Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts by Mark Bowden
Back in the leather-helmet era Turkey Day was unscripted and exuberant. Sometimes the game would last all afternoon, ending only when one side had had enough or the sun went down. Today football is choreographed to the second, and even high school games are as much contests between coaches and game plans as they are tests of brawn and grit. Teams scout each other for weeks, scour game films for tendencies and to plot counterstrategy. But events had conspired to make this year’s Turkey Day game a throwback. Neither Kirkwood nor Webster knew what to expect from the other. Kirkwood was fielding an inexperienced, unpracticed squad with the kind of game plan—ten plays—that the kids could have put together themselves the night before.
Webster Groves had an advantage. Its freshmen and sophomores had not disbanded when their season ended; they had been scrimmaging almost daily with the varsity to help prepare it for the state tournament games. “For us this is just another game added to the schedule,” said Yarmon Kirksey, the jayvee coach. “We usually spend only a day or two putting a game plan in place, so we’re ready to go.”
If Webster came to Turkey Day with a full playbook, well rehearsed, Kirkwood brought little more than its passion. In the four days the young Pioneers had to get ready, the sidelined varsity players (in many cases their older brothers) had fired them up. If Webster was going to the state finals, and if the Kirkwood upperclassmen weren’t going to get their shot, then at least they were going to bring back the Bell. Webster Groves had won it the last two times, so Kirkwood’s seniors were in danger of going their whole high school football careers without a Turkey Day victory. “It’s not a question of wanting the Bell,” said Big Joe Mopkins, the Kirkwood lineman. “The Bell is the only thing left for us. We have to have it.”
Thanksgiving Day was cold and sunny at Ray Moss Field (named after an esteemed former Webster football coach). The soggy remains of the previous night’s bonfire filled a stone pit beyond the east end zone, and the air smelled faintly of burning leaves and wood. The high school’s grounds crew had painted a black-and-orange checkerboard pattern in both end zones and a giant Statesmen helmet at midfield, and the mood was festive. The competing marching bands were blasting warm-up tunes into the air, and crowds were already filling the stands on both sides of the field and beginning to form around the track. It looked and felt just like every other Turkey Day.
But there was Blake Earnhart on the Kirkwood sideline, looking forlorn, bare-armed against the chill in his white-and-red varsity jersey, hands thrust deep into his baggy blue jeans. The eighteen-year-old had been an all-conference center and defensive end for the Pioneers. This was supposed to have been his day, his last big football game. Instead, he was watching his oversized kid brother, Matt, a freshman, warm up. “It’s painful,” Blake said. “I started playing football in the eighth grade, and I’ve grown up dreaming about playing here. Now, not only do I not get to play, I have to watch our rival team go play for the state championship. On top of that, my little brother, a freshman who never even played football before this year, gets to play.”
Varsity wide receiver Martin Drummond was out on the field helping to coax the Kirkwood underclassmen through warm-ups. He had rebounded somewhat from his depression earlier in the week but was still sad. He had watched his brother Greg play in this game in 1996 and lose. “He came home all upset,” said Martin. “I couldn’t understand why it was such a big deal—a bell. But as I got older I understood what it really meant. It’s a memory you make for yourself. So far every year since I started high school, Webster has won that bell. This year I really wanted to win it back. I wanted to play in this game so bad. I went to the Webster semifinal game, and when they won in double overtime, my heart just broke completely down. After graduation I’m planning to go into the Navy, so I’ll probably never play in another football game.”
Martin predicted victory for Kirkwood’s underclassmen. “Before we came over here, I told them, ‘Promise me you are going to win back the Bell.’ And they looked me in the eye and promised they would. And I believe it.”
Martin and his teammates, all of them in their white-and-red jerseys, formed a raucous cheering section that moved up and down the field with the action, bellowing encouragement to their proxies through a giant white plastic cone. On the Webster side of the field, a few of the varsity Statesmen watched the action, with a comparative lack of interest. Darrell Jackson tossed a football casually with a teammate. They had used the field all morning to practice for their big Saturday game. They looked like varsity players forced to attend a jayvee game.
Coach Wade had called it days before: Kirkwood had all the passion for this game. Football students, take note—in the contest between desire and preparation, bet on desire.
Kirkwood dominated from the start. A tall, fast freshman named Jeremy Maclin, whom Webster had never seen before, carried the ball on nearly every play. Lining up in a single wing, he would catch the snap from center and just take off—left, right, or up the middle. Webster couldn’t stop him. With his long legs and quick cuts, Jeremy seemed to grow in stature with every snap. On Kirkwood’s first two possessions he marched his team upfield for touchdowns. By the end of the first quarter the score was Jeremy Maclin 14, Webster 0.
Webster pulled together and kept him from scoring in the second quarter. Coach Kirksey laid into his players at halftime. They weren’t playing with discipline! They were forgetting their assignments! The ends were failing to contain! “And the defensive line,” Kirksey said, “you haven’t shown me nothin’! Nothin’!”
In the second half one of Jeremy’s long, skinny legs got hurt. Stripped of his pads and helmet, seated on the bench with the painful limb stretched out in front of him, tears streaming down his cheeks, Webster’s nemesis was revealed to be a baby-faced fourteen-year-old boy. “Can you bend it?” the Kirkwood trainer asked.
