Never Ran, Never Will Page 3

  Every boy who passed through the Mitey Mites had stories he liked to tell about Coach Vick. Gio had heard some of the stories but hadn’t spoken to the coach until a few days before the season’s first game. He was slightly intimidated when Vick approached him before practice. At 43, Vick looked 10 years younger, and his pointy beard and raspy delivery gave off a vaguely menacing air that suited his reputation.

  “I seen you around the park and on that playground a lot,” Vick said once the official introductions were complete.

  “Uh huh,” Gio replied.

  “Everything OK? Any problems you dealing with?”

  “Nah, everything’s cool,” Gio said, his voice low.

  “OK. OK. Just checking,” Vick said, nodding slowly, a hint of skepticism in his eyes. “You ever need to talk to somebody, you got Coach Vick here for you. Remember that.”

  That Sunday, Gio’s mother drove him to Fort Hamilton High School, the location of the game. It was 40 minutes away, in southwest Brooklyn, further than his mother expected, a frustrating surprise for the morning of her day off from her job as a receptionist. When they arrived, the Mitey Mite game had just finished and the Junior Pee Wees were taking the field. Gio’s Junior Midgets would play last. His heart raced. Veteran players had told him that the hits came faster and harder in games than they did at practice.

  He joined his teammates, who were watching the games from under the shade of an oak tree behind one of the end zones. He took a seat on the grass as the Mitey Mites made their way toward their parents in the bleachers. A few of the small boys were crying. At the edge of the field, Coach Vick crouched down beside one of those boys and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “We gotta take our losses like men,” he said, his voice calm but firm. “You gotta toughen up.”

  The boy nodded, his fingers wiping the tears from his cheek.

  “Losing’s part of life. Don’t like how it feels, you gotta do something about it. You gon’ do something about it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the boy, no longer crying.

  VICK DIDN’T SMOKE cigarettes in front of the kids. So, with the Mitey Mite game finished, a tough loss, and the postgame speech done, he walked to the track around the field and pulled out his pack of Newports. He had coached at Mo Better for 17 years, and for 17 years he coached the Mitey Mites. Much of the credit for Mo Better’s reputation for discipline fell on Vick. “Military man,” one parent called him. Vick ran hard practices and spoke to his 7-, 8-, and 9-year-olds like they were grown men. He ordered push-ups if a boy left his helmet on the ground. Push-ups for a bad report card. Push-ups for talking back and sucking teeth. Push-ups for looking away when he was speaking to the team. Push-ups if a boy stepped out of the single-file line they had to keep as they walked off the field after practice. His boys spoke his name with reverence. “They don’t respond to nobody else like they respond to Vick,” Coach Esau said. Vick was known to show up to a kid’s school without him knowing and sit in the back of the class. “Their eyes get big as fifty-cent pieces when they see him,” said Miss Elsie, Vick’s assistant coach and mother. And if the kid misbehaved, he’d order him to do 10 or 25 push-ups right there beside his desk. The way Vick saw his role, he was the first father figure in many kids’ lives and one of the last guiding voices they heard before adolescence.

  He didn’t have any interest in coaching older boys. His tactics, he found, wouldn’t be as effective. When he screamed at his Mitey Mites, they looked up at him wide-eyed, terrified, eager to please. Older boys shot back a cold, indifferent stare, fully aware that all he could do to them was yell. He couldn’t hit them or ground them or take away their PlayStations. As he circled the track at Fort Hamilton, he saw those changes all around. The three age groups played on the same day on the same field in successive games, the youngest first and the oldest last, and to Vick’s eyes the effect was like watching a time-lapse of every boy who’d ever passed through the program. There, in front of the bleachers, were his Mitey Mites giggling, sipping on juice boxes, playing tag. There, on the field, were the Junior Pee Wees, scowling at the ref after a bad call, wearing colorful armbands and flashy cleats. There, strapping on their pads under a tree, were the Junior Midgets, with hard faces and a certain kind of walk. “That bop in their step,” said Vick. “Swagger. They’re more conscious of their hair, sneakers, their appearance. Their attitude changes. You can’t reach ’em the same way.”

  And it was at that age that he and the other coaches risked losing them. He’d seen it many times. He’d seen it in his own adolescence as the kids he grew up with in Brownsville got sucked up into the street life. He’d seen it with his former players, seen them on the corners after dark or in a mug shot on the local news. He remembered one night some years back when he walked through the Seth Low housing projects on the way home and five young men tried to rob him.

  “Don’t move,” one said. Two nine-millimeter handguns were trained at his head.

  A few seconds of silence.

  “Awww,” one of the young men suddenly whined. “Come on, Coach Vick, whatchu doin’, man?”

  Then Vick recognized three of the faces. They’d played for Mo Better. The young man leading the group, nicknamed Pup, had been one of the program’s best players in his day.

  “Come on, man, get outta here, Coach!” Pup said. “We was ’bout to get you.”

  Vick had been relieved at first. He would get home safe. Then he was saddened at the thought that his boys had fallen through the cracks. Whenever he saw his former players on the streets, he treated them with a chilly respect. He didn’t lecture them. He slapped hands with them, told them it was good to see them, and went on his way. They were out of his control now. There was nothing more he could do but hope. He never gave up hope.

