Once, Pernell appeared in two simultaneous sporting events at South Johnston. In the spring of his senior year, between innings of a baseball game, he several times rushed to the nearby track to perform, at one point anchoring the winning relay team still wearing his baseball uniform.
In the classroom, Pernell was not nearly as spectacular a performer, however, though he managed to maintain a low “B” average.
At the beginning of his junior year, Pernell had begun dating a classmate, Sarah Wheeler*, from the community of Four Oaks, leading to an on-again, off-again relationship that would last through his remaining time at South Johnston. Sarah was a petite, attractive freshman when Pernell met her in study hall on the second day of school.
“I thought Pernell was very handsome,” she remembered years later. “I didn’t even know he played sports. I had no idea.”
Sarah was just 14, and Pernell became her first romance. “He was a very lovable person,” she recalled. “Everybody loved Pernell. Especially the teachers. He was so polite. You know, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘No, ma’am.’”
Before the year was out, Sarah was known throughout the school as “Pernell’s woman,” and he had become very possessive of her. As time went on, she began to feel smothered by his attentions and expectations, and at the beginning of her sophomore year, she decided to do something about it.
“Pernell,” she said as the two of them walked along an upstairs hall at South Johnston early that autumn, “we need to talk.”
“What about?” said Pernell, who was beginning his final year of high school as the star of the football team.
“Us,” she said.
“Okay,” he responded warily, stopping to look at her.
“Pernell, I like you a lot,” she said. “You’re a nice guy and I enjoy being around you. But I want to back off a little bit. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand,” he said, his voice rising.
“Pernell, I’m just fifteen years old. This is your last year at South Johnston and we don’t know what’s going to happen after that. We can be friends, but let’s ease off a little.”
Sarah turned and hurried off to her next class. She looked back and saw Pernell still standing in the same spot, watching her go.
A few minutes later, a commotion developed at the bottom of a flight of stairs not far from where Pernell and Sarah had stopped to talk. Pernell lay motionless and apparently unconscious at the base of the stairway. A group of students quickly gathered, and some ran for help.
One of Pernell’s football coaches, Ronald Avery, was in his classroom not far away, and when he heard that his star quarterback had fallen and was hurt, he pushed his way through the crowd but could get no response from him. “Somebody call the rescue squad,” he called.
“I thought he was dying,” Avery said years later.
Pernell still had not moved when medical attendants arrived and checked for vital signs. Avery thought he saw a worried expression on the face of one of the medics. Pernell was placed on a stretcher and rushed to the hospital.
Avery hurried to his classroom, gave his students quick assignments and left for the hospital, where the medics told him that Pernell appeared to have suffered cardiac arrest during the trip. Deeply worried, Avery waited uneasily for word from the doctors. But when a doctor finally emerged, he told him that Pernell would be okay.
“Just let him lie there for a while and then take him back to school,” the doctor said.
Avery was confused. “The medics said he might have had a cardiac arrest in the ambulance,” he said.
The doctor smiled.
“Well, he convinced the rescue people of that. In the excitement and the urgency of the moment, that can happen if somebody wants you to think he’s dying. But he was faking it.”
“Faking?” Avery was incredulous.
“There’s nothing wrong with him except that he must have wanted to get somebody’s attention,” the doctor said.
But word already had spread quickly through South Johnston High that the school’s star athlete was seriously injured, and Sarah was distraught when she heard it.
“I still don’t know what really happened,” she said years later. “I just heard that Pernell had been rushed to the hospital and I know I had a hard time waiting until I got home on the school bus. I planned to ask my dad to take me to the hospital. I was really worried.”
But when she got home, she was startled to find Pernell on her front porch.
“What happened to you?” she asked, as he smiled broadly.
“Oh, I just fell on the stairs,” he said. “Guess I knocked myself out.”
“What did the doctors say?”
“They said I just got a little knock on the head and that I’ll be all right.”
Relieved, Sarah rushed to his arms. Their relationship continued as before, and Sarah came to realize that backing away from her involvement with Pernell would not be easy.
Before the year was out, she would try several more times to ease away, but never with success.
“Pernell would get demanding,” Sarah recalled. “Too bossy. He always wanted things his way. It got to where it was like I was married to him. He’d get angry and yell at me. It always happened when I wanted to back off. My biggest problem with Pernell was the breaking up. He didn’t like that. It was like it hurt him so much, he couldn’t handle breaking up.”
During Pernell’s closing days of high school, in the spring of 1980, Sarah tried once again to break off from him. This time, he became angrier than she’d ever seen him.
The blow from Pernell’s strong right hand caught her by surprise, and she ran away, confused and angry, her ears ringing. When she got home that day, she unexpectedly encountered her father, Walter Wheeler*, who had arrived home from work early. He immediately saw that she was upset.
“Sarah, what’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” he repeated sternly.
“Pernell,” she said softly.
“Pernell what?” her father pressed.
“Oh, Dad…”
She hesitated.
