Never Ran, Never Will Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Albert Samaha

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  First Edition: September 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Samaha, Albert, author.

  Title: Never ran, never will: boyhood and football in a changing American inner city / Albert Samaha.

  Description: First edition. | New York: PublicAffairs, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018000983| ISBN 9781610398688 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541767867 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mo Better Jaguars (Football team) | Football—Social aspects—New York (State)—New York. | Brownsville (New York, N.Y.)—Social conditions.

  Classification: LCC GV956.M6 S34 2018 | DDC 796.332/6209747/1—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000983

  ISBNs: 978-1-61039-868-8 (hardcover), 978-1-54176-786-7 (ebook)

  E3-20180705-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Characters

  Author’s Note

  PART I BOYHOOD

  1 Gio’s Arrival, July 2013

  2 Looking for These Better Days, August 2013

  3 Directed Toward Decay, September 2013

  4 The Fundamentals of Life, September–November 2013

  5 Crossroads, January 2014

  6 Pressure Chamber, March–April 2014

  7 Between Saviors and a Dead End, April 2014

  8 What’s Best for Isaiah, May 2014

  9 Goodbyes, June 2014

  PART II FOOTBALL

  10 The Days and Nights of Summer, June–July 2014

  11 On the Horizon, July–August 2014

  12 Hell Week, August 2014

  13 Stop Dancin’ and Run Somebody Over, August–September 2014

  14 What They’ve Been Waiting For, Early to mid-September 2014

  15 East Orange, Mid-September 2014

  16 To Make It in the Jungle, Late September 2014

  17 Brick City, Late September 2014

  18 None of Y’all Gon’ Die Tonight, Mid to late October 2014

  19 The Rematch, Late October 2014

  20 Blessings, December 2017

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Bibliography

  Index

  For my mother, Lucy Concepcion

  Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe, then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away—you know?—from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters, and all that blood.

  —JAMES BALDWIN,

  “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon”

  Characters

  2013 Mo Better Jaguars

  Junior Midgets (ages 10 to 13):

  Chris Legree—program director, coach in charge of Junior Midget age group

  Gary Gravenhise—assistant coach

  Gio—offensive lineman, defensive lineman

  Isaiah—running back, defensive back

  Junior Pee Wees (ages 8 to 11):

  Muhammad Esau—coach in charge of Junior Pee Wee age group

  Andrell—assistant coach

  Oomz—running back, linebacker

  Hart—offensive lineman, defensive lineman

  Chaka—wide receiver, defensive back

  Naz—quarterback, defensive back

  Time Out—running back, defensive lineman

  Dorian—offensive lineman, linebacker

  Lamont—offensive lineman, defensive lineman

  Mitey Mites (ages 7 to 9):

  Vick Davis—coach in charge of Mitey Mite age group

  Elsie—assistant coach

  James—assistant coach

  Oscar—assistant coach

  Puerto Rico—offensive lineman, defensive lineman

  2014 Mo Better Jaguars

  Pee Wees (ages 9 to 12):

  Muhammad Esau—coach in charge of Junior Pee Wee age group

  Andrell—assistant coach

  Oomz—running back, linebacker

  Hart—offensive lineman, defensive lineman

  Isaiah—running back, linebacker

  Donnie—offensive lineman, defensive lineman

  Chaka—wide receiver, defensive back

  Naz—quarterback, defensive back

  Time Out—tight end, defensive lineman

  Dorian—offensive lineman, linebacker

  Lamont—offensive lineman, defensive lineman

  Junior Pee Wees (age 8 to 11):

  Chris Legree—program director, coach in charge of Junior Pee Wee age group

  Gary Gravenhise—assistant coach

  Mitey Mites (ages 7 to 9):

  Vick Davis—coach in charge of Mitey Mite age group

  Elsie—assistant coach

  James—assistant coach

  Oscar—assistant coach

  Puerto Rico—offensive lineman, defensive lineman

  Tarell—wide receiver, defensive back

  Author’s Note

  I BEGAN REPORTING THIS BOOK IN THE SUMMER OF 2013. Over the next two years, I spent many hours with the players of the Mo Better Jaguars, their coaches, their parents, and other current and former neighborhood residents. I went to nearly every practice and game, and spent time with them at the park, at their homes, on the phone, in their cars, walking around, on buses to New Jersey, and anyplace else they’d let me shadow them.

  This book is based on interviews, conversations, and observations from four and a half years of reporting in and around Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood, as well as outside research. It’s filtered through my own interpretations of what I saw, heard, read, concluded, and believed.

  One of the harder decisions was over what to call a neighborhood like Brownsville. I went with “inner city” because it’s what most of the locals used and, I guess, the clearest way to put it at the moment. The word is loaded because it has been misused so often, especially in efforts to deny the forces of systemic oppression that batter black and brown neighborhoods.

