Playing Through the Whistle
Page 33
“It’s like you’ve lost everything,” Law said. “Nobody in the damn neighborhood wants to talk to you. You’re already feeling bad when you lose, but when you lose in Aliquippa and come home and think you’re going to get a pat on the back talking about ‘Good game!’ or ‘You’ll get ’em next time’? No. It’s rough: ‘You lost to them? What the hell? You all suck!’ And they ain’t just fans. We used to go down to a friend’s of mine’s house, we called it the Fifth Quarter, go hang out after, drink a couple beers . . . and boy, if you lose? And you think you’re going to come up in there and get sympathy or think you’re even going to grab a beer? That’s not happening.
“At Michigan, they treat you nice. Even in the pros, there was nothing they could say or do that I hadn’t already seen or wasn’t prepared for. Coach Parcells is known for always messing with the first-round guys; he tried to give it to me every day, and I’m like, I’ve seen way worse than this. I looked at Parcells, like, ‘Who are you?’”
Still, during his senior year at Aliquippa, the world became all kindness and light. Law was named a Parade all-American while doing what even Sean Gilbert couldn’t: leading the Quips to their first-ever state title. That was 1991, a year after administrators finally admitted reality and dropped to AA—but what of it? Balanced by irrepressible running back Chico Williams, Marocco’s boys avenged an early-season loss to edge Riverside to win the WPIAL, then rolled over Forest Hills, 20-6, to set up a state title showdown with defending champion Hanover, winner of thirty straight, in Pittsburgh’s South Stadium. But that challenge was nothing compared with the gut-wrencher Law had faced right before.
Because on that December Saturday morning, along with two teammates, Law was scheduled to take the American College Test (ACT) at Moon Area High School. And he had to pass, if he wanted to play Division 1-A college ball. Georgia Tech, Pitt, every school with an eye on a national championship wanted him, but this was Ty’s second try, and in his previous attempt he’d come up just short of the minimum score required for eligibility. “I had to make it on this one,” Law said. “I don’t pass? I don’t go.” And then, right after the test, there was a state title game to get to, fast.
Law finished the test after noon, and felt pretty good. (He passed. His two teammates didn’t.) A police escort led them on the twenty-mile sprint into Pittsburgh, and the three players could see the teams warming up as they scrambled into the locker room. Law never had a chance to stretch. He was still tucking in his shirt while waiting for the opening kickoff; teammate Dorian Jackson fumbled, and the ball landed in Law’s hands. He ran 61 yards for the touchdown. This time, he kept his shoes on. Aliquippa crushed Hanover, 27-0.
“Crazy, crazy day,” Law said.
It was, but that was only appropriate. Marocco, who hadn’t coached in eleven years when he took over the program, only found out that he got the job when school board chair Salt Smith, appearing on a local radio program, rang him up and offered it to him on the air. Marocco had grown up with blacks in Logstown, and his hugs and kisses and voluble openness made him beloved by black families. His us-versus-the-world mentality—less tired coach’s act than residue of immigrant paranoia—resonated with boys armed with decade-long evidence that the world, indeed, was against them.
“When we went to football games, we were going to wars,” said Donald Walker, who played for Marocco three years later. “We’d close the doors and he’d say, ‘If you don’t like what I’ve got to say? Get the fuck out. These motherfuckers are coming up here to our house and we’re going to fuck them up! Italian and blacks! Go kick their ass!’ That’s how he talked. You looked at Coach Marocco, you just wanted to tear off your shirt and kill something. Anybody who played for him, those years: you wanted to kill for that man.”
Winning the town’s first state title, of course, killed off any last grumbling about his hiring. At fifty-four years old, Marocco achieved something that both King Carl, his overbearing mentor, and Hollywood Don, his overpowering rival, never did. Afterward, some fans in the crowd could be heard chanting, “Don Who?”
That the outside world sneered at Marocco and his like to the last made it even sweeter. In the days before the game, Marocco had heard that his opposing coach, Alex Kopacz, had dismissively wondered, “What’s a Quip?”
