by Mark Bowden
“You’ve got to get in here right now, Buddy has been looking for you. It’s important!”
Marvin hung up and headed for the door, when the phone rang again. It was George.
“Hold on a minute, Marvin, Buddy wants to talk to you right now.”
The call was patched down to the coach’s office, and Buddy’s familiar drawl came on. The coach sounded peeved.
“Where have you been?”
“I was on my way down there right now, boss.”
“I told you, when you cleared waivers, be here to sign the new contract for the practice squad.”
“Right, I’m going on the practice squad.”
“Well, seven o’clock last night is when you came off the waiver wire,” Buddy said. “I was looking for you at seven o’clock.”
“Did you call?”
“Now, why should I call you? You’re the one who wants a job, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes. You’re right, boss.”
“I didn’t know what to think,” said Buddy. “I thought you got pissed off because you got released and figured, ‘Fuck it.’”
“No, I would never do that, boss. I told my agent to call and find out when you needed me….”
“No agent called here.”
“I told him to call.”
“You need to get rid of your agent, son. You didn’t need an agent to get you here, you sure as hell don’t need one now.”
“Okay, okay. What do you want me to do now?”
“Now you’re gonna have to wait.”
Buddy had signed Tyrone Watson, another of the free agents at camp that summer (who happened to be represented by Buddy’s son, a player agent) to a practice-squad contract. He told Marvin that he would put him back on the roster as soon as there was an opening.
But the opening never came.
The season ended, Buddy got fired, and Marvin Hargrove is still waiting. Unless he beats the odds again, he has earned the nickname “One-for-One-for-One” Hargrove, one pass, one catch, one touchdown.
And so he shall remain.
FOR FRED BARNETT, the toughest gate in the Sluice wasn’t the last one—landing on a pro roster—it was the first. He couldn’t get anywhere in football until he got past his mom.
He still winces at the memory, a dozen years back now, of his mom, Earlean Barnett, showing up on the Rosedale, Mississippi, High School football field on the first day of summer tryouts. Fred was warming up with a group of his junior-high friends. They were too young to play for the high-school team, but the coaches invited the younger boys out to practice to scout them for future seasons. Attending these practices was what you did if you aspired to suit up with the big boys in a few years. Fred was eager to show off his skills. But before practice had gotten fully under way, he saw the beige Plymouth pull off the highway in the distance. Earlean got out, her dress billowing like a mainsail as she strode purposefully across the field. She spoke to the coaches, then Fred saw them looking for him.
Earlean had forbidden Fred to play football. She had lots of reasons. For one, she was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and the violence disturbed her. For another, Fred had been doing poorly in the seventh grade (he would eventually have to repeat it). But beyond those reasons, football stood for all the foolish things people put before their relationship with God. She had seen how crazy her small Mississippi riverfront town got over the high-school team, how the boys who played got special treatment from football-obsessed teachers, alumni, and … girls.
She knew if her Fred played football he’d be good. He had it in his blood. Fred’s uncle, Johnny Barnett, had been good enough to play halfback for the L.A. Express in that USFL, and his father and other uncles had all been big stars at Rosedale High. From the time he could walk, Fred was just like them. His father and uncles would throw him the ball and compliment the way he could hang on, the way he could run and jump, filling his head with visions of glory. But Earlean and Fred, Sr., were divorced shortly before Fred started junior high, so this tendency to be just like his father and uncles became a sore subject with Mom. She was a tough woman, working in a factory by day and taking care of her children at night. She was determined that her Fred would not be like his father and uncles. One way he was not going to be like them, he was not going to play football.
Her Fred was going to grow up strong in the Lord. He was going to be a good student. He was not going to hang out or go to parties where they drank alcohol and smoked dope—and where girls got pregnant. Which is not to say she didn’t have doubts. Fred was such a daydreamer, and the game was so important to him. At the dinner table he would break up the food on his plate and arrange it in football formations. As a little boy, when he went to bed at night, he would take the stuffed animals on his bed and pretend they were football players, crashing them into one another. Earlean saw all that. But then, when she thought again about the pitfalls, she was sure once more that football, while not so bad in itself, would open the door.