  I wrote this book because I wanted to explore why some kids made it out and some didn’t. What were the factors that made the difference? And did escaping tough circumstances also have to mean turning your back on the neighborhood? In my reporting on disenfranchised communities across the country, I repeatedly came across people who’d dealt with the fear of poverty or crime, learned lessons from their circumstances that helped them grow into successful adults, and then found themselves drawn back to their homes. This book is entirely from a third-person perspe
ctive because I wanted to present this world as it looked—and as it continued to look in the moments I wasn’t there. This story belongs to the people who allowed me to peek into their lives, and my primary goal is to do them justice, while answering the questions I’d become focused on.

  While I do not appear in the book as a character, the story I chose to tell is undoubtedly personal, a journey to better understand tensions that have discomforted me. I was part of the wave of gentrifiers moving into Flatbush, Brooklyn, in the early 2010s, and I still live there as of this writing. My apartment is two and half miles from Betsy Head Park, an easy walk on a nice day. I go to bars and brunch spots that replaced longtime local businesses. There’s no escaping the knowledge of the benefits I’ve gained at the expense of families with deep roots in a place I only recently started calling home.

  I began reporting this book around the time I’d started grappling with my feelings about football, the sport that dominated much of my childhood. I had NFL aspirations and played until my second year in college. I love the game and still believe that the virtues I learned from playing it were critical to whatever success I have been able to find. Like many, the more I learned about the brain research, the more I cringed at the big hits, wondered about the sport’s future, and questioned the morality of supporting it. In reporting this book, I hoped to cultivate some sort of understanding—in myself, at least—of what football’s place in American society is, will be, and should be.

  Albert Samaha

  January 27, 2018

  Flatbush, Brooklyn

  PART I

  BOYHOOD

  1

  GIO’S ARRIVAL

  July 2013

  THE BOYS CAME TO THE PARK FOR FOOTBALL PRACTICE on Saturday mornings in the summer. Some of them would be lost by winter; Coach Chris Legree couldn’t yet say which ones. It was early July 2013, and Chris was hopeful. Despite years of evidence to the contrary, he still held on to the dream that this would be the year he saved all the boys gathered around him at the park.

  There were more than 50 of them lined up across the hard dirt field in the Brownsville neighborhood, deep in east Brooklyn. The youngest boys were 7; the oldest, 12. Most wore T-shirts and basketball shorts, though a few, the newcomers who didn’t know better, were in jeans. In a few weeks, they’d all be in helmets and shoulder pads, and Chris would learn “who was really a football player” and who wasn’t cut out for the game. But for now, in the thick heat of peak summer, their only tasks were to learn the plays and get in shape.

  “Set! Go!” shouted Chris, who was 57, built like a bouncer, and had the robust, commanding voice of a former quarterback. “Let’s go! All the way through!”

  The boys sprinted across the field, their sneakers and cleats kicking up dust. Yes, Chris knew some would be lost, but he was just as certain that within this pack, too, were future stars. Every boy had aspirations beyond professional football dreams. Isaiah, a rail-thin 11-year-old who ran with easy strides, his slender frame almost gliding with the dust, wanted to start his own business. Oomz, a mercurial and solidly built 10-year-old jogging in the middle of the pack, wanted to become a doctor. Hart, a big 10-year-old lumbering near the back, wanted to practice law.

  It was hard to tell, at this point, whose childhood struggles were prologues to against-all-odds stories of upward mobility and whose foreshadowed tragedy. Who would make it out and who wouldn’t. To Chris, it sometimes felt arbitrary. He’d coached boys at this park for nearly two decades, and over those years he’d seen promising kids, from stable households and decent schools, fall into the streets, and he’d seen troubled kids, with poor grades and juvenile records, get on track. The adolescent years were fickle in this neighborhood. One push this way or that could make all the difference, erasing every move that came before. It was both a reason to hope and to despair.

  “Keep going!” Chris shouted. “Don’t slow down! When they see us they gon’ know what Brownsville’s about!”

  Within minutes, some boys were hunched over, out of breath, wilting in the sticky heat. Chris called for a water break. His eight assistant coaches, posted at various points on the field, reminded the boys that walking wasn’t allowed during practice. As the boys dispersed, to their backpacks piled at the base of a tall cement light post or to the water fountain behind the baseball diamond, Chris spotted an older boy watching them from behind the fence.

  Chris always scanned the park during practice. A five-block patch of dried grass and cracked pavement in the center of Brownsville, Betsy Head Park was his domain. He’d grown up in the housing projects down the street, the Brownsville Houses, and his Mo Better Jaguars youth football program had practiced on this dusty field for years. Anybody looking for Chris knew to find him at the park. He waved at friends, greeted parents and former players, scouted for new recruits, and kept an eye out for any older kids who might tempt his boys onto the streets. Chris couldn’t protect his boys once they left Betsy Head Park, but as long as they were under his watch on this field, nothing could touch them.

