by Bryan Mealer
The thing with Hampton upset Gail. She was still hot when she called Canisa Friday morning. “How can those coaches not even call him?” she said.
But Gail was never one to lie down. “The power of life and death is in the tongue,” she always told her niece. “Speak life and you will speak things true.”
She’d spoken life to Mary’s doctors at the hospital those many years ago (“My sister is gonna walk outta here!”), and now Gail was speaking life to Mario’s uncertain future.
“Just because one person passed him up,” she said now, “doesn’t mean someone else won’t come and get him.”
Canisa and Gail spoke on the phone nearly every day, usually for an hour or so. But for some reason Friday was a marathon. The two of them jawed well into the afternoon, covering just about everything. Gail said she was having dreams, the way she did, but more of them recently. She was dreaming of her mother and father, both of whom had passed. A few nights after Mario’s all-star game, she’d even seen her sister Mary. “The dream was about her and my mom,” Gail said, “but I still haven’t been able to put it together.”
For Canisa, talking with Gail was effortless, like having a conversation with herself and her mother at the same time. They even talked again at nine thirty that evening. Gail was already in bed, and she sounded tired and maybe a little sick. She wanted to know if Canisa and Mario were still coming to stay the night tomorrow for church on Sunday. Canisa told her, “Yes, we’ll be there. I’ll call you in the morning.”
But that night, alone at home, Gail died in her sleep.
Her goddaughter Ginell found her body the next evening, still under the covers. Her hands were clasped under her chin. “Like an angel,” said Canisa. The family suspected she had suffered a heart attack.
Canisa heard the news as she prepared to drive to Gail’s house. She’d started doing laundry that morning and completely forgotten to call as she’d promised. Then her cousin Carmen rang and said, “Have you talked to my mom? I’ve been trying her all day.” Strange, Canisa thought, Gail always answers her phone. Something instantly felt wrong, as though the temperature had dropped. Canisa dialed and dialed and only got Gail’s voice mail. She began to pray, Please God don’t let anything happen to my auntie. She’s all I got left. Her cousin called back and said Ginell had a key and was on her way over. The next thing Canisa heard was that they’d found Gail’s body. She dropped the phone and began to scream.
Mario was at a classmate’s house for debutante practice, along with Les’Unique and several of his Raider teammates. He took the call outside from his nephew William Likely. “Get home,” Will said. “They found Auntie Gail. She’s dead.” Mario repeated the news to Les’Unique but he refused to believe it himself. “We’re going to her house tonight,” he kept saying. As Les’Unique stood by, crying, Mario frantically paced the yard and dialed his auntie’s number.
“She’s gonna answer,” he said, trying again and again. “I know she’s gonna answer.”
They buried Gail at Foreverglades in the same crypt as Mary and James. After that day, Mario felt as if he would drown. He drifted for weeks, snagged on the painful debris that Gail’s passing shook loose. Often he’d find himself just driving, past Pahokee and around the lake, then back to Belle Glade, up one street and down the next. He started spending time with older friends, “doing things I shouldn’t do,” he said. People were worried, especially Hester.
“We cannot let that boy slip away,” he said.
By late spring, Mario began to resurface. That resilience he’d developed as a kid helped him regain focus and concentrate on graduating and, more important, getting out of Belle Glade. He’d managed to keep his grades strong, enough that Florida A&M offered Mario an academic scholarship. But, still wanting to play football, he passed on the opportunity to consider other options. The only other interest came from a junior college near Chicago. Then finally, in July, Mario got a call from North Carolina Central University in Durham.
Henry Frazier III, the Eagles’ head coach, wasn’t interested at first in the chubby, undersized kid he saw on film. But one of his assistants who’d met Mario kept pressing. “This guy’s a player, Coach,” he said. “This kid can play.”
They brought Mario up for a visit. One conversation changed Frazier’s mind. “There was just something about him,” he said. “He exudes confidence. I went against all the recruiting checkpoints. I knew we had to get him on this team.”
