Gio went to one of those struggling schools, Middle School 588. It was the school closest to his home, just three blocks away, and it shared a building with one of the area’s best charter schools, Kings Collegiate. He had seen the building before, but the sight of the wide, four-story brick-and-stone structure still impressed him. “Everything is so big here,” he said. “This whole building is just for three grades!” He arrived early on his first day of school and stood outside for a few minutes as kids around him greeted one another and caught up with friends. The loud, raucous symphony of middle-school joking filled the air. In front of a laundromat across the street, students gathered in tight circles, laughing, flirting, gesturing expressively with their hands. His stomach twisted with nervous energy, Gio entered the building. By his first day, the Thursday after Labor Day, the kids at Kings Collegiate had already been in classes for almost two weeks.
Gio and his classmates, who wore red and yellow polo shirt uniforms, had shorter school days and older textbooks than their counterparts on the other side of the building, who wore white collared shirts with navy pants. The student-to-teacher ratio at Gio’s school was more than twice as high as in the charter next door. Only 4 percent of students at MS 588 passed the state math exams in 2013, worse than 85 percent of middle schools in the city. At Kings Collegiate, the 2013 class scored better than 75 percent of middle schools. The shared building embodied both Brownsville’s progress and its limitations. New lanes of opportunity had opened, but they were narrow, and access seemed frustratingly arbitrary: names pulled from a basket was sometimes all that separated those who went to Kings Collegiate from those who went to MS 588.
Within days, Gio’s excitement and optimism about school evaporated. The teachers seemed nice, and the principal seemed to care deeply and work hard, but Gio was struck by the lack of order in the classrooms and hallways. “A lot of kids there are troublemakers,” he said. “They act like animals, messing around and causing distractions.” He lost interest in his classes. His grades were poor, teetering on the precipice of failure in nearly every subject. But school had not been a total disappointment for Gio. He made new friends who lived nearby. He went to their houses after school, played video games, talked about girls, hung out with their older friends from around the neighborhood. When they asked him why he kept ditching them for football practice three times a week, he answered, simply, “Chasing my dream.”
He’d developed professional football aspirations and was now taking the sport more seriously—a craft as opposed to just a hobby. He arrived at practice early to squeeze in extra drills. He was attentive when his coaches spoke. He discussed high school options with Coach Chris. On the morning of the second game of the season, he was awake by seven, rustling his mother out of bed earlier than he had to because he was worried about traffic—another thing he’d noticed that America had in abundance. When they stepped out of the apartment building, the neighborhood was quiet, relaxed in the Sunday stillness that held in the hours before the church folks paraded down the sidewalk in their fine, colorful dresses and suits. Gio’s mother was tired as she silently turned on the ignition, her feet and back sore. She’d woken up with a headache and was in no mood for an extended drive.
Mo Better no longer played its home games at Betsy Head Park. A few years earlier, Pop Warner officials had deemed the field unfit for competition, and so every week the coaches had to scramble for a location, begging high schools throughout Brooklyn to accommodate their boys. Parents usually didn’t know the time or place of a weekend game until Thursday. This Sunday morning’s game was at Poly Prep, a half-hour drive from Brownsville and a world away. Gio and his mother had never been to Poly Prep before and were not quite sure how to get to the campus, which sat tucked away on the borough’s southwestern corner. From the highway, Gio kept his eyes out for the school, unaware that a wall of trees shielded it from view.
They missed the exit. It was the last off-ramp before the highway crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, with nowhere to go but Staten Island. Gio and his mother bickered. They had been arguing more and more in recent weeks, and now even trivial disagreements were escalating into heated back-and-forths. After his mother paid the $16 toll and turned around to cross back into Brooklyn, she told Gio that they were going home. Her headache was getting worse. He told her to drop him off and give him money for a cab. She said no and they kept arguing all the way back to Brownsville.
BEYOND THAT WALL of trees, the boys were trickling onto Poly Prep’s campus, their eyes big with awe. As Oomz, Hart, and the rest of the Junior Pee Wees slipped on their shoulder pads and pulled up their football pants, they looked around at their home field for the day. Some boys reached down and picked at the rubber pebbles embedded in the artificial grass, scooping up a pinch, then sprinkling the stuff back down. The field was pristine, like most everything at Poly Prep. Next to the football field, on the other side of a black chain-link fence, stretched a grassy area alive with teens playing lacrosse and soccer in front of the school’s main building, a colonial-style red-brick manor topped with a domed white clock tower. Beyond one end zone, a pond rippled with ducks. Past the other loomed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, gleaming in the late summer sun. Rows of houses with garages and neat lawns surrounded Poly Prep’s Bay Ridge campus. Banners strung up on a fence by the bleachers boasted that three Mo Better age groups—Junior Peewee, Junior Midget, and Midget—won Pop Warner league championships in 2011, and that the Midgets won another in 2012.
“Yo, that field looks really nice,” said one boy.
“It’s a beautiful field,” said Hart. “It’s a shame we’re gonna tear it up.”
