by Bryan Mealer
“They were off to rob someplace and wanted me to go,” he said.
When he refused, one of the men said, “We know where you live.”
He told them to hit the block. When they circled back around, he’d left ten dollars by the gate.
Mindful of such stories, many of the pros who came home for brief periods made it a point to lie low, never pulling out rolls of cash or wearing heavy jewelry. Flashiness had never been part of Hester’s nature, and the fame and money he garnered while in the league did little to change that. Aside from owning a few sports cars during his playing days, Hester had never been comfortable with extravagance.
For her book Battle’s End, Caroline Alexander tracked down her former student athletes from the 1981 Seminole football team to follow up on their lives. In 1994, she found Hester at his family’s modest ranch home in Wellington that he’d bought several years earlier. Entering his ninth year in the league, he was the same Jessie whom Alexander remembered: polite, thoughtful, and downplayed.
“He was dressed very simply in jean shorts and a T-shirt,” she wrote. “Shining with mesmerizing brightness from his wrist, however, was a gleaming diamond-studded Rolex.”
Throughout their interview, Hester kept fingering the watch “with something approaching disdain,” until finally he addressed it. “This is a flashy watch,” he said. “But I didn’t buy this—my money bought it.” Lena had purchased the Rolex as a gift, he explained. At first, Hester had carried it in his pocket until coins started scratching the face. Terrified of leaving it lying around, he had no choice but to wear it. “She thought that I would like it,” he said. “I told her, you know … don’t do it again.”
Now, more than a decade into retirement, Hester drew a pension from the NFL and earned money on his properties, although most months he wound up floating many tenants who couldn’t pay their rent. Lena worked full time and the family still lived in the same house. “With the same old bathrooms that were here when we bought it,” Lena once said, annoyed. “He’ll use something till it can’t be used no more.”
Aside from the gold nameplate that Jet wore around his neck, his only outward indulgence seemed to be a few gadgets: an iPad and video camera, and in place of the diamond-studded Rolex, a bulky watch phone that he often labored over with a stylus.
These toys, along with Hester’s pension (the amount of which was often debated in town), were enough to inflate his mystique and incite wonder and misconception. “You know Jet,” his assistants would sometimes say to punctuate a conversation. “He don’t gotta work.”
“The man’s a millionaire,” another once said. “Yet he still chooses to come home and help these kids.”
But the real reason Jessie returned to the Glades after retiring was not “to give back to the youth of his hometown,” as Coach Knabb told the Friday-night crowd on homecoming. Not yet, anyway. All of that would come later. What brought him home was the fear of losing his family.
In the early nineties, while he was still playing for the Colts, his mother had been shot. One of her boyfriends had pulled a gun on another man. The gun went off and the bullet struck Zara’s leg, putting her in the hospital. There were other issues with Zara that Hester kept private. And long before these incidents, Jessie’s sister Agnes began struggling with the addiction that would eventually lead to her death.
A thousand miles away in Indy, Jessie felt powerless. In addition to his mother and Agnes, both Anthony and Cora still required assistance. It was becoming too much for Roger and their grandmother to handle. The two were calling more and more, asking Jessie to come home.
“I thought I’d best get a little closer in case something happened,” he said. “I felt like I carried weight with the family and I was in a better position to hold things down.”
So he came back and bought the house in Wellington, far enough away from Belle Glade where Lena wouldn’t feel so “countrified.” And for years it was where Jessie would return each evening after days back home, deflecting the same dark forces that would later come against him as a coach.
Leaving home was on KB’s mind. Not just leaving, but the whole buildup to the great exit, when he would stand on Glades Central’s auditorium stage on Signing Day and bestow on the university of his choice the gift of his talents.
Whereas Hester had gone into hiding during his recruitment, Benjamin relished the courting, devouring the bait of praise and promise that the recruiters left in trails toward their locker rooms.
