Muck City Read Free

dark and pressing desire to win.
    When he was eight years old, in a space of five months, both Mario’s mother and father suddenly passed away, leaving a bottomless well of sadness the boy would often tumble down.
    His mother, Mary, was a schoolteacher who’d always dreamed of having a big family. But her heart was weak, and bearing six children had only made it weaker, so much so that the doctor had warned that a seventh child might kill her. She’d borne Mario anyway, then flatlined a month after leaving the hospital. Doctors had kept her alive long enough for the boy to grow and love her, and then died before he could understand that it wasn’t his fault. Mario’s grieving father followed five months later, suffering a fatal stroke.
    “Mary gave her life to Mario,” Mary’s sister Gail would say. “The boy has purpose. He is here for a reason.”
    For Mario, that reason was to play football, something he’d discovered to fill the gaping emptiness inside. And now in his senior year, it was todeliver his father’s dream: having a son win a championship as a Raider, a wish his three older brothers were unable to deliver.
    The linebacker had been the last person to leave the field after the Raiders lost the title game the previous year. Sitting alone in the end zone, tears streaking his face, he’d looked up at Hester and told him, “We’ll be back. I’ll bring us here.”
    Hester sensed a leader in his midst. When the quarterback position came open, he chose Mario, not caring that physically he was hardly quarterback material.
    Like Gail, the coach had seen something undeniable.
    “The will drives him,” he said.
    But for Mario, leading the Raiders and fulfilling his father’s desire would take both an emotional and physical toll. And the spotlights that so often found young men in the Glades and bestowed them with opportunity and fame would prove elusive for the unlikely quarterback.
    •   •   •
    IF DAVONTE ALLEN had a nickname, it would be “Clean.”
    For him, Belle Glade symbolized the great valley of the shadow of death that he steeled himself against each morning in prayer. But his feet had never walked its menacing streets, something that Deacon Julius Hamilton would credit as one of his greatest achievements in life.
    Davonte was raised in his grandparents’ tiny church overlooking the canal, where regal men still donned bowler hats in the Everglades summer. Growing up, he’d followed a rigid course of schoolwork, Bible study, athletics, and weekend chores. Crossing these lines guaranteed swift rebuke, “for the wrath of God shall fall upon the disobedient child,” Julius liked to warn.
    In a region where many children never traveled as far as the coast, Davonte’s grandparents had shown him the country and introduced himto a bigger world. They’d enrolled him at Glades Day School, a private, mostly white institution on the opposite end of town that opened in the 1960s, before integration, and boasted six state football titles of its own.
    After two years as a standout receiver for the Glades Day Gators, Davonte transferred into Glades Central already a champion. The diamond-studded ring from that winning season now sat on a shelf in his room next to his old Bible, a display that provided both daily nourishment and inspiration. For Davonte, the move to a lesser school was the only way to prove himself on a bigger stage, where the rewards of a righteous servant—college and a career in the NFL—lie waiting under those prime-time lights. But to reach them, he would first have to escape the long, imposing shadow of Kelvin Benjamin.
    •   •   •
    FOR THE 96 PERCENT of Glades Central students who did not wear the maroon and gold on Friday nights, there were no weekly faxes by way of the Crimson Tide or Hurricanes. There were no photo spreads in the
Palm Beach Post
, no middle-aged men in performance wear sending texts laced with promise; no eleventh-hour home visits by the