by Casey Gerald
If you dumbass niggas don’t lower your goddamn voices we gone pull out the book and work!
At least once, Coach Taylor made good on his threat and so out came the economics textbook. It was time for “popcorn reading.” One student was called on to read aloud, then that student chose the next reader, and so on until the passage was complete or the whole class had participated. Juice shot his hand up first and flashed his gold-clad incisors. Lemme start, Coach!
Juice began to read and the more sentences he put behind him the more his lips spread into a grin, a damn-fool grin. He finished his passage.
C’mon, Larry, you next! Juice shouted, cackling.
I don’t know that I’ve seen many sadder scenes than Larry Hughes trying to read—or the rest of us watching him read. C’mon, Larry, the snickers, Juice cracking up. Coach Taylor finally showed a mercy—Aight, man, call on somebody.
Despite it all, Larry never stormed out of the room, never shed a shamed tear. Perhaps he knew as well as anybody that of the hundreds of college recruiters who showed up to watch him practice or on film or from the stands of SOC games where they sometimes took up half a section of bleachers, not a single one would ask our coaches or his father or the boy himself whether he could read. And they’d never meet one of his teachers, who would not have told them the truth anyway.
And by this boy’s stripes, I was healed. Helped, at least.
It was a late fall practice the week before we faced one of our main rivals, the Kimball Knights, and our head coach, B. J. Price, wanted to keep Larry fresh because he’d just recovered from a shoulder injury and there were four other positions he had to fill. Since I was almost as fast as he was, especially when I was scared, Coach Price substituted me for Larry on a play that had a complex name I no longer remember. I was to go in at quarterback. Shotgun. The center would snap the ball to me. I would then fake a handoff to the running back standing to my left or right, and then run the other way. Sounded familiar.
On my first try, I fumbled the snap. Want to say the ball was wet but the truth is that I was nervous. Could hardly say hut.
Well I’ll be John Brown, son! Take the goddamn snap and hold on to the ball or else I’ll get your numbnuts-lookin’ ass outta there!
Coach Price was, like the rest of his staff, a brother of Omega Psi Phi fraternity, which meant that most of the things that came out of his mouth were barks, sexual testimonials, comedy bits, or withering insults like this one, delivered in his piercing high-pitched voice.
Stop the tape, Coach. He’d whine during a film session. I’ll be John Brown. What in the shit is this? Fifteen niggas missed the tackle! Some of you niggas missed him twice! I’m telling you guys. You think I’m fuckin’ around. Them niggas from Roosevelt gone come over here and put they foot so far up your monkey ass you gone be walkin’ around bent over like a question mark!
Once, Coach Price brought the legendary Bobby Knight to speak to us. Nobody gave much of a damn. But Coach Price was so inspired by the General’s example that, the next practice, he brought out a yardstick and threatened to strike Terry Newsom, who instead of taking his lick grabbed the yardstick and drew it back above his head. Nigga if you ever raise yo’ hand to me again, I’ll kill yo’ bitch ass. You ain’t my fucking daddy.
Coach Price never raised his hand to Terry Newsom again. He kicked him off the team and forced him to transfer to another school before the year was out.
I didn’t have Terry Newsom’s testicles, and Coach Price had always been better to me than I likely deserved, so when he berated me for fumbling the snap I just said yes sir and returned to the shotgun to call for the ball again. The center shot it back and I took off—around the left tackle, past a linebacker too slow to catch me and, now that I had survived the Lincoln Massacre, through a senior safety who intended to teach me a lesson, then on into the end zone.
Shiiit all right, son. Okay! Coach Price yelped. He decided this new scheme would be our opening attack against Kimball.
Since there was no film of my junior varsity days, no mention of my name in Kimball’s scouting report, and no cheers from the crowd of fifteen thousand when I stepped on the turf of Sprague Stadium, where Coach Walton had taught fourteen-year-old me to run for his life, this simple play still worked. I was so afraid of the Kimball varsity defense that I ran even faster than I had in practice, even faster than Larry Hughes, who walked over on the sidelines after the first drive and slapped me on the ass—damn, keep running like that, boy. And I did.
