Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  “Debt, mortgages: everybody has to have one. I mean, that was the American Dream: put so much down, buy a house. Hello! After a while some guy’s unemployed. It’s not his fault all the time, but there’s no sympathy from society. You’re caught in a trap and you can’t get out and it’s terrible.”

  Still, Ditka and his generation can’t do much about it now. They’re on the fade, losing day by day the energy needed to hector, guide, take a public stand. Once, in 2004, Ditka mulled running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. That kind of ambition is gone. He works TV mostly, bringing gruff gravitas to NFL broadcasts, but even his famed competitive fire is flickering.

  Soon Ditka’s ninety-three-year-old mother, Charlotte, would be moving out of the old house in Linmar and into a nursing home in Beaver. Soon, she would die. “You see her getting all the IV shit and all that: it’s terrible,” he said. Then he shrugged. “But I’m going to go through it, too.”

  Such is the mean secret of progress: it depends on the self-delusion of youth, the sense that, somehow, all striving and achievement—any kind of victory—will somehow hold death at bay. Once that goes and the truth is accepted, there’s no stopping the air from leaving the balloon. The only shock is that it doesn’t pain Iron Mike to admit as much: to admit he doesn’t care about winning anymore.

  “You know what it is? It’s apathy,” Ditka said. “You don’t give a shit. Because it’s not going to define me at this point. When I was growing up, I thought it would define me. I don’t compete on TV to be the best; I say what I think I should say and that’s it.

  “Up until a couple years ago I was a pretty good golfer, and I was really competitive; I really wanted to win. But now? I want to play. If I win, fine; if I don’t, that’s fine, too. I play cards: same thing. It doesn’t bother me a bit. I laugh now. I don’t miss it. You’ll find out. When apathy sets in, you don’t give a damn. And it’s setting in.”

  A company town without a company is like a man past his prime; both become hollowed, age faster, without the regenerating charge of daily purpose. Such has been the Rust Belt affliction for the past forty years, but large urban economies like Pittsburgh at least had the scale and diversified infrastructure that help make reinvention possible. “Aliquippa’s in a weird place: it’s not the center of the region, it’s not the city, it’s not quite rural,” Briem said. “What is the competitiveness of a lot of towns that used to have a reason for being that don’t anymore?”

  Ditka’s heirs, meanwhile, have scattered. Unlike Iron Mike, they left Aliquippa unburdened by golden-age memories; the town gave them toughness and fuel, they know, but ultimately it was a place to escape. Sean Gilbert lives in North Carolina, Ty Law in Florida, and Darrelle Revis in New Jersey and Florida in the off-season. They come back for weekends here and there to see family, to show that they haven’t forgotten their roots, to give kids a chance to see a local boy made good.

  All have tried giving back. Gilbert started a nonprofit counseling program and construction of a Plan 11 church; Law funded a Head Start program in Plan 12, and ran a charity golf tournament and basketball game to raise cash for school supplies and computers; Revis holds an occasional football camp, funneled NFL-style Nike uniforms to the Quips program. But all are wary of pleas to refurbish The Pit or simply drop masses of money on the town because, first of all, no one knows whether Aliquippa High and the need for a football field will even exist in five years. And then, there is the largest unspoken question: How much, really, do I owe this place?

  Years ago, Law was stopped by an elderly lady. “What are you going to do for us here in Aliquippa, Mr. Law?” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  If he had known the woman, Law says, he would’ve lit into her. “You look at it,” he said. “There wasn’t nobody out there running with me at midnight, there wasn’t nobody dealing with what I was dealing with at home. So I don’t owe you anything. I owe my grandfather. I owe my mom. Because if I was out there selling drugs and end up going to jail, what are you going to do? You going to come bail me out?

  “Unfortunately, that’s the mentality for some because a select few of us made it. Even if we put all our money together, all our contracts, we cannot change the facts. We can make it look nice; we can probably go out and fix up a hundred homes around there to where they look real nice and pristine. But that’s not going to change the environment with the drugs and the fact that there ain’t no jobs. How you going to maintain it? It’s going to get right back like it was before we fixed it up.”

