Muck City

by Bryan Mealer

  “Joshie got him a pancake,” Boobie shouted, slapping his helmet.

  Clewiston provided the Raiders with a much-needed statement game, another year of bragging rights around the lake, and for the time being it silenced the critics. But the game had been wrapped in turmoil like most games before it, caused mostly by the general lack of seriousness so often mentioned. After three years it was finally chipping away at the usually understated head coach, whose moods were swinging wildly.

  He’d exploded earlier that afternoon as the team suited up, leaving those in the room stunned by the rare display of emotion. The boys had misbehaved during the team dinner, he said, wearing headphones, ignoring instruction, straight disrespecting. As he lectured the players once again on their poor attitudes, he noticed one of his wide receivers, Jaqavein Oliver, lying down, apparently asleep.

  Oliver was a smiley, droopy-eyed kid who was content spending his Saturdays perched on the canal banks, fishing for bass. He’d been cut from the squad the previous season, then returned that summer in better shape and quickly showed skills. He’d completed a pair of clutch first-down catches against Skyline and American Heritage, and was now competing with Davonte for the number-three slot. But today the boy certainly wasn’t helping himself.

  “Get up,” Hester screamed. “Get up, get up, get up!”

  Oliver flung himself against the wall, eyes wide, nowhere to escape.

  “You got a problem with authority, bwah?”

  “Man, you can’t be doing that,” Oliver tried, but Hester was already in his face, his breath hot on the boy’s cheek.

  “I can do that because I’m your coach, bwah. I’m your coach and from now on you WILL LISTEN TO YOUR COACH.”

  Hester jerked back, as if released by a spirit. He took a breath, rubbed his brow, then scanned the room.

  “Don’t yall ever make me get out of my character again,” he said, then calmly walked out the door, leaving only the sound of the track lights humming overhead.

  It was an extreme leap of emotion for a man who, just two weeks before, had displayed such extraordinary tenderness. During the tense game against American Heritage, a junior cornerback called Slick had nearly come to blows with defensive coordinator Tony Smith, who’d groused over a missed block. The fight had caused a wild scene along the sidelines, with players screaming, “Take his helmet, Coach!” while fans watched from above and shook their heads.

  Tempers had flared once again as the team gathered after the game, until Hester physically pulled Slick from the pack and took him aside. Down on both knees, he whispered softly to him, caressing his flak vest and shoulder pads, as a mother would a child. The second Hester’s hands made contact, the boy went slack and began to cry.

  “You gotta remember they’re just children,” he said, walking away. “And you gotta pour on that love. Just keep pouring on that love.”

  So, the following Thursday at practice, as the Raiders prepared for one of their most important home games of the regular season, nobody knew what to expect when Hester stood before them with that same furrowed brow which preceded each of his “I’m disappointed in you” speeches. And sure enough, the speech came.

  “On a serious note, guys,” he said, looking down, shaking his head. “There’s always somethin, aint it? Always somethin. Well, this somethin is this: we got a cat who can’t play tomorrow. A serious leader, too. So serious that yall might not even win without this cat. This here’s a cat who done disappointed his team, his family.”

  He paused for an entire minute, letting the silence sink in.

  “Don’t yall wanna know who I’m talkin about?”

  “Who is it, Coach?” someone whispered.

  “Huh? I can’t hear you.”

  “We wanna know who it is.”

  “You what?”

  “Who’s the person?”

  “Say it again.”

  “Who it is, Coach?”

  Hester’s face broke into a smile as he grabbed his crotch.

  “DESE NUTS!”

  The boys roared with laughter, and all the tension from the past weeks seemed to drift away. Tomorrow was homecoming.

  • • •

  HOMECOMING IN BELLE Glade was like Easter Sunday and Fourth of July wrapped into one glimmering extravaganza. It was a day when parents dressed their children in lavish costumes to peacock down the boulevard, a time to eat well, drink heartily, then gather around the lights for the evening beat-down on the muck.

