by Bryan Mealer
“The feeling has existed for years that the two-city battle was a must on every sportsman’s calendar and both schools treat the situation with all the pomp and ceremony of a Roman emperor returning from the wars.”
The term “Muck Bowl” was coined in 1984 as a way to market the game as a showcase for the talent being exported from the region. But out of all the meetings, Belle Glade maintained the edge. Since ’84, the Raiders had won 18 out of 26 games over the Blue Devils.
“This is our reputation in the community,” said Mario.
Or, as Page put it, “This is the only team we bigger than, so we like to punish those boys.”
• • •
LOCATED EIGHT MILES across the canefields, Pahokee had a history very similar to that of its sister city to the south. In the 1920s, the sleepy fishing camps along Okeechobee’s East Beach were swallowed by the rush to farm the black, fertile muck. By the Second World War, Pahokee shared the title as the “Winter Vegetable Capital of the World” and, like Belle Glade, was a major food supplier to Allied soldiers. Vegetables opened banks and restaurants along Main Street, as well as hotels and a theater, and kept the lights on at the Rotary Club dinners. Before football, Pahokee was most notable as the home of country music singer Mel Tillis, who himself had played for the Blue Devils.
Don Thompson was a living relic of those early days. In 1949, when Don was nine years old, his family left their sharecroppers’ farm in Harrisburg, Arkansas, forty miles west of Memphis, for the promise of abundant wages in the beanfields of the Glades.
The family settled in Pahokee, yet still rode the migrant circuit during summers up to Michigan for strawberries and cherries, Arkansas for cotton, then back home for beans. By the eighth grade, Don had arms like a pipe fitter and weighed over two hundred pounds. When Blue Devils coach Webb Pell spotted Don walking home along a dirt road one day, he slammed on his brakes.
“You’re playing football for Pahokee,” he told him. “Get in.”
Don played middle linebacker and offensive tackle, eventually earning a scholarship to The Citadel, the military college in South Carolina; later he played at Arkansas A&M.
After he graduated, Coach Pell gave him a job as defensive coordinator. In his first year with the team, the mostly young and inexperienced Blue Devils did not win a single game. But hope arrived the following year, when Pahokee leaped ahead of most schools in Palm Beach County and began integrating its schools. While panic gripped the rest of the town, the football coaches were beside themselves. Get down to East Lake High, Pell told Don. Invite those boys to come and play.
Black students at East Lake had the choice of attending all-white PHS or transferring to Lake Shore High in Belle Glade, which would not integrate for another five years. Don needed volunteers, and the way he sold the players on the Blue Devils was his weight program. While in college, Don had become a self-described weightlifting fanatic. He was already strong; he’d been the only cadet at The Citadel whose shirts had to be specially tailored, because his neck was twenty-two inches around, earning him the nickname “Bear.” But it was at Arkansas A&M where he’d first seen a proper strength-training program, something most colleges and high schools were slow to embrace.
Boys in the Glades, both black and white, got strong by lifting crates of cabbage and throwing corn. But Don knew they could become bigger, and besides, “weightlifting is the ultimate team builder,” he believed. He scoured the Glades looking for dumbbells and barbells and had little luck. Finally, a serendipitous event:
“There was a train wreck in Canal Point,” he said. “I went down there when the crew was cutting those rails up and got them to cut them in certain lengths. I weighed them, then added more weight with cement-filled buckets.”
Many of the black players lived in migrant camps outside of town and had to walk to school, so Don began picking them up each morning for training. He’d pull up before dawn, blowing the horn of an old ’59 van that had floorboards so eaten with rust you could see the pavement. Back at the weight room, Don began fattening them up.
“I had the milk truck stop in each morning,” he said. “I’d get these boys to drink a quart of this heavy cream, high-protein stuff. They’d be pumping steel and drinking milk at six in the morning. They’d get sick half the time. But I tell you something—those linemen put on fifty pounds a man. We came back that next year loaded for bear and we kicked butt.”
