Muck City (12 page)

There was no questioning both states’ obsession with Friday-night football and the talent each had produced. Before the showcase began, the
Sun Sentinel
even ran a chart showing how the most recent NFL roster was dominated by players from Texas and Florida, with 179 and 176, respectively. Florida’s major college programs (Florida, FSU, and Miami) had captured ten national titles, while the Lone Star State’s big three (Texas, Texas A&M, and TCU) had won seven.

On the high school level, however, the numbers told a diverging story. Approximately 165,000 students played football in Texas, compared to just 38,291 in Florida—a huge disparity, even when accounting for Texas’s size and population difference. But perhaps the greatest difference was money.

Michael Irvin, the Hall of Famer and Fort Lauderdale native, summed it up for a
Sentinal
reporter. “Florida has better players,” he said, “and Texas has better facilities.”

Texas, where the state capitol in Austin reached fourteen feet higher than the one in Washington by design, carried a similar attitude toward the school gridiron. Multimillion-dollar stadiums dotted the flat Texas landscape like totems to the gods, replete with indoor practice fields, harems of student trainers, paid assistants, and head coaches who earned upward of six figures to lead boys into championships like lion-hearted generals.

At Glades Central and throughout Palm Beach County, the salary for Hester and his three paid assistants (the others volunteered their time) was just enough to cover the gas to practice and a PlayStation for the kids at Christmas, maybe a new phone. Despite being one of the most elite football programs in the state, it took the school board years to approve $10,000 for a simple press box for Effie C. Grear Field. The track coaches practically had to go to battle to get an eight-lane course. The school board wanted to give them six, which would have made them ineligible to hold regional and district championship meets. Coach Willie McDonald had to remind them that between the boys’ and girls’ track teams, Glades Central held seventeen state titles.

Pahokee had recently won a string of Class 2B championships, along with an endorsement from Nike that paid for uniforms and equipment. But to hear the coaches at Glades Central grumble, a fistful of rings and famous alumni were worth as much as the paint on the welcoming wall. Couldn’t buy you a tent or even a jug of Gatorade.

Grit, discipline, and God-given athleticism were all Glades Central had ever needed to win. So Hester hoped his players could at least draw upon
their genetics after looking at Dallas Skyline’s roster. They were big boys, bigger than any team the Raiders would face all season. The thought of flinging his soft offensive line against them almost seemed cruel.

“Show your speed,” Hester told his boys. “It will be the only friend you got.”

The day before leaving, spider lightning streaked across the sky from an encroaching storm and drove the team indoors. The Raiders clustered inside a drab industrial arts class where Hester kept an office, since the team locker room was too small to fit them. As rain lashed against the roof and rattled the thick metal doors, Hester addressed his boys.

“We on some lists that call us the best this or that in the country,” he said. “All it means is that every team we play’s gonna have us circled. You’re marked every time you’re on that field.

“Yall got a real good football team. You could be a
great
football team. All the ingredients are there. But you’re only as good as the bunch. This is the group that we coaches have been waiting on. This here is the season to win. So make your mark.”

From the back row of chairs, the quarterback stood and addressed his team.

“Get my back,” Mario said. “And I’ll carry you.”

“That’s why you been given a team,” Hester replied. “Now go and lead them.”

•   •   •

PROBLEMS PLAGUED THE
Raiders from the outset. The school had yet to hire a trainer, forcing players and coaches to administer wrappings that fell apart and littered the field. In a repeat of Tallahassee, a miscommunication resulted in the team having no water and coaches scrambling to Walmart to buy it in bottles.

Municipal Stadium was equipped with artificial turf, which appealed to a long-held belief in the Glades: that boys who grew up running the
spongy muck were twice as fast on the hardtop. But the late-summer sun was broiling by the noon kickoff. Heat waves bounced off the black rubber in the turf, giving it the feel of hot charcoal underfoot. Then, of course, there was the Dallas line.

