by Mark Bowden
Moving off the Muck became an obsession to Andre. As he entered his teens in the midseventies, he had the example of older brothers and sisters who had escaped, and some who hadn’t. All had finished high school and some had even gone to college. His half sister Irma, unmarried with six children, was still living in Belle Glade, as was Monica, who had married and was raising a brood that would eventually number nine. His half brother Harry was an army officer. His half sister Sandra was working for her college degree in social work. Anthony, another older half brother, had joined the air force.
Andre had his own plan. Like millions of boys who grew up watching the NFL come of age on TV, Andre was going to be a pro football player. In his last few years of elementary school, he had hero worshiped with the rest of the town as Pahokee High went to three straight state championship games led by a strapping tight end named Rickey Jackson. Sought after by colleges all over the country, Jackson had chosen the University of Pittsburgh, where he would star as defen sive end and get drafted in the second round in ’81 by the Saints (and still be giving Antone Davis fits at the end of the ’92 season as a Pro Bowl linebacker). With only a child’s understanding of how remarkable, how literally one-in-a-million Jackson’s course had been, Andre was determined to trace his steps.
When he showed up for tryouts in the summer of ’76, the year after Jackson graduated, Andre was a skinny, hyperkinetic fourteen-year-old, with a gigantic Afro, whom everyone called Spanky. “I guess because I used to get so many whippings,” Andre says. Coach Anton Russell almost sent Spanky home, and probably would have, if he hadn’t needed every kid who showed up. Little Pahokee High competed against schools from the more affluent eastern side of Palm Beach County, where coaches had the luxury of sorting out boys by size and skill and assigning them suitable positions. Coach Russell had to work with whoever showed up. Typically, his linemen were as small as other teams’ defensive backs. Coach Russell looked for intangible assets, things like boldness and heart.
The younger brother of the kid who played quarterback the year before had that job sewn up, and Coach had most of the other glamour jobs parceled out to boys he had seen play before, so Andre, small as he was, got lumped in with the linemen.
He was determined to make up in ferocity what he lacked in size. And he made a good impression on his first day, especially in drills where he had to pull from the guard position, sweep around end, and launch himself at would-be tacklers head-on. Andre showed reckless enthusiasm for this. He took visceral pleasure in violent contact. The coach was impressed. When Andre told his brother Anthony about the practice, though, Anthony had some sage advice.
“Don’t play so good there,” he said. “If you play the line good, they’ll end up keeping you there, and you’re too small to play that position in college.”
The next day, Andre slipped and fell a lot. His pulling move slowed, and he kept missing the blocks on his sweeps around end. He played so badly, Coach banished him from the offensive squad, telling him to go work out with the defensive backs, where his quickness and surefooted play were miraculously restored.
Coach Russell didn’t have the biggest or the fastest or the most talented athletes in the county, but he always had some of its best football and track teams. Many of the boys who played for Pahokee had never seen a weight room and had never run on a track, but they had grown up, like Andre, working in the fields and groves and in the packing houses. Russell never had to worry about bulking his boys up or getting them in shape. Pahokee boys were poor, tough, and wild. When they played against the bigger schools, it was class warfare. They were small, but they were feared. Boys from the suburbs rationalized their fear by calling the Pahokee players dirty.
Andre set out to be the toughest of the Pahokee tough guys. He had grown up this way. If they played soccer, Spanky wanted to be goalie, so he could come tearing out and dive at the feet of attacking players and snatch away the ball. In baseball, he liked playing catcher, getting dirty down behind the plate and standing in tough when some bigger kid tried to bowl him over at the plate. Now, on the football field, opposing players and coaches would complain that the little cornerback was hitting people late, aiming for their knees and ankles— trying to hurt people—and Coach Russell would defend him, saying, “He’s just a hustler; he wants part of every play,” and then wink at Andre—Never hurts to make ‘em afraid.
