Muck City (22 page)

But it wasn’t until a few weeks later, back in Belle Glade, that he finally came around. Jessie was at his grandparents’ house with some cousins, who were trying to perk him up, when Willie, who was sitting in his recliner watching
Gunsmoke
, had finally heard enough. Willie told everyone in the room to shut up, then turned and looked at Jessie.

“Son, nobody forgets how to catch a football,” he said.

“This man never said nothin,” said Hester. “I mean
nothin
. And just like that. All that noise and talk was gone. The way he said it—he was right. It was then I knew I had to go back and play.”

•   •   •

HESTER RETURNED TO
Atlanta and spent the next six weeks in heavy training. He hadn’t worked out in almost a year since his toe injury, so he started slow: first jogging around his sprawling apartment complex, then speed work. Pretty soon he was clocking forties and picking up time. It felt good, like being in his old skin. His agent placed him back on the market, and soon he was getting calls to try out for the Patriots, Eagles, and Colts.

The quarterbacks coach from the Raiders, Larry Kennan, was now offensive coordinator with Indianapolis, which Jessie saw as a plus. And other than Andre Rison, who was the Colts’ number-one receiver, the roster was mostly guys Hester didn’t recognize. The smaller midwestern market looked to be a genial and welcoming place for a man aiming to start again.

“I thought I could prove myself easier on that team,” he said.

It didn’t take long. Just before the season opener, the Colts traded Rison to Atlanta, while number-two wideout Clarence Verdin sat out with an injury. After five games, Hester became rookie quarterback Jeff George’s go-to utility receiver, having caught fifteen passes, including a career-high eight receptions in a loss against Denver.

“It’s like I’ve been reborn,” he told the
Sporting News
.

•   •   •

THE TRANSFORMATION WAS
nothing miraculous. Rather, it came about as the result of two small changes. Little things. For one, Hester simply became a better student of the game. In his short time in Atlanta, he’d worked with a receivers coach named Jimmy Raye, who’d introduced a more fundamental approach to seeing the position. It was a revelation.

“Jimmy Raye taught me to pay closer attention,” he said. “He was real hands-on. Before, it was guys telling me to look for the ball at ninety degrees, and meet the ball at forty-five degrees. Jimmy’s putting it on the board and showing me on the field. He’s showing me that one subtle move that otherwise I might have missed or forgotten. I put those in my notes. I started watching for that move in other guys and taking notes on them. My career took off after that.”

Hester’s note taking would become so meticulous and ritualistic that later in his career his teammates would dub him “the Professor.”

Also, while he was still in Los Angeles, Hester discovered that he had trouble with his vision. He had requested to see an optometrist and confirmed one of his fears. It turned out he had amblyopia, or “lazy eye.” In his case, his right eye was weaker than the left.

“I started remembering old basketball games, football games, seeing the ball coming, then suddenly turning back and it was gone,” he said. “I guess I somehow compensated for it in high school and college, but in the pros, the competition was just too much that it didn’t work anymore.”

He’d told few people aside from the team trainer, fearing it would be seen as an excuse. Instead, he’d sit in his apartment—a more modest affair in Inglewood that he’d traded down for after his struggles began—and perform eye exercises: looking left to right, focusing on two objects and making them one. He began doing this daily. By the time he reached Indianapolis, his vision had greatly improved.

“The combination of me maturing mentally and being able to see the ball more clearly gave me more confidence. For once, I was able to be me.”

Unfortunately, the early nineties were lean years for the Colts, who won a total of five games in Hester’s first two seasons. But Indy proved to be the ideal for redemption. At the end of his first season, his numbers nearly equaled those of his entire career so far.

By Hester’s third year with the Colts the dreaded curse had not only lifted but reversed its cruel order. Hester could not
stop
catching the ball.
By the time he left the Colts in 1994, he’d caught passes in sixty-two consecutive games, a franchise record that dated back to the days of Johnny Unitas. Acquired by the Rams, Hester returned to the West Coast not as a disgraced superstar but as a man on a streak—one the reporters were calling one of the longest in the NFL.

