Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

By then the mill had all but shut down; Ocie and most every other steelworker in town were jobless. A small band of retirees, dubbing themselves the “Tunnel Rats,” spent more than a year outside the old J&L tunnel entrance protesting pension and benefits cuts by LTV. “The group of steel workers were arrested by local police for disorderly conduct,” reports the town’s official account. “There were tears in the eyes of some of the arresting officers as they were forced to handcuff their own family members.”

  Yet even after most cuts were restored, the men kept coming to the tunnel, each weekday, no matter how cold or hot or wet. It almost felt like work.

  But with all the winning—maybe because of the winning, almost too much winning now—Yannessa began to smell something else in the air. Sure, there’s always that human need to criticize. But more than one national network had been in to do pieces on the team, and Rolling Stone, too, and now he had a cable-TV show each week, cohosting This Week in High School Football—and when people said “Hollywood Don” these days there was sometimes this shake of the head, a knowing twist of the mouth: Guy just loves to hear the sound of his own voice and ’at, don’t he?

  So Yannessa took it all in: little things like the accusations of training-camp hazing that came and went one year, none of them holding water, or the school board members who believed he’d become too powerful, too big to control. That was rich, considering the results, but it only lined up with the fatalistic streak that ran beneath his sunny banter. “It’s just the way it is,” Yannessa said. “The more success you have, you will accumulate enemies. They’ll be a silent minority, but they’ll be there. We used to say they’re like wolves in the forest: if you look, you can see the moon reflecting off their teeth. Because they’re gnashing their teeth and looking for a vulnerable moment. Somewhere they can attack you.”

  So Yannessa sniffed around a bit, even threw his name out there when a combo coach/athletic director position opened at North Allegheny in ’87. Maybe that would shake ’em a bit. Maybe not. Maybe they’d just figure, Aliquippa guy? He won’t ever be able to leave. Because even after the ’88 run with Sean Gilbert, all the way to No. 2 in the nation, the school board ignored the clause in Yannessa’s contract that promised a salary bump for “superior performance,” a raise for his assistants, too, and acted—where it mattered most, in the wallet—as if ’88 had never happened.

  At the same time, though Yannessa was teaching only four classes in seven periods by then—no homeroom duty, didn’t even have to fill out report cards; he didn’t want to deal with the hassle of instruction anymore. So there he was, feeling stale, a bit pissed off, and meanwhile enrollment was down to less than four hundred kids; the Quips had been dominating AAA schools that had four times that many students. The pressure, there for years, to drop the football team to AA was proving more and more irresistible. He felt it, too.

  But the old man, King Carl, was always in Yannessa’s head, had been there even in the late ’70s when the losses were piling up and his own athletic director was pushing him to drop down. He imagined the fans muttering, even if he did go on to win at that level: He couldn’t stay where Aschman was, Aschmann played in the big leagues. . . . “I knew that,” Yannessa said. “There were people just waiting for me to do something like that so they could criticize the move.”

  But now, with that semifinal win in ’88 over Brownsville—­Aschman’s old school, no less—Yannessa had passed the King to stand alone as the all-time winningest coach in Aliquippa history, 142-45-5, with four of the last five WPIAL titles in hand. When Baldwin High came calling, offered the AD position and head coach, no teaching and an $18,000 raise, it seemed a no-brainer. What did he have left to prove?

  Baldwin’s offer of a $60,000 salary for a high school coach was an outrage, of course. A teacher with twenty years and a master’s degree at that school was making only $46,000; his principal was making $63,000. “You have to question the educational priorities at Baldwin High,” Sports Illustrated tut-tutted at the time. But in Aliquippa they understood. When Yannessa took the job on June 2, 1989, saying over and over, “It was time,” nobody blamed him. Who would walk away from that kind of money?

  Still, it felt like a vicious decade’s departing shot. Football was the valley’s game, Aliquippa’s game most of all, perhaps, and Yannessa had made it so again against all odds. “This is almost as big as J&L closing,” Aliquippa’s athletic director, Bob Castagna, said. “This is a black day for Aliquippa.” He wasn’t referencing race. But black families felt the loss, especially; Yannessa had helped them feel accepted, important, celebrated—in a way few whites ever had; as a result, the thought of any racial division—in football, anyway—came to seem frivolous. “As far as having a good rapport with the blacks, I think it’s better to say he had a good rapport with everyone,” Salt Smith, the president of the school board, said then. “The community is one. And he is Aliquippa.”