Oomz nodded, grinning. He appreciated Hart’s confidence, which usually matched his own. The Junior Pee Wees had won their first game handily the week before, confirming Oomz’s belief that the team was good enough to win every game this season, just as in years past. He looked over at the bleachers, where several fathers were standing, clapping and calling out to the Junior Pee Wees. He often thought about his own father in these moments. While there were just as many mothers and siblings in the stands, the fathers were loudest and most relentless with their shouts, and Oomz imagined his father standing among the men, complimenting their sons, complaining about the refs, critiquing the coaches. He sometimes felt cheated by the circumstances that led to his father’s absence. Every game he played was one more his father would never see.
BIG OOMZ HAD made his way into the drug game in his early teens. He got arrested for the first time when he was 15 and a grand jury indicted him on felony gun possession charges. He skipped out on court and evaded arrest over the next few years. In 2005, when he was 20, he and an associate drove down to Wilmington, North Carolina, to do business. While they were there, cops busted into their Sleep Inn motel room and found more than 900 packets of heroin worth $20,000 on the street, police told local reporters. He was convicted of felony drug trafficking and would spend eight years in prison. Oomz was 2 at the time.
Every month from then on, Big Oomz’s mother, Monique, and her husband would drive down to North Carolina with Oomz and his older brother. The trip took 12 hours. They left on Friday, got two hours of visitation time on Saturday then two more hours on Sunday, before heading back up Interstate 95. Often, they returned early Monday morning, just a few hours before the kids had to be in school. Some of Oomz’s earliest memories were of seeing his father on the other side of a thick glass partition. Oomz looked forward to the trips—the pit stops at quaint middle-of-nowhere diners, the thrilling indulgence of a freshly made hotel bed, the joy in his father’s eyes when he stepped into the visiting room. Despite the circumstances, Oomz was close with his father. They spoke on the phone two or three times a week. His father was always lecturing him on the importance of education and being careful about who you spend time with.
Even without his father physically present, Oomz grew up surrounded by support. Both sets of grandparents lived in Brooklyn, as well as several aunts
and uncles—plenty of loved ones around to babysit or pick him up from school or drive him to a football game. It was this familial infrastructure, his grandmother Monique believed, that ensured Oomz spent most of his free time inside, at somebody’s home, rather than out and about in the neighborhood, where a boy is more vulnerable to the social pressures that sweep up so many others.
Oomz was well aware of these pressures. From an early age, he’d been exposed to the perils of the street. His father told vague, cautionary tales about his own experiences. His mother, Tasha, worked at a juvenile detention center and, with an endless supply of examples at her disposal, constantly reminded Oomz that even good kids face terrible consequences if they stray too far down the wrong path. Attuned to this world outside his doorstep, Oomz was aware that his neighbor, Poppa, was involved in the street life, though he didn’t know the details. Poppa often spent the night at Monique’s house down the block from the park, but while Oomz liked and looked up to the teenager, he knew better than to follow his trail. Oomz was never one to follow. He didn’t like crowds and he crossed the street whenever he saw a group of people on the sidewalk. Once, when he got disciplined for disrupting class, Monique asked the teacher, “Was he just following other kids?” The teacher replied, “No, they were following him!” It was not the first or the last time Monique got such a call from PS 156.
Oomz had been getting in trouble at school more often in recent weeks. Though he went to a good school, Tasha worried that he’d “gotten too comfortable.” He had many neighborhood friends there. He was one of the most popular kids in his grade. Now, early into his fifth-grade year, with Bs and Cs on his progress report, it was clear to his mother and grandmother that he wasn’t taking school seriously. His coaches, too, noticed that Oomz seemed distracted. They couldn’t blame him. The past year of his life had been an emotional drain.
Big Oomz was released from prison in 2012. His mother paid for his plane ticket to New York, and on his first day back in Brooklyn, all his family and friends were gathered at her home to welcome him. They feasted. Oomz smiled brightly all day, excited and euphoric about the new life he and his father would have together. Then, without warning, a few months later in February 2013, New York City police arrested Big Oomz. He still had a warrant out from the gun charge he picked up at 15. Oomz had hoped his father would be back out within a few weeks. But a few weeks turned into a few months, and now a full year was approaching. A conviction meant up to 15 years in state prison—maybe Green Haven Correctional Facility two hours away, or maybe Riverview Correctional Facility seven hours away, or maybe one of the other prisons in between. Oomz’s mother and grandmother told him to keep his spirits up and that things would work out. He wanted to believe them, but he also understood that the situation—the laws, court dates, bail money, prosecutors—was too complicated for him to know what to believe. His confusion and anxiety fueled a simmering anger.
The Mo Better fathers in the Poly Prep bleachers saw the fruits of this frustration as they watched Oomz race down the field on the opening kickoff and bulldoze the poor blocker who tried to stop him.
“That boy Oomz play with some fire, huh,” said one father.
“Like he wanna knock somebody’s head off,” said another.