On the weekends and holidays, when football games were scheduled, Andre would have to work in the orange groves. It was hard work up on ladders, wearing long sleeves to avoid the thorns, a burlap sack over one shoulder, picking fruit for hours. Coach Russell would tell the boys to take it easy during the day and come out to the high school to stretch and warm up before home games, or board the bus early for away games. But there was no taking it easy for Spanky. Sometimes the coach would have to hold the bus, waiting for the trucks to return from the fields. Andre would hop off the back end of the truck and jump on the bus. The coach toyed with the idea of speaking with Willie Ola about it, seeing if she would let the boy take a day off now and then, especially when there was a big game coming up. But he thought better of it. He knew other women like Andre’s mom. Andre’s work helped keep her family fed and housed—what was a football game weighed against that?
Willie Ola had never seen her son play football. She saw all the stories in the local papers when his team won or lost, and she knew lots of people in town got all worked up over it, and, frankly, she thought it was all a bit much. All that fuss for nothing. She knew it was important to Andre—too important, really—so she tolerated it. It gave her some of the leverage a mother needs to keep a rambunctious teen in line. She’d tell him, “If you don’t do this …,” or “If I ever catch you doing that…,” it would mean the end of his precious football career.
One afternoon, coming home from practice, Spanky and five of his teammates were picked up by the Pahokee police for stealing oranges off trees in a backyard.
Willie Ola got the phone call at home late that afternoon, after a long day’s work.
“You’ll have to come down here and pick him up, ma’am,” said the cop.
She didn’t have a car, so she had two long miles to stoke her wrath. Among the things in which Willie Ola took great pride was the fact that none of her many children had ever gotten in trouble with the law. When she got to the station, she had to sign her name in a book that recorded Andre’s offense: petty theft.
Confronted with the offender, Willie Ola uttered the three words she had been practicing to herself with every step:
“No more football.”
Andre started to cry.
“Mama, please,” he said. “Whup me, do anything to me, but please, let me play ball.”
“No more football.”
At that point, one of the police officers, moved by Willie Ola’s harsh, swift justice, intervened. He lied.
“With all due respect, Mrs. Perry, I don’t think your boy was one of the ones who actually took any of the oranges. He was just with the others.”
Willie Ola relented. She reduced the sentence to an undetermined period of house arrest.
She left on foot at a stern pace, with Andre walking just a few steps behind. As they walked, he reached back and dropped the oranges he had stashed in his backpack, leaving a guilty fruit trail down the road. “If she turned back once, I’m busted, “he would remember, laughing. “But she was too mad to turn around and look at me.”
By his senior year, Spanky Waters was a local star, feared by opponents as a mean, dirty little player, but beloved by his teammates and his school. Off the field, he had a sweet, decent way about him, but on the field, he became someone else. He worked at it. Before the game he would don his pads and jersey, carefully wrap his forearms, pull on elbow pads, affix his helmet, transforming himself into someone bigger, faster, and stronger, psyching himself up for the violence of the arena.
Andre was good, but not good enough to attract Rickey Jackson-sized interest. Size, sp
eed, and state championships drew college scouts, not intensity and a flamboyant field personality. Coaches use the word “scrappy” to describe a player like Andre, which means The kid makes the most of limited assets.
Still, Coach Russell had connections. Every year he had players like Andre, players with lots of heart and big dreams but minimal prospects. The idea was to sell these kids to Division II schools, use football to get them in the door, and hope they came out four years later with a degree—their ticket off the Muck. He was able to swing Andre a partial scholarship to Alabama A&M and an invitation to try out for the football team at Cheyney State, in Pennsylvania. Cheyney’s coach, Andy Hinson, had spent twenty-two years coaching in Florida, and he knew Pahokee players tended to play better than their size and speed would indicate. With no scholarship money, Coach Hinson could hardly compete for sought-after high-school players. So when he got a call from Coach Russell, who said he had this scrappy boy who deserved a chance, Hinson sent Andre an invitation.
