Muck City (11 page)

Subversion had infected his own coaching staff, which he’d been forced to purge. Over the past two seasons he’d fired two assistants who were reversing play calls, thwarting his control, going above the program. One had even screamed at the boys after the loss to Cocoa, calling them quitters.

“Some of those guys didn’t see it like I did,” he said, “like a high school game. It was too big to them and I had to let them go.”

The coaches had been former Bobcats and Raiders, men who’d been part of the program for decades. Their dismissal had caused a backlash among many fans, due partly to the men Hester hired to replace them. Out of his twelve assistant coaches, four had never worn the maroon and gold. Even worse, one was from Connecticut. In fact, the only person to carry
over from Snead’s staff was assistant head coach Sam King, who’d overseen special teams for Glade Central for thirty-one years. Nobody fired Sam, especially someone as superstitious as Jet. Sam King
was
the Raiders. The man came with the field.

As for the other coaches, Hester felt the Raiders needed more than just hard-nosed football guys. Given the kinds of problems affecting his team, what the kids needed most of all were mentors.

“The coaches I chose are guys who worked well with kids, guys who kids would respond to,” Hester said. “You want people who are there for the right reasons.”

Kids responded to defensive line coach Sherman Adams, the interloper from Hartford, especially when he’d load his SUV with linemen after practice and spring for fried chicken. Sherm stood six foot seven and worked for Geek Squad in West Palm Beach installing televisions. Despite Sherm’s Yankee roots, Hester and the others had accepted him as a born-again muckstepper. He even spoke of “sprinkling some of that in your food” for strength and magic. Until Sherm started eating muck, he said, he and his wife had been unable to have children. “Now we got a beautiful baby girl. There’s power in this ground.”

During summers, the boys pumped iron with strength coach JD Patrick, who was another assistant who’d never been a Raider. In fact, JD had been so small in high school that his nickname was “Squeaky.” A sharp mind for numbers and electronics had later served him well in the army, where he’d worked at Fort Bliss preparing the Hawk missile for deployment. Once out, he’d gotten through a nasty divorce by embracing weightlifting, which added bulk and kept him lean and strong in his later years. He was now a youthful man of fifty-five, with a new wife and a two-year-old daughter at home. And despite a bald patch on top, JD let his salt-and-pepper hair grow long in back, almost to his shoulders. Aside from coaching, he worked as Belle Glade’s director of parks and recreation. His office was inside the community recreational center off MLK Boulevard where the team did their summer workouts.

The kids responded to Randy Williams, the running backs coach. He’d played on the fabled Raider teams of the mid 1990s that had produced so many pros. After graduation, he ran the football on a scholarship at Savannah State before a broken ankle and tibia ended his career. He now worked as an officer at Glades Correctional Institution, transporting inmates to trials and appointments. At school he spoke the kids’ language and often dished hard advice to any potential “danks and jitterbugs” who’d show up bleary-eyed and loiter on the sidelines.

“Stop being a dank,” he would tell them.

But out of Hester’s coaches, Greg Moreland was the most beloved. He was two years older than Hester, with a shiny bald dome and a sculpted goatee that he kept dyed jet black. His job as a counselor at a youth mental-health facility in Jupiter had given him an easy, natural rapport with players, many of whom he’d given nicknames such as “Standstill,” “Little Hands,” and “Muscle Mutt.”

His own nickname was “Q,” which was short for “GQ,” which he’d earned after spending some time once as a male model. For a football coach, Q had personal style to spare, from the fifty-six pairs of shoes in his closet to the white convertible Sebring he drove to practice with late-seventies-era Isley Brothers playing softly in the deck.

What kids loved most was Coach Q’s bawdy humor, which was irresistible. On a road game later that season, he would leave the team weeping with laughter after complimenting a woman on her eyes, then asking, “If God forbid anything ever happened to you, could I take them things out and keep ’em in a pickle jar?”

His conquests in the bedroom were also public information. “I’m taking my Cialis early,” he announced once at the end of practice. “I told my wife to get ready, ’cause tonight I’m puttin on the cape and jumpin off the dresser.”

Another time he confided, “Cats and midgets terrify me.”

•   •   •

AS PRACTICE GOT
under way, the coaches busied themselves dragging bags of footballs and water, reading excuse notes from doctors and mothers, organizing warm-ups—squats and high knees, lunges and jumping jacks. They downloaded football apps on each other’s phones. They ate candy.

Coach Q and a few others stood around Greg Hall, the heavyset receivers coach whom they called Minute. Hall was one of Hester’s oldest friends and now worked as a sheriff’s deputy. He also struggled with diabetes.

“Minute don’t carry a gun ’cause they know he got the sugar,” Q said. “When they send Minute out, all they give him is a flashlight and a roll of quarters.”

He straightened his face, all serious. “They know he could go at any time.”

Hester, behind dark sunglasses, paid no attention. He was busy watching his young squad slowly trickle onto the field while trying to ignore the newspaper article he held in his hand. Mario was already loosening up. Robert Way and Davonte Allen were getting dressed. But there was no sign of Benjamin. In fact, half the team was already late.

“Let’s go,” he said. “You jitterbugs done wasted enough time.”

“Hey, Coach Hester,” one player yelled. “You seen us in the papers?”

The coach just scowled.

After the team gathered for prayer and fell into laps around the field, Hester finally looked down at the
USA Today
cinched under his clipboard. The paper’s preseason Top 25 poll listed Glades Central at number twenty-one in the nation.

Hester hated national rankings. The way he saw it, of all the outside forces working against him and his coaches, a national ranking only gave them footing. Rankings were a distraction that built false hope and ratcheted expectations. They also gave life to a growing sense of entitlement that many believed had infected the program for years.