  Take such a man out of such a town, and neither one could ever be the same again. Everybody felt that, no matter the money to be made. After the announcement, Yannessa and his wife went to the stadium and stood at the fence staring at the place where he had made his name as a player and coach, as a favorite son. Both cried, and on Sunday a photo of the two adults weeping was stretched across the top of the sports section of the Beaver County Times. “It’s not the end of the world,” Elaine said to him. But it felt like something close.

  The children being born then, after the mill died, would live unburdened by the knowledge that the town had once been anything but sinking. Maybe that was better. Remembering could be a curse. The generation that grew up with dads hauling themselves off to work, that eyewitnessed Aliquippa’s meltdown, couldn’t help but dwell on the better days. Some got stuck there.

  “Had a Sol’s Sporting Goods downtown; bought a little football there,” said future mayor Dwan Walker, son of Chuckie and Chedda, born 1975. “Woolworths, the grocery store: downtown was awesome. On Friday nights you’d go to the drive-in. Load up vans and trucks and go out there, softball games old versus the young, play down at the playground. Used to go blackberry picking and sell them to the older ladies on our streets. Crab apples. Used to go crayfish pickin’ in the creeks. It was fun then. And we had older adults that would take us to those places, and took time with us. . . .”

  He and his identical twin brother, Donald, went everywhere together, big and grinning and loud and looking so much alike that people gave up and took to calling them both “Twin.” And the twins said “Yessir” and “No, ma’am.” They weren’t alone: All their friends, when some lady would call out, had been raised by parental belt and glare to stop cold in their tracks and respond, “Ma’am?” But they were the last of that breed.

  Christmas ’87: that’s when the boys started feeling it. Before that, a spray of toys and gift wrap and sports stuff would roll out from under the big tree, covered two-thirds of their living room floor in Plan 11; as an electrician, Chuckie had been making $18.75 an hour at J&L, base, with as much overtime as he could handle. In his best years, he was pulling in near $70,000 a year, money enough to buy a good car, a house, ride the family out to Oklahoma each summer, and even, once a week, take the whole brood to Long John Silver’s.

  But then that stopped: the Christmas booty dried up. There was maybe a board game and some small trinkets now, the merciless accounting of two twelve-year-old boys: What? This is all we’re getting? And their father would drift out of the room, quieter than usual.

  By the cold early days of 1989, ex–Aliquippa High football star Jeff Baldwin, twenty-six, was known for a certain kind of trouble. So on paper, of course, she would appear vulnerable, the weaker of the two: Tezmalita Pharr was a high school junior, just seventeen years old, when she took up with him. But even then, some say, the mismatch went the other way. Because Jeff was easy, a big softie. And no one ever accused Tez of being anything but sharp and hard as a blade.

  Not that she
had been all that experienced. On numbers alone, Tez wasn’t, but poor percentages grew her up fast. “The first time I had sex: fourteen. Got pregnant with her,” Tez said of her oldest daughter. “The second time I had sex? I had Jonathan. I thought I was safe; I was on the pill. Later my aunts said to me, ‘We could see that coming. We all got pill babies.’ I said, ‘NOW you tell me?’”

  Tez’s single mom, Harriet, tried to keep the girl in check. Until her eighteenth birthday, in fact, Tez had to be home in Plan 11 before dark. She didn’t go to parties. But she’d been a mouthy tomboy growing up, fast enough to play in the boys’ pickup football games and tough for even the best athletes to catch. So when Tez began to show again in the spring and summer of ’89, all her football buddies started getting on her: All gonna change now! No more games, running around . . . Whole life got to change. . . .

  “You watch,” Tez would say, all that summer. “You just watch what I create.”

