Chris’s childhood was filled with praise and victories. He dominated Little League and racked up Punt, Pass & Kick trophies. During his senior year at South Shore High, he quarterbacked the football team to the city championship game, then a few months later took the mound as the starting pitcher in the baseball title game. South Shore lost both—“Heartbreakers,” his younger brother Jeff said. Chris accepted a football scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh, where Tony Dorsett played, but Pitt was stacked at QB and Chris rode the bench for two years. Frustrated, he transferred to Fordham. He played well but didn’t make the NFL. So, he came home to Brownsville and joined a semipro team called the Brooklyn Golden Knights. They traveled around the region and played their home games at Betsy Head. Players earned up to $50 a contest, usually less. Chris played for seven years, paying the bills with a Consolidated Edison job his coach helped him land. “Everywhere I walked, everybody wanted to know what was going on,” Chris said. “I was the guy who was supposed to make it, to really be a star.” He felt like he’d let Brownsville down. He’d been so blessed—with athletic talent, with an active mother, with a team of uncles and brothers loving and supporting him, with coaches and teachers invested in him. “I felt like I needed to make amends,” he said.
By then, crack cocaine had arrived in Brownsville. More potent and much cheaper than the powdered version, the drug induced a nationwide epidemic, provoking tough-on-crime policies that played an equal role in tearing families apart. Fathers went to prison. Mothers spent paychecks to feed their addiction. Addicts robbed. Kids fell in with the gangs who controlled the neighborhood, using force to ward off competitors in a highly profitable market—anybody could buy a chunk of coke, turn it to rock, and double their money. Death was all around. “The crack epidemic has precipitated an explosion of violent crime, unlike anything we’ve ever experienced,” Lee Brown, the city’s police commissioner in the early ’90s, told the Harvard Business Review in 1991.
In 1990, Brownsville’s 73rd Precinct averaged eight reported robberies, four reported assaults, and three reported stolen cars a day. In 1993, the neighborhood averaged a murder every five days. Even kids from other rough patches of Brooklyn, like Bed-Stuy and Flatbush and East New York, knew not to fuck with Brownsville kids. “Notorious cats in Brownsville,” said Parrish Johnson, who grew up in Bed-Stuy. “If you were talking to a girl from Brownsville and you wanted to go visit her, you better bring a crew. Those folks were fierce.” And the Brownsville kids knew they were fierce. The attitude, as Brownsville native Erica Mateo put it, was, “I’m from Brownsville and I don’t give a fuck where you from.”
This mind-set of toughness and pride had inspired a neighborhood motto, though nobody was sure who said it first: “I’m from the ’Ville—never ran, never will.” Some residents traced the line to the late ’60s. Richard Swinson, a community activist who mentored a young Chris Legree back in the day, recalled uttering the phrase in his teenage years, and in the decades that followed “it picked up steam.” By 2013, it was mostly just older adults who still said it, or younger folks using it ironically, or local businesses attaching it to their brands. But “I remember when cats were saying it all the time,” said Nelson Urraca, a longtime barber in Flatbush. “They wanted you to know they were from there. We all knew guys from there didn’t back down from nothing.” In 1993, Riddick Bowe, the heavyweight champion boxer from Brownsville, had carried the refrain into wider culture when he told New York Magazine, “I’m not ducking anybody. I’m from the ’Ville—never ran, never will.”
In October 1995, Chris and his childhood friend Erv Roberson drove down to DC for the Million Man March. They returned to Brownsville energized. They decided they would create something to help the community, and football was what they knew best. Chris liked Spike Lee’s film Mo’ Better Blues, so they decided to name their program the Mo Better Jaguars. “I just thought it sounded nice,” he said. “Jaguar’s a smart, fierce animal. And Spike’s from Brooklyn so it pays respect to where we come from.” All winter and spring they passed out fliers in the neighborhood and spread the word. Two kids showed up to their first practice, and one of them was Erv’s son. But soon more came, and by the time fall arrived they had enough kids for two teams: 10-to-13-year-old Junior Midgets and 12-to-15-year-old Midgets. The Midgets won a league championship that first year. Two years later, Mo Better’s Midgets won the eastern regional title. Three years after that, the 2001 Midgets won league, then regionals, and then went down to Florida for the national finals and won the Pop Warner Super Bowl.