The boys from Skyline were indeed huge, with broad, corn-fed physiques that made a mockery of even Glades Central’s biggest players. On the first play of scrimmage, they trampled over the Raider offensive line, as if leaping over a row of folding chairs, and flung Mario to the ground. The first drive ended with an interception, and afterward they gave him no rest. Each play found the quarterback scrambling to get rid of the ball as soon as it touched his hands. He would end up tossing two interceptions and getting called for as many intentional-grounding penalties. The Raiders’ inexperienced OL continually jumped offsides, aborting any forward progress. By the end, Glades Central would commit fifteen penalties for a loss of 148 yards.

And when the Raiders finally fought their way into scoring position, Jeffery Philibert, one of the few seasoned big men, went and lost his mind in the heat. Immediately following a play, Philibert grabbed a Skyline defender by the jersey and hurled him to the turf. He then straddled the boy’s chest, and, to the horror of his coaches, began hammering both fists into his face. (“He was grabbing my balls,” Philibert would say in his defense, but the state athletics board still handed down a four-game suspension, further weakening an already porous Raider offensive line.)

But for every misery Dallas inflicted on Mario, the nimble Raider defense answered with two. They pounced on the hulking Skyline offense like a pride of cats, suddenly alive at the rumble of the drums. Behind the cheers of five hundred Raider faithful in the stands, Hester breathed easy, watching the great muscle of his squad begin to flex.

Along with Jaja, the lightning Raider defense was anchored by Dominique Gibson, who, like his teammate, evoked the old breed. They called him Boobie, just like his father, Frank Williams, who was married to KB’s sister Tangela. This meant that Boobie was KB’s nephew. And like his
uncle, the junior linebacker had already led a complete and troubled life before wearing the maroon and gold.

As a boy, Boobie had lived in Macon, Georgia, with his mother, Cassandra. Early on, he showed a whip-smart intelligence and a love for numbers. He made the math team and wore a pair of thick, black-framed glasses, none of which brought him any peace among the neighborhood boys. Then again, neither did his older brothers, whose reputation as troublemakers often made Boobie an easy target. “Kids would try me because they thought I was soft,” he said. By the fifth grade, Boobie had been kicked out of two schools for fighting.

Boobie’s older brothers later got mixed up with gangs and guns, and such a life was hard nourishment for a boy looking to grow up fast. At age twelve, he was arrested for theft and vandalizing city property. In 2006, Frank pulled Boobie out of Macon to live with him and Tangela. In the few short years that followed, everything in Macon fell apart. In February 2008, Boobie’s brother Derrick died in a car accident and another brother was sent to prison. During that time, Cassandra became gravely ill with kidney disease. She died in July, just months after burying her son. When Boobie heard the news of his mother, Frank said, “he fell over backward on the floor.”

Trouble and sorrow had hardened Boobie by his seventeenth birthday, leaving him so old in the face that he seemed an impostor walking the halls of a high school. Girls swooned over him because of this, and boys feared him and gave him room. He still wore the black-framed glasses, usually coupled with an Oxford shirt and sweater, which worked to soften his flinty persona. The last time he’d taken the ACT, he’d scored a 23 out of 36. So comfortable with himself, one evening before a game, he sat before his teammates and recited Maya Angelou’s entire poem “Still I Rise” with flawless cadence.

He’d started the Skyline game on offense, running the ball. On his very first carry, the boys from Dallas sent a message by spearing him so hard in the chest he would later spend the night in the emergency room with a
bruised lung. Barely able to breathe, Boobie still pounded the Dallas line all afternoon for a game-high eighty-six yards, then played sideline-to-sideline defense as linebacker.

The tandem of Boobie and Jaja shut down the feared Skyline rushing attack, slipping into the backfield to bury the running backs the second they touched the ball. Jaja and Robert Way also sacked the Dallas quarterback three times and forced an interception. At halftime, Dallas had yet to enter Raider territory.

By the third quarter, with the score still 0–0, the heat took control. Players dropped to the turf from cramps, swatting helmets and crying in pain. On the Raiders, they were dragged off and plied with salty pickle juice, spilled cups of which littered the ground and enveloped the entire sideline in a hot vapor of vinegar.

The stout Dallas defenders soon began to wilt, enough to allow Boobie two handoffs that drove the Raiders downfield. Struggling for every breath, the powerful running back carried four Texans on his shoulders for ten yards into the end zone. The extra point attempt was a dud.

