Muck City (25 page)

JaJuan was now the running backs coach for the Marshall Thundering Herd, and one of his official duties was recruiting in the muck. To him it was clear that signing KB was a long shot, especially with the Gators and Seminoles fighting for his attention. So JaJuan had turned his focus on
other players, particularly Robert Way and Davonte, the latter of whom also happened to be his cousin. The Herd had made offers to both players, and JaJuan was setting up their official campus visit for later that season.

When JaJuan was in town, he was usually joined on the sidelines by his old friend and teammate Roosevelt Blackmon, who now worked as Glades Central’s assistant athletic director. Watching the adulation and attention heaped on young recruits must have left a grin on Blackmon’s face. For if there was ever a story to inspire a fat, struggling quarterback or a half-pint lineman, it was the story of Roosevelt Blackmon.

Blackmon’s nickname growing up was Tadpole, and his size was true to label. When he’d tried out for the mighty Raiders as a freshman, the coach had looked down at the scrawny, ninety-five-pound weakling and shaken his head. The best they could do for him was water boy. He’d hauled water his sophomore year, too, the only role he could manage on a team stacked with talent.

By senior year he’d added sixty pounds and made starting receiver, but he was no glimmer in any recruiter’s eye. Roosevelt Blackmon was not among the names in the basket of faxes and correspondence. So he made it happen himself.

One of his class assignments that fall was to write to a college and request an admissions application. Blackmon sent letters to Florida and Miami, listing his home address as the Raider football office. The next week, the letters started appearing in the basket, never mind what was inside.

“Tadpole, the Gators want you?” someone asked.

“Mmm-hmm.”

Blackmon graduated without a single offer, yet still determined to play football. An attempt at being a student at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach failed, so he returned to Belle Glade and found work where he could, scrubbing tires at A&D Used Cars. And whenever someone died, he dug their grave at the cemetery.

But his dreams were very much alive.

“A setback is a setup for a comeback,” he would tell himself, hoisting his shovel.

One of his teammates had made the squad at Morris Brown, a Division II black college in Atlanta, and he felt Blackmon might also have a shot. But when Blackmon arrived and enrolled at school, he was informed the football team had been placed on probation and was not giving scholarships. Feeling sorry for him, the coaches did what they could. They put him on the meal plan and made him the water boy. Without financial assistance, Blackmon had to take a job working night shifts at Winn-Dixie, stocking shelves. During holidays, he’d drive home in a beat-up Chevy Spectrum that barely pushed sixty.

At Morris Brown, while Blackmon was washing uniforms and lugging water bottles, he was also working out with the team—tossing footballs, learning plays, talking smack. His chance to prove himself finally came the following year. Off probation, the Wolverines extended to Blackmon a scholarship as a defensive back.

In his first game against Clark Atlanta, he had four tackles and two interceptions. For the rest of the season, Tadpole was like a caged man set free. By his junior year, he was a two-time All-American. His next season, he was playing in the Senior Bowl and was roommates with Fred Taylor, by then a stud Gator running back whom he’d once kept hydrated.

Taylor was a shoo-in for the NFL, and his other former teammate Reidel Anthony had gone the previous year. Blackmon never mentioned that as a water boy at Morris Brown, he would stare into the glass trophy case and ruminate over the small handful of players who’d made it to the league. Standing there, he would address the reflection staring back, the gravedigger and shine boy muckstepper without a scholarship or a hundred dollars in the bank: “I’ll be the next man,” he’d say.

An invitation to Pro Day at Georgia Tech—where a scout for Detroit had gushed over his 4.38 forty—had reinforced this conviction. Blackmon was so confident he’d be picked in the first three rounds, he’d driven home
to Belle Glade in April for the draft, bought a trunkload of food and champagne, and invited all his friends and family to celebrate his ascent into glory. But after two days of watching the television, after everyone had eaten his food and gone home, his phone still had not rung.

He was in church that Sunday, having just given his offering, when his uncle rushed in and said the Green Bay Packers just called.

“Yall hear that?” the preacher announced. “Tadpole pays his tithes and gets called by the NFL.”

He played three years in the league, with Brett Favre’s Packers and then the Cincinnati Bengals, who eventually released him. In 2000, he returned home to Belle Glade and pursued another dream of working in the school.

“People say, ‘Oh, you didn’t make it,’ ” said Blackmon. “But I
did
make it. And I was happy to come back and say it doesn’t matter where you go to college. No matter where you’re at, if you want it bad enough, they will find you.”

A
fter coming off two easy victories, the Raiders entered week seven feeling giddy. It was mid-October. The stifling muck air was beginning to thin and give way to the cool winds of autumn. And the suspense over
where
KB would mark his place in history was the talk of Raider nation, from under the tarp at Ray King’s barbershop to the booths of Dixie Fried Chicken.

With the Raiders having pummeled two mediocre teams and the playoffs just weeks away, it seemed the last thing people were discussing anymore was whether KB and the Raiders were actually any good. Could the cocky, undefeated Raiders learn to embrace the little things and play to their potential, or had the near beating they’d taken in week three not taught them anything at all?

Week seven took the Raiders to Fort Lauderdale to face the Dillard Panthers. The team carried a lackluster 3–3 record, but battled in a tough
division, a wild-card squad capable of giving the Raiders another painless stat game, or sneaking up as American Heritage had done and putting them on their backs.

The Panthers’ number-one weapon, Wayne Lyons, a six-foot safety who had offers from Notre Dame, Nebraska, and UCLA, had recently torn a ligament in his knee and was out for the regular season. His absence in the secondary would help the Raider passing game, but Hester expected Dillard to take it right back on the ground. The Panthers did quick counts and almost always ran the ball. Their running back, Otis Wright, had legs like an ox and was capable of hanging a hundred yards rushing on you before you could blink.

