“YOU’VE GOT A MAN DOWN IN HERE”

Brandon Sanders was in the shower, deep in the metal catacombs beneath the Orange Bowl, when he heard the sobs. He and his University of Arizona teammates could be forgiven for shedding some tears. The 1992 edition of the Wildcats had just come achingly close — a foot away, if you want the measure of it — €”to beating the top-ranked, defending national champion Miami Hurricanes on their home field.

This Miami roster was filled with future NFL stars and a soon-to-be Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback Gino Torretta. Arizona had to this point in the ‘92 season been a collection of underage, undersized underachievers, who only a week before played woebegone Oregon State (final season record 1-9-1) to a 14-14 draw. Against Miami, a team that had won 47 straight home games, the Wildcats were 28-point underdogs. Yet Arizona fought the celebrated ‘Canes to a brutal, bruising, humbling standoff, losing 8-7 in a contest so dominated by defense that the difference was a safety - and a missed field goal.

Every man in that locker room was hurting. But what Sanders heard was different. This was deeper. “I look over, and it’s Steve, and he’s in a corner crying.”

A half-hour earlier, Arizona kicker Steve McLaughlin pushed his 51-yard try at the final whistle just to the right, by the length of a ruler. “He was just devastated,” recalls Dick Tomey, Arizona’s head coach that day.

Devastated and alone. “It was heartbreaking, because we fought so hard,” McLaughlin recalls. “I needed a moment, so I just kind of found a place over by the showers.” Some teammates were walking past him, like he didn’t exist, and that pissed off Sanders, a redshirt freshman safety.

Sanders weighed, maybe, 175 pounds, but his intelligence and charisma made him respected among his peers, a young group including future pros Tony Bouie, Tedy Bruschi, Sean Harris and Rob Waldrop, who were determined to turn the program around. Sanders also had a disturbing ability to deliver a blow on a football field, leaving a trail of cracked ribs and crumpled collarbones ever since he was a kid playing Pop Warner in San Diego. This made him not just respected, but a little bit feared.

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“Something just came over me,” he says now. He threw a towel on, walked into the locker room, jumped onto a bench to enhance his 5′9 stature, and started yelling — at seniors, at 300-pounders, everybody. Didn’t matter. “Hey, we have a man fucking down in here!” he shouted. “Get in there and pick him up — everybody! Tap him on his shoulders, tell him he’s going to be all right. Whatever you got to do, everybody needs to get in there. Everybody!”

Angry young men are volatile. Brandon Sanders knows this. He grew up in Southeast San Diego amid the turmoil of the 1980s Bloods and Crips gang conflicts. And angry young football players are built for physical violence. It’s in the game. He braced for a fight.

Didn’t happen. “Nobody challenged me,” Sanders says. “Everybody — everybody on that team went.” They lifted McLaughlin up, tapped his shoulder, treated him like a brother and not a loser. “They all got together, did like a ‘1-2-3 CAT!’ thing,” McLaughlin says. “It’s not like anybody felt any better in that moment, but it showed the underlying character of that team. And Brandon spearheaded that. That’s just the kind of guy he was.”

The next week, McLaughlin nailed a 51-yarder from almost the same spot on the field against No. 11 UCLA, one of three kicks he’d make in a 23-3 rout. Four weeks after that, he hit three more FGs as the Wildcats knocked off No. 1 Washington, led by Mark Brunell, 16-3. Two years later, he won the Lou Groza Award, given annually to college football’s best placekicker, and moved on to the NFL.

Sometimes, when people are given another chance, they go on to do great things. Brandon Sanders knows this, too.

A MAN AT WORK

The chair squeaks. It’s an ancient brown metal thing, sturdy as a barge and covered in an orange substance that may or may not be Naugahyde. The ceiling is short some perforated tiles. The couch, which has seen better days, doubles as a storage unit for sports equipment. The dowdy office at Pueblo Magnet High School in Tucson, where Brandon Sanders now sits, features a few reminders of where he’s been. The autographed 1994 Sports Illustrated cover that proclaims, “Rock Solid: Arizona is No. 1,” with Sanders and his defensive mates mean-mugging next to a giant saguaro. A framed certificate noting that he was Arizona’s captain in 1995. Tchotchkes from his three years with the New York Giants as a special teamer and backup DB. Otherwise, the space is fairly typical for a head football coach and athletic director of a slightly rough-around-the-edges high-school program. On a PC monitor that sits atop an Eisenhower-era wooden desk, Sanders scans the Hudl video of the Pueblo Warriors’ next opponent. “Oh, they want to go,” he says to nobody in particular. “They want to play fast.”

Alex McIntyre

He has the same fierce eyebrows as in the SI cover, but the head is now shaved, the face is less angular, and though he’s chugging from a giant yellow can of Monster energy drink, his overall demeanor is calm. Don’t be fooled. In his second year, he attacks the job with the same intensity he hunted receivers coming across the middle as a college and pro safety. He’s in on a Sunday scouting and cleaning up the gym. That’s after spending all day Saturday here, first watching video with about 20 members of his squad, then helping stage a charity hoops game, then keeping an eye on youth football contests on Pueblo’s field. That followed a full school day and a long Friday night that culminated in his team’s 56-7 victory over Palo Verde.

Now, between loads of football and basketball laundry, he’s studying Pusch Ridge, a Christian academy that’s better endowed than Pueblo. Many places are. Pueblo’s South Tucson neighborhood has a median household income of less than $21,000. More than a few kids at the school, and on his team, experience the problems endemic to such poverty. Last year, police ticketed one of his players for underage driving. This wasn’t rebellious, joyride stuff; his family needed him to drive his grandmother to doctors. “No judge in America is going to say, ‘That’s OK due to the circumstances,’” Sanders says. “So this is the kind of thing we’re dealing with.”

But there’s pride here on this low-slung, sprawling 1950s-vintage campus. The hallways are tidy, the school produced a Gates Millennium Scholar last year, and the Lever Gym, donated years ago by Pueblo alum and NBA star Fat Lever, just got a refurbished floor with a gorgeous powder-blue paint job. Members of Lever’s 1977-78 state championship hoops teams played in the previous day’s charity game against the current boys and girls varsity teams, and several hundred alumni showed up to laugh and reminisce. “We’re trying to have events, not just games,” says Frank Rosthenhausler, Pueblo’s assistant principal, who along with the principal, Augustine Romero, wants to bring the entire community together around a stable institution. Back in the day, they called it school spirit.

And Sanders, as the athletic director and head football coach, is part of the push. In his first season in 2014, the Warriors posted a 7-3 record, Pueblo’s first winning season in 12 years. This year, the word has gotten out to the Pueblo community. On a pleasant early-October night, nearly a hundred fans made the trip across town to Palo Verde. They saw Pueblo’s senior stars, running back Jorge Romero and quarterback Justin Pledger, overwhelm the hosts. Romero rushed for more than 200 yards and four TDs, including a clever 21-yard gallop in which he swept right, was cut off, reversed his field and raced through the left side of Palo Verde’s defense and into the end zone. Pledger showed his versatility all night, on one play using his nimble feet to avoid a rush, moving to his right and heaving a perfect pass 60 yards in the air to Frankie Gomez for an 82-yard score.

At the end, the players gathered in front of the visiting bleachers and sang the Pueblo fight song as the band played along.

Alex McIntyre

Sanders’ job isn’t glamorous. Many of his players never set foot on a football field until high school, so some schemes he learned in college under Tomey and as a pro under current Bears head coach John Fox will have to wait. It’s not like he’s on an NFL or major-college staff, where under different circumstances he might be working now, and where many ex-teammates are today.

But Pueblo is Sanders’ show. “It’s all on me,” he says. “That is the absolute greatest, to be in control of your own program. Yes, it’s a lot of work. Yes, it’s a lot of time; I’m here in this office right now on a Sunday afternoon.”

Friday nights like the one at Palo Verde make it all worthwhile. The coaches’ box can’t contain him as he chatters at his players, praising every good tackle and telling them to shake off the mistakes. Next play! Next play!

He keeps any scolding brief and often repeats how proud he is of them — and how they can do better. “Don’t worry about scoreboard stuff,” he says after a Monday practice, anticipating the next game. “Worry about, ‘Next play, do my job. Do my job 100 percent right, next play. I make a mistake, all right, my bad, next play. What’s the next play?’

“We do that fellas, they’re not gonna beat you. We do that fellas, we’ll open some eyes, not just in our city but up north as well. Got it?”

YES SIRRR! they reply in unison.

When he talks about his players in more private moments, he often refers to them as “my guys out there,” and there’s no mistaking the pride in his voice. Like any job, there are headaches, and Friday nights don’t always go well. But after what he’s gone through to get here, he’s OK with that.

STRAIGHT OUTTA SOUTHEAST

In the 1980s and ’90s, a kid couldn’t grow up in Southeast San Diego without meeting either a soon-to-be-famous football player, or a gang member. This was Brandon Sanders’ world. The area has produced three Heisman Trophy winners, Marcus Allen, Rashaan Salaam and Reggie Bush; three-time All-NFL lineman Lincoln Kennedy; and a Super Bowl MVP in Terrell Davis — plus dozens of lesser-known college and pro players.

Sanders is the youngest of Betty Sanders-Nevis’ three children, and she and Brandon’s father divorced before Brandon was born. Betty worried about her son being bullied, so she signed him up for Pop Warner football. Always undersized, that never stopped Brandon from being “like a bull in a china closet on the field,” Betty says.

He vividly remembers one moment from those Pop Warner days. Playing linebacker, Sanders saw a gap open up right in front of him. He stepped in to fill it and hit “a brick wall” — Davis, the future 2,000-yard rusher for the Broncos, running through the hole. “He got up,” Sanders says, “and I didn’t.”

That didn’t happen often. Sanders overcame his lack of size with smarts and deceptive athleticism. He started on the basketball team at Helix High, the suburban San Diego sports factory that churned out Bill Walton and more recently Reggie Bush and Alex Smith, and he triple-jumped 50 feet in track.

And, damn, could he hit. Once, he broke an opposing receiver’s collarbone during a high-school all-star game; in a bar a few years later he saw the guy, who approached him to tell how bad he jacked him up. Sanders told him he was sorry, “but he tried to come across the middle. Can’t do that.”

One time late in a blowout Arizona win, Sanders hit a receiver just as the ball did on a corner route, hit him so hard the crowd collectively gasped. After doling out those cracked ribs, Sanders, who knew only one speed, felt bad about the mismatch and asked to be taken out of the game.

Betty remarried and moved the family into a safer neighborhood near Lemon Grove, which is what put her son in the Helix High district. The school buffered him against the worst influences in his old neighborhood, but didn’t shield him completely. The aggressiveness that enabled him to hurl himself at a charging Terrell Davis or to jump up and yell at teammates in Miami had a downside. Sanders fell in with some friends and relatives who dabbled in crime. More than once he stole cars from the San Diego State campus. “I didn’t do it because I needed the money,” he says. “It was just the excitement, the rush. It was the ‘Straight Outta Compton’ era. You got the ’80s drug epidemic. You got guys stealing and selling drugs and just gang-banging and everything else.”

It wasn’t organized, mafia-style crime, he says, but more like cliques that occasionally wandered off the path. One day it would be, “Let’s get together and we’ll go to Lincoln High School and we’ll play football.”

The next? “I’m broke today. I’m about to go up to San Diego State and steal a car.”

“All right, I’m with you. I’m broke, too.”

“Let’s go.”

That ended when John Singer, his basketball coach at Helix, caught wind of Sanders’ motor-vehicle heists, and upbraided the kid during his sophomore year. “He’s a big guy, loud, with a handlebar mustache,” Sanders says. “And he just told me, ‘You have a future in football.’”

This was true. Cal, UCLA and Colorado all recruited him hard, but he decided on Arizona — far enough away from neighborhood influences but close enough for his family to see him play. He soon found a home next to Bouie in the Wildcat secondary, and the hard-hitting, ball-hawking duo formed the backstop for the defense that became famous as “Desert Swarm.”

Stephen Dunn/Getty Images

“He was undersized but he was fearless in filling the gaps and knocking people out as they came across the middle,” says Bouie, “and he had a very strong personality between the lines, that was for sure.”

The Desert Swarm legend really began with that 8-7 loss to Miami. “We knew we could play with anyone after that,” Sanders says. The following season the Wildcats won 10 games and a share of the 1993 Pac-10 title, and they destroyed Miami 29-0 in the Fiesta Bowl. Most important, they beat Arizona State three times in a row. Their No. 1 ranking fell apart midway through the 1994 season, after an upset loss to Colorado State, and they finished 8-4 and 6-5 in Sanders’ final two seasons. But those teams remain fixed in fans’ memories — partly because of the warm bond they formed with Tomey, partly because of Bruschi’s long NFL career with the Patriots, and partly because Keanu Reeves immortalized them in “Speed.”

Sanders was an outstanding college player; Bill Walsh, who coached against Sanders at Stanford, once called him “pound for pound, the best player in the Pac-10.” But he went undrafted in 1996 after graduating with a degree in media arts emphasizing film, and then was cut by Kansas City in training camp. He worked at a Blockbuster store in Tucson, renting videos and writing screenplays on the side. The next year, he made the Giants as a free agent, where his ferocity made him a coaches’ favorite. The head coach at the time, Jim Fassel, called him “a live bullet.”

In the NFL, though, your measurables eventually catch up with you, and Sanders never weighed as much as 190 pounds. He was released by the Giants, then the Browns, and then the Giants again ahead of the 1999 season. But seven weeks after New York cut him the second time, Sanders had his finest moment in the league. The Giants’ top two free safeties had suffered injuries, so they called Sanders, who knew the defense. Just days removed from his couch in Arizona, he made his first NFL start, racking up eight tackles and a forced fumble in a 23-17 overtime victory over the Eagles. He remembers Jessie Armstead asking him after the game, “Do you know how hard it is to do what you just did?”

His greatest victory looked to be off the field. At a time when many children in Southeast fell into drugs and crime, he seemed to escape. Ahead of the 1998 Super Bowl in San Diego, Sanders agreed to be interviewed for a New York Daily News article on the intersection of the football and gang cultures in his old neighborhood. From a hilltop high above San Diego, he pointed out which streets were Bloods and which were Crips. Kids here couldn’t avoid gangs, he explained, and were almost always “affiliated” in some way. But that didn’t mean you were a crook. It just meant you didn’t forget where you came from. “You can grow up and be affiliated,” he said that day, but “you don’t have to be a criminal. You have a chance to do other things.”

Sanders had that chance. And then he slipped.

VEGAS

Before Sanders’s fall, though, there were good times, in Las Vegas, a place where it seems OK to take gambles and risks you might not take anywhere else.

Sanders was no stranger to the place. That SI cover on his office shelf has a Sin City connection. On the eve of the ‘94 photo shoot, Sanders was in Vegas with some of his friends, and had no money for a plane ticket. He didn’t know the photo was for the cover, and considered blowing it off. But he’s always enjoyed gambling. Throughout his football career, Sanders won big money playing Madden video games for high stakes. He went downstairs with his last $20, and by the next morning, he’d won $800 from slots, blackjack and craps, caught a cab to the airport, bought a plane ticket to Tucson and made it to the cover shoot. Vegas treated him well. Little wonder then, that when Sanders had an offer to play for the Las Vegas Outlaws in WWE mogul Vince McMahon’s newly hatched XFL in 2000, he leapt at it. “I loved it,” Sanders says of the XFL. “Loved it probably even more than I loved New York.”

Todd Warshaw/Allsport

His voice rises when you ask if the demon baby of a wrestling promoter and a then-desperate network, NBC, was legitimate. “Absolutely it was real football,” Sanders says.

But yes, it was goofy. McMahon controlled every aspect of the league, and he tried to make a TV star out of Sanders, who enthusiastically obliged. McMahon liked how Sanders talked trash in a promo and demanded more. By the final preseason scrimmage in Vegas, Sanders had honed his shtick. They were playing the Los Angeles Xtreme, quarterbacked by Tommy Maddox, a former UCLA wunderkind who left after his sophomore year to become John Elway’s heir apparent in Denver. It didn’t quite work out, so now Maddox was a castaway in a new league. Sanders decided to have some fun. “I went hard at Tommy Maddox,” he says, ranting about how he had just been selling insurance and ripping his UCLA ties — and L.A. in general. “I was over the top,” he says.

The jests shocked anyone used to the No Fun League, and sounded worse in an empty stadium, playing on a continuous loop on the scoreboard. His old-school coach, Jim Criner, told him, “I’ve never been so embarrassed by a player in all my life,” Sanders recalls. “He was pissed.”