And in response, Marocco looked to the center of the town name and said to the press, “A ‘Quip’ is the heart of Aliquippa.”
Marocco and his players thought the comeback clever, but, to Marocco’s eternal mystification, it rubbed Kopacz wrong. “The coach for Hanover, he was very bitter about Aliquippa,” Marocco said. “So at the end of the game they all said, ‘Coach, go tell him what the hell a Quip is!’ But he wouldn’t shake my hand. He ran off the field. He would not even shake our hands.”
Later that month, one of Marocco’s assistant coaches, Peep Short, rolled late at night through Plan 11 in a Beaver County Sheriff’s cruiser. He recognized a tall figure, walking alone. Short didn’t coach Mike Warfield when he quarterbacked the Quips in ’86, but this was Aliquippa football: Everybody knew everybody. Still, Peep hadn’t realized that Warfield was back, home for good after graduating from little Catawba College—having passed for nearly 7,000 yards in his time there—in North Carolina. And in a flash he toted it up: ex-baller, no father, bored and at loose ends. He knew the sequence well. The next step was usually trouble.
“Get in,” Peep said. Warfield opened the cruiser door, and they sat talking under the dome light.
“What are you doing?” Peep said.
Warfield didn’t know. There wasn’t a plan. He hadn’t been drafted by the NFL. He’d heard about some tryouts. . . .
“You want a job?” Peep said. “Come down and put an application in.”
Warfield had long looked up to Short, but that’s not what tipped him. He’d always wanted to be a cop. And there was something else. He hadn’t been back much since graduating in ’87, but word of Aliquippa’s decline had still found him. “You would hear things: Friends I knew robbed a bank,” Warfield said. “And it just started going downhill after that. People in a position to do things, policemen, weren’t doing their job. Things just got out of control. And once it got out of control, it couldn’t be reversed.”
Now he was seeing the spiral firsthand, all around his mom’s home, No. 254, up on Linmar Terrace. To outsiders it looked like shabby public housing—and worse by the day—but for Warfield it was still home. And he did need a job.
For the next eighteen months, Warfield worked at the Beaver County Sheriff’s Office. Short was Marocco’s defensive coodinator then, and many shifts Warfield would ride with him, serving search warrants, talking football. Short was loud. He used “motherfucker” as a term of endearment. His father had been everything: drummer for Lena Horne, loan shark, newsdealer, ladies’ man. When Peep was young, his dad owned three legit businesses—and ran a numbers joint, besides—in the Funky Four Corners. They dubbed the boy “Peep” because he would peer around a corner when the adults were talking, peeking into business that wasn’t his.
That never changed. Peep knew nearly every dealer, thief, and gangbanger on sight; some colleagues muttered that he knew them too well. He had a volatile temper, was never averse to throwing his bulk around; one story, perhaps apocryphal, had him punching one suspect so often with his badge that he left imprints in his face. Another story Short tells himself: In 1997, he got word that Anthony “Ali” Dorsett—Tony’s nephew, son of Tony’s brother Keith—was talking to Short’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Kiki. Short also knew that Ali, then twenty, was already hustling drugs. He warned him to stay away.
Not long after, Short was riding down Kennedy Boulevard when something in the car ahead seemed familiar: the back of Kiki’s head, rising above the passenger seat, and Ali behind the wheel. He pulled them over, walked up to the door, and punched Dorsett square in the face. “Knocked the shit out of him,” Short said.
Depending on the critic, Peep had too rigid or too flabby a sense of right and wrong. “There’s a dichotomy about him,” said one area police source, “that’s off the charts.” But even those who would later decide that Peep Short was all kinds of dirty will tell you: He had guts. No matter what kind of rough or desperate soul lay behind it, he was always known for going through the door.
“A lot of people would say, ‘Short, man, you know me, you’re my boy, we grew up together,’” Peep said. “I said, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, and you see me come through your door? Then duck.’ Because I’m coming through there for business. I’ve arrested friends. Family. The fucking whole nine yards.”