  It was a day when everything must shine, and preparations began early. The trucks and flatbed trailers for the morning parade gathered along the canal at eight, waiting to be dressed, while, nearby, Haitian women stood over sleepy-eyed little girls, speaking rapid Creole while braiding hair and mending dresses.

  The store and social club across from Glades Central was abuzz all morning with men sprucing up for the big day and placing bets on the victory against the Boca Raton Bobcats. Behind the counter, an old woman holding a fistful of cash barked into a cell phone, “Raiders 24, Boca 10,” while down the hill along the ditch, Ray King ran a makeshift barbershop under a blue tarp. A cluster of men sat waiting in folding chairs for five-dollar shaves and ten-dollar cuts, reading magazines, staring into phones, and swatting mosquitoes that poured from the stagnant creek nearby. Over near the street at Joe Whitey’s car wash, rag men crouched on their knees polishing a gleaming row of twenty-four-inch rims with studied detail.

  By noon hundreds gathered along MLK Boulevard, which ran through the tumbledown heart of town, feasting from sidewalk stands selling lemonade and pulled pork, boiled crab with eggs and potatoes, and buttery pound cake. And nobody batted an eye when suddenly the streets filled with muscled white police wearing weapons and tactical gear.

  The floats were both spectacular and confounding, each bedecked with elaborate Asian and Egyptian scenes that rolled in high relief against the pillbox boardinghouses and Dixie Fried Chicken. There were floats of schoolkids dressed as pharaohs and queens, heads topped with shiny paper crowns and gold ribbons woven into braids as if done surgically. Floats of young black boys masquerading as Chinese emperors in silk pajamas; tuxedoed chauffeurs driving horse-drawn carriages with tiny girls smiling under pink paper umbrellas.

  And once the floats had passed—the pageant queens! There was a chosen queen for every class in every school, from Miss Rosenwald Elementary to Walkeria Carter, Miss Glades Central. The girls sat perched atop the hoods of slow-creeping Mercedes and tricked-out ghetto chargers, their long, flowing gowns spilling over the sides like melted wax.

  Leading the procession was Jonteria, representing the Raider cheerleaders. She wore a brown strapless dress that she and Theresa had picked out at a Fort Lauderdale boutique, Theresa reminding herself of the importance of the event as she’d laid down $200. But it was gorgeous and complemented Jonteria’s golden hair extensions her cousin had spent seven hours weaving. The flaxen curls now draped over her shoulders as she rode atop the covered bed of a pickup, her hand raised at her side, waving like Lady Di.

  • • •

  IN SHOP CLASS before the game, the boys were bug-eyed with excitement. Waka Flocka Flame thumped from their headphones as the team decked themselves in pink: do-rags, wristbands, and socks, all in recognition of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Mario paced the room in silence, his eye black reading simply, I’M BACK.

  So was Jaime, who walked through the door looking fragile and listless; he’d come straight from the emergency room. “I had a fever today and went to the hospital,” he said. “I was so weak. But the nurses told me to get up on outta there ’cause I had a team and fans who needed me too much.”

  And in lieu of speeches, Hester stayed in his office and let his boys be boys.

  “This is gonna be a night you never forget,” he said before cutting them loose. “Homecoming night. It’s all about having fun and putting on a show.”

  The Raiders ran out into the night air and down the sidewalk, through the fragrant c
louds of pit smoke and the cheering throng of fans. They formed a howling pack near the goalpost, banging helmet against helmet, body against body, anxious for that first touch of click-clack.

  And once the whistle blew, they indeed put on a show. On the Raiders’ second possession, the Bobcats blitzed with all their linebackers, and running back Neville Brown read it perfectly, taking the handoff from Mario and darting through the gap for seventy-five yards and the score. Another touchdown by the fevered Jaime Wilson had the hometown crowd up on their feet; then, two possessions later, KB slammed on the overdrive for a forty-three-yard burst up the sideline to send them reeling. By halftime, the score was 34–0.

