Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  “Then I’d go to practice—and Aliquippa’s some tough football—and I just didn’t have the energy. I went to Coach one day and said, ‘I’m starving.’ And Sherm, Coach Z, Peep Short went and got me some food. I’d be sitting on the sideline eating a sandwich. They were the greatest. They understood. And they helped you get through by making light of the situation.”

  Every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday after practice, the coaches handed each player a hoagie, chips, a cookie, a piece of fruit, and a drink, just to ensure they were eating at least once a day. Every Thursday, the Quarterback Club set up a spread and grilled hot dogs or hamburgers. Sometimes a parent would show up, grab a paper plate, and get in line. No one asked why.

  Walker’s situation was, if not typical, hardly unusual: father dead, mother on crack. When a parole violation landed her back in jail his junior year, Willie started dealing to keep himself and his thirteen-year-old sister, Kerrie, afloat in their Valley Terrace apartment. His cousins, the Dawkins boys up in Linmar, were in the business. Walker did and saw some “unhonorable things” over the fall and into the spring of ’03, one of the worst being the moment when a colleague’s mother approached and bought drugs from her own son.

  “I was just lucky enough to keep my head and not let it suck me in,” Walker said. “Because that’s what Aliquippa does. It’s a monster, and if you don’t tame it, it’ll just swallow you up.”

  Soon after his mom was locked up, he went to see Zmijanac and McBride to tell them he had to quit football; if he didn’t land work, legal or illegal, he’d lose the apartment. The coaches loaded a small fridge with food and had it delivered to Valley Terrace, arranged to get him some odd jobs. When Willie started dealing, he didn’t let them know. The combination kept his sister safe. He stayed in school, graduated, and enrolled at nearby California University of Pennsylvania. He spent five years there, played well enough to get himself a tryout with the Cleveland Browns, relieved to be away from his hometown—yet missing it awful.

  “It definitely is a love-hate relationship,” Walker said. “Aliquippa causes you a lot of pain. But to this day—and I’ve been up with the pros, I’ve played at college—there is nothing like Friday night at The Pit. When everyone is there it’s the most beautiful thing Aliquippa has to offer, that Pit. It might as well be a monastery, because that’s the best thing going for Aliquippa. Football brings people together.

  “I’ve seen it. I’ve seen guys who hated each other . . . but then you start practicing together and playing, you can’t help but depend on each other, and that camaraderie builds something that is unexplainable. I’ve seen guys try to rip each other’s head off because they’re from two different parts of this small town, but the hostility fades and the next thing you know these guys are sitting on the bench sharing a hoagie and tea.”

  No one mistakes this for a kumbaya-style unity. Walker and all the rest know that the town’s divisions can still rear up and cripple or kill the best-intentioned man or plan. Pull some stunt to make the Quips lose? All-conference linebacker Mike Lowe blindsided an opponent, drawing the penalty that killed a score and Aliquippa’s chance at a WPIAL title in ’99; one teammate, Anthony Peluso, still can’t forgive him. “Mike Lowe,” Peluso said, as if speaking about a nightmare. “The bad part is, I had to go to college with him: we both went to Edinboro, and I never talked to him. I’d see him and talk when in team meetings—but never went out of my way to go hang out with him. Prior to that, we were real good friends. But after that he was like a leper.”

  No, that football tightness, the “Together” that Superintendent ­Wytiaz describes, is more about a common defiance that remains despite the rotting beams and frayed cuffs, a core of resentment at a world that left them to die, an us-against-everyone chip that figures to teeter on the collective shoulder until the “us” shrinks to nothing. And even then, it will carry on.

  “I still feel that sense of pride—even now, at Carnegie Mellon, one of the top engineering schools in the country, if not the world,” Jon LeDonne said. “I walk in there the same way I walk into Aliquippa High or anywhere else: with my Aliquippa T-shirt and hat on, and sometimes people look at me, like, Is this the janitor? But I’m not going to change who I am or where I came from for anybody.”