  Revis, for his part, can’t say enough about his hometown; “I love it to the utmost,” he said. But even “utmost” has its limits. He’s got a son and a daughter being raised in Beaver Falls, and the boy is another athlete in the making. Revis has no desire to send his son back home, for seasoning or grit or anything else. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I don’t want him in Aliquippa. If Aliquippa can pick their school up, and their coaches, and move somewhere else? Yes.”

  But that is impossible. Town and team are going nowhere. Any salvation, it seems, will have to be delivered by those left behind.

  The first weeks after James Moon killed D were hell. Dwan Walker careened about the emptied streets, hoping that someone would cut him off so he could slam the brakes and jump out and hit flesh, bone, feel the blood on his fists. He woke each night at the hour Diedre died, begged God to bring his sister back. For a second, a minute: Please. Just five minutes with her again. Chedda, worried, made him come by the house. His dad kept saying he heard D’s voice. “Sit quiet, son,” Chuckie said. “You don’t hear it because you still got a lot of pain.”

  In November 2009, two months later, Dwan started his campaign for mayor, knocking on doors. Primary Day was still sixteen months away, but he’d finish a shift at FedEx, tug on his Quips football sweatshirt, walk until the day turned dark. He talked about his vision, passed out T-shirts: “Remember What Aliquippa Was, Knowing What Aliquippa Can Be.”

  And he heard her voice clear, stepping off porches, trudging Aliquippa’s streets for twenty-two weeks straight in winter’s biting cold and the slow-coming spring. He knocked on every door in every Aliquippa neighborhood—5,100 homes in all, even in West, his opponent’s bastion. “I told you!” Dwan heard her say after each good contact. He answered by pointing at the sky.

  Word filtered back to Anthony Battalini, Aliquippa’s mayor since 2003, that the kid was hustling hard. Walker was thirty-four, an ex-Quips player with no political experience. Battalini was a three-term incumbent backed by the local Democratic kingmaker, Salt Smith—­former real estate agent and black Aliquippa’s most feared and connected voice, a thirty-two-year member of the Board of Education, the longtime general manager of the Municipal Water Authority, and chair of the Aliquippa Democratic Committee. Smith controlled jobs and pols alike, and Democratic governors and senators had long depended on him to deliver the town’s black vote. Aliquippa had been a Democratic stronghold since the 1930s. Nobody had ever challenged the machine’s mayoral choice—and won.

  It so happened that Smith’s property backed up against Chuckie and Chedda’s place: in the 1980s, Smith would invite the Walkers over for barbecues. His parents urged Dwan to pay respects. The meeting didn’t go well. In Walker’s version, Smith told him that he had no chance of beating the machine, that he should wait his turn, work an election or two and build political capital, and only then would he deign to “give me a seat.”

  “And I said, ‘I don’t want you to give me anything, Mr. Smith, because I don’t want your hands in my pocket,” Walker recalled. “‘I don’t want nobody to say I owed ’em anything, because that’s how y’all work. If I owe you something, you’re always going to have that over my head: ‘Man, you wasn’t nothing until I put you on this ticket!’

  “When I said that to him, he said, ‘Mr. Walker? You can’t win. We’re a machine. We do it right.’”

  Smith says he was h
ardly that emphatic. He says he merely told Dwan to speak to his own cousin, Aliquippa city councilwoman Lisa Walker, and learn the system: help those who came before you, and maybe you’ll get a shot. “The selfish person’s out there supporting himself,” Smith said. “People get involved, they work the election, next election there’s an opening: Who’re you going to turn to? The ones who showed the energy. That’s the way it happens.”

  Neither man budged. At the end Dwan shook Salt’s hand and thanked him. “Okay, Mr. Smith,” he said. “You’re going to regret telling an Aliquippa kid he can’t win.”

  More than a year later, Walker still hadn’t backed down. He convinced his twin brother Donald and a friend, Mark Delon, to run for city council on his “One Aliquippa” ticket; it didn’t seem to matter that none of them knew how to write a grant application or break down a city budget (“They’re so fucking green,” said developer Chuck Betters, “that you could dig a little hole, stick ’em in, and they’d start growing”).

