Muck City (36 page)

The following afternoon, Coach Z appeared on the Glades Central practice field. He told Hester and others he’d come to look at Jaime, Likely, and Davonte. But everyone knew he was in Belle Glade to talk with KB, to try to salvage whatever allegiance he thought he’d gained. Standing on the sidelines with Coach JD, he could not conceal his frustration.

“The Seminoles have their tentacles all in my boy,” he said. “They’re all over him. What’s worse is that this town is crawling with them. Once they come down here, it’s gonna be a block party.”

He told JD that as he drove south, a trip he hoped wouldn’t end with him losing the best recruit of his career, the big-time player for the big-time
place, he’d phoned his wife—the woman who’d followed him from Bowling Green to Central Michigan and now to Gainesville.

“You know what she told me,” he said, the lines finally relaxing from his face. “She said, ‘Sometimes the greatest players don’t always turn out to be the greatest players.’ ”

The words provided comfort, but still, knowing that KB was questionable, Azzanni was out to get the second best, and that was Davonte. “What kind of player is he?” he asked JD, who, sensing the line of his question, laid it on thick about the receiver. Azzanni also grilled Robert Way.

“Who’s better at receiver, Davonte or Jaime?” he asked him. “Who’s the best overall athlete? Don’t sit on the fence, Robert. You can tell me.”

Before practice was over, Coach Z slipped into the darkness and drove to KB’s house. He stayed for spaghetti and appealed to Benjamin and his family. He was careful not to bash the Seminoles. Instead, he employed the strategy Meyer had taught him long before when it came to winning a recruit: Stick with the facts. And the facts spoke for themselves. Florida was in the SEC, the greatest conference in college football. And until recently, they’d beaten Florida State six years in a row. He also added that in the most recent NFL draft, seven Gators had been chosen in the first three rounds.

After three hours, Benjamin assured Coach Z he was still undecided. Getting back into his truck, Azzanni was doubtful, but not defeated.

“I felt like we’d certainly taken a step back,” he said. “But by no means did I think I’d lost him.”

T
he win over American Heritage had earned the Raiders a trip to the state semifinals game, putting them only one date away from the ever-desired rematch with Cocoa, who’d also won the previous week and were very much alive.

For the first time in two years, the Cocoa Tigers were traveling for a postseason game—this time to the state’s northern border to meet the Madison County Cowboys, the fierce defensive squad that had fallen to the Raiders in the 1998 state championship. Even the name of their stadium, Boot Hill, sounded ominous.

Although the Cowboys were undefeated and executing their signature swarm defense that had carried them to five state title games, there was a psychic understanding among the coaches and players in Belle Glade that Cocoa would prevail. It was how the ending had always been written, they felt—the two teams meeting once again on the cold and empty plain.

In fact, the entire postseason schedule had become an exact replica of last year’s run: Cardinal Gibbons, followed by American Heritage. And now, once again, the Raiders would face Robinson High School in Tampa as the last obstacle before reaching the Citrus Bowl. Hester would not even acknowledge the coincidence, never once brought it up in practice or in meetings with his coaches. On his ever-sensitive radar of superstitious activity, this was bleeding red off the scale.

Like Cocoa, the Raiders would also be traveling—this time across the state to Robinson’s home turf. In last year’s semifinals game, the Raiders had embarrassed the Fighting Knights 33–0 on Effie C. Grear Field. But Hester knew the Raiders would be facing an entirely different team this year, one bent on revenge behind the support of its own fans. The Knights were coming in with a 10–2 record and running Glade Central’s same spread offense. They’d scatter the defense with receivers Frankie Williams and Ruben Gonzalez, who’d combined for fourteen touchdowns that season, then slice the soft middle with their running back, J. J. Hubbard.