The Jet was back.

T
he fairy-tale comeback of Jessie the Jet was a story known by few, if any, players on the Glades Central squad. The coach was such a guarded man that he did not provide the story to KB as a cautionary tale of hubris and human fallibility, and not to the quarterback struggling with his own “hyper nerves” and a doubt about his own potential. Just like Jet, they would be forced to learn these lessons the hard way, to gut them out alone.

For Mario, the next test was a game against rival Clewiston, the home of U.S. Sugar, located fifteen miles up the west side of the lake. It was the forty-fourth meeting between the two towns, this time at Cane Field, where the stands and sidelines were mostly white, and the first place all season where country music blasted from the press-box speakers during warm-ups. A narrow canal ran behind the field, which was framed by high sugarcane, sending up billions of gnats and mosquitoes.

As Benjamin had predicted, Clewiston provided the stat game for the
ages. The Raiders won 55–0 and scored on nearly every possession, including a ninety-yard punt return by KB that even the Tiger crowd had to applaud for its beauty. Benjamin, Jaime, and Davonte would end the night with two touchdowns apiece.

Clewiston’s offense never showed any sign of life against the Raider defense. Robert Way, after recording two sacks the previous week, rolled off the weak Tiger line all night like a slippery fish and dropped the quarterback three times. Even Joshua Knabb, a kicker for the Raiders and the only white player on the team, managed a vicious tackle on the offensive line.

“Joshie got him a pancake,” Boobie shouted, slapping his helmet.

Clewiston provided the Raiders with a much-needed statement game, another year of bragging rights around the lake, and for the time being it silenced the critics. But the game had been wrapped in turmoil like most games before it, caused mostly by the general lack of seriousness so often mentioned. After three years it was finally chipping away at the usually understated head coach, whose moods were swinging wildly.

He’d exploded earlier that afternoon as the team suited up, leaving those in the room stunned by the rare display of emotion. The boys had misbehaved during the team dinner, he said, wearing headphones, ignoring instruction, straight disrespecting. As he lectured the players once again on their poor attitudes, he noticed one of his wide receivers, Jaqavein Oliver, lying down, apparently asleep.

Oliver was a smiley, droopy-eyed kid who was content spending his Saturdays perched on the canal banks, fishing for bass. He’d been cut from the squad the previous season, then returned that summer in better shape and quickly showed skills. He’d completed a pair of clutch first-down catches against Skyline and American Heritage, and was now competing with Davonte for the number-three slot. But today the boy certainly wasn’t helping himself.

“Get up,”
Hester screamed.
“Get up, get up, get up!”

Oliver flung himself against the wall, eyes wide, nowhere to escape.

“You got a problem with authority, bwah?”

“Man, you can’t be doing that,” Oliver tried, but Hester was already in his face, his breath hot on the boy’s cheek.

“I can do that because I’m your coach, bwah. I’m your coach and from now on you WILL LISTEN TO YOUR COACH.”

Hester jerked back, as if released by a spirit. He took a breath, rubbed his brow, then scanned the room.

“Don’t yall ever make me get out of my character again,” he said, then calmly walked out the door, leaving only the sound of the track lights humming overhead.

It was an extreme leap of emotion for a man who, just two weeks before, had displayed such extraordinary tenderness. During the tense game against American Heritage, a junior cornerback called Slick had nearly come to blows with defensive coordinator Tony Smith, who’d groused over a missed block. The fight had caused a wild scene along the sidelines, with players screaming,
“Take his helmet, Coach!”
while fans watched from above and shook their heads.

Tempers had flared once again as the team gathered after the game, until Hester physically pulled Slick from the pack and took him aside. Down on both knees, he whispered softly to him, caressing his flak vest and shoulder pads, as a mother would a child. The second Hester’s hands made contact, the boy went slack and began to cry.

