by S. L. Price
“This is why I do what I do,” Mike Zmijanac said before each winning playoff game in 2011, and then again in 2012, when the Quips—led by dual 1,000-yard rushers Dravon Henry and Terry Swanson—cruised through the postseason and crushed Washington 34-7 to win its fifteenth WPIAL title. In September of 2013 Zmijanac turned seventy, but neither he nor his team showed signs of slowing. Another undefeated regular season unrolled, capped by Aliquippa’s sixth straight appearance in November’s WPIAL championship game, at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field.
All over America, then, the view of football was changing fast. That was the month Tony Dorsett revealed that he had been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the latest retired NFL player in an ever-lengthening line to blame the game for memory loss, depression, thoughts of suicide. “Football caused this,” Dorsett said during a spate of national interviews. “Football has caused my quality of life to deteriorate.” A week later, the country’s largest youth football organization, Pop Warner, reported that participation had dropped nearly 10 percent from 2010 to 2012, and cited fallout from the game’s concussion crisis as “the No. 1 cause.”
Even smashmouth icon Mike Ditka was going soft; soon he, too, would admit that he wouldn’t let a young son of his play now. “I wouldn’t,” Ditka said on national television in early 2015. “And my whole life was football. I think the risk is worse than the reward.”
But if such talk circulated back in his hometown, it wasn’t very loud. There was still a waiting list to play on all four levels of Little Quips—Twerp (eight and under), Termite (ten and under), Mighty Mite (twelve and under), and Midget (fourteen and under)—and any criticisms of the game focused on Zmijanac’s seeming inability, of late, to claim big titles. People began carping again about his run-first/run-more play-calling after Aliquippa failed to score four times from inside the 20-yard line and lost to Wyomissing, 17-14, in the 2012 AA state title game. Then came back-to-back defeats in the WPIAL AA championship to South Fayette in 2013 and ’14.
It didn’t matter that South Fayette’s enrollment was twice as large; that with just over 300 students—138 boys—Aliquippa was a Class A school facing the second-largest school in AA. It didn’t matter, either, that Zmijanac hadn’t lost a conference game going back to 2009, or that he would run his regular-season winning streak up to sixty in 2015. For some parents and fans—and especially the Little Quips coaches who’d handled the players before they hit high school—it meant more that Aliquippa went into that 2014 clash averaging a Class AA–leading 50 points per game and scored just 22. To them, Zmijanac was too stubborn, too predictable: the second coming of old King Carl.
“I guarantee you, a Yannessa-coached team would have never gone to Heinz Field three times and only scored twenty-one points,” said Mayor Dwan Walker, a longtime Little Quips coach, referring to Aliquippa’s total output in the 2008, ’09, and ’10 WPIAL title games. “Frank Marocco? It would have never happened. But you see Zmijanac on our sidelines: everything he says goes. He doesn’t listen to nobody but himself. This is a basketball coach being a football coach, and all these ex-players are there coaching with him—and you don’t listen to them? To me, that’s selfish.”
Indeed, when things went wrong—even slightly—things got personal, fast. For some, Zmijanac would always suffer in comparison to his predecessors, and his standoffishness—summed up all too easily by his residency in tony Mt. Lebanon—only made questioning his methods easier. Most parents loved Coach Z’s my-way-or-the-highway stance on grades and comportment, but a small faction complained that he didn’t do enough to help second-tier players land scholarships. Never mind that more sophisticated high school scouting, a deeper talent pool, and the reduced size of college rosters had made Division 1-A far more discerning since Yannessa’s day. Or that a marginal player’s marginal transcript usually overrides any coach’s glowing comments about the kid’s “character.” It had to be him.
Zmijanac, typically, shrugged all that off. Privacy laws, not to mention his own discretion, prevent any comment about student test scores, and, frankly, he figures his string of D-1 players speaks for itself. And X’s and O’s? For years he had stressed, publicly, how much he leans on assistants Sherman McBride and Peep Short; if people weren’t ripping him for being a control freak, they were griping about him being little more than a figurehead. Which one was it? As for Aschman, Zmijanac says he overhauled the offense after Yannessa left—and, anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s not his play-calling that wins or loses games, he says; it’s the players’ talent and drive, and the way his assistants monitor, teach, and keep them playing clean and tough.