  The boy behind the fence wore a dark T-shirt, shiny basketball shorts, and unremarkable sneakers. He had close-cut hair, high cheekbones, and big, down-turned eyes that lent him an air of vulnerability despite the ridges of muscle visible on his calves and forearms. Chris didn’t recognize the boy, but the boy began walking toward him.

  “Hey, how ya doing?” Chris said warmly.

  “Hi,” the boy said. “I was wondering how I could join the team.”

  Now that they stood toe-to-toe, Chris saw that the boy did not wear the hard face he’d seen on so many of the older boys around the neighborhood. His voice, too, was soft, hesitant.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  The boy’s name was Gio. The first thing Chris noticed about him was that he was big for his age. The second was how politely he spoke even without a parent present. Later, after seeing him move on the field for the first time, Chris told his fellow coaches: “This kid got a chance to be a star.”

  GIO HAD ALWAYS wanted to play football. He hadn’t gotten much of a chance to try the sport growing up in Saint Lucia, in the Caribbean, where his friends mostly played soccer. Gio was good at soccer, faster and more coordinated than the other boys his age. But the complexity and collisions of football appealed to him, and he watched the game as often as possible. His favorite team was the New York Giants.

  By the time Gio was in grade school, his mother and older brother had moved to New York City, where they lived in a big brick apartment building in Brownsville. Gio stayed behind with his father in Saint Lucia while his mother settled into the new home. The boy enjoyed life on the island. It was comfortable. He had many friends. They often spent their afternoons on the beach, kicking a soccer ball, swimming, running races, and roughhousing. But it was a small place, and Gio grew bored of the beach. “It gets old if it’s the only thing you do every day,” Gio said. He welcomed his mother’s decision to bring him to America.

  To his eyes, the country was full of wonders. Tall buildings blocked the horizon. Cars filled every driveway and lined every curb. Large flat-screen televisions glowed through living-room windows. A few days after he arrived in the summer of 2013, his mother took him to Coney Island, eight miles south of Brownsville, where the beach was thronging, far busier than any he’d seen. Wide-eyed, he took in the roller coasters, ice cream parlors, carnival games, and the hundreds of people strolling along the boardwalk and crammed towel-to-towel on the sand. There was abundance all around him. Within his own neighborhood, he saw big shops that sold many versions of any kind of item you could want. On a single block there might be a place for Chinese food, a place for burgers, and a place for deli sandwiches. Across the street from his apartment building, a block down from a halfway house, stood a Dunkin’ Donuts, a T-Mobile branch, a Dollar Tree, a fried chicken joint, and two pizza chains. Several blocks farther north, on Pitkin Avenue, the neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare, the shops
lined up, one after the next, as far as his eyes could see—selling sneakers, suits, hair products, discount jeans, fresh fruit, liquor, video games, tattoos, and more. “It’s like you can get anything you want,” Gio said. He liked to go for walks along Pitkin Avenue, dropping into shops and people watching. He wondered if all of America was like this.

  One Saturday, a month after his arrival, Gio cut through Betsy Head on his way home from Pitkin and saw kids playing football. The park teemed with summer life. Sweaty guys played pickup basketball on blacktops. Small children splashed in the pool. Joggers looped the red rubber track. Teenagers lounged on the jungle gym. Old-timers played cards on chipped picnic tables. Young men and women chatted on cell phones and ate greasy takeout on the red cement steps that served as bleachers behind the baseball diamond. Somewhere, a boom box was blasting hip-hop. And, in the center of it all, 50 or so boys kicked up dust.

  Gio was taller than all of the boys, and as he watched them, he figured he was stronger too. He imagined himself running with the ball and knocking opponents to the ground, the big hits that made the crowd go ooooh! on TV. He thought about how popular football was in this country and the riches that came from being good at it. He began to dream.

  GIO’S MOTHER DIDN’T know much about football, but she supported his interest. Though she came to the country with high hopes for the future, she worried about her son’s transition into American life. It was not the glittering paradise some of her relatives in the Caribbean pictured, and she’d hesitated to move Gio to the States. There were more opportunities here than anywhere else, she still believed, but soon after arriving she realized that those opportunities were more distant than she expected—especially for boys Gio’s age, especially in working-class neighborhoods like Brownsville, where she landed because rent was cheap. She learned that many of the schools in her neighborhood were notorious for hallway fights and low test scores. She read news articles declaring that Brownsville’s crime rate was among the highest in the city. She heard stories of young people falling in with local gangs.