Muck City (6 page)

Gone were the beloved Golden Rams and Bobcats, their fight songs swept into the dustbin of dark history. The new integrated school was named Glades Central Community High, and Jenkins was selected to lead its new football team, the Raiders.

The school was now predominantly black. On the first day of tryouts for the new Raider squad, many of the Rams’ former starters were absent, having transferred or just refused to take part. “They’d played with a few blacks like myself,” Williams said, “but this was just too many.”

Even so, about seventy-five players now stood on the sidewalk because the locker room was too small to hold them all. Two sides of town, two storied programs, two radically different histories, now stood facing each other, chests puffed, eyeballing.

“Yeah, we here,” someone said. “It don’t mean we gonna like you crackers.”

One of the Bobcats turned to Williams. “I know you been playin this light football with these boys,” he said. “But we about to see what kind of real men yall are.”

“Both sides felt they were being forced,” said Newman. “No one had made us party to the decision-making process. There was a lot of tension that day.”

The Lake Shore boys had brought with them a giant chip on their shoulder. The Rams had always had the better equipment, the better schedule that allowed them to play the bigger teams in bigger venues along the coast. For years they’d tried to schedule a public game against the Rams, but with no luck. They’d played only once in the mid-sixties, when the two teams met in secret on a muck patch near the fire station, but the police had broken it up. It was now the Bobcats’ chance to prove something they’d felt all along.

“We knew we could beat them,” said Wayne Stanley, the Bobcat starting quarterback. “Our attitude was that we were going to come in and take all the positions. We were going to take that team.”

In the first days, fistfights broke out between the two sides. A favorite target of black players was a leathernecked lineman named Dan Griffin. The son of a sod farmer and local businessman, Griffin had grown up working alongside blacks in the fields and at his father’s grocery store, the Chicken Shack, located in the heart of the migrant neighborhood. Now among the few whites on the Raiders, Griffin was not intimidated by his new teammates.

“I wasn’t but 180 pounds,” he remembered, “but I was strong.”

When Jenkins commenced one-on-one drills, the biggest black players lined up to challenge Griffin. One by one, they found themselves flat on their backs and staring into the sun.

“To Dan, it was just football,” said Williams. “He never backed off and the black guys loved him for it. After that, they started calling him ‘Wildlife.’ ”

If the new arrangement was to work, Jenkins’s biggest test was
choosing a starting quarterback. Wayne Stanley was already a superstar across the canal. He was handsome, bright, and exceptionally athletic. His father was the foreman of a 4,600-acre farm outside of Belle Glade, a position that offered the family status and a life of relative comfort. During the summers, Wayne helped his father turn the soil on the farm for a daily wage, but he’d never had to endure the rigors of the migrant road.

Wayne drove around Belle Glade in a souped-up metallic ’56 Chevy, so slick it had its own name, “the Rooster,” on account of its tail fins. As a player, Stanley was blessed with a superb arm, but he was even better at running the ball. At Lake Shore, he’d doubled as a tailback.

Newman stood six foot five and weighed 165 pounds. “If you can imagine a stick, that was me,” he said. But his height allowed him to scan the entire field, then drop back and launch bullets. Both quarterbacks had only two losses between them and, more important, the loyalty of their teammates and communities.

Both white and black players remembered Jenkins being quick to address racial tension early on. At the same time, players said that Jenkins’s Mississippian upbringing, plus pressure from the white community, may have prevented him from fully embracing equality on the football field. When it came time to choose a starting quarterback, Jenkins went with Newman.

“I started most of that year,” said Newman. “I feel that was because Coach Jenkins probably felt like a black quarterback couldn’t do it. If that was the case, he was really wrong. Wayne was an unbelievable quarterback. No one on the team was happy about it.”

Black students at Glades Central were definitely not happy. Dan Griffin remembered a group of students, led by a local black activist group, interrupting a team film meeting one afternoon to inquire why Stanley was not getting more playing time. “Jenkins pretty much let them have it,” Griffin said.