“They think they’re fuckin’ Vince Lombardi,” Zmijanac said of his critics. “The correlation between Little Quips and the high school team is like the one between the high school team and the fuckin’ NFL. I’m not angry with those people when I say that, but that’s typical. They want the credit. It’s silly. And here’s my real attitude: They want to make themselves feel good about it? Fine. I don’t care.”
Still, by the time of the 2015 season, the heat was on. If Zmijanac had nothing to prove, everyone else felt it. Civic pride mattered, as always, but more than ever football was seen as the town’s clearest path to success—and suddenly, the path didn’t even seem that tortuous. Dravon Henry and Terry Swanson had wasted no time breaking in at name-college programs, West Virginia and Toledo, respectively; in 2014, Henry was named a freshman all-American at safety and Swanson rushed for 732 yards. But the most dazzling example played Sundays: fresh off a Super Bowl championship with New England, Darrelle Revis was back in uniform with the Jets under a contract guaranteeing him at least $39 million. His career earnings, at thirty, now totaled $124 million.
“I guess I have a golden ticket,” Kaezon Pugh said one night in October, sitting on the porch of his dad’s house in Plan 12. “God planned this for me, and I’m just taking advantage of it.”
He was, indeed, The Next One: The previous Friday Pugh, a senior now, had rushed for 313 yards and two touchdowns as Aliquippa breezed to a 35-14 win over Quaker Valley. And that was an off night; his calves had seized up with cramps nearly from the start of the game. At 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, with a 4.4 time in the 40-yard dash, Pugh was bigger than Henry and Swanson and just as fast. By then he had sorted through three dozen scholarship offers and all but decided to follow the Ditka-Revis pipeline to Pitt, where the coaches project him as a linebacker.
Not that Pugh cares where he lines up. “Growing up, I hated football,” he said. And though Pugh would soon become the fifth back in Aliquippa history to gain more than 4,000 yards, though he was starting to talk now about how he has come to revere The Pit, he had warmed up to the game only a bit. Like Revis and Jonathan Baldwin, he had lived for basketball as a kid. Like them both, he realized that it didn’t offer much of a future.
“To be honest, I’m only in love with football because I think that’s my only way out,” Pugh says. “Because I have to love it. You can’t succeed at something you don’t love; it’s just not going to happen—you can’t be great.”
His father, the rarest of crossovers, pushed him here. Aliquippans are as guilty as any outsider of portraying the town as a battleground for competing ecosystems: its spiderweb of violence and drugs versus that network of family and ex-players pushing their boys to play. But sometimes the two worlds mesh—and never more seamlessly than in the person of David Askew.
Until the eighth grade, Pugh was happy living with his mother, Katia Pugh, and two younger siblings in Ambridge, getting all the playing time he wanted against lesser competition. But when, in 2008, David Askew was paroled out of prison after serving seven years for the murder of Eddie Humphries, he kept stressing to his son that a growth spurt was coming—and that Kaezon needed to take full advantage. “My dad broke it down to me,” Pugh says. “Told me what I was going to become.”
That Askew had long been like a big brother to P
ugh’s cousin, Dravon Henry, and was on his way to marrying Diana Gilbert and becoming Revis’s stepfather, only gave his words more weight. Pugh was struck, too, by his father’s determination to change, to serve as a cautionary tale. “They say jail is good for some people; you come out a whole different person. My dad was one of those who didn’t want to go back,” Kaezon said. “He’s been down that road, and I know I’ve got to go in the opposite direction. That’s a must. And that’s what I’m going to do—take my ticket, the way I want to take it.”
Pugh moved to Aliquippa. He started at linebacker his sophomore year and moved into the starting backfield his junior, amassing 1,626 yards and averaging nearly 11 yards a carry in 2014. His Quips running mate, Hopewell transfer DiMantae Bronaugh, rushed for 1,262 and a 9.3 average. The back-to-back losses to South Fayette in the WPIAL championship stung, and the two vowed to come back even stronger for their senior year.
