by Bryan Mealer
Benjamin knew that Meyer’s imminent departure would certainly throw Coach Z’s future into question. His decision seemed easier now. In the days afterward, a Seminoles cap remained perched upon his head, yet he gave nothing away.
The nation’s eighth-ranked receiver still told reporters he was undecided. I’d like to see who’s replacing Meyer, he mused. Perhaps I’ll give LSU a second look, he told the Post. He even scheduled an official visit to West Virginia, stirring up the pot even more, then failed to board the plane, saying he was sick.
“I’ll probably hold a press conference,” he finally said one afternoon.
After months of waiting and anticipation, Mario secured a college trip. Coach Field, the recruiting coordinator at Hampton University, had been watching from the stands the previous week against American Heritage. He’d seen Mario rise from the dead like Lazarus and pound his way downfield to set up the field goal that secured the victory. Afterward, he’d arranged to fly the quarterback to tour their campus and athletic facilities once the season was over. Now among the Chosen Ones, Mario could be heard at practice saying, “I can’t wait to take that visit, bwah.”
Davonte and Robert Way had recently returned from their official visit to Marshall, transfixed. In November 1970, the Thundering Herd lost thirty-seven members of its varsity team and eight coaches in a tragic plane crash, an event that still rallied the town of Huntington. It was even the subject of a Hollywood film, We Are Marshall, which Way had watched twice on YouTube before leaving.
In Huntington, the two boys socialized with the team and watched a game; then JaJuan Seider had taken them around town. For Way, it was like football heaven and cast Belle Glade into a harsh new perspective.
“That whole town is green,” he said, referring to the school colors. “Everything surrounds that team. We’d be eating in a restaurant and people would come up to us and say, ‘Yall football players?’ and we’d say, ‘No, recruits,’ and they’d still shake our hands and say, ‘Welcome, hope you can come.’
“I mean, even when the Herd made mistakes on the field, the community backed the team no matter what.”
He could only imagine.
During those weeks, most of the recruiters came to see Davonte and Way. Others came to eyeball the various goods on display with hopes of getting an overlooked sleeper. For the most part, their demeanor was peculiar. The culture of scandal and punishment in college football now dictated their every move. Most were polite but cagey with coaches and skittish around reporters, with whom they were forbidden to speak about potential recruits under NCAA rules. And because they weren’t allowed to speak with players until the season’s end, they tried their best to remain inconspicuous. They hugged the sidelines like Secret Service men, mostly in silence, scribbled things on clipboards, then climbed back into their rental cars and drove away.
Some recruiters didn’t try to hide their disdain for the region, even while feeding from its trough. Former Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin had upset many in the Glades two years before when he’d said this about Pahokee: “There ain’t a gas station that works. Nobody’s got enough money to even have shoes or a shirt on.”
A recruiter from Illinois was just as shameless as he stood on the sidelines at Glades Central. He was good-looking, like Joaquin Phoenix, and seemed proud of himself for having paddled so deep into the heart of darkness.
“So are all these guys involved in crime, or what?” he asked a reporter, and smirked.
Then, later, “You go into their houses and stuff? I bet they all look like shit inside.”
When he heard the answer was negative, that most were actually pretty nice, he looked embarrassed and quickly changed the subject. Later he said he was hoping to lure away a defensive lineman.
If the presence of recruiters on the sidelines incited anxiety or excitement, the Raiders never showed it. Recruiters had simply become part of the late-season landscape, like cane trailers on the highway or the ash that settled each morning on windshields. And despite the enormous dominion the university men possessed over their futures—for they were the rainmakers of the Glades—surprisingly little was even said about them once they were gone. Either they’d already called you or they had not. For the ones who had not been called, the smart ones anyway, all you could do was give a hundred percent when the men entered your orbit and hope to hear something before February. Talking loud about it with your boys only made you look stupid when the call never came. Or that was the thought, anyway.