Mixing black and white students did not happen without problems. At school, there were fights and black students staged walkouts to protest. But on the football field, coaches Webb Pell and Don Thompson saw a mostly seamless transition. Because the school was so small, the coaches were able to field a team of fifteen whites and fifteen blacks, with most everyone getting time. “The white boys were not threatened by their positions. They could all play football,” he said.
As Belle Glade would experience five years later, joining the two teams had the effect of powder and fuse. The integrated Blue Devil team of 1965 included Leopold Sterling, a running back whose raw power was as intimidating as his name. “He had eyes on the sides and back of his head,” said Don, “and legs like tree stumps. He could break arm tackles like wading through water.”
There was middle guard Walter Boldin, aka “Baby Huey,” who, at six foot eight and three hundred pounds, had to wear uniforms patched together with other uniforms. Boldin would play for the Houston Oilers, while tailback Willie McKelton was picked up by the Minnesota Vikings. Defensive back John Osborne went to the Browns.
Back then, before recruiters began their annual pilgrimage to the Glades, a player’s recruitment was only as strong as his coaches’ connections. Pell had ties to West Virginia and FSU and sent many players there. Don knew Red Parker at The Citadel. In 1968 he sent Parker a grainy black-and-white reel of a graduating senior named Norman Seabrooks, who became the first African American ever to play football at the military college.
As racial turmoil still gripped the South, Seabrooks staged a brave and lonesome protest against the traditions of intolerance around him. As team captain of the Citadel Bulldogs, he refused to run onto the field with his fellow teammates while the school band played “Dixie.” Instead, he would run ahead, standing alone and defiant as the all-white crowd belted out the Rebel anthem in a thunderous chorus.
Whereas Jessie Hester cast a permanent light on Belle Glade, in Pahokee it was Rickey Jackson. Drafted by New Orleans in the second round in 1981, Jackson spent thirteen of his fifteen years in the league with the Saints. A six-time Pro Bowler, he was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame in February 2010, twenty-four hours before New Orleans won its first-ever Super Bowl.
Known as “City Champ” in high school, Jackson is still regarded as the best linebacker and defensive end to ever play for Pahokee. Jackson and fellow end Walter “Brickhead” Johnson made the Blue Devils murderous on offenses.
“They didn’t need down linemen,” an opposing coach once told a reporter. “[Jackson and Johnson] covered sideline to sideline. And if you threw, it had to be a three-step drop. You had to get the ball the hell out of there.”
As Jackson’s coach Antoine Russell once put it, “That joker could bust some headlights.”
Both Jackson and Johnson ended up playing at Pitt. But it was little-known Cheyney University where Jackson’s teammate Andre “Spanky” Waters eventually wound up. The Philadelphia Eagles signed Waters as a free agent in 1984, and for the next decade, he starred in one of the hardest-hitting defenses in the league. The hits Waters delivered were meant to maim and cripple or, at the very least, chill the marrow of an opposing quarterback. He once speared Vikings quarterback Rich Gannon in the knees twice on Monday Night Football. He’d done the same to Rams QB Jim Everett, resulting in a rule named after him that forbade defenders from hitting quarterbacks below the waist while still in the pocket. Dan Dierdorf called him a “cheap-shot artist” and nicknamed him “Dirty Waters.”
That battering-ram style not only took a fatal toll on Waters
’s health, but changed the game forever. Waters committed suicide in 2006 after years of crippling depression. It was tissue from his brain that Dr. Bennet Omalu, a neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh, used to finally confirm the connection between concussions suffered in football and early-onset Alzheimer’s, dementia, and depression. In 2010, after a flood of supporting data and lawsuits from former players, the league began ejecting and fining players for helmet-to-helmet hits, sparking debate among erstwhile gladiators over whether their profession was going soft.
• • •
ANDRE WATERS’S NAME appeared alongside those of hundreds of other Pahokee legends on the walls lining the Blue Devil locker room, names that included nine All-Americans; more than thirty NFL players; two Super Bowl champions; and one member of the Hall of Fame; along with forty-four other Blue Devils who were currently playing college ball.
The “Wall of Fame” was actually a row of Dry Erase boards with names carefully scrawled, a project Don originally started in 1985 after he returned to Pahokee as head coach, a position now occupied by his son, Blaze.
