Deadly Goals

by Wilt Browning

  “Hey, man,” he said to the male student whose name Sarah had not yet learned. “Better move on and find somebody else to talk to. That’s Pernell Jefferson’s woman.”

  Sarah was furious.

  “It was as though I wasn’t permitted to have friends of my own,” she said years later.

  By that time, Sarah already knew that she was pregnant, and she didn’t plan to let Pernell know about it. They had broken up during the summer, although he had talked about getting back together before he left for Guilford. Since he’d gone, though, she hadn’t heard from him at all.

  “I was going to have the baby and if he never came around, he’d just never know anything about it,” she said later, recalling her feelings at the time.

  But word soon got around the school that she was carrying Pernell’s child, and a South Johnston football player who visited Pernell at Guilford one weekend told him about it. When Pernell returned to Benson for the Thanksgiving break, he went to see Sarah.

  “Is it mine?” he asked.

  “It’s yours,” she said, warily, uncertain of his response.

  “He was thrilled,” she remembered years later.

  Sarah gave birth to a son at Smithfield-Johnston Memorial Hospital on March 1, 1982. She asked a friend to notify Pernell.

  “They told me that when he was told, Pernell went dancing around the room celebrating,” Sarah said. “They said he got up on a table and was dancing and yelling.”

  For three days, the child remained unnamed. “I didn’t know what I wanted to name him,” Sarah recalled. “A friend wanted me to name him Patrick. Patrick Wheeler. It sounded okay, but it wasn’t exactly right. The people in the hospital just knew him as ‘Boy Wheeler.’ Then I told them to put ‘Pernell’ down for his name. Pernell Maurice Wheeler.*”

  Two weeks after his son was born, Pernell came home for spring break.

  “I’ll never forget him coming to our house,” Sarah said. “When he came in, I was just sitting there, holding the baby. Pernell smiled the biggest, prettiest smile…”

  He reached out tentatively and touched the baby, then lifted him from her arms and clutched him to his chest.

  “Pernell,” he said. “Pernell Junior.”

  When he returned the baby to Sarah, he hugged her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  5.

  The Turning Point

  IN HIS FRESHMAN YEAR on the Guilford football team, Pernell had managed to get onto the field only for a few kickoffs and punt returns late in the season. But long before practice had begun in the summer before his sophomore year, he had become confident that this year he would be a starter on defense.

  Although he barely had survived his first year of college academically, he was stronger than he ever had been, virtually addicted to muscle building.

  Before classes began, Pernell learned that he had been assigned to share a dormitory room with a freshman candidate for the football team, Lamar Boykin. Still growing, Lamar was taller than Pernell, rangier and faster, and he was the closest thing to a natural defensive back that Pernell had ever seen.

  Although they were competing for the same spots on the team, Pernell and Lamar hit it off from the beginning, and by the time of the season’s first game, both not only were starters, they were close friends and confidants.

  Always the optimist, Pernell seemed almost carefree to Lamar, a man at peace with the world and in love with his own existence. And when Pernell returned the opening kickoff 100 yards for a touchdown in one of the season’s early games, he was suddenly the college football star he’d been determined to become. Lamar sensed that his new friend even walked with an attitude bordering on arrogance after that.

  But if Pernell felt self-assured about his ability, his position coach, Tommy Saunders, no longer was certain.

  Although, Pernell’s explosiveness as a kick returner was paying big dividends, the elusiveness and individual style that made him good at it were becoming problems on defense. Saunders, a disciplinarian, pushed for strict attention to assigned plays and assigned zones, but Pernell resisted.

  Even when Saunders began sending in another player, Keith Milner, Pernell still did not respond. After all, Milner wasn’t doing noticeably better.

  “It was like neither one of them wanted to hit anybody,” Saunders recalled. “And neither wanted to stay where he was supposed to be. They’d get out of position and we’d get killed.”

  The problem quickly became acute. In desperation, Saunders pleaded with head coach Charlie Forbes to move John Hoots, also a sophomore, from his running back slot to the strong safety position Pernell had been playing. The switch was made on Wednesday prior to the game against Mars Hill. Hoots spent most of that practice learning the position and by the end of practice on Friday he seemed at home there.

  Still, Hoots remained on the bench through the first half of the Mars Hill game. But the game wasn’t going well for the Quakers, and at halftime, Saunders huddled briefly with Forbes.

  “I don’t have much choice,” he said to Forbes. “I’m putting Hoots in at strong safety in the second half.”

  Told of the lineup change in the dressing room at halftime, Pernell argued vehemently with Saunders, but to no avail. He sat sullenly on the bench during the second half.

  A day later, after the coaches had studied the game films, Forbes sought out Pernell.

  “You’re not going to start any more until further notice,” Forbes told him, then quickly departed, leaving no quarter for discussion.

  “That was a killer,” Pernell later recalled. “I was crushed.”

  He retreated to his dormitory room, fell heavily onto his bed and for a long time lay staring at the ceiling.

  He had endured the long rehabilitation for his broken ankle, had worked hard to come back, only to find rejection. Injuries happen, he reasoned, but this latest blow, this demotion, was because another player was bigger and stronger.