  She delivered Jonathan on August 10, 1989, adding an infant to the toddler now making demands in Harriet’s house. After six months of dull domesticity—and high school studies—Tez moved out and checked out of mommy duty. She was eighteen, didn’t want to hear it from Harriet anymore. And Jeff was hardly a steadying influence.

  “It was freedom: I’m going to do what I want to do. That didn’t work too well,” Tez says. “More or less just partying, something that I was not allowed to do. So I wanted to party and being young with children, I was like, This is kind of fun. But after a while, it was, Oh, this is not good. To this day I tell people: You can’t raise a child from a bar. A child requires constant, everyday attention.”

  Now Ty Law was coming. He was going to be “The Next One,” the heir to Ditka and Sean Gilbert. Anyone could see that, ever since the time that he was playing Midgets one wet day at Carl Aschman Stadium, a championship game no less, and his cleats got stuck in the mud and damn if the kid didn’t run right out of his shoes, leaving them right there in the ground, and race 65 yards for a touchdown in socks. First year with the Quips, 1989, the swift, tough sophomore showed he could do just about anything—run, receive, patrol the defensive backfield—and new head coach Frank Marocco, home at last, won a AAA WPIAL title in his first season. Good omens all around: maybe Yannessa’s leaving wouldn’t be such a loss, after all.

  But there were problems. Crack use was only growing, its acrid scent wafting through Linmar and Valley Terrace, the Plan 11 quadrant known as the “Funky Four Corners,” the environs of Wykes and Davis Streets in Plan 11 extension, where Ty lived with his grandfather Ray. Family ties and old mores curdled with the seep of fast money and an even quicker high. Football and the drug trade had become the town’s most thriving concerns, and it took no time for the line between them to blur.

  Ty Law wanted a new pair of Air Jordans. He wanted cash in his pocket so he could buy girls ice cream, and feel cocky, make like he was something to see. Being a football star wasn’t doing that anymore, not nearly as much as it used to. The dealers were getting all the play. “That’s what was cool,” Ty said. “That’s what got the girls.” In the summer of 1990, a cousin of Ty’s fronted him some product so he could ride around in a car, and sell it out the window. He dealt crack for about a month.

  But mostly, Law wasn’t very sly or very good at it, because the whole exercise made him uneasy. First, there was the fact that his mother had turned their home upside down with her own drug use, and now here he was peddling the same poison to other guys’ moms. And then there were those disquieting moments when some lady his mom’s age would offer up sex for the drugs he was selling—Come on, hook me up, give me a ride. . . . I’ll take care of you. . . . —which made the fifteen-year-old Ty Law queasy. Because then he had no choice but to wonder: Is my mom doing that?

  It was hard, too, because in lucid moments Diane Law tried to be a parent. Once that summer, she stumbled across his stash of cocaine, and screamed at Ty and said that she’d flushed it all down the toilet, even left the container floating in the bowl to convince him. But deep down Ty knew. He didn’t admit it to himself until years later but, intentionally or not, he’d actually supplied his mother. Much later, after she had gotten clean, Ty would ask Diane, “So did you really flush my drugs?” They could even laugh about it.

  “Come on, man: Drug addict ain’t going to flush no drugs,” Ty said. “At the same time, you’re an addict but you’re trying to be a mother. It was horrifying to her, but she ain’t flushed ’em. She says, ‘Hell no, I ain’t flushed it!’”

  Then there was one hot night on Wykes, when a guy Ty was snapping at about something small—a girl, an insult—pulled a gun and jammed the barrel against his head. “Say something!” he demanded. And Ty didn’t, but the shame of being made into a punk—Big-time football player, huh?—the cold fear that he’d been forced to feel: It made him crazy. Ty ran home to his grandpa’s house, to the closet where Ray kept his hunting rifles and handguns, and grabbed a long-barreled pistol and headed for the door.

  His grandfather chased him. Ray Law hollered and asked Why? and tried to stop him, but not too much because how, exactly, do you stop a 190-pound whirlwind of teenage muscle with a loaded gun? Ty bolted from the house. He fired the gun into the night air as he loped down Wykes Street, got two or three shots off before the guy crouched and fired back, and the sound wasn’t tinny like Ray Law’s old hunting pistol: It sounded like rockets vrooming past. Oh, shit! Ty thought, and he turned tail and got out of there fast.

