Muck City (14 page)

Before bed that night, Hester gathered his team on the dark pool deck of the Hampton Inn. With the whine of semis on the highway in the background, he lectured them on the little things.

“You notice the way those guys played tonight,” he said. “Disciplined. Not one of them walked off that field. They ran and they ran together. Aint a selfish cat on that team. Aint nobody freelancing on that team. That’s how yall need to play tomorrow, like a family.”

He reminded them of their assignments, to drink plenty of fluids for the blistering Texas heat, and to eat pickles for the salt, which the team had brought by the case. (“A lot of yall believe in that pickle stuff, so go get that pickle,” he said.) He spoke of their duty to represent their home; so far in the showcase, he said, Florida teams had beaten Texas in every matchup except one. But most of all, Hester told them, go to bed tonight visualizing perfection.

“Nights before games,” he said, “I would lie in bed and visualize every single play to the point where I couldn’t make a mistake.
Why?
’Cause I’d already seen it. I’m putting this in yalls head now.

“Lay down tonight, wake up in the mornin. You already seen it. See myself catchin that slant, pirouetting, putting my hand in the ground and going seventy-seven yards for the touchdown.
I already seen it
. Kick return. Eighty-eight yards back.
I already seen it
. Two or three interceptions. Fifteen sacks. Why?
’Cause you already seen it
. Because if you saw it, guys, what must that mean?
What does that mean
? If you saw it,
it must have happened
.”

That night on the embattled gridiron of his mind, the unlikely quarterback envisioned four touchdowns, then delivered exactly that many the following day against the Denison Yellowjackets. Despite ten starters having to sit out the first quarter for skipping practice that week, the Raiders’ athleticism dominated the bigger, slower Texans from the first possession.

Halfway through the first quarter, Mario’s nephew William Likely stunned the crowd by juking past what looked like every Denison defender on a seventy-five-yard punt return for the score. The quarterback took over from there. After his much-criticized debut against Skyline, this week found Mario more at ease. By the middle of the second quarter, he’d thrown two touchdown passes to Jaime and another to KB—a flying horizontal grab over two defenders into the end zone. He would also find Davonte three different times for fifty-six yards.

By halftime, the score was 39–2. The Raiders were well on their way toward a Lone Star sweep. But as players sat in the locker room cooling off and eating pickles, Hester fumed over a litany of stupid mistakes.

In terms of discipline, the Raiders seemed to have learned nothing from Cocoa the night before. Once again, the offensive line crumbled to the touch, allowing Mario to be sacked six different times. After the previous game against Skyline, coaches had become so frustrated by the OL’s incompetence that they’d singled out one lineman in practice to set an example.

Brandon Rodriguez was a sweet, plump-faced kid, tall and lumbering. At six foot two and 255 pounds, he was one of the big guys who’d so unnerved Hester that summer by skipping workouts. As the OL practiced its man-on-man blocking that week, Brandon would repeatedly get toppled and let go his defender. Nothing his coaches told him seemed to stick. Having seen enough, Hester finally blew the whistle and pulled Brandon aside.

“We goin one-on-one,” he said, then ordered the defensive line to circle around him. One after another, they raced into Brandon’s chest and knocked him to the dirt.

“Move your feet, Brandon!” coaches yelled.

“Get mad, man!” his teammates screamed.

Delbert Clarke hit Brandon so hard that somehow his own contact lens ended up in his mouth.

“We gonna have to take Brandon to Walmart,” Coach Q said. “That boy needs some gunpowder for his oatmeal.”

That day against Denison, it wasn’t just the offensive line that stymied the Raiders. Special teams were also a mess, and their costly miscues would haunt the team for the remainder of the season. In the first quarter they allowed a blocked field goal. Minutes later, backup quarterback Greg Davis bungled the snap on an extra point. Instead of yelling “Fire!” and tossing it to the tight end who was headed for the post, the way he’d been taught, Davis tried to run. The Denison defenders read it perfectly and planted him on his back, then plucked the football off his chest and ran it ninety-nine yards for the safety. Special teams later botched
four
separate two-point-conversion attempts. Nothing they did seemed to work.

