On this evening, cool and windy, Chris rattled off the names of star players who had passed through Mo Better: Jaiquawn Jarrett, now a safety with the New York Jets. Kevin Ogletree, now a wide receiver with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Jamal Schulters, who now played professionally in Poland. Lance Bennett, now a coach at Poly Prep Country Day School. Brian Flores, now a coach for the New England Patriots. Brandon Reddish and Wayne Morgan, now starting defensive backs at Syracuse University. Then the long list of standout players on some of the best high school football programs in the city.
“Who’s next?” Chris said. A few small boys raised their hands. A few older boys, familiar with this call-and-response script, shouted, “I am!”
Many of the boys around him, he knew, would go on to the high schools of their choosing. He had built bridges to several high schools around the city, and the players of the past had stamped credibility onto the players who followed. High school coaches loved getting Mo Better players. “Very well-disciplined kids,” said Dino Mangeiro, head coach at Poly Prep. “High-character kids, good students.”
Chris and his coaches had rooted the team’s philosophy in self-control, and former players often credited that philosophy for their success in life. “Even when you’re in high school, the coaches continue to talk to you about being disciplined and doing what you have to do in the classroom,” said Jarrett, the Jets safety. “They really developed us into some grown men. They always instilled toughness.” There were laps for tardiness, more laps for bad grades. When Coach Vick and another coach were driving some players to a game one morning and the boys got rowdy in the back seat, the coaches pulled the car over on the side of the freeway and ordered the boys out to do push-ups. The kids dressed in suits before games and marched single-file and silent to the locker room. They hit harder than their opponents but seldom lost their cool after the whistle. “The kids that come out of the program, even though they may have all of these hardships and handicaps, they’re pretty polished. Not only as football players, but as potentially outstanding young men,” said Vince Laino, Fort Hamilton’s head coach from 1990 to 2009.
Mo Better teams were known for their physicality, too. They ran the same power running offense every year, and every year they lined up, with no tricks or gimmicks, and pounded the ball through the center of the line. They were strong and fearless, and often the boys on the other team gave up after a quarter’s worth of banging helmets. From the late ’90s to the mid-2000s, Mo Better’s most dominant stretch, many games ended with cartoonish scores of 42, 56, or 63 to 0. When coaches and former players thought back to those years, their memories always took them to Dajuan Mitchell. No player embodied Mo Better’s mystique more than Dajuan. He was a big, strong, fast running back, and he was tough as hell. “You can’t find kids like that no more,” Chris said. When he was 12, Chris said, he had the body of a 15-year-old. He was a terror to linebackers who tried to get in front of him. One former teammate compared his running style to “a Mack truck going 90 on the highway.” He led his teams to a string of league and regional titles. He seemed to play his best in big games, on fields long bus rides away, cold and rainy games against upstate white boys who probably didn’t think they played much football in Brooklyn.
Dajuan’s most memorable game, though, was at Betsy Head, in 2002 against the Mount Vernon Razorbacks, a rival regional powerhouse. Dajuan was a Midget that year and Brownsville locals had been hyping the matchup against Mount Vernon’s Midgets all week. This was a battle between the two best teams in the region. The locals had also heard that the son of Sean Combs, then known as P. Diddy, played on Mount Vernon’s Midgets, and word on the street was that the hip-hop mogul himself would make it into Brownsville for the game.
The game was early in the season and the morning was warm and clear. On days like this, when the field was dry and the slightest wind kicked up the dust, the fire department often came to hose down the field before the game, to try to spare the kids with asthma from wheezing in the dust. There was no sprinkler system at Betsy Head and the field had not been green since the 1980s. Some locals blamed the city for failing to keep up the park. Others blamed the influx of West Indian immigrants and the young men among them who tore up the field with soccer games every evening. But they all knew that the barren dirt expanse was a big part of Mo Better’s great home-field advantage. Youth football programs, used to softer fields in richer neighborhoods with smoother roads, bused into Brownsville and struggled to adjust to the environment. “You’d go all the way down Flatbush Avenue, get lost, then GPS’ll drop you off in the middle of the hood, and you’d be like, ‘Where am I at?’” said a coach on the East Orange Jaguars.