  Oddly, the moment that may best encapsulate that pride happened nowhere near The Pit. It was expected by few and seen by even less. The school’s track program, after all, had long been the sports scene’s bastard child, used mainly to keep footballers lean and busy. Despite its storied athletic history and reputation for speed, Aliquippa had produced just three individual state track champs, all in field events—and none in the previous forty-nine years. This seems less stunning once you know that the Quips haven’t had a track to run on since 1960.

  That’s when the new middle school was built on top of the hill in Plan 12, wiping away a classic cinder oval. So in cold weather, the relay team practices exchanges in school hallways, using the walls as starting blocks. When it warms, runners train in the parking lot. “Other than that? It’s these hills,” said Quips offensive coordinator Sherman McBride, who has doubled as head track coach since 2003. “They’re running hills, running steps; I got a sled during football season that harnesses these kids. Put weights on the back of the harness. Using my football coaching to do whatever it takes.”

  So every Aliquippa meet is a road trip. Small rosters make competing well at dual—rather than multi-school invitational—meets all but impossible. Speedsters like Revis and Tommie Campbell made McBride’s first squads a sprint threat, good for individual WPIAL golds and silvers. But with next to no participation in field events like pole vault, shot put, and javelin, the thought of a team title was usually absurd. And in 2005, especially, it looked all but impossible.

  “That put me on the map,” said McBride, who, as an Aliquippa football and basketball assistant and track head, has had a hand in thirty-two other team or individual WPIAL and state champions. None were more gratifying.

  Academic troubles and distractions had trimmed McBride’s twenty-five-man track roster down to eight in the spring of ’05; well-funded schools with all-weather tracks often arrive at States with a squad of fifteen to twenty. By mid-May, when it came time to qualify for the WPIALs, the Aliquippa team had lost three more athletes. The five remaining rode a van three hours east to Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, and climbed out with just their spikes and a baton.

  The first four were dependable. Tommie Campbell had emerged in Revis’s wake as Aliquippa’s “Next One,” an all-state wide receiver/safety who won a WPIAL title in the relay in ’04 and WPIAL gold in both the 100 and 200 meters just weeks before. Mike Washington and Campbell had finished 2-3 behind teammate Desmond Patrick in their sweep of the WPIAL 100 meters in ’04. James Sims, having just finished second in the WPIAL 400 meters, was a solid middle-distance threat.

  The question mark was senior long jumper Byron Wilson. At the WPIAL championships, he had finished second in the long jump with a leap of 20 feet, 3 inches. He entered the state championship seeded twenty-first out of a field of twenty-four. “We didn’t know how he was going to do,” said Washington, a wide receiver and defensive back who went on to play at the University of Hawaii. “He had leaping ability. But we’d practice out here on concrete in our cleats and Byron would sit there and chill sometimes. Sometimes he wouldn’t even show up.”

  “I ain’t going to lie,” Campbell said. “Going in, wasn’t nobody really thinking Byron could win State at long jump.”

  He had never quite fit in. Unlike his teammates, Wilson didn’t play football. He was known for being alternately quiet and hot-tempered—and the fact that his stepfather, Andre Davis, was Aliquippa’s assistant police chief only complicated things. “Quiet kid. Well dressed,” Davis said. “Has an anger problem when somebody bothers him. My wife’s family is from the North Side of Pittsburgh, but I’ve been with Byron since he was three. So he grew up a
nd graduated from here—but somehow the guys down here never accepted him as an Aliquippian. Isn’t that something?”

  Wilson fouled on his first attempt. “It wasn’t like Byron had technique,” Washington said. “He was just running.” Indeed, Wilson was starting his sprint toward the pit a yard too close, then chopping his steps to compensate, and taking off a yard short. His second try, 21 feet and change, was better. But on his third and final attempt, with Westmont Hilltop’s Brad Kanuch leading the field with a jump of 21 feet, 10 inches, Byron took off. His strides were long; his steps dropped as if choreographed. He hit the board perfectly.

  “The prettiest jump,” McBride said. “He looked like he was just flying. He jumped 22 feet, 3¼ inches. Personal best.”