From the time his two sons were born, Don had prepped them to become Blue Devils (he’d even named his oldest boy Pell, in honor of his former boss and mentor), though it may not have always seemed that way. Don had left coaching in 1970 to pursue his growing passion for weightlifting. He bought a franchise of a company that sold universal weight machines. For the next fourteen years, the family traveled the country while Don sold weight programs to high school coaches, often demonstrating the equipment by benching the entire four-hundred-pound stack of plates.
“I’d tell coaches to give me a ten-by-twelve-foot room and I’d give them a weight program,” said Don. “I sold them like crazy. I’d go state to state and stay in the swankiest hotels and live like a king. Often I’d forget what town I was in.”
So did his family. During this period, Don, Alice, and the boys moved thirty-six times, switching schools and homes so often that childhood had become a blur to Blaze.
“Remember that farmhouse we lived in?” Don asked his son one afternoon. “North of Atlanta, with the chicken barn?”
Blaze shook his head.
But through it all, Don not only made sure his boys played football, he even held them back a grade to ensure they’d be more physically mature as seniors. In 1981, Don said, the program 60 Minutes even featured Blaze and Pell in a segment about these “football holdbacks.”
“What can I say?” he said, laughing. “I’m a coach at heart.”
Don had always hoped and prayed that his family could one day return to Pahokee. And in 1984 his stars aligned. Pahokee called and wanted Don to build them a universal weight program. When he was finished, they said, they wanted him to deliver a state championship—something the Blue Devils had never won.
• • •
AT THE TIME, both Blaze and Pell were “playing good football,” and just in time to become Blue Devils. Don took the job and delivered on his promise, giving Pahokee its first championship in 1989, beating Port St. Joe by a score of 24–7. By the time Don quit in 1992 because of health concerns, he’d sent twenty-two boys to DI and five to the NFL, including running back Kevin Bouie, who later went to two Super Bowls with the St. Louis Rams.
Unfortunately, Blaze and Pell had graduated before the Blue Devils could win the championship. Pell had gone off to play ball for the Air Force. But Blaze had surprised everyone by turning down his scholarship to Troy State and enrolling instead as a student at the University of Central Florida. After a life steeped in the game, he chose to walk away.
“I’d been playing since I was six years old,” he said. “I was done.”
But as soon as he quit, he felt a hollow place. He returned home after graduation, and just like his dad, accepted a job with the Blue Devils. “Once you get away from something, you realize how much it meant to you,” he said. “I had the opportunity to get back into football. Now I can’t see myself not in it.”
When head coach Joe Marx hired Blaze, he doubled up, pulling Don out of retirement and tapping him as strength coach. Starting in 2003, with father and son together on the Blue Devil staff, Pahokee won five more championships in six years and firmly established the Muck City reputation. In a chilling repeat of Glades Central’s emotional 2006 title run, the Blue Devils clinched the 2008 championship three months after the murder of senior linebacker Norman Griffith. The winning touchdown came with fifty-five seconds remaining on the clock. After the game, when Griffith’s mother wrapped her arms around Blaze after accepting her son’s gold medal, the Citrus Bowl nearly lifted off the ground.
The following year, the team moved into a $9 million, five-thousand-seat stadium across the street from the high school that was named in honor of alum Anquan Boldin. It was the same year the Blue Devils sent thirteen of their twenty-two seniors to Division I programs.
Unfortunately, losing that many upperclassmen sapped the strength and experience from the Blue Devils’ roster and marked the end of its glorious run. Belle Glade could brag that they “don’t rebuild, they reload” whenever their coffers were full, but even the mighty Raiders once went twenty-seven years between titles. By the time the 2010 Muck Bowl arrived, the Blue Devils had won only three games all season. For the first time in a decade, they were not going to the playoffs.
Several days before the game, Don and Blaze were riding golf carts around the stadium, painting lines on the field and preparing to host the Raiders. A rumor in Belle Glade was that the Blue Devils had jinxed themselves when they built the new, fancy digs. They’d stripped the grass and removed the precious black soil underneath to lay artificial turf, then changed their minds, replacing it with topsoil. The new Bermuda grass struggled to grow and died in patches. A maintenance man with the school district said that was what Pahokee deserved for “demucking” their hallowed home ground. They’d taken away the juju.