Boys on the other teams would step onto the hard dirt field and see hundreds of taunting fans standing behind a rope around the edge of the field, because there were no bleachers at Betsy Head. Then the boys would fall on that hard dirt and it almost felt like falling on concrete, and they’d wish they didn’t have to fall on it again. But they’d have to get back up and take more hits from the hard-hitting Mo Better boys, and the crowd fed off of the hits, took pride in how rough and tough their boys were, and the taunts would get louder, and young men in tall Ts and baggy jeans would say, “You soft, boy!” when an opponent got up too slow. The community rallied around Mo Better games, and more than one local would tell you that so many folks turned out at the field that “the crime rate would go down.” “That’s who Brownsville is,” Chris’s brother Jeff said. “When they respect something, everybody stops for that. They’d line the whole outside of the field. They’d crowd the handball courts. People would get off the train to watch.”
The park was packed as usual for the Mount Vernon game, and there was already a buzz humming through the crowd when the black SUV pulled up five or ten minutes before kickoff. It didn’t draw much attention. “It’s a big game, everybody anticipating,” Chris recalled. “Everybody’s looking at the field.” Chris had expected Combs’s arrival. The rapper’s security team had called him nearly every day that week with questions and demands, worried that his presence would trigger a hectic, dangerous scene. As the players took the field, the SUV’s doors still hadn’t opened. It just sat there, engine running. Then, moments before kickoff, out popped P. Diddy. He strolled into the park and onto the field. “And nobody looks!” said Chris, chuckling at the memory. “He came into the crowd. He came by, says ‘excuse me’ so he could get to the front. They still weren’t looking at him!” Their eyes were on the field.
The game lived up to the billing. It was a highly contested, smashmouth affair. Dajuan was unstoppable that day. It took two, three, four defenders to bring him down on most runs, and by the second half Chris was giving him the ball on almost every play. With Mo Better down late in the fourth quarter, Dajuan pounded through the defense and broke away for the game-winning touchdown. Mo Better won 14–12. P. Diddy caught more eyes on his way out, but the majority of locals were busy celebrating. The big shot they wanted to meet was Dajuan. “Dajuan Mitchell, we thought he was gonna be a star,” Chris said. “He was our top dog. A grown man on the field.” The next year, he attended Sheepshead Bay High School. He played football for a couple of years, but “we just couldn’t get him on track,” said Chris.
He was killed a few years later. The locals who didn’t hear through word of mouth might have seen the blurb in the September 11, 2006, edition of the New York Times:
Two men were fatally shot about 2 p.m. yesterday in an East New York apartment building in what one witness said “looked like an ambush.” One of the victims, Dajuan Mitchell, 19, was found on the sixth-floor landing of a building at 428 Sheffield Avenue, shot twice in the torso and once in the groin, the police and witnesses said.
He wasn’t the only former player shot to death in his teenage years. There was Darrell, quarterback on the ’98 regional championship team. There was the original Puerto Rico, who owned the nickname that Coach Vick would pass down to the new Puerto Rico. There was Pikachu, th
e best athlete Vick had ever seen. And there were others, another then another young man gunned down then laid to rest with a boyhood photo of him in his Mo Better uniform beside his casket. “With Mo Better, I’ve had some of the highest highs I’ve ever had, but I’ve also had some of the lowest lows I’ve ever had,” said Erv, the program’s cofounder. Football took up only so many hours in the week. And when they left the field, many Mo Better players stepped back into their other world, the one they’d been immersed in almost since birth. “One foot on the turf, one foot in the streets,” Vick put it.