Frazier ended up redshirting the entire freshman class. Even on the scout team, Mario kept standing out. “He just started emerging, like the voice of the class,” he said. “This is when I started paying close attention.”
Frazier told a story about a midseason game when the Eagles were getting pulverized by Morgan State. At halftime, the score was 42–3. Frazier was so upset that he took a seat outside the locker room, put his head down, and tried to gather himself before going inside.
“Suddenly I felt this hand on my shoulder,” he said. “It was Mario. He kind of grabbed me and stood me up, looked at me, and said, ‘Coach, keep your head up. Keep your head up, Coach.’ Then he said, ‘I promise you this won’t happen when my class is playing.’ Here was this freshman who’d been there two months. But I believed him. I kind of brushed myself off, made some adjustments, and went out and coached the second half.”
The Eagles still lost the game, but after that day, Frazier understood what he had on his team. “What he did was almost heaven-sent,” he said. “He uplifted me.”
Entering the 2012 season, the NCCU staff were scrambling to figure out where to play Mario. The tight ends coach wanted him, but so did the linebackers coach.
“We’re gonna let it play out,” said Frazier. “But I do know this: he’s a leader. He has a tremendous amount of confidence and I’m looking forward to coaching him these next four years.”
• • •
THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA hired Will Muschamp to be their new head coach on the Saturday the Raiders lost in Orlando. The following week, the Gators released Coach Z and, with him, any real hopes of winning Kelvin Benjamin. As Azzanni said, every good recruiter knows you can never take a break on a big target like Benjamin. Each day you left him alone, the more he tended to drift. By the time Aubrey Hill took over as UF’s receivers coach and got his bearings, Benjamin was lost in enemy territory.
Not long afterward, Coach Fisher pulled KB aside during a final visit to Tallahassee. “Many of the other recruits are asking when you’re gonna commit,” he said. The coach needed an answer.
“There are moments when you know a decision is good or bad,” said KB. “You can feel it inside you. And at that moment it felt really good. I said yes, and when I did, everyone started jumpin up and down.”
Minutes later, he said, coaches had him phoning other top prospects with the news. “I’m goin to State,” he told them. “Yall might as well jump on the bandwagon.”
Many of them did, giving Fisher the number-one recruiting class in the nation, according to ESPN. That class also included Rashad Greene, a receiver from Fort Lauderdale’s St. Thomas Aquinas who had just helped lead his team to back-to-back state championships. Ranked number twenty in the nation, Greene didn’t possess the freakish physique that caused grown men to swoon, but he was an artful route runner and incredibly fast. And with a 3.5 GPA, Greene was also dependable. In addition to Greene, of course, the Seminoles’ lengthy depth chart included seven returning receivers. Benjamin didn’t seem fazed.
“Coaches think I can win the Biletnikoff Award,” he said, referring to the prestigious trophy given each year by the Tallahassee Quarterback Club Foundation to the nation’s best college receiver. Past winners included Randy Moss, Larry Fitzgerald, and Calvin Johnson.
“No one from Florida State’s ever won it,” he added. “I mean, they telling me I can be an All-American freshman.”
Benjamin was MIA most of his last semester in Belle Glade. His free time mostly was spent retaking the last of ten cor
e classes in order to meet NCAA requirements. He did his work after school in the computer lab, hunched over a workbook and a keyboard. By mid-May, he’d finally submitted everything and was awaiting approval.
By the week of graduation, Benjamin hadn’t run over a mile in six months. Sitting at Frank and Tan’s dining-room table one afternoon, the time off was showing. The once broad, muscled torso appeared flabby under his T-shirt. And the locomotive legs that had carried him this far seemed whittled and diminished. With training camp just under a month away, he was an alarming sight. Now the delusions that had once seemed so innocent were just depressing, almost painful to hear.
“Dawsey said if I can run six routes, I’m good,” he said, referring to quick-cutting dig patterns across the middle, ideal for KB’s mismatched size. “He said just do what I do best.”
