Muck City (30 page)

Between plays, Don’Kevious bounced behind the line, barking like a dog. He and his boys wanted more. At 6:00 p.m., they begged the coach for an extended practice. The next day was a teacher work holiday, they said. Let them punish these boys a little longer. The coach agreed. The OL’s suffering would not end soon. “No school tomorrow,” Don’Kevious shouted. He was only getting warm. “So we gonna play till yall get it right.”

As the sun began to set, the hits became so raw and painful that two fights broke out that cleared the sidelines and took every coach to stop them. Then it began to rain, the drops falling like rocks from the darkening sky and bringing a cold wind. The boys loved to play in the wet. The click-clack chewed up the field, leaving them sliding in the black muck until the light finally vanished.

“Great practice,” Hester told the team afterward, standing in a downpour. “That’s the kind of intensity I like to see.”

Coach King added that in 2006, the last time the Raiders won the championship, there were fights like that every day—fights for all the right reasons.

•   •   •

THE SENIOR NIGHT
ceremony took place before a small pregame crowd as the sun sank behind the cane. Junior players lined up to form a tunnel through which the seniors walked to meet their families at the other end. Each carried a carnation tied with ribbon for the proud parent or grandparent waiting with open arms. Coach Knabb read prepared notes
over the PA regarding each boy’s plans after high school, and which college programs had extended offers.

For those who did not know which college they’d be attending, yet who still wished to play the game, Knabb provided the stock line: “… who hopes to attend the college of his choice and to play the game he loves, football. And if God blesses him so, a career in the NFL.”

Hoping that God would bless him so, Mario ran out of the tunnel and presented his carnation to his sister, Canisa. Davonte, with his offers from Marshall, West Virginia, and others, embraced his mother, Delia. For all the other players, the ambitions varied: Dion Blackmon was headed to the Air Force; Rashad Darisaw wished to become a sports agent; Robert Burgess had dreams of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Courtney Porter had the humble hopes of returning home after college to teach math at Glades Central.

The last player to be called was Benjamin, who sauntered down the tunnel to the wild applause of the crowd. He would attend the college of his choice and major in criminal justice, said Knabb. But Belle Glade would have to wait until the first week of February to find out where God would bestow his blessing.

Benjamin was out of uniform, wearing a white T-shirt and a Phillies cap turned backward. He’d appeared only once that week at practice, just to say hello, and stayed less than an hour. For the rest of the week, he’d gone home straight after school, not answering calls or returning messages.

The Saturday after his last game, he’d turned up at a picnic in Pioneer Park hosted by Pastor Dez. He was moody and withdrawn and admitted that his season had been a letdown. For this, he blamed Hester.

“It felt like he didn’t like me,” he said. “When I first started, he would stay late after practice and coach me one-on-one. But then when I got so good, and blowed up and stuff, it’s like he stopped trying to coach me. So by my last game, I was ready to stop playing. It wasn’t as exciting as I thought my senior season was gonna be.

“I was promised a bunch of touchdowns,” he added. “And when I
didn’t get the touchdowns, I didn’t say nothin. Life goes on. I was just going through the motions.”

He’d positioned himself near the ticket booth before the Senior Night ceremony began, chatting with teachers and greeting fans as they walked through the gate. Showing that he was still there, that he’d not disappeared. As his Raiders wrapped up the first quarter already up by two touchdowns, KB stood alone on the sidelines, staring into his phone, as if trying not to seem invested. When he sensed someone watching him, he turned around and gave a goofy grin. By halftime, with the Raiders coasting to an easy victory, he was long gone.

Up in the stands, Frank Williams was sipping gin and juice with the other Raider fathers. He’d also been watching KB down on the sidelines and acknowledged that he was feeling down. All week KB had come home and played video games with his little nephew, Willie. “Not being part of the team, it’s hurting him on the inside,” said Frank. “He didn’t even come out of the house.”

Frank planned to get a family friend, James Jackson, to start conditioning KB for summer training camp, wherever he decided to go. Jackson himself had played for the Miami Hurricanes and Cleveland Browns and now ran a fast-track program in Wellington. “I told KB he’s gotta start running and lifting or his body’s gonna go to waste,” he added.

KB had just nodded.

•   •   •

ALSO SEATED IN
the stands during the first half was John Williams, there to escort his daughter. He wore a four-button pin-striped suit and a blue tie. His hair remained styled in the classic Jheri curl with enough sheen to make it sparkle under the lights. He sat with Theresa while Jonteria led the cheerleaders through their routines on the track below, wincing after she fell down from an awkward jump. “Shake it off, baby,” he muttered under his breath. Then, to Theresa, “I think she’s jumping too high.”

The Senior Night ceremony for cheerleaders took place at halftime at midfield. There was a chill in the air, so John held his daughter close to keep her warm. Theresa, dressed in a brown pantsuit, stood with them smiling, waving to friends in the stands. When Coach Knabb announced their daughter’s future plans, Theresa and John walked proudly on either side, as if the past had never happened. And for a moment, as the three of them posed for photos under the lights, Jonteria let herself imagine that it had never changed, and that it would stay this way tomorrow and forever.

A
fter beating the Suncoast Chargers 39–0 and capturing the district title, the Raiders arrived at Monday practice to a changed reality. Hester gathered the team under a crisp, blue November sky and told them to forget about the past nine games. The time for handholding was over. Moving forward, only the best eleven guys would take the field.

“Right now, we in the playoffs,” Hester said. “Aint no more regular season for us.”

Technically, there
was
still one more game remaining on the schedule. But it was no ordinary game, nothing to take lightly. In fact, many would argue that nothing beyond this game even really mattered. The Raiders could win state and send twenty kids to Division I, but history would regard the season as a failure if Glades Central lost to Pahokee.

“It’s Muck Bowl time,” Hester reminded them. “Nothing more needs sayin.”

•   •   •

IN ADDITION TO
sending an extraordinary number of players to college and the NFL, Pahokee and Glades Central were known for one other thing, and that was their annual shoot-out against each other. Touted as one of the greatest high school rivalries in America, the Muck Bowl drew thousands of fans and practically emptied both towns. In addition, there were those in the Muck City diaspora who treated the game as an annual pilgrimage and traveled from as far away as Alaska. The tailgating began early Friday morning and didn’t end until Sunday night, leaving lower Okeechobee hidden from space under a hazy cloud of pit smoke.

Reporters from the major papers, magazines, and networks also arrived looking for good color; over half the stories ever written about Glades football in the national press were written during Muck Bowl. Even ESPN had once televised the game. More important, the matchup between the Raiders and the Blue Devils also drew a throng of college coaches and scouts looking to maximize their time. In past years, both schools reserved entire sections of bleachers just to accommodate them.

The rivalry dated back to 1943, the year Belle Glade High first opened its doors and invited the inevitable pissing match with its bean-picking neighbors to the north. For decades, the annual meeting was called the “Bean Bowl” or “Everglades Bowl” and was played on Thanksgiving Day. It was the premier social event of the season, as described in an editorial in the
Belle Glade Herald
on November 22, 1957:

“The feeling has existed for years that the two-city battle was a must on every sportsman’s calendar and both schools treat the situation with all the pomp and ceremony of a Roman emperor returning from the wars.”

The term “Muck Bowl” was coined in 1984 as a way to market the game as a showcase for the talent being exported from the region. But out of all the meetings, Belle Glade maintained the edge. Since ’84, the Raiders had won 18 out of 26 games over the Blue Devils.

“This is our reputation in the community,” said Mario.

Or, as Page put it, “This is the only team we bigger than, so we like to punish those boys.”

•   •   •

LOCATED EIGHT MILES
across the canefields, Pahokee had a history very similar to that of its sister city to the south. In the 1920s, the sleepy fishing camps along Okeechobee’s East Beach were swallowed by the rush to farm the black, fertile muck. By the Second World War, Pahokee shared the title as the “Winter Vegetable Capital of the World” and, like Belle Glade, was a major food supplier to Allied soldiers. Vegetables opened banks and restaurants along Main Street, as well as hotels and a theater, and kept the lights on at the Rotary Club dinners. Before football, Pahokee was most notable as the home of country music singer Mel Tillis, who himself had played for the Blue Devils.

Don Thompson was a living relic of those early days. In 1949, when Don was nine years old, his family left their sharecroppers’ farm in Harrisburg, Arkansas, forty miles west of Memphis, for the promise of abundant wages in the beanfields of the Glades.

The family settled in Pahokee, yet still rode the migrant circuit during summers up to Michigan for strawberries and cherries, Arkansas for cotton, then back home for beans. By the eighth grade, Don had arms like a pipe fitter and weighed over two hundred pounds. When Blue Devils coach Webb Pell spotted Don walking home along a dirt road one day, he slammed on his brakes.

“You’re playing football for Pahokee,” he told him. “Get in.”

Don played middle linebacker and offensive tackle, eventually earning a scholarship to The Citadel, the military college in South Carolina; later he played at Arkansas A&M.

After he graduated, Coach Pell gave him a job as defensive coordinator. In his first year with the team, the mostly young and inexperienced
Blue Devils did not win a single game. But hope arrived the following year, when Pahokee leaped ahead of most schools in Palm Beach County and began integrating its schools. While panic gripped the rest of the town, the football coaches were beside themselves. Get down to East Lake High, Pell told Don. Invite those boys to come and play.

Black students at East Lake had the choice of attending all-white PHS or transferring to Lake Shore High in Belle Glade, which would not integrate for another five years. Don needed volunteers, and the way he sold the players on the Blue Devils was his weight program. While in college, Don had become a self-described weightlifting fanatic. He was already strong; he’d been the only cadet at The Citadel whose shirts had to be specially tailored, because his neck was twenty-two inches around, earning him the nickname “Bear.” But it was at Arkansas A&M where he’d first seen a proper strength-training program, something most colleges and high schools were slow to embrace.

Boys in the Glades, both black and white, got strong by lifting crates of cabbage and throwing corn. But Don knew they could become bigger, and besides, “weightlifting is the ultimate team builder,” he believed. He scoured the Glades looking for dumbbells and barbells and had little luck. Finally, a serendipitous event:

“There was a train wreck in Canal Point,” he said. “I went down there when the crew was cutting those rails up and got them to cut them in certain lengths. I weighed them, then added more weight with cement-filled buckets.”

Many of the black players lived in migrant camps outside of town and had to walk to school, so Don began picking them up each morning for training. He’d pull up before dawn, blowing the horn of an old ’59 van that had floorboards so eaten with rust you could see the pavement. Back at the weight room, Don began fattening them up.

“I had the milk truck stop in each morning,” he said. “I’d get these boys to drink a quart of this heavy cream, high-protein stuff. They’d be pumping
steel and drinking milk at six in the morning. They’d get sick half the time. But I tell you something—those linemen put on fifty pounds a man. We came back that next year loaded for bear and we kicked butt.”

Mixing black and white students did not happen without problems. At school, there were fights and black students staged walkouts to protest. But on the football field, coaches Webb Pell and Don Thompson saw a mostly seamless transition. Because the school was so small, the coaches were able to field a team of fifteen whites and fifteen blacks, with most everyone getting time. “The white boys were not threatened by their positions. They could all play football,” he said.