Ugly as it was, the Raiders won, 6–0.

•   •   •

LATER THAT NIGHT
, Mario returned home and turned on the computer. The write-up in the
Post
gushed over the first-time quarterback’s tenacity and echoed Hester’s postgame message to the team: that against one of the toughest defenses in the country, Mario had proved himself.

But the quarterback saw only the venom that came despite the win. He spent the night reading forums and message boards that condemned him as too fat and short for the position, not the caliber of athlete to lead the mighty Raiders—a senseless coaching choice to be remedied at once. The same anonymous fans who’d showered him with encouragement that summer had not only turned on him, they were carving him up. Staring at the screen, he felt himself slowly come apart.

There was Super Mario, the No. 1 QB who crawled down Main Street in the tricked-out Lumina: candy blue with twenty-four-inch rims like disco balls in the sun, and the arcade hero himself airbrushed in a panorama across the back. There was Mario with the gold chains and high fade, the candlelight eyes, and a smile that could cut through a fog. There was the locker-room jock who bragged of older friends and easy pussy, who prepared for games with rapper Murder Man Flocka pounding in his head, singing,
“GUN SOUND, luv dat luv dat GUN SOUND.”
There was Mario with a polished swagger that suggested ready violence if crossed.

But that young man now lay discarded like a shucked suit of armor. Exposed now in the darkness of the room, illuminated by the cruel, flickering screen, was the quiet, sensitive child. The teachers’ favorite. The orphan who longed to remember the feel of his mother’s embrace.

He’d been too young to know every detail, just that she’d been sick, the walls of her heart weakened by disease and made worse in the labor of six children. But Mary Rowley felt her happiest whenever swarmed with little ones. The chaos of her second-grade classroom infused her with energy, made her whole. And the madness of so much family at home kept her mind off a strained marriage.

Her husband, James, worked in the mills of U.S. Sugar. Once the cane season was finished, he followed harvests as a packinghouse foreman. He was a papa bear in the wide eyes of his children, strong arms and a round belly, a man whose talents over a kitchen stove braising oxtails and simmering stews only matched his generous appetites.

Summers he’d pile the van with kids for weekends at Walt Disney World or family reunions in Georgia. But he never stayed home long. For he was a road man at heart, raised up in the migrant fields and driven by seasons like the leaves on a tree, and its wildness had infected him. He’d disappear for days on a jag, come home stewed and raving, and empty out the house. When the road would call to him again, Mary could only pray as the sound of his truck faded toward the highway.

They’d been high school sweethearts at Glades Central and stayed
together as Mary tucked into her studies at Florida Memorial University, graduating magna cum laude, later earning a master’s in early childhood education. She’d always wanted a big family; her own parents had stopped at four, and Mary thought that a shame. And having children became her odd way of coping once her husband’s behavior became more erratic.

After she’d had Jamal, her sixth child, she’d suffered a mild heart attack. Doctors diagnosed her with cardiomyopathy, her heart so weak the specialist came into the room asking, “Where’s this old woman?” and found meek little Mary, all of thirty-three. The cardiologist suggested a heart transplant, given her age, but Mary refused, and together with her sister Gail told the doctors, “We believe in prayer, not transplants.”

No more children, then, he said. The next one will kill you.

Three years later Mary was pregnant again and ashamed to tell the doctors. Gail pushed her to the cardiologist, who said a Cesarean might be the only way she’d live through the birth. Who knew what her heart could take? But the delivery went fine, thanks to answered prayers, and Mary went home with Jamarious Rowley, blessed with those same round eyes and fat cheeks as his daddy.

A month later, while standing at the chalkboard in front of her class, Mary hit the ground with a massive heart attack, her eyes dialed white.

She died twice in the course of an hour. Doctors shocked her back to life and told her children she wouldn’t make it through the night. She lay in a coma for three days, a small woman sprouting tubes and wires to a machine that moved her lungs, monitored her fragile heart. James made fleeting appearances, staring through the window at the still, unresponsive form, not knowing what to say.