“You gotta remember they’re just children,” he said, walking away. “And you gotta pour on that love. Just keep pouring on that love.”

So, the following Thursday at practice, as the Raiders prepared for one of their most important home games of the regular season, nobody knew what to expect when Hester stood before them with that same furrowed brow which preceded each of his “I’m disappointed in you” speeches. And sure enough, the speech came.

“On a serious note, guys,” he said, looking down, shaking his head. “There’s always somethin, aint it?
Always somethin
. Well, this somethin is
this: we got a cat who can’t play tomorrow. A serious leader, too. So serious that yall might not even win without this cat. This here’s a cat who done disappointed his team, his family.”

He paused for an entire minute, letting the silence sink in.

“Don’t yall wanna know who I’m talkin about?”

“Who is it, Coach?” someone whispered.

“Huh? I can’t hear you.”

“We wanna know who it is.”

“You what?”

“Who’s the person?”

“Say it again.”

“Who it is, Coach?”

Hester’s face broke into a smile as he grabbed his crotch.

“DESE NUTS!”

The boys roared with laughter, and all the tension from the past weeks seemed to drift away. Tomorrow was homecoming.

•   •   •

HOMECOMING IN BELLE
Glade was like Easter Sunday and Fourth of July wrapped into one glimmering extravaganza. It was a day when parents dressed their children in lavish costumes to peacock down the boulevard, a time to eat well, drink heartily, then gather around the lights for the evening beat-down on the muck.

It was a day when everything must shine, and preparations began early. The trucks and flatbed trailers for the morning parade gathered along the canal at eight, waiting to be dressed, while, nearby, Haitian women stood over sleepy-eyed little girls, speaking rapid Creole while braiding hair and mending dresses.

The store and social club across from Glades Central was abuzz all morning with men sprucing up for the big day and placing bets on the
victory against the Boca Raton Bobcats. Behind the counter, an old woman holding a fistful of cash barked into a cell phone,
“Raiders 24, Boca 10,”
while down the hill along the ditch, Ray King ran a makeshift barbershop under a blue tarp. A cluster of men sat waiting in folding chairs for five-dollar shaves and ten-dollar cuts, reading magazines, staring into phones, and swatting mosquitoes that poured from the stagnant creek nearby. Over near the street at Joe Whitey’s car wash, rag men crouched on their knees polishing a gleaming row of twenty-four-inch rims with studied detail.

By noon hundreds gathered along MLK Boulevard, which ran through the tumbledown heart of town, feasting from sidewalk stands selling lemonade and pulled pork, boiled crab with eggs and potatoes, and buttery pound cake. And nobody batted an eye when suddenly the streets filled with muscled white police wearing weapons and tactical gear.

The floats were both spectacular and confounding, each bedecked with elaborate Asian and Egyptian scenes that rolled in high relief against the pillbox boardinghouses and Dixie Fried Chicken. There were floats of schoolkids dressed as pharaohs and queens, heads topped with shiny paper crowns and gold ribbons woven into braids as if done surgically. Floats of young black boys masquerading as Chinese emperors in silk pajamas; tuxedoed chauffeurs driving horse-drawn carriages with tiny girls smiling under pink paper umbrellas.

And once the floats had passed—the pageant queens! There was a chosen queen for every class in every school, from Miss Rosenwald Elementary to Walkeria Carter, Miss Glades Central. The girls sat perched atop the hoods of slow-creeping Mercedes and tricked-out ghetto chargers, their long, flowing gowns spilling over the sides like melted wax.

Leading the procession was Jonteria, representing the Raider cheerleaders. She wore a brown strapless dress that she and Theresa had picked out at a Fort Lauderdale boutique, Theresa reminding herself of the importance of the event as she’d laid down $200. But it
was
gorgeous and complemented Jonteria’s golden hair extensions her cousin had spent
seven hours weaving. The flaxen curls now draped over her shoulders as she rode atop the covered bed of a pickup, her hand raised at her side, waving like Lady Di.