But the six route only worked if KB could separate, if his legs were nimble and strong. Wasn’t he worried about reporting to camp so out of shape, about having to compete against the best recruiting class in America, against smaller and hungrier guys who would dig his eyes out to keep their jobs? Hadn’t he heard a thousand times already that hard work always beat talent?
He shrugged.
“I aint worried,” he said. “You know kids from the muck, we always gonna have that advantage, athletic-wise, over everyone else. I mean, I still know how to do it. I’ve been playing some street ball.”
Later that day, KB returned to his mother’s apartment on the edge of the canefield. Inside, aluminum foil covered the windows and left the living room dark and cool. Benjamin lay stretched out on the floor of the back bedroom staring up at a television screen, his mind locked in a game of Call of Duty. He was shirtless and fleshy, an image that evoked Brando’s Colonel Kurtz.
He was not alone. Sitting in the dark living room was his girlfriend, Mika, all of seven months pregnant.
News of his approaching fatherhood had come out reluctantly. No one had dared mention it, not Frank, Tan, Boobie, or any of KB’s teammates. In fact, KB had always deflected questions about his love life. Whenever Mika’s name was mentioned, he would change the subject or go quiet and begin to brood. So, while sitting at Frank and Tan’s house, he’d been asked if there was anything he would miss in Belle Glade. Naaah, he said. There wasn’t anything, not anything, that he was leaving behind? He’d put his head down on the table, paused, and said Mika.
“I mean, we’re having a baby,” he said. Mika stood up from the plastic-covered sofa and said hello. She was petite, with long black hair and an easy smile. Her round belly poked through her shirt, and her skin appeared radiant in the dim light. She looked beautiful. And as she began to speak, the overweight, four-star receiver languishing in the next room began taking on new form.
Mika said it was a girl. She and KB had already decided on a name: Kelyiah. The baby was a blessing, she said, given what had happened earlier that year. Toward the beginning of the football season, Mika had miscarried. That pregnancy had been an accident and stunned them both. But when the child died four months later, KB had taken it especially hard.
“We were both really upset,” Mika said, her quiet voice carrying a twinge of country. “This one was more planned. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon.”
The Boys and Girls Club, where she worked full-time as a family liaison, was giving her ten weeks of maternity leave. Afterward, she would decide how the three of them would have a life together. On top of her job, she also had plans to begin night school to finish her nursing degree. That left only weekends for trips to Tallahassee. KB had also talked about getting a car to make the drive south.
The whole idea of being a football wife made her laugh. She’d never been interested in sports or popular guys, she said, even when she was a cheerleader. (In fact, KB was only her second long-term boyfriend.) So all of the recent attention was jarring, all the reporters calling him, all the men who approached him in shopping malls and restaurants in West Palm to praise and give him advice, some just to stand and gawk.
The only part of KB’s celebrity that seemed to interest Mika was seeing him through the eyes of her children at work. “All the boys want to make Raider jerseys with number 3 on them,” she said, smiling. “They want to be like him. The kids look up to him. And when he comes and talks to them, it just makes their day.”
She was proud that he’d climbed from such a low place to reach the cusp of his dream. And she was happy to share the rest of the journey, however far it took them. But it wasn’t everything. “If he doesn’t go to the league, it won’t matter,” she said. “I look beyond that. We have a bond that can’t be broken.”
Mika then turned and looked at KB from across the apartment, half a smile still on her lips. The look she gave was pure and asked for nothing. It did not strip him down to meat and bone, or see him as a prospect—the beautiful freak taking flight with wings made of money. It was as if she were seeing him through the eyes of their child, and it transformed and made him more human. He was simple parts now: a boy never equipped for the machine that loomed and beckoned, a young man dangerously close to throwing it all away. He would need them. When he left this town and discovered he was all alone, he would need them.
• • •
A MONTH LATER, Benjamin reported to training camp in Tallahassee and stepped into reality. “I was so out of shape,” he said later, “I couldn’t run my routes without wanting to fall down. I was tired and winded.”
