by Bryan Mealer
After the realization, Hester and his coaches called a team meeting. “We got one gang on this team,” he told them. “One family.”
By midseason, two of his players had been shot. In September, cornerback Byron Blake was shot in the hand while exchanging gunfire with another man. A month later, linebacker Robert Hardnett was hit in the chest and arm during a gang-related drive-by shooting, which also wounded junior varsity linebacker Carl Vereen—the bullet passing less than half an inch from his spine.
The same week Blake was shot, Pahokee captain Norman “Pooh” Griffith was murdered at a dance in downtown Belle Glade. It was hours after the Blue Devils’ homecoming victory over Jupiter. As Griffith tried to leave that evening, two men blocked his truck while one opened fire through the window, then reached in and snatched his gold chain. A simple robbery, the sheriff concluded.
Griffith had done everything right: he was a decent student, a disciplined player, a regular “house boy,” as people endearingly described children who chose to stay indoors rather than risk going outside. With offers already from Iowa State and Buffalo, Pooh was on his way out.
Hester was quickly overwhelmed, naïve about the new realities of coaching in Belle Glade. He and his assistants were now arranging grief counseling because so many players had been friends with Pooh. His assistants were buying groceries, paying light bills, waiting for the next phone call. So little of the job had anything to do with football. And it dragged Hester out of his comfort zone, put him in a funk.
“Jet’s first year, he didn’t even talk,” said one assistant coach. “He’d say maybe three words to you all practice. You had to get inside that dude’s head to know what was going on.”
Amazingly, the Raiders still went undefeated through twelve games, only to lose in the regional playoffs. For Jet, the love affair with fans endured despite the loss; most agreed it was because Miami Pace had soaked their grass just hours before the game, thus robbing Raider receivers of their God-given ability to separate and explode.
At the outset of Hester’s second season, another scandal befell the team. A local minister named Richard Harris was arrested for sexually assaulting young boys in Belle Glade, several of whom were identified as football players. For years, Reverend Harris had been a fixture on the sidelines and in the locker room, an overeager booster who provided the team with Gatorade, bought shoes and clothes for players, and persuaded parents to let him pick their boys up from practice. Little did anyone know he was also luring kids into his home with promises of college connections, then pressuring them into sex.
In March 2009, burglars robbed Harris’s home and made off with stacks of homemade videotapes showing him with various students and former players. The tapes made their way around Belle Glade before police were able to confiscate them and make an arrest. One fifteen-year-old former player told detectives that Harris asked him, “What would you do to go to college?” before pressing him to perform sex acts.
Despite these distractions, Hester and his staff still managed to pull off their own private victories. Byron Blake, the kid who was shot through the hand, got a scholarship to Arkansas State. Greg Dent, a versatile athlete who coaches had worried would slip into the void, got picked up by the Seminoles. They’d also managed to pull from the brink one of their youngest, most promising linemen.
Robert Way was so bashful that one would assume he had never learned to speak. And with the nickname “Joon-Joon,” the boy’s sweet nature seemed to drip out like honey whenever his mother, Shawanna, would call it. But trouble had wooed and beguiled Robert, and often his mother would have to pull him close when the siren song of country hood life became overbearing. In that world, he was an actor trying on deadly poses.
During his sophomore year, his best friend, Willie “Gene” Thomas, was shot and killed inside the trailer park next door to Glades Central, another bloody chapter in the long-standing feud between rival gangs. Months later, a car full of gang members pulled up on Robert and some friends. When the boys jumped out to fight, one of them bobbled and dropped a pistol. Robert’s younger brother later found the gun buried in Robert’s laundry hamper. Shawanna turned it over to the sheriff, explaining that her son had discovered it on the road.
Later, when Robert beat a kid in school and stole his iPod, the kid’s mother called the police and threatened to press charges. The school had Robert on a surveillance camera, they said. At her wits’ end, Shawanna tried sending her son to live with his father in Georgia, who refused to take him. The only man who seemed to know how to speak to him was his coach. Having just pulled Robert onto the varsity squad, Hester staged an intervention, along with Shawanna and his coaching staff.