Actually, the Alabama A&M offer was better. They had a bigger program and a tougher schedule. Andre probably wouldn’t get a chance to play much until his junior year, but he’d have time to learn, and if he did grow into a decent college player, he’d get more exposure playing in the football-crazy Southeast Conference. But Andre had his heart set on Cheyney. First, he was under the impression that he had been offered a full scholarship—he hadn’t bothered to read those letters Hinson had been sending him, the ones that explained that Cheyney State had no scholarships to award. Hinson had assured Andre that all he had to do was get himself north to the school and the rest would be taken care of, but “the rest” involved room and board and tuition loans, not scholarships. All Andre heard, of course, was the just-get-yourself-up-here part. To him, that meant a scholarship. Second, Andre had this friend who told him that all the football games played by Cheyney, which was just a few miles outside the big city of Philadelphia, were on television. The magic word for an ambitious young football player is “TV.” Just as TV had turned the NFL into a multimillion-dollar industry, for a player, one big game in front of the cameras could make a pro football career. Andre figured he could intercept the hell out of the ball at Alabama A&M without a scout ever noticing, but if he could get on TV! Weighing a full scholarship— and TV—against the partial deal at Alabama A&M … well, in his mind, it wasn’t even close. Andre (with typically inflated notions of his own talents) figured Coach Russell was pushing Alabama because he’d made promises to coaches there and didn’t want to disappoint them.
“Spanky, man, why do you want to go all the way up to Cheyney?” Coach Russell would ask him. “Don’t you know how cold it gets up there in the winter?”
But the coach knew that arguing with a kid like Andre was hopeless, once his mind was set.
Of course, both of Andre’s assumptions were false.
When Andre got a letter from Cheyney requesting a fifty-dollar room deposit, he was puzzled. He called Coach Hinson and asked, “What’s this?”
“Don’t worry about it,” the Cheyney coach said. “Just pay it and we’ll see about reimbursing you once you’re up here.”
Hinson knew the hard part was getting the kid to show up. Competing against schools who had money to give away, it would have been unwise to unduly stress that Cheyney did not. They sent out all the information, and it was all spelled out clearly for any kid who was paying attention. But kids, being kids, often weren’t paying attention. For a poor kid like Andre, it would take his family every penny they could scrape up to send him north. Once he arrived, he’d have no way of getting home even if he wanted. And it wasn’t like some kind of evil scam, either. Hinson all but adopted the boys he recruited for his program. He took care of the loans and financial-aid packages just as he promised. The kid and his family didn’t have to put up a penny until the kid had his degree, and was presumably in a position to pay. His boys got a chance to play football and they got a college education, and Hinson got a football program that could compete against other schools in his division with more to offer.
Andre had only himself to blame for getting almost everything about Cheyney State wrong. He had looked it up in an encyclopedia in the high-school library. It didn’t say anything about having a bigtime football program, but it did say that the school was a small black college in the Philadelphia area. Andre had this image of attending school in the big city, an exciting, magical place full of beautiful sights, gleaming towers, and glamorous people. After a lifetime on the Muck, out in the middle of nowhere, Andre was ready to go someplace big, someplace where important things happened.
Instead, Cheyney turned out to be set on a wooded campus in the remote rural outskirts of Chester County … in the middle of nowhere! Then at the first meeting of the football team, Coach Hinson got up and started telling the guys how to apply for their bank loans. Andre thought, Well, he be talkin’ to these other boys ‘bout gettin’ bank loans; I’ll wait till after the meeting and talk to him ‘bout my scholarship.
So afterward he stepped up to Hinson. “Coach, you know, how do I go ‘bout gettin’ my scholarship?”
“Son, Cheyney doesn’t give out any scholarships.”
Andre felt like crying. More than a thousand miles from home. All he had in the world was the change of clothes in his traveling bag. They had put him up in a small dorm room with Keith Banks, an offensive lineman. There were two beds with a small table between them and a radio alarm clock on the table.
“Man, I got to leave,” Andre told Keith.
He called home. Willie Ola was off on a picking trip north, so he talked to Anthony.
