The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (53 page)

 

Dear Coach Reid and the UVA Coaching Staff:

. . . This morning I met with you to discuss my involvement in the hunger strike and you expressed your disappointment that I and my fellow strikers are not seeking to resolve this grave issue in a more “political” manner. You told me that you had thought higher of me before you learned of my involvement in this campaign and stated that you were dismayed by my perceived unwillingness to “follow the rules.”

. . . I would firstly like to point out that this campaign has existed at UVA for 14 years and has thoroughly exhausted all manner of negotiations “within the rules” without any tangible results . . . Secondly, no great injustice has ever been overturned by following the rules. Our great country was founded on the wholly evil institution of slavery, which was only overturned when the nation split in two and engaged in civil war. The Jim Crow reign of segregation and fierce race hatred in the south, though challenged repeatedly through purely political and judicial actions, was eventually overturned only as a result of the nonviolent protest tactics of the Civil Rights Movement.

. . . I believe it is my responsibility as a member of the University community, and even moreso as a member of the human race, to stand up for those whose voices have been silenced and whose livelihoods are being marginalized by the policies of the current University administration. In fact, I firmly believe that the workers that the Living Wage Campaign represents are just as important to this community, if not moreso, than any football coaches, players, or fans. Thus, it disheartens myself and my fellow campaigners that while these workers, the majority of whom are women and African Americans, are being systematically discriminated against and exploited, there are plans to spend millions of dollars on a domed practice field and other accommodations for the athletics department . . . I refuse to comply with rules, regulations, or restrictions that reinforce the discrimination, persecution, and exploitation of human beings.

. . . I happily sacrifice my bodily needs for the greater cause of economic and social justice and I would, without hesitation, sacrifice my membership on the football team and my enrollment at the University if it would result in the University administration recognizing and meeting the demands of the Living Wage Campaign . . . I wish you, the rest of the coaches, and all of my teammates nothing but the best and I sincerely love you all as my family.

—Best, Joseph

 

A few hours later, he ups the ante. His letter to his coaches becomes the heart of a “Why I'm Hunger Striking” post that he writes for
Michaelmoore.com
. In no time the Huffington Post and
The Nation
, upon discovering that he's an athlete, publish it too.

He decides to ignore his coach's reservations and keep starving. Stairways grow daunting. His body grows colder. His sense of smell intensifies, a primal response to food deprivation: he can scent a ham sandwich a first down away. Over and over, the gut flashes the mind a message—
I'm hungry
—and the legs begin walking automatically toward the dining hall, and over and over the mind flashes back the same reply,
Stop! You can't eat
, until finally the loop exhausts itself and the body says,
To hell with it all, then, just let me sleep . . 
.

 

Hunger's fourth day dawns. The campus workers send word to the strikers—
We can't show up at the noontime rallies; we're afraid of getting fired
. But Miss Mary can't be fired for riding by on her bike and smiling and waving her gratitude to Joseph. “Every time I see him,” she says, “it's a joy to my eyes.” Mama Kathy can't be fired for shaking a finger at him and crying, “Eat, gorgeous! Just eat when nobody's looking and act like you're hungry! Pretend you're in the drama department and you're going for the Academy Award!”

“Aw, I can't do that, Mama,” Joseph replies.

He has lost a half-dozen pounds. His mind's mush. He raises his hand three times in Martin Luther King's Political Thought class and forgets each time what he meant to say. Fellow striker Breezy Pitts blacks out in economics class. The doctor orders her to eat.

A dozen teammates keep tabs on Joe-Joe with texts or calls. “Some appreciate his hunger strike,” says wide receiver Miles Gooch, “and some think it's a bit extreme.”
All
are stunned by the swelling media attention.

Suddenly, a fourth-string cornerback's being featured in the
Washington Post
, the
Chicago Sun-Times
,
SI.com
,
Yahoo! Sports
,
Ebony
,
msn.com
,
AOL News
—in
45
Google pages' worth of websites! Suddenly the hunger strikers have a national bullhorn and UVA has a major publicity problem, all because of a walk-on football player of whom the school's media relations department doesn't even have a photograph in its files. All because sports is our obsession.