CHRIS HAD THOUGHT last year’s 2012 Midget team would bring Mo Better its first national championship since 2001. The team had seemed unbeatable, rolling to a North Jersey Pop Warner League title, before losing in the regional championship game in Maryland by six points. That was a talented group of 14- and 15-year-olds. Chris’s nephew, Sharif, was the star quarterback, and now, just a year later, the sophomore was starting varsity quarterback at Fort Hamilton High. He would make his debut on this September Saturday afternoon, and Chris was excited for the game.
More than a dozen of those 2012 Midgets were making varsity debuts. Though Mo Better had practice scheduled until 1 p.m., any player or coach who wanted to watch a loved one’s high school game was excused to leave early. Chris walked across the Betsy Head field, checking to see who was going to which game.
Vick’s son was making his debut for Tottenville High School, which was playing Erasmus Hall High School in a rematch of the previous season’s city championship game. Chris had considered it one of the best city championship games he had ever seen. Tottenville played well, but Erasmus’s junior running back Curtis Samuel was too dominant a force. He rushed for 117 yards. Tottenville took a 14–7 lead in the second half, before an Erasmus touchdown cut the score to 14–13. Rather than kick the extra point, Erasmus handed the ball to Samuel up the middle for the game-winning two-point conversion. College football recruiting rankings listed Samuel as one of the most prized running back prospects in the country. He received scholarship offers from Notre Dame, Florida, USC, Wisconsin, and many others. In August 2013, he chose Ohio State, and within a few years he would be drafted by the Carolina Panthers, convert to wide receiver, and climb his way into the starting lineup. So, the Tottenville game was not only a rematch, but a showcase for the best high school football player in New York City. Samuel, of course, had played for Mo Better.
Vick told Chris he wasn’t going to the game. He was a security guard and he had a shift that afternoon. After Chris turned to head back off the field, Vick walked over to the dirt of the baseball diamond a few yards from where his Mitey Mites were practicing. He had deliberated for days on whether to skip work to watch his son, and he was already regretting his decision. He turned his back to the boys, squatted down, pulled his purple bucket hat over his face and cried.
Chris hitched a ride with a Mo Better parent, Antoine, whose oldest son was Fort Hamilton’s starting fullback. Antoine’s youngest son, a 9-year-old, sat in the back seat and stared out the window of the gold Ford Taurus as the men in the front talked. It was a 20-minute drive from Betsy Head to Brooklyn Tech High School, and as the car swept through central Brooklyn, the men in the front, two Brooklyn lifers, traded lines about how much their borough had changed. They drove north up Thomas Boyland Street, past the row houses built by church groups in the 1980s, past the shops on Pitkin, past Utica Avenue, then turned west on Eastern Parkway and into Crown Heights.
They remembered when Crown Heights, not too long ago, was one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city. Right in the middle of Brooklyn, halfway between Bed-Stuy and Brownsville, East New York and Red Hook, it was a hub for drug trafficking in the ’80s and ’90s. It was where gangs from all around the borough would meet and trade product and gunfire. They drove past Nostrand Avenue and Bedford Avenue, then turned north on Franklin Avenue, once notorious, a place you didn’t go at night because the streetlights were always out and junkies lined the sidewa
lks and thieves hid between parked cars waiting to ambush the first fool who came their way. The Franklin they drove by now, though, was lined with new storefronts, home to one of the hippest bars in the city, with a Skee-Ball machine and a rotating selection of craft beers. Two blocks up, a shop sold artisanal chocolate, freshly baked bread, and locally made cheeses. A few of the longtime businesses, now getting pushed out by the rising rent prices, had put up signs on their windows that read “Moving to Flatbush.”
