Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  But the mayhem hardly stayed contained. Neighborhoods and buildings once thought inviolable had fallen into crime’s orbit; even the B. F. Jones Library, the downtown jewel placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, wasn’t immune. On April 2, 1998, a Raccoon Township mother returning a book to the refurbished facility was killed after a crack user with a record of violence and sexual assault jumped into her truck. Suzanne Bold, forty-five, with a husband and three children at home, fought back against her attacker. The truck careened a hundred yards down Franklin Avenue before crashing into a steel utility pole. It was 7:45 p.m. Bold died of blunt-force trauma. Her purse held less than $100.

  Fear and apathy, meanwhile, were nibbling away at social niceties. Donald and Dwan Walker, graduates of Aliquippa High in ’94, found it most noticeable after they started coming home from college. Old folks had stopped chastising neighborhood children: indeed, the kids cursed out such elders, and often their parents did, too. “We saw young dudes walking around smoking weed—side by side with their parents!” Donald said. “I couldn’t believe that. I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

  Meanwhile, the sight of football players wearing red bandannas made it easy for whites in authority to conclude that the team, under Marocco, had been contaminated. A hair-trigger readiness to fight had long been a trademark of Aliquippa players, but his regime seemed edgier from the start. In 1990, Marocco’s second season in charge, the Quips announced themselves in the AA playoffs by mauling Apollo-Ridge 24-0. After Quips running back Eze Jones was tackled hard into the fence behind the home bench at Aschman Stadium in the final seconds, four of his teammates descended on Apollo linebacker George Smith, stomping him while he lay defenseless on the ground. “One of the most disgusting scenes you ever saw,” Wytiaz said.

  Smith needed eight stiches to seal the wound under his left eyelid. With WPIAL threatening an outright ban on the Quips for the ’91 season, the four players were suspended from all athletics for the school year and Marocco agreed to “institute a program” to prevent another such incident.

  Problem was, Marocco wasn’t equipped, professionally or personally, to reverse the trend. He lacked state certification as an educator and hardly ran the tightest ship. Stars like quarterback Mike Lundy knew they could miss practice with no real excuse and still start the next game, and Marocco’s rapport with black players, though appreciated by their families, fueled a perception that he was more interested in winning friends—and games—than in instilling high values and proper behavior. “He’d gotten fired at Ambridge and had a losing record in eleven years there, so now, this was his opportunity,” Zmijanac said, alluding to Marocco’s 48-51-7 record with the Bridgers. “The only thing that mattered to Frank was winning. So he could have his day in the sun.”

  Many of Marocco’s players deny that still. “He was one of the few coaches who cared if you were getting your grades right, always asking, ‘How’s you’re mom doing?’” Ty Law said. “Cared about you personally, so you wanted to play for him. To this day, if I’m at home I’ll stop by and see him and his wife. When I have cookouts or anything at the house I invite Coach over, because he lives right around the corner from my mom.

  “One thing: Because everyone was comparing him to Yannessa, he had to make his own mark and coach his own way—and people thought that Frank would be soft. And he was anything but. He was stern, yet he was understanding of the situation that a lot of us grew up in: drugs, broken homes. He was a father figure to a lot of us.”

  But few players were as self-motivated as Law. And the middle school, where Marocco was charged with keeping order, had gone rogue; a street-gang ethos swamped the halls. Marocco had been there eight years when Melvin Steals returned for a four-year stint as principal in June, 1996. “In my first year on the job, there were many days when there would be as many as five fights by nine a.m.,” Steals wrote after his departure in 2000. “During my second year, two of my middle school students robbed and murdered a young father of four. A few weeks before, the individual who had provided them with the gun had punched me in the hall.”

  In all, Steals spent thirty-six years in public education. “Aliquippa Middle School,” he said, “was the most dangerous building in which I had ever worked.”

  Near the end of Steals’ first year there, Wytiaz asked about Marocco. “I told him that if that man was going to be serving in that position the following school year, I would resign,” Steals said.