We lost a close game to Kimball that night, but under those radiant lights and the wall of sound coming from the Golden Bear band blasting Stevie Wonder’s “Jammin’,” and the crowd chanting Who ya rootin’ for? S-O-C!, and the old-timers coming up to tell me that I ran like my old man used to run, and Coach Price letting me switch my jersey to number 1, that performance was the high point in a career composed mostly of low points or none. And thanks again to Larry Hughes’s bounty, my four or five brilliant plays did not go unnoticed—recruiters started courting me, too.
There was nothing more precious to receive than the letters these men sent, starting with a sprinkle your sophomore year, a deluge by the time you were a junior. Some boys kept the letters in their book bags. Some kept boxes full of them like messages from a lover at war. Some boys who had their own room at home might fill up a whole wall with letters instead of posters of Michael Jordan or Emmitt Smith. The better you were, the more letters you got. The more personal those letters would be. Larry Hughes wouldn’t even open a letter from a school like the University of North Texas. Should a letter come from a powerhouse like Michigan, he might file-13 anything other than a handwritten note from the head coach himself.
Dear Larry,
I’m here in Ann Arbor thinking of you. You did a great job last week and I can’t wait to see you here in a Wolverine uniform. Please give your dad my best.
—Coach
By junior year spring, these letters led to in-person visits from recruiters, who showed up to watch the boy’s best game film and to ask his high school coach one question: Is he a good kid? A question that meant far more than it let on, intended as it was to solicit answers to two impolite if not illegal questions: Can we get him into school? and Is he hungry enough to stay? No recruiter wanted to waste time on a boy who would not be accepted by the college admissions committee (the better the athlete, the lower the bar). And no recruiter wanted to court a boy who would not submit to his demands—who did not feel such deep gratitude for his opportunity that he’d do almost anything, be almost anybody, not to lose it. This was the threat behind Coach Jasper’s Be good to the program and the program will be good to you. And not long after he signaled that I’d held up my end of the bargain, the SOC coaching staff tried to hold up theirs.
A few weeks before the end of junior year, Coach Taylor ran out to find me in the parking lot, where I was bumming a ride home, excitement all over the big flat brown face that made him look like an adorable teddy bear despite all the cursing. He’d just finished showing my Kimball film to a recruiter, who had been convinced to visit a school on the other side of the Trinity by another coach who made many such visits yet never convinced anybody that I know of to attend his podunk college in Kansas and who told the recruiter of a boy he’d seen on tape who might have decent enough grades to be worth a look. Boy, I’m glad I came. We don’t have anything that fast in the whole program, the recruiter told Coach Taylor, who rushed to tell me all about it.
Man, ain’t nobody from Yale ever showed up here!
Where is Yale, Coach?
It’s up in Connecticut. East Coast. That’s a real good opportunity, Casey. I’m tellin’ ya. Think about it.
Aight, Coach. I will.