After KB’s junior season, there had been a rush to secure an early commitment. Alabama head coach Nick Saban had personally visited Benjamin at Glades Central just months after the Crimson Tide had won the national championship. The coach had seen KB’s highlights and told him he had the build and style of Julio Jones, the Tide’s standout receiver.
“He was down-to-earth,” Benjamin said of Saban, whom Forbes once called “The Most Powerful Coach in Sports.” “I didn’t really know who he was.”
But by senior year, Benjamin had narrowed his choice down to the University of Florida and Florida State. Both programs had already hosted him at summer camps and tournaments and each felt it had a shot. Following September 1, the date by which NCAA rules allowed coaches to begin personally contacting players by phone (one call per week until season’s end) and visiting practice (only to watch, never to speak), both programs assigned their receivers coach the daily task of winning his favor.
For the Seminoles it was Lawrence Dawsey, the former FSU wide receiver who’d played seven years in the league, mainly with Tampa Bay. During the Raiders’ homecoming victory over Boca Raton, in which Benjamin had three catches for over seventy yards and a touchdown, Dawsey stood tall by the Glades Central end zone in a pair of pressed jeans and cowboy boots.
“This place, they got speed like nowhere else,” he said. “Every year you can find a receiver, DB, or running back. It’s just unreal. These boys can run.”
Dawsey had extra help on the ground from Mike Morris, another former Seminole. Back in 1990, Morris was one of the top ten offensive guards in the nation until a broken foot ended his playing career. He’d grown up in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, site of devastating race riots in the late sixties and early eighties that left it one of the poorest and most violent sections of town. So tough, Morris would brag, “it makes Belle Glade look like Candyland.”
And like Belle Glade, Liberty City produced phenomenal athletes, so many that the Miami Hurricanes built their championship football program in the 1980s from players recruited primarily from that area.
Morris went into law enforcement after college and was now a lieutenant with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. His turf was Belle Glade, and all over town the mucksteppers knew him as Big Mike. He’d put on weight from his playing days, and even then he’d struggled to keep himself under three hundred pounds. In a town where many felt under constant siege by the law, Big Mike could be trusted. If you wanted to report something in confidence, you called Mike. If your boyfriend was locked up and you needed information, you called Mike.
His pickup was a constant fixture in the quarter, where he’d crawl with the windows open so people could approach and present their case. Often he’d stop outside the boardinghouses and ask if there were any kids inside, then pull out backpacks filled with school supplies. At the Popeye’s Chicken on Main Street, not even the mayor was given such a rousing welcome.
Still wistful about his college days, Mike remained a fervent booster for Florida State. He and his wife, Melanie Bolden, one of the vice-principals at Glades Central, took handfuls of students each year to FSU and other colleges for motivational tours, helped them fill out admissions and scholarship applications, and volunteered as mentors. Kelvin Benjamin had been one of the kids they’d adopted, and now Mike was determined to use his leverage to deliver him to the Seminoles.
For the University of Florida, it was Zach Azzanni, a young and tenacious receivers coach who channeled the polished intens
ity of his boss, Urban Meyer. The Florida head coach had first hired Azzanni as a graduate assistant a decade earlier at Bowling Green. Now back with Meyer after three seasons at Central Michigan, “Coach Z,” as he was known to players, already carried an aura of Gator dynasty.
The first time Azzanni actually saw KB up close was at basketball practice during Benjamin’s sophomore year. Azzanni was visiting on behalf of CMU when one of the football coaches steered him toward the gym and said, “You gotta watch this kid run around.” Benjamin didn’t need pointing out, with his long arms, loose hips, and powerful legs. He was the biggest guy on the court, playing like a slippery point guard.
It took Azzanni all of two minutes to imagine what kind of damage KB could do to a secondary. He also realized Benjamin could be the biggest recruit of his career. By the next season Azzanni was recruiting for the Gators and held the power to make it happen. He started e-mailing and called when he was allowed to call. Over time, he got to know Chris, Frank, and Tan and started building a relationship.
“With a kid like that, you have to be on top of it daily,” Azzanni said. “There were so many people in his ear. His mind could be swayed every single day. I never took a break recruiting him.”