“We’re just rebuilding,” said Blaze. Unlike his dad, who loved to gab, Blaze could be taciturn and easily annoyed, especially when reporters came around pestering him about his team’s losing record. “We graduated twenty-two starting seniors. It’s been pretty tough to get back to our normal success.”
The Blue Devils’ only hope, he said, was that the Raiders would play to type and come out overconfident. “But the fact is,” he added, “our record is fairly accurate, which is to say we’re not as good as we’ve been in the past. We’ve just gotta play our best game.”
Worse, the Blue Devils star defensive back, Rontavious “Buck” Atkins, had broken his hand the previous week against University. Buck now stood outside the Blue Devils’ locker room with his hand wrapped in a thick, puffy cast. As his team suited for practice, he looked dejected, out of place. Buck was a senior, off to play for the University of South Florida after graduation. Broken hand or not, he wasn’t missing his last dogfight with those GC flyboys.
“People tellin me it could hurt me in the future if I make it worse,” Buck said, referring to his hand, which he’d snapped on an opponent’s helmet while making a tackle. “But this my last Muck Bowl. This a big game, man. Muck Bowl mean everything, man. That’s the game everyone wanna win. If I had to sit out, I’d break down and cry.”
• • •
IN BELLE GLADE, emotions ran just as high. Both Jaime and Davonte caught word that Buck had them marked. (“I’m going for Jaime,” Buck had warned. “And Davonte been sayin how sorry we are. I’ll be lookin for him, too.”) Both sides relished the pregame smack talk as much as the game itself. The Raiders gave it back in spades.
“Buck?” Davonte asked, feigning insult. “Tell Buck the only thing he’ll be lookin at’s the back of my numbers.”
Mario said, “I’m gonna put my helmet right in the center of that field, bwah, right on top of that Blue Devil head.”
The Muck Bowl was like two neglected brothers squaring off in the backyard year after year. Both sides had grown up together, played little league against each other,
shared the same families, hopes, and tragedies. For the Raiders, it was like playing themselves. The scrap and grit of the Pahokee boys should not be underestimated, said the coach.
“Do not look at these people’s records,” Hester told his team. “Do not. My senior year, they must have won two or three games the same way. We were the high-and-mighty Raiders going in there, top dogs, same deal. And they beat us. They beat us. Going into Muck Bowl, it’s always zero-zero.
“Those kids are built of the same creed and gusto as you guys,” he reminded them. “They already know you, so they aint afraid. Just know you gonna have to fight.”
• • •
A CREW FROM ABC News had arrived in town for a story about the Muck Bowl. The pretty brunette reporter had given small video cameras to Davonte and Oliver and asked them to film their lives for twenty-four hours before the big match. On game day, the two weaved through the cafeteria filming the pregame meal of chicken and cornbread, then interviewed teammates in the shop room as they strapped on pads and blasted Lil Boosie.
“What you think about Muck Bowl?” they asked.
“We gon’ punish, dawg.”
Aside from that, there were few words spoken as the team dressed and boarded the two buses to Pahokee. With sheriff’s cars escorting the convoy, the buses blew through red lights, having near misses at intersections, the driver cackling and yelling back, “I’m ya number-one bus driver, don’t worry none, I get yall there!” The laugh could be mistaken as sinister, given the scowling, red-eyed Blue Devil that peered from her straw hat.
After the bus cleared the divider of canefields, it entered Pahokee along state route 715, passing between rows of majestic royal palms that lined both sides of the road. The tailgating had begun in Pahokee before noon; all along Rardin Avenue and Larrimore, men stood over hot grills wearing white tank tops smudged black with soot. Nearing the stadium, the wood smoke grew even thicker and the smell of chicken and ribs seemed to ride on an invisible vapor of booze. Crowds poured across the street from the parking lot. Once they saw the police lights, great cheers rose up from both sides of the road, along with scowls and jeers. The Raiders had arrived in enemy lands.