But beyond the football field, a small crack had surfaced in the public bond between the football program and the community. For years, going back to Yannessa’s days, the program had enforced a policy of withholding players’ recruiting letters during the season. The practice helped tamp down runaway egos, kept the focus on team and the game at hand. But for those inclined to question Zmijanac, it also bred easy resentment.
In December 2014, a week after the Quips’ loss in the WPIAL final, David Askew visited the football office and was given a box of dozens of letters—none of them hard-core scholarship offers. But one, he said, was from the U.S. Military Academy and addressed to “the parent of Kaezon Pugh,” requesting permission for the player to visit West Point—for a game that was now past. Irate, Askew posted a three-minute Facebook video of himself sorting through the box, naming Zmijanac, and calling for “change” in the Aliquippa football program.
That led to a community meeting: Peep Short was invited and attended, and a petition was presented calling for Zmijanac’s resignation. The Beaver County Times published a story, another player’s mother criticized the coach’s perceived lack of interest in getting her son a scholarship, a Pittsburgh TV station ran a report. Word spread online. “That guy don’t like me,” Askew said. Bad enough that a star player’s dad had taken such a stand, but no one stated—publicly—the real curiosity: as Diana Gilbert’s husband, Askew was part of Aliquippa football’s most famous clan, two of whose members had been coached by Zmijanac. Perhaps Sean Gilbert and Darrelle Revis had no sway with David Askew. Maybe neither thought it worthwhile to cross sister or mother, and hoped that the issue would just die. But, publicly at least, neither Gilbert nor Revis said a word in Zmijanac’s defense.
Regardless, the movement gained little traction with the public or school board. But the program’s hard-line stand on recruiting letters did dissolve—players can now come by the office once a week to pick up any mail—and some wondered whether Zmijanac would bother returning. He and his staff never talked, publicly, about the letters or the petition—not even McBride, who had called the reformed Askew a “great guy now.” But Zmijanac’s longtime ally, schools superintendent Dave Wytiaz, said, “Mike had been under fire for various stupid things involving a guy who’s been in prison much of his adult life. It all died down because it was bullshit. But I think that’s driven him, too.”
Four months later, in April 2015, Zmijanac signed a new three-year contract that projected him still on the sideline at seventy-four. For the upcoming season, Kaezon would require some deft handling, to say the least; and only one starter each was returning to the offensive and defensive lines. Still, Wytiaz said, “I see a renewed vigor in Mike.”
Then, a week before the first game, Bronaugh was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and ruled out for the season. The tone shifted: Quips Nation rallied. Bronaugh stood on the sideline in the opener, began a schedule of nauseating weekly chemotherapy sessions in Pittsburgh. Blood drives were held, blankets were knit, T-shirts were sold. The senior class donated $600 in gas cards for his hospital runs. Messages of hope poured in from California, Australia, Iraq. Former Quips like Mark Washington and Jon LeDonne, now coaching at Hopewell and Shaler High, respectively, raised money at their schools, and every road opponent chipped in at halftime. The team kept winning. The fundraising total rose to $9,000. Week after week, the players kept saying they were doing it all for DiMantae.
“The support has been overwhelming,” said Bronaugh’s aunt, Aliquippa High teacher’s aide Anita Gordon. “People I don’t even know walk up to me and say how much they’ve been praying and hoping he gets better. The community has been wonderful.”
By September’s end, Bronaugh was in remission. His teammates vowed to win him a championship and Pugh, meanwhile, shouldered Aliquippa’s offensive load. He didn’t complain. Any awkwardness with Zmijanac from the previous winter was gone. Between his dad going to prison and a thirty-one-year-old aunt dying of cancer in 2013, Pugh had survived worse. “I have a certain motor that keeps me going through anything,” he said. “Just straight ahead, no matter what.”
After rushing for nearly 1,300 yards during the Quips’ 9-0 regular season, Pugh hit another gear in the 2015 playoffs. He had plenty of help; with a fast-maturing line and quarterback Sheldon Jeter’s passing providing variety that Aliquippa hadn’t shown in years, Pugh shook off a concussion in their first-round win, romped for 253 yards against Seton-La Salle, and ran for 237 over Freeport. The Quips sailed into Heinz Field for their third straight WPIAL title shot against their recent nemesis, South Fayette—now riding a 44-game winning streak. Pugh ground out another 179 yards, but the game ended up being about nearly everything but him.
