Muck City (37 page)

It would be Hubbard’s longest run of the game. After that, the show belonged to Baker. The running attack provided a much-needed respite for the battered Mario, who’d been in no shape for forty-eight minutes of run-and-gun football. The inclement weather had grounded the flyboys, anyway. The wind coming off the bay was bitter and turned the football as hard as ice. The leather had no give, and Mario’s hands were suddenly too small to get a grip.

Denied by air, the Raiders went by train, and Baker’s engines were steaming hot. He lowered his shoulder carry after carry, and moved the Raiders across the plain. Halfway through the second quarter, he broke two tackles and hit the open field for forty yards, dragging two black jerseys across the goal line. That made the score 21–7, and the Knights could never rally.

Just like the previous meeting, the Raider defense stifled Robinson’s fight for life. They walled off the Knights’ receivers and intercepted them twice. Play after play, they stormed the offensive line, and sandbagged the quarterback five times. Two of those sacks came courtesy of Way, who flattened Rice so hard before the second half that Way’s own face mask was crushed like a beer can. One of the coaches later had to use a hammer and a pair of pliers to straighten it back.

Hubbard would finish the game with only four carries over four yards. Meanwhile, Baker had the game of his life, finishing with 142 yards, two touchdowns, and the undying knowledge that he’d given his team a second chance against Cocoa. Before the whistle ended the game, giving the Raiders the 35–10 win, word spread that the Tigers had scraped out a narrow victory at Boot Hill, defeating Madison County by the score of 17–15. Even without Buie, Cocoa had prevailed.

The rematch was on.

“Straight gutsy effort,” Hester told his squad as they gathered in the end zone. “We got that ticket to the dance. That girl said yes. And when we get her to the dance …” He left the sentence open for the boys to bark and howl.

Just then, Ruben Gonzalez, the Knights receiver, crashed through the huddle and stood huffing in the middle. A wide stream of blood dripped from his bottom lip and painted his teeth and chin. He looked insane. He’d been crying.

“Yall take that shit, dawg, yall
take that shit
.”

He was all messy adrenaline, but the boys in the huddle were rapt. He was talking about Cocoa.

“Last year yall lost. For real, take that shit. Yall beat me and I wanted that shit bad. For real.
Go get that shit, dawg
.”

“We got ya, bro,” the boys said, then applauded their fallen opponent.

Hester squeezed the receiver’s shoulder as he left. “We appreciate that,” he told him. “What that cat’s tryin to say is that if they lose, they wanna lose to the champions. What we got ahead of us is Cocoa, baby. This is what we wanted. This is what they wanted. They got us. Those kids are the champions and that means we have to dethrone them. We have to go to Orlando and take it. Monday, we go back to work.”

T
he Raiders’ return to the state championship sent a jolt of excitement through the school campus that week, helped in part by some other encouraging news. The state had just released the new school grades, and Glades Central, for the first time since opening its doors, had scored a C.

For most schools, such a grade would not be cause for celebration, but in Belle Glade it was monumental. A passing school grade sent a ripple of optimism throughout the embattled community: property values could rise as a result, businesses could be lured, residents might think twice before packing up and moving to the coast.

The minute the news was conveyed, a collective hallelujah erupted through the halls of the administrative building. Vice-Principal Angela Moore, who’d driven that school bus through the migrant quarter picking up kids on test days and ironing their clothes, raced to the school’s
PA system and made the grand announcement, at one point becoming so emotional she broke into song.

“It
IS
a good morning, in fact,” said Ms. Rudean Butts as she answered the school switchboard. “Glades Central is now a C school.” The news was not lost on anyone who called.

“We knew it could be done,” said Anderson, emerging from his office looking like a man who’d just enjoyed the best sleep of his life. “This truly demonstrates the progress students can make once they get to Glades Central. The monkey is finally climbing off our backs.”

There was a small caveat, the principal said. For the first time, the state had determined the schools’ grades by considering more than just FCAT scores. The school’s graduation rate, students’ overall success in AP classes, and their scores on SAT and ACT exams now factored into the grading process. But when it came to the FCAT, Anderson’s students still struggled, especially with reading scores. They also needed to find a better way to advance the group of kids most at risk. In fact, the sluggish rate of improvement in the school’s bottom 25 percent had narrowly kept Glades Central from earning a B grade.

“There’s still more to do,” he said. “But this sends the message to our teachers and students that their sacrifice and effort have not been in vain.”

•   •   •

THE RAIDERS WOULD
not be the only team from Belle Glade traveling to Orlando. Glades Day had beaten Victory Christian Academy 45–27 in the Class 1B semifinals for a championship game in the Citrus Bowl to be played on Friday. Mucksteppers from across the Glades would soon be on the move.

The cold snap that had blown in the previous week now dropped temperatures into the low thirties. The wind off Lake Okeechobee was damp and settled in the bones. As the Raiders prepared for the biggest test of
their young careers, many practiced while numb in their fingers and toes. Most spent the majority of the time with their hands tucked down their crotches to keep warm. Mario clenched his teeth and said nothing.

The freezing temperatures were also ravaging crops throughout the Glades. The big farms from Moore Haven down to Belle Glade began sending fleets of helicopters zipping low across their fields of beans and corn to keep the frost from settling. It was a decades-old practice. The blades pushed down warmer air that hovered some forty feet off the ground, where the difference in temperature could be as much as ten degrees. But there were risks in flying low and often before the sun. On December 8, three choppers went down in the freezing fields near Pahokee, all in the same morning.