  • • •

  A DOUBLE-DIGIT LEAD at halftime was expected fare for the homecoming crowd. But this year also brought something special. The Raiders were retiring the numbers of three of their biggest stars, who gathered now at midfield. Standing next to Hester were Jimmy Spencer and Fred Taylor.

  Spencer, Class of 1987, was part of the early crop of studs to leave Belle Glade after Hester and play in the pros. Like Jet, Spencer had been recruited by just about every major football program in the nation. He ended up choosing Galen Hall’s Florida Gators, then later was drafted by Washington. Over the course of a dozen years, Spencer had been part of five NFL teams, ending his career with the Denver Broncos, where he later became an assistant coach. He still lived in Denver and worked as a minister.

  Taylor had flown in from Boston, where his New England Patriots were taking their bye week. The Pro Bowl running back had spent his first eleven years in the league with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Alongside his cousin Santonio Holmes, Taylor was Belle Glade’s biggest active celebrity. His youth and Sunday-ready physique stood in contrast to the older men at his side. When he’d moved through the crowd, there was a noticeable wake of both admiration and some upturned noses, a reaction that spoke to the complicated relationship between the poverty-stricken town and its rich and famous men.

  • • •

  “I CRIED MY eyes out the first time I left Belle Glade,” Taylor said.

  He was fifteen, on his way to basketball camp in Johnson City, Tennessee, and seeing the world outside of Palm Beach County for the first time. Leaving home was a common, dominating memory for most every player who’d ever competed on the next level. For Hester, it was a recruiting trip to Ohio State in the dead of a midwestern winter. And for most, the fear was quickly overwhelmed by a sense of awe at the great unfolding world. Staring out the windows of buses and planes, many experienced a jarring new understanding of home and history.

  “Belle Glade will get a grasp on you and won’t let you go,” Taylor said. “But those people who can get away and experience life elsewhere, that’s often all it takes to motivate them.”

  Guys soon realized the power their hometown held, both to destroy and to evoke a sense of wonder. For young men striking out in search of identities, the muck defined who they were and branded them on the outside, especially in football.

  “We had a chippiness about us, the way we played, our bravado,” said Hester. “Muck players have edge. They’re raw.”

  Louis Oliver had once stood before the starting Gator secondary and announced, “I’m a safety from Belle Glade. And as long as I’m here, aint none of you muthafuckers gonna play.” It was edgy all right, given that Oliver was just a skinny freshman who’d walked onto the team with an academic scholarship.

  Whenever Santonio Holmes caught a touchdown on national television, such as the one to win Super Bowl XLIII, he’d often find the nearest camera and strike a flexing pose, the emphasis on the “561” area code tattooed across his right bicep.

  But outside football, the stigma of Belle Glade followed its own like an offensive odor. “In college, people from Belle Glade would say, ‘I’m from the Palm Beach area,’ ” said Taylor. “There came a point where I just embraced it, but that took a while.”

  The muck instilled a sense of place, but for many, the place itself remained too hot to touch, save for one or two fleeting visits a year for family or charity events.

  “I’ll never forget where I’m from,” said Holmes, who came back each year to host a kids’ football camp with his cousin Fred. “But I certainly don’t miss it. Just hearing about the shit that happens here daily—kids getting shot, the gangs. That’s not what I remember. I hardly recognize this place.”

  That same new reality had hit another former player, Santonio Thomas, particularly hard. Thomas, whose local nickname was Fat Man, had helped anchor the defense of the 1998 and 1999 championship teams, a defense so feared it was known across the state as the Legion of Doom. He’d signed with the Miami Hurricanes, and after graduating with a degree in sociology and secondary education, he’d spent three seasons in the league with New England and Cleveland.

  The Browns waived him in September 2009, after which he retreated to a quiet, two-acre spread in the Georgia pines. His wife later accepted a job in Fort Lauderdale, and once Fat was back, Hester invited him to coach the offensive line. At the start of the Raider season, fresh after arriving, he’d brimmed with excitement about the new adventure.

  “I’m just happy to come back and prepare these players for the realities of college,” he said, then mentioned a desire to maybe get his teaching certificate and stay at Glades Central.