Many, especially one-parent boys like Mike Warfield, would look upon Short as a father figure. But then there’s this: In September 1987, Della Rae Campbell gave birth to a son, Tommie, who one day would become yet another off the Aliquippa line to make the NFL. Short wasn’t a factor in Tommie’s early life, but rumors flew and Della wasn’t shy about feeding them; after Tommie graduated high school, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette declared Short “Campbell’s father.” At the same time many locals, including Della’s longtime boyfriend Rick Hill, remained sure that Tommie’s dad was the man the boy was named for: Della’s ex-husband, Tommie Campbell Sr.
Sometimes Della let them believe that, too. But Tommie’s patrimony remained a mystery for a simple reason.
“I don’t know,” Della said. “I don’t. When I had married Tommie Campbell Sr., I was dating Peep Short at the same time. I only married Tommie Campbell Sr. because my mother was telling me that I wasn’t grown, that I don’t need to be going out every weekend. I’m, like, ‘I’m 19 years old!’ I just went and got somebody and got married. I didn’t even know the man.”
Later, while moonlighting as a security guard at Valley Terrace, A Building, Short would watch little Tommie compete with the other kids, “and if he wasn’t crying he was fighting,” he said. Yes, he admits, the boy reminded him of himself.
But when asked directly, Short won’t confirm or deny that he’s Tommie’s dad. His discomfort, it seems, lies more in taking credit than ownership. “All I’ll say is this: any man would be proud to be his father—and I told him that,” Short said. “We discussed it, and I think that’s all I’m going to say on it. Because the thing with that is, I don’t like this Johnny-come-lately shit where all of a sudden he’s in the pros and I’m his dad.”
Ty Law began noticing in his senior year at Aliquippa, ’91 or ’92: His things were disappearing. One trophy gone, then another. Then a letterman jacket. Then another trophy. It took a while for it to sink in, if only because he was racing everywhere and, besides, why would anyone get into his Grandpa Ray’s house. . . . and only take . . . Oh. That’s how it hit him: Slow, like the dawn of a dreary day. Oh, damn. She’s selling ’em off. . . . And then an understanding hit him, the one he’d been trying to bat away. His mother was peddling valuables to buy crack.
How could she? Sell off my stuff, when you’re supposed to love me? I’m your son. You love this drug more than you love me. . . .
Worse yet, Ty would come to find, as it kept on the next few years, that Diane Law was selling his possessions, the totems of his growing name, to a local doctor, for God’s sake, who could read her ravaged symptoms, a white man that Ty had long looked up to and to this day will not name. It was almost too cold to take in: the man was buying stock, getting in at crack-rock-bottom prices. “He thought I was going to do something with myself and he’d have some ‘Ty Law’ memorabilia,” Law said. “Which was pretty messed, because you knew exactly what my mom was doing. You knew what was happening. And it went on through when I was in college: anything that he could get.”
The only respite came two weeks each summer, when Ty flew down to Dallas to visit his distant uncle, Tony Dorsett, in Dallas. Then he and Dorsett’s son, Anthony Jr., would work out endlessly with Tony and Cowboys stars like Everson Walls and Ken Norton Jr., and listen to the just-retired legend’s tales, all the little backstories behind the nearly 13,000 NFL rushing yards and that surefire induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. More than once, Tony caught Ty staring at his Heisman Trophy.
“Man,” Tony jabbed. “You got to be a bad boy to get one of them.”
That was the carrot, leading Ty on every day. Not that Law thought he’d win the Heisman—he knew his future was as a cornerback, and corners don’t win Heismans—but that here was an Aliquippa guy, one who knew what it meant to have an old man working the mill and a family with drug problems, and he had made it out. Gorgeous house, nice cars: It could be done. “Tony Dorsett saved me as well,” Ty said. “Because after my grandfather, I was looking at him; I was, like, This is where I want to be. My grandfather was doing it the right way, I knew that. But I wanted more.”