Along with the cold, the month of December ushered in college recruiters by the dozen. Now permitted to visit schools, they arrived from programs far and wide: Buffalo, Kansas, Iowa State, Syracuse, and Toledo, just to name a few. But the big news that second week was that Urban Meyer was stepping down as the University of Florida’s head coach, throwing into question the future of every kid from Jacksonville down to Naples who’d already given the Gators his commitment. Weeks earlier, the Miami Hurricanes had fired coach Randy Shannon with the same results. After Davonte got hot in November, Miami—his dream school—made an informal offer. But in the days after Shannon’s exit, the calls stopped coming. The recruiting coaches, too, had been sacked, their words of honor meaningless once the swinging doors hit them on the way out.

Benjamin knew that Meyer’s imminent departure would certainly throw Coach Z’s future into question. His decision seemed easier now. In the days afterward, a Seminoles cap remained perched upon his head, yet he gave nothing away.

The nation’s eighth-ranked receiver still told reporters he was undecided. I’d like to see who’s replacing Meyer, he mused. Perhaps I’ll give LSU a second look, he told the
Post
. He even scheduled an official visit to West Virginia, stirring up the pot even more, then failed to board the plane, saying he was sick.

“I’ll probably hold a press conference,” he finally said one afternoon.

After months of waiting and anticipation, Mario secured a college trip. Coach Field, the recruiting coordinator at Hampton University, had been watching from the stands the previous week against American Heritage. He’d seen Mario rise from the dead like Lazarus and pound his way downfield to set up the field goal that secured the victory. Afterward, he’d arranged to fly the quarterback to tour their campus and athletic facilities once the season was over. Now among the Chosen Ones, Mario could be heard at practice saying, “I can’t
wait
to take that visit,
bwah
.”

Davonte and Robert Way had recently returned from their official visit to Marshall, transfixed. In November 1970, the Thundering Herd lost thirty-seven members of its varsity team and eight coaches in a tragic plane crash, an event that still rallied the town of Huntington. It was even the subject of a Hollywood film,
We Are Marshall
, which Way had watched twice on YouTube before leaving.

In Huntington, the two boys socialized with the team and watched a game; then JaJuan Seider had taken them around town. For Way, it was like football heaven and cast Belle Glade into a harsh new perspective.

“That whole town is green,” he said, referring to the school colors. “Everything surrounds that team. We’d be eating in a restaurant and people would come up to us and say, ‘Yall football players?’ and we’d say, ‘No, recruits,’ and they’d still shake our hands and say, ‘Welcome, hope you can come.’

“I mean, even when the Herd made mistakes on the field, the community backed the team no matter what.”

He could only imagine.

During those weeks, most of the recruiters came to see Davonte and Way. Others came to eyeball the various goods on display with hopes of getting an overlooked sleeper. For the most part, their demeanor was peculiar. The culture of scandal and punishment in college football now dictated their every move. Most were polite but cagey with coaches and skittish around reporters, with whom they were forbidden to speak about
potential recruits under NCAA rules. And because they weren’t allowed to speak with players until the season’s end, they tried their best to remain inconspicuous. They hugged the sidelines like Secret Service men, mostly in silence, scribbled things on clipboards, then climbed back into their rental cars and drove away.

Some recruiters didn’t try to hide their disdain for the region, even while feeding from its trough. Former Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin had upset many in the Glades two years before when he’d said this about Pahokee: “There ain’t a gas station that works. Nobody’s got enough money to even have shoes or a shirt on.”

A recruiter from Illinois was just as shameless as he stood on the sidelines at Glades Central. He was good-looking, like Joaquin Phoenix, and seemed proud of himself for having paddled so deep into the heart of darkness.

“So are all these guys involved in crime, or what?” he asked a reporter, and smirked.

Then, later, “You go into their houses and stuff? I bet they all look like shit inside.”

When he heard the answer was negative, that most were actually pretty nice, he looked embarrassed and quickly changed the subject. Later he said he was hoping to lure away a defensive lineman.

If the presence of recruiters on the sidelines incited anxiety or excitement, the Raiders never showed it. Recruiters had simply become part of the late-season landscape, like cane trailers on the highway or the ash that settled each morning on windshields. And despite the enormous dominion the university men possessed over their futures—for they were the rainmakers of the Glades—surprisingly little was even said about them once they were gone. Either they’d already called you or they had not. For the ones who had not been called, the smart ones anyway, all you could do was give a hundred percent when the men entered your orbit and hope to hear something before February. Talking loud about it with your boys only made you look stupid when the call never came. Or that was the thought, anyway.

But on this particular week, all attention was toward O-Town. Starting Monday, Purvis and several teammates gathered for daily prayer, asking God for guidance and clarity. Jaime would awake each night around 3:00 a.m. from dreams of already playing the game; the lights and sounds of crashing bodies left his heart racing too fast for sleep.

Each day after school, both Mario and Way would sit at home and replay film of last year’s championship. They searched for the soft spots in the Tiger line, studied how the secondary stacked up against the pass. Mainly, though, they watched to see themselves lose—to feel that helpless panic again and again as the Tiger lead expanded and the clock ratcheted down to nothing. For Mario, it brought back that emptiness as he watched Cocoa celebrate and the conviction that came, so pure in his guts, that he would walk that field again.

“I’ll bring us here,” he’d told his coach.

For the Glades Central coaches, the preparation focused on pushing Cocoa out of its comfort zone: shutting down their highly efficient running game and making them pass. Compared to the modern red-gun attack of the Raiders, the Tiger offense was an homage to the old breed, a thin but effective playbook of “wing-T” and “power-I” formations.

Coach John Wilkinson would run it until you couldn’t stand it. Wilkinson trusted his rushing attack so much that his quarterback had only executed one pass all postseason.