Hubbard was nimble and downright slippery. Only five foot eight, he weaved and shimmied through defenses like a small deer before streaking across the open field. He was the Class 2A leading scorer, with twenty-seven touchdowns on 1,450 yards, averaging a first down with every carry. He’d killed Tampa Jesuit the previous week with 177 yards and two TDs, not including a seventy-yard burst to the end zone that was called back on a penalty.

“When I see daylight,” he’d told a reporter, “all I think is touchdown.”

But for its part, Glades Central was coming in ranked one of the fastest defenses in the state, allowing opponents just nine points a game with five shutout victories. In their last meeting with Tampa Robinson, the Raiders had allowed the Knights only twenty-eight total yards, not only stopping Hubbard but crushing his running game for negative fifty.

Even so, you could never overestimate a scorned team who sought redemption at home. “Trust me, guys,” Hester warned his squad that week,
“these people want this badder than yall can understand. They want this. We need to make sure they don’t get it. We need to bring that grit from the Glades.”

•   •   •

GRIT WAS ABOUT
all the quarterback had left in his bag. After Mario had been knocked unconscious in the game against American Heritage, he’d faked his way into being let back in the game. Just to be safe, the team trainer had ordered Mario to the doctor to check for a concussion. Mario didn’t go, yet told everyone the doctor had cleared him to play. “What’s the point?” he said later. “All he’s gonna do is tell me something I don’t wanna hear.”

Hester remembered Mario being cleared on the sideline. Regardless, for several days, Mario practiced despite blinding headaches. The concussion was helped a bit by an early-winter storm that blotted out the sun and eased the pain. But the damp, cold weather just made his shoulder hurt worse.

On Friday, after lunch and prayers, the Raiders boarded two charter buses and hooked north around the lake, through the fields of burning cane and orange groves of LaBelle, then west toward the Gulf, where the wind whipped against the window and turned the glass crystal-cold. A winter chill was settling over the state. Hester sat in the front seat suffering through a cold, his first in a decade. His eyes were puffy. He couldn’t breathe. His whole delicate constitution was under siege.

As they drove, the coach was also handed some unfortunate news.

Earlier in the day, administrators at Cocoa High School confirmed they had just suspended Tiger running back Chevelle Buie. No reasons had been given, but rumors were quickly spreading. Whatever Buie had done, he would not be playing that night against Madison County.

Immediately the thought was,
Could Cocoa win at Boot Hill without their superstar?
Playing at home, the Cowboys were already the favorites. Even
worse, people were saying Buie could be suspended for the rest of the semester. It was Buie who’d sunk the Raiders with two touchdowns in the state finals. And now the much-anticipated rematch was suddenly thrown in jeopardy. The news cast a fog of disappointment over the team. No one wanted to win a championship with an asterisk.

The weather was freezing by the time the bus pulled into Robinson High School. While Hester watched the teams warm up before kickoff, he saw something else that sank his mood even lower, something downright insulting. The Knights were practicing with only three down linemen while stacking the secondary with linebackers and DBs to anticipate the pass. Running such a formation implied that the Raiders were only one-dimensional. Since he was already in a foul mood, seeing that sent Hester over the edge.

“Typically, you know what I like to come out and do,” he told his team as they gathered before the whistle. “Nine-eighty-fuckin-nine. But I aint doin that tonight. I looked out there and saw these cats runnin a three-man front. That irks the heck out of me. Think about that shit.
A three-man front
. Three guys on five? I mean, I took that personally. They tryin to tell me my dawgs aint got that kind of fight in ’em. Yall about to send the message to whoever we play next week that three men aint gonna work. We gonna hit these boys in they goddamn mouths tonight.”

“All night!”
Mario shouted.

“They think we comin out there to pass. Our intent aint by air, aint by sea, it’s by any means necessary to hurt them.”

“Come on, baby,”
the quarterback cried.
“I’m goin to O-Town.”

“We gone too far for this story to end,” the coach said, now scanning the eyes. “We all know it’s gonna get written either way. So how’s the story gonna be told? Who gonna be the hero this week? Which guy will it be?”