“No!” said Jeremy. “It hurts too much!”
“Is your mom here?” one of the coaches asked.
“No, she had to work,” said Jeremy. And his father lives in Florida, so the Kirkwood star sat by himself, a dripping bag of ice taped to his knee.
“It’s just a bruise,” said the trainer, looking back at the boy over his shoulder. “He’ll feel better once he calms down.”
Then, in the third quarter, Kirkwood kicker Andy Krapfl’s little brother Matt, the young Pioneers’ quarterback, launched a perfect sixty-yard touchdown strike. Andy ran out on the field to congratulate Matt, but the kid was already buried under his happy teammates.
Webster came alive in the fourth quarter, seemingly on the determination of DJ Jackson alone—“I set goals every day, and I try to reach them,” the tiny sophomore had said. “My goals are: Every game I give one hundred ten percent, show leadership, play my very best.” DJ kicked, ran the ball, and played strong safety for Webster. He was all over the field. In the final minutes of the game he broke loose twice for touchdowns.
On defense DJ saved a touchdown by executing a perfect open-field tackle on a Kirkwood back about twice his size who had broken free with a clear shot at the end zone. DJ hit him ankle-high near the Kirkwood sideline and took his feet right out from under him. Martin Drummond ran out to help DJ to his feet. “DJ, he’s my cousin,” Martin said happily.
Kirkwood scored again midway through the fourth quarter, and Holley leapt with both hands in the air. “The Bell is ours!” he said. The young Pioneers would win 28–14.
As the clock wound down, Coach Wade lined up Kirkwood’s players on the sideline. “Nobody on this team goes for the Bell until you have shaken hands with the Webster players,” he said.
John Lothman squeezed into the line. He had made several tackles in the game. His white uniform was dirty, and he was wearing a big smile. It looked like his six-five frame had grown two more inches. “It was great!” he said.
When the final whistle blew, a mob of deliriously happy Kirkwood varsity players led a mad dash across the field for the Bell. Wade’s underclassmen dutifully trotted across
“Hold your heads up,” Coach Kirksey shouted at his team, which huddled on one knee in a disciplined semicircle around him as the jubilant horns faded in the distance. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. You all are just starting to learn how to play football, and today was a good lesson. Now let’s say a prayer.”
Darrell Jackson stood silently to one side. “All I can say is, we better win state,” he said. “Otherwise we’ve got nothing.” (The Statesmen would win 23–22 over Raymore-Peculiar High, and Darrell would be the star of the game.)
The last player off the field was DJ Jackson, who was pleased with his effort despite his team’s loss. His father, Donnie, a former Kirkwood star, had in the past watched his son’s games standing in the end zone, between the Kirkwood and Webster sides. “He came over to the Webster side today,” said DJ, grinning.
The Bell was waiting outside the gym as the jayvee victors emerged from the locker room showered and changed, ready to head home for turkey dinner. The varsity Pioneers were still celebrating. They grabbed the younger players as they emerged from the gym one by one and insisted that each clang the Bell, stake his claim to it.
Kirkwood had the Bell, and Webster Groves would have its state championship. The young Pioneers would walk with a swagger for the rest of the year, and the Webster jayvees still had two or three years to avenge their loss. It was as close to a perfect ending as anyone could ask.
THE UNKINDEST CUT
FEBRUARY 1997
Anyone who ever tried out for a high school team remembers the emotionally grueling process of waiting out the coach’s cuts. There were times in high school when I saw my name on the list and times when I didn’t. Sports Illustrated bought the idea of letting me follow this excruciating process at Coatesville High School, one of the traditional basketball powers in suburban Philadelphia. The coach and the boys trying out were thrilled that SI was interested, even if it did mean that their success or failure would be acted out on a national stage. It was a reminder to me of how much things like making the team matter to teenage boys, and how hard it is to be that age. I fell in love with these guys, and on the day when Coach Smith posted the final list, it was almost too painful for me to watch.
It starts with the boys who cut themselves. They are a blessing. Take the freshman who trips in the first set of suicide sprints. Coach Jim (Scoogy) Smith whistles the start, and in a crisp volley of chirping sneakers the kid goes down. He promptly rights himself, but soon he is a full court behind the pack, his skinny arms and legs chugging, his buzz cut tucked deep in his shoulders, as if the gym were about to collapse on his head. Scoogy (rhymes with “boogie”) loudly counts off the long seconds of the boy’s humiliation.
He never recovers from the fall. Within days he is gone from the group of about fifty boys who showed up for the start of basketball intramurals, or preseason workouts, at Coatesville (Pennsylvania) Area Senior High. The two-day tryout from which the twelve-man varsity will be chosen is still six weeks off, but each of the hungry young hearts in the gym knows that it’s in the intramurals that he will or won’t make the team. And making the Red Raiders, wearing the red and black, is about as big a deal as there is for a teenager in Coatesville.
Mark Hostutler, a junior who has spent hundreds of solitary hours launching jump shots at the Y near his house in a suburban development, sums it up for many of the boys in the gym: “Basketball is my life. I have to make this team. It’s all I think about.”