Kicking and special teams had long been the Raiders’ handicap. Whereas receivers and sprightly skill players sprang from the muck in bunches, good kickers were about as frequent as snow days.

“Only once in a blue moon do the Raiders ever have a good kicker,” Hester said. “I’ve never understood why. It’s just not something we’re good at.”

One would assume that a school so rich in raw athletic talent—and with an abundance of Hispanic, Haitian, and Jamaican students—would have a decent soccer program to feed the football gods each fall. But the Raider soccer team was worse than lousy, even more terrible than the baseball team, and had actually gone winless the previous season. Its sorry showing was enough to propel Marvin McKenzie, a pensive Jamaican immigrant, to abandon his lifelong dream of soccer stardom and play a game he’d always considered brutish and silly.

Marvin had grown up in the town of Anchovy, just south of Montego Bay on the northwestern coast. His family was poor, like most everyone else around them. When not in school, Marvin and his friends would spend their days on the beach roasting breadfruit over a fire, playing soccer with borrowed shoes, and always dreaming of America.

“The news of my life came today,” Marvin wrote in his journal in August 2008. “I could not believe I got my visa. It was my dream and God
came though for me. I still can’t believe it’s real. I will never forget where I’m coming from.”

His father, a construction worker, had finally sorted out paperwork and sent for Marvin and his sister. Growing up, their image of America had been shaped by the two channels that came through on their television. It was of slick cars and beachfront estates, an image soon shattered when they arrived at their tiny apartment on Southwest Eighth Street, where black mold spotted the walls and nightfall was to be feared.

After the discouraging soccer season, Marvin tried his luck at football. He’d avoided football players since arriving at Glades Central, finding them to be pompous and disruptive in class, showboats. But as always, the Raiders were desperate for a kicker, and Sam King, the special-teams coach, saw promise in Marvin’s leg. It had taken most of the preseason to get his approach right, and he still had a bad habit of lifting his head and throwing off his stance. But here in Texas against the Yellowjackets, that was hardly the problem. Both times Marvin was called out to kick, the whole line fell to pieces before he even had the chance to miss.

Luckily for the Raiders, the Yellowjackets could never fully capitalize on the special teams’ mistakes, thanks to another powerful showing by the defense. Linebackers Boobie, Jaja, and Don’Kevious Johnson worked with sudden quickness, wrapping up the Denison running backs the second they reached the open air. They held Denison to 152 total yards and forced three late fumbles, with Boobie running one back for a fifty-six-yard score. Jaja would notch eighteen tackles on the afternoon, plus two sacks on quarterback Jordan Watson.

By the fourth quarter, the Raiders led by a score of 56–17. The game was so lopsided that for kicks, Hester allowed Benjamin to join the defense, the six-foot-six receiver prowling the Raider secondary like a lion lunging for buffalo. It was a slaughter.

The next morning as the team waited for the plane home, Benjamin—clearly proud of his performance—spotted a group of girls in the terminal and announced, “I saved three touchdowns. I’m a athlete, baby!”

K
elvin’s mother, Christine, had a proclivity for athletes. The one true love of her life was James Otis Benjamin, considered to be one of the greatest running backs ever to pump feet over the muck. He’d been a blockbusting god at Lake Shore High on the eve of integration, going 2,300 yards for twenty-two touchdowns his last two seasons, then to Florida A&M. But during his first year of college, Chris announced she was pregnant. After Kelvin’s sister Tangela was born, Otis hung up his cleats and started driving trucks for U.S. Sugar, yet for years the memory of his electrifying power still drew college recruiters hoping to pull him out of retirement.