The team grouped in pairs, slid their helmets on, then sprinted down the long sidewalk. They burst through the concession scrum, parting a sea of parents and teenagers with painted faces and balloons, singing a military cadence with Boobie’s warbled voice leading the charge:

Mama, mama can’t you see

Mama, mama can’t you see

What Glades Central doin to me

What Glades Central doin to me

I used to drive a Cad-il-lac

I used to drive a Cad-il-lac

Now I’m beggin for a snack

Now I’m beggin for a snack

During the last stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the capacity crowd began to hiss when the squad ceremoniously held their helmets high and shouted
RAIDERS
!, all but drowning out the singer.

The Knights, wearing all-black uniforms, set the tone immediately by executing a perfect onside kick and recovering the ball on the Raider forty-seven. Two seamless plays later, Frankie Williams took a handoff from quarterback Blake Rice and zipped thirty-eight yards into the end zone, beating Robert Way and the entire Glades Central secondary.

When the Robinson defense trotted onto the field, they were so tall Mario had trouble seeing the field over their heads. But it hardly mattered tonight. As the Knights lined up in their three-man front, the coach had just the answer.

Robinson, meet Aaron Baker.

Before Hester had released the Raiders onto the field, he’d laid out his strategy for the three-man front. “We goin 23 Load,” he said, “and we gonna load it till they can’t carry it no more. So yall better bag your teeth, squeeze your nuts. Do whatever you gotta do, goddamnit, ’cause these people gettin up out of this three-man front.”

It was a staple rushing play where the guards pulled left or right and the back shot the opposite gap. And Aaron Baker, at five foot eleven and two hundred pounds, was the load the Knights never saw coming.

All season long, the sophomore halfback had been the great
if only
. Both his parents were dead, leaving him to stay with relatives in the gang-addled trailer park near the school. He floated with thugs and brimmed
with ready violence. The previous season he’d been in constant trouble with teachers and his grades were horrible. Coaches had all privately braced themselves for the phone call saying he was either dead or in jail. As much as he hated doing so, Hester had been forced to kick him off the team, hoping to send a message. Baker was a classic case, a jitterbug time bomb headed for zero.

But with a mature, strapping physique and legs like timbers, he also had the potential to be a special athlete who succeeded beyond the Glades. After the game in Dallas, when Coach Randy had made both Baker and Page a season-long project, getting them out of Belle Glade and just being a friend, Baker began to thrive. So much that he even made the honor roll. In practice, he began to listen and learn: “Don’t stop pumping your feet, Aaron,” they told him. “Don’t run with your eyes closed, Aaron!”

Most of the season, Randy had rotated Baker with Likely, Page, and Neville Brown, leaving in whoever got hot. But the past few games, the coaches had started building their postseason rushing attack specifically around Baker and Likely. Likely, who played both directions, had been the ace in the blowout against Suncoast, running over a hundred yards for two touchdowns. But tonight, one victory from O-Town, Baker was stepping into the light.

The vertical runner went headlong into the Robinson defense with a confidence and power never before seen. In three plays he drove the team to midfield to set up a pair of quick strikes to Jaime and Oliver for the touchdown.

Running off the field, Baker appeared as surprised as anyone.
“It’s working, it’s working,”
he shouted to Hester and Randy.
“The pumping of my feet!”

Baker’s coming-out performance proved the perfect opening for a flashy scatback such as Hubbard. Two plays into Robinson’s drive, the Knights were poised on the Raider twenty-three. Rice flipped Hubbard a shovel pass and the disappearing act began. As he crossed the line of scrimmage, he came face-to-face with Robert Way, faked to his right, and blew past, flying down the sideline headed for the end zone. As Hubbard crossed the
five-yard line, three steps from glory, Way—having sprinted nearly twenty yards in pursuit—suddenly pounced on him from behind and smashed the ball from his hands. It took a bounce before Way could throw his body atop it and secure the fumble.