The disharmony in the locker room and hallways of Glades Central
was also reflected in the home crowd, which was starkly divided down the color line. It even manifested in the Raider uniform. The new maroon and gold outfits had yet to arrive, so players dressed in a raggedy patchwork of purple, blue, and gold from both the Rams and Bobcats. Despite these problems, the sheer athleticism of the combined forces made the Raiders fierce contenders.

By Thanksgiving the team was undefeated and headed into the playoffs. After victories in the district and regionals, Glades Central met Hollywood Chaminade for a berth in the state finals. But here the experiment finally fell short; the Raiders dropped the game 28–13.

In February, a race riot rocked the campus of Glades Central. What began as a protest led by dozens of black youth—many of them non-students—erupted into a massive brawl that spread throughout the school. White teachers and students were pulled out of classrooms and beaten. Police were called en masse. In the midst of the chaos, someone even phoned in a bomb threat.

The explosive atmosphere of race and politics seemed too much for Jenkins. That April, the coach resigned.

The
Palm Beach Post
later reported that intimidation may also have played a factor. At one of the games, Jenkins’s daughter had been pushed by a group of black teenagers. Others said whites had threatened his family if the team dared to win a championship. Whatever the reason, Jenkins soon took a job as an assistant football coach at Cocoa Beach High School.

Taking his place was a man they called Shorty Red.

Al Werneke was built like a triangle, with a broad chest and stumpy legs. As his nickname suggested, he was small. A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Werneke had played basketball and football at Indiana State, then, for the next decade, had coached high school football in small midwestern towns with names like Dugger, Oblong, Flora, and Brazil. When he arrived in Belle Glade in August 1971, he found a school still brimming with racial tension. On his first day of practice, the coach was greeted by another
idiosyncrasy of the Glades: many of his players were still in the vegetable fields.

“This is the first time in my experience all the squad hasn’t been on hand for opening practice,” an exasperated Werneke told the
Belle Glade Herald
. “They keep telling me, ‘They’re up north—in Georgia—working.’ I am at a loss.”

For Johnnie Ruth Williams, that summer had marked the first time she didn’t require her children to travel for the harvests. The living conditions in the northern labor camps had become too unsuitable for families, she felt. There was too much drinking and fighting, and on their last trip up north, someone had been shot and killed. That same summer, her father had suffered a stroke while driving a truck and died in a Georgia hospital.

With his summer now free, Williams devoted the time to conditioning his body with one goal on his mind. Each morning, he and his teammate Dan Brown, a white running back, would lace up in army boots and run the three miles to the lake marina, then sprint up and down the thirty-foot Hoover Dike until their knees could no longer hold them.

“We ran that dike and ran that dike,” Williams said, “talking about a championship and nothing else.” That summer, he even began sleeping with a football in his bed. “I’ve never wanted anything more,” he added.

That same kind of resolve was evident once Werneke finally assembled his new team and stood before them. Unlike his predecessor, Werneke hailed from the North and didn’t carry the same racial baggage. “All he saw was this phenomenal group of football players,” said Newman.

To avoid conflict, Werneke broke the Raiders into four groups: Red Team offense and defense, and Blue Team offense and defense. He also realized what a gifted quarterback he had in Wayne Stanley. Not wanting to choose between him and Newman, Werneke made the decision to start both players. Stanley and Newman would simply alternate halves.

“Each team was mixed black and white, all based on talent, attitude, and ability,” said Williams. “And with this setup, the black players bought into the system. It was fair.”

For any coach, it was a dream team.

“We just didn’t have a weakness,” said Stanley. “We had strength and we had it two and three deep in every spot. For other teams, it was just ugly.”

The Raiders tore through their regular-season schedule with little resistance, the victories so lopsided that Werneke started ordering his starters to shower and dress at halftime and sit in the bleachers. By midseason the intimidation factor was enough to wilt teams before the whistle even blew.

“We’d play some of these all-white schools and they’d get this deer-in-the-headlights look when we walked onto the field,” said Mark Maynor, a running back who was white. “The black guys would stand together and do this chant to get us all going. I’m sure it looked and sounded ferocious.”