But who was Sanders supposed to listen to? The coach? Or McMahon, the owner of the league? Sanders led the ill-fated squad in interceptions — and had a grand time doing it. He remembers attending one team function at a tony Vegas nightspot, and being guided through a series of passages to an exclusive VIP section, “like in Goodfellas.” Unfortunately, Sanders’ life soon resembled the iconic film about gangsters obliviously, almost comically, spinning out of control. “That may have been why I got in so much trouble later,” he says of his Outlaw days. “God was punishing me for how much fun I had.”

A FAVOR FOR A FRIEND

The XFL was gone, and the NFL wasn’t calling in early June of 2001. But NFL Europe’s Amsterdam Admirals asked him to join them as their spring season wound down — a couple of weeks, a thousand bucks a game.

He flies to Frankfurt’s league headquarters for a physical, where the airline loses his luggage. His hotel has no hot water. His European cell phone doesn’t work. Meets the team for a game in Berlin, where he doesn’t play a down in a 41-10 defeat. Gets off the plane in Amsterdam, steps outside, and rain starts to pour. The bus from the airport blows a transmission. When he finally gets to the hotel, there’s no power on his floor. Orders some stroganoff. It’s inedible.

“This is a bad, bad, bad omen,” he says.

Soon a friend, whom he won’t name, calls from the States to ask a favor. Another friend, Lloyd Lake, who played basketball at Helix and grew up in Southeast, calls him, too. (What follows is based on court records and interviews with Sanders; Lake did not respond to an interview request made through his attorney, Brian Watkins.) Lake tells Sanders their buddy is having a bad time with drugs, he’s got this marijuana at home, and he doesn’t want to get caught with it. Can he leave it at your house? Lake asks. He’ll get himself straight, then he’ll come take it.

Lake and Sanders were tight. Sanders dated one of Lloyd’s sisters, Leslie, and Lake’s mother and father were almost like a second set of parents to him. Lloyd was the fun-loving pal from the old days who had a nose for trouble; he had convictions for domestic violence and drug possession in the 1990s. “I would tell Brandon that with certain people, you should say, ‘Hi,’ and ‘’Bye,’ and move on,” says Betty. But Sanders never turned his back on a friend.

So Sanders says OK, as long as the weed’s gone by the time he returns to Tucson from Europe. “That was a fateful mistake,” he says now. Sanders thought they were storing 20, maybe 30 pounds. When he arrives at his suburban Tucson home, he sees it’s way more than that. He calls his friends. “Get this out of my house ASAP,” Sanders says.

Nothing happens. Sanders is ready to dispose of it in the desert, but Lake says to wait; their buddy will pick it up. Only problem is it won’t all fit in the trunk of a car. Lake flies in from San Diego to help Sanders cut the bale down into manageable pieces. It’s hard. Sanders, a liberal arts major, and Lake, who barely finished high school, devise a plan that requires engineering and a machine with which they are not familiar.

Guillermo Legaria/AFP/GettyImages

“Get this out of my house ASAP”

They buy a gas-powered log splitter.

They figure they’ll use it to break up the bale and compact pieces of it into a metal mold and then put them into plastic bags that can fit in the car trunk. But the log splitter isn’t designed to do this. It takes hours, and the whole time the gas generator is fumigating the closed garage with carbon monoxide. “It’s smoky in there, I’m getting lightheaded, and I say to Lake, ‘We’re going to kill ourselves.’”

It gets worse. The next day, they decide to take the mold to a metal shop and ask the shopkeepers to make a bigger one. The number one thing, Lake and Sanders agree, is not to leave the pot-tainted mold with the shop. The shopkeeper says he needs to keep it as a model.

They leave it behind.

They agree that when they go back, they’ll take off their license plates, grab the molds and leave, so that if the shop calls the cops, the car can’t be traced. They go home, start playing Madden, fall asleep. When they wake up, it’s past closing time. They call, and the guy on the phone says he’ll stay open until they come. Lake and Sanders decide to go.

They forget to take off the license plate.

On the drive back, Sanders notices they’re being followed. He and Lake pull into a supermarket, and a white car pulls in behind them. Lake goes right up to the car and asks for directions to the airport. The driver has a badge, but denies he’s a cop.

Sanders and Lake, really nervous now, jump back on the freeway. A different car follows. They jump off the freeway, make some quick turns and lose the chase car. They head home, but vow to park away from Sanders’ driveway.

Then they go back to the house and park in the driveway.

Not long after, Sanders steps outside to get the mail. Plain-clothes police meet him and ask questions. Sanders shows them the molds in his truck, and the officers say they smell marijuana from a vent in his house. Sanders believes that was impossible, but the officers get a search warrant. He’s run headlong into a different sort of brick wall.

It was a state case, and the Arizona prosecutors cut a deal with Lake and Sanders: three years probation for possession. Sanders believes he could have fought the legality of the search warrant, but he had already piled up huge legal fees and took the deal. It looked like the right move. By the time of the guilty plea, in spring of 2002, Sanders had an offer from Canada’s Montreal Alouettes, and Arizona authorities agreed to let him work there while serving out his probation. But just before the first scrimmage, Montreal released him. “They didn’t give me a whole bunch of details,” he says.

Early in the morning on Friday, June 14, 2002, a few days after he flew home from Montreal, Sanders heard a knock on his door. He opened it to find 16 armed federal officers. They told him they had him on tape “saying things.”

The next thing he knew, Brandon Sanders was on Con Air, the federal “airline” that ferries prisoners, as part of his journey to San Diego via Oklahoma City for a bail hearing. The real Con Air is nothing like the Nicholas Cage film. “It’s just like a regular plane,” Sanders says. Except there’s no logo on the outside, and all the passengers wear ankle and wrist restraints. Also, if you get up for any reason, there’s no guarantee your seat will be available when you return. “When I find out I’m sitting next to Big Honcho,” he says, “I know there’s no way I’m going to the bathroom on this flight.”

Wayne Alfred Day, aka “Big Honcho,” helped found the Grape Street Watts Crips. He’d supposedly helped set up a long-lasting truce between Bloods and Crips in LA in 1992, following the rioting that broke out after police were acquitted in the beating of the black motorist Rodney King. This was Sanders’ seatmate. As Sanders tells it, the nearly mythical figure gave him tips on surviving in jail, and spun stories about the early days of the Southern California gang culture, “basically giving me a seminar on his life.”

At his bail hearing, the judge told Sanders he was “on the edge of a cliff,” implicated in a drug-trafficking case involving San Diego gang members or associates, some of whom he knew, and one he knew well — Lloyd Lake. The FBI had wiretaps on Lake and Sanders for months, all part of a three-year investigation. In its stories about the roundup of 15 suspects, including an accused cop killer, the Associated Press led with Sanders, the pro athlete. But in the indictment, Sanders’ name was at the bottom, indicating to Sanders that they didn’t think he wasn’t much of a player.

Initially, though, the government took a hard line. Prosecutors insisted he could face 30 years in prison — longer than he had been alive. That terrified him. They claimed to have video evidence of him throwing gang signs during NFL games. This exasperated him. Any of Sanders’ teenage gang affiliations had long cooled by the time he reached the NFL, but more practically, he was a special-teamer and backup DB, not exactly a darling of the TV cameras.

Because of so many defendants and so many moving parts, the prosecution took its time. The feds eventually split off Lake and Sanders from the other cases, and nothing happened for months, then years.  “It was like watching paint dry,” says Sanders’ mother.

Meanwhile, the government pressed Sanders to give up information on Lake or someone else. “But I didn’t know anything,” he says.

The feds obtained some major convictions, including a 17-year sentence for another defendant in the case who chose to go to trial. But while Lake spent three years in jail awaiting trial, he ultimately only received probation after a plea deal. Lake wasn’t through finding trouble, though. Rap fans may be familiar with Lake as a man who in recent years called out Suge Knight as a snitch on the Internet. USC football fans know Lake as the wannabe agent who gave extra benefits to Reggie Bush while trying to court him as a client, transactions that cost Bush his Heisman and USC four years of probation. Sanders knows Lake as a former friend.

It would be convenient to blame Lake, but Sanders takes responsibility for what he did. “I never should have had that pot in my house, and I should have just gotten rid of it once it was there,” he says. “I’m a grown man. I could have said no.” In his final plea agreement, he admitted guilt to a felony charge, accessory after the fact, primarily for knowingly evading a law-enforcement officer in his car. His sentence? One year of probation, no prison time.

Still, he lost his football career, all his money — everything. And as a convicted felon, he was borderline unemployable.

DOWN IN THE HOLE

By the time he was 28 years old, Brandon Sanders had a firm belief in hard work. It had earned him a scholarship, an education and six-figure salaries in professional football. “I was a grinder,” he says. “I was under the impression that nothing was unattainable if you were willing to dedicate yourself and work hard for it.”

After his court case, he questioned all of that. “No matter how much I played in the NFL; no matter how much I played at Arizona; no matter how much people knew me — I have a college degree and everything else — a criminal charge trumps all that. It just trumps it.”

Research on unemployment among ex-cons bears this out; employers are twice as likely to hire welfare recipients or long-term jobless applicants as felons. The odds are even longer if a felon is African-American.

Sanders felt like he could still play pro football, but now that was out. He knew he’d like to coach, but that was a non-starter, too. With two and later four children to support, he needed money, and he was willing to do any job, cobbling together two or three gigs at a time. Prep work for oil changes on cars in 110-degree desert heat. Part-time work officiating and setting up games at a Jewish community center and a local parks department. A lot attendant at a car dealership. Off-hours stocking shelves during the holiday rush at Toys R Us. “A great Christmas for the kids,” he says, “but that almost killed me.” The worst was cleaning up bedding at a hospital; he’s a germophobe and couldn’t take it.

The lot attendant job turned into a sales position for a while, but he quit in the fall of 2003 after a disagreement with a boss. Tucson’s economy was strong, and he thought he would be able to get something else. He sent applications everywhere, as many as 50 in one week. He did not receive a single callback for months. Around the same time, he learned he would lose his four-bedroom house.

“I was like in tears,” he says. He even considered asking the court to revoke his bail. “I’ll go back and I’ll sit in the jail cell maybe down near San Diego, and all I got to do is whatever they’re saying. … I mean, I didn’t want to deal with life anymore. I always used to say, ‘I can’t understand how somebody could ever say that.’ But I was there. I was like, I just don’t want to live.”

In early 2004, he finally caught a break when a friend helped him get a job at a call center, selling women’s clothing over the phone. Did the bone-crunching ex-NFL player care that he was now catering to people in their 60s who wanted something more fashionable than elastic waist bands and easy-fit blouses? Not a bit. “I got to talk to women all day,” he says. He was good at it, got promoted, and even after being laid off during the 2008 recession, found a similar job with another company.

Life had calmed down and Sanders settled in. He had finally found some stability, enough to start thinking about football again.

I’M A COACH

On a Friday afternoon Brandon Sanders stands in a cage. It’s the equipment room under the Pueblo Magnet High School grandstand, filled with the beat of rap music and the din of teenagers who in a few hours will play a football game. He’s in a good mood, handing out game jerseys and pants, and the occasional thigh pad. “Hey coach!” A squatty kid hollers at him and sticks out his tongue from the other side of the room. “Beltran!” Sanders yells back. Michael Beltran, a 5’11, 330-pound junior lineman, is one of the smartest kids on the team. In a science course where the teacher regularly fails 80 percent of the class, Sanders says, Beltran is acing tests. He’s also a team clown. Once, during a film session, Beltran commented that the other team’s quarterback was “a fat ass.”

“Beltran, are you kidding me?” Sanders said. “Ain’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”

“He’s a quarterback, coach, not a lineman,” the player explained.

Alex McIntyre

As his players gear up, Sanders is describing how his slow road to coaching suddenly sped up. He had asked about coaching before, but the blot on his record held him back. Then Tomey told him that if he wanted to coach, he had to be a coach — anywhere. So he assisted on a semipro team, helped out a youth football league, did personal training, then joined the staff at nearby Pima Community College coaching defensive backs. All the while, he kept a day job.

In January of 2011, he heard Tomey was involved with the Casino Del Sol College All-Star Game in Tucson, a showcase for lower-level college players with NFL dreams who didn’t get a Senior Bowl invite. Sanders asked if he could observe, but another coach backed out at the last minute, and suddenly he was in charge of the DBs. It was a fluke, and a blast. And his team won.

Not long after that, he had a revelation, “a lightning bolt,” he says. He called his mom. “I know what I want to do,” he told her. “I’m a coach.”

Less than a year later, he was in his car listening to a sports talk station when he heard Tomey tell the host that Brandon Sanders was going to be on the staff for the January 2012 Casino Del Sol game. “He hadn’t told me yet,” Sanders laughs.

He spent 2012 on the Pima staff, then jumped to a high school assistant job — but not just any job. Jeff Scurran, one of the most decorated coaches in Arizona high school history, was taking over the program at Catalina Foothills. Twice before, at different schools, Scurran had taken winless teams all the way to the state finals within two years. Scurran had made some enemies in the coaching ranks in Southern Arizona, but that didn’t matter to Sanders. “I know I don’t know everything,” Sanders says, “and this was someone I could learn from.”

Sure enough, Cat Foothills, quarterbacked by current Arizona coach Rich Rodriquez’s son, Rhett, went from an 0-10 team to an 8-3 playoff squad in the 2013 season.

All of a sudden, Sanders had a resume. He had another important credential, too. Before he could coach high school, he needed a state fingerprint clearance card, and Scurran helped shepherd him through the process. The little laminated slab, about the size of a driver’s license, might be Sanders’ most cherished possession. It doesn’t expunge a criminal record, but it’s proof that the state of Arizona sets that record aside. For anyone thinking of hiring a convicted felon, it marks a debt paid.

Five high school head coaching jobs came open that winter, and Sanders sent resumes to three schools. Rosthenhausler, Pueblo’s assistant principal, called back first and set up an interview in December of 2013. Sanders thought it went OK, but this was all new. “I remember leaving there thinking, I’m happy I went through it, and I’ll be better for the next two.”

Pueblo offered him the head coach position the next week.

The next summer, Pueblo named him athletic director.

That fall, the Arizona Daily Star named him coach of the year.

Alex McIntyre

THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON

When first contacted about a profile last spring, Sanders was gracious but hesitant. This fall would be crucial for his program, he said. For decades, Pueblo had lived with a culture of losing, and despite the winning record in Sanders’ first year, the Warriors failed to make the postseason in 2014, continuing a 25-year playoff drought. A bad 2015 season could reverse Pueblo’s progress. He agreed to cooperate only if the story ran after the season.

The coach didn’t want any distractions, and going public with his legal history could create one. “I don’t like bringing up the negative stuff with papers,” he says, “because I know somebody’s gonna shoot darts at me.”

Alex McIntyre

Yet he’s never feared his players finding out about his past. Instead, he’s open about it, telling them how a lifetime of achievement can disappear “just from the company you keep.” His greatest regret is a teachable moment.

Once the season started he’d recap how his squad did, and how he did, what worked and what didn’t. What usually worked was a spread offense that allowed Pueblo’s playmakers — his do-everything QB Pledger, his punishing running back Romero, and his quicksilver wideout Gomez — do their thing.  “I spent my whole life trying to win games 6-3, or 3-0,” he says. He wanted wide-open football now. He lost sight of that once, in the Warriors’ 32-6 loss to Flowing Wells in the third week of the season. Thinking he had an advantage up front, Sanders overruled his offensive coaches and called too many power running plays. “If I’d stayed out of the way,” he says, “we’d have been in it.”

The season turned the next week against Thatcher, a school in a tiny farm and mining town near the New Mexico border, two hours from Tucson. The Warriors had every reason to lose. Thatcher runs the veer, and Sanders was at an athletic directors convention on Monday and Tuesday, so his players had only two days to prepare for an option offense they’d never seen. The team bus arrived to pick them up 50 minutes late, and the Warriors made it to the field just 35 minutes before kickoff. When Sanders asked the refs if they could delay the game 10 minutes so his kids could get a proper warmup, “They were like, ‘Yeeeeaaah, uh … no.’”

Thatcher ran a tricky reverse to set up two scores, and Pueblo turned the ball over three times in the red zone. The Warriors were down 12-6 in the third when things got biblical. Swarms of gnats and grasshoppers hit the field. Such a series of unfortunate events might have sunk past Pueblo teams. Just a week before at Flowing Wells, the kids gave up a long running play with the score still 14-6, and acted like the game was over.

Alex McIntyre

But at the AD’s convention earlier that week, Sanders sat in on a talk by former Virginia Tech women’s soccer coach Kelly Cagle. She described how whenever anyone on her team would make a mistake, whether coaches or players, they had a signal to acknowledge it. Mess up, give the signal, take responsibility, and move on. Nobody harps on it. Sanders implemented the system the week of the Thatcher game — mess up, signal, own it, move on — and it worked. “We kept our focus,” he says. “Everybody just kept pushing, pushing, pushing.”