  And this, he knew, was no temporary setback. He and Hoots both were sophomores. Unless he got big enough and strong enough to compete with Hoots, the best he could hope for was an occasional punt or kickoff return. But he knew there was a way that he could do that. His weightlifting friends at the health clubs had been telling him about it.

  The following day, Pernell acquired a vial of Winstrol V from a teammate who had boasted from time to time that he was using steroids. In the privacy of his dorm room, he pushed the needle into the fatty part of his right hip and drained the steroid into his system.

  In the coming days, on the recommendation of an acquaintance at a health club, Pernell added a Winstrol tablet called Stanozdol to his injections of Winstrol V. The combination became what was regarded as a modest stack of steroids in weightlifting terms. Pernell had launched his first steroid cycle. Others would come in quick succession as his workouts became more intense.

  He doubled his dosage, then tripled it. He began eating twice as much. Steadily, his lifts increased. So did his weight. And as he grew bigger and stronger, as if by magic, he gained more and more confidence. He also won the attention of his coaches, who saw his new regimen as red-blooded resolve to win back his starting position. They admired him for it, and at mid-season, they rewarded him, giving him a new starting position on the boundary side of the secondary, where he immediately proved himself.

  “Maybe it took me a while, but I finally realized I had to get Pernell onto the field,” Saunders said. “I made it easy for him. I put him on the boundary side of the field because I wanted him to do just two things—go up or go back.”

  There would be other changes in a defensive secondary that was looking for consistency. Lamar was shifted into Pernell’s old position on the wide side of the field, normally called the strong side in most defensive schemes. Lamar, who possessed good size and the speed to compete against fast wide receivers sent deep into the zone, became the key to the new defensive secondary.

  On the first day of practice unde
r the new alignment, Saunders knew he had finally hit upon the right combination.

  Back in the starting lineup again, Pernell once more was happy. By the time of the homecoming game late in the season, Pernell had received accolades for his dramatic kickoff and punt returns. Gone now were the personal doubts and uncertainties that had plagued him only a couple of months earlier. In a Wednesday practice session, he capped off the day’s special teams work by returning a kickoff for a touchdown with a dazzling run.

  As he trotted past Forbes at the end of practice, Pernell made a promise.

  “Gonna give you one of those Saturday, Coach,” he said cockily.

  On Saturday, just prior to the game, athletic director Herb Appenzeller walked along the sidelines, stopping beside Pernell, who was doing his stretching exercises.

  “Think you can run one back today?” Appenzeller asked.

  “Just watch me, Dr. A,” Jefferson answered with a grin.

  Remembering that he had left some game tickets on his desk in the field house 200 yards away, Appenzeller hurried off to get them. He was delayed in getting back, and just as he stepped out of the fieldhouse, a roar arose from the crowd in the distance.

  Pernell had returned the opening kickoff more than 80 yards for a touchdown. Lamar rushed to hug his roommate. Drowned by the roar of the crowd were the cheers of another of Pernell’s new friends, Susan Demos.

  6.

  Equality in Black and White

  WHEN SUSAN DEMOS had entered Guilford College in the autumn of 1980, she had been following a family tradition. Her mother, her grandfather and her great-grandmother all had graduated from Guilford. Her mother’s father had been a professor there.

  Soon after her own arrival at Guilford, a school so liberal that it had been among the first in the South to admit black students and had boldly recruited Japanese students during the Japan-hating years of World War II, Susan had begun gathering about her a new set of friends without regard to race or any other prejudices. The daughter of a Quaker mother and an orthodox Greek father, Susan had from childhood been taught about the brotherhood of man by both parents. But it had not been until her sophomore year that she had met Pernell, a freshman who, like Susan, reported to the dining room in Founders Hall every day to bus tables. Pernell smiled freely and conversation over clanking dishes had come easily. Susan found him charming and liked him immediately.

  “We were just friends for a while,” she recalled.

  But by February 1982, more than halfway through his freshman year, Pernell had asked Susan for a date. Having been influenced in her formative years principally by the liberal Quaker beliefs of her mother, Irene*, Susan had no qualms about interracial dating. In high school, she had for most of her junior year dated a black classmate. After they had gone to a school dance together, Susan had gone early the next day to pick up the newspaper for her father and at the end the family driveway, she had discovered “Nigger Lover” spray-painted in white on the black asphalt.

  Years later, it still bothered her. “How could whoever wrote those words hate me?” she asked. “They didn’t even know me.”

  More importantly, though she didn’t know it at the time, nor did she understand it for years, the incident had instantly changed her relationship with her father, George.* As he had rolled a dark sealer over the hateful words, he had remained silent, and he would never speak to Susan about the incident.

  “My dad was a great person,” she said years later. “Anybody who knew us would tell you my dad thought I walked on water. But we never did communicate on deep, important things.”

  Susan still was struggling with her father’s silence when she accepted Pernell’s invitation to a Chinese restaurant and a movie.

  “Pernell was a lot of fun,” she said. “We were always doing things together. We both liked Chinese food. We were always going to different sports events together. For me, it was exciting. There was so much Pernell had not been exposed to.”

