Never Ran, Never Will Read online

  Before her 12-year-old son could go off to college, start a career, and buy a house, he had to make it out of the neighborhood, avoiding the traps along the way. Gio had grown up in an insulated, safe environment, where he’d had the same friends all his life and saw the same people every day. His mother worried he’d be unable to handle the negative influences she saw around the neighborhood, the older boys on the corners late at night who pulled younger boys into their circle. She worked all day and so did Gio’s 20-year-old brother, and she worried how Gio would spend his free time. It calmed her to know that he would be at the park, learning from coaches and meeting new friends, for so many hours each week.

  She met Coach Chris, liked his enthusiasm, and felt blessed to have another adult looking after her son. She hadn’t really considered how football could shape Gio’s future until she talked to Chris. The coach was telling her that her son might be good enough to go to college for free. Within days of their first meeting, Gio had become Chris’s prized prospect. Not only was he fast and strong, but he could kick the ball 40 yards and throw it nearly as far. He had a sharp mind, quickly picking up the plays and the rules, and he showed up to every practice. Chris bragged to high school coaches about him. When old friends dropped by the field to see Chris, he pointed to Gio and said, “Watch this kid right here. This kid could be a star.” He worked with Gio on kicking and blocking drills before practice and during water breaks. “Just imagine what this kid can do when he actually knows how to play,” Chris said.

  The other boys were just as impressed. It wasn’t long before many of them looked up to Gio. He was funny and warm and, even though he was older and more athletic than the others, he never acted like he was too cool. One night, after a Tuesday evening practice in mid-August, a group of them stayed on the field with Gio to see how far he could kick the ball. The sun was setting. Lights on tall cement posts around the park illuminated the field, where, on the other side, a group of mostly West Indian men were playing soccer. Gio launched the football high into the darkening blue sky. As it barreled down, the other boys jockeyed to get underneath, but it hit the dirt before anybody could snag it, and it bounced around the way footballs do. The boys raced after it, pushing one another away until finally somebody dove on the ball.

  “My ball!” shouted Oomz, as he hopped to his feet, his white shirt stained with dirt. He threw the ball to Gio, then got back in position for the next round. But before the kick, he heard somebody calling his name: “Yo, Oomz!” He turned and saw Hart standing by the side of the field with his parents, who were folding up the lawn chairs they’d sat on during practice.

  “I’ll let y’all get the next one,” Oomz said to the other boys before jogging off toward Hart and greeting his parents.

  “Oomz, you wanna come over tonight?” Hart said. “My mom and dad said it’s cool.”

  “I wish I could, but I gotta ask my mom first,” Oomz said. “Next practice, though?”

  “You’re welcome at our place anytime,” Hart’s mother chimed in.

  The boys slapped hands and parted ways. As Oomz sprinted back to the middle of the field, Hart and his parents headed for their car, bound for a quiet block of nice houses in southeastern Queens. While a majority of boys on the team lived in Brownsville, some commuted to practice from middle-class pockets of the city, where white people lived and parks had lush grass. Several boys waited at the park entrance for their rides. Others took off on bikes or caught the bus or subway. A few stood with their parents talking to coaches, their conversations punctuated every minute or so by the thud of Gio’s booming kicks.

  Coach Muhammad Esau, at 24 the second-youngest coach on the staff, stayed at the park with the boys waiting out front. Once they’d all been picked up, he turned his attention to the field, where the game of kick and catch continued. Esau had been a team captain during Mo Better’s glory years, a sure-tackling cornerback. Even back then, Chris thought Esau would make a good coach. In Chris’s ideal world, Esau would one day run the program. For now, he was deputy in charge of the Junior Pee Wee age group, which included Oomz and Hart.

  “Yo, what y’all still doing out here?” Esau said to the boys on the field. “Y’all should be headed home.”

  The summer had been violent. Tensions between the two dominant crews of the neighborhood, the Hood Starz and the Wave Gang, had thickened. On some nights, teenagers opened fire on one another on Rockaway Avenue, the boundary between their territories, three blocks from the park. The coaches recalled at least six shootings on the avenue this summer. Other nights, boys traded shots in the cluster of housing projects across the street from the park.

