Muck City Read Free Page B

of Kampala or Nairobi than any rural American town. It was a place so removed from modern society that some families had resorted to catching rainwater to survive.
    In a farming town of 17,467 people, there were more than a dozen gangs that preyed on young men and saturated the downtown streets with cocaine. In 2003, Belle Glade had the second-highest violent crime rate in the country. Shootings remained near-weekly occurrences. AIDS had left its indelible scar and lingering stigma. If you stayed long enough, there came a time when you felt as if everyone you spoke with had been touched by some sort of tragic episode—so that even along Main Street, with its fast-food restaurants and sleek Bank of America branch, and within the quiet, middle-class neighborhoods, Belle Glade carried the aura of a trauma zone.
    Yet somehow from this crush of poverty and tragedy came one of the country’s greatest concentrations of raw football talent. After Jessie Hesterwent to the Los Angeles Raiders, thirty players from Glades Central reached the NFL, while more found their way into Canada and other professional leagues (Pahokee’s numbers were even greater). For a school of only 1,037 students, it was a staggering rate of success, considering that only eight out of every ten thousand high school football players (or .08 percent) are ever drafted into the NFL.
    In recent years, Glades Central has sent an average of eight players to NCAA Division I programs. It is said that in any given year, one hundred former Raiders are playing football somewhere in North America. Glades Central also boasts six state titles and twenty-five district championships.
    With such numbers, one might think,
It’s a town obsessed with football
, and tick down the other places that come to mind: Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Odessa, Texas, or perhaps even Long Beach, California, where Polytechnic High School alone has sent more than fifty players to the NFL since 1927. Or it could be one of a hundred other places in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Michigan that inform Hollywood’s treatment of the Friday-night game—the story of bighearted kids winning it all behind a coach’s tough love in a town where football is like religion.
    But this is not that story.
    In Belle Glade, where the risk of joblessness, prison, or early death followed each boy like a toxic cloud, high school football was more than religion, it was like salvation itself—the raft by which to flee a ship that kept drifting back in time. Football offered an education, a chance at life. As for the town, the relationship with the game went beyond fandom. It was something deeper, more psychological, like a weekly remembrance of lost, unblemished youth. Glades Central had to be one of the only high schools in America where its students were largely absent from football games. Watching from the bleachers were the uncles, fathers, and old gridiron kings whose own escape had eluded them. For a town with trouble on its mind, the Friday-night lights were the closest things to a catharsis, or at least a fleeting escape.
    “Down here,” one player said, “there’s so much trouble that winning is the only thing to look forward to. It’s the only thing we’re good at. For that moment, all our problems go away.”
    Belle Glade was like no other football town in America. There was no Hollywood treatment of the Muck City game. What follows instead is the messy and chaotic pursuit of a title-seeking team, a story about home, loyalty, and the pressure to win in a town whose identity lay rooted in a game. It is a tale of great escapes, a story of survival.

T he city of Belle Glade was born in the watery wake of Manifest Destiny, a settlement hacked and forged from America’s last wild frontier. Like most of South Florida today, Belle Glade emerged as the result of one of the most ingenious and cataclysmic feats of modern engineering, the draining of the Florida Everglades.
    For thousands of years, summer storms