  Before that time came, before a boy was beyond his command, there was urgency. He’d seen signs for concern in Gio. Although he had not coached the boy, he had observed him from afar, intrigued by his talent. He noticed that Gio was funny and confident around other boys—the type of kid who’d have no trouble making new friends. Yet his mature disposition veiled an underlying innocence, an inquisitive interest in the world without a deep understanding of how to navigate it. Maybe naïve was the right word. Maybe “being a kid” was a more accurate description. But naïveté was a trait many kids in Brownsville had shed early on. Vick considered the case of one his current players, a smiley eight-year-old he had nicknamed Puerto Rico.

  One day when Puerto Rico was five, sitting in the back seat of the car as his mother was pulling into a parking spot, he saw a man shoot another man in the head in front of a barbershop. By the time he was seven, he knew that lampposts covered with flowers, teddy bears, ribbons, and hand-written notes were memorials for people who’d been killed. By the age of eight, he’d memorized the routine for what to do when he heard gunshots outside his second-floor window: crouch down, hustle to the windowless living room, shut the bedroom door. Sometimes, his cousins from out of town would be over at his house and they would think people were lighting fireworks outside. Puerto Rico would calmly correct them.

  Vick feared what this exposure to violence did to a kid—how it stunted childhood, eroded innocence, burrowed deep, and shaped whatever worldview was blooming inside a young mind. And yet, perversely, there was a way in which this hardened mind-set helped protect youngsters from the environment they would face in adolescence, instilling an early onset world-weariness that kept them attuned to the neighborhood’s minefields. Vick sensed it in local boys like Oomz and Isaiah. Not Gio, though—which is why he felt uneasy seeing Gio out at the park so often.

  Vick stubbed out his cigarette and walked to the concession stand beside the bleachers. Under the tent, a 20-something man, wrist-deep in batter, was frying catfish, shrimp, and chicken. The batches made a loud sizzle.

  “Smells good,” Vick said.

  The man under the tent looked up, grinned, and wiped his hands off on his apron.

  “Wassup, Coac
h Vick!”

  “Sup, Pup!”

  The men hugged. Pup was careful not to get grease on his former coach.

  THE JUNIOR MIDGETS lost badly. Gio maintained proper decorum, his face somber as he left the field, but he had reason to feel good. His first official football game had bolstered his love for the sport. There’s a certain thrill when the clock is on and the coaches are on the sidelines. The pre-snap chess match in the long seconds between plays—anticipating what will come and how to proceed—gets the mind running, coils the muscles, sharpens the senses before the built-up energy springs forward in the short seconds of hand-to-hand combat, a personal mission within the chaos of 22 bodies chasing and crashing.

  Gio hoped to play running back one day, but because he was the biggest kid on the team—and because the team had few sizeable players to begin with—Chris saw no choice but to put him on the offensive line. He embraced the role, which further heightened his standing in Chris’s mind, and whatever yardage the offense managed to get was thanks to his bullying blocking. He moved opponents as if they weren’t resisting, driving defenders straight back, opening space for his runners to follow. On defense, he threw blockers off of him and engulfed the ballcarrier anytime he was in reach. He was tall and muscular and moved so gracefully that it was easy to miss how unrefined his fundamentals were. His footwork was sloppy, he stood too high on blocks, he grabbed at the ballcarrier’s shoulder pads and whipped him down instead of squaring up and wrapping his arms around him. But even with those rookie blemishes, it was clear he was the best player on the field.

  Gio’s performance gave Chris something positive to think about, but his mood was down. While he had accepted that the Junior Midgets weren’t going to be great this year, he didn’t expect lopsided games. Chris gathered the boys, who each took a knee and stared at the ground. Parents stood in a row behind them.

  “There’s a thing in this life called being resilient,” Chris said, his tone measured. “Being resilient is a father losing his job and worrying about how he gon’ feed his family. He gotta do something. Can he stay home and cry about what happened?”

  “No, sir,” a handful of boys answered.

  “He gotta get off his rear end and find a what? A job. Resilient people are people who don’t quit, right? And they keep coming back. They keep coming back. Some of your ancestors was slaves. Whatever hardships they had, you think they said, ‘Well I ain’t gon’ pick no cotton today?’”

  “Tell ’em, coach!” shouted a parent.

  “They ain’t have a choice,” Chris said. “What hardships we got? Losing a game?”

  “There you go!” shouted the parent.

  “Come on, man,” Chris said to the boys. “We all right.”

  “Tell ’em, coach! Tell ’em!”

  When the gathering broke, Gio stood up and saw a tall white guy walking toward him.

  “Hey Gio, it’s great to meet you,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” The man wore a cap bearing Fort Hamilton’s logo. He introduced himself as the school’s head football coach. “Have you thought at all about what high school you want to go to?”