“The rest of your life can be decided today,” Hester told him. “You can either choose to be great, or become just another dead jitterbug on the street that nobody remembers.”
The confrontation broke Way down into tears; then he chose to be great. Within months, his GPA rose to 3.0. The next season, Way recorded 146 tackles, thirty-nine for negative yardage, and twenty-seven sacks. The last was a school record previously held by Ray McDonald Jr., now a defensive tackle with the San Francisco 49ers, who phoned Robert to congratulate him. As Way excelled on the field, the Post published a story about the great transformation of the Raiders’ young lineman. The scholarship offers came trickling in.
But certain fans—the most vocal ones anyway—did not register such victories. After the Raiders lost to Cocoa later that year under the lights of the Citrus Bowl, before God and the Glades, the relationship quickly soured. Hester, the hometown legend, became just another stupid coach. Within hours of Hester leaving Orlando, someone rang his phone, drunk, saying, “Jet, if I ever see you on Fifth Street, I’m gon’ shoot yo ass.” Other callers threatened to burn his cars, his home.
It was all money talking, lost and gone money. Gamblers had always frittered away their Friday paychecks in the bleachers, eyes dancing with gin, wagering on everything from point spreads to total receiving yards before the half. A bookie named Pie ran numbers on Raider games from a cinder-block social club across the street from the school. Hurricane Wilma had blown the roof off the club’s upper floor, which still sat gaping under the Florida sun. At home games, there could easily be hundreds of dollars on the line. For a championship, tens of thousands.
The Raider fans had always filled that symbolic “twelfth man” position, yet to great extremes. At Effie C. Grear Field, so went the joke, the bleachers were merely a place to fit the fifteen hundred assistant coaches. But even that implied a kind of playfulness. The fans were more of a variable, ever-shifting force, like weather over the ocean. As Jenkins, Werneke, and Snead could attest, they were a force that could both carry you and bury you, one that could undermine your authority and render you powerless.
• • •
HESTER SAW DARK forces in every direction. On this soupy August afternoon, he sensed them along the fenceline where a group of fans gathered to watch the first week of practice. They were fathers and uncles and men from the club across the street, many of them former players or those whose circumstances had never allowed them such status.
A lineman named Gator had failed to produce sixty-five dollars for his equipment and physical, and now trotted out to where they stood. Helmet in hand, he slowly made his way down the line collecting bills and small change. As Gator counted his loot by the fence, the men gathered around, jabbing the air with their fingers. Coaching.
“I tell the kids one thing, and these guys tell ’em another,” Hester said. “Somebody’s always in their ear. Come game time, they can’t remember nothin.”
Subversion had infected his own coaching staff, which he’d been forced to purge. Over the past two seasons he’d fired two assistants who were reversing play calls, thwarting his control, going above the program. One had even screamed at the boys after the loss to Cocoa, calling them quitters.
“Some of those guys didn’t see it like I did,” he said, “like a
high school game. It was too big to them and I had to let them go.”
The coaches had been former Bobcats and Raiders, men who’d been part of the program for decades. Their dismissal had caused a backlash among many fans, due partly to the men Hester hired to replace them. Out of his twelve assistant coaches, four had never worn the maroon and gold. Even worse, one was from Connecticut. In fact, the only person to carry over from Snead’s staff was assistant head coach Sam King, who’d overseen special teams for Glade Central for thirty-one years. Nobody fired Sam, especially someone as superstitious as Jet. Sam King was the Raiders. The man came with the field.
As for the other coaches, Hester felt the Raiders needed more than just hard-nosed football guys. Given the kinds of problems affecting his team, what the kids needed most of all were mentors.
“The coaches I chose are guys who worked well with kids, guys who kids would respond to,” Hester said. “You want people who are there for the right reasons.”