She had given in once. Fred (with her accent, the name came out in two distinct syllables, Fray-ed) had cried and sulked until she let him play on the junior-high-school team. In the first game he played quarterback and ran the ball for a touchdown and angered his coaches by performing a dandy spike in the end zone— That’s rubbin’ it in their faces, boy, you don’t do that! (They were clearly happier with the points, he noticed, than angry with the spike.) On the way home, the bus made a sudden stop, and Fred was thrown forward. He cracked his front teeth on the steel back of the seat in front.
One look at Fred’s broken and bloody mouth, and Earlean wasn’t in the mood for explanations.
“This is what I was tryin’ to tell you about football,” she said.
“Oh, Mama, it wasn’t football,” Fred pleaded. “The man hit the brakes on the bus!”
“If you hadn’t been playing football, you wouldn’t have been on the bus,” pronounced Earlean, with airtight parental logic. And that was that. No more football. When Fred defied her by going out to the preseason practice, Earlean drove to the field to fetch him.
He thought about running, but what good would that do? He hung his head with shame as his mother led him by the arm across the field and back to her car. It would be five long years before Fred would get another chance to play. Five years of writhing with envy in the stands, watching boys with lesser talent romp in the glamorous floodlit Friday-night world of schoolboy football. Fred would play in pickup games with these guys and run rings around them. The highschool coaches knew about Fred. They saw him play in intramural basketball. He could leap so high it was startling. He had hands twice the size of most kids his age. And speed? Nobody in the school could keep up with him. He had the lean, fluid moves of a natural. The talent was raw, but unmistakable. Fred had a totally undisciplined, showboat style on the court. Playing with the other boys, he wouldn’t even bother with passing or outside shots or the finer points of the game. He just wanted to dunk. If he scored thirty points in an intramural game, twenty-six of them would be gaudy, soaring dunks, which was funny, because off the court he seemed so shy.
After phys-ed class one day, Fred started fooling around at the high-jump pit. He had never tried it before. He just set the bar up near the top of the frame and jumped over if. Just like that.
Then he went in, showered, and got dressed. On his way out, one of the gym teachers asked him how high he had jumped.
“I don’t know.” He pointed to the rung.
“That’s six-three,” the teacher said. “I don’t believe it!”
By the time Fred was in his junior year, his cousin Tim, who was a year younger, was a star on the high-school football team. That really bothered Fred. But he had given up arguing with his mom.
“The Bible says, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’” she would say. “There are times in tackling when you hurt people. Do you want to be hurt?”
“No, I don’t want to be hurt; it’s just a game.”
“You
think of how many people have been hurt in that game.”
“But you don’t try to hurt people, you try to tackle them. It’s just part of the game.”
Earlean wouldn’t budge. She felt good about her decision. Fred was getting better grades now. He didn’t hang out and party with the other teens. He was different, just the way she wanted him to be. And that was a good thing, right?
As Fred grew older, she began to wonder. He seemed to spend most of his free time alone in his room. After supper, he would close the door to his bedroom, lie across the bed, and fantasize—elaborate, detailed daydreams—about playing football. He didn’t visualize himself just playing high-school ball. In his mind’s eye he was on a pro field, with tens of thousands of cheering fans, announcers in the booths upstairs, cameras, and he would be racing alone down the field, leaping for the ball, closing his hands around it….
“Are you okay, Fred?” Earlean would ask through the closed door.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“If something is bothering you, you would talk to me about it, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
And then back to the daydream.
Two coaches from the high school launched a campaign to change Earlean’s mind. They called and stopped by the house. Earlean heard them out politely and then just shook her head.