During the summer after his junior year, KB attended a football camp in Gainesville, where he outshone some of the best recruits in the nation. For being so raw, Azzanni said, “he had a savvy for the game. He had a knack for getting himself open. Our guys were just in awe of what he could do. I don’t think even KB knew how much he could do.”
That kind of raw naïveté helped explain why KB, whenever discussing his own recruitment, did so without the slightest trace of vanity. On the field, he rarely boasted. Rather, one got a sense that Benjamin was as genuinely astonished by his newfound gifts as were the coaches pursuing him.
“Coach Z called me last night,” KB said one day at practice. “Said I’d be a threat on their team and get them to the national championship. Said I’m not like a regular receiver with the height and speed I got. It’s not all hype. I know it’s true.”
• • •
DAWSEY’S BOSS, JIMBO FISHER, had been calling Benjamin since the Raiders’ game in Dallas, joking that KB should swing up to Norman, Oklahoma, where the Seminoles were playing the Sooners, to score a couple of touchdowns.
“Coach Jimbo tells me I got Randy Moss syndrome. That’s how he describes my style,” he said.
It wasn’t just Fisher and his assistants who made the comparison, but Randy Moss himself. At the annual Heath Evans Foundation 7 on 7 Championship held that summer in West Palm Beach, Moss appeared on the sideline in a golf cart and followed the team through several matches. After the competition was finished, KB described how the All-Pro wide receiver approached him.
“You look good out there,” Moss told him. “In fact, I look at you and see myself when I was younger.”
“That’s crazy,” answered Benjamin, of all things to say.
“I don’t get nervous around celebrities,” he added. “Randy Moss is my size. In fact, I’m probably a little bigger.” (Which was true: KB had Moss beat by two inches and twenty pounds.)
On the Saturday after the Raiders’ homecoming victory, Benjamin traveled to Gainesville for the Gators’ game against LSU. The school had invited dozens of potential prospects from around the state to mingle with players on the sidelines, talk with coaches, and see the facilities. But after the game, which the Gators lost, it was KB whom Coach Z tapped on the shoulder and ushered into the locker room to meet the head coach. On Monday, Benjamin could hardly contain his excitement as he recounted the exchange.
“Coach Meyer seen me and said, ‘What’s up, freak?’ He always calls me that. He calls me that because the way I’m built, you see. He aint never seen no one my size who can run so fast. And because I got a long wingspan and stuff like that. And because I’m crazy on the field and be catching balls like crazy and stuff like that. He says they don’t have that big target, that first-round NFL draft pick, on the team right now. That’s why they been losing.”
A few days earlier he’d expressed concern that the UF offense, now without Tebow, was having trouble executing in the red zone. On his list of pros and cons, it was one of the biggest strikes against the Gators.
“But I been thinking about that lately,” he said, reconsidering. “And you know, they don’t have me yet. I’m not on that team.”
He paused to tie his cleats, then added, “Anywhere I go I’m gonna get play.”
Didn’t it depend on the program? he was asked.
“Not really,” he said. “Anywhere.”
• • •
ANYWHERE WAS EXACTLY where Mario hoped to end up. His great exit had not revealed itself. When he was a junior, Hampton University had pursued Mario as a linebacker. Coach Stephen Field, the team’s recruiting coordinator, had recently called Mario again and reaffirmed their interest.
Among the coaches in the Glades, the small historically black college in Hampton, Virginia, had a reputation as a kind of bottom feeder—albeit a worthy one—that snatched up muck players who’d been kicked out of bigger programs for either bad grades or trouble.
It was where Pahokee’s Nu’Keese Richardson had landed the previous year after getting booted from Tennessee. The wide receiver had caused so such commotion when he’d spurned the Gators and ’Canes and signed with Lane Kiffin’s Volunteers that photographers used to follow him around the Walmart in Knoxville. But a week after scoring his first touchdown as a freshman, he was arrested for armed robbery outside a Pilot convenience store. Kiffin banished him from the team, and after getting three years’ probation, Richardson was seen at Hampton’s spring practice.