Kids responded to defensive line coach Sherman Adams, the interloper from Hartford, especially when he’d load his SUV with linemen after practice and spring for fried chicken. Sherm stood six foot seven and worked for Geek Squad in West Palm Beach installing televisions. Despite Sherm’s Yankee roots, Hester and the others had accepted him as a born-again muckstepper. He even spoke of “sprinkling some of that in your food” for strength and magic. Until Sherm started eating muck, he said, he and his wife had been unable to have children. “Now we got a beautiful baby girl. There’s power in this ground.”
During summers, the boys pumped iron with strength coach JD Patrick, who was another assistant who’d never been a Raider. In fact, JD had been so small in high school that his nickname was “Squeaky.” A sharp mind for numbers and electronics had later served him well in the army, where he’d worked at Fort Bliss preparing the Hawk missile for deployment. Once out, he’d gotten through a nasty divorce by embracing weightlifting, which added bulk and kept him lean and strong in his later years. He was now a youthful man of fifty-five, with a new wife and a two-year-old daughter at home. And despite a bald patch on top, JD let his salt-and-pepper hair grow long in back, almost to his shoulders. Aside from coaching, he worked as Belle Glade’s director of parks and recreation. His office was inside the community recreational center off MLK Boulevard where the team did their summer workouts.
The kids responded to Randy Williams, the running backs coach. He’d played on the fabled Raider teams of the mid 1990s that had produced so many pros. After graduation, he ran the football on a scholarship at Savannah State before a broken ankle and tibia ended his career. He now worked as an officer at Glades Correctional Institution, transporting inmates to trials and appointments. At school he spoke the kids’ language and often dished hard advice to any potential “danks and jitterbugs” who’d show up bleary-eyed and loiter on the sidelines.
“Stop being a dank,” he would tell them.
But out of Hester’s coaches, Greg Moreland was the most beloved. He was two years older than Hester, with a shiny bald dome and a sculpted goatee that he kept dyed jet black. His job as a counselor at a youth mental-health facility in Jupiter had given him an easy, natural rapport with players, many of whom he’d given nicknames such as “Standstill,” “Little Hands,” and “Muscle Mutt.”
His own nickname was “Q,” which was short for “GQ,” which he’d earned after spending some time once as a male model. For a football coach, Q had personal style to spare, from the fifty-six pairs of shoes in his closet to the white convertible Sebring he drove to practice with late-seventies-era Isley Brothers playing softly in the deck.
What kids loved most was Coach Q’s bawdy humor, which was irresistible. On a road game later that season, he would leave the team weeping with laughter after complimenting a woman on her eyes, then asking, “If God forbid anything ever happened to you, could I take them things out and keep ’em in a pickle jar?”
His conquests in the bedroom were also public information. “I’m taking my Cialis early,” he announced once at the end of practice. “I told my wife to get ready, ’cause tonight I’m puttin on the cape and jumpin off the dresser.”
Another time he confided, “Cats and midgets terrify me.”
• • •
AS PRACTICE GOT under way, the coaches busied themselves dragging bags of footballs and water, reading excuse notes from doctors and mothers, organizing warm-ups—squats and high knees, lunges and jumping jacks. They downloaded football apps on each other’s phones. They ate candy.
Coach Q and a few others stood around Greg Hall, the heavyset receivers coach whom they called Minute. Hall was one of Hester’s oldest friends and now worked as a sheriff’s deputy. He also struggled with diabetes.
“Minute don’t carry a gun ’cause they know he got the sugar,” Q said. “When they send Minute out, all they give him is a flashlight and a roll of quarters.”
He straightened his face, all serious. “They know he could go at any time.”
Hester, behind dark sunglasses, paid no attention. He was busy watching his young squad slowly trickle onto the field while trying to ignore the newspaper article he held in his hand. Mario was already loosening up. Robert Way and Davonte Allen were getting dressed. But there was no sign of Benjamin. In fact, half the team was already late.
“Let’s go,” he said. “You jitterbugs done wasted enough time.”
“Hey, Coach Hester,” one player yelled. “You seen us in the papers?”
The coach just scowled.