What I really thought was Ain’t nobody from SOC ever gone to no school in Connecticut—where is that, anyway? Here was my own coach, saying in so many words that I was such a pathetic fo
otball player that he’d send me halfway around the world to play peewee football for a team nobody knew anything about. Not that I was angry at him, but I sure was insulted and embarrassed. Guess you could also say ignorant and proud—in other words, I was a seventeen-year-old heading into my last year of high school, which should instead be called the first year of real life: when, after a long blind walk pushed along by the winds of fate, a boy rubs the dreamy crust of youth from his eyes and looks upon the world as a man. A man with choices if not options, with no clue and little doubt, in heat to be somebody, even an awful somebody, which I was. I’d paid my dues on the outskirts of the world—had worn the too-little pants and the run-down shoes, had pretended not to hear the No you take hims and the He’s not my responsibilitys, had been a nobody for so long and to so many that I could still taste other people’s leftovers, could still see the empty seats in the stands, could still feel a violent smirk come across my face when I sensed somebody sniffing around my life to figure out whether I was worth their time. Maybe I had not been worth it for seventeen years, but now I would be. Now I was on track to be valedictorian like my sister, and I ditched any class that demanded too much work so that I could put more distance between me and the second-ranked student. Now I was captain of the football team and I did the inviting to lunch and the bossing of underclassmen. Now I was the senior class president, thanks to the pressure BK et al. put on other students to vote. Now I was the voice of tyranny flowing out over the PA system for the afternoon announcements, the face in the SportsDay section for the fall season preview, and the name on the South Oak Cliff marquee:
Dallas Mayor for a Day
Casey Gerald
The City of Dallas had launched the Mayor for a Day program to give one senior from each public high school a day of exposure to the world of power beyond their backwater, and to give the city leaders some comfort that, despite the stench of failure in the school system, there existed at least a fine mist of success. One fall morning I put on my only suit and was dropped off at city hall—one of three buildings in Dallas designed by I. M. Pei, a testament to what one longtime civic leader told me: Dallas always believes it is one great building away from being a world-class city—and spent the day shadowing Mayor Laura Miller. This included taking one picture with her, standing to be recognized in the city council meeting, and sitting in the backseat of her chauffeured car while she handled city business on the phone. This whole exercise still seems like almost as big a waste of time for a teenager as it was for the leader of one of the largest cities in the country.
But if everything happens for a reason, then perhaps I spent that day with Laura Miller because Somebody knew what I only recently learned: Six months before I was born, my father spent a day with Laura Miller, too. He was not a senior in high school but a lumber hauler at Home Depot. She was not the mayor but a journalist, profiling him for a special issue of the Dallas Morning News’s magazine: When Bad Things Happen to Good Athletes.
The article opens with those familiar lines: As a high school quarterback growing up in South Dallas, Rod Gerald possessed two of the fastest legs and two of the steadiest hands in America etc. etc. . . . And there he is, in a nearly full-page photo, standing under hazy fluorescent light between aisles of wood in his orange Home Depot smock, showing that same mustachioed smile he wore in our family portrait, telling this woman all the things I’d need to know but would not hear directly.
If you’re good enough, the college can handle anything. If you don’t have the money to go to college, the college can handle it. If you don’t have the shoes or the clothes, they can handle it. If you tell them you’re embarrassed to go to college because you don’t have the car, the clothes, the money—they’ll make sure you have it. Until you mess up.
Rod Gerald had messed up and now, with his seed that would become me growing in my mother’s belly, he was earning seven dollars an hour at the Home Depot in Red Bird Mall.
In 1986, Laura Miller saw this as a parable—the most prized product from a school that had reportedly sent more players to the National Football League than any other high school in the nation, now chewed up and spat out.
Gerald’s is a familiar lament among stellar, blue-chip former high school football stars. He is but one of thousands of 17- and 18-year-olds across the country wooed each year by college recruiters and proud high school coaches into believing that pigskin is their savior—a free ticket to a college education, a stepping stone to the pros.
In the time that had passed since my father’s day with Laura Miller, some things had changed. South Oak Cliff had sent only one player to the National Football League in the preceding eighteen years and would send only two more in the years to come, including Larry Hughes. (We had sent one player to the pro basketball Hall of Fame, Dennis Rodman, but everybody said his sister was the real star at SOC, so nobody made much of a fuss about him.) The Home Depot was no longer near Red Bird Mall. Neither was RadioShack or JCPenney or the McDonald’s down the street, which was closed temporarily because one night, when Luke and I stopped to pick up a hamburger after leaving the mall, we saw a boy lying in a pool of blood behind the cash register. Somebody had come and shot him in the head about a half hour before we showed up.