But it wasn’t just want: Law needed more. By the time he’d enrolled at Michigan, he had seen enough of Aliquippa. He had become convinced that only money could end their problems, end his grandpa’s worry, solve his mom’s drug addiction. Going to Ann Arbor, he wasn’t worried about getting a degree. Law needed to get to the league. He needed to get paid. “I’m thinking you can buy your way off of drugs,” he said. “Come to find out that ain’t the damn case. . . . ”
But that understanding wouldn’t land for more than a decade. No, even as he’d put off older teammates (“They couldn’t stand me,” Law said) for refusing to redshirt and bragging that he wouldn’t be at Michigan long—and then became the Wolverines’ first true freshman, ever, to start—even as he’d disappear from campus some days and race the four hours home to shield Ray from some episode of Diane’s drug nonsense and then drive all night back and still make it to morning class, Law had no doubt. The money, surely, would fix everything.
Normally, the second week is too early in a football season for high emotion: Teams are still working their way into form; teachers and students are just hitting the post–Labor Day stride. But the WPIAL front-loaded the drama upon Aliquippa in 1994. Not only was Hopewell coming to play its archenemy at Carl Aschman Stadium that Friday night, but an even more charged game was scheduled across the river at Ambridge. For the first time since Yannessa bolted six years before, Hollywood Don and his Baldwin High kids would make an appearance in Beaver County.
But at 7:03 the night before, September 8, police radios all over the county began crackling with alerts about a horror in Hopewell Township, less than a mile from the Aliquippa exit off Highway 60. U.S. Air Flight 427 from Chicago, a Boeing 737-300 on descent into Pittsburgh International Airport, had dropped in silence and exploded near Green Garden Road. All 132 passengers and crew were feared dead.
With time, Flight 427 would gain a significance unusual even for major plane crashes. The National Transportation Safety Board declared that a design flaw in the widely used jet’s rudder had caused the crash, and then called for a fleet-wide repair that cost the airline industry billions of dollars. The treatment of victims’ loved ones over the first hours and days, especially, was so bureaucratically callous that President Bill Clinton issued an executive order and Congress later passed the Disaster Family Assistance Act. “I can’t think of one accident that had more impact on the NTSB, on the aviation industry, and more importantly, on how families of all disasters are treated worldwide than the Pittsburgh accident,” said NTSB chairman Jim Hall.
But all that came later. For the locals, the impact was instant, visceral. No one on the ground was hurt that Thursday night, but children playing on
a nearby soccer field had watched the plane crash and explode. Any and all law enforcement hands, like Peep Short, rushed to the scene. Off-duty nurses and doctors, like Mickey Zernich, mixed with growing crowds of onlookers and media streaming in from all over the country. Body parts dropped from the trees, littered the gouged earth; the stink of fuel filled the air. Veterans spoke of their worst day in Vietnam and declared this its equal. “The most horrible scene I’ve ever seen in my life,” Zernich said then. “You can’t describe it. The pieces—the pieces were unidentifiable. It’s just indescribable.”
School was canceled in Hopewell the next day, but, after some debate, opened as scheduled in Aliquippa. Friday’s night’s Aliquippa-Hopewell game—just twenty-four hours after the crash—was allowed to go forward. “We really needed this to take our minds off it,” said Cindy Caldwell, whose daughter was one of the soccer players who had seen the plane fall. “We’re all looking for a diversion. You can’t get away from it on the television.”
She said this while surrounded by an overflow crowd, more than 7,000 people jammed into Carl Aschman Stadium. None of Yannessa’s carny touches were allowed this night. Instead, there was a moment of silence, the playing of “Taps,” the lowering of a flag to half-staff.
There was a new fear in the wind: Flight 427 was the fifth crash for USAir, the largest carrier in Pittsburgh, in five years. For many in town who worked there, the airline, though it paled in terms of total number of local employees, was the next best thing to J&L. Marocco, Aliquippa-born and its football coach now, was quoted in the next morning’s Detroit Free Press with a message for the town’s young. “Get out of here,” he said. “There’s nothing here for them. If you don’t get an education, what are you going to do?”
Aliquippa beat Hopewell that night, 15-6. It was Marocco’s hundredth career victory as a head coach. Less than three miles away, in Ambridge, Yannessa and his Baldwin team won 31-7. And no one cared. For the first time, ever, the football games were played and no one with any sense cared at all.