  Eavesdropping behind Gio, Chris beamed. He took great pride in his role as a conduit between promising players and high school football programs. Just as he boasted of his players to high school coaches, he gushed to parents about the top-notch schools he could help get their sons into. While he liked to send his most ambitious players, with the best grades and work ethic, to Poly Prep Country Day School, he recommended many of his talented prospects to Fort Hamilton, where his Mo Better pipeline had helped build a city powerhouse. The way Chris saw it, the pipeline kept going past high school, through college, and into professional life. It was a pipeline out of the neighborhood he loved, sending his boys away from the pain that filled Brownsville’s air more often than he wanted to remember.

  That night, after Gio and Oomz and Isaiah returned home, the familiar echo of gunshots carried across the neighborhood. Three blocks from Betsy Head Park, a one-year-old boy named Antiq Hennis was shot to death.

  3

  DIRECTED TOWARD DECAY

  September 2013

  “SAD WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT LITTLE BOY,” COACH Chris said to Coach Gary Gravenhise two days later. They stood by the Betsy Head field on the red rubber track, which was ragged with divots and cracks.

  Gary, who had a shaved head and the body of an offensive lineman, nodded solemnly. The men had grown up together in Brownsville. The Sunday night shooting had been a big story for the local papers and TV news. The boy’s father had been pushing him in a stroller through the Marcus Garvey housing projects when a gang rival opened fire. The shooter was going after the father but missed and hit the boy. Police sources quoted in newspapers said that the father refused to identify the shooter. Reporters went to the father’s house, but he declined to speak more than a few words. “I’ve got to keep my family safe,” he told the New York Daily News. “I got to get them out of this neighborhood.” He asked the reporters to leave, unless they were willing to pay him for an interview. Two photographers snapped photos of the father, and the next morning the Daily News and New York Post each featured a large picture of the scowling man. The caption beneath the Daily News image read: “Anthony Hennis—father of murdered baby Antiq—is angry with the media and begins attacking camera crews.” The Post’s story began: “He won’t lift a finger to help cops nail the low-life who gunned down his baby boy, but the father who was the likely target of the shooting doesn’t mind profiting from his son’s murder.”

  Gary and Chris knew the boy. The mother was Chris’s wife’s cousin and Gary’s niece. Gary told Chris that his niece’s family blamed the boy’s father for the tragedy and demanded that he cooperate with the police. But Gary, as always, was working to calm everybody down.

  “There’s a lot of tension amongst the families,” he said. “Our side is feeling that their side is at fault, you know what I’m saying? And I’m trying to tell ’em, why that man can’t feel like he feel? Why he can’t be in silence? Why he can’t grieve? Why he can’t feel whatever it is that he feels?”

  “People grieve in different ways,” said Chris.

  “Exactly.”

  Chris left the park and headed up Saratoga Avenue. He liked to maintain a regular presence around the neighborhood. He checked in with the locals who kept eyes out for him. Subway workers informed him when one of his players ducked under a turnstile. Shop owners told him when one of his kids got jumped, or when one of them did the jumping. Neighborhood OGs told him who’d been staying out late at night.

  On Saratoga, he passed the brick row houses, with driveways and iron fences, that had gone up within the last 20 years, replacing the empty lots that once surrounded the park. Now the lots, weedy and littered with trash, were only to the south of the park. On Strauss Street, he passed neat two-story houses with shingled roofs and barred windows and rocking chairs and potted plants on porches. He passed abandoned houses with overgrown front yards and caved-in doors and crumbling stoops and gutters that sagged like loose teeth.

  He passed a church every few blocks, storefront churches: Seventh-day Adventist and AME Zion and Baptist and First Baptist and Missionary Baptist. In front of a liquor store, several men sat on folding chairs drinking bottles from brown paper bags, bobbing their heads to the ’80s hip-hop crackling through an old boom box, slapping domino tiles on a plastic table at the edge of the sidewalk. Chris stepped around them. “What kinda example that set?” he said, still in their earshot.

  He saw similar scenes across the neighborhood, if not in front of liquor stores, then on picnic benches in parks or in housing project courtyards. He passed through many housing projects on his walks through the neighborhood. There were 18 of them packed into Brownsville’s 1.16 square miles, and they came in every form. Marcus Garvey Village: an open expanse of squat cement buildings, with wide pathways in between, the “suburb of the projects,” as one local described it. Seth Low and Tilden:
brick high-rises that towered over the neighborhood’s low skyline. Van Dyke: a sprawling 22-acres of fat brick towers. Brownsville Houses: a dense cluster of more than two dozen six- and seven-story buildings.

  Chris recognized a boy walking out of one of those buildings. He wore a gray polo shirt and he jogged over when Chris called out to him.

  “How you doin’?” said Chris.

  “Good,” said the boy, who was 13.

  “Whatchu doin’, you playin’ this year?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “You wanted to,” Chris repeated. “Why you didn’t come back?”

  The boy looked down nervously, shifted his feet. He didn’t have an answer.

  “Why don’t you come by tomorrow night if you still wanna play? All right. OK?”

  “All right.”

  “Good seeing you.”

  The boy then went and joined two other boys who were swinging on a milk crate hanging from a rope between two trees in the courtyard. He would not come by tomorrow night.