by Bryan Mealer
It was around this time that Lester Finney arrived to add the finishing touch: painting the Raider head on the fifty-yard line. Finney was a local artist and musician who ran a youth program on Avenue A. He’d also been a Raider in December 1974 when Glades Central fans rioted on the field at Chaminade and put four policemen in the hospital. After the incident, Finney’s face was plastered across the Belle Glade Herald with the headline A CRYING SHAME. (“It’s a crying shame when high school students like Lester Finney are disgraced by the actions of their elders at a football game,” the editorial read.)
Standing at midfield, Finney—wearing a straw hat and a T-shirt that accentuated his sinewy, muscled body—free-handed the image of a Raider using Coach Mann’s paint machine and a hand nozzle. Finney’s Raider was once the official face of the team, he said, until former coach Willie Snead came in and replaced it with the current stock image. The new Raider had whiter features—almost Spanish-looking—and appeared more friendly. “A cartoon character,” said Finney, more Pirates of the Caribbean than Mucktown Destroyer.
Finney’s Raider was black with a wide nose. He had a wild, bushy beard, a gold ring in his ear, and a tomcat look in his eye. “That’s the Raider that’s gonna hurt somebody,” he said with a smile. “This one’s from the hood.” Within an hour, the fourteen-foot mascot was staring up from midfield at the heavens—just as the cane fires reached the highway and blotted out the sun.
When the school bell rang, the team congregated around the flagpole for the pregame prayer. The boys locked elbows and became quiet. Eyes closed, head bowed, Pastor Dez lifted them up to the God of the Glades in another plea for triumph.
“Father, give them eagle eyes tonight,” he prayed. “Make them strong like lions and swift like gazelles. Brace them with the same power that you used to roll back the mighty Red Sea, the power that gave Joshua the victory over Jericho. We ask that the defense might be as a wall, and that the offense might be fierce and powerful, and that our opponents won’t be able to stand before us. They will come to us with a sword and a spear, but we will overrun them in the name of the Lord.”
• • •
THE RAIDER HOME field was a fortress in late November. In postseason play, the Raiders were 29–1 at home. Of course, one of those playoff victories had come the previous year against the same Cardinal Gibbons Chiefs who now stepped off the bus just before dusk.
To the kids who didn’t know, there appeared to be a brief moment of revelation as they breathed the soot-filled air and adjusted to the red, spooky light from a land afire under the setting sun: So this is the Muck, huh? The ones who already knew simply stared ahead and walked to the lockers, trying not to acknowledge the gang of Raiders eyeballing them from the sidewalk.
Fans filed into the stands of Effie C. Grear Field and crowded the fenceline, moving to the anthem that blasted from the speakers: “First down to the touchdown … Everybody knows: RAIDERS!”
The crowd cheered the Raiders as they bounced onto the field from the shop room. On the sideline, Hester lathered them up with his playoff-ready chant, so loud the fans were laughing HA-HA-HA. The team then paused to observe the national anthem. As always, when the silk-voiced soprano up in the press box belted the lines “O’er the land of the freee, and the home of the …” the boys lifted their helmets high and cried, “RAIDERS!”
• • •
THE CHIEFS, WEARING all-white jerseys with red trim and lettering, lost the coin toss and kicked to Glades Central. The Gibbons coaches were no doubt harboring some hope that the Raiders would be weakened without their six-foot-six superstar receiver, who was nowhere to be seen. But the pliant Glades Central offense quickly demonstrated its ability to fill empty shoes. His name was Davonte Allen.
It was Davonte whom Hester set in motion on the first call of the game: 989 Rolls-Royce. The deep go route had become Jet’s signature airmail with the question “Can yall run?”
The pass from Mario, whose eye blacks bore the name of his dead mother, sailed thirty yards downfield and landed in the crook of Davonte’s arm. The next play, Baker crashed through the line for twenty-seven more yards and the crowd chanted, “Move them sticks!”
Now, on the Chiefs’ forty, Mario rolled out of the pocket and threw the ball on the run before getting slammed out of bounds. Davonte was already standing in the end zone. He leaped just as a defender clipped his thigh and spun him upside down, landing hard on his shoulder with the ball still in his hands. But his pain was for nothing; the touchdown was called back because the Raiders had jumped offsides.