As the Raiders rolled from victory to victory, they were propelled by a force that had been largely missing the previous season: the town. The harmony and camaraderie between black and white players was now starkly evident on the field. Stepping back from the lens of race and politics, the only thing visible under the football lights was a group of kids playing a game they both loved. On Friday nights, at least for a few hours, the town understood this and was united.

“The full thrust of the stands cheered for both black and white,” said Williams. “When you looked into the crowd, you saw it was now all mixed. Maybe they saw the brotherhood on the field. That must have been the reason.”

In the playoffs, the Raider dream of a rematch against Hollywood Chaminade was realized. Except in this matchup, the Raider defense held the Lions to only five first downs in a 31–0 rout. The next week, Tampa Catholic fell 35–0, catapulting Shorty Red’s Raiders into the state championship.

The title game was against the Haines City Hornets. Located forty miles south of Orlando, Haines City was predominantly white and just as rabid about its football as any mucksteppers in Belle Glade. The Hornets were known for their powerful defensive line and a wishbone offense that
pounded opponents while mercilessly chewing the clock. But the Raiders were also coming into the game with one of the toughest defenses in the state.

Dan Brown received the opening kickoff, and there before a crowd of ten thousand people, his summer mornings running the Hoover Dike paid off with a ninety-one-yard return for a touchdown. The rest of the game was a defensive battle. The giant Hornet line blitzed the Raider quarterbacks nearly every play and wrangled them in their own distant territory. Newman and Stanley managed only two completions, while the Raider running game gained a mere fifty-two total yards. Likewise, the only two passes thrown by Haines City quarterback Steve Wilkinson were intercepted. With no passing attack, the Hornets resorted to a game of hammer-and-nail. On four different occasions they managed to get inside the Raider ten-yard line, but only accomplished one touchdown and a field goal.

By the fourth quarter, the Raiders were losing 10–7. With three minutes remaining, the Hornets mustered a final sustained drive and were perched on the Raider seventeen-yard line, ready for the kill. Werneke called a time-out. The game was all but over.

Playing both receiver and defensive end, Williams had hardly left the field all game. Now he shouted to his line, “Hold your man up,” and to his linebackers, “Plug them holes and leave no space. Aint nothing getting through.”

Wilkinson snapped the ball. The Hornets’ play call was a lateral option pass, but when Wilkinson turned to flip the ball to his running back, there was no one there. The back somehow misread the play and sprinted ahead, leaving the ball bouncing on the naked grass.

“I watched it fly out,” Williams said. “And I took it.”

The instant shot of adrenaline caused Williams to juggle the ball, as if it were a thousand degrees in his hands. But once he had control, he began to run. Reaching the fifty-yard line, he felt his tired body begin to falter. Glancing back, he saw a Hornet defender quickly slicing toward him, gaining ground.
I’ll never make it
, he thought.
I’ll just lie down
. It was then that
teammate John Banks suddenly appeared between them like an attending angel, following Williams step for step, shouting, “Come on, Pearl. Don’t stop, Pearl. Keep going, keep going.”

At the twenty-yard line, Banks turned and stuck his helmet in the numbers of the Hornet pursuer and cleared the path. When Williams crossed the end zone for the winning touchdown, he crumpled like a sack of rocks.

“There was no air in the atmosphere,” he said. “My lungs were burning. I just collapsed and lay there. All I could hear was the crowd going crazy.”

Raiders win the championship, 13–10.

One of those voices cheering in the stands was Johnnie Ruth’s, but she was not well. Her cancer had returned just before the playoffs, and both the disease and the aggressive treatment had whittled her down to half. Her cheeks were now sunken, and her body thin from the nausea and vomiting that plagued her days and kept her indoors. But she’d gathered enough strength to make the three-hour drive to Haines City. For she was the one who’d set this whole thing into motion, who’d challenged her children to be fearless and grab hold of dreams no matter what side of the canal.

As the fans lifted Williams and his teammates onto their shoulders in celebration, he saw his mother walk onto the field. He knew right away that she’d probably never see him play football again.