OOMZ WAS A favorite among many of his teammates’ fathers. Those men saw in Oomz a reflection of their own childhoods. Some of them, like Mr. Hart, had grown up in Brooklyn’s roughest areas before escaping, somehow, to middle-class adulthood. These men often thought back on all the ways their lives might have gone off track—if a teacher didn’t take interest, if a police officer didn’t go easy, if a boss didn’t make the hire, if a bullet didn’t miss. The men considered what had gone differently for them, what had separated them from their unlucky peers, when they saw smart and ambitious boys like Oomz who seemed capable of going very far in life despite the headwinds.
It was different for boys like Hart, who were a generation removed from that struggle. While the fathers saw themselves in Oomz, they saw in Hart an example for their sons to follow. Hart didn’t talk like most 10-year-olds. He carried himself like a much older boy, sometimes like a grown man. He enjoyed sharing his thoughts about events in the news and liked to ask questions that began with “What did you think about…?” He extended a handshake when he greeted people. When asked a question, he paused to organize his thoughts before answering. He sometimes wore a bow tie and dress shirt to school—a public elementary school that didn’t require a uniform. When his teammates clowned him with the type of jokes 10- and 11-year-old boys normally make, he pursed his lips and rolled his eyes. Before practices, Coach Chris quizzed the boys with math problems or trivia questions or asked them to give the definition of a big word, and damn near every time it was Hart who raised his hand first. One practice, after Hart meticulously explained why he had gotten a lower-than-usual grade in a class, Coach Chris chuckled, shook his head, and said admiringly, under his breath, “fuckin’ attorney.”
And indeed, Hart did think about becoming a lawyer when he grew up, but it was his plan B, if the NFL didn’t work out. “If I do go to the NFL, I’ma get myself a nice house, pay it off so it’s mine,” he said. “I hope I do make the NFL. I’m worried if I don’t. Then what am I gonna do?” He said this not with desperation but curiosity. He spoke about his future with the urgency of a high school senior waiting to hear back from colleges. And it troubled him that he was not yet sure about what exactly he wanted to do as an adult. “I gotta go get a master’s,” he said. “I’m definitely gonna get a bachelor’s. But I still don’t know what I’ma do. I got three years to high school, then four years of high school. Then four years of college. That’s just 11 years!”
He was a polite and pleasant boy, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he played football. He played as rough as Oomz. He wasn’t fast or agile, but he was strong, knew how to use his size, and had remarkable instincts on the field. His goal on every snap was to hit somebody as hard as he could. This was easy enough from his spot in the center of the offensive line. He snapped the ball and had a boy right in front him to smash helmets with and drive into the ground. From the center of the defensive line, he was, in the words of one coach, “a wrecking ball.” He blasted into the backfield and tackled runners barely a second after the quarterback handed them the ball. He studied the tendencies of his opponents and tried to predict when the center would snap the ball and which way the play would go, guessing correctly so often that teammates jokingly asked him to tell them the results of future sporting events. But on some plays, the running back received the ball closer to the sideline and ran to the outside, away from Hart. On those plays, Hart would seek out some poor offensive player trailing the play, like the gazelle at the back of the pack, and knock the boy over with a thudding shoulder bump. By the middle of the third quarter at Poly Prep, Hart was a big reason why Mo Better had kept the Montclair Bulldogs scoreless.
“Yeah Andrewwww!” his father boomed from the stands, after another tackle. “Way to go Andrewwww!”
But Mo Better had not scored either. Other than a few decent gains by Oomz, the offense had barely moved the ball. This was a disappointing development to the fathers and mothers in the stands. This Junior Pee Wee team was supposed to be a championship contender, and here they were struggling against the kind of program they used to steamroll. There was no doubt the team was talented. Quarterback Naz could zip the ball 40 yards downfield. Wide receiver Chaka could run past any defensive back who tried to cover him. Lineman Lamont had so much natural strength and athleticism that Coach Chris often reminded him that, if he paired his talent with a willingness to put in the work, colleges would be fighting over him one day. Linebacker Dorian was a sure tackler and, like Hart, smart enough to call out the other team’s plays before the snap. Running back Time Out was quick and savvy and kept the team loose with his one-liners. And then there were Oomz and Hart—“The heart of this program,” Coach Gary said. With the third quarter nearing an end, Mo
ntclair scored the game’s first touchdown, putting them ahead 6–0.
THE GAME WAS ticking away. Seven minutes left. Montclair had the ball and the offense took its time. The players lingered in the huddle and strolled to the line of scrimmage. Two-yard run up the middle. Three-yard run to the left. Six-yard run to the left. First down. Three more runs and another first down. Five minutes left.
“Andrewwww!” shouted Mr. Hart. “Get me that ball, son! We need that ball!”
Two more runs up the middle, and now a third down. Four minutes. The offense lined up and the center snapped the ball, but when the quarterback pivoted to deliver the handoff to the running back, the ball slipped from his hands and bounced on the turf. Everyone dove for the ball, and several bodies were piled up when the referees blew their whistles and approached. They pulled boys from the pile, and out of the mass popped Hart, holding the ball high over his head like a torch.
“Yeah Andrew!” said Mr. Hart. “Yeah Andrew! Andrew got it! Andrew got it!”
“Your boy got it?” said another father.
“Damn right he did! Yeah Andrew!”
“He’s getting all the tackles too,” said a third father.
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