  The coaches were familiar with the rivalry. Less than a decade earlier, a group of former Mo Better players had formed the Hood Starz. Some of those players got locked up after a police gang sweep in the late 2000s. Others were killed in the conflict with the Wave Gang. Hakeem, the 16-year-old alleged leader of the Hood Starz, had been murdered in 2010. And as the older boys went away, to prisons and cemeteries, younger boys stepped up to replace them and avenge their deaths, keeping alive a rivalry whose origins many of them did not know. Now Hakeem’s younger brother Poppa, once a star quarterback and team captain on Mo Better, was said to be among the crew’s leaders. Coach Chris didn’t believe this was true. “Just rumors,” he said. But he also knew that, for an adolescent boy, the neighborhood was a tinderbox of social pressures, street politics, and the directionless anger that blooms from the daily struggle of poverty. These were the same factors battering boys in working-class black neighborhoods all over America. In most ways, Brownsville had more in common with blocks in south Chicago, north St. Louis, west Baltimore, and east Oakland than it did with the increasingly gentrified stretches of north and central Brooklyn, much less any place in Manhattan. While crime rates dropped across America—most dramatically in New York City—in the 1990s and 2000s, violence became increasingly concentrated in these neighborhoods. Dreams of upward mobility still felt remote. Coach Chris had lost scores of boys to the streets over the program’s 18 years. Esau had played with some of them.

  Hearing Esau’s orders, the boys left the field and headed home. Gio went south, down Livonia Avenue, to his building on Kings Highway five minutes away. Oomz went north, up Strauss Street, where his grandmother’s house was a block down. He lived on the same block as Poppa, whom he’d known for as long as he could remember. Poppa’s final year on Mo Better, when he was 15, was Oomz’s first year, when he was 7, in the Mitey Mite age group, which was headed by Coach Vick Davis, the most respected and feared coach in the program. When Oomz was 8, he and Hart led the Mitey Mites to a North Jersey Pop Warner League championship. “We was some pretty bad dudes,” said Hart. By now, they were veterans of the program, the two best players on the Junior Pee Wee team. At practice, they stood out from the boys whose muscles had yet to memorize the technical movements of football. Oomz and Hart had mastered the sport’s dance—hips twisting, backs flat, balls of their feet chopping the ground. Just as their bodies had internalized the sport’s mechanics, their minds were synchronized to the seasonal routines that had structured their lives for years. For Oomz and Hart, the summer was about to reach its crescendo—that narrow stretch of time every year between the first day in football pads and the first day of school, when the hours feel shorter and reality sets in.

  THE DOOR TO the building was open when Gio arrived. The lock had been broken for at least as long as he’d lived there, in the massive brick structure locals called the Castle because it looked like one from the outside. The lobby was long and wide, and during the day it was filled with little kids playing, sometimes bouncing a red rubber kickball across the linoleum. Paper plates, empty cans, and broken glass littered the elevator floor. The building’s hallways were loud, echoing pattering footsteps, distant shouting, and thudding music. Gio liked many things about New York City, but one thing he hadn’t gotten used to was the constant noise. Cars blasting heavy bass waited at stoplights. Sirens
whined. Gio entered his front door, shuffled down the long hallway of the railroad-style apartment, and collapsed onto his bed. The subway rumbled by on the elevated tracks a few dozen yards from his window, a long, low thunder that shook the bare walls of his room all day and all night. Some nights, too, he heard gunshots.

  Still, he felt like he was adjusting well to the new environment. He hung around the park on most days and began recognizing familiar faces from the neighborhood. When the helmets and shoulder pads came on in late August, he quickly got comfortable with the equipment. At first, the gear had felt heavy and suffocating. The helmet blocked peripheral vision. The shoulder pads limited arm mobility. The tight pants lined with protective cushions slowed his strides. But by the end of his first week of practice in pads, Gio’s movements had become smooth and casual, as if the armor were nothing more than a hoodie and basketball shorts. What had initially felt oppressive now felt freeing. Stripped of fear and physical inhibitions, Gio ran full speed into the game’s maelstrom of collisions. Football, it turned out, came easily to him. It was the rest of his American life he had to worry about.