This was a new Brooklyn, a new New York City, a new “inner-city” America. The violence, chaos, and ruthlessness that had once defined the city now seemed distant, driven away by many factors, economic, social, and political, the same ones that washed over inner-city neighborhoods all over the country. Younger brothers swore off the drug-ravaged paths they saw their older brothers take. More police officers patrolled the streets, aggressively enforcing low-level quality-of-life laws. The job market improved, the population aged, and city leaders initiated a new wave of business and cultural project in hopes of drawing more commerce to downtown areas.
It became a moment of reckoning with old problems left by the earlier era and recognizing new problems created by the transition forward. Newspapers in New York City and elsewhere were filled with stories about men freed from prison decades after being wrongfully convicted during the nation’s push to get tough on crime. There were stories about inmates serving life sentences for nonviolent offenses, and stories about lawmakers rolling back policies created during the War on Drugs. And there were stories about young, middle-income white people moving into historically black and Latino neighborhoods. In Brooklyn, the march of gentrification began on its northwestern tip, just over the East River from Manhattan, in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, moving east along the L train into Bushwick and south along the subway lines that ran through central Brooklyn, from Fort Greene and Park Slope to Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, and Flatbush. The black and Latino residents who had it hardest in that old era now carried suspicions about the changes they saw all around them. Longtime residents worried they wouldn’t experience the benefits of their neighborhood’s economic revival because the influx of wealthier people would push them out. They feared getting left behind in the wake of this supposed progress. This concern was so great and so widespread that, at the moment Chris and Antoine were driving through Brooklyn, the city seemed on the verge of electing as its new mayor the populist public advocate Bill de Blasio, who was campaigning on the idea that the transition from that old era to this new one had created “a tale of two cities.”
This transition only underscored that America lacked the vocabulary to properly categorize the economically impoverished sections of a big city. In the most literal sense, “ghetto” denoted an economically weak neighborhood and the ethnic minorities trapped within its bounds, “inner city” denoted an area’s geographic location, and “urban” denoted an area’s social environment. But over time those terms had been weighed down by white people who used them to pin blame on black and Latino residents for poor economic and social outcomes. To reflect not a neighborhood’s census data but an entire population’s behaviors and motivations. To suggest that a neighborhood was poor and violent not because of long-term systematic oppression, but because of its people’s apathy and incompetence. But what else to call low-income communities of color in postindustrial big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, DC, Baltimore, Newark, Saint Louis, Milwaukee, Memphis, Detroit, and Oakland? With no better option available, Chris favored “inner city.” Obama, after all, used “inner city,” he pointed out.
So-called inner cities were not the only places in America struggling through poverty, violence, and a lack of public services and private investment; some academics dubbed this wide swath, which includes rural and suburban communities, “disinvested neighborhoods.” But the inner city was shaped by a particular set of intersecting factors and historical trends, not all of them accidental or well-intentioned. Black people followed the Great Migration north to escape Jim Crow and reach the oasis of industrial jobs and established black communities in big cities. Racist banking and housing policies by both private companies and state and federal policymakers suppressed wealth, shutting down lanes of geographic and economic mobility, creating dense pockets of poverty and blight. White people fled to the suburbs, shrinking the tax base in big cities facing fiscal crisis. Manufacturing jobs disappeared. Big city police departments, encouraged by desperate mayors, made more arrests, disproportionately targeting black and brown people, locking up breadwinners and youngsters. Lead particles in paint and drinking water damaged young brains. Guns became easier to access. Institutional neglect in every public sector, from education to health care to housing, continued on.
Now Chris’s neighborhood, and really inner-city neighborhoods everywhere, had entered a new chapter. Brooklyn was no longer defined by poverty and violence. It was a place in the midst of dramatic change. The change began long before the private investment and the white people and the real estate section trend pieces. But now that the private investors and the white people had noticed the change, Chris Legree and his fellow Brooklyn lifers wondered how long they would get to enjoy the changes they’d helped create.