On the very next drive, however, Davonte shot across the middle with two white jerseys on his tail, then dove across the goal line to meet a thirty-seven-yard bullet in midflight.
Raiders up 7–0.
The Glades Central defense was watertight from the start, quickly shutting down the Chiefs’ go-to running back, Denzel Wimberly, and forcing Gibbons to punt on its first two possessions. Coach Tony, the Raider defensive coordinator, pulled the trigger on blitz after blitz, sending a swarm of maroon jerseys into the face of quarterback Chase Bender. After having been suffocated under double coverage most of the season, Robert Way took his vengeance tonight. He sacked Bender so hard in the first quarter that even the bloodthirsty mucksteppers in the stands had to wince. Before the night was over, Bender would go down seven times.
At the start of the second quarter, Jaime took a punt return and started home. But as he sliced up the sideline, the ball bounced loose from his hands. The Chiefs defensive back Dan Fitzpatrick picked it up and raced fifty yards for an easy touchdown to tie the game. But Jaime was quick to redeem his sloppiness. As soon as the Raiders had the ball again, Mario hit him on a short route for a fifty-one-yard play into Chiefs territory. The next snap, he found Oliver on a twenty-yard strike into the end zone.
After the extra point, the Raiders led 14–7.
There was something unusual happening to the short, fat quarterback. The panic and impatience, the fear that had once gripped him as soon as the ball touched his hands, no longer was there. No imaginary ghosts haunted his blindside, spooking him into the open. For the first time against an admirable defense, he felt relaxed.
And he knew why: his line was holding. After months, his boys up front—Brandon, Corey, Salt, and Gator—were finally giving him the game he’d always wanted. For once, there was rhythm. They were in sync. Here tonight on the hallowed muck, the quarterback could finally show his town that he was worthy of their tradition. Tonight, he was man of tha city.
Anything seemed possible. After the touchdown, LeBlanc made a spectacular, one-handed tilt-a-whirl interception with both feet kissing the grass before his body flew out of bounds, the very kind of play that sent boys from Belle Glade to college. Back on the field, Davonte told his quarterback, “Throw it as far as you can. Wherever you put it, I’ll get it.”
Hester nodded from the sidelines: 989 Rolls-Royce. From the Raider forty-seven, Mario took the long snap, cocked his arm with two short steps, and launched the ball. Davonte was already halfway to the goal and racing to beat his man. Just as he broke away, he craned his head and saw the ball as it twisted under the lights, precisely on course. It dropped into his arms at the five, and Davonte trotted into the end zone. A fifty-yard bomb. The stands went wild.
“It’s pretty, aint it?” Jet said, smiling. “That’s the best pass he’s thrown all season.”
The quarterback rode the high all the way through the fourth quarter, throwing for over three hundred yards to eliminate Cardinal Gibbons 28–14 and take his team one week closer to a rematch with Cocoa. Up north, the Tigers had done their part, narrowly beating Orlando Jones 14–9.
Later that night, Mario went home and turned on his computer. Jeff Greer’s recap of the game was already up on the Post’s website, the whole article dedicated to the quarterback’s great transformation:
“The former linebacker gets so pumped up for big games that sometimes he forgets that he now plays a position
that requires a steady hand,” Greer wrote. “But playing in his first playoff game as a quarterback, Rowley was as cool as ice, throwing three first-half touchdowns.… The Raiders will live and die with [his] arm this season.”
“It’s playoff time,” Mario told Greer, the arm in question feeling as though it were attached by a metal spike. “My attitude switches to a whole new mode now.”
Round two of the playoffs took Glades Central on the road. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, the Raiders traveled south to Fort Lauderdale to face American Heritage–Plantation, the private academy whose sister school in Delray Beach had nearly beaten them at home in October.
Despite their shaky 7–4 record, the Patriots had one of the most talked-about players in Broward County, a fourteen-year-old Haitian running back named Sony Michel. For weeks the Raiders had been hearing about the great Michel, the six-foot, two-hundred-pound freshman prodigy who ran a 4.3 forty and smashed through lines of scrimmage like Bo Jackson.