Coatesville (pop. 11,038) is a worn-out steel town about forty-five minutes west of Philadelphia, where the land begins to riffle up toward the Piedmont Plateau, Blue Mountain, and the mighty Appalachians. The town bends like a gray scar along an old rail line between two wooded ridges that, as basketball season begins, are in full autumn flame. Coatesville High takes most of its 2,176 students from the upscale developments and small towns scattered across the surrounding hills, but it draws its reputation—and nearly all of its basketball players—from the hard streets of Coatesville proper, where most folks are poor and black.
These players grow up under the looming gray sheds and black stacks of Lukens Steel, in a hive of run-down row houses and bland projects around a derelict downtown strip whose only thriving retail trade is in crack. Here basketball is more than the biggest game in town. It’s hope. It’s often the only thing that keeps teenage boys off the streets. Basketball can be a ticket to college, to a life. This was true when Scoogy wore the red and black in the 1960s and was still true when his assistant Ricky Hicks was a Red Raiders star in the ’80s. Coatesville is a perennial power in Philadelphia-area schoolboy basketball. The high school game is the town’s intergenerational glue.
The boys who show up for intramurals are signing on for an ordeal familiar to every kid who ever chased a dream of sports glory: the sizing up of talent and the hazarding of ego called trying out. It’s a process that began for most of them years ago with the choosing of sides on the asphalt at Ash Park or the Ninth Avenue rec center, where the nets hang in tatters and the backboards are gray from the smudges of a million caroms. Those who were chosen, who kept being chosen, who went on to star in rec leagues and summer basketball camps, have reached the ultimate reckoning at this new gym tucked against a leafy ridge east of downtown, where Scoogy’s practiced eye decides who will become a Red Raider and who won’t.
“It’s hard,” Scoogy says, sitting with the back of his plastic chair tilted against the wall in his office a few days before intramurals begin. He toys with his whistle. Scoogy, fifty, is a rangy man with pale copper skin, big hands, and a round face whose features are so large that they need an extra second or two to arrange into a smile or a frown. He got his nickname as a baby—it was his grandmother’s word for an especially wiggly, insistent child—and it still fits. Mouth and man are in constant motion on the court, teasing, instructing, berating, howling with pleasure, or, more often, dismay. He’s a cheerful tyrant.
Some parents don’t much like Scoogy—who was a basketball assistant at Coatesville High for two years before being named head coach in 1995—because he’s blunt and impatient and so demanding of their boys. But most of the parents do like him, and what the players feel goes way beyond that. They want to be his boys. The task of choosing only a dozen of them, of dashing so many tender hopes, gives Scoogy pause. He hums a sustained bass note and then repeats with emphasis: “Hard.”
Intramurals run from late September through October and into November, three evenings a week of demanding drills and scrimmages. Official tryouts start Monday, November 11, and two days later Scoogy will pick his team. Some boys, like the hapless sprinter in the first suicides, will do him a favor and cut themselves. They will fall on their faces or simply size up the competition and go home. But most of the others who show up are infected with the dream. Each can see his career as a glorious progression from playground to state championship to NCAA Final Four to…the NBA! And the only obstacle to this megabucks, slam-dunk future is one man with a whistle.
SEPTEMBER
They come to the gym in groups of two or three and anxiously await his arrival. They wear jerseys that hang to mid-thigh. Their playing “shorts” billow to below the knees and are pulled down at the waist far enough to show off a full hand of Fruit of the Loom. They wear anklet socks under yacht-sized sneaks. Their sleeveless T’s and jerseys advertise summer basketball camps and rec leagues.
Newcomers and former jayvees admire from a distance the joyful ease of returning varsity players, most of whom regard the intramurals as beneath them. They are an established elite. Counting one or two sure bets who are playing football and won’t be out for basketball until after Thanksgiving, Scoogy has only five or six empty slots on this season’s varsity.
A
“Making varsity is the best thing in the world, the best,” says Clarence (Nin) Bacon, a sophomore with long dagger sideburns who is vying with Damon and six others for one of three point-guard spots. “It’s everything. I was on the ninth-grade team last year, and we got in to see all the varsity games. The gym is filled, and it’s so loud, and when the team comes out, the crowd goes crazy, man…it’s…it’s…” Nin just puts up his hands and smiles. “It’s the biggest thing. If you’re on the team, everything is great. Your problems are all gone. Even your schoolwork goes easy. Everybody looks up to you, because everybody would like to be on the basketball team. At the parties after the games, you’re the man. The girls, like, line up.”
Tion has a better chance than most. He’s six-four, with long arms and big hands and a grace remarkable for a boy his size. Scoogy has already mentally penciled in Tion, not only on the varsity but also in the starting five—so long as he doesn’t mess up. Tion has a history of defeating himself: he lacks discipline and direction. Predictably, he’s not in the gym on the first night of intramurals.
Scoogy’s arrival hushes the crowd. “All jewelry off!” the coach shouts. Then he lines the boys up at one end of the gym for suicide sprints and blows his whistle. The ordeal has begun.