As far as expectations, the Raiders’ dominating performance at the seven-on-seven in Tallahassee had certainly fed the community’s hopes of
another title run. Several weeks later in Tampa, the NFL had hosted its annual seven-on-seven with elite teams from all over the country. Already the reigning champions, the Raiders clinched the title again.

But these tournaments were deceiving because they were merely a showcase for the flyboys who came a dime a dozen in the Glades. They provided no window into the health of the team’s interior core, which was the offensive and defensive lines. And like rankings, they told you little about the character and chemistry of the squad.

Standing at practice, Hester looked out at the group of kids crowned one of the best teams in the nation. As much as he loathed the rankings, it was something he desperately wanted to believe. After two years of trying to weed out the bad elements, instill discipline, and buffer the outside forces, this was the crew he’d been waiting on. This was the squad he and his coaches had groomed since they were freshmen and sophomores, the ones they’d hoped to inspire into believing in themselves and the program. These were the guys who’d come together as “one gang, one family” and deliver Glades Central its seventh title. And for Hester, his very first.

But now, taking inventory, he began to wonder.

It was already clear his offensive line was a disaster. The few precious linemen who weighed over 250 pounds were slow and out of shape. Realizing their value in the land of cheetahs, many of them had blown off the mandatory summer workouts.

“They don’t show up ’cause they know I need ’em,” Hester had complained at the time. “These boys got my hands tied.”

His two centers—Travis Salter and Kevin Edourd, a soft-spoken Haitian whom everyone called Cubby—now gasped during sprints and wobbled in the heat. Cubby couldn’t even make it twice without taking a knee. Corey Graham and Brandon Rodriguez, the two guards, looked on the verge of needing an ambulance.

The OL had been the weak link in the previous year’s squad, especially against Cocoa. The Tigers had sliced them apart and hammered away at
the quarterback, Leron Thomas, rattling his focus and forcing the key interception that turned the game.

The crushing loss in Orlando seemed to have provided little motivation. Only Gator, whose real name was Tavious Bridges, appeared hardy and fit. He ran his sprints with the same crazed smile that greeted his opposing defenders, one that jacked his eyes open wide and revealed a mouthful of giant white teeth.

“Is that why they call you Gator?” someone asked him.

“Nah,” he said, “I’m just physical in everything I do.”

The same could be said for Jatavis “Jaja” Brown, the junior linebacker now running shuffle drills. Last season, it had been Jaja and the tight Raider secondary that had largely carried the team. Now that Hester was seeing the shape of the OL, he hoped Brown and his boys could do it again.

He loved watching Jaja play football. The kid was a throwback to a bygone era, with straight-backed posture and a body sculpted by milk, push-ups, and mornings on the dikes. Even the way he tucked his sweats down into his socks was reminiscent of C. W. Haynes and the ironmen from the proud old days. At six foot one and two hundred pounds, he was blessed with blazing muck speed and ferocious power. Running backs remembered him the next morning. So did college recruiters who saw his film. Jaja already had multiple offers from Division I programs.

But his ferocity on the field was betrayed by a terrible shyness. He rarely spoke in public, and when he did, the words came out soft and measured.

“The boy don’t say much,” said Hester. “But he shows up for work.” Of the players on the Raiders who reminded Hester of himself, one was Jaja.

The other was Jaime Wilson, the Raiders’ number-two receiver, who now practiced hand drills with the rest of the corps. One by one, the flyboys burst off the line and hooked in front of Coach Hall, who fired footballs straight into their faces. In such drills, Jaime’s hands were a thing to behold, trapping the hurtling projectile with a graceful, gentle touch.

Although he was skinny and not very tall, it was Jaime whom coaches considered to be the best overall athlete on the team. He had breakaway speed,
instant separation, and those sturdy hands. And he was versatile. Jaime doubled as the team’s punter, and during the summer tournaments, he even played quarterback and displayed nimble feet and a rifle arm. As a junior, Jaime was already getting attention from the Hurricanes and Gators. He was also ranked one of the top twenty-five receivers in the state. And to Hester, that’s what made Jaime vulnerable to the forces—the uncles and cousins and family friends—that assured him of his singular talent. Hester knew what all coaches knew, that for an athlete with that kind of gift, the worst kind of calamity, aside from injury, death, or prison, was believing your own hype.

As much as Hester feared to admit it, he was already losing Benjamin.

The team captain and figurehead, the playmaker upon whom the Raiders would hang their season’s dreams, was now refusing to work out. After arriving late to practice, Benjamin ignored orders to do push-ups. When Coach JD yelled, “Let’s go, KB,” the nation’s number-eight receiver mimicked the motions, then stretched out in the grass. On the first morning of two-a-days, Benjamin had also refused to wear his helmet on account of fresh ear piercings.

“I don’t want titties,” he protested, referring to lumps of scar tissue left behind by the closed holes.

“Where are your priorities at, KB?” Hester said. “Put your helmet on and get out there.”

“Just burn both ends of a broom straw and stick ’em through,” Coach Randy said. “That way they won’t close. That’s how we used to do it.”

Hester glared at him. “I said get out there, KB.”

Benjamin trotted onto the field bareheaded, the studs in his ears glistening in the sun.

Before the month was out, sportswriters along the coast would pick the boys from Glades Central to rally back to Orlando. Despite what Hester saw, he dared to believe that could be true. The only question remained:
How bad did they really want it?
For any coach, that was something you simply could not teach.

The season started in a week.

I
f the pressures of maintaining tradition weren’t great enough, the Raiders’ season openers thrust upon them the burden of state pride. The first two games of the season would be played against nationally ranked teams from Texas, part of a showcase designed to give bragging rights to the true national powerhouse—at least for a year. The first matchup was Saturday against Skyline High School of Dallas, a noon game under the sun at Daytona Beach’s Municipal Stadium.