  That stand, by such a vocal, on-the-ground member of the black community, swung African-American support on the board to Zmijanac. From there, Marocco was all but defenseless. He lacked Holly­wood Don’s glib charm and had nothing on Zmijanac’s sardonic wit and connections. The Samuel murders, meanwhile, were still fresh: The fact that members of Marocco’s team had been shaking down Brian for money didn’t help his cause.

  “Remember, you’re in a suburban inner city right here. Frank Marocco, for as many wins as he had, had no control over anything,” Zmijanac said. “That’s why they wanted to get rid of him.”

  Still, more than anyone wants to admit, the board’s problem with Marocco was as much as anything a question of style. “They didn’t like him: bull-in-a-china-shop personality,” Yannessa said. “Everything [with Marocco] is paranoia and looking over your shoulder and resentment.” Zmijanac himself had two players suspended from his basketball team just months before he was given Marocco’s job. He would, indeed, rid the football team of bandannas and gang colors, and make players behave come game day, but he was no more successful than any other Aliquippa coach in remaking players into choirboys.

  “From the outset they screwed Frank: simple as that,” said Peep Short, who has been Zmijanac’s defensive coordinator nearly every season since that time. “Who controls the kids in the community? We had kids down here four or five years ago involved in a gunfight—kids on the football team. We’ve had kids get in arguments and fights with coaches. I’ve been through all three coaches. And all three coaches have the same problem that Frank had—no more, no less.”

  “I loved that job: they were like my kids,” Marocco said. “They’re still my kids. I go to a lot of black funerals.”

  Fifteen years later, after Zmijanac had become the winningest coach in Aliquippa history (never mind that Yannessa partisans, led by his wife Elaine, dismiss any Quips record set, as she says, with a “Little Sisters of the Poor” AA schedule), he sat in the football office at Aliquippa High and fielded a question about his successor. “That’s not my domain,” he said, “and whoever it is—and I’m not saying this arrogantly—has a problem.

  “Because you don’t follow Bear Bryant. I’m trying to be modest, but you don’t follow somebody who has that kind of record. The guy who followed Bear Bryant, the guy who’s following Joe Paterno: those are tough. The guy that followed Aschman crashed. The guy that followed Yannessa crashed in his own way, because he didn’t do it right.”

  Sure, that’s another shot at Marocco, and if you spend any time around the seventy-two-year-old Zmijanac, it’s to be expected. Coaches are always defining themselves in relation to their predecessors; the profession’s reliance on scorekeeping demands it. But bluntness is also part of Zmijanac’s public persona, the way he has always distinguished himself. He delights in being contrary, in deflating hype and the notion that coaching takes some kind of “genius,” in telling truths no one wants to hear. When critics say he’s not the schmoozer Yannessa was, or as warm as Marocco, he hardly takes it as an insult. He had no great ambition to coach in Aliquippa, he says. He could walk away from it anytime.

  No one has ever said Zmijanac wasn’t smart. Those same critics call him uncaring, distant, skewer him from the stands for his predictable play-calling. But his mind and sharp tongue, not to mention an impeccable sense of timing, keep most off-balance. Indeed, Zmijanac had turned down the Aliquippa football job when Yannessa left—and the head basketball job whe
n legend Red McNie retired in ’93—because he knew: You don’t follow Bear Bryant. The fact that Zmijanac never played football or basketball on even a high school level was a black mark for any coach, anywhere, never mind one taking up the reins in Aliquippa.

  So he waited. Zmijanac taught creative writing and American literature year after year, worked as Yannessa’s assistant at Baldwin and kept an eye on Marocco. He knew that only a crisis, a moment when football knowledge was secondary, would be the right time. And then the right time came. In 1997, a year after the Aliquippa School Board handed Zmijanac the basketball job, it handed him the football program, too. Elsewhere in America the age of two-sport coaches—at least at “name” programs—had long passed; but that was the point. This was the desperate act of a desperate board in a desperate town.

  Aliquippa was facing $12 million in bond debts, and an ever-shrinking tax base. Eighty-five percent of the 1,850 children in its school system qualified for free lunches, 300 were special education pupils requiring more teachers and funding, and 65 percent were black. Most of the visitors’ stands at crumbling Aschman Stadium had to be closed because no money was available for repairs.