“What about Pernell?”
“He got a little mad.”
Silence followed while her father waited for her to elaborate.
“He scared me,” she said.
“Did he hit you?”
“Just once.”
Angry, her father turned to leave.
“Where are you going, Daddy?” Sarah asked anxiously.
“I’m going to find Mr. Jefferson,” he said.
Shortly, Walter Wheeler was knocking on Pernell’s front door. Pernell’s mother answered.
“Mrs. Richardson,” Wheeler said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to talk to you about Pernell.”
Inside, out of sight, Pernell was listening intently.
“He hit Sarah today and I won’t allow that to happen,” Wheeler said.
“Oh, my,” Joann responded. “I’m so sorry.”
“If it ever happens again, I’ll have to do something about it,” Wheeler said. “Tell him that.”
“It won’t happen again,” Joann said, her embarrassment obvious. “I promise you that.”
After being lectured by his mother, Pernell apologized to Sarah, who forgave him and went back with him.
“He never beat me again,” Sarah said years later. “To tell you the truth, I think he was afraid of what my father would do to him. He didn’t want Dad coming looking for him again.”
Although Pernell weighed only 150 pounds, far too light to be thought a likely prospect by most college football coaches, he had been getting the attention of a handful of college recruiters, among them those from North Carolina State, where his close friend, Tol Avery, was the starting quarterback.
Avery encouraged him to join the Wolfpack, as the State team was known to its fans, and Pernell was tempted, but he knew that the chances of an undersized quarterback or defensive b
ack getting more than token playing time with such a team were remote. Instead, he turned his attention to smaller colleges within the state, where he believed he could become a star. His first choice was Elon College, near Burlington, which had just won the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics championship. But when he visited the campus, the coaches concluded that Pernell was too slow. He drove home under the crush of disappointment.
After this rebuff, Pernell decided to try for a scholarship in either track or baseball. But as his senior year drew toward a close, a man emerged from the stands at one of his last baseball games and introduced himself as Steve Davis, a football coach at Guilford College.
Pernell knew little of the Quaker school in Greensboro, but he was impressed when Davis told him that M.L. Carr of the Boston Celtics and World B Free of the Philadelphia 76ers had played basketball at Guilford.
He accepted an invitation to visit the campus on the first weekend in May, 1981. His brother Willie, his cousin Donnell Smith, and his uncle Andy Smith made the trip with him, and before the four started back to Benson on Sunday, Pernell knew where he would be spending the next four years. He became the last player to sign with the Quakers that spring.
As soon as he got home, Pernell hurried to Sarah’s house to tell her the news. That night, they celebrated by making love.
4.
Where Winning Isn’t Everything
FROM THE BEGINNING, Pernell and Guilford College were an unlikely pairing. In a fundamental way, the institutional notion of athletics and Pernell’s view of sports were at counterpoints almost from the moment he stepped onto the campus dominated by ancient oak trees. Guilford College had been established in 1837 by the Society of Friends and for more than 100 years the peaceful Quakers had had an uneasy association with football, principally because of its violent nature. For generations, faculty pressure had periodically arisen to discontinue the sport.
Consequently, not only had Guilford never been a reservoir of talent for the National Football League, it could claim many mileposts in the sport that were unique.
The legendary University of Alabama coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant, then a rookie head coach at the University of Maryland just five days out of pre-flight school near the end of World War II, got the first of his all-time record 323 victories against the Quakers in 1945. The score was Maryland 60, Guilford 6.
A Guilford graduate named Charles “Block” Smith once coached the team for six years, even though he won just three games, lost 41 and tied three. During the same period, Smith coached the basketball team as well, with no better results, his teams winning just three games while losing 68.
Like every coach Guilford College ever had, no matter the sport, Smith finally resigned of his own accord. No coach in the school’s history ever was fired or pressured to resign for not winning games.
In the early 1970s, Guilford’s football team was so inept that it came within one game of tying a national record for consecutive defeats by losing 32 in a row. When that opportunity for dubious national recognition was shattered by an unexpected 36-31 victory over Randolph-Macon, some on campus, mostly long-suffering faculty, were crestfallen for weeks that their team had been denied even that moment of questionable glory. But the students tore the goalposts down.
No individual player ever symbolized Guilford’s dismal football fortunes more than Don Cupit. He spent his first two collegiate seasons, 1969 and 1970, at Virginia Military Institute, where the football team won only one game. Hoping for better fortunes, Cupit transferred to Guilford College for his junior and senior seasons. He arrived right in the middle of the Quakers’ long losing streak, and his new team lost 19 more games without winning any, giving Cupit a four-year college career of 1-39.
When Herb Appenzeller was hired from Chowan Junior College in 1956 to coach the football team, he was called to the office of Guilford’s president, Dr. Clyde Milner, to talk about the approaching season. What he got was a lecture on the importance of good sportsmanship and the lofty ideals of sports as part of the college experience. After Milner had finished, Appenzeller sat for a moment contemplating what he had just heard.