The thaw came only when Earlean reconciled with Fred’s father.The boy was a junior then, and Willie Thomas, an assistant coach at Rosedale, saw an opening. He knew some of Fred’s uncles, and they were all dying to see the kid play. He went to work on Fred, Sr., who resisted at first—no sense making more trouble between him and Earlean.
“It’s not up to me.”
“Why not—he’s your son, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re being fair to Fred. The boy is really hurting.”
When Fred, Sr., explained Earlean’s worries, Thomas promised he would personally drive Fred to and from practice every day.
Fred, Sr., and Earlean reopened the issue, looking at it every which way. Fred wasn’t a little boy anymore. He was old enough to drive a car. He had just one more year of high school left. She wasn’t going to be able to shelter him forever.
Earlean sought advice from her meeting hall. She was told that Jehovah gives each individual a life, and there comes a time when parents have to stop making decisions for their children.
One of the elders told her, “It’s not like you haven’t already done the basic things that Jehovah requires of a parent, which you have.”
At first, Fred was allowed to go out for the track team, where he quickly bettered his six-three leap of that afternoon. He would jump six-eleven in his senior year, bettering the competition by more than a foot. When Earlean let him play on the football team in his senior year, despite his inexperience, Fred was the school’s star safety on defense, making eight interceptions. As a receiver, Fred caught five touchdown passes. While his cousin Tim was the bigger star, Fred’s play in just that one season was enough to attract recruiters at Arkansas State, three hours away.
Five years later (after sitting out one year with a knee injury), Fred was drafted in the third round by the Eagles, the seventy-seventh player taken in that year’s NFL draft. The following year his cousin Tim was drafted in the third round by the Chiefs, also the seventyseventh player taken.
By then, true to those pictures in his head, Fred was a star.
AS THE REST of the team is moving into Gertrude, five of the Eagles’ starters head home to settle in for another NFL summer ritual, the holdout.
Eric Allen flies back to the lush hills of San Diego, for what he figures will be a long stay with his in-laws, not far from the neighbor hood where he grew up. Middle linebacker Byron Evans heads home to the modern house he has built for himself in Arizona, up in the stark brown Salt River Mountains, south of Phoenix. Through the still desert haze of late summer, looking north over the patio and pool and towering cacti, he can make out the rooftops of the South Broadway projects where he grew up, where his older brother Buriss had been shot and killed five years ago, and, beyond that, rising abruptly from the flatness, the glass-and-steel towers of downtown. Kicker Roger Ruzek returns to Ogden, Utah, where he’ll golf some and bowl, and maybe squeeze in some trout fishing. Receiver Calvin Williams drives south on 1–95 in his white Wagoneer to his new, mostly empty neocolonial home outside Baltimore, set on a hilltop in a green western suburb that empties every morning when his neighbors all drive off to work. Serious and businesslike, Calvin will adopt a daily schedule here to mirror training camp, rising early to eat breakfast; running by himself on the track at Randallstown High School, zipping past the usual midday assortment of daytime joggers as if they were standing still; then eating lunch and doing a second workout in the afternoon, running up and down hills wearing a weighted khaki vest; having dinner and then going to bed early.
For strong safety Andre Waters, the trip is to Tampa, where he plans to do some jet-skiing in between his regular workouts. This will be Andre’s fifth contract negotiation. None of them has been pleasant, but at least the process has become predictable. He figures it will take … oh, about three weeks. He’ll be back in time for the last two exhibition games.
There’s a logic to signing holdouts, even if fans can’t understand it. The club has its payroll budget, about $32 million, and it tends to sign players in ascending order of salary, and, hence, of importance. Rookies, with the exception of the first two or three picks, would all be signed by the time training camp started. The veteran backup players would come to terms early in camp, then the top draft picks. The veteran starters would be the last ones in, divvying up what remained of the pie.