“If a safety gets on Sony in the secondary,” his coach Byron Walker once said, “there’s going to be a wreck.”
Michel had recently racked up 350 yards in a game against Chaminade. He was one of several backs in Florida, along with Glades Day’s Kelvin Taylor, who were giving legitimate chase to Emmitt Smith’s all-time rushing record. Michel had a slight advantage over Smith: American Heritage was K–12, so he’d played varsity the previous year, as an eighth-grader—running for 1,825 yards and twenty touchdowns (Smith, by comparison, had run three hundred fewer yards as a freshman at Escambia High with just as many TDs). But the Raiders had faced Michel that same year in the playoffs and eliminated the Patriots 46–20 to advance to the semifinals.
Even so, coaches from opposing squads, when jawing with Glades Central staff after games, couldn’t help but offer words of warning: “Watch out,” said one assistant from Boynton Beach, “ ’cause that boy a man. That boy will run the stretch all night, and if you aint got him locked up by the time he passes that line of scrimmage, he gone.”
To which the coaches replied: seen it, done it. But regardless, all week they prepared for the stretch. They also prepared for Michel’s brother Marken, a flyboy receiver and defensive back. They’d even practiced on Thanksgiving Day, meeting in the early-morning chill for three hours of walk-throughs before going home for turkey and sweet potato pie. Looking to squeeze in some extra conditioning, Don’Kevious and Jaja had even found a burning canefield and killed some rabbits.
Despite the team’s apparent readiness, an unavoidable statistic still haunted Hester: the Raiders carried the stink of a losing record in playoff games on the road after Thanksgiving. Those numbers included Hester’s first season, when they’d lost the regional finals at Miami Pace. Superstitious as Hester was, it gnawed at him: through his entire Thanksgiving dinner, on the bus ride south through the canefields and sawgrass prairie, up Broward Boulevard and into the locker room at American Heritage.
“This is a test we haven’t passed in a while,” he told his team. “On the road during this time of the year, we got to understand what we’re facing. That’s a big monkey on our backs and we got to get it off. This is the statement game. Everybody will know after tonight what kind of football team we are.”
And just to illustrate the power of bad juju, he reminded everyone that the previous week, Jaime had chosen to break the rules and stand out. He’d worn black socks instead of the uniform white, then suffered a grievous fumble that led to a Gibbons touchdown.
“We still got some guys who don’t wanna follow the norm,” Hester said. “Look at the type of game this cat had last week wearing the black socks. Look at his game.”
The playoffs seemed to bring out the old crow in everyone. Now, before each game, about twenty Raiders lined up to get patted down by Coach Sherm. The six-foot-seven coach would stand the boys in front of him, then pound his clenched fists violently atop their shoulder pads like two cannonballs rolling off a house. A glow of barbaric ecstasy would wash over their faces. The beating “settled” the pads, they said, like tenderizing a tough piece of meat. But it was also rooted in superstition.
“Every time Sherm pats me down,” Davonte said, “I score a touchdown.”
At American Heritage, there was also coincidence at play, and it certainly wasn’t lost on the old-timers. Byron Walker, the Patriot head coach, was a muckstepper from way back. He’d coached the Glades Day Gators for sixteen years and led them to three state titles. Before that, Walker had been the Glades Central quarterback who’d led the Raiders to their second championship in 1972.
Even more of a coincidence was that during the Raiders’ first title run in 1971—under Pearl Williams, Wayne Stanley, and Mark Newman—Walker had been a paunchy linebacker. When he came aboard his senior year as starting QB of the mighty GC Raiders, the town had mocked and doubted him, saying he was too fat, too short. But Coach Al Werneke hadn’t budged. “You’re our quarterback,” he’d told Walker. “Now that’s the end of it.”
As Glades Central began its pregame warm-ups, Walker looked out across the field at the Raider captain in the number 1 jersey and smiled. “Yep,” he said, “Mario reminds me a lot of myself.”
The Patriots’ field sat adjacent to the pristine American Heritage campus, its buildings uniform red brick and surrounded by tall trees. Tuition was upward of $22,954 for high school seniors—the per capita income in Belle Glade was just $14,018—with students drawn largely from the wealthy gated communities nearby.