  The win gave Aliquippa the maximum 10 points. Suddenly, a team title was more than possible. Problem was, Campbell had been so ill the night before that McBride drove him to a Walmart for NyQuil, and when he woke that morning Tommie nearly emptied the bottle trying to calm his nerves. Now his stomach was imploding—and he had five races to run. He almost quit. “If it wasn’t for Byron winning that long jump, I probably would’ve given up,” Campbell said.

  Instead, seventy-five minutes later Campbell survived the 100-meter and then the 200 semis. At 12:15 p.m., he ran 10.65 seconds to win the 100-meter final, and Patrick’s fifth-place finish and Washington’s eighth gave Aliquippa 24 points. Then, with Wilson running second leg and Campbell anchoring, the Quips won the 4x100 relay championship to give Aliquippa 34 points. Now Campbell’s gut was heaving. And he had to finish at least second in the 200 for Aliquippa to win the team title.

  At 2:13 p.m., as he was setting his feet in the blocks, Campbell dropped his head and vomited. The gun sounded, and he staggered through the first turn; for a moment it looked like he might finish last. But then, with the words Come in second, we’re going to win pounding in his head, Campbell summoned one last burst. “I ended up catching everybody,” he said, and he’s just about right. Kanuch leaned in to finish first at 22.33 seconds, with Campbell a quarter-step behind at 22.42.

  “If we had to run five more meters, he probably would’ve caught me,” Kanuch said then.

  Campbell’s second place gave Aliquippa 9 points and the AA state title, 43-41 over Westmont Hilltop. His effort seemed the stuff of Revis-like legend: Ill and spent, Campbell had accounted for more than half of his team’s total. He’s still given credit for the town’s biggest upset ever. But everyone close to the team knows better.

  “Byron’s really why we won gold,” Washington said.

  The news spread fast. And to anyone desperate for good news, it settled like a small blessing. “It just showed us—and everybody around us—that just because we don’t have anything, you don’t make excuses,” Campbell said. “Ain’t no excuses in anything. It’s one of my best moments, sportswise. Something nobody ever can take away from us.”

  Later that afternoon, vacationing in North Carolina, Byron Wilson’s mother and stepdad received a call from their son.

  “He couldn’t believe it: You could hear it in his voice,” Andre Davis said. “It was gratifying. To us, it meant: Thank God. Now he knows that he has a talent. He realizes if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish something. And I’m sitting here, as we speak, looking at his medal awards in track. We have them hanging off the corner of our dresser mirror, right in our bedroom. All of ’em.”

  By then, Darrelle Revis was gone. He had learned to carry himself at a remove from Aliquippa’s worst elements, had graduated healthy and whole. Now he’d just finished his freshman year at Pitt, his full scholarship already justified: started eleven games, made 49 tackles, picked off a couple of passes, and averaged 10 yards returning punts. Day by day that “corner” was growing smaller in the rearview.

  Still, the town had a way of asserting itself. On a visit home from school his sophomore year with the Panthers, Revis drove up to Cureton’s Mini Market in Plan 11 to buy the latest Air Jordans. On his way in that afternoon, he exchanged pleasantries with a Linmar lookout type standing by the door. “Yeah,” the guy said, “I see you ballin’.” The vibe couldn’t have been friendlier.

  Minutes later Revis walked out, new shoes in hand. His half-brother Jaquay showed up with Byron Wilson. Revis knew Wilson, had run track with him in ’04. He also knew that in the few months after that miracle state championship and graduation in ’05, Wilson’s life had begun to slip. A scholarship offer to run track at California University of Pennsylvania, under Olympic great Roger Kingdom, had come and gone. “He never got in trouble in high school: goofy guy, wasn’t even negative,” Revis said. “But as soon as he got out of high school, something just flipped.”

  Wilson was never connected to the warring gangs that had infested Linmar and Griffith Heights. But his sharp tongue had inflamed hotheads on both sides, and without drugs or turf in the mix, his few friends in Griffith Heights had little interest in protecting him. “A lot of guys wanted to kill him,” Revis said. “After it started Linmar was like, ‘We’re going to kill him’: you’d hear that all the time.”

  Willie Walker, the Quips lineman, had long been close to Byron. But he was also related to the crew—the Dawkins family, led by Billy Love Dawkins—who along with Anthony “Ali” Dorsett had taken control of the drug operation in Linmar when Jamie Brown and Tusweet went to prison. Soon one of Willie’s relatives warned him to distance himself from Byron. They wanted him dead, too.

  Now Revis stood chatting outside Cureton’s with Wilson and Jaquay. “This is how fast this happened: I’m talking to them for a second and this white car came up,” Revis said. “Guy just came out the car and started shooting, pistol. I got a bag of shoes in my hand, I jump behind this car, and the other lookout guy—he didn’t have no gun—now me and him are laying on the ground looking at each other, face-to-face. My heart is beating so fast, I’m like, What is going on!? and you just hear the gunshots: Boom! Boom! Boom!

  “So now I’m looking at the lookout and he’s acting, like, Oh, shoot—like he doesn’t know what’s going on. And I’m thinking, You know what the hell’s going on. . . .”

  Down on the pavement, Revis began fearing that his brother might be dead. “Then I hear the car pull off. Nobody got shot. Byron got up and started shooting. I’m shaking. My car was shot up; it had a couple bullets in it. I get in my car and get out of there. I’m like, I don’t need to be no witness.

  “You got to understand: That happens all the time; everybody who got shot, there’s been people around. But that’s the first time I saw somebody try to shoot somebody in broad daylight. Usually it happens at night. Aliquippa people, we always say, ‘These guys see each other all day, be chillin’ on the same corner, and then when night falls it’s like . . . werewolves.’ Like: Why are you shooting at him? You were just hanging out with him four hours ago?! It’s crazy. We don’t get it.”

  For Aliquippa people, though, such illogic can create a bond that only seems bewildering to outsiders. Revis was just a sophomore in November 2004, still building a rep, when he broke through to block a field goal attempt in Pitt’s blowout win over the University of Connecticut. The ball dropped right in front of him, and a long, wide-open path to the end zone beckoned. It was a cornerback’s dream play, as clear a star-making moment as football produces. But just as Revis was about to scoop it up, he noticed teammate Josh Lay closing in. Lay, a Quips star when Revis first arrived, was a Pitt senior now, playing the final home game of his college career.

  Revis pulled back. “Josh, get it! Get it!” he said. “It’s your day!”

  The startled Lay did as he was told. And the two hometown boys raced 71 yards down the sideline, Revis yelling, “Reel it in for the touchdown!” Lay scored and Darrelle gave him a happy shove in the end zone. The moment didn’t fit a sports culture given to me-first preening, but in Aliquippa they understood. No matter how much you want to flee the place, you never quite
leave it behind.

  Indeed, even with a twenty-five-mile cushion, Revis couldn’t help but feel the latest odd vibes from back home. That same year, his mother, Diana Gilbert, lost her job at the Beaver County Jail. She had been working as a guard there—had been publicly honored, in fact, in 2002 for “outstanding achievement” in successfully transitioning from welfare to full-time work—always unarmed, no nightstick or Taser, and rarely seeing any trouble.

  “Forty inmates to one guard in the pod,” she said. “I had a man-down button. The rovers—a team of guys on the shift—would come and subdue the person.” She pushed the button a few times, she says, but “I don’t think I had any really bad situations.”

  In 2005, Gilbert resigned after her bosses alleged that she’d had a three-week-long sexual relationship with a male inmate. Despite the fact that such a relationship is a felony, the warden, William Schouppe, elected not to prosecute because the alleged convict would not cooperate, according to the report issued after an independent investigation in 2007. George David, the jail’s chief of security from 1999 to 2008, called investigators’ attention to Gilbert’s resignation and “expressed concern that the matter was not pursued criminally.” He repeated that concern during a meeting with investigators—with Schouppe present.

  “She was a good guard, though,” David said.

  Oddly, considering that seven other jail officials were interviewed about the alleged affair, there’s no evidence that Gilbert herself was approached by law enforcement or independent investigators to give her side of the story. Asked if David’s assertion was untrue, she only said, “I want to say: what Georgie David put out, he could’ve handled it better.