound for his house a few blocks away. As he passed a church, he heard somebody call his name. It was an old friend, a former police officer who now worked as an undertaker, and they slapped hands and embraced. Been too long, they said to each other. Dressed in a black suit, the old friend was on the clock for a funeral that night but had a few minutes for small talk.
“You guys still up at Betsy Head?” he asked Chris.
“Mmm, well, here and there,” Chris mumbled in reply, bobbing his head but not quite nodding, before adding enthusiastically, “We got big things coming.”
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