At the end of camp, Florida State gave KB a redshirt. Benjamin said part of the reason, besides not being in shape, was related to academics. The university would never comment. All that was certain was that KB was forced to sit out the entire 2011 season. Meanwhile, Rashad Greene had one of the most electrifying freshman debuts in recent memory, leading all receivers with seven touchdowns and nearly six hundred yards receiving. Greene was even named MVP in the Champs Sports Bowl.
During the season, rumors appeared on the blogosphere that KB was transferring from FSU to shine on a smaller stage, much as his icon Randy Moss had done after redshirting as a Seminole. But Benjamin stayed with the program, put his head down, and did his work. He emerged the following spring in the best shape of his life, carrying 240 pounds of lean muscle, loose hips, and a newfound comfort with the special weapons he possessed. Speaking to reporters, Coach Fisher praised Benjamin’s work ethic and said he’d “gotten himself in really good shape now that he can control that body.”
A year after leaving high school, there was a marked humility in KB’s tone.
“My coaches expect me to be the player they recruited,” he said. “They want me to be the best, and every day I work on that.”
He then laughed, adding, “But they runnin the shit out of me.”
On his phone he kept a picture of his daughter, now seven months old. “She’s big and goofy like me,” he said. He saw her and Mika every few weeks, with both of them making the trip. Maintaining that was hard work, he said. But as he was realizing, so was everything else in life worth keeping.
• • •
DAVONTE ALLEN and Robert Way both reported to Marshall University in Huntington and were also given redshirts. The raw muck talent they possessed needed time to be shaped and developed, the coaches felt. The same went for their bodies. As soon as they arrived, Way and Allen underwent intense weight-gain regimens, both in the weight room and the cafeteria. At the end of each meal, coaches often appeared with second plates of food. “I couldn’t get up until it was finished,” Way said.
Within six months, Davonte had gained forty pounds of muscle and Robert had added thirty. Like KB, Davonte felt he benefited from a season on the scout team, getting in shape, learning the Herd’s playbook, plus a new language of sideline hand signals. “I saw it as an opportunity to get better,” he said. “I’m not just a speed receiver anymore, but an all-around player.”
JaJuan Seider, the coach who recruited him, agreed. “He’s gonna have a breakout year,” he said.
Da
vonte still spoke to his mother and Julius nearly every day on the phone and adhered to his own regimen of scripture and prayer. “Nothing has changed in terms of the way I live my life,” he said, then laughed. “Except now when I go home, I don’t have to mow the grass.”
• • •
A SEASON on the scout team did not sit well with Robert Way, however. His tolerance hung on a much shorter fuse. He grew restless and tired of spending his days as a mere practice dummy. “It wasn’t making me any better,” he said. “Without being able to play, I just got miserable.”
Despite falling in love with the city of Huntington upon his first visit, he now felt squeezed and suffocated by it. He described sitting around on Saturdays while the rest of the team traveled for games, nothing to do but lift weights, watch college football, and fume. “We’re seeing all these other freshmen from Florida playing, so why aint we playing?” he said. “Finally I just got tired of it.”
After his first semester, Way quit the team and dropped out of school. His coaches were left disappointed and sour. “He wasn’t patient enough to wait his turn,” said JaJuan. “That’s the thing with these kids [from Belle Glade], they’re entitled.”
Way was now back in Belle Glade, living at home and weighing his options. After leaving Marshall, he received a full scholarship from Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. But he was holding out for a DI program, perhaps FAU or better. The boy who Coach Hester once pulled from the brink was aware how vulnerable he now seemed. Out of high school, without a job, and down on your luck—the casualty rate was high. “I’m keeping a positive attitude,” he said. “Something will come up. I mean, it’s got to.”
• • •
FOR JONTERIA WILLIAMS, the final semester of high school began with her first broken heart. After months of anticipation, Vincent finally came home for Christmas break. Jonteria had built their whole reunion up in her mind, what she would wear, what they would do together, the goose bumps she would feel watching him laugh, being kissed.