Anthony told him to stick it out. He figured if he scraped together enough money from his brothers and sisters to buy Andre a train ticket home, the kid would come back, get a job in the fields making two or three hundred dollars a week, and be satisfied with it—and stuck. Anthony called Coach Hinson the next day and got the straight scoop Andre would have gotten from the start if he had been paying attention. He then called his half-brother back and laid out the situation plainly. Cheyney State played Division II football. There was no TV. Chances of a pro contract when he was done were remote, at best. There was no scholarship. While he was trying out for the football team he could share a room in the dorm and take his meals in the cafeteria, but books and tuition money would all have to be borrowed.
“Don’t worry about football,” Anthony told him. “Get an education. If you get a good grade point average in the first semester, and you still want to come home, I’ll help you transfer.”
Andre stayed. He went out for the football team halfheartedly, expecting to be cut every day that summer—looking forward to it, actually. He was playing against grown men now. Cheyney may have been Division II, but just about every man on the field was better than anyone Andre had ever played with or against. He felt that he didn’t measure up, and, what was worse, he wasn’t sure he even cared anymore— no TV, no scholarship, no pro scouts! In his mind, he was putting football and the dream behind him. He told his roommate, “I’ll be glad when they cut me…. I’m going to go ahead and get my education and then transfer.”
But Andre was making a better impression than he thought. He made varsity as a freshman, as a backup to a senior cornerback, and when the senior snapped his thigh muscle in the first game of the season, Andre became a starter. They called him Batman because of the bat wings he drew on his elbow pads, and because of his dark reputation as a hitter. Andre was still small—he stood well under six feet and weighed around 180—but that trancelike violent state he achieved during a football game was something else.
When he finished his four years as a starter at Cheyney, even after earning honors on the small-college circuit, Andre was no closer to playing in the pros than he had been to playing in college after his last game in Pahokee. Once washed out of the Pigskin Sluice, which Andre was in any ordinary sense when college recruiters had ignored him, it was hell getting back in. Andre’s success at Cheyne
y wasn’t even that remarkable. While his eccentricities and desire made him a favorite with his teammates and the fans, he was still just a scrappy ballplayer. Coach Hinson didn’t even consider Andre the best cornerback on the team, that distinction went to a junior named Terence Capers. When you’re the second-best cornerback on a Division II football team with a losing record … well, your light isn’t just hidden, it’s out. Time to knuckle down and get that degree.
Which is pretty much how Andre sized things up in the winter of ’83. It’s a tribute to the extensiveness of the Sluice that pro football paid any attention to Andre at all. He wasn’t invited to any of the NFL’s pro scouting combines, and none of the teams inquired about him—Cheyney not only lacked the elaborate promotional apparatus of the publicity divisions in major college athletic departments, it didn’t have a publicity division.
But after all those years at Penn, Harry Gamble, then working as an Eagles’ scouting assistant responsible for evaluating local talent, had a soft spot for overlooked players from smaller colleges with losing records. He liked what he saw of Andre in films of Cheyney’s games. So Eagles defensive assistant Fred Bruney showed up one afternoon with a stopwatch and a receiving prospect named Willie Tolbert, and put Andre through his paces.
The Eagles didn’t draft Andre, but they invited him to attend their training camp as a free agent.
He never unpacked his travel bag up in Gertrude that summer. The team roomed him with Evan Cooper, a defensive back from Michigan who was their third pick in the draft that year. Cooper knew he was going to make the team. He arrived with three big suitcases full of clothes. Before cut-down days, Andre would lie awake in his bed all night, watching Cooper snore, meditating on the injustice of it all. When he would drift off for a moment, Harry, who was then the Turk, would knock at the door and ask, in that pleasant way Harry has, “Andre, are you ready to go?” Then Andre would wake up. He’d check the door and hall just to make sure he had been dreaming. When his alarm went off he’d suit up and spend another hot day throwing himself around on the practice field like a man possessed. West Chester isn’t far from Cheyney, so Andre would slip out when he got the chance and escape the foreboding to spend the night back in his old dorm with his friends.