But on this particular week, all attention was toward O-Town. Starting Monday, Purvis and several teammates gathered for daily prayer, asking God for guidance and clarity. Jaime would awake each night around 3:00 a.m. from dreams of already playing the game; the lights and sounds of crashing bodies left his heart racing too fast for sleep.
Each day after school, both Mario and Way would sit at home and replay film of last year’s championship. They searched for the soft spots in the Tiger line, studied how the secondary stacked up against the pass. Mainly, though, they watched to see themselves lose—to feel that helpless panic again and again as the Tiger lead expanded and the clock ratcheted down to nothing. For Mario, it brought back that emptiness as he watched Cocoa celebrate and the conviction that came, so pure in his guts, that he would walk that field again.
“I’ll bring us here,” he’d told his coach.
For the Glades Central coaches, the preparation focused on pushing Cocoa out of its comfort zone: shutting down their highly efficient running game and making them pass. Compared to the modern red-gun attack of the Raiders, the Tiger offense was an homage to the old breed, a thin but effective playbook of “wing-T” and “power-I” formations.
Coach John Wilkinson would run it until you couldn’t stand it. Wilkinson trusted his rushing attack so much that his quarterback had only executed one pass all postseason.
A key component to stopping the rush was stopping Chevelle Buie—who at that point was still the great unknown. It was still unclear if the running back would be playing on Saturday in Orlando, and Cocoa officials were saying nothing on the matter.
By then, the rumors in Belle Glade about Buie had become absurdly colorful. One had the player brandishing a gun. Someone else on the team said Buie’s only crime was that he’d been caught skipping school.
“Nah, dawg,” a teammate interrupted. “He got caught skippin school and stealin a car. For real, bro.”
With no clear information, all the Raiders could do was practice and prepare for the young man whose legs had beaten them the previous season. Thoughts of crushing Buie and the Tigers were what woke them up in the mornings and put them to bed at night.
“Buie’s ass needs to play,” Hester said that week. “He’s part of their team. That’s the kid who did it to us. If he aint there, then who do we defeat? He’s that diamond-encrusted egg they got in that basket. And we comin to take everything in it. Buie needs to be there.”
• • •
ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, 150 miles north of Belle Glade, a gray and turbulent sky churned over the town of Cocoa. The town was centered in the storied “Space Coast,” just across the Indian River lagoon from Cape Canaveral, the Kennedy Space Center, and the powdery sands of Cocoa Beach. The arrival of the space industry in the 1960s had quadrupled Cocoa’s population, which continued to grow to more than sixteen thousand residents.
But in the past decade, as ambitions of space exploration have diminished, many of the high-paying jobs have moved elsewhere. Cocoa now had the highest poverty rate in Brevard County, at 27 percent, and the lowest number of college-educated residents. And like Glades Central, the high school had been a perennial low performer. In 2006, four administrators had to be removed for rigging the school’s FCAT results.
After school the Tigers hit the practice field at Cocoa Municipal Stadium, located directly across from campus. A heavy drizzle began to fall, pushed sideways by a bitter Atlantic wind that whistled through the rafters. On the field, many of th
e boys wore spirit jerseys underneath their pads that read, COMPLETE THE MISSION. LET’S RIDE TIGERS. There was no sign of Buie.
Athletic director Chuck Goldfarb appeared in a golf cart and got out. He was an older man, tanned and loquacious, the kind who seemed more at home selling oceanfront developments than running a sports program at a scrappy central Florida high school. As the Tigers ran through their drills, he guessed the town was not dissimilar to Belle Glade: too few jobs, too much temptation, and a narrow, stunted worldview. “We have a hard time getting kids to want to leave Cocoa,” he said. “They don’t care to know anything beyond this place.”
Goldfarb came to Cocoa twelve years ago after having won two championships as baseball coach at the regional powerhouse Merritt Island, just nine miles across the river toward Cape Canaveral. When he arrived, the Tiger football team had one of the worst records in the region; in four years they’d won only six games, and they had just one playoff victory in their entire history. Only one coach on the squad had ever played college ball, and two others had never suited up in their lives.