After nightfall, the weather was crisp, not a breeze to be found. The planes beginning their descent into nearby Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood airport appeared as blinking stars above. “It’s a great night for football,” said Hester.
Coach Fat provided inspiration. “You give anything on this planet life, they gonna fight for life,” he said. “And when you give them life, you also give them strength. Now let’s go step on their mutherfuckin throats.”
“Pursue piranha-style,” Coach Tony told his defense. “If we pursue, everybody’s gonna eat. Make them feel that pain all night.”
• • •
IT WAS MARIO and Davonte who dealt the first blow. On the opening drive, the two connected on a forty-yard pass; the receiver scooped it up at his ankles, then jogged into the end zone.
Glades Central 7, American Heritage 0.
But as soon as the Patriots had the ball, it was all Sony Michel.
Play after play, the running back made the Raider line look more like guppies than flesh-eating piranhas. He would average eight yards a carry and not encounter trouble until he reached the open air, where Boobie and Page were waiting. It was Page who hit Michel on that first drive, so hard the bleachers recoiled when the boy’s helmet slapped the cold mud. But still he got up and celebrated, raising both arms to the crowd like a mini King James. He got the Patriots far enough downfield for an easy field goal, putting American Heritage on the boards.
The Patriot defense, for its part, sealed every gap and eliminated Glades Central’s running game. The heavy pressure also forced mistakes and penalties that hobbled the Raiders throughout the first half: little things such as holding, false starts, illegal blocks, and an ineligible-player-downfield penalty that erased a touchdown.
The Raider Nation was not pleased. And since the American Heritage field had no track, the bleachers were within spitting distance of Hester and the bench. They heard it all:
“Get yall head in the game, man!”
“O-line coach, that line is standin straight up! They standin up, Coach!”
“The middle wide open, Jet. Open yo’ eyes. The middle wide open!”
Halfway through the second quarter, Likely pulled down an interception that put Glades Central inside the Patriot thirty. Two plays later, Mario hit Oliver on a seven-yard route in the end zone to put the Raiders up 14–3.
American Heritage responded with another field goal after Michel single-handedly drove downfield, taking five- and ten-yard chunks out of the Raider defen
se before Boobie nailed him to the grass. Coach Randy winced when he heard the hit, then said, “That bitch won’t be gettin outta bed tomorrow.”
Before the half, the score still 14–6, the Raiders were forced to punt after a drive stalled in their own territory. Before Jaime could kick the ball, he looked up and found three defenders racing toward him. He froze, then flung the ball to the nearest maroon jersey—Don’Kevious—who caught it like a hot potato and took off running for the first down. The next play, Jaime took a short pass and ran it thirty yards for the touchdown. Raiders led 21–6.
“That’s the way to be great, baby!” Mario shouted into the manic crowd as he paced the sideline after the play. “That’s the way to be great!”
After the half, Michel snatched away the Raiders’ cushion with a quick forty-yard touchdown to make the score 21–13. At the fourth-quarter whistle, American Heritage was within one possession of tying the game.
The Raider Nation grew eerily quiet after the Patriots forced Glades Central to punt, then drove down the field once again. Just when it seemed as if they would score—the quarterback gave Michel a needed rest and called for the pass—Likely appeared once again out of nowhere and stole the ball from midair.
The crowd took to its feet as Mario returned to try to seal the game. On his first play, the defense blitzed and pushed him from the pocket toward the sideline. Just as he crossed out of bounds, a defender rocketed toward him headfirst and speared him in the helmet.
The quarterback’s body crumpled onto the grass as he lost consciousness. He lay on his back in the mud, his eyes moving in different directions. Coaches huddled close while the team doctor held up his fingers, shouting, “How many do you see? How many do you see?” From the stands, you could hear the collective gasp.
“Get up, Mario!” someone screamed.
“Come on, baby!”
The panic grew worse as he hobbled to the bench. Davis then entered the game and threw a bullet up the middle without a maroon jersey in sight. The ball was nearly picked and Hester lost his mind. “Do not throw the ball up the middle, Greg,” he screamed.