Five times the lead changed hands. Aliquippa held a 14-point cushion with less than six minutes left—and let it slip away. Then, facing a do-or-die drive on the South Fayette 47-yard line with the score tied 38–38 and 1:11 left, Zmijanac—who seemingly had no imagination, who seemingly had lost his big-game touch—answered his critics with a bang. Out came a trick play he hadn’t run in four years: Jeter flung a first-down lateral to wide receiver Jassir Jordan—who had never thrown a touchdown pass in his life—who then fired the ball downfield to a wide-open Thomas Perry. Perry raced the final 15 yards to give Aliquippa the 44–38 win, and its sixteenth WPIAL championship.
“Those are the kind of plays where if they don’t work you look stupid,” Zmijanac said after.
“He has been in this business a long time,” said South Fayette coach Joe Rossi. “That’s why he’s so successful.”
But if the breakthrough meant another paint job on the field house roof, it provided no relief. Aliquippa kept living dangerously. Now seeking its first state title since 2003, the Quips came from behind in the fourth quarter to beat Karns City in the state quarter-finals, then trailed Central Martinsburg in the fourth in the semis. Pugh had been laid out twice in the second half with blows to his elbow and upper body; now he took over. He scored the game’s next 16 points—two touchdowns and two conversions—to seal the 30–21 win and a trip to Hershey, Pennsylvania, for the championship. He finished with 160 yards on 28 carries—a bit below his playoff average of 192 yards per game. No one complained.
“This is not a giving-up team,” Pugh said after. “I was sitting there hurting and said, ‘No, I can’t go out like this.’ I just had to push—and keep pushing.”
Why? Winning was part of it. Helping DiMantae was part of it. Getting to college and the NFL, making millions someday, was a big part, too, but not all. Pugh has a dream, one he doesn’t talk about much. It involves the dodgy streets of Plan 12 and the corner where his friend Tiquai died, the crumbling Pit, his mom living up on a darkened street off Monaca Road. It involves, even, all the factors that pushed his dad to pull a trigger and go off to jail.
“My plans? If I ever make it, I want to talk to all the big celebrities that came from around here and together we’ll just rebuild Aliquippa,” Pugh said that night in October. “Make it new. Get it to st
art feeling, like: I’m home again. I would love that feeling. That would be the best—to have everybody who’s made it out come back and just . . . enjoy ourselves. Like a family again.”
A winter’s chill was already in the air. He let the idea marinate a moment; a shaft of light spilled from the living room window onto the darkened porch, enough to see Pugh nod and smile. “I think it can happen,” he said. “I’ll make it happen.”
The fight was four to one—four men with law on their side, to one wounded freebooter, half-starved, exhausted by days and nights of pursuit, worn down with loss of sleep, thirst, privation, and the grinding, nerve-racking consciousness of an ever-present peril.
They swarmed upon him from all sides, gripping at his legs, at his arms, his throat, his head, striking, clutching, kicking, falling to the ground, rolling over and over, now under, now above, now staggering forward, now toppling back.
Still Dyke fought. . . .
—Frank Norris, The Octopus
December 19, 2015
Now they have come east. Some nine hundred parents, sisters and brothers, other relations, friends, administrators, teachers, alums still there and alums who moved out to Hopewell or Monaca or farther but never really left—roughly a tenth of Aliquippa’s remaining population—filled five charter buses or piled into trucks, minivans, or cars to make the four-hour drive here. It is nearing 11 a.m. Their black-shirted team occupies half of a stadium field, split into squads, running through plays one last time. All have come to Hershey, Pennsylvania, annual site of the state championship games, seeking the perfect ending.
A win would mean a promise kept to DiMantae Bronaugh, the Quips running back sidelined with cancer. A win would redeem the state-title loss in 2012 and silence all the old Aliquippa players who wonder about this generation’s steel. And a win would provide a fitting close to the program’s twenty-five-year run as a Double-A power; two weeks before, in response to the state athletic association’s decision to expand to six classes in 2016, Zmijanac and school officials announced that Aliquippa would bump up yet another level, to AAA, and resume its rivalries with Hopewell and Central Valley.