After practice on Thursday, Hester gathered his team in the twilight and attempted to light their fire.

“Guys, we got a scenario where we goin into somebody’s house tryin to take their baby. That’s the scenario this time. We tryin to take
their
baby. They see us comin. They know we out there.”

“We the dingo,” someone said.

“That’s right, we the dingo. And because they know we out there, guess what we need to be prepared for? Traps. Be prepared for the ambush.”

He instructed each boy again to go home and visualize the field in his sleep, to see every snap, correct each mistake, and rise having already played the game. But in his reading of the oracle, perhaps Hester saw something else.

“This is the chapter of the book where it gets interesting,” he told them. “Now you gonna see what all the main characters fixin to do. Chapter seven tomorrow, guys. This is where it all unfolds.”

•   •   •

ON GAME DAY
, the ensemble cast of “Chapter Seven: Dillard” played mostly to type. Half the team were late for walk-throughs and film, causing
Hester to get so angry he locked dozens of them outside to languish in the sun. Once again, there was horseplay when coaches asked for focus and rolled eyes over the boring parade of “tradition.”

Before the game, Coach Fat, the two-time champion, attempted to rally the boys by pointing out that Dillard had scheduled the mighty Raiders as their homecoming game—a bitch-slap back in his day.

“Everybody knows you schedule homecoming against a team you can beat,” he said, trying to boil their blood. “We would have
never
stood for that kind of shit when I was playing. That’s a fuckin disrespect to this program. Yall should be insulted.”

But Coach Fat was turned to the wrong page; this was no Legion of Doom. A voice rose from the back of the room:
“Maaan,”
it said, “we aint into that stuff.”

The voice was KB’s. By now, the rah-rah speeches of old high-school heroes bored him to tears. The old slights and burden of tradition sparked no fire within his guts. He’d even said one time, “These old guys take this stuff way too seriously. I’m just tryin to have fun.” And when KB spoke, the team listened.

Benjamin led the ensemble cast onto the field of Dillard’s Otis Gray Jr. Memorial Stadium, strutting through their warm-ups. And when the Dillard Panthers appeared, KB stood at midfield and let them know the dingo was at their door, shouting,
“We comin for you, baby! We comin!”

The dingo came out snapping and drew first blood. Benjamin took the kickoff sixty-seven yards, stiff-arming defenders into the dirt. Mario then found KB on a twenty-yard corner route over two Panthers and put the Raiders on the one-yard line. Page punched it into the end zone.

“That’s right, bwah! Raiders comin!”

But the boys had not played the game in their dreams the night before. For if they had, they would have seen the traps laid everywhere. The ambushes at every snap. Confusing, because in that dream, the Dillard Panthers were nowhere in sight. The big bad dingo kept hanging himself, twisting the chains tighter and tighter.

After the Raiders stopped the Panther offense and forced them to punt, Benjamin stood in the backfield for the return. But instead of another thrilling run, the ball bounced off his fingers and wobbled beneath his legs. A Dillard lineman pushed him aside and smothered it on the ten. Two plays later, Otis Wright broke loose into the end zone for the score. The extra point attempt was no good.

Raiders 7, Dillard 6.

The Raiders ended up turning the ball over again on a botched fourth-down attempt, placing it right back into the hands of the unstoppable Wright. For if anyone had played the game in his mind the previous night, it was him. Wright exploited every block, every missed tackle. The only thing the Raiders didn’t give him was a welcome mat. Wright would have thirty carries by the end of the night. Here he led the Panthers on a forty-yard drive to set up the first of two touchdown passes from quarterback Ernest Merritt to William Dukes. The Panthers easily executed the two-point conversion.

Raiders 7, Dillard 14.

The next drive, Mario came storming back, but on unsteady legs. He’d suffered a deep-thigh bruise in the Raiders’ homecoming victory over Boca Raton that had left him unable to run. The doctor had given him more pain pills and told him to rest. But Davis, the Raider second-string quarterback, had been suspended that week, leaving only Jems Richemond, who had little experience. Before the game, Mario had lied and said he felt fine. After all, he thought, the leg couldn’t hurt any worse than a torn shoulder.

As if sniffing his wounds, the Dillard line kept him running all night. On the second play of the Raiders’ next drive, the offensive line disintegrated and left Mario exposed. He scrambled out of the pocket, but couldn’t find speed. He dashed toward the sideline in a mad hobble and saw Davonte standing alone on the twenty. The throw was perfect. Davonte juked a defender, made him miss, and trotted into the end zone.

But the snap on the extra point attempt was too high, forcing Mario to
throw it away. The Raiders would not convert on another extra point for the rest of the evening.

Raiders 13, Dillard 14.

Glades Central quickly got the ball back, but went nowhere. Once again, the Dillard defenders pushed aside linemen Travis Salter and Corey Graham as if they were sidewalk traffic, chasing Mario ten yards into the backfield and pile-driving him into the grass.

On fourth down and fifteen, Hester called a time-out and implored the quarterback to look across the middle. “Check down,” he told him. The underneath receivers running “hot routes” across the middle had consistently been open, he said.

Most of Hester’s route sequences had a built-in hot route. Two outside receivers would run the straight post, usually deep, while the others would stay shallow for the underneath option—usually a dig route to the outside or a crossing route over the middle. The hot routes were designed for emergencies, to dump the ball quickly in danger and pick up yardage. But because of Mario’s height, he’d always feared the middle.

“I can’t see it,” the quarterback would say.

“Just look for the defender,” Hester would tell him. “If you can see the defender, the middle is yours. The receiver will be there. Just trust in yourself.”

But Mario couldn’t find the confidence. He consistently favored the outside, often leaving receivers wide open.