The men in the car followed Franklin north, into Bed-Stuy, Do or Die Bed-Stuy, of Do the Right Thing and Biggie Smalls fame. Everybody knew Bed-Stuy was real rough in the ’80s and ’90s, but it was still pretty rough just four or five years back, the men in the car remembered. One of the men told a story about a friend of a friend, a young Mexican-American 20-something who had grown up in a rough part of Sacramento and moved to New York City for a summer internship on Wall Street in 2010. The young man had signed a lease to an apartment in Bed-Stuy, on Nostrand and Fulton, sight unseen. He broke the lease and left after three nights because of the gunfire he’d heard on one of those nights and because of the young men who stood on the corner by the subway stop, clowning him every evening for wearing a suit. Just three years later, Bed-Stuy was perhaps the hottest rental market for young professionals priced out of the fully gentrified Williamsburg neighborhood on the borough’s northwestern waterfront, or arriving from out of town looking for a place in Brooklyn. There were new condos to satisfy this demand, as well as all the expected signposts of New Brooklyn: an organic, fair-trade co-op; a spot that sold flatbread and artisanal grits and had a bowl of dog treats by the register; a coffee shop with a French press and baristas who drew foam art on lattes and a seating area packed with people in checkered shirts and knit beanies staring into MacBooks, rustic-looking backpacks on the floor beside their chairs.
The men drove past all these things then headed west on Lafayette Avenue, into Fort Greene, where the story was the same. Antoine parked and they stepped out of the car. When they looked to the north, they saw the shiny, sleek high-rises of Downtown Brooklyn gleaming in the sun—luxury condominiums and apartments, near the DeKalb Avenue subway stop, in buildings with names like “DKLB BKLN.” They turned and walked south, toward the football field. The game had already started by the time they arrived. Chris went straight to the Fort Hamilton sideline. He shook hands with coaches and patted players on their shoulder pads. He found his brother Jeff, Sharif’s dad, at the far end of the sideline, and the men slapped hands and hugged. Then their eyes were back on the field. You would’ve thought Jeff was a Fort Hamilton coach the way he paced along the edge of the field, calling out directions and encouragement. The Legrees were royalty around here. Sharif’s older brother Jeff Jr. quarterbacked Fort Hamilton to back-to-back city championships in 2005 and 2006, both teams loaded with Mo Better alums. Their older brother David played at South Shore High School and went on to start at quarterback for Hampton University. David was now a coach at South Shore. Jeff Jr. was Fort Hamilton’s offensive coordinator. There were great expectations for Sharif, given his last name.
In his debut, he looked sharp for his age, but he also made the errors sophomore quarterbacks tend to make, and Brooklyn Tech kep
t the game close deep into the second half, then took the lead. Yet Sharif didn’t appear to panic, nor did he ever drop his head. He didn’t pump his fist or raise his arms when he threw his first touchdown. He had played in big games before, championship games in the harsh cold of upstate New York and in Maryland against the best players in the Northeast. He had won big games and he had lost big games, and football was just football no matter the design of the uniform or the location of the field.
Sharif seemed unfazed about the prospect of losing his debut. Down 19–18 with fewer than two minutes left, he led the offense downfield and threw a touchdown pass to win the game. “He’s gonna be a star!” Chris gushed. Two years later, after transferring to Grand Street Campus High School, Sharif would lead his team to a city championship. Another Mo Better prodigy in a long line of them.
IT WAS THE same routine at the end of every Mo Better practice. “Everybody circle up,” Coach Chris said. He called over the parents and coaches, and the adults gathered behind the circle of players, who had their helmets and shoulder pads in hands. “We got a special way of closing.” A speech about the day’s theme: perseverance, or responsibility, or accountability, or work ethic, or execution. Some words about keeping grades up. More words about maintaining the legacy of the program. Perhaps an anecdote about an old player he ran into the other day. Usually some rambling small talk peppered in. Then finally a closing prayer. He often spoke for 15 or 20 minutes or more, and it was a running joke among some parents and coaches that the former star quarterback took every opportunity to perform for a crowd. And Chris did love the spotlight. But he also aimed to stretch the final minutes he had with his boys before letting them back into the world outside Betsy Head, to throw as much knowledge at them as he could and hope it was enough to keep them coming back.
Never Ran, Never Will Page 5