  2

  LOOKING FOR THESE BETTER DAYS

  August 2013

  THE DUST CLOUDS FORMED AFTER THE HITTING BEGAN. Several collisions in, the dust hung like a fog over Betsy Head Park. There was not much grass on the field, and so the dust rose from the ground. It drifted toward the housing projects to the east and the elevated subway tracks hanging over the park’s southern edge. The August evening was warm and humid and the dust stuck to everybody. It stuck to the legs and feet of the mothers sitting along the green benches near the park’s entrance. It stuck to the necks and foreheads of the fathers leaning against the waist-high fence to watch the hitting. It stained the yellow bills of the ball caps worn by the coaches spread across the field. It covered the purple mesh jerseys of the boys, who stood in two lines, facing each other, forming a stage for the tackling drill.

  Crack!

  Ooohhhh!

  Oomz had just run through another defender. Oomz had gripped the football in his right arm, faked to the right, then cut to the left in a burst and knocked the boy trying to tackle him on his back for the second straight time. The boy turned onto his stomach and slowly pushed himself up.

  “Come on! I want you nasty!” said Coach Chris. “This is Brownsville! This is not Flatbush! Or Sheepshead Bay! This is Brownsville! Get aggressive! Who gon’ be nasty?”

  At first, no boy stepped forward. Oomz’s teammates knew he wouldn’t ease up. It wasn’t that Oomz was fighting to earn more playing time. He had been a star running back and team captain since his first season at Mo Better. And it wasn’t that he was showing off. Oomz wasn’t interested in attention. He didn’t count how many touchdowns he scored and he didn’t pout when his coach asked him to block for another ballcarrier. It wasn’t even that Oomz took football so seriously. He usually took his time to get to practice and often arrived late, and once at practice he rarely gave full effort on footwork drills and wind sprints. Simply, Oomz wouldn’t ease up because he loved to hit. He felt a thrill in the seconds before contact and a deep satisfaction in the seconds after it. It felt natural.

  “Come on, who gon’ be nasty?”

  Another 10-year-old hopped out of the line and onto the stage.

  “There we go! Let’s see what you got!”

  Oomz jogged to the opposite end, 10 yards from the boy. He stood casually, his head tilted to the side, the football at his waist, a look of indifference on his face, and he watched the boy. The boy bent his knees and leaned forward. Dug his cleats into the rock-hard, weedy, dusty field. Checked the straps on his purple and yellow helmet.

  “Set!” shouted a couch.

  The boy was a bit smaller than Oomz, and Oomz decided he would not make a cut but run straight at the boy. He took pride in his strength. He was not particularly big, but he was built sturdy, with compact legs and a solid chest. Oomz watched the boy bite down on his mouthpiece, and he believed the boy was scared. He also believed fear didn’t belong on a football field.

  “Go!”

  The boy shuffled forward, reading Oomz’s movement, toes chopping the ground. Oomz ran forward, two slow steps then a burst. The boy cocked his arms back and lunged toward Oomz’s waist. Oomz crouched at the moment of impact and the boys’ helmets went thwack!

  More ooohs from the teammates and fathers.

  The boy fell backward, onto his butt, but grabbed two handfuls of Oomz’s jersey on the way down. Oomz trudged on for three strides then fell forward, stretching his arms over the imaginary goal line.

  “Wooo!” howled one of the coaches.

  “He run just like his daddy!” shouted another.

  Oomz loved hearing that, and he heard it all the time. His father had played at Mo Better in the ’90s. His father was the original “Oomz,” but some now called him “Big Oomz.” He was one of the fastest kids to ever come through the program, and one of the roughest too. He would run over three defenders and break away for an 80-yard touchdown, then jog to the sidelines struggling to breathe. In his effort to suck in air, he would wheeze: ooooommz oomz… ooooommzz… oomz…, which is how he got his nickname. A parent would rush over with his inhaler. He’d take two big puffs then run back onto the field for defense and deliver the biggest hit of the game. Longtime coaches around the regional youth football league still talked about the block Big Oomz laid on some poor 12-year-old during a teammate’s interception return. Most of them couldn’t tell you who the opponent was or exactly what year it happened, but they could tell you that the hit knocked the buckles off the kid’s helmet and left him writhing on the ground. The teammate went 104 yards for a touchdown, but all anyone could talk about was the block. Most vicious block in league history, everyone who saw it agreed.