  Fans saw Walker screaming in the stands at football games. Most knew his story: dead and gone, D was still working for him. His love for the place that he had every right to hate seemed so obvious that it short-circuited any charge of callowness. Who could question his sincerity? The downtown had flooded twice in the past four years. The mayor’s job paid $175.42 a month, after taxes, with no health benefits. Dwan Walker was gaining traction.

  In truth, that shouldn’t have been surprising. If there was one thing that Aliquippa still could be counted on to produce—and respond to—it was an against-all-odds tale. Jesse Steinfeld, James Frank, Ditka, Ty Law, and Darrelle Revis were stories the battered town kept telling itself for comfort, inspiration; Dwan Walker was just tapping in. You’re going to regret telling an Aliquippa kid he can’t win. And sure enough, just then, yet another local was pulling off an unlikely victory.

  They always speak of “The Next One” in Aliquippa, but the position also casts a shadow. Because for every alum like Revis there’s a Monroe Weekley—some gun-toting wraith whose talent isn’t enough to stop him from killing or being killed, fast or slow: the next waste. The next, Man, that’s pathetic. And by 2008, Tommie Campbell had just about completed his jump from “One” to the other.

  Of all of the great athletes on that ’03 state championship team, he might’ve been the most gifted. But Campbell flunked out of Pitt, lost a full scholarship after two years of missed classes, practices, and football meetings. His last-chance meeting with head coach Dave Wannstedt? Didn’t show; didn’t even call. Campbell had narcolepsy, tended to skip his medication, and never saw why the world couldn’t soften up its pesky rules, schedules, commitments. “Like a lost little boy,” he said. “I never had a plan. I just thought things were going to be handed to me.”

  Such entitlement was rarely discussed on the “Next One” side of the divide. If football presented Aliquippa’s flashiest alternative to drug dealing and led to scholarships, too often its players went off ill-prepared and returned without a diploma—never mind a pro contract. Athletics might get them out, shield them for a time, but higher competition or injury exposed any weakness. And, paradoxically, successes like Ty Law and Revis could discourage those bumping up against the limits of their own skill or desire. Once a means to escape the steelworker’s fate, football had evolved into an end in itself, a promise of riches and fame that made a mere bachelor’s degree seem shabby.

  “Some of our guys have been struggling,” Wytiaz said. “Everybody can’t play at Pitt, Penn State, Notre Dame, but you may be able to play at Grove City or Westminster. But they go to these places, and quite honestly it’s a step down athletically—and they can’t handle it. The kids are bright enough. There’s nothing wrong with going to Westminster, Slippery Rock, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Get your education.”

  Still, if it doesn’t work out, Aliquippa—and its troubles—always welcomes them home. Josh Lay, the gifted Aliquippa quarterback who manned Pitt’s other cornerback slot during Revis’s sophomore season, the senior Revis escorted into the end zone after his blocked kick, had short stints with the New Orleans Saints and St. Louis Rams, played semipro ball, and then, in March 2011, was arrested after being stopped near Sixth Avenue in a car carrying a digital scale and thirty-one bags of marijuana. “He’s as good or better than Revis,” said longtime Quips booster John Evasovich. “But no work ethic. Had all the athletic talent you could possibly have. All of a sudden he doesn’t have a job because he doesn’t have a degree . . . so what do you do? There ain’t no mill. So you sell shit.”

  The guessing game on who will end up good or bad starts early (“I guarantee you: next year three of these kids will be in jail,” Evasovich said, scanning a Quips roster; “I just don’t know which three”) and can finish late. Some surefire successes curdle: Jonathan Baldwin became a first-round draft pick in 2011, signed a $7.5 million contract with the Kansas City Chiefs with a signing bonus of $3.9 million, but was out of the league within three years because of a lax work ethic, inconsistency, injury. And some surefire failures, at the last minute, reverse course.

  After sleepwalking his way out of Pitt, Tommie Campbell played the ’07 season at Division II Edinboro and then washed out of there, too, all the way back to his mother’s couch in Plan 12. He started smoking, drinking, dropped twenty-five pounds, frittered away a year on PlayStation. One night Tommie rushed in, shaken from a run up to Valley Terrace. “He was over some girl’s house and they stuck a gun to his head,” said his mother, Della Rae. “They thought Tommie had money and wanted to stick him up because he was delivering, you know, back and forth. They put the gun to his head and it jammed. Tommie had tears coming down his face. He just knew that was going to be his last thing, right there.”