“Doctor Milner,” he finally said. “I want to understand you correctly. Are you telling me that if we can beat the devil out of them, don’t do it?”
“Why, yes, my dear man,” Milner responded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“I guess he thought we were going to be good,” said Appenzeller after recalling the story. Appenzeller’s first team at Guilford failed to beat the devil out of anyone, winning just one of eight games.
Still, Guilford had high expectations from time to time. When John Stewart was hired prior to the 1963 season as the replacement for Appenzeller, who had earned a doctorate and was becoming the school’s athletic director, Stewart confidently predicted that his first Quaker team would finish the season undefeated. It finished without a victory in ten games.
Still, there was no grassroots movement to replace Stewart, no hangings in effigy. Indeed, Stewart could not discern that ten straight defeats had had any appreciable effect on the small campus.
Occasionally, there were coaches at Guilford who became troubled by the pacifist nature of the Quakers and tried to make the school more competitive. One was the football coach who felt that a new team logo that reflected the aggressive nature of the sport might help. A talented Western Guilford High School student, Duke Hilliard, designed three possible logos, among them a fierce, angry Quaker that the coach preferred.
School administrators were rapid and unanimous in their dissent and ordered that a more fitting logo be designed. Within days it was unveiled: a silhouette of the oldest spreading oak tree on campus. That became the school’s official emblem. It still appears on all school correspondence and publications, but it never has been applied to the football team’s helmets.
At Guilford, the finer points of football were never fully appreciated. In 1959, during Appenzeller’s tenure as head coach, the Quakers once rescheduled a late summer practice session to the early morning hours so that the Green Bay Packers, then one of the National Football League’s marquee teams, could use Guilford’s facilities for an afternoon drill in preparation for a pre-season game in the area.
Appenzeller, still wearing his coaching attire, had rushed from his sessions with his own players to stand along the sidelines while the legendary Vince Lombardi and his staff put the Packers of Paul Hornung, Bart Start, Jim Taylor and Max McGee, all in their famous golden helmets with the “G” on the sides, through their paces. Appenzeller had stood there spellbound, his arms folded in front of him, and for a time was not aware that Dr. Milner, the school’s president, had joined him without speaking.
“Oh, my good man,” Milner finally said to Appenzeller with enthusiasm, “I believe we’re going to have a pretty good ball club this year.” Milner turned and walked away before Appenzeller could explain that the “G” on the players’ helmets stood for Green Bay, not Guilford.
It was into such football innocence that Pernell Jefferson arrived in the late summer of 1981, bent upon achieving fame.
As a potential defensive back, Pernell was assigned to Tommy Saunders, an assistant coach. For years, Saunders had seen undersized defensive backs come and go, and the information he was given about Pernell prior to the beginning of practice didn’t indicate that he would be any different.
“I just knew he was a quick kid,” Saunders remembered years later. “Small, 145 to 150 pounds. I knew he had been a quarterback down there at South Johnston. And I knew he could get into school. That’s it.”
Pernell was a step ahead of Saunders, though. He understood that he was likely to be nothing more than a face in the crowd, so he made sure his face would be remembered.
He showed up at practice wearing a Mohawk haircut. It worked. “This guy must want to play,” Saunders told a fellow coach as he watched his players go through their first afternoon of conditioning.
Pernell was wor
king hard to impress Saunders, but while he was making a quick turn on an agility drill during that first practice session, he felt pain shoot through his left ankle. He tried to keep his footing but suddenly found himself lying on the field with Saunders rushing to his side.
Soon, Pernell was being helped away, a bulging bag of ice lashed to the outside of his left ankle. He was taken to a Greensboro hospital where X rays showed a broken ankle.
The injury was a devastating blow to Pernell. Even before he could get to know his new teammates, he was an outsider looking in, a sports invalid leaning on crutches along the sidelines, watching practice. Depression gripped him and he wondered if he would ever play again. It took days, but he finally pushed the doubts and depression aside and began working toward his goal once more.
Even as his ankle was healing, he continued the strict weight training program required for all members of the football team, and it was beginning to make a difference. Though his weight still fluctuated between 150 and 155 pounds, he felt stronger. And by the time he was able to return to the lineup as a reserve defensive back halfway through the season, he was beginning to develop something close to an addiction for weightlifting. Not only did he take regular turns in the Guilford College weight room, he also began to frequent several Greensboro health clubs, where he met competitive weightlifters who were willing to share their training secrets. When Pernell began to hear from them about non-prescription drugs that could accomplish miracles, he listened with interest and filed the information away in his memory. He was determined to make himself strong enough so that neither injuries nor anything else could keep him from his goal of becoming a football star.
Although Pernell was nearly three hours away at Guilford, some things had not changed for his girlfriend back in Johnston County. After school started that fall, Sarah stopped between classes to chat with a male student she didn’t know. A football player soon approached them.
Deadly Goals Page 4