After the team gathered for prayer and fell into laps around the field, Hester finally looked down at the USA Today cinched under his clipboard. The paper’s preseason Top 25 poll listed Glades Central at number twenty-one in the nation.
Hester hated national rankings. The way he saw it, of all the outside forces working against him and his coaches, a national ranking only gave them footing. Rankings were a distraction that built false hope and ratcheted expectations. They also gave life to a growing sense of entitlement that many believed had infected the program for years.
As far as expectations, the Raiders’ dominating performance at the seven-on-seven in Tallahassee had certainly fed the community’s hopes of another title run. Several weeks later in Tampa, the NFL had hosted its annual seven-on-seven with elite teams from all over the country. Already the reigning champions, the Raiders clinched the title again.
But these tournaments were deceiving because they were merely a showcase for the flyboys who came a dime a dozen in the Glades. They provided no window into the health of the team’s interior core, which was the offensive and defensive lines. And like rankings, they told you little about the character and chemistry of the squad.
Standing at practice, Hester looked out at the group of kids crowned one of the best teams in the nation. As much as he loathed the rankings, it was something he desperately wanted to believe. After two years of trying to weed out the bad elements, instill discipline, and buffer the outside forces, this was the crew he’d been waiting on. This was the squad he and his coaches had groomed since they were freshmen and sophomores, the ones they’d hoped to inspire into believing in themselves and the program. These were the guys who’d come together as “one gang, one family” and deliver Glades Central its seventh title. And for Hester, his very first.
But now, taking inventory, he began to wonder.
It was already clear his offensive line was a disaster. The few precious linemen who weighed over 250 pounds were slow and out of shape. Realizing their value in the land of cheetahs, many of them had blown off the mandatory summer workouts.
“They don’t show up ’cause they know I need ’em,” Hester had complained at the time. “These boys got my hands tied.”
His two centers—Travis Salter and Kevin Edourd, a soft-spoken Haitian whom everyone called Cubby—now gasped during sprints and wobbled in the heat. Cubby couldn’t even make it twice without taking a knee. Corey Graham and Brandon Rodriguez, the two
guards, looked on the verge of needing an ambulance.
The OL had been the weak link in the previous year’s squad, especially against Cocoa. The Tigers had sliced them apart and hammered away at the quarterback, Leron Thomas, rattling his focus and forcing the key interception that turned the game.
The crushing loss in Orlando seemed to have provided little motivation. Only Gator, whose real name was Tavious Bridges, appeared hardy and fit. He ran his sprints with the same crazed smile that greeted his opposing defenders, one that jacked his eyes open wide and revealed a mouthful of giant white teeth.
“Is that why they call you Gator?” someone asked him.
“Nah,” he said, “I’m just physical in everything I do.”
The same could be said for Jatavis “Jaja” Brown, the junior linebacker now running shuffle drills. Last season, it had been Jaja and the tight Raider secondary that had largely carried the team. Now that Hester was seeing the shape of the OL, he hoped Brown and his boys could do it again.
He loved watching Jaja play football. The kid was a throwback to a bygone era, with straight-backed posture and a body sculpted by milk, push-ups, and mornings on the dikes. Even the way he tucked his sweats down into his socks was reminiscent of C. W. Haynes and the ironmen from the proud old days. At six foot one and two hundred pounds, he was blessed with blazing muck speed and ferocious power. Running backs remembered him the next morning. So did college recruiters who saw his film. Jaja already had multiple offers from Division I programs.
But his ferocity on the field was betrayed by a terrible shyness. He rarely spoke in public, and when he did, the words came out soft and measured.
“The boy don’t say much,” said Hester. “But he shows up for work.” Of the players on the Raiders who reminded Hester of himself, one was Jaja.
The other was Jaime Wilson, the Raiders’ number-two receiver, who now practiced hand drills with the rest of the corps. One by one, the flyboys burst off the line and hooked in front of Coach Hall, who fired footballs straight into their faces. In such drills, Jaime’s hands were a thing to behold, trapping the hurtling projectile with a graceful, gentle touch.