  But it wasn’t the flying bullets, the nearness of death, that made Ty quit. It was his grandfather’s shocked and fallen face, both when he pushed past him the first time and when he came home after. Ray had always been Ty’s ally against Diane’s addiction, but now the boy saw a new heartbreak in the old man’s eyes. Ray did everything for him: spoiling Ty no end, talking him up in the neighborhood, bringing real ketchup to school for Ty to put on his lunch hot dogs, even. Because the boy was good—Ray just knew it—and the boy was going to make good, too. Theirs was an unspoken bargain, but absolute. Ray had had no idea that his grandson was dealing, no idea that he’d bottled up that kind of rage. But now he could see it clear: one daughter down, and my grandson hitting the same path . . .

  “My grandfather was scared to death,” Ty said. “It shocked him so much, because I’d never showed him any of those sides of what I might be doing or tried to do out on the street—out of respect for him. He’d never seen that. It did something to him.”

  Is it any wonder, then, that here—late in the ’80s—the game got bigger? Once merely the vessel of local pride, football in Aliquippa now assumed deeper resonance, even greater import. It was as if those who remained sensed the worst: This is it. This is what is left. Football is the endgame, the gritty final distillation of the dream that our great-grandfathers came here to dream, the one systematic and proven process that can still result in a scholarship, a way out for the next generation, maybe big money.

  There were a few dissenting voices. After giving up on songwriting, Melvin Steals became an English teacher at Aliquippa High and was named the city’s Teacher of the Year in 1984. He spent most of the decade working on postgraduate studies in education. While researching a support system for high school student-athletes, Dr. Steals said, “I solved the major mystery: I began to realize the true meaning of a student-athlete.

  “Aliquippa was a plantation system. And I stopped going to the games because I saw a lot of these kids. People said, ‘Don could get a rock into college’—and he did. There was a kid whose nickname was ‘Killer Rock’—and he got Killer Rock into college. But you would see them by the second or third game of the following football season, after they graduated from high school, they began filtering back into the crowds at the football game. Because they were not academically prepared to meet the rigor of a postsecondary learning environment.”

  For his 1989 doctoral dissertation at Pitt, Steals appended the Aliquippa sc
hool system’s 1988 results on the California Achievement Test. “By the time the kids had reached tenth grade, 60 percent of the students, white and black, were reading below grade level—and 62 percent were performing below grade level in math,” said Steals, who departed Aliquippa High in 1989 to teach in Pittsburgh. He vowed never to return. “The longer they were exposed to that curriculum, the more poorly they did,” Steals said. “I cried the day I left Aliquippa.”

  But such bad academic news provoked little outrage at football or Yannessa or any other sport or coach in town. If anything, it only reinforced the belief that athletics was the prime ticket out, an all-or-nothing proposition that, incidentally, announced its winners and losers to the world each week in newspapers and on TV. And with such a zero-sum atmosphere settling in, the town assumed an all-in tone about the team, darker and meaner and more urgent than the chords that once thrummed around Ditka or Dorsett.

  Losing was awful. It had always been awful. But for all involved before, it wasn’t considered so heinous, if only because Aliquippa had other options. Now they were gone. Motivation usually teeters between a push for pride and the avoidance of shame, but now the balance tipped. Now when a season ended without a title, players were told by brothers and friends and mouthy fools, ‘Y’all suck!’, and it was more harsh, less joshing, than ever before. Because without winning, without that one reinforcing emblem of relevance, the era’s reality—its ever-diminishing returns—stood starkly revealed. What else was there to cheer?

  Ty Law would go on to play big-time college ball at Michigan, then become the best cornerback in the NFL after breaking in with Bill Parcells’ New England Patriots in 1995. He would lose to Notre Dame and Ohio State as a Wolverine, would be the defender burned by Colorado’s Michael Westbrook’s miracle catch in 1994. He would lose pro playoff games that meant money out of his pocket. But nothing in his career ever hurt worse than the seven obscure losses that Law experienced in his three years at Aliquippa High.