Otis had a second career as hero in the eyes of his daughter. Tangela’s memory is occupied with fog-filled mornings when her dad would rustle her awake for predawn workouts on the dikes. Even then, Otis maintained an athlete’s frame. They’d ride bikes to Okeechobee’s great wall, where Otis would pound up and down the hill in shorts and striped tube socks
before regimens of jump rope and sit-ups on a flat board, his pint-sized trainer giggling as she counted off, ONE-TWO-THREE.

Even after Otis slipped into drugs years later, some say because of overwhelming sorrow for what could have been, he remained present. Living on the streets, his life in shambles, he’d still slip past the house at night to give his daughter a kiss through the window screen.

At thirty-six years old, he suffered a stroke in North Carolina, where he’d gone to piece his life back together. Hearing the news, Chris drove up and found him in a coma, his brain already gone, then held his hand while doctors switched off the machine. “He was the greatest man I ever had,” she would always say of him. “He loved me.”

After Otis’s death, Chris began dating a professional golfer who’d drive over from the coast every few months, a man who showered her with money for bills and gifts for her children. When she became pregnant again, she was certain it was the golfer’s child, until nurses in the hospital handed her the baby boy with skin the color of cinnamon.

To Chris, that meant one thing: that the real father was Tony Barnett, the lanky Jamaican who owned the restaurant on Fifth Street. “Tony Dread” was a man she’d sneaked around with against her best intentions, a man she claimed to hate but couldn’t resist. Tony had seen her growing belly in the subsequent months and had the audacity to claim it for his own, even predicting a boy “pretty like you, but tall and red like me.” When Tony visited Chris in the hospital and saw that Kelvin was a mirror image of himself, he could only beam with pride. “I told you he was mine,” he said.

As much as she hated being associated with Tony, with his Rasta locks that hung down to his backside, he was a good father to Kelvin. He’d pick him up on weekends and parade him on his shoulders through downtown, bragging to the shopkeepers about his son. He paid bills, covered day care, and even took Tan and the others for days at a time—his “little piglets,” he called them.

But when Kelvin was three, Tony was arrested on marijuana charges
and eventually deported back to the island, forever barred from entering the States. In the months that followed, Kelvin would cry for his father, asking Chris, “When’s Daddy coming back?”

I’ll let you know, Chris would say.

Tony would call every so often, but the promises of his returning slowly began to deteriorate over the watery gulf that separated them.

Chris raised her three children on her own while working a variety of jobs, which included at a day-care center and fast-food restaurants. Every so often she’d get help from a local electrician whom she’d also started dating.

Growing up, Kelvin was a big kid. His mother described him as physically awkward, a boy who was more comfortable playing video games than running for touchdowns. Nonetheless, during summers he’d still join his friends spray painting the yearly gridiron onto the asphalt for daily pickup games. He even followed them into little league, considered to be the entry level for every future Raider, but soon quit when coaches made him run in the heat. With football, his heart just wasn’t in it.

“Other kids always talked about their favorite players, but I never had any,” he said. “I didn’t even like football. My mind was always elsewhere.”

By junior high, Kelvin was already pushing six feet tall. And while football coaches were unable to utilize KB’s size and strength, others enjoyed its advantages. Older boys befriended him and roped him into their schemes. When Kelvin was fourteen, he was arrested for theft after he and others went on a spree of terrorizing younger kids and stealing their iPods. His mother begged for leniency from the judge, who sentenced Kelvin to a year and a half at the Okeechobee Juvenile Offender Corrections Center, located sixty miles from Belle Glade in the swamps on the lake’s north end.

The company Vision Quest ran the program, which Kelvin described as “summer camp, except you can’t go home.” Inmates took long, meandering walks through woods and learned to handle the extreme heats of an Indian sweat lodge.

“We did rituals and chants in those sweatboxes,” he said. “A man then dumped water on the rocks. But I’d be cheatin. I’d be over there breathin by the hole in the tent.”