Tight end Keith Jackson and quarterback Jim McMahon are special cases. Keith’s grudge with Norman runs as deep as his salary demands go high, and he is set on an independent course that, in just a month, will enable him to slip the League’s hammerlock on players’ careers. Jimbo, by virtue of the special status of quarterbacks and his own celebrity, is holding out for a salary almost double that of an ordinary NFL backup—and will get most of it. He is also looking for a commitment from Richie that he will get a chance to compete with the returning Randall for the starting job—he will get the commitment, but not the chance.
Apart from these two, Andre knows the drill. The holdouts will return in order, with neatly ascending salary figures, from Ruzek on up to Allen, with one exception—Andre will be the exception. Allen, the most valuable player missing, will sign last ($1.3 million), just days before the first game of the season. Andre will sign second from last, befitting his position in the team’s pecking order, but he won’t sign for the second-highest salary. On August 19, Williams ($400,000), Ruzek ($450,000), and Evans ($825,000) will all agree to terms. Two days later, Andre, the second most-valuable player holding out, will cave in for $685,000.
Andre is sick and tired of being the exception. It’s an old feeling, a bad feeling, one linked to his childhood, to a place called the Muck.
That’s what locals call the great expanse of Palm Beach County real estate that opens out as you head west from the Atlantic Ocean on Route 98 toward Lake Okeechobee. The Muck is the north end of the Everglades, saw-grass swamp drained a century ago to open up five thousand square miles or so of farmland, land so rich and moist it looks alive, shining, like the black back of some great slumbering reptile. This soil—Frost Free! Cultivates with Ease!—was reputed to grow fruits and vegetables of such Olympian size and miracle sweetness that it provoked a stampede of veterans after World War I, a kind of Ag Rush. Things grew prodigiously all right (although not to the proportions promised), but the amateurs were thwarted by the pre—refrigerated trucking challenge of keeping crops fresh en route to distant markets. The few farms that lasted became huge agribusinesses, nursing orange groves and fields of celery, corn, and sugarcane (which boomed after Fidel Castro closed off Cuba’s crops). The growing business demanded lots of cheap, uns
killed labor, which prompted the Muck’s second tide of immigration, thousands of poor blacks willing to work with their hands for low wages under the hot Everglades sun. The wealthy growers built their estates back east in Palm Beach and Lake Worth, while the field hands huddled in concrete barracks and mud-stained shacks in the lakeside towns of Belle Glade and Pahokee.
Andre was born in Belle Glade, the eighth child of Willie Ola Perry, a sturdy twenty-seven-year-old field hand with a mystical Christian bent who liked her bed warm and her work steady. She worked seven days a week, ten hours a day to support her still-growing brood. In all, Willie Ola would have ten children (and adopt one more) by four different men, all of whom had wanderlust in common. Andre’s father, Henry B. Waters, left when he was three. Willie Ola just labored on. She would have two more children by another man (who also left) before she was done. She didn’t expect too much from men.
With his mother off working, Andre spent many of his early years living with relatives. He remembers summer days working with his cousin to find enough discarded soda bottles to raise the quarter they needed for an afternoon at the community swimming pool. One of his earliest memories is of playing with the ducks at his aunt Mary’s farm outside Tampa, where his mother took the children every year at Christmastime. Andre desperately wanted to take a duck home with him as a pet.
“I’m not gonna give you one of my ducks until you move off the Muck,” she told the boy.
He never forgot the promise, and when Willie Ola moved her brood to Pahokee, ten-year-old Andre thought his time had come.
“Auntie, Auntie Mary, we don’t live on the Muck no mo’,” he told her that Christmas. “We done moved to another place.”
“Boy, you still on the Muck,” she told him.
Moving off the Muck came to mean something much more as the children of Belle Glade and Pahokee got older. It meant getting a high-school diploma and going off to college or the army. Most of those who stayed wound up working in the fields by day and hanging around the barracks and shanty towns getting drunk or high by night, raising the next generation in the same squalor they had known—or worse. In recent years, Belle Glade has become a pathetic symbol of the ravaging potential of AIDS, with a death rate from the disease triple that of most big cities.