  Two months later, however, the optimism and glee were nowhere to be found. Shortly after the Clewiston game, Coach Fat sat in the shop classroom as the team dressed, and tried to diagnose the newfound depression that filled him.

  “You know when you come from a place and there’s nothing but positive energy, then you go to a place where there’s a lot of negativity?” he said. “I’m just feeling a lot of negativity in my life right now. I’m feeling like I can’t escape it here. Like it surrounds me from every direction.”

  Much of the negativity that pros experienced was rooted in jealousy. Because for every young man who made it to the next level, there were forty who did not, guys who didn’t have the discipline or skills or support structure at home, or who’d made it part of the way, only to get spit back to earth by the big machine.

  The earth and its days are evil, the scriptures say, and many cannot walk circumspectly once they’re free upon the land. In 2001, former Pahokee star receiver Keo Green, twenty-five years old, shot and killed his girlfriend and then himself after a police chase down Highway 80. And there was Roosevelt Johnson, twenty-four, the Raider defensive tackle who’d cycled out of Southwest Mississippi State and returned home, only to empty his pistol one night at some men who’d insulted him on a homemade rap tape. Johnson had missed the men and killed Lanetra Brown, a mother of three. And like Coach Vickers, everyone liked to use Jerry Campbell’s rousing comeback victory in the 1998 championship game against Madison County as an example of toughness and character. Yet they left out the part where Campbell, back home for several years, got picked up for robbery.

  A crowd of older boys usually gathered on Saturday afternoons in Pioneer Park to play pickup ball with current Raiders. Several years out of high school, with no college and few job opportunities, some of them were already caught in the swirl of gang life and had spent some time in jail. (“Some a them boys be carrying guns right now,” said one Raider, watching from the bleachers.) They relished occasionally burning rising talents such as Jaime or Boobie, but few Raider players even bothered exposing themselves.

  “People try to bring us down,” said KB. “I don’t even get involved.”

  The more ambitious ones gathered on the community center field, where the Muck City Starrs, the regional semipro team, met on crisp February nights for practice. The Starrs belonged to the sixteen-team Florida Football Alliance, its roster filled with former Raiders and Pahokee Blue Devils whose dreams had been upended for myriad reasons. Most were now in their mid-twenties; the oldest player was forty-one. And many were still hoping to get noticed, either by a small college or the lower-level pros, such as the Arena League. Over
the years, several Starrs had gotten second looks in Canada.

  There was Jarrell Moore, the defensive back who’d been forced to quit Miles College before his freshman season when his brother was murdered on Avenue D. He’d come home in 2007 and gone to work in the fields, chasing the mule train. Now twenty-three, he led the FFA in interceptions and was hoping to be in shape for the Canadian league’s next tryout in Orlando.

  “I’ll feel like it’s the last shot I have,” he said.

  For the Muck City Starrs, the quest for a second chance was certainly not as easy as the first time around. With no sponsorship, the team had little money for equipment or travel. Many players still wore their old pads from high school; their silver helmets were gashed, reconstituted relics. Injuries to aging bodies were rife and dream-crushing. With no bus, players drove themselves to games, some as far away as Tallahassee, a six-hour journey.

  “We make our money from car washes,” said Jarrel Ford, the team’s owner. “There are no NFL players giving back to us.”

  While the Starrs were not expecting any handouts, there were plenty in town who were. And perhaps this, above all else, was what kept many pros from coming home. Some had been burned early in their careers after donating to what they thought were local charities, only to discover the money had simply disappeared. But most just felt judged and harassed by people they hardly knew.

  “You have people in that town who had the same opportunities as you, some even more,” said Louis Oliver. “You make it, and they don’t make it, and suddenly they think you owe them something. It’s like, how did you help me to get where I am?”

  After Hester’s first season in Los Angeles, he was standing outside his mother’s new house when a car full of men rolled up. They were high school acquaintances who heard he was back in town. One of them asked Jet for gas money to drive down to Miami, then flashed a gun.