  Campbell won’t confirm the details, but admitted, “It was a real scary moment, man. If that had never happened to me, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. I got scared straight, you could say.”

  No. Fear was only half the antidote. Next came shame: he was twenty-two years old with two sons, no future, no job. He tried to enlist in the Marines, but a slew of unpaid speeding tickets—$2,000 worth—ended that. He stayed on the couch, scared to go out and face people asking what the hell he was doing with his life.

  A girlfriend’s connection finally landed Campbell one of the only positions he was qualified for: janitor, at Pittsburgh International Airport’s USAir terminal. His mom had been a janitor once, at Aliquippa Hospital: Tommie used to vow that he’d never clean up people’s trash. But now, for the next six months he worked graveyard shift—­changing can liners, scraping gum off the floors with a blade, spraying blue chemicals into toilets littered with piss and pubes and streaks of shit. Every two weeks, he took home about $460.

  Every day men and women hurried past him without a second look, on their way to homes, careers, respect. You’d think his worst nightmare would be the sight of a pro football player—the realization of what Tommie, once, was sure he would be—walking past. “I saw something worse: one of my ex-teammates from the University of Pittsburgh coming through,” Campbell said. That evening, he was pushing his cleaning cart in the terminal when he saw defensive back Elijah Fields approaching in his team-issued sweats. Tommie wanted to disappear. Fields saw him.

  “It made me feel little,” Campbell said. “I was real skinny and everything, and it made me feel little just as a human being. He came over to talk to me for a brief second. I told him I was proud for him because he was doing the right thing at the time. I told him: ‘Listen, if you don’t take care of what you need to take care of, you’re going to be right here, too. . . .’”

  Fields didn’t listen. By 2010, he had been kicked off the team and out of Pitt in a haze of indolence and pot smoke. The chance meeting has lingered with Campbell ever since. “There’s a lot of time to think while you’re mopping that floor,” he said. “Lot of time to think about what you could’ve done better—and if you’ll
ever get a chance again, what’re you going to do?”

  His daily round was filled with cautionary tales: Mom, Rick Hill, Peep Short, so many football teammates. Then there was Byron Wilson, the long jumper on that miracle track team of ’05, son of the Aliquippa police chief. Two years after his title-clinching long jump, Byron plea-bargained a fifteen-month sentence after pulling up next to his Linmar enemies in a car and opening fire. In August 2009, while Tommie Campbell was gathering trash, Wilson stepped into the Hollywood Lounge during a Linmar birthday party and wounded two men with a .22-caliber pistol, got two years in prison.

  Finally, Tommie Campbell reached out to Larry Dorsch—a white real estate developer living in whiter, quieter Cranberry Township whom he’d met just before going to Pitt. Dorsch put Campbell to work on one of his job sites, spreading mulch, stocking shelves at a local supermarket, gave him money to eat. But Dorsch also knew that any comeback had to start instantly. He invited Tommie to move in with him, his wife, and her eighty-three-year-old mother. Della didn’t like it; she wanted her son to stay home. But Tommie knew this was his last chance.

  He stayed there a year and a half. The Dorsches laughed when their neighbors did double takes at seeing a young black man come and go. They started calling Tommie, after the old TV comedy series, “The Fresh Prince of Cranberry.” He took to calling Dorsch “Pops.”

  “He helped me in every aspect possible,” Tommie said. “He is the father figure to me. I have a stepdad and he was always there for me, but everybody had a disagreement. Larry never gave up on me. If I was willing to do it, he would always help me try.”

  The cigarettes disappeared. The first time Campbell tried a timed, 40-yard dash he ran a 4.70—good for bragging at the Hollywood Lounge and little else. Then the meals and sleep and work kicked in, and the pounds began to stick. Campbell paid off the speeding tickets. He convinced a skeptical defensive coordinator at California University of Pennsylvania to give him a shot. Everybody in Western Pennsylvania knew what a motivated Tommie, back up to 220 pounds now, could do.