“I fired them all,” Goldfarb said.
Even worse, the Tigers were sharing a home field with their rival, Rockledge High School, giving the team no sense of ownership. So Goldfarb worked with the city to build a $3.5 million stadium, then went looking for a new coach. In 2002 he hired one of the best: Gerald Odom, his old friend who’d won back-to-back state titles at Merritt Island in ’78 and ’79 and was already one of the winningest coaches in the history of Florida high school football.
Known for both his tough discipline and compassion, Odom took a squad of mostly black, no-name teenagers, many of them from broken homes and vulnerable to trouble, and chiseled them into competitors.
“I don’t understand what they’re saying half the time,” the sixty-two-year-old coach told a reporter shortly after arriving. “As long as they understand what I’m saying, though, we’re okay.”
In 2003, Odom got the Tigers to 9–2 and met Glades Central in the regional semifinals, held in Cocoa. The undefeated Raiders were rolling toward their fourth title in six years and, as usual, were brimming with celebrity. Their all-star quarterback, Omar Haugabook, was the state’s leading passer and would later embark on a stellar career at Troy. The Raider firstteam all-state wide receiver, Albert Dukes, would later sign with Ohio State.
But on this night, Odom’s squad of anonymous storm troopers flew out of the gate and kicked the mighty Raiders off their feet. It was an epic fight, with the lead changing five times throughout the night. Haugabook was sacked eight times for losses of eighty-three yards, yet still managed to throw for four hundred yards and four touchdowns. He even ran for one himself.
In what would become the team’s signature style, Cocoa had rallied in the final minutes to execute the fatal plays that mattered most: a fake bootleg fumblerooski that set up the leading touchdown, followed by a forty-three-yard breakaway run that sealed the game. The Tigers went on to eliminate the Raiders 45–35.
After Odom resigned two years later, his methodical style and philosophy were carried over by Wilkinson, his former assistant and disciple. Wilkinson had played offensive guard under Odom at Merritt Island and, after graduating from UF, had come aboard as his offensive coordinator. He’d then followed the coach to New Smyrna Beach, where Odom had transformed the program, and then finally to Cocoa.
“Johnny is just a highly intelligent person, and that transposes to football,” said Goldfarb. “Our kids believe in our coaches. We’ve got the same bad influences as Belle Glade and elsewhere, but our kids have bought into our program and staff.”
That much was clear. Unlike the Raiders, the Tigers practiced mostly in silence. There was no evidence of showboating, no smack talking, no small fires that erupted to derail the schedule. As the offense ran series of old-style sweep plays, bootlegs, and flea flickers, even the B-squad stood attentive along the sidelines. Even more striking was the presence of only six assistant coaches on the field—as opposed to Glades Central’s twelve—each of them locked into his own assignment. There were no jokes, no passing around porn on smartphones, no idlers on the sidelines with vague and dubious titles. There in the cold rain, the scene on the field was almost militaristic, a place where ego and tomfoolery, even passion, had been drilled out of the atmosphere.
And in this absence, there was still no sign of Buie. Goldfarb shook his head at the mention of the running back’s name, then called over Wilkinson.
“Buie’s not going to play,” he said.
When the coach arrived, neither he nor Goldfarb would say what Buie had done, only that he would not be suiting up in Orlando.
“The team will be great without him,” said the coach, who wore a goatee and still carried the stocky build of a lineman. “They know he made a mistake and they’ll do it for him. Buie gets a lot of attention, but we have a lot of talented kids on this team. We’ll see some kids stepping up.”
The next day, both the Florida High School Athletic Association and the Brevard County school board cleared Buie to play, saying they were satisfied with his punishment. But it was the head coach who made the final decision, and the ultimate gamble, to go a step further and bench his marquee player in the biggest game of the season.
As Wilkinson described it to the local paper, he drove over to Buie’s house and told him “eye to eye.” No matter how much he loved Buie as a kid, he said, and no matter how much the team and Tiger Nation thought they needed Buie to play, there was a larger message to deliver.