And just months earlier, former Raider running back Antwon Chisholm was about to begin his freshman season at Marshall University when he was arrested for first-degree robbery in Huntington, West Virginia. According to police, he and several teammates allegedly robbed a pizza deliveryman outside their dorm. Marshall immediately revoked his football scholarship. Days after posting bail, Chisholm was also on Hampton’s rotation. “And without learning a damn thing,” Hester said.
Two former Glades Central coaches were now at Hampton, including Willie Snead, the head coach who’d won the 2006 title, ensuring that the pipeline from the Glades to Virginia would remain steady. After Coach Field’s phone call, Mario was ebullient and relieved, even adding HAMPTON PLAYMAKER #1 as his text-message signature. But after six weeks he’d received only one other phone call. Still, it was enough to keep his hopes alive. “They know I got a positive mind-set,” he said. His signature now read: I’M THA MAN IN MY CITY.
Marshall University was another school that had established a recent presence in the Glades, hoping to tap its talents for years to come—and, if at all possible, to lure KB to the program that had produced his NFL idol, Randy Moss. Marshall’s weapon in that campaign was JaJuan Seider, the son of Glades Central’s former athletic director and older brother of Jyron, the slain Raider linebacker.
JaJuan was the handsome, easygoing quarterback for the storied 1994 Raider team that went on to produce many NFL players, including Fred Taylor and Reidel Anthony, both first-round draft picks. Along with Ocala’s Daunte Culpepper and Shaun King in St. Petersburg, Seider was part of a rising group of young black quarterbacks in Florida that were being heavily recruited by colleges nationwide.
With offers from Miami, Tulane, Clemson, and Notre Dame, he eventually chose West Virginia. But after playing under the shadow of Marc Bulger for three long years, Seider transferred to Florida A&M, where he made up for his college career in one season, passing for 2,512 yards and twenty-seven touchdowns and earning an All-American honor.
The San Diego Chargers selected him in the sixth round in the 2000 draft. One night after training camp, while having a late dinner with fellow quarterback Jim Harbaugh, Seider received word that his little brother had just been murdered in Belle Glade. With his family devastated and mourning at home, Ja
Juan spent the season in a fog of grief and depression. The Chargers released him the following year.
“I could never get back into it,” he said. “It was just too much to deal with. I just had to be with my family.”
JaJuan was now the running backs coach for the Marshall Thundering Herd, and one of his official duties was recruiting in the muck. To him it was clear that signing KB was a long shot, especially with the Gators and Seminoles fighting for his attention. So JaJuan had turned his focus on other players, particularly Robert Way and Davonte, the latter of whom also happened to be his cousin. The Herd had made offers to both players, and JaJuan was setting up their official campus visit for later that season.
When JaJuan was in town, he was usually joined on the sidelines by his old friend and teammate Roosevelt Blackmon, who now worked as Glades Central’s assistant athletic director. Watching the adulation and attention heaped on young recruits must have left a grin on Blackmon’s face. For if there was ever a story to inspire a fat, struggling quarterback or a half-pint lineman, it was the story of Roosevelt Blackmon.
Blackmon’s nickname growing up was Tadpole, and his size was true to label. When he’d tried out for the mighty Raiders as a freshman, the coach had looked down at the scrawny, ninety-five-pound weakling and shaken his head. The best they could do for him was water boy. He’d hauled water his sophomore year, too, the only role he could manage on a team stacked with talent.
By senior year he’d added sixty pounds and made starting receiver, but he was no glimmer in any recruiter’s eye. Roosevelt Blackmon was not among the names in the basket of faxes and correspondence. So he made it happen himself.
One of his class assignments that fall was to write to a college and request an admissions application. Blackmon sent letters to Florida and Miami, listing his home address as the Raider football office. The next week, the letters started appearing in the basket, never mind what was inside.