Some nights, hard-faced young men waited beside the field for practice to end. A coach would approach them, and they’d tell the coach they weren’t looking to cause trouble with the team but just had a dispute to settle with one particular boy. The coach would tell them to take their beef outside the park, and they did. The OGs who controlled the streets respected the program and the respect trickled down to the younger generation. For many boys, Mo Better’s purple and yellow offered protection. Players often walked home wearing their jersey and helmet, which served as a pass to get by without hassle. Many of those who ran the neighborhood had worn the colors themselves. Like Pup. Even while he was still on the team, Pup cut such an imposing figure on the streets that stick-up kids avoided targeting his teammates. “Leaving the park at night with their book bags, that’s an easy target,” Pup said. “But the rough guys were my guys.”
One morning, when Pup was 14, the team was preparing for a bus trip to Syracuse for the regional championship game. The players, parents, and coaches met at the Brownsville Recreation Center, on the other side of the neighborhood from Betsy Head. As the bus idled, Pup and two teammates made a last-minute trip to the corner store to grab breakfast sandwiches. They ran into a group of Bloods inside the store. Pup lived in Crips territory, and he was out of bounds. The boys traded punches, and as Pup’s crew broke for the bus, one of the Bloods reached out with a knife and slashed the back of his suit jacket nearly in half. Miraculously, Pup made it into the bus unscathed. The next day Mo Better won the regional title.
The stories of the street legends lived on in Mo Better lore right alongside the stories of the gridiron legends. The most infamous OG to pass through Mo Better was the Boogeyman. Vick remembered giving him that nickname when he was seven because he always had snot on his face. The Boogeyman was a skinny but strong linebacker and offensive lineman. Coaches recalled him knocking more than one ballcarrier out of the game with his ferocious hits. He grew up to become “one of the most notorious criminals in Brownsville,” in the words of one local. “The sidewalks would clear when he walked past.” Or as Vick put it: “He run the neighborhood. I mean he run the neighborhood. He say kill somebody, it’ll happen.” The Boogeyman was in prison now, though nobody was quite sure what charge they got him on or how long he’d be in. “Maybe murder,” said a local. “Maybe armed robbery. Maybe something with drugs. Shit, maybe just gun possession.”
Coaches estimated that at least 30 former players were in prison. And just as Chris asked his boys who would be next to get a college scholarship, he wondered who next would find a tragic end. The street life tradition pressed on at Mo Better. All the coaches could do was guide the boys while they had them and hope that their lessons were enough to keep them straight once they moved on from the program.
“You’re only passing through us,” Chris said to the circle of players around him, his post-practice speech winding down. “It’s all about later.”
He let the words hang for a few seconds. Some boys looked back at him with serious faces. Others toyed with their mouthpieces or helmet straps or Gatorade bottles.
“OK, everybody touch somebody,” he said.
The players linked hands. The parents and coaches in the back put their palms on each other’s shoulders.
“Lord God, we come to you to say thank you,” Chris began.
“Thank you!” the players shouted back.
“Thank you,” said Chris.
“Thank you!”
Heads bowed as he prayed and rose with the “Amen!” The players, parents, and coaches left the park and dispersed across Brownsville’s dark streets. Chris walked a block to the Saratoga subway station and climbed the steps.
“Chris!” somebody behind him said.
He stopped, turned to see a familiar face from seasons past: a middle-aged mother in a red pantsuit. They embraced. She told him about how her son still talked about Mo Better and about how much he missed those days. He’s still in love with football and watches every Sunday, she said. He had been teaching his nephews the game’s nuances, encouraging them to play.
The train arrived.
“Anyway, it was really good to see you!” she said cheerfully, before hustling up the steps.
“Take care!” Chris replied, leaning back against the railing of the stairs.
When she was out of earshot, he exhaled. “That’s tough for me,” he said.
The woman in the pantsuit was the Boogeyman’s mother.
4
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF LIFE
September–November 2013
GIO’S BROWNSVILLE HAD COME A LONG WAY FROM THE Boogeyman’s Brownsville. Its overall crime rate in 2013 was a third of what it had been in 1993, the number of murders down from 74 to 15. There were fewer blighted homes and vacant lots. The crack cocaine problem had diminished. The neighborhood had access to a growing number of well-run public schools. More than anything else, locals said, there seemed to be more hope these days.