  Those were the days when Mo Better was dominant. The pride of Brownsville. The younger Oomz had heard the stories. All five age groups, from 5 years old to 15, made the playoffs every year, and a few made it to Florida for the Pop Warner Super Bowl. Youth football coaches across the mid-Atlantic respected, feared, and admired this hard-nosed powerhouse from the zip code with the highest concentration of housing projects in America and the highest murder rate in New York City. Mo Better’s coaches recruited players almost exclusively from the projects in Brownsville and neighboring East New York back then. Those teams were strong, disciplined, and played with an edge. They simply overpowered opponents.

  The Mo Better teams were not as good these days. They still won more than they lost, and some years one age group might showcase the talent common in years past. But the program was smaller. Oomz’s father had played football with many of his friends from around the neighborhood. Few of Oomz’s friends played, though. With all the new concerns about concussions and brain injuries, their parents wouldn’t let them. Once, more than 100 kids came out to play; less than half that number signed up for the 2013 season. Now Mo Better fielded only three age groups: 7-to-9-year-old Mitey Mites, 8-to-11-year-old Junior Pee Wees, and 10-to-13-year-old Junior Midgets.

  Oomz’s Junior Pee Wee team reminded some coaches of the ’90s-era squads. This was an athletic and physical team. Many of its players had been together for three years now, and they’d rarely lost a game. Oomz believed he could restore the glory of his father’s days. He wanted to live up to his name and build on it. He wanted to reach the dream his father had failed to reach. “I came to this team to represent my father,” he said. “Ever since he was little he played, but he didn’t get to finish playing football because he got caught up in something, and he didn’t want me to do what he did.” Big Oomz had been a hustler. He caught his first drug conviction when Oomz was a baby, and he spent nearly a decade in prison. He served his time, but then was arrested again shortly after his release. He was in jail now, on Rikers Island awaiting trial, and Oomz feared his father would be locked up for many more years. Oomz wanted nothing more than for his dad to see him play and hear the coaches shout, “He r
un just like his daddy!” He was angry that his dad was in jail, and he ran like his daddy because he was angry like him. His favorite part of football, he said, was “the impact of pads on somebody else.”

  His face was solemn even as his teammates slapped him on the shoulder pads and his coaches patted him on the helmet.

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!”

  “There you go, baby!”

  “That’s a Mo Better football player right there!”

  THE HITTING AND the dust and the rush of early season excitement sent a shiver of nostalgia through the coaches. But Mo Better had, over the past year or so, stepped into a new and worrisome era. These days, Coach Chris wasn’t sure how many more seasons his program could survive. He’d begun to see teams around the region fold. It was a national trend: Pop Warner, the largest youth football league in the country, lost around 10 percent of its players from 2010 to 2012, the first stretch of decline in the organization’s 84-year history. While Mo Better’s turnout was solid in 2012, Chris was troubled that the gradual decline in participation had accelerated in 2013. He kept his concerns to himself—the last thing Mo Better needed was an exodus of players to programs that seemed more stable. But also, he didn’t have to say anything. The struggle was obvious to every coach and parent, and nowhere was it clearer than on Gio’s Junior Midget team.

  Before the season had even started, the number of 12- and 13-year-old boys showing up to practice had dwindled to 14. To meet the Pop Warner requirement of 16 players, Chris had to bump up two 11-year-olds from the Junior Pee Wee group. One of them, Isaiah, had never played tackle football before. So much lighter was Isaiah than the other Junior Midgets on the field that Chris hesitated to give him the ball despite his speed. Instead, he turned to a strategy of brutal simplicity: the team’s biggest runners would plow forward behind Gio’s bulldozing blocks. Usually, Mo Better’s oldest team was its best, a machine crafted to precision over years of work, the group Coach Chris devoted the most attention to while leaving his assistants to manage the younger divisions—Coach Vick called the shots for the Mitey Mites, Coach Esau the Junior Pee Wees. But this year’s Junior Midgets were an inexperienced bunch. The cohort had shrunk over the years. Unlike the Junior Pee Wees, the Junior Midgets had few boys—three, to be exact—who had joined the program as Mitey Mites. It wasn’t just that the other boys had to catch up on developing their skills. The main value of those Mitey Mite years was tutelage under the jurisdiction of Coach Vick Davis.