Pueblo scored 20 unanswered points en route to its most important victory of the season, a 26-18 triumph that started a four-game winning streak. The Warriors finished the regular season 7-3, with a 6-0 record to win their division. Their final regular-season home game, a 73-41 victory over Santa Rita, clinched Pueblo’s first playoff berth in a quarter century.

Betty Sanders-Nevis made the five-hour trip from San Diego to be there. She saw the Warriors’ open affection for their coach, the hugs, the respect. “They love him,” she says. And she witnessed her son’s first sideline shower, when his players dumped the contents of two water coolers on his head in celebration.

THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

Pueblo lost its playoff game, 42-13, at Estrella Foothills, a suburban Phoenix school. Sanders says he learned something: You can’t treat the playoffs like just another game. He says he’ll adjust next time. He won’t divulge how. He still has some secrets.

On-field results are only one measure of success, and in high school, nowhere near the most important. Pueblo always struggled with keeping players academically eligible, so Sanders mandated twice-a-week study halls. Miss them, and the whole team runs gassers. Last year, a ref told Sanders he’d never seen so many Pueblo players suited up for the final game. This year, 97 percent of his players maintained their grades and stayed eligible all season.

“Before, there was no discipline, and kids just came and went,” Romero says. “It was on the kids’ time. No one paid attention. But when coach came in, he just flipped it around. He laid down what his rules were, and we obeyed him.”

More than discipline improved, though. “He’s helped us become a family,” says Pledger. “He showed us how to play together as one.”

Alex McIntyre

Nobody experienced that more than Brianna Bertsch, a 5’5, 265-pound senior who plays as a backup on the offensive and defensive line. Bertsch is a girl, which was an issue before Sanders arrived. “My freshman year and sophomore year, no one would really talk to me,” she says. “After he came, it’s like they’re my big brothers.”

Her best football memory? She was on the ballot for Homecoming royalty along with running mate Skyblue Estrella, a boy on the cheer squad. When results were announced at halftime, they lost, but the whole team and all the cheerleaders ran out on the field cheering for Bertsch and Estrella. “It was so cute,” she says. “I loved it.”

Beltran, the lineman with the quick wit and the 3.7 GPA, says Sanders sets big goals for his players, the biggest being to overcome whatever circumstances life hands them — including Pueblo’s reputation. Asked to define that reputation, Beltran starts laughing. “Oh, this is gonna be fun. Well, I’m sure you know we had a couple of rough seasons before he got here. The students, you know, like there’s drugs and stuff. And the community that a lot of us grew up around, there’s gangs up and down 36^th and Ajo, right down the street. But he pretty much just tells us, don’t let that be a reason to quit. Rise above the occasion, and what I mean by that is, push ourselves in the classroom, push ourselves out here on the field. He’s always on us about our grades, and he’s really just giving us a chance to make it out of what most of us have been through. It’s been real cool that he’s done that.”

He’s taught them a game, and something else. “Integrity,” Beltran says. “Definitely integrity. We had every reason to give up, every reason to quit. Odds are against us, being Pueblo, you know what I mean? And he really taught us to just rise above it.”

Alex McIntyre

Like any good coach, Sanders is never satisfied. He’d like more players. He craves a state championship. He wants to finance a new artificial-turf field, a blue one, Pueblo colors, that the whole community can use year-round.

And yes, he wouldn’t mind a higher-paying job someday, maybe at a higher level. So many of his peers are coaching in college or the pros — ex-Giants such as Tyrone Wheatley, Sam Garnes, Jessie Armstead and Ike Hilliard — and he wonders how he’d do.

But this is where he’s supposed to be now, a place where the future isn’t a void and the past isn’t a shackle. He sometimes worries that people will use his record against him, that they’ll try to take away his second chance, that they’ll paint him as a bad guy. “I’m not a bad guy,” he says. “Do I think I was around bad people? Absolutely. Do I think I wasn’t smart? Absolutely. Did I make some bad decisions? One-hundred percent. But I owned up to it, and I lost a lot for it.”

He ended up gaining a lot, too, winding up here, in this office, on that squeaky old chair, on everyone else’s day off. “Sitting here, watching film, learning, seeing what someone else’s team does, and then seeing those kids’ faces at the end of their game and being around them, it is a special thing,” he says. “I’m fortunate. I truly, truly am. And now, it’s like I have to do what I’m doing. I have to train kids. I have to help kids find a better way.”

In the worst of times, when the case looked like it wouldn’t end, and it felt like he might never find work, and the game he loved was a receding memory, he would ask God for any glimmer of hope, and add: Thank you for the little candlelight you give me in the darkness.

“It was funny,” he says. “Everytime I was like, this might be the day I just don’t want to do it anymore, and think, ‘Can I give up? Can I really just give up?’ there would be a phone call.”

Maybe from one of his uncles, or a cousin, or an ex-teammate, or a guy from Southeast. How you doing man? Just checking up on you. Let me know that you’re doing all right. Hey, here’s what it is, you know we’re behind you. Keep working hard. We’re proud of what you’re trying to do. Wherever your mind is, keep the fight going.

“Every single time,” Sanders says, marveling. “Every time it got to the worst point, it would be crazy, like that same day…”

After awhile, he came to accept it all. If a bill can’t be paid, let it go and figure out how to buy the groceries. If the lights go out, find a way to turn them back on. Mess up? Take responsibility. Acknowledge it and move on. Keep working. Keep going.

Next play.

Alex McIntyre

At the end of the row, he is by himself.

In front, first seat on the right of the aisle, blue and gold mat on the floor before him, huge American flag hanging from the rafter above. The lighting above the gold circle is big and bright and centered, illuminating a setting where men will soon be doing what men have been doing for thousands of years, using arms and legs and hands and minds and brawn and strength to see who is the toughest of the tribe, the one who survives and gets his hand held high at the end.

The man at the end of the row is there to see American college wrestling, not fake pro wrestling or mixed martial arts or the international Greco-Roman style of grappling used in the Olympics. This is a distinctly American sport, emphasizing the time an opponent is controlled on the mat, rather than the lifts and throws favored more on the international stage. Dominance and control, rather than risk and explosiveness matter. Less style, more substance.

He sits and stares at his cell phone, keeping up with his business in Washington, waiting for the match between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Wisconsin to begin. He is an alum of Wisconsin, he himself wrestled in this field house 30 years ago, one of the best wrestlers to ever put on the singlet for the Badgers — and in the United States for that matter — but hardly anyone in the crowd knows that and he likes it that way. He is here to see his son Isaac wrestle: redshirt junior, ranked No. 3 in the country at 165 pounds, the youngest of his four kids.

Photo: Daniel McGraw

The crowd is very small on this Saturday afternoon, maybe 2,000 at most, inside a building opened in 1951 with all the design amenities of an airplane hangar. The Fitzgerald Field House used to be where the Pitt men’s and women’s basketball teams played (and where Jerome Lane pulled his infamous Darryl Dawkins-style backboard shattering dunk in 1988 against Providence), but about a decade ago the hoopsters moved down the street to the $120 million Petersen Events Center.

So the basketball teams get the shiny “events center,” while the grapplers (and along with the gymnastics and volleyball teams) inhabit the half-dome “field house.” Tickets for the Pitt men’s basketball in the higher levels go for $65; front row seats (and all the other ones, too) at men’s wrestling cost five bucks. No $85,000 luxury suites in the field house either.

But Jim Jordan is not concerned at this point that college men’s wrestling has been pushed to the edges of the collegiate sports world on this Saturday afternoon in mid-December. He is a United States Congressman from Urbana in western Ohio, a Republican representing the state’s 4^th congressional district. The borders have been redrawn through the years to remain less urban and more rural, 90 percent white and very conservative, and configured in such a way as to avoid having Toledo, Columbus or Cleveland (or their suburbs) within its boundary, snaking from Lake Erie almost to Dayton. The district’s largest city is Lima, population 38,000.

One of the issues Jordan is looking into these days is sports related — how big money-making collegiate sports like football and basketball push lesser revenue-producing sports like men’s wrestling slowly into obscurity and how to keep college education and sports connected in a way that emphasizes academics and not TV money. But today, he is just a father and fan, screaming several times at the referee, “Let ‘em wrestle,” during the lower weight class matches.

But when Isaac Jordan takes the mat for his match, his wiry father — 5’7 and about 150 pounds, close to what he was three decades ago when he wrestled for Wisconsin — is not in his prime front row seat. He has moved to the edge of the stands on the right side, standing on the four-lane indoor track. As his son does takedowns and escapes, he paces, he moves, he almost hides behind a mesh curtain that separates the track from the stands. Hands to his face at times, his left hand twitching so bad at one point he shoves it in his pocket. It is almost as if he is inside his son’s head because he has been where his son is hundreds of times before.

It is a close match, Isaac up 3-2 going into the final period. This is one of those tactical matches, with each wrestler waiting for his opening. Jordan does that at the very end of the first period, pulling out a takedown at the edge of the mat that seemed to catch his opponent off guard to score. But he suffers a similar lapse in the second period, and now only one escape point is the difference.

It is very early in the season, and by all accounts, Jordan should be pummeling his unranked competitor, Pitt sophomore Cody Wiercioch. But this is also wrestling, where rankings matter little during the seven minutes in the circle, where one slip-up, a move not made or wrong move at the wrong time can mean the ref hand slaps the mat and you are done. Work and prep and cutting weight and dedication and all those values your coach and father taught you might not matter much at that one instant.

But Isaac Jordan holds on and wins 4-3 — his 12th straight victory — and his father suddenly seems relaxed. He does not pump his fists or whoop it up, he just waits for his son to come over the indoor track and they walk back and forth under the stands and in front of the tiny concession stand for about 10 minutes. “I don’t really talk to him much about this move or that move,” Jordan says later. “He’s a real smart kid and knows what he’s doing. It’s almost like he listens to me so I can get all my excitement out.”

“And it’s a cliché, but it’s so true,” Jordan continues, “that it is so much harder watching your child compete in sports than competing yourself.”

And as they walk through the old field house, it is not apparent to this small crowd in Pittsburgh that these two men represent perhaps the most successful wrestling family the country has ever produced. Jim Jordan won four Ohio state high school titles, Isaac won three. Jim won NCAA titles in 1985 and 1986, and defeated two-time Olympic gold medalist John Smith — now the wrestling coach at Oklahoma State University — twice in the NCAA tournament, including their legendary championship bout in 1985.

Isaac was the Big Ten champion at 165 pounds as a sophomore last year, beating his cousin, Bo Jordan of Ohio State, in the final. Bo and Isaac are currently ranked No. 2 and No. 3 nationally at that weight. The Jordan cousins were a combined 336 wins and 10 losses in high school.

Photo: Daniel McGraw

Above: Jim Jordan, 1982

Bo is the son of Jeff Jordan, younger brother of Jim and also the holder of four Ohio state high school titles. He coaches in western Ohio at Graham High School in St. Paris, Ohio, the same school he and Jim graduated from. Graham is a national powerhouse in wrestling, having won 15 state titles. Jeff Jordan runs a nationally prominent wrestling camp and is a partner in an online business that sells wrestling gear and T-shirts. All told, the Jordan family has won 22 Ohio state wrestling championships.Jim and Jeff had a combined high school record of 309-2 (one loss each)

Some have said that if the Kennedys are the first family of American politics, then the Jordans of Champaign County, Ohio, are the first family of American wrestling. The comparison may be a stretch in some respects, but in others the Jordans in represent a change in the American psyche just as the Kennedys once did in another era. The Jordans epitomize the blue-collar, white, middle-class, so-called “average Americans” who now find their political affiliation with the Republican fringe of the Tea Party. And they got to that ideological spot because of wrestling.

Jim and Jeff’s father, John, spent 30 years at a General Motors plant in Dayton, and supported Democrats while a faithful union guy, but as he grew olderhe moved further right and Dems didn’t represent his values any more.One of the ways John Jordan taught his sons conservative values was through wrestling, first in the basement and the garage, and then on school teams. The sport was about hard work and individual responsibility and independence and being accountable for your actions. It is not a stretch in the least to say that, of all the American high school sports, wrestling emphasizes those values a bit more than the others do.

And Jim Jordan now finds himself in the middle of a movement that believes American values have warped and need to change and need to change in a hurry. After eight years in the Ohio Legislature, Jim Jordan was elected to Congress from the very conservative Ohio 4th District, reliably Republican since 1938, in 2006. In January of this year, he helped foment a deep division within the Republican by helping to form a coalition called the “Freedom Caucus,” which he now chairs. The caucus is the most conservative of the conservatives, and Jim Jordan, 51, is one of their leaders.

Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call

Their purpose and ideals are simple: Even though the house has a Republican majority, Freedom Caucus members don’t think Congress has done enough to cut taxes, defund programs like Planned Parenthood, repeal Obamacare or any of the other litmus tests ultra-conservatives have used as defining issues. They have just enough numbers to shut things down if they want, and they provided the political muscle to get House Speaker John Boehner to step down a few months ago. It was unprecedented in many respects, because the people in power like Boehner generally do not step down between elections without health concerns or scandal being at the root of it.

Moderate Republican U.S. Representative Charlie Dent from Pennsylvania told The New Yorker the Freedom Caucus was part of the “rejectionist wing” of the party, adding, “We need to help redefine what it means to be a conservative. Stability, order, temperance, balance, incrementalism are all important conservative virtues. Disorder, instability, chaos, intemperance, and anarchy are not.”

But Jordan might call it controlled chaos, and he and the other Freedom Caucus members pulled a takedown and pin on the House Speaker because he underestimated their determination and power and tactics. Before Boehner knew what was happening and could counter, the ref had slapped the mat.

The way Jordan explains it, he had nothing against Boehner personally, it was just an ideological difference. Even though they were in Congress from the same party and the same state and their districts were next to each other. “I think it came down to Boehner had told Jordan to sit back and wait his turn, and Jordan got tired of it after a while,” says one political lobbyist in Washington who did not want his name used. Tired of the JV team, he wanted to wrestle varsity.

“It was just time for a change,” Jordan says. “People in Congress get elected by saying they are going to cut spending, and then they don’t. That way doesn’t cut it for most Americans. We literally have to do what is unpopular and we have to do it now. I learned that in wrestling: hard work and perseverance and doing what is needed.”

Of course, some see Jim Jordan a bit differently in this; that his ideology lacks practicality. Even though you cantake down the king, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have the backing to assume the throne. Former representative Steve LaTourette, an Ohio Republican who now works as a Washington lobbyist, said in an interview with USA Today that the Freedom Caucus has “the ability to throw sand in the gears and keep things from happening but they are not a big enough block to make something happen.”

Jordan contends that all Americans are “big enough” to make things happen. After all, he won his first Ohio High school state title in the 98-pound weight class, and wrestled in college at 134 pounds. He wasn’t one of the 6’9 guys who could windmill dunk or a 250-pound linebacker who hit as hard as a freight train. When he explains all these things are connected — sports and politics and his brand of family values — he doesn’t quote a politician. He always quotes his high school wrestling coach and chemistry teacher, the late Ron McCunn.

“He had one message and it has stayed with me,” Jordan says. “‘Discipline is doing what you don’t like when you don’t want to do it.’”

Before he eviscerated John Boehner from Congressional leadership, Jordan was not well known outside the wrestling community and the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But in many ways those groups are linked, circles of interest with about 75 percent overlap. That’s not to say everyone who wrestled wants to see Planned Parenthood defunded, or that every Tea Party member wants to see more taxpayer-funded scholarships for college wrestlers.

But there is a shared outlook on life that is in some ways astounding. Traditionally, wrestling has always been big in middle-class suburbs and small towns, and in recent years, it has become even more concentrated in those areas. While some cities have formed “Beat the Streets” urban programs, to get inner city and minority kids to take up wrestling and to restart programs at urban high schools, the power base of wrestling is out in sprawl land, where people can always move further out and farther away from what they don’t like.

And the average male wrestler is, well, very average, and that has been its calling card through the years. You could make it, like Jim Jordan did, as a 98-pound young man in a macho tough-guy world, if you wrestled. It was, and has been, the epitome of the “last man standing” cultural cock-of-the walk motif.

The Tea Party, likewise, tends to be more suburban and small town, more male than female, white and evangelical Christian. They think they are what they view the average American to be, hard-working, independent, responsible for their own lot on life and not everyone else’s. Industrious, hard-working, disciplined, old-school-values type of people.

And both groups feel the government has let them down. When Jim Jordan graduated high school in 1982, 147 colleges had NCAA Division I men’s wrestling programs. Last year only 77 supported men’s wrestling, and there has been a 30 percent decline of men’s D1 wrestling scholarships in that time period. Many in the wrestling community blame federal Title IX provisions, which among its many applications seek to equalize the number of men’s and women’s scholarships at the university level. In other words, some believe the decline of wrestling at the college level is almost a conspiracy of Big Government.