For Gio, hope seemed highest on his first day of seventh grade. He strolled eagerly that morning, bouncing on the balls of his feet down the sidewalk, his face looking wide-awake even though he’d barely been able to sleep. A rush of adrenaline had hit the night before. Gio was looking forward to the start of classes, which he knew was unusual because he’d been hearing his teammates mourning the end of summer vacation for weeks. He had always liked school. His favorite subject was math. He enjoyed the challenge of quickly working through a problem, the feeling of his brain churning through the numbers, the satisfaction of rattling off one right answer after the next—cold, clean order in a chaotic world. But that chaotic world interested him too. As he walked to his new school on this balmy morning in early September, he was most excited about his social studies class. “I want to know more about how America became the way it is,” he said.
He had inherited his interest in school from his mother, who instilled in him a reverence for education. On the Caribbean islands, she told Gio, they respected teachers more than perhaps any other profession—and certainly more than Americans did. In Brownsville and elsewhere in the States, teachers were paid poorly, dropped into unfamiliar neighborhoods, and often thrust into the role of social worker, tasked with helping kids navigate family troubles, medical problems, and the relentless challenges that weigh down a childhood in poverty. “A lot of us burn out quickly,” said a fourth-grade teacher in Brownsville. “You have young teachers coming in, staying a year or two, and by the time they’ve become good, experienced teachers, they’re on their way to another neighborhood where the job is not as hard. And then another batch of rookies comes in to replace them.”
There were several very good schools in Brownsville. While administrators sometimes cited standardized test scores to prove a school’s excellence, parents more often trusted word of mouth. Test scores could be deceptive, a result of teachers focusing their lessons on exam preparation at the expense of deeper learning. On the other hand, standardized tests—and a kid’s ability to do well on them—partly determined which high schools he or she would get into. With so few objective metrics with which to grade a school, a parent’s best bet was to go by what they’d heard from other parents and, if they had the time, to meet with the teachers and principals themselves.
For many parents in New York City, school choice was a complicated process. For those in Brownsville, where the pool of tax money and donations funding the local schools was
smaller, this process brought especially high stakes: although the neighborhood’s stronger schools were as good as any in the city, its weaker schools ranked far below the worst-case-scenario options for kids in wealthier places. The period leading up to enrollment was a stressful time for parents. They could request to send their kids to a better public school outside of their home “zone.” Or, if their child did well enough on a certain test, they could send them to one of the city’s gifted-and-talented schools, two of which shared a building in Brownsville: Public School 156, where Oomz was a fifth grader, and Intermediate School 392, where Isaiah was in sixth grade. Those schools carried strong reputations for capable teaching, orderly classrooms, and discussion-based lessons. Parents also had the option to apply to send their child to a charter school, which are publicly funded but operate independent of the district. At Brownsville Ascend, a majestic stone fortress on Pitkin Avenue where Puerto Rico was a third grader, students passed the 2013 standardized tests at a higher rate than the city and state average. Some of the best schools in Brooklyn were charter schools, but this fact came with a caveat: unlike traditional public schools, charters had the freedom to deny admission to kids and were usually quicker to expel problem students. So many parents were applying for the limited seats in these new charter schools that an annual lottery drawing determined which lucky few got in.
This whole dynamic created an increasingly stratified neighborhood school system, where the most promising young kids, with the most active parents, got filtered into the area’s better schools while the young kids who struggled in their early academic years, or whose parents didn’t understand or weren’t aware of the local public-school landscape, got shunted into the same old subpar schools. The students most likely to struggle, including kids with mental health problems and learning disabilities, were concentrated in the schools that were already struggling—an education system analogous to the housing plan that pushed all those projects into Brownsville. “It’s like we focus on one group of students and then kind of forget about all these other kids, who never really get the same chance to succeed,” said the Brownsville teacher.
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