But
do
our athletes have any more obligation to rush to the ramparts in the struggle for social justice than our bank tellers or mailmen or stockbrokers? No, probably not, Joseph says, but omigod, the platform and the wattage at athletes' disposal if they do. The tidal waves of attention paid to sports are an energy stream that can be diverted anywhere, even to the plight of a janitor or a dishwasher, even by the most insignificant of athletes. Joseph emails his fellow strikers, expressing his worry that the media focus on him might rub them wrong. Rub them wrong? They're thrilled. They're reaching audiences they never dreamed they could. Joseph's email account is about to explode, messages pouring in from professors and students and pastors and football fans across the country.

“A rose will bloom even through the crack of a concrete sidewalk,” says Edwards. “That's what has happened at the University of Virginia.”

 

Day five for Joseph. Day eight for more than half of the 21 others now going hungry. They're hoarse, frayed, frantic, marching to the doorstep of the university president's house, screaming,
You're not meeting! We're not eating! You're not meeting! We're not eating!
Marching on the Board of Visitors meeting in the Rotunda and shrieking,
The people, united, will never be defeated! The people, united, will never be defeated!
Marching on the administrative offices, howling,
When workers' rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up! Fight back!

The administration won't budge, sending emails to tens of thousands of students and faculty explaining its financial predicament, pointing out that its minimum starting pay of $10.65 plus benefits to its direct employees is the second-highest in Virginia regardless of the fact that the university is hiring ever-growing numbers of contract workers from outside agencies that pay them as little as $7.25 an hour with little or no benefits. Outsourcing on the cheap, no different from many U.S. corporations. At their noon rally the strikers take turns on the bullhorn pleading their case and sharing their personal stories, then sag to the ground in exhaustion, a few dissolving into tears.

It's Joseph's turn to tell his tale. So how
did
this kid slip through the cracks of the U.S. sports system—or bloom through one? Oh, it's clear right away, he's not been washed here by the mainstream. This is what it takes for a Division I athlete in 2012 to end up starving and chanting for human rights: a childhood lived in homeless shelters, transitional housing, a church basement, a friend's attic, a tiny camper, fleabag motels, grandparents' houses, cramped apartments . . .
30
homes in his 19 years. Got off easy: his older sister, Joy, tallied 50. Moving because the joint was infested or the landlord a creep or the plumbing pitiful or a job in some other town might actually pay just enough for them to survive. Four children and a parent sleeping in one bed at one shelter, piled in with families whose adults had addictions or physical handicaps, piled in with people wondering what was odd about
this
family, besides the obvious: it's an interracial family in Virginia. Again and again, someone somehow materializing and offering them a hand, saving them from the streets and starvation.

How did Joseph's mom, Rhonda—raised Jewish and middle-class and suburban in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania—end up a gypsy trying to keep four children out of oblivion's clutches? Married to Bruce Williams, a burly, good-natured black man, a reformed drug addict from the hard half of Norfolk. Both had joined Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, done years of volunteer and mission work, and, still strangers to each other, committed to wedding in 1982 as part of the church's plan to erase the barriers between races and nations through intermarriage. Bruce ricocheted from job to job, a security guard one day; a counselor at a home for troubled kids the next; a taxi, truck, and bus driver who kept crashing taxis, trucks, and buses . . . and then seemed to give up. There was never, because of all of his and Rhonda's mission and volunteer work, a cash reserve to tide them over. And so Mom kept bursting through the door to announce, We're moving again! Right
now!
Scavenge the dumpsters behind the grocery and liquor stores for cardboard boxes! Jam the sheets and towels in those plastic bins! Dismantle the cinder-block bookshelf! Heave everything else into those crates! Don't forget the mousetraps! Leave the place cleaner than when we arrived! You know the drill!

Truth was, they didn't—it was usually helter-skelter, a ransacked army on the run, one eye out for the roaches and rodents that kept moving with them. Between the moves and job changes, Rhonda would round up the kids on weekends and summer mornings, dress them in donated clothes, funnel them into a clunker, drive past all the ball fields where all those kids in crisp unis were playing weekend tournaments, and find someone, somewhere, in worse shape than they were to help out. Or
better
off; didn't matter. The Williams Crew cleaned up streets, parks, schools, hell, even rivers, wading into the Anacostia River in waist-high boots to have at the 20,000 tons of trash entering it each year. They planted trees, organized a summer school for underprivileged kids, made sandwiches for poor people, baked cookies for old people, sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem” in nursing homes.

Somebody in that flock of saints had to rebel, so Joseph, in ninth grade, volunteered. Puberty had come, Dad had gone—Bruce and Rhonda had split six years earlier—his two older siblings had just moved out, and the feeling that everything was falling apart was confirmed when his mother couldn't scrape together the $200 to get Joseph's heart murmur checked out, so his big love was lost too: no high school football. He started getting in fights and disrupting classes, then skipping them altogether, drinking and smoking pot at a pal's aunt's apartment, once even funding his mutiny by pocketing cash he collected for Hurricane Katrina victims. He landed in a youth shelter, slugged a kid there who blew on his neck, and was charged with assault and battery and hauled off in shackles to a juvenile detention center.

Rhonda stared at her 13-year-old delinquent in disbelief. Sure, the kid had been hyper right out of the chute, had been class cutup and funkiest dressed, wearing a big green clock on a string as a necklace to school or picking his hair out into a puffy 'fro, then having his younger brother shave a bald stripe down the center and one down each side: Reverse Triple Mohawk, Ma! But he'd always been the Williams's prodigy, spewing five-syllable words at age three, bypassing first grade altogether, and reading at an eighth-grade level at—
What? He can't be six!
When he cursed his mother one day in the summer after his to-hell-in-a-purple-handbasket ninth-grade year, Victor, his best buddy as well as his older brother, beat him to a pulp and left him sobbing in a bush in the front yard of a town house they'd just moved into on government vouchers . . . and Joseph's fever finally began to lift. Dominion High principal John Brewer, rather than expel him, gave him an
eighth
chance, the assault charges were dropped, Victor moved back home, Joseph passed his sophomore football physical, and the two brothers went on to become stars and leaders of their football team in Sterling, Virginia.

Something else happened too.
How
, Joseph asked a man in the 100 Black Men society who mentored him on weekends,
can we ever pay back all the people who've helped us?
And the reply struck him in the heart:
You pay them back by helping someone else
. He began staying after school to tutor struggling classmates and signing up—even before his mother could—to help those hurting. When his college application landed at UVA, admissions officers panting over his volunteer-work list had no air left when they got to his 1420 SAT score, and they fell over themselves to help cover tuition, board, and books of an incoming 16-year-old.

That's
how Joseph made it through high school still holding on to the strange notion that he's not separate from other human beings, not different from custodians and dormitory maids. That's why he's the one in 444,000 U.S. student-ATHLETES standing at the hub of his campus imploring his peers and professors and administrators to care. He had to be incubated in a way that neither money nor poverty incubates in America, grow up differently from other fledgling white, brown, and black athletes. Grow up without the buckling weight of his extended family's expectations, without his consciousness narrowed to the needs of kin and posse, chained to the lifetime role of Clan Messiah—the poor African American athlete's fate ever since the 1980s, when the money got crazy—and without ever climbing aboard the middle- and upper-class striver's conveyor belt of camps, clinics, private coaches, travel teams, weightlifting programs, and every-weekend tournaments. All of them, from both backgrounds, kept anxiously aware of their place in the pecking order by Internet scouting and ranking services reminding them what their height, weight, bench press, and time in the 40 needed to be, tunnel vision hardwired by their Sweet 16th.