The Tea Party believes they represent people who have worked hard and earned their keep in this world, the people who the government is taking from to reward those who have not earned it, who do not know the meaning of discipline and sacrifice.

One more shared point. Both the Tea Party and wrestlers form into groups or teams only because they have to. They are about self-discipline and self-reliance. Most wrestlers compete to win personally. They like it if their teammates win, but don’t really care much if they don’t. Tea Partiers just want to be left alone as well, mainly because they think that being by themselves is better than being part of the collective society. Sticking to individual principle is more important than sharedgovernance.

“What Jim Jordan is bringing to the table is a lot of wrestling ideals right now,” says Robert Alexander, a political science professor of Ohio Northern University in Ada. “What is Donald Trump selling? The woosification of America and how horrible it is. Jim Jordan is saying the same thing in his own way. Just go out and do things. Take responsibility.

Photo: Daniel McGraw

“He promised that he would get rid of Boehner, something no one thought anyone could do, and he delivered,” Alexander continues. “And the funny thing about it is that Jim Jordan doesn’t think what he did is a big deal. Wrestlers never show up the opponent when they beat them, nor do they celebrate too long, because the next match is real soon against someone who wants to tear you head off.”

And Jordan did take Boehner’s head off, something not lost among longtime Washington conservatives. “You don’t aim at the king’s head and miss,” says David McIntosh, a former Republican Indiana congressman who is president of Club for Growth, a political action group based in free market economics and other right wooing political policies.

“Once Jim Jordan is locked into what is the right thing to do, he doesn’t give up and he succeeds eventually,” McIntosh says. “I think what is happening in America right now, and it goes beyond Donald Trump and the presidential race, is that a majority of Americans feel the government needs to let us compete as individuals, to let America compete, and to stop coddling us and protecting us from competition and ourselves. Jim Jordan represents that.” But the problem with that line of thinking is the assumption that all Americans share that goal and those mostly macho male values of wrestling, where it is just you and the other guy on a mat. Yet life doesn’t work that way. Not every one of us is the same. Is it any wonder then that we seem to care less and less about wrestling as a sport that holds our attention?

With more sports choices, wrestling just doesn’t get the interest it used to get. Many have found other sports they like better, soccer and lacrosse and even rugby. And many seem to have decided that backing a sport where young men regularly starve themselves every week to compete and sometimes dehydrate to unsafe levels isn’t something they want to support.

The numbers say it loud and clear. Wrestling has never been a big spectator sport. Last year, only two college programs — University of Iowa and Penn State — averaged over 5,000 fans per meet. The Olympics has considered dropping wrestling, in part, because hardly anyone watches it anymore and there is no professional league to cash in on it and return the investment. Other sports simply seem more interesting to the average sports fan. Interest brings revenue, and the Olympics are all about revenue these days.

That drop in popularity is mirrored by the Tea Party. A Gallup Poll in October was headlined “Support for Tea Party Drops to New Low.” Not only did the number of Tea Party supporters drop from 32 percent in 2010 to 17 percent this year, the percentage of people who had no opinion one way or another went from 30 percent in 2010 to 54 percent today. In other words, a whole lot of people don’t give a shit about the Tea Party any more.

Wrestling has that problem as well. It used to be that we didn’t watch wrestling all the time, but every four years we’d pay attention, either to Dan Gable, the 1972 Olympian who later coached Iowa to 15 national titles, or Rulon Gardner, who famously defeated Aleksandr Karelin in the 2000 games, or other grapplers. We all knew guys who wrestled, with their V-shaped torsos and thick necks and cauliflower ears. We understood how novelist John Irving’s characters were wrestlers and how that was so much of who they were. We felt for the guy like the Emilio Estevez character in the 1985 film The Breakfast Club, the wrestler who duct taped the butt cheeks of the non-athlete in the locker room to please his domineering father.

We know fewer of those people now. We have other things to do, and sports pique our interest — fantasy sports, cycling for the man-bun crowd, yoga meditation after work. And that is the problem no one in wrestling is talking about.

We just don’t hear about wrestling much these days, the real kind anyway, the kind without the octagon. America may be moving on, and for a variety of reasons, both the Tea Party and wrestling could be left behind.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Matt Huffman, a former Republican member of the Ohio House of Representatives (term-limited out), and now running for state senate in Jordan’s district, remembers going to Jordan’s daughter’s wedding a few years ago and being surprised at who he ended up sitting with for dinner.

“They had the politicians table at the reception, and when I sat down at my place, I saw I was sitting next to Dennis Kucinich. I thought, “Am I at the right wedding?’”

Yes, that would be the Dennis Kucinich who might be the most liberal member of Congress ever. The former Cleveland mayor served in the U.S House as a Democrat from 1997 to 2013, and is now a political consultant and Fox News analyst. He is known for bringing articles of impeachment in 2007 against President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for what he claimed was misinformation put forward on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction prior to the war. Kucinich even proposed a new cabinet position: The Department of Peace.

Kucinich was Sen. Bernie Sanders before it was social media cool to be a socialist and ran for president in 2004 and 2008. He is the antithesis of Jordan ideologically in terms of the role of government. Kucinich thinks more is usually better, Jordan think less always is.

“We are very good friends,” Kucinich says. “Sometimes the person you may find yourself in disagreement with on a political basis, you can build a relationship by learning why they think the way they do. I did that with him, and he did that with me.”

“Jim and I could have had some big fights,” Kucinich continues. “But we kind of became like brothers who play on the opposite teams. You play to win on the field, but afterwards you shake hands and are still brothers and you work together.”

But Kucinich also did his homework on Jordan. “When he came into Congress, and we served on the same subcommittee, I found out he was a great wrestler in high school and college,” he says. “So I figured the best way to deal with a great wrestler is to not wrestle with them. I took the non-aggressive Zen approach and it worked well for us.”

And since Jordan became the leader of the group that’s says “no” to every government plan put forward, many have expected him to be a meanie of sorts as he moves into more of the political celebrity status. But he isn’t that way at all. After graduating from Wisconsin in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he coached wrestling at Ohio State University for the next decade. Along the way, he picked up a master’s degree in education and a law degree. For the most part, Jordan is smart and engaging, a “nice guy.”

He is in a safe conservative district, where he doesn’t have to campaign too much. But after his district was redrawn prior to the last election, he found that Oberlin, Ohio, a one-time abolitionist stronghold, had been added to his district. That effectively disenfranchised many voters in the liberal college town Ohio conservatives refer to as “People’s Republic of Oberlin.” Last December, students at Oberlin College demanded (but did not get) postponement of their finals because many claimed they were suffering from “racism trauma” after protesting excessive police force against black males in Cleveland. “The Oberlin League of Women’s’ Voters held a candidates forum and were surprised when I showed up,” Jordan laughs.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On Veterans Day this year, Jordan sponsored free haircuts for veterans. He didn’t go to Oberlin for that, but to at a little barbershop in Bluffton, a northwestern Ohio town of about 4,000 that is far more reliably white and Republican, a place where a trip to Columbus or Toledo is worth a mention the next day and the fact that John Dillinger once robbed a bank there is a source of pride. That is not usual; politicians love veterans and all the publicity they get for doing things for them. But what was unusual about this event is that Jordan not only went to the barbershop, but stayed for a scheduled two hours. If there is one thing politicians try to avoid, it’s being stuck in a place for a long time with constituents without an escape hatch. But there he was, talking with older veterans about how much he appreciated their service and how hard he was working on keeping the federal government form reaching into their pockets and taking their money. And paying for their haircut.

But despite his friendliness and ability to befriend both socialists and veterans, it did not come as much of a surprise when Jordan was railed at by the media during his recent questioning of Hillary Clinton at the latest Benghazi hearings. Or for his argumentative and repetitive questioning of Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood about its practice of fetal tissue donation, which deteriorated into a shouting match when Jordan kept asking her over and over again why she had apologized for the behavior some of her staff when she also was testifying that what they were doing was legal.

“He mistreated Cecile Richards very badly, and it is further proof that Jordan does not work and play well with others at times,” says Sandy Theis, a former Ohio journalist who covered Jordan when he served in Columbus and now the executive director for Progress Ohio, a liberal advocacy organization.

Al Drago/CQ Roll Call

“He mistreated Cecile Richards very badly, and it is further proof that Jordan does not work and play well with others at times”Sandy Theis

He also berated Clinton, with the same questions over and over about the Libyan Embassy attacks, an 11-hour interrogation that resulted in no new information. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called Jordan’s questioning “clearly the worst, the most unprofessional, the most misleading, [and] the most … demeaning to Congress” adding it was a “repulsive spectacle.” Political analyst David Gergen, who served in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations, said Jordan’s approached a “brutal quality about it that — [a] badgering quality to take everything she said in the worst possible light to try [and] to accuse her of not caring,enough, the fact she went home, somehow, the night of the Benghazi attack.” Like a wrestler, the committee gave him a dominant position and he held on for all it was worth.

Yet Jordan sloughs off the notion that he was more mean and nasty to Clinton and Richards than others. “We have hearings with Republicans and Democrats testifying, with all sorts of government agencies, and our job is to ask questions and get answers,” he says. “If I am not doing that I am not doing my job.”

He put it more succinctly in an interview with Press Pros Magazine(an Ohio sports publication) a few years ago, when asked if politics had gotten meaner over the years: “Politics has never been a place for ‘sissies,’ if that’s what you mean. John Kennedy said, ‘It’s is the only game for grownups,’ and he was right. “

Theis says Jordan has always “been genial, and friendly with the media, but we always found it strange how he would ask for eight spending provisions in a budget bill, get five of them, and then vote against it.” After the hearing with Cecile Richards, Theis decided to send Jordan a book of etiquette, “just to poke him a bit over how mean he seemed.”

The name of the book? How Not to Be a Dick: An Everyday Etiquette Guide by Meghan Doherty. Jordan says he never got the book, but said, “I’m glad to see people can at least have some sense of humor over this,” then added,” and I try not to be one.”

In 2001, when Marquette University decided to close down its men’s wrestling program, Russ Hellickson was asked to give a speech at the dinner where they said goodbye to wrestling. Hellickson, a silver medalist at the 1976 summer Olympics, coached Jordan at Wisconsin, and then took him on as his assistant when he moved to Ohio State in 1986.

But Hellickson didn’t just give a rubber chicken banquet talk about how sad they’d all be, then move on. He wrote an impassioned poem about wrestling called “Do Not Weep For Me” and read it to the crowd:

I am Wrestling! Do not weep for me!!

No political agenda or political interpretation can ever destroy me. My merit and my worth is no threat to any cause, but rather through my values, I am a model for others.

I am Wrestling! Do not weep for me!!

Celebrate what I am, celebrate what I have been, celebrate what I represent, and celebrate the many ways I have impacted your life. I will survive this test as I have survived others, I am forever etched into the very fiber of all mankind.

In a phone conversation, Hellickson delivered the usual platitudes to his former wrestler and assistant coach (“He is the most driven and determined person I’ve ever been around.”), but the conversation soon turned to the state of wrestling and America these days. He thinks the on-again, off-again, on-again status with the Olympics, along with the shutting down of college wrestling programs, speaks to a larger issue. “Wrestling is a hard sport to do, and we don’t want to do it anymore because we are a softer society now and we don’t want to do hard things,” he says.

But true achievement is hard, and not everyone can do it. “That’s why what Jim Jordan says is a difficult message for many,” says Hellickson, who voted for Obama once, and against him once. “Jordan makes it tough on people because he believes that people should not be given everything by the government. Not that it is bad for the rest of us, but bad for the people getting everything given to them. We are capable of doing unbelievable things, but we have to go out and get it done ourselves, and not have things given to us.”

That subject comes up repeatedly at a happy hour/meeting Jordan attended in Cleveland last month for the Wrestlers in Business Network. The group was formed in Cleveland a few years ago, but now has about a dozen chapters nationwide. The group is built around the notion that people who have wrestled are interested in doing business with people who have wrestled, because they speak a common language, most notably, “that everything is easier than wrestling was.”

But they are also networking to keep the Cleveland State University men’s wrestling team in play, after it was saved from the brink of extinction earlier this year, when the school was threatening to cut the program. By adding a student fee (about $15 per semester for the average student), and with some other grants and gifts, the wrestling program was saved, at least temporarily.

For Jason Orsky, who wrestled in high and college, and owns his own brokerage firm now, the thought of colleges getting rid of wrestling is mystifying. “The decisions that are being made right now are whether a sport makes money for the university, or whether it in some ways gets the numbers wrong with Title IX,” he says. “But it is still the sixth most popular high school sport in terms of participants, [trailing football, basketball, baseball, soccer and track], but we are going to get rid of it because it doesn’t fit in easy right now?”

Matt Ghaffari, who wrestled for Cleveland State and won the silver medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, says that men’s wrestling is a unique sport, “The oldest sport known to man, and one where a man who weighs 110 pounds and one that weighs 300 pounds can compete. We need to realize that there is value in teaching men the accountability this sport embraces more than any other.”

But the decisions on what sports to keep and which ones to cast off are complicated. First, football is number one, and anything that gets in the way of the cash cow is ripe for the taking. Men’s wrestling might cost too much for what it brings in, creates unbalance to the men’s and women’s’ scholarship equilibrium, and therefore, must be sacrificed on the altar of Title IX.

Matthew Holst/Getty Images

It is not hard to see how that works. Division I NCAA football programs can have 85 scholarships. To add a new sport that is gaining popularity, like rugby or lacrosse, schools must either drop a men’s sport or add a women’s. Or both. That’s why there were 3,659 men’s wrestling D1 scholarships when Jordan graduated high school in 1982, and 2,544 last year. It is also why there were 862 women’s’ rowing D1 scholarships in 1982, and 5,856 last year.

“We have to quit playing the victim,” says Jason Effner, a former Cleveland State wrestler and owner of a construction company.

“Jim Jordan has learned that playing the victim in Washington — whether it be on the entitlement side or the conservative cutting spending side — is no way to get your point across. You have to explain to people why you are relevant. We are different from other sports, and we have to emphasize that it is a good thing to be different from the other sports.”

Jordan emphasizes those ideals in his speech to the group in a German-style restaurant in downtown Cleveland. He told them that his daughter got a golf scholarship to Wisconsin, and therefore he is not against the principles of Title IX as a way to get more women on athletic scholarships who deserve one (and not opposed to financial assistance for his family, either). Then he zeroes in on the next big controversy, schools paying athletes a stipend of $3,000 to $4,000 per year to cover the “cost of attendance,” a program the NCAA has approved and schools are figuring out how to administer.

“That money is going to be coming from somewhere in the budget, and we have to be careful that it doesn’t come out of the budgets that allow non-revenue producing sports to operate,” he says.

Still, he doesn’t not want government intervention and says the best course of actions is to hold hearings in Washington to emphasize that getting rid of these sports with Olympic ties will have a negative effect on the American psyche, something only Olympic success can bring. In effect, he is saying doing nothing is the best approach, which is consistent with Tea Party doctrine. But the inaction is not going to save up wrestling.

After the beer steins have been drained, and sauerkraut and sausages have been eaten, the former wrestlers in business go to the CSU gym to watch the Vikings take on the Buckeyes of Ohio State. One of the first matches involves Jim Jordan’s nephew, Bo. He is a freak of sorts, 165 pounds of lean muscle and with a neck that seems to grow from the middle of his shoulders. He has vacant stare as he readies for the match that oozes confidence. He seems very serious and quiet.

Bo Jordan pins his opponent in 28 seconds.

Marysville, Ohio, is about 30 miles from Columbus (Plain City is roughly in between). To the east is Columbus, growing so fast due to the growth of public spending in big state government and THE big university that Marysville is now almost a suburb. To the west is the beginning of about 1,000 miles of rows of corn mostly, which feed our cattle and provides ethanol for our cars.

It is a foggy Saturday morning in Marysville, with a frost on the matted corn stubble that causes the land and sky to join together in color. It is early December, and the first really cold day in Ohio, some leaves still hanging on some trees until the wind gusts get their way.

Photo: Daniel McGraw

Inside Marysville High School, home of the Monarchs, eight boys wrestling teams from seven schools — Graham has two teams — are warming up with leg grabs and headlocks on the four wrestling mats covering the basketball floor. There are pictures of nine current Marysville High School boy wrestlers on the wall, and three girls’ basketball stars. Those are the big sports in these parts.

As Jim Jordan likes to say, this is part of the country where “we grow things and make things.” In Marysville, that would include the growing of corn and soybeans, the Honda factory that builds Accords, and the corporate headquarters of The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. Three miles down the road from the high school is another Marysville big employer, the Ohio Reformatory for Women prison, opened in 1916 and home to about 2,000 women, including Donna Roberts, the only women on Ohio’s death row for having her husband murdered in 2001.