  Susan and Pernell had sports in common—in high school she had competed in track, basketball and volleyball—but socially, their differences were great, and in a sense, Pernell became a challenge for Susan. Pernell was the product of a background vastly different from Susan’s and from that of most of the students at Guilford, where for decades the student body had been made up in large measure of sons and daughters of the wealthy. Pernell lacked some of the social graces that were second nature for other students. His grammar was often inconsistent and his clothes were not of the latest fashion or from expensive shops. Susan had set about changing all that. She had taught Pernell etiquette without insulting his pride. She had bought clothes for him that would make it possible for him to more readily blend in with his trendy classmates.

  “He loved new shoes,” she remembered. “And he loved to share what he had. I’d buy him a new pair of shoes and a week later they’d be gone. He’d given them to somebody who had liked them. I’d go buy him another pair. I bought him so many shoes I was going broke.”

  Susan also bought the first set of contact lenses Pernell ever owned. “He was thrilled the day he got them,” she said.

  A shirt, a pair of shoes at a time, Susan had been gradually becoming Pernell’s woman, at first without realizing what was happening. “I don’t even remember when that happened,” she said later. “I just know that I wanted to make a point and Pernell gave me the chance to do that.”

  The old Quaker teachings of her childhood, now reinforced by much of what she saw and learned at liberal Guilford College, became once again important in her life. Susan had come to believe that her mother and father stood a world apart from one another in their views about equality and racism.

  “I know now that it wasn’t so much my dad as it was the difference in his times and my times,” she said years later. “And the two were on a collision course. The point was—and not everybody agreed with me—that I felt that everybody is equal. And I set about making sure Pernell was equal to all the other students at Guilford by buying him the same kinds of clothes everybody else had. I thought that if Pernell looked equal, then he must be equal. I will always believe that everybody is equal. But I will never try to prove it that way again.”

  Before his first year of college had ended, a trend had developed in Pernell’s life. Most of his male friends were black; most of his female friends were white, a curiosity that would not trouble Susan until years later.

  “I always thought Pernell looked for white women,” she said. “Where he’s from, whites and blacks still don’t mix like they do in other places. Back around Benson, whites still own the big farms, and blacks work for them on those big farms. I always thought he resented that his mother had had to work on those farms picking vegetables when he was growing up. So, for Pernell, to have a white girl on his arm meant he had arrived. I was a status symbol for Pernell. So were all the other white girls in his life.”

  By the time Pernell had begun gaining attention as a football star near the end of his sophomore season, Susan had begun seeing changes in his personality. He was becoming more domineering, more possessive. He had begun questioning her about things she felt were insignificant.

  Then came the violence. “I don’t even remember the first time he hit me, because he wound up hitting me so much,” Susan later recalled.

  Ironically, as his violence toward her increased, Susan became even closer and more dependent on Pernell.

  “You always want to go away, but when I did, Pernell would always beg me to come back, or threaten me if I didn’t. That worked pretty well. Low self-esteem on my part was a big part of that.”

  Circumstances also were conspiring to confirm Susan’s sinking impression of herself. As her relationship with Pernell grew deeper, she felt all the more alone, estranged even from friends on campus the two once had shared.

  “Pernell was the center of attention. He’d tell me nobody cared about me, it was him they were interested in, and when that gets reinforced again and again, you start to be
lieve it’s true. After a while, Pernell and I were both sick. I was as much like Pernell as I could possibly be. I wanted to leave, but I felt it was just me in the world and I felt if I left Pernell, I wouldn’t have anybody.”

  Guilford’s football team wasn’t championship caliber in 1982, finishing the season with five wins and five losses, but it was improving, and there was no doubt that Pernell was becoming one of its stars. He was determined to shine even brighter on next year’s team. But as the school year wore on some began to wonder whether he would remain academically qualified to play. Because of the demands of football practice and his weightlifting regimen, he had taken a light class load in the fall semester, then had doubled up for the next semester by enrolling in two night classes. But his study habits were poor and he began falling behind.

  Then when the football team turned out for spring practice, Pernell suffered another painful injury to the ankle he had broken nearly a year and a half earlier. Once again, he was hobbling along the sidelines on crutches. And he feared that he might lose his starting spot on the team. Worried and depressed, he dropped his night classes and failed both subjects, compounding his problems.

  Susan became the brunt of his growing anger and frustration. At one point, without provocation, he suddenly grasped one of his crutches near the bottom and, swinging it as if it were a baseball bat, slammed it into the shin of Susan’s right leg, knocking her to the ground in excruciating pain. By now she had accepted that that was just the way Pernell was, and she was helpless to do anything about it.

  7.

  At The Sight Of Blood

  BY THE BEGINNING OF HIS JUNIOR YEAR, things had begun looking up for Pernell. He had stayed on campus through the summer, passing enough classes to keep up his eligibility for the football team. His ankle had healed once more, and he was again playing brilliantly. He believed that he owed it all to steroids, and he had become as dependent on them as Susan had become dependent on him.