“There’s consequences to rules,” Wilkinson said. “Nobody is above the program.”
As much as Hester wanted Buie on the field, he knew better than to believe his absence made Cocoa a weaker team. Just from studying film, he knew the Tigers had three other players in their backfield who were capable of feats equal to or greater than Buie’s, boys who’d sunk opponents that season on their own.
If anything, Hester knew that Buie’s absence could only sharpen his teammates’ resolve and, most important, that Cocoa played best when they were down. He’d learned that from watching them beat the Raiders.
But there were other intangible factors, things for which he could not prepare. There was Cocoa’s thirty-seven-game winning streak, now the longest in the state. There was also the fact that all postseason, the Tigers had survived three of the best teams in Florida despite having trouble scoring, and having committed a number of near-fatal turnovers. Even Goldfarb said the Tigers should have lost to Orlando Jones “by four touchdowns.” But still, the team had always caught breaks and found a way to win.
Superstitious as Hester was, he dared not give voice to what kept turning in his mind: the Tigers were playing lucky. And that, above all else, was what worried him the most.
It had been an exhausting week. By now the Raiders had practiced for every possible scenario and honed every conceivable key to victory: the OL blocking Cocoa’s swarming pass rush; shutting down their sweep running plays and ensuring the linebackers and ends didn’t get trapped inside; forcing the five-man front by running the ball into their faces, then pulverizing defensive back Rick Rivers and their secondary with crossing routes and deep passes.
“That DB is soft against receivers,” Hester said of Rivers during film. “We’re gonna go at him all night.”
All week the coaches had stayed late watching film, arguing over strategy and tweaking the schedule. On Thursday evening after practice was over, they gathered in the film room to get out of the cold and ate sausages pulled hot off a parking-lot grill. Coach King, who’d seen a lot of great Raider teams fall over the years, pulled up a chair and looked at every coach in the room.
“I’ve been around a long time, fellas,” he said. “And I think these guys are ready. In my mind, we done won this thing.”
For Hester, it was too early to know. He didn’t see it on Friday afternoon when the team gathered for one last walk-through before leaving. Despite looking dressed for the big dance, wi
th maroon polos and pressed khakis, shoes polished, hair freshly cut with uniform tags across the backs of their skulls that read, simply, STATE BOUND ’10—it was the Old Raiders who’d appeared, dragging ass through their drills, clowning instead of following instruction, still freelancing out in the void. If only they could have seen the way the Tigers had looked in the cold, driving rain.
The coach let out a sigh. “It’s too late for you to change because of who you are,” he said. “And that’s the only thing I’m disappointed about.”
• • •
BUT SOMETHING MUST have occurred on the three-hour bus ride to Orlando, perhaps a slow but sobering register of the kind of battle that awaited. Along the way, the team learned that Glades Day had just beaten Warner Christian in the 1B championship held in the Citrus Bowl, giving the Gators seven titles, one more than both the Raiders and the Pahokee Blue Devils. Taylor had scored the winning touchdown, one of five that afternoon.
The added pressure seemed to purge the boyish energy and align each player into a state of deep reflection. That night in the hotel, the cell phones and gameboards were surrendered and turned off. The hallways were silent. Lying two to a bed, the Raiders went to sleep and played their final game in their dreams.
Boobie found himself standing near midfield. There were lights all around, then loud voices. Screaming. It was Purvis and Buie. They were in some kind of argument and Buie was crying. Why was Buie crying? Where is everyone? Purv, man, come on. We gotta get our stuff on and play. Suddenly the team was lined up on either side, looking at him. Through the row of face masks, he saw their eyes were wide and wanting. He saw the ball perched upon the white line, ready for the kickoff. Boobie took his steps, felt the leather smack his foot just as someone pounded on the door of his room. He shot straight up in bed, looked over at Jaja, who was still asleep beside him. Holy shit.