But aside from these changes, and the fact that I’d gone from living in my mother’s womb to living without her altogether, everything was mostly the same nearly two decades later. The fast legs were still running, the steady hands were still catching, the recruiters were still lying, and Brenda Battle—now Brenda Cox, another slight change—was still delivering the same tired lecture in her classroom that she’d given to Laura Miller in that 1986 article:
A kid is a kid, and I think society looks at that kid as a commodity. Let’s face it, sports is big bucks. I think what happens is your universities and your recruiters do not look at the kid as a possible future executive. They look at that kid specifically for what he came there for—and that is to get winning points for that particular team. And you take a 17-year-old kid who is praised for his running ability, his tackling ability, his shooting ability, and that’s all that he can see.
A decade-plus later, in 1997, I stepped into Ms. Cox’s class for the first time—saw the face that was so racially ambiguous that she was often privy to the private things white people said about nonwhites and Mexicans said about non-Mexicans and blacks said about blacks and nonblacks alike; heard the voice which carried her father’s twang from South Dallas by way of Waco and her mother’s harshness from Louisiana, where she picked up the skin and hair of her French-speaking grandparents and two degrees from Southern University in Baton Rouge, making her one of the few teachers with a masters in her subject when she joined the South Oak Cliff faculty in 1974 (and one of the few with an afro, which the principal tried unsuccessfully to make her cut or perm).
I’d walked the three blocks to SOC from the house on Marsalis with my mother to be a witness for some presentation that Tashia was to deliver after school. I don’t remember anything Tashia said and very little else about that day besides my fear that the building might swallow ten-year-old me up, clutching Mama’s hand so tightly I could have cut off her circulation if I hadn’t been so weak, walking so close up under her that I kept tripping over the back of her shoes.
Boy, you were hiding behind Debra like a shadow! Ms. Cox always taunts. You were so leetle and your eyes were so big like you were tryin’ to catch everything. I thought you were gonna pee yourself, you were so scared. She pauses—I just said to myself . . . Somebody needs to protect this little boy.
Seven years later I was back in her room and Ms. Cox had, by then, decided that she would do some protecting—but I was no longer a little boy, no longer hiding behind my mother, no longer looking around trying to catch anything, and no longer mute. I was talking a lot. Lying a lot, actually, and I have the record to prove it, thanks to the fact that the Dallas Morning News seems to have conspired to record my life
just so I could tell you all about it someday.
In November 2004, the paper ran a big article on the front page of the sports section—“SOC Defensive Back Forges Own Identity”—that included three testimonials that reflect the lies my family told ourselves about ourselves and one another.
There was my sister, reprising her role as Moral Force of Hope. She now spoke of her baby brother instead of Daddy. I’m just grateful he hasn’t let his circumstances define who he is. He’s risen to the challenge. He’s grown into his own man.
Now what shall we call a boy whose college application is a thousand-word pastiche of trauma pornography? Whose letters of recommendation echo all his stations of the cross? Who looks down into the camera with pitiful eyes for a portrait that will be the banner of an article about his father and his mother and his poverty and the troubles of his world? A boy so far from growing into a man that even the things he believes most deeply he believes only in response to someone else? I say we ought to call him a boy defined by his circumstances.
Perhaps we all are—just seven billion Eves made from the rib of our Adam-circumstance—but why do we lie about it? Why don’t we want to believe it? Is it that it shames us to admit how limited our power is, how much we can submit—have submitted—to the things we did not choose? I reckon it’s some of that. Real shame. The trouble isn’t that we are defined by our circumstances. It’s that we are so defined by running from them that we don’t understand what they mean, what they did and are still doing to shape the way we see and move through the world. And we call the running rising to the challenge. Not so. Not so.
Then there was Clarice, offering her highest praise when the journalist noted how remarkable it was that I was not an angry boy despite all events.
You can’t ever tell if he’s upset or not. He doesn’t show emotions. He just moves on.
Perhaps she could have asked if I was upset, or how I felt at all. Perhaps she or anyone could have knocked on the bathroom door after twenty minutes of hearing the faucet run. Perhaps instead of being proud that a kid could endure so much, she should have been troubled that there was little sign of any harm. Where had it all gone? Did it just evaporate? How did this boy—all these boys—become so brave?