  Local officials kept launching trial balloons about a merger with Hopewell: all floated away unanswered. Everybody in Aliquippa assumed that was a matter of race, of the white burghers of Hopewell trying to ensure that their daughters would never date a black boy. “They think they’re better than we are,” said Jon LeDonne, a white Aliquippa gridiron standout who graduated in 2001. “What makes you better than me? A lot of them left Aliquippa so they wouldn’t have to have their kids there; it’s always been that way. I hung out with Hopewell kids; I dated a Hopewell girl in high school—and today I think that feeling has left me a bit. I want to see their teams do well. But you still have something down inside you that’s like: They thought they were better than us.”

  Then again, with all the news about crime and mayhem, it was hard to argue any upsides for Hopewell in a merger. The only sure thing on offer was Aliquippa’s football talent. And reining in that team, making sure the players behaved, was the most visible way to show the world that the town was worth investing in, merging with, fighting for. The board needed a hard-ass sheriff to stand firm against any threat to the town’s most visible asset.

  Yes, Zmijanac could coach. It was unquestionable: His football defenses surrendered just 6 points a game for five years in the ’80s, he’d just won the state title in his first year as Aliquippa hoops coach; hell, when he turned his hand to girls’ basketball at Baldwin, they started winning there, too. More to the point, his teams—like his classes—behaved. You never saw a Mike Zmijanac team running up the score or swarming a prone opponent and stomping his face.

  His first year, 1997, Zmijanac followed Marocco’s WPIAL championship with a shutout loss in the first round of the playoffs. The next two years his Quips lost in the WPIAL semifinals. But long after he got rolling in football, plenty liked to say that anyone could win in Aliquippa. Whenever Zmijanac-coached teams fell short—even after he’d won his own state title and six WPIAL championships; even while headed, from 2008 to 2015, to eight straight WPIAL title games—you heard it: With the talent Aliquippa produces, with all those tough and swift players that keep Division 1-A scouts coming, year after year, with all the fathers and uncles pushing them to defend the family name, a coach in Aliquippa doesn’t have to do anything but keep ’em healthy and out of jail.

  Few ideas chafe him more. Mention it, and Zmijanac will start off flip and end up on fire. “Well, this is my comeback for that—and I don’t really have much of one because I don’t really give a fuck what they think,” he said. “But from ’65 to ’71, Aliquippa was 12-51-2. Same-type players. The difference between those teams and this team now is, there were six times as many kids in school, six times as many boys, and the same kind of kids. So you have to account for that somehow.

  “I would be the first to tell you there’s always players here. There were players when I was a kid, there’ll be players here when I’m gone. That doesn’t mean you win. There are players in Monessen and Charleroi, other traditional football towns, Wilkinsburg. Lots of coaches have good players, but no clue what to do with ’em. You can take a woman who’s a five and make her an eight; you can’t make her a ten no matter how hard you try. There’s lots of motherfuckers who take nines and make ’em fours. I’ve taken eights and made them at least that. At least.”

  “Wilkinsburg” is a name that comes up often with Zmijanac. The borough just east of Pittsburgh, home of the world’s first commercial radio station, thrived like many towns in Allegheny and Beaver Counties in the 1950s and was a WPIAL football power. Now the population is half the size, its schools are penniless, and crime dominates; the team is a Class A afterthought. Once, it seemed like anybody could win there, too.

  “I wouldn’t downplay the talent for a second,” Zmijanac said. “Anybody can win here? Might be right. But not everybody can look right, act right, play right—do it right. They may very well be fucking right. I don’t count our success in wins and losses. I count our success in those young men who talk to you, who know how to talk to you and have respect for their opponents and their teammates and all.”

  He brings up his basketball predecessor, Jim Deep, who coached from 1993 to 1996 and finished 53-30.

  “Jimmy Deep won here,” Zmijanac said. “Jimmy Deep came in from Ambridge and won in basketball here, his first year won the state championship. But at Christmastime that first year . . . I’m trying to think of the kid’s name—he’s in jail in Florida right now—they’re in the gym practicing and Jimmy tried to throw the kid out. And the kid said, ‘You’ll fuckin’ leave before I will.’

  “Deep called the police. Police came, my friend Dennis Riggins came up, and the kid told him the same thing: ‘You’ll take him the fuck out of here before you take me.’ And guess what? Kid never missed a second of playing time, they won a state championship. Is that what you want? If that’s what you want, okay. We could be Wilkinsburg that fuckin’ fast. We were close to Wilkinsburg. Until the right people, including me, took over.”

  Still, while Aliquippa’s football standard was getting shored up and walled off, decline worked like acid on everything surrounding. The downtown hollowed. Arrests rose. Definitions, too, shifted: little by little, behaviors considered immoral or fringe or “crazy” edged toward the center. The town’s idea of convention gradually split from the world’s. To hear Aliquippa High assistant coach and Beaver County detective Timmie Patrick discuss murder, illness, corruption, or racism—even in the most personal terms—is to hear the flat tone of a man mulling tomorrow’s weather.

  Part of that is distancing, part immersion. Patrick’s lifelong steep in Aliquippa’s extremes numbed him to shock or alarm. Crazy became normal well before he started chasing criminals; his dad screamed at him to play on a broken leg, after all. But even he has a limit.

  This was 1997. Patrick had moved into a house up on Sheffield Terrace, and was just climbing out of his car when he noticed activity on a roof two doors down. It took a few seconds to assemble—first one face, then another, then a third appearing amid the peaks and dips—­because the figures up there were all moving. Fast. And then, just when he realized that he knew them, that it was the LeDonne boys—the twins Jon and Justin, whom Patrick was then coaching at Aliquippa Middle School, and younger brother Nathan—Patrick also realized what they were doing: playing tag, twenty-plus feet above the ground with no railing, nothing at all, to hold them back.

  “And I mean, aggressive tag—as in, trying to push you off the roof,” Patrick said. “They literally were hopping roof to roof, pushing each other. The funny part is, my dad pulled up behind me and I said, ‘Look. What would happen if you ever seen us do that?’ He said, ‘Before you fell? Or before I jumped up there and killed you?’”

  In describing it, Patrick’s eyes shine and he’s almost yellin
g. You can’t overestimate the joy felt by a jaded soul when forced to recalibrate its standard for shock. He thought he’d seen everything. Fifteen years later, he’s still shaking his head. “Just . . . crazy,” Patrick said.

  Because it was different. Because the scene he witnessed wasn’t about desperation or defending turf or any of the clashing human sadness seen whenever a mill or an era ends. This was a vision of lunatic, male adolescent fun at a time when fun had supposedly left town, fun with a decidedly Aliquippan coloring; one slip, of course, and the LeDonne boys could be paralyzed or dead. Then again, that family had always been different.

  For one thing, they were white in an increasingly “black” town. For another, Chris and Edwina LeDonne didn’t bolt far when J&L shut down; Chris, a truck driver running routes all over Western Pennsylvania, just moved his wife and oldest boy, Brandon, and the newborn twins up to broader confines in Sheffield. They thought about moving one last time, when Jon and Justin were in elementary school; Chris and Edwina actually looked at homes in Hopewell and Center. But it felt wrong. Aliquippa was home.

  And not just in a physical sense. The fact is, the LeDonnes could’ve fit in anywhere: the boys were handsome, superb athletes, highly intelligent. But with a wild streak that responded to the more worldly facts of Aliquippa life, the LeDonnes mixed comfortably with blacks and, most of all, thrived in the macho, off-the-books aesthetic that accounts, still, for much of the town’s vibe. They had the rare temperament—the human gold sought forever by coaches and generals—that revels in discipline and mayhem.

  Brandon quarterbacked the Quips his senior year in ’98 to the WPIAL semifinals, and by then Jon, two years younger, had been coming to practice for years. He was a fifth-grade water boy the day Peep Short, outraged by some player’s back talk on the practice field, literally tore off the kid’s uniform—shoulder pads, cleats, socks, helmet, pants, all of it—and sent him to the locker room in his underwear. “That kid came back maybe a week later, apologized, and never stepped out of line again,” Jon said.