There are parents and grandparents sitting in the bleachers and little kids running around wide-eyed as the meet gets underway at about 9 a.m. This eight-team tournament will go on for about six hours, and it is a wonder that this many families got up at 6 a.m. to get their kids and the relatives off to a wrestling match on a Saturday morning.

Up in the stands is Andy Stickley, who grows corn and soybeans on about 1,100 acres near Urbana. He has two sons who wrestle for Graham: Justin, a senior, finished second in state last year at 120 pounds, and J.D., a sophomore, is an up and comer at 132 pounds. Andy Stickley wrestled with Jim Jordan in high school and is his brother-in-law.

He talks about the commitment that wrestling in high school for a program like Graham takes, and the impact of not having a full ride scholarship waiting at the end of the trail if successful.

“Think of it this way,” he says. “These kids start when they are 5 or 6 years old and it is pretty much every day from then on until they are out of high school. A few breaks for a week or two during the off season, but it is lifting and practicing, the same drills over and over again.”

“And in the end, it is not a sport geared toward the glory or the fans, it is sport that is about commitment and that you yourself are responsible,” he continues. “And there are no teammates to hide behind like in the team sport. When you win, it is you, but when you lose, it is you, too. There is a personal responsibility that these kids learn at a young age.”

Just then, Justin comes up and joins his father and mother and grandparents after he pinned someone and is waiting for the next match. He finished second in the state championships last year, and hopes this is the year to be first. He is looking at smaller colleges mostly, including any Ivy League program that will find a way to move some grant money his way for an academic scholarship if he wrestles.

“You have to do it for yourself,” the 18-year-old says of his wrestling, “and a part of that is being held accountable for what you do.”

Andy Stickley then joins in: “Jim Jordan is who he is because of what Justin just said. Did wrestling turn him into a person consumed with success in this sport? Sure. But his level of self-discipline is unmatched. He was completely self-motivated in high school, and still is. There were none like him.”

And Russ Hellickson, the poet, pops into my head once again:

I am Wrestling! Do not weep for me!!

Look to those seated around you and think of the qualities that make them what they are:

Accountability, responsibility, persistence, fortitude, strength, compassion, work ethic, ingenuity, determination, integrity, honesty, focus, diligence, and resolve.

And if you live with me long enough these will become you.

Is wrestling dying a slow death? No, not in the sense that it will ever be gone completely. But one sport specialization is now preferred in high school, and the star athlete that plays football in the fall and wrestles in the winter is rare. Kids who have to have to starve themselves to make weight, or worse, put a finger down their throat before weigh-ins, may have been acceptable 50 years ago, but not as much now.

And while the wrestling coaches all like to say that participation is increasing on the high school level, it all depends on how you play the numbers out. The number of high school wrestlers has increased by 5 percent since Jim Jordan graduated in 1982, but the number of high school students is up 18 percent in that same time period.

Maybe all this is just part of a societal change that is part of the pendulum swing. It not like everybody has always bought in completely to the ideals promoted by wrestling. Dedication to hard work is fine — and starving yourself to make weight might be admirable in some ways — but is suffering really necessary to have success? Sometimes sharing the bounty is a good way to lift up the masses, rather than competition for every morsel.

And today the Tea Party is similar position. They say no to everything, and claim that doing that and the elimination of government programs is the only way for our country to succeed. Individuality over connectivity, austerity over sharing the national wealth. And although those principles are often based on values, too often it comes down to my values, and not yours.

Bill Clark/Roll Call

Jim Jordan finds himself at the center of this complicated debate. But it gets down to one simple fact: More than half of the country doesn’t care one way or another about the Tea Party or what it says or does. And most of the country has never seen amateur wrestling on TV or in person either.

Maybe one of the reasons most people don’t care much about either one is that neither wrestling nor the Tea Party have much in common with either of them anymore, that the values don’t connect.

Is that a problem in this country? Jim Jordan would say it is, and he is always ready to step into the circle in Washington to fight for his ideas. Even if others don’t like what you are advocating, you still have to do it.

That’s what his high school wrestling coach told him about 35 years ago. And the world hasn’t changed much since.

Or so Jim Jordan still believes.

It is late September, early evening. The field where the 2015 Frederick Douglass High School Mighty Ducks football team plays has a scoreboard, but no lights, and a lined turf, but no trainers or Gatorade jugs filled with water on the sideline.

To the left of the field is Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall, where National Guard tanks sat for nearly a week last spring after Freddie Gray, 25, was arrested a little more than a mile from the Douglass campus. His death from injuries sustained while in police custody led to protests around the city and helped fuel the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Demonstrations turned violent on April 27, the day of Gray’s funeral. A crowd of nearly 100, many initially assumed to be Douglass students, clashed with police at Mondawmin, a three-level shopping mall next to a transit center serving 10 different bus lines. Looters sacked many of the mall’s shops. Douglass was closed the next day. The city of Baltimore went into a state of emergency for more than a week.

To the right of the field, the skyline of the central business district bisects the field goal uprights. Banners along the field’s fence read “Work Hard. Play Smart. Win” in dark blue and orange, the Douglass colors. Parents, siblings, girlfriends and past and future players form a small crowd in the bleachers. A police helicopter circles from the back of the school, around Mondawmin and toward downtown, just as it does a few times each day, just because. Gray clouds hang in the distance.

Three players show up on the field for practice with white helmets instead of orange — “Did you not get the memo?” an assistant coach asks — and the team lines up in rows on the turf for stretches. One, two, three claps and “WOOO!” because even here, on a field in west Baltimore among players born in the late ’90s, wrestling’s Ric Flair still made his mark.

The stretches are loose and the count is off. A junior quarterback yells out to his teammates, “We should stop talking, we should focus.”

An assistant coach replies, “Well, you’re the one who threw 19 interceptions on Friday.”

It wasn’t 19 interceptions. It was three. But for a team with state title ambitions early in the season, the scrappy, disjointed loss against rival Edmonson-Westside exposed the team’s faults. Off-field troubles are beginning to affect on-field composure, and the Ducks are beginning to crack. The players are still trying to distance themselves from the reputation Douglass has carried since the riots. This season is a chance at redemption, and a chance to rewrite the school’s story in Baltimore in 2015.

After a tumultuous spring, the summer hadn’t been much better — three months after Gray’s death, July of 2015 marked Baltimore’s deadliest month in three decades. Nineteen of those 45 murders took place within three miles of the Douglass campus. By November, despite the attention and promises lavished on the city since April, the per-capita homicide rate for 2015 would be the highest in Baltimore history.

No player on that team is untouched by violence in Baltimore. They lost friends and fathers in shootings. They saw brothers and aunts imprisoned. For them, this team was supposed to be a refuge, and for their school and neighborhood, a symbol of hope.

Most of the Ducks were born here, in a city ranked the worst in the nation in social mobility for young black males. This field is meant to be a place of opportunity in a city that desperately needs it. A place to make a name, a place to escape, a place to identify. Above all, a home.

But the turmoil they sought to block out when on the field was now inextricably tied to the 2015 season.

Over the course of the season, a team that Baltimore loved to hate — because of Coach Elwood Townsend’s self-admitted arrogance, because of the way the Mighty Ducks trounced city and county opponents over the past two years — tried to avoid becoming just more collateral damage.

Coach Townsend, a Baltimore native, is a compact man with a round face and a trimmed beard. He graduated from high school in southeast Baltimore and attended schools in Wyoming and North Carolina during service in the Air Force before returning home to coach junior varsity in nearby Anne Arundel County. He took over Douglass’ JV program in 2008, and became head coach a year later. He inherited a varsity squad that had gone more than a decade without a winning season and turned it into a state finalist in less than five years.

Townsend accepts no excuses — especially not from his players. He is gruff but ends his statements with an unsuspecting lilt. He calls his squad to huddle near the sideline as practice ends.

“Y’all got to figure out what you want. Right now, we’ve got 45 different athletes with 45 different problems,” he says, and though it is not a question, his inflection leaves the sentence open-ended. It comes off as if he is asking if his players are capable, more than telling them what they need to do.

“I understand that stuff happens. Life happens. But this should be your outlet, your place. This is my safe haven. I’m in the school. I see that shit.”

Townsend announces he is going to institute a swear jar and says the spoils will go to the season’s MVP. The players laugh it off; they will still curse like teenage boys do, though never as much as the junior varsity coaches.

Photo: Amanda Berg

Malik Holloway is one of the school’s emerging stars

Northwestern University has just inquired about Malik Holloway, a three-sport athlete and defensive end, and Townsend lets the rest of the team know. Malik, a 6′2, 205-pound, sinewy and soft-spoken junior, is one of Townsend’s emerging stars. Boston College, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia have also expressed some interest, as well as Monmouth, Old Dominion, Delaware and Towson. He’d likely play outside linebacker in college. Yet Malik is not ranked on 247Sports or similar websites, and Baltimore City Public Schools are vastly underrepresented in recruiting databases. Only four of 151 players from Maryland on 247Sports are from BCPS. In his seven years as coach, Townsend has sent only two players to Division I programs, but neither to a Power Five conference.

Townsend sees Malik, 16, as a muted leader on and off the turf, a “quiet assassin” who is not too emotional and as an “animal with raw talent” when challenged. Placement for Malik at a top program would be another show of Townsend’s prowess, and a sign of Douglass’ recent progress.

Three losses in the past two years has solidified the team as a one of the best in the city, and Townsend is looking to bring the Mighty Ducks back to the state final at M&T Bank Stadium for the third year in a row. But this is his first year under a new principal, a former coach at a rival school with plenty of old buddies he probably wouldn’t mind putting in the top spot at Douglass.

Townsend knows that. And he knows he needs to prove that he can maintain control amidst the helicopters, the media attention, the upcoming Freddie Gray trials and the aftermath of violence that gutted his players’ neighborhoods physically and emotionally.

The approaching storm has darkened most of the sky by the time Townsend dismisses his team. The mood is lighter among the players, but even then, two weeks into the 2015 campaign, Townsend knows that everything is a bit more tenuous than in any season prior.

Getting to “the Bank,” as they call it, is never easy. Through the next six weeks, Townsend and the Mighty Ducks will need to trudge through the muck left in the wake of a turbulent year in hopes of making it back to the biggest stage in Maryland football.

Everyone was sick of reading about the riots by the time September rolled around. Could Douglass do anything without someone bringing up Mondawmin? It was as if everything the school had worked for — a three-year turnaround through a federal grant, a revamping of the facilities and extracurricular activities — was erased by a protest that happened to take place directly across from the school’s entrance.

But then, during the second week of practice, Douglass and the Mighty Ducks found another reason to pop up in the news.

Townsend was off school grounds when an assistant coach called him to let him know that one of this players, Sean Johnson, a junior running back and linebacker, beat up a younger teammate in the school cafeteria.

“OK,” Townsend said, relatively unperturbed at first. Teenage boys fight. Football is school-sanctioned violence, and sometimes it spills over into the hallways.

“No, you don’t understand,” the assistant coach said. “He beat him up real bad.”

Bad enough that the victim was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Bad enough that school was let out early and a Foxtrot helicopter was sent to oversee the dismissal. Bad enough that Johnson would be charged with attempted murder.

Someone recorded a clip of the fight. It’s unfocused and shot from two angles, but it’s a harrowing 21 seconds.

Johnson comes up on his teammate’s left as the video opens. The players are in Douglass’ spacious, recently revamped cafeteria. The bottom half of the walls are bright orange, like the rest of the Douglass hallways, and flags of various nationalities hang from the ceiling.

A group of students sit at one of the folding cafeteria tables in the background as the video begins. Johnson enters the frame and holds the victim by the shoulder with his left hand then slams him to the ground with his right.

The first vantage point of the camera is from the other side of the table, and it shows Johnson throw five punches to the upper chest and face. He steadies himself after the fifth blow, and whoever is holding the camera moves from behind the bench to the floor.

Johnson then pummels the victim five more times in the face, then reels back and stomps on his jaw with his right foot before the camera cuts out.

A school police officer later said after staff intervened and cleared out the area that that the victim “was having a seizure while lying in a pool of his own blood.” Johnson was charged with attempted murder, the victim sustained a broken nose, facial lacerations and a concussion, and required require reconstructive facial surgery.

The reason for the fight? Johnson had thought his teammate stole the visor off his football helmet. A visor. The district cancelled a week of practice out of concern for the safety of the players, and that Friday’s game against Dunbar was scratched. It was slated to be one of the best matchups in the city that season, and a chance for Douglass to gain needed points in the playoff chase.

Nine days after the fight, on the day of the Edmondson game, Townsend received official notice that the incident had prompted a school investigation into the program. Suddenly, this was the new identity of Douglass football in 2015, an entire roster now defined by one kid’s anger.

Photo: Toni L. Sandys/Washington Post

The video soon appeared on national outlets and was heavily circulated in Baltimore, played over and over again on the evening news as broadcasters fretted and shook their heads. It was a disappointing representation of a school with a storied history in the city, and one that undermined any recent progress.

Douglass was founded in 1883, the second oldest historically integrated high school in the United States, the first public school in Maryland (and only third in the country) to award diplomas to black students. Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned abolitionist leader, gave the commencement address himself for the class of 1894. 

For 50 years, Douglass was the only high school in Baltimore for African Americans

Photos: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

For five decades, it was the only high school in the city for African Americans. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall graduated from the school in 1925. So did Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr., a civil rights activist and the chief lobbyist for the NAACP, band leader Cab Calloway and other esteemed alumni: The first African American police commissioner in Baltimore. The first African American Congressmen from Maryland. The organizer of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP.

Douglass established itself as a place of achievement and pride in a city that struggled openly and deeply. Still, crime, corruption and drugs overtook the surrounding community with the kind of ferocity that tends to only inflict the most forgotten of metro areas.  Even Douglass was overwhelmed.

Today, the school motto is “continuing the tradition with pride, dignity and excellence.” But in the neighborhoods around the campus and where students live, chronic poverty is the tradition.

Malik’s mother and stepfather, Nichole Crowder and Randy Newkirk, used to live in one of the roughest neighborhoods in south Baltimore. It was bad. They attended funerals of kids killed in gun violence. Two of Nichole’s brothers were murdered.

Five years ago, they moved to a spacious multi-story home further west, a quiet neighborhood with large front yards that Randy calls the “country” in comparison to their old streets. The four youngest of Nichole’s seven children — Malik, Brian, a senior at Douglass, and two sisters in elementary and middle school — live in the home. On a Monday evening earlier this fall, Nichole sits at the long, wooden table that takes up much of the space in the dining room. She wears a white T-shirt spray-painted with “15,” Malik’s number, in hot pink and orange. On the far side of the room is a tiered shelf that looks like it might soon crunch under the weight of the medals and trophies for Malik, Brian and their older sister, Tierra, who plays volleyball at Indiana State.

Randy, a man as portly as Malik is sinewy, wears a Ravens’ Ray Lewis jersey. He scrolls through his phone while his wife talks, but stops to listen to her describe a typical street in Baltimore.

“You’ve got a Chinese food shop, then a fried chicken place, then a liquor store on every block,” she says. “And then down the street, you’ve got the church that’s trying to save us.”

Randy nods his head in agreement and laughs loudly.

“That was a good one,” he says.

The Baltimore that an outsider often imagines when they hear mention of the city, the Baltimore one associates with The Wire and The Corner— that is a Baltimore dominated by its vices.

One morning Nichole called Randy on her way to work as she drove down North Avenue, where boarded up row homes are plastered with black and white signs that read “We must stop killing each other.”

“It’s 6:15 in the morning and I’m driving down the street and I’m like, you know what? I can’t even get a cup of coffee. Or a cup of tea out here at 6 a.m. in the morning. But I passed six liquor stores,” she told him. There was a line outside one of the liquor stores, wrapped around the block, and the sun hadn’t fully risen.

“And you wonder why so much crime?” she adds.

Photo: Amanda Berg

Urban blight around Douglass took a toll on the school. A decade ago, the graduation rate dropped down to only 25 percent. Barely two-thirds of teachers were certified, more than a fourth of the students were absent daily, and in 2005 fully half of the freshman class dropped out by June. A 2008 HBO documentary, Hard Times at Douglass High, put the faltering institution in the national spotlight for the first time.

But they still tried. In 2010, the city took advantage School Improvement Grant from the Department of Education to drastically overhaul the way things worked at Douglass. The “turnaround” included a new principal and replacing half the staff.

Meanwhile, the reputation of Douglass football also suffered. The Mighty Ducks alternated between middling and dismal until Townsend took over in 2009. In 2010, the team went 8-3 for the first winning season since 1998, and their hard-earned success seemed to mimic that of the school.

Baltimore City hired a successful former owner and operator of daycare centers in Georgia, Antonio Hurt, as the new principal. His first year was also Townsend’s second (and last) losing season with the program. The next year, Douglass lost four games by a combined 14 points to go 7-4.

Murals with Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela and Louis Armstrong were painted on the hallways of the school, and dark blue duck footprints were pasted on the floors, leading students toward the classroom and away from truancy. A statue of Frederick Douglass was placed in between the twin metal detectors at the school’s main entrance and quotes from Douglass were painted on the white walls; one reads, “Man does not plan to fail, he just fails to plan,” in gray and white. In 2013, with one year left in the federal grant, the school achieved its academic target for the first time in 18 years. Attendance was up to 80 percent. The school was lauded as a success story by the Department of Education.

Townsend’s squad was undefeated going into playoffs that season and upset the top seed in Class 1A in the state semifinals. Douglass lost 25-0 to a team from western Maryland, but having a chance to play until December, and to do so on the Ravens’ home turf, was an accomplishment.

The trajectory of the football program fit nicely with the resurgence of Douglass. A football team drew potential athletes and kids looking for a strong sense of school spirit from all over the city. Everything was on the up, a welcome change for a school once considered the worst of the worst in a notoriously struggling school system.

But in April 2014, Hurt pled guilty to defrauding the federal government of nearly $2 million in his previous position in Georgia. He had used funds meant for the underprivileged to lease luxury cars and buy jewelry, and was sentenced to two years and one month in federal prison.

Parents and students were shocked. People like Randy and Nichole associated the turnaround at their children’s school with Hurt more than the federal money. He made sure that prom tickets were free for students who passed state tests, hosted banquets for honor roll students with free food and T-shirts, and filled the seats at Back to School Nights. The man that helped bring standards and purpose back to a declining school was gone. The Mighty Ducks again made it to the state finals, and again fell to the same team from western Maryland.

This time, the accomplishment did not seem so gratifying.

Elwood Townsend’s office is in the basement of the school, accessible through a winding staircase by the side entrance or a few steps in the back of the building. There’s a large equipment closet on the left side that creates a narrow hallway to enter the room, which is big enough for a mismatched assortment of chairs and table on the right side, with a fridge in the back and on the far wall, a washer and dryer.

It smells like a mix of mothballs and dried sweat. Townsend keeps the shelves on the left full of equipment like the orange helmets with the navy tape stripes that his staff added by hand before the first game of the season.

On the bulletin board on the right side, photos from previous seasons are displayed alongside printouts commemorating Douglass playoff wins. Pasted on patterned construction paper in a whimsical font, at first one would assume a student or art teacher crafted the decorations on the board.

But it was Townsend.

The same guy that was ejected for some “choice words” in the second game of the season, the guy who admits quickly that others will call him arrogant, the guy who ends his first interview by reminding a writer “I say what I feel and mean what I say” — is also a coach who decorates the small wall space in his office with bright colors. He knows which of his players won’t have food on the table when they get home and keeps Doritos and Gatorade from the office ready as necessary. He takes a player to get a haircut if he notices that no one else has.

“If I don’t care for them, who does?” he says.

“A lot of them are rebellious to my role at the start, but once they see you have a genuine interest in them, that you’re not just trying to parade them around, use them for your football team … I just want to make sure they know I have their best interest in mind.”

He is a stickler for detail. If you can tuck your shirt in for school, why can’t you tuck your shirt in for the game? If you want to play football on Friday night, why can’t you run laps at Tuesday practice? Townsend believes the key to success is if you can do small things consistently and without exceptions.

Photo: Amanda Berg

“You can’t make excuses,” Townsend said. “You don’t have to be a thug because your mom or dad isn’t in your life.”

Townsend guesses that a little more than half of his players are without both parents in the home, He knows there are kids with worse situations than others, and part of his job is to figure out who is struggling, and why.

The value of football here is that it is a diversion as much as anything else, a reason to not get in trouble. The week that Douglass did not practice after the fight, a junior varsity player found himself in a significant legal jam.

One coach says he was caught with a gun, but Townsend can neither confirm nor deny the claim. The student became one more player that could have benefitted from more time on the field and less time off school grounds, says assistant coach Dewan Clay.

“Football saves these kids. That’s how it works in Baltimore,” he says. At least that’s the way it is supposed to work.

There’s a senior defensive end that says he wants to be a police officer one day. He will be one of a few players without a family member to accompany him when he receives a certificate of participation and poses for photos at halftime of his senior game.

At one practice, he steps to the sideline to talk about his time with the Mighty Ducks.

“I’ve been here two years, and there’s been too much going on,” he says.

He’s tired of reviewing the same play for the last 25 minutes, of reporters poking around on his campus, of watching things fall apart.

“This is where I find my peace.”

Townsend raised eyebrows with moves like scheduling a game at suburban powerhouse Bel Air in Harford County for the fourth game of the season. The Mighty Ducks spent almost an hour heading up I-95 N to play a heavily favored squad from a larger, wealthier and whiter school.

The Bobcats were undefeated, and as a longtime member of class 4A draw from a student body of more than 1,400. Douglass barely hits 1,000 students. The Bel Air quarterback had scored five touchdowns in a win the week before, while Douglass, after opening the season with two wins before the cancelled game, had suffered its first loss to Edmonson-Westside, 14-8, a team they beat by 43 points in 2014.

Plus, it was Bel Air homecoming, pouring rain and everyone was still a bit on edge, particularly given a trip out of the city so soon after the fight. But the Mighty Ducks were up by two touchdowns at the half, and held on to give Bel Air its only loss of the regular season, winning 24-13.

They are going to take it easy today, Clay says at practice on the Monday after the win. He’s up in the top row of bleachers at the Douglass field, watching as the junior varsity coach makes two players do 25-minutes of crab walking around the track.

Assistant coach Justin Tolbert, a hulking, talkative guy who likes discussing Netflix series and UFOs, arrives from his day job. He sits down next to Clay in the bleachers.

“Did you see what the Bel Air athletic director said about us?” Clay asks him. He searches for something on his phone. It’s a text from the AD to Townsend that he shared with the rest of the staff.

After a brief rundown of injury updates from the Bobcats’ side, the athletic director comments on Douglass’ representation Friday night.

“I want to compliment the program, given everything going on in the school and portrayed in the media,” he wrote, adding that he would speak highly of the Mighty Ducks and their staff to anyone who asked about scheduling the team in the future. It’s nice, but also sad to see that it even needs to be mentioned.

But now someone is reviewing the Baltimore Sun write-up of the game. The fight between Sean Johnson and his teammate is mentioned within the first sentence.

“Could they write a story about us without it starting with violent assault?” a coach asks.

Townsend doesn’t say much the whole practice except to ask a pair of players why they took their helmets off. They close out with a set of full-field sprints. A junior named Gary does something that ticks Townsend off, and he sends the tackle off the field as his teammates complete their final sets of 100s.

Photo: Amanda Berg

After practice that evening, Malik calls the Bel Air win the one of the best things that’s happened to him this year — besides making the honor roll and National Honor Society. The worst thing this year? The fight. And the worst thing in his 16 years? That’s easy. The deaths. He has known 10 people — Nichole’s two brothers, closest friends, people he grew up with — killed in violence. A few months ago, a close friend was coming out of a club in east Baltimore and shot down. The guy was 20.

“I stay out of harm’s way,” he says. “I stay out of trouble.”

“It makes us stronger,” he says of the common experiences his teammates share, the violence that they see but do not seek. “It motivates us more. Even through all this violence, we’re still winning. We’re still striving to be the greatest.”

At one of the first practices of the season, Townsend started with a warning to his players. “The streets are undefeated on the scoreboard, and you are at zero. The only way out of the streets is death or in jail.”

Four days after the Mighty Ducks routed Maritime Academy during homecoming and three days before they take on City College, it is almost 4 p.m. and time for Townsend to check progress reports. If he can get his kids to practice, he can get them to graduation, and from there, hopefully to higher education or anything but the streets he warns about.

He sits in his office in the only chair on the right side, the only seat in the room that provides a first look at who is walking through the door. A player walks in to hand him a printed out report, and Townsend notes that he’s missed a practice this week already.

“It’s like, one practice a week, and there you looking plum dumb,” he says, without looking up from the sheet. “Maybe I grew up in an era where we don’t miss football practices … what is that, two Fs on the progress report?”

There are a bunch of jerseys in the washer and another bunch strewn around the office, along with empty green Gatorade cups. The assistant coaches wait in the mismatched chairs by the shelves, snacking on the chips stored next to Townsend’s makeshift desk.

At the beginning of the year, the coaching staff goes out to dinner to divide the varsity team into groups. Each coach has a crew of about eight players that they are responsible for, keeping tabs on grades, attendance, commitment and so on. They make sure that their charges are kept busy and their time is fully booked year round. Playing winter and spring sports is less of a suggestion and more of a requirement.

Only 57 percent of Douglass students graduate in four years, and only 20 percent go on to college. But 13 of Townsend’s 15 seniors from the class of 2014 continued their education. Of the two that did not, one had a child and went straight to work, and the other joined the military.

Another player comes in halfway through changing into his practice gear.

“Don’t come in my office again with no shirt like that, like this is a strip club,” he tells him. The same kid is struggling to make an early-morning class; Townsend tells him to either catch a different bus or get up earlier.

“What are you going to say to your college coach when you’re late to the 8:30 a.m. class on the other side of campus?” he asks.

Over at City College in northeast Baltimore, where the Mighty Ducks spent the fourth Friday in October, nearly 99 percent of the student body goes on to higher education. The school is the only one in Baltimore City to offer the International Baccalaureate Programme.

City College’s football team isn’t up to par with their academic performance this year, and it wasn’t the toughest win, but it’s an important one given the Mighty Ducks’ new classification. Douglass used to be in class 1A, the smallest classification in Maryland, until 2015, when the Mighty Ducks were bumped up to 3A, the second largest.

The turnaround at Douglass and subsequent jump in attendance now puts the Mighty Ducks in a division with more suburban schools and less city and rural teams. Beating a 3A team like City will help in point standings that determine postseason playoffs. It helped though, Townsend noted, that the Black Knights coach had benched all of his seniors for some indiscretion.

Still, they’ll take it. So little comes easy.

The win against Poly pushes Douglass to third in the points standing in the 3A North region. Only the top four teams in each region will make playoffs, and the missed game against Dunbar puts the Mighty Ducks at a disadvantage. They are game behind everyone else in the playoff race. Only three other Baltimore City schools (out of 18 eligible) are ranked as high or higher in their respective divisions.

It is the day before Halloween, 57 degrees and sunny, and the Mighty Ducks are wearing the jerseys printed with “pride,” “dignity” or “excellence” on the back instead of last names. They walk down the field in two columns holding hands, and prep to face Digital Harbor by dancing in a huddle to whatever the assistant coach blasts from his phone’s speakers.

“I be feeling like the man when I walk through,” they sing.

“None of them know their schoolwork, but they can repeat this verbatim,” coach Tolbert says, shaking his head.

No one starts the clock on the scoreboard after the first whistle and no one seems to notice. Digital Harbor is 1-7 at this point, and the Mighty Ducks should have taken an early lead, but Townsend’s unhappy from the start.

He replaces a sophomore guard early in the first quarter because he has not blocked a soul all night.

Sophomore linebacker Andre Owens sacks the Digital Harbor quarterback. It took you an hour to get there.

Douglass gets the ball at the 19 and the ball goes way past wide receiver Deandre House.

Deandre, what are you doing?

You can’t jog on your routes.

You’ve got to get hot.

Deandre, you’re blowing my high, son.

It is the last home game of the season, and at halftime, Townsend runs up to the microphone at the top of the bleachers to announce his seniors as they receive a certificate of participation and roses. There is no P.A. announcer, and so this is another of Townsend’s multiple roles during the course of one game. The marching band in the right of the stands, all 23 students strong, plays Drake’s “Trophies.”

Photo: Amanda Berg

Randy Newkirk with Malik Holloway

Among all the spectators, Randy Newkirk is easy to find; look for the largest and loudest fan on the sideline. He sat up top in the bleachers for the first half, but then moves down to the fence along the track.

Randy has a large white T-shirt decorated in graffiti style spray paint, the type of shirt you buy on the boardwalk and bring inside a shop to get customized, just like the one Nichole wears at home. His shirt is covered in No. 15s — Malik’s number — of varying sizes in bright orange and pink. His hat is spray painted in the same style. The most muted part of his outfit are the tan Crocs on his feet.

“Let’s go. Turn that shit up,” he yells after Malik knocks the ball out of the quarterback’s hands. “Eat. Eat. Eat.”

Malik’s biological father was imprisoned nine years ago and still has time left to serve.

“A lot of stupid stuff,” he says of what sent his father to prison. Some of it was to help the family, he adds. Some of it was just trouble.

Randy came into Malik’s life 11 years ago, back when the kid was less of an athlete and more of a mini menace, the type of kid who whirled through the neighborhood with endless uncontrolled animation.

“I first met his mother when he was 5, and I said ‘He has to turn that energy into something,’” Randy said.

So Randy, a former player for Douglass, introduced Malik and his brother Brian to sports and quickly found them a team for every season.

Football, basketball, baseball and repeat, for as many years as possible.

“Just to put something into them to keep them busy,” Randy says.

Randy would load Malik, Brian and six or seven other neighborhood boys — enough for a full team — into his Chevy Caprice and drive them to park in west Baltimore with the “mangiest” field in the city. The grass was so high it was nearly impossible to practice ground balls.

He coached youth league teams with players from the neighborhood for years. Football and baseball were the staples, and basketball was added in middle school. Randy knew the value of getting his sons, and their peers, invested in something early on.

“It helps a lot of kids,” he said. “You never know what a person is going home to.”

It took nearly the entire season for the school to come to the conclusion that Sean Johnson, the junior now charged as an adult with first-and second-degree attempted murder, had been left off the eligibility sheet required by Baltimore City schools to keep track of which players are in good standing to participate in sports. To be eligible, each player is required to participate in 10 practice days, have a recent physical and present a report card that proves passing grades.

Johnson was eligible, Townsend says, and he wasn’t intentionally left off the sheet. But his name was not included.

On Monday, Nov. 9, four days before the Mighty Ducks were scheduled to take on Franklin in the first round of playoffs, Baltimore City Public Schools contacted the executive director of the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association to announce they were withdrawing Douglass from the state regional tournament. By 8:30 a.m., Townsend was called in to speak in front of a committee of representatives from the city to determine whether or not he had left Johnson off the sheet intentionally to allow an ineligible player to participate. The committee voted 7-1 that Townsend was not ill-intended, and enforced no penalty.

Toni L. Sandys/Washington Post

The seniors had played their final high school game without even knowing it.

But that didn’t change the fate of the Mighty Ducks. The team would have to forfeit the first two games that Johnson played. Their record went from 7-2 to 5-4, and Douglass dropped from 69.6 points to 54.5 in the regional standings, far out of playoff contention. A season that had started with so much hope and promise was over.

The decision was made public at 11:30 a.m., but Townsend’s players knew before he could tell them himself. The Baltimore Sun had reported the story and the news quickly spread through Twitter. Townsend called a team meeting of parents and players at the school that afternoon.

There were tears and raised voices. The parents, who had gotten used to packing up and heading to the home of the Ravens in December, were just as disappointed as their sons, if not more. Some guys didn’t care, Townsend admits. It’s just another loss.

But the seniors were devastated; they had played their final high school game without even knowing it.

It is early December, early evening, but the sky is already fully dark. Townsend shows up to a practice for the Baltimore All-Stars few minutes after 6 p.m. wearing a ski hat to ward off the chill in Elkridge, a suburb about 10 miles from the Douglass campus and right outside the borders of Baltimore County. Three Douglass seniors made the roster for the 20th annual Baltimore Touchdown Club’s All-Star Classic game between the Baltimore and the Metro All-Stars.

This is now Townsend’s only coaching job.

About three months ago, in an interview after the second game but before Sean Johnson sent his teammate to the hospital, Townsend had called himself a realist.

“All good things come to an end, you don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “We want to hold up the pride and dignity and excellence we have. Keep riding while we’ve still got some air left in the tires.”

He knew then that his job would be under more scrutiny with a new administration; he did not know the season would devolve the way it had.

“It was an unfortunate situation,” he says “It is my program. I take the blame.”

Photo: Amanda Berg

Shortly after the season unceremoniously ended, Townsend posted on Facebook that he and his coaches all planned, at the time, to return to the Mighty Ducks for the next season. But on Nov. 22, Townsend Tweeted out the following: “Hello! Effective immediately I have resigned as Head Football Coach at Frederick Douglass HS. It’s been an amazing ride! I love you all!”

In an interview shortly after with the Baltimore Sun, Townsend told reporter Katherine Dunn: “Myself and the administration, mainly the principal (Kelvin Bridgers), we don’t see eye-to-eye on the overall direction of the program, so I thought it was just best if I resigned and looked into other opportunities. We agreed to disagree about the future of Douglass football…  The kids weathered the storm as much as we could…”

Later, he would allude to the fact that he felt he would rather resign than get pushed out.

His wasn’t the best team out there, he admits. Maybe they got a little cocky, having gone to the state finals twice in a row, and let it get to their head. If they had won that last game against Mervo, even with the forfeits, they still would have qualified for the playoffs.

“We did well considering the obstacles,” he says: transitioning to a new principal, the riots, the Freddie Gray trials on the horizon, the fight, the cancellation of the biggest game of the year …

“All good things come to an end,” he says again, this time with certainty.

A former coach once pointed out to him that most kids in Baltimore choose their football program based on the name and the status. But over the past few seasons at Douglass, it’s been about Townsend just as much as the team. In December, Townsend was hired to coach Reginald F. Lewis, a small 1A school in the city that finished 4-6 and has not won a playoff game in the school’s 13 years. He’s looking forward to building up another program.

He hopes to establish the same kind of reputation at Lewis, one equally strong in playoff performance and leadership. And he hopes his players, the ones he knocked for not hustling in drills or the ones who he let stay over his house when things were bad at home — he hopes that they knew that he cared a coach, but also for something more.

The cramped office at the bottom of the building is nearly cleared out. Townsend took the pictures of this teams and staff, but he left the colorful construction paper decorations.

“They can always go in there,” he says, smiling, as he walks to take his spot on the field to coach the all-stars. “And they’ll know the ghost of Elwood Townsend is still around.”

Malik collected 77 tackles for the season, 21 for a loss, and 25 sacks, good for 213 negative yards. According to his coaches, he ranked second in the state in that category.

He joins his parents at their dining room table after getting back from school soon after learning of the forfeit. He wears socks with the Maryland flag pattern and bright red sneakers to match, and his jaw is swollen from getting a tooth pulled earlier that day.

His parents are reviewing the Facebook group for Mighty Ducks parents and coaches. One mother posted her own take immediately after everyone heard about the withdrawal from playoffs.

“They are just waiting for one of our boys to act out over this so they can say I told you so but not today or any other day,” she wrote. “Praying for our boys and coaches. They have had a bull’s eye on our back from day one. We will show them otherwise. We will still walk with our heads held high and keep striving for better days for our school.”

Another assistant coach posted the name and number of a contact at the Baltimore ACLU.

Malik is subdued about the whole situation, while his parents are both seething. Nichole is particularly peeved. She is adamant: her children’s Baltimore is worse than the one she remembers. So to take this away, of all things, is especially cutting.

“We had already gone to the stadium twice and they were salty about that anyway,” she says. “They screwed us, you waited. All. Of. Those. Weeks,” she adds, hitting the table between each word. “Why did you wait all this time? It doesn’t sound right. It’s all mixed up. Even if Townsend did know … the school, the state, the city, whoever waited until the morning of to make a decision, and they knew we wouldn’t have time to fight it.”

Photo: Amanda Berg

“They screwed us, you waited. All. Of. Those. Weeks.”Nichole Crowder

How do you explain the situation to an outsider, to someone who has no idea of the importance of Douglass football to this community and these kids? How do you express the gravity of this loss?

“Wow,” Randy says. He repeats it again a few times. Douglass is used to assumptions, not understanding, from those outside the community.

When Freddie Gray dies, when the murder rates rise, when suddenly the rest of the country realizes the state of another city — that’s when Baltimore matters, when the black lives matter. Yet that is every day for Nichole and Randy’s children, for Townsend’s players.

“The devastation,” Randy says. “I just think, you know, it’s unfair. It’s unfair what the media is doing to them.”

And at that point, Nichole interjects. “Cause you can’t judge a book from its cover,” she says. “Everything in that school is not bad. I’m just so upset that’s it’s taking away from the kids.”

There’s a conversation Nichole had with her son Brian that reminds her of what is gained by the Douglass football team, and what has just been lost.

“He told me, ‘I wish the Ravens would win, because it makes the city a little better. It makes it a little calmer. Because everyone had something to cheer for.’”

“People were getting along better. People were talking; you know what I’m saying? You were having conversations in the street with people you didn’t even know. People were talking and communicating cause everybody had one agenda, which was going to the Super Bowl, and it made everyone happy.”

It works the same for high school playoffs, she says. For the last two years, the Mighty Ducks have played all the way to December, collecting hand warmers and rain gear for the fans depending on the weather. A common goal unites and encourages. They had grown accustomed to looking forward to a Saturday spent in the purple seats at “The Bank,” willing the Mighty Ducks to make history for the city and the school.

“Now, we just sitting around looking, trying to figure out how this happened,” Randy says.

Malik’s parents wouldn’t mind if he chose to play elsewhere as a senior. Nichole asks her sons to avoid wearing their Douglass shirts in the mall; she doesn’t want someone to unfairly associate them with the violence in and outside the building this past year. Private school coaches from all over the state have contacted Townsend about Malik, he says. Going to one of those schools might make it easier to get a scholarship.

But Malik, a self-described “mama’s boy” who wants to be an EMT, a kid who is currently enamored with his girlfriend, action movies and any mixtape he can download off Spinrilla, is not interested in any other options for his senior year. He wants to graduate from Douglass.

He does not want to leave, despite it all, despite everything.

It is home. And that matters.

Every boxer wants to be somebody, and everyone dreams of being the champ, and once it looked like Alex Ramos might be both. He had that big wide smile, a way with the ladies and a pair of hands that could hurt any fighter alive. He was adored, too, a South Bronx kid that everyone in New York cheered like a favorite son. Boxing fans clapped each other on the shoulder congratulating themselves on every knockout as if they had flashed the leather themselves. Nothing fueled the lore more than broadcaster Howard Cosell’s nasally and deliberate voice introducing Ramos to a new audience in the late 1970s; the next great middleweight champion in waiting. If Cosell said so, then that’s the way it was.

Photo courtesy of Alex Ramos.

And for a while, that seemed to be true, devastating knockouts in the amateurs culminating in four New York City Golden Glove championships, followed by a quick start as a pro. But not everyone handles success well, and maybe that’s why things came apart, why he never reached the level to which his talent could have taken him.

Or maybe it was something else, something that wouldn’t go away, something that slowly scraped away at the heart of who he was. Legal problems began to make more headlines than his KOs, and his career first slowed then plateaued, then went into steep decline in the late 1990s as his troubles mounted and old friends turned away. And just when his life seemed to be on the ropes, Jacquie Richardson showed up to keep him on his feet and then help him get medical help as the years of fighting began to catch up with him. If there was a problem, she would solve it, cobbling together lives from the broken minds and souls that once laced up in professional boxing rings.

She knew what kind of damage a man could endure in the ring and cause outside of it. And she knew the legal system. An assistant to the district attorney in Ventura County, California, Richardson focused on sex crimes. She had years of knowledge and experience on the subject, and she had needed it all, especially with Alex. Her latest problem child had been questioned more than once about a string of rapes in New York City, a brutal series of crimes where the perpetrator gained the confidence of his targets — and intimidated them — by claiming he was a middleweight contender, then employed drugs to subdue his victims and had his way. And even though Ramos’ guilt in those crimes had yet to be proven, even if he truly was innocent, he had still shown a predilection for mayhem and violence. He served nearly two years of prison time in Corcoran, California, for an assault in 1989, and had been known for a dangerous temper easily ignited by the cheapest vodka he could find.

But Alex could be charming, and it seemed his calmer, gentler side helped him shed the assault conviction. He had once beaten a rape charge, even though a Manhattan victim accused him by name. After that, he reversed course, changed his very nature, put the past behind. For years he had abused alcohol to take the edge off, to beat back the memories, the anger. But the booze only made things worse. It had taken work to quit alcohol. Not just a prison sentence, but homelessness — homelessness and Jacquie. The peroxide blond, bubbly and talkative, helped him pick up the pieces to his life. And as his boxing career petered out, Ramos, improbably found a calling, using his connections as a once famous athlete to create the Retired Boxers Foundation, an organization bent on helping needy former boxers with medical and financial support when their days as models of fitness and power were gone.

He was years into his recovery and redemption, when just last April, the phone rang at the foundation and Jacquie answered.

It was a lawyer, offering help to Alex Ramos. He said he had raised money for his appeal, for a second opportunity at life, for another chance for Alex to prove that he wasn’t a violent rapist, the monster authorities and the newspapers had claimed. The lawyer said they had a plan to help him beat the charges, that Alex was a just an innocent man serving an unjust sentence. He could get him out of jail, he promised.

“I think you have the wrong guy,” Jacquie said to the voice on the phone. “Alex is right here with me.”

Perhaps it was an omen when Ramos was born into the world on Jan. 17, 1961 the same day The Greatest turned 19, a fast-talking still unknown young fighter from Louisville, Kentucky, who one day would be known the world over as Muhammed Ali. Yet unlike Ali, Ramos’ upbringing was lean, the territory of his youth unfriendly.

Look into his past, the way he was raised and where he lived. You’ll see how he was made and what made him a man with such vast potential for destruction in a prize ring, and outside of it. For a black Puerto Rican, Ramos’ home, the South Bronx of the ’60s, was the kind of place that could swallow a life before it really had a chance, a tough town in an already tough town.

His mother, Socorro, knew this. She and Alex’s father, Alejandro, had brought the family from Puerto Rico when he was a toddler, a fresh start in the land of opportunity. Alex’s mother wouldn’t let him piss away his chance at a real life. A misstep and his mother was happy to beat his ass with the nearest object. A small, full-lipped beauty, his mother had the curves to stop traffic, and at 5′2, somehow held physical dominance over him, sometimes smacking him in front of his friends when he talked tough.

Photo courtesy of Retired Boxers Foundation.

Socorro and Alex Ramos

She was a school teacher from a family full of college graduates, and simply showing up to classes never impressed her. When Ramos and his sisters Betty and Miriam didn’t focus, when he goofed around at school, when his report card wasn’t what it should be, he was punished, sentenced to kneeling on a cheese grater on naked knees, holding books over his shoulders, the way Atlas shrugged the Earth.

It was an introduction to how hard life could be. Maybe the abuse was a way to harden him to the realities of a place where desperation, like trash, littered the sidewalks. Ramos was 8 years old when he saw a limp body spread like pancake batter on the sidewalk, surrounded by syringes, and witnessed things even worse, once watching a knife wielding man pounce on his victim, dispensing death, quick and cruel.

The neighborhood was known for hardship, described once in a Timefeature as a “torched gray wasteland.” His mother wanted to keep him away from that wasteland, but what happened at home drove Ramos away.

His father was different. Alejandro was one of the few car owners around the neighborhood, and he didn’t have the same concern about his children’s education. But his gentle, laid back, public demeanor belied his true nature. He was a big shouldered man standing 6′2, a former carnival boxer in Puerto Rico who’d fought all comers for a penny and a bottle of 160-proof rum. That was his drink of choice, right from the bottle, the stench clinging to his clothes Friday nights after the paycheck was cashed. But he was a calm drunk, holding a consistent job installing awnings around the city, never lifting his hands to the three children. Instead, it was his wife who suffered.

His father’s side of the family had a history of violence. Alejandro’s father shot his mother, a death whose motivation isn’t clear today. But Alejandro’s violence never turned deadly. Still, he had rules for the pretty mother of his children that were the topic of many arguments: No drinking. No going out. No racy outfits.

A woman with a strong will, she didn’t take to those rules well. That’s when the beatings came, when the big fists used to pummel men into submission were used on his little wife.

“My brother grew up angry watching my father abuse my mother,” his older sister, Miriam, would say years later. This is where that anger that would become his trademark first began to grow. A street gang called the Sons of Satan tried to recruit him, the sort of culture that embraces angry young men. Alex didn’t give a shit about that, but fitting in was important, a way to stay safe.

“I stole, beat up on people,” Ramos said in the Time article, “I wanted to prove I was bad and not a punk.”

More than that, he learned an undeniable rule of the streets: when you get hit, you better hit back. It’s a lesson he’d remember.

As much as Alex hated the mistreatment of his mother, he still loved his father. He knew Alejandro had been a boxer and asked to go to the gym. Alex was a 90 pound 11-year-old when he found the outlet for his anger, a place away from the streets where fighting was treated as craft instead of the skill of thugs. Boxing introduced him to his first grudge.

Photo courtesy of Retired Boxers Foundation.

“I’m the sort of person who never forgets,” Ramos will say. “You do something to me, and I’ll never forget.”

A 13-year-old thought he’d pick on the new kid, show him how cruel a beating in the ring could be. Ramos didn’t forget that, and he didn’t retaliate right away, he waited. And waited. And once he was ready, he found that same kid, and worked his ass over in the ring so he’d get the message to never mess with him again.

“Life’s a bitch, and payback’s a motherfucker,” Ramos would come to say.

But life in those days wasn’t a bitch for him, as long as he kept his mother happy. Things started to go right for him. If he kept up his grades, he could box, following his friend Adonis Torres to the gym. A few years older, Torres, who later boxed professionally as a featherweight, kept his eye on Ramos, something his mother demanded. And when Torres wasn’t around, Ramos risked his mother’s wrath and went anyway. He didn’t have as much time to stop by the handball court as before, but he’d make the occasional trip to soak up the praise of the locals. Most of his free time was dedicated to the gym. The result? BoxRec puts his record at 143-9, but Ramos recalls 160 amateur bouts, 154 wins and 80 knockouts. Either way, the candy store on his block displayed a sign: Ramos the E. 136 Street Champ.

“I was as sure my son is El Gallo, a brave fighting cock, as sure as I am that when the priest blesses this house, I’ll win at the track the next day,” Alejandro told Time.

He jogged the streets where he grew up, past the packed basketball courts, and the street corners where he would hang with his pals Popeye, Angel and Shorty. The roadwork offered a reminder for what the streets could do to a kid. His friend, known on the streets as the Candyman, was shot in the chest five times when he tried to rip off a drug dealer.

Ramos survived.

Everyone at the basketball court by the school knew what he could do in the ring, and pretty soon it was like he knew everybody. Actually, it was more like everyone knew him. But there was still trouble to navigate. Drug dealers stuck around the playground, and all manner of people were there eager to meet the local celebrity and draft in his wake.

“The name’s Spooky,” one kid said when he introduced himself to Alex.

That was just the 16-year-old’s nickname. His given name was Alberto Lugo, and he was a reputed drug dealer Ramos saw from time to time, but didn’t really know well. He was smaller than Ramos, a head shorter, and had the lumpy body of an unaccomplished athlete. There were lots of people like that on his way to the top, the first as forgettable as the last, people who look at a boxer and see not something to become, to aspire to be, but see only what they themselves are not, something not to work toward in the gym, but to take a piece of if they get the chance.

Photo courtesy of Retired Boxers Foundation.

His amateur career blossomed in 1979 with a National Amateur Athletic Union Championship. In another time, he might have been an Olympic gold medalist. But when the 1980 Moscow summer Olympics rolled around, the Soviets were entrenched in a ground invasion of Afghanistan, a power grab that alarmed the globe. Dozens of countries boycotted, including the United States.

With nothing left to prove as an amateur, at 19 Ramos turned professional. A Hispanic fighter with the goods to contend, in a city that had 1.9 million Hispanic residents at the time, promoters began to take him seriously. Shelly Finkel, better known as a musical promoter, saw his potential and made Ramos one of the first boxers on a roster that included Billy Joel, Olivia Newton John, Yes, and The Who.

Ramos turned pro in November of 1980, bringing to the professional ranks a style that could make him a star. He was what fight promoter Bob Arum called “a great banger,” a fighter whose first objective is to land his best shot, and if he happens to get nailed in the meantime, then fine. Ramos thrived, knowing that his best shot was probably better than anything that would come back at him.

That style was an easy sell, and Ramos often occupied a spot on the undercard, a guy who could put butts in seats at the casinos in Atlantic City. In their enthusiasm, fans began calling him the Bronx Bomber, a gesture of respect borrowed from two legendary champions, both Joe Louis and the New York Yankees — sometimes he even wore pinstriped trunks. He had a name, a punch and a future in the game, a ranked fighter at a time when the middleweight was boxing’s glory division, home to Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Benitez and Duran. There were big fights for big dollars every few months, and each man was worth millions and recognized everywhere.

With each win, Ramos soared higher and farther. Everyone seemed to know him, and family. But it was a big city, celebrities everywhere, and sometimes they could still go unnoticed. One night Miriam went to Studio 54, a former opera house renovated into a nightclub, the place to be and be seen. She was there dancing when a stranger, a man with a dark complexion, approached her, talking a big game, his patter already practiced. He wasn’t tall, just a few inches more that her 5′2. He told her he was a boxer, a Golden Gloves winner making his way up now in the pros, fighting at the Garden.

Miriam was puzzled. She knew boxers, and this guy didn’t have the look of a fighter, like her brother. He wasn’t lean, and his shoulders sagged.

What’s your name?

Alex Ramos.

Miriam laughed.

No you’re not. He’s my brother.

The guy walked off. It was Miriam’s lucky day.

Ramos started fast, blasting his way to a 15-0 start. Then came an ignominious knock out loss in 1982 to lightly regarded Ted Saunders in Atlantic City, and all the promise he seemed to have hit the canvas with him. He fought his way back up for a while, beating Curtis Parker in 1984 to take the USBA middleweight crown, a minor title, but enough to start talk of a fight with Hagler, and an opportunity at a really big win, a chance to grab the titles that mattered, those administered by the WBC/WBA/IBF and The Ring. But he couldn’t hold the USBA belt and dropped it to James Kinchen before the year was out.

He moved on to Scottsdale, Arizona, to revive his career. One night in 1983, the phone rang, a cop from New York City on the other end of the line. A rape victim there told police she had been raped by the boxer, by Alex Ramos.

But there was no way. Ramos had been across the country, trying to get his career back together. He had an alibi, but flew back to clear his name and look at mug shots. One face was familiar.

It was Alberto Lugo, the guy better known in the old neighborhood as Spooky.

The imposter had been using his name to get perks like free hotel rooms, and impress women who otherwise looked right through him. Spooky was busted in short order, convicted in ‘85, and sent away in ‘86 to serve three to nine years. It was quick and clean for Ramos, who moved on with life.

The Ring Magazine/Getty Images

Hector Camacho, 1982

Ramos soon relocated to Los Angeles to train with his friend Hector “Macho” Camacho, a slick boxer who eventually held seven titles but was best known for his wild partying habits — Camacho was once arrested in Florida for having sex while driving his Ferrari. When training camp wasn’t in session, Alex and Camacho would party — booze and coke. When Camacho left town around ‘87, Ramos stayed behind. He developed a taste for the Hollywood lifestyle, mingling among celebrities. Besides, his career hadn’t turned out the way many thought it would. And he seemed to be going so far with those four Golden Glove titles and all those knockouts.

But the inheritance of such physical gifts that helped him on the path to a championship also came with a flaw. Ramos adopted his father’s love of booze. And unlike his father, when Alex drank, he became dangerous, a humorless guy who could hit hard with either hand. Sometimes it was a look, maybe an innocuous comment, and his past would surge back in the form of a foul temper and hideously accurate fists, a dangerous and potent combination.

The guy who once looked to make his name in a historic division with fighters regarded as top-10 fighters of all time like Sugar Ray Leonard, Harry Greb and Mickey Walker, would never be a star, instead becoming a guy up and comers looked at to score a quality win.

This is when the drinking caught up to him, when the value of each purse became more important and it became clear they wouldn’t always be there. He became unhinged, and that anger he had for his father when he hit his mother became inflamed. As he hurtled toward the bottom of a vodka bottle, the knockouts he earned weren’t in the ring. He flattened a manager and a promoter with those sledge hammer fists, thinking they had cheated him of thousands of dollars. The jury convicted him of assault with a deadly weapon: his hands.

By the time Ramos was sentenced to prison in 1988, the boxer who was once 15-0 was 28-8-2. He spent 20 months in the state prison in Corcoran, a town of about 25,000 people, 50 miles south of Fresno. It was brand new in 1989, and housed some of the most high-profile criminals in the country, like Charlie Manson, and for a while it appeared as if the 26-year-old fighter would spend the rest of his prime in a jail cell surrounded by evil, something that had grown inside him, something he wanted to destroy.

Instead, he struck a deal. It wasn’t a deal with the state, or with the devil, but in some ways it came close. It was a drug dealer, one of the shady friends he had made while he was snorting cocaine and spiraling out of control. If the drug dealer could get him out of jail, Ramos agreed to fight again to pay him back.

To the average fight fan boxing is about violence, and violent men in the boxing ring offer no surprise or outrage. Other sports punish athletes for misbehavior, but boxing is different. Press conference brawls only fuel excitement for a fight, and rarely incur financial penalties. A bad guy in a matchup sells tickets, and Ramos, the ex-con who beat a rape rap, was a bad guy.

Yet Ramos never quite fit that role, even if he did have the reputation. He wasn’t even in shape to fight real professionals after he had softened in prison. Out of the joint, Alex was drinking and snorting, and fought just twice between 1990-91. By 1993 Alex was back in prison on a parole violation, sucked back into a life he had seen so much of as a child.

But Ramos still had to pay back his debt to the drug dealer who found a way to spring him. So he got back in the gym for real in 1994 and in six months won 9 fights in a row, paying back his debt and more, finding some deliverance, finally harnessing his temper, cutting back on booze. But what first seemed like a real comeback turned out to be just a delay for an end that had been coming for years. It was too late, and his talent was already squandered.

Still, in November he got a shot at the WBA middleweight title, fighting Jorge Castro for $25,000 in Argentina, his last chance. A win could have launched him into a series of big money fights — although Hearns, Hagler and Leonard were all about finished, the division still attracted big money.

It was not to be. Castro knocked him out in the second round. It was the end of a career whose success and failure had been built on anger, his final record 39-10-2. But now that there was no one left to hit, he found something better.

The comeback may have failed, but his turnaround was real. He put his energy to better use in 1995 when he founded the Retired Boxers Foundation using what he had left of fame and celebrity connections to help raise funds. Over the years the foundation helped the tattered leftovers of prize fighters survive their reentry to the real world, and cope with the physical devastation often incurred from years of fighting. Anything Ramos could do to help, from distributing sweatpants, to finding beds at rehab centers, he did. Ron Shelton, director of “Play it to the Bone,” ponied up $10,000 a year to support the foundation, and offered $50,000 to the great Wilfred Benitez, who lost his home in 1998 to hurricane Georges.

Jacquie Richardson helped write grants for a boxing program in Los Angeles when she met Ramos. She began to help him with his project, eventually taking over as the Executive Director. Ramos was the face of the foundation, it’s heart and soul, and Jackie kept him going.

Photo courtesy of Retired Boxers Foundation.

The foundation was doing well as the millennium approached. Ramos had celebrities supporting him, like hall of famer Freddy Roach, as big a name as there is in boxing circles. His life, it seemed, had come together. Then something from his past threatened to destroy the life he had put together.

The strange phone call came from his father. Is this you? Did you do this? What? What did he do? Alex, they’re saying you raped these women.

The call came shortly after one of the coldest stretches of the year in New York City, the third week of February 1999. The temperature wallowed in the mid-teens, making the restaurants and taverns safe roosts from the bitter cold. The boxer was holding court at a midtown bar hoping to find a girl to bring to his room on East 29th Street at the Hotel Deauville. He found his mark in an attractive Atlanta tourist. She was just 27 years old, and she had told him she needed money for one thing or another. The boxer offered her a way to make some quick cash, $3,000 to be a ring card girl at his next fight at Madison Square Garden. When he left the bar, so did she.

The next week a newspaper story broke in the New York Daily News. It told of a rape. The story was familiar. A man posing as a pro boxer was accused of drugging a woman, luring her to a hotel, and forcing her to have sex with him. The suspect had already served a sentence for the same crime in 1986, and there was speculation that there were even more victims who hadn’t come forward. It was big news. The young woman lured with the promise of an easy payday remembered the name of her attacker. It was Alex Ramos, the Bronx Bomber. The boxer.

The newspapers and police press releases ran with the name, telling the citizens of New York to be on the lookout for a convicted rapist and boxer who may have struck again. The name “Alex Ramos” ran in the headlines, and although the story explained that he had used two other names, Alberto Ramos and Alberto Lugo, it didn’t really explain the difference. On the East Coast, Alex Ramos, the former boxer, and Alex Ramos, the serial rapist, became all but synonymous.

Photo courtesy of Alex Ramos.

If the police couldn’t figure out who the hell they had in lock up, then how could the general public believe the real Alex Ramos hadn’t done these crimes?

In Simi Valley, the Retired Boxers Foundation had picked up momentum, and the other Alex Ramos had settled into retirement, seemingly free from everything that had threatened to upend his chances at a normal life, at any life. When Alejandro called, Alex was stunned, but knew this had happened before. What he couldn’t believe was that it still was. Spooky, the childhood acquaintance was out of prison and had been going by the name Alex Ramos for years now, hunting women at bars and clubs, just as he had once hunted Alex’s own sister, Miriam. What stunned Alex was that somehow, this imposter still went by Alex Ramos, unimpeded by the authorities, who seemed to think maybe he was Alex Ramos after all. He was even booked under the name.

Jacquie Richardson was stunned too, but enraged is the emotion she remembers. She wrote letters the New York Police Department, to the state attorney general, and to Governor George Pataki. Why was Alex Ramos still the name used to identify this man? The answer wasn’t forthcoming.

In jail, the cops even asked the fake to sign some autographs for them, convinced the charade was real.

If the police couldn’t figure out who the hell they had in lock up, then how could the general public believe the real Alex Ramos hadn’t done these crimes?

He was forced to wage a war for his own name, to piece together a tattered reputation.

Martha Bashford was nearly 25 years into a career as a prosecutor, focusing on sex crimes, when Lugo’s case came across her desk. She had graduated summa cum laude from Barnard, and then got her law degree from Yale in 1979. By the time she opened the case file in 1999, Lugo had been masquerading as Alex Ramos since the early ‘80s, and it was hard to tell just how much damage he done.

Even under lock and key, Lugo wouldn’t admit who he really was, not even in a videotaped interview with Bashford.

“Why don’t you start out by telling me your name,” Bashford said in a 2000 New York Post article.

“My name is Alex Ramos,” Lugo told her. “I boxed for a while.”

“Amateur?” Bashford asked. “Professional?”

“Both,” said Lugo. “Amateur and professional.”

The farce had gone too long, and so had Lugo’s predation of women. This time the prosecution called a host of witnesses to nail Lugo for good, including the man whose life he had made his own. During the trial in 2000, the real Alex Ramos took the stand. The lawyers kept referring to his imposter as “Mr. Ramos,” and he didn’t like it. The prosecution put him on the stand and asked, “How do we know you’re the real Alex Ramos?”

The fighter replied, “You put me and him in that room over there, and I guarantee the real Alex Ramos will come out.”

In the end, the evidence was enough to convict Lugo, and this time, he’d go away for good. He was sentenced to 148 years.

But the nightmare hadn’t ended. That one phone call made it clear his shadow would never truly leave him. In 2015, Ramos’ name seemed under siege again. This time, he needed her more than ever.

“He’s the sweetest,” Richardson said. “He has been for the 18 years I’ve known him, and he’s been through hell.”

The years of abuse in the boxing ring had left him brain damaged, excess fluid oozing onto the surface of his brain. He was catatonic, unable to hold conversations. A procedure to syphon off the fluid brought Alex back to who he was before, a bright, funny guy who didn’t stutter, the hallmark symptom of brain damage. But he really wasn’t fully healed and never would be. He still could perform his public duties as founder of the Retired Boxers Foundation, but Richardson took firmer hold of the reins. He could remember what happened in the past, but his ability to remember new things had been damaged beyond repair.

The Benjamin Greenwald law firm of Monticello, New York, reached out to Jacquie. They represented the “other” Alex Ramos, Lugo, and wanted to rally support for an old pro to get one last chance. Informed of their mistake, the law firm looked into its client. The error amounted to a filing oversight, the firm said. The guy once known as Spooky was still in prison, but still holding the name Alex Ramos hostage.

Ramos and Richardson wondered how long this round would last, if the imposter would have the last laugh. The last time this happened, sponsors pulled support for the foundation, and Ramos’s reputation had been smeared. A lot of people had given him a second chance after he had come back from the booze and the drugs. But serial rape was far too ugly to forgive. For so long the name had been his, but Lugo had devalued it, like building a sewage plant next to a mansion.

Lugo, who had spent so much of his life in the shadows, only to emerge and wreak havoc, seemed poised to do so again. What Ramos and Richardson didn’t know then, was that Lugo was nearly out of time. Four months after that phone call from the attorney, on August 10, 2015, Spooky died in prison. His own family didn’t even know, having disowned him long ago.

Alex is happy to have his name back, but the anger he was once known for sometimes bubbles back into his eyes and contorts his smile when it is mentioned. There are many things he cannot remember, but this he cannot forget.

All these years, Miriam had remained close to Lugo’s brother, an old friend from the neighborhood. She never blamed him for what his brother had done, for the lives he had changed and destroyed, or for the name he had twisted almost to destruction.

When Miriam learned the news in November, she was happy the chapter was over, happy the dead man couldn’t hurt anyone else. She called Lugo’s brother. It had been years since he’d heard from Alberto. Still, he was surprised to learn that he had died.

“He was a piece of shit anyway,” Miriam told him.

“Yeah” the man said, “but he was still my brother.”

And he died as his brother, Alberto Lugo, finally leaving Miriam’s brother, Alex Ramos, to reclaim his name as his own, to look in the mirror and see only himself.

For more information of the Retired Boxers Foundation, see their Facebook page

It’s an unusually mild Monday morning on August 10, 2015, and the Carolina Panthers training camp practice at Wofford College is over for the day. Thousands of Panthers fans head towards their cars, sunburned and dried out by the Carolina sun, in need of shelter but satisfied with their autographs and brushes with people they normally only see on TV. Adults wonder aloud about where they parked, kids marvel at the size of their idols — “Newton is sooooo huuuuge” — and everyone is ready for a nap.

There is one player left on the field.

Photo: Latria Graham

In this sea of black, turquoise and white mixed with the soft green grass, everyone seemed partial to a particular player. There were Luke Kuechly jerseys. There were Cam Newton, Luke Olsen and Bene Benwikere fans — hell, even a couple of Graham Ganos — but there were no jerseys for the man still on the field practicing. Later in the week, you could tell when his family was in town, as they would be the only people sporting jerseys with the No.  24.

Still the man remained, helmet on, pads in place, catching tosses from the ball boys, who were giddy at the chance to help a professional work on his craft.

A few stragglers hung around, hoping for more magic, for another brush with greatness, watching the man pull footballs out of the air with astonishing speed, clutching them to his chest before tossing them back.

Fifteen minutes later the man sinks his knees into the forgiving grass, and positions himself flat on his back before motioning to the ball boys to recommence throwing. This time they decide to switch up the tempo — harder, faster, wild throws, safe bets, and everything in between.

He ends every practice at training camp with this particular drill, catching balls on his back. Today would be no different. Perhaps, however, it was more important today, after the scuffle with the team’s quarterback, Cam Newton.

It was the first indicator, the only notice to the entire league that this season the Carolina Panthers would be a force and that cornerback Josh Norman, relatively unknown outside Charlotte, would become more than just No. 24.

It was a simple play, the kind practice is made of, the kind seasons are built on and, perhaps, the kind that make careers.

The drill started out like any other. Starters lined up, helmets on, pads, 7-on-7 in the 90-degree heat of the South Carolina sun. It wasn’t even noon yet, but it was hot enough for what was about to happen. Just watch.

There’s the snap and Cam Newton holds the ball the way quarterbacks do when they’re looking for an opening.

The ball lets loose from his hand, spiraling towards its black jerseyed intended target before a flash of white extends its reach and pulls the ball close to his chest.

Interception.

What happens next wasn’t part of the drill.

Norman pulls the ball close and heads for the end zone — if this was a game, he would be poised to score. Newton gives chase, red no-contact jersey trailing behind him. There’s a push, a stiff arm, and then both men push some more. It only takes a second for Newton’s helmet to come off and then both men are on the ground.

Two years Norman’s junior, 5 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier, Cam Newton’s supposed to be a different class of fighter. As a $100-million-dollar franchise quarterback, he’s supposed to be in a different class all together. Demigod tussles with mortal, the media will say. First round draft pick vs fifth round pick.  Superstar v. role player.

That doesn’t matter, not to Josh Norman — in his mind it a clash of Titans, or rather Batman vs. Superman, a year before its scheduled release. He likes a challenge, and two smart, hot talking athletes trying to make one another better gets him up. His job was simple: square off, run the route, anticipate, make the play. He made the play.

But that’s not what the viewers saw. They wouldn’t see what really happened until the regular season started, that this year is different, for Newton, for Norman, and for the Panthers, too.

The footage of the aftermath is all over the internet, a scrap of red buried at the bottom of a pile of black and white, as teammates try to sift through the melee. And as they peel the bodies off, they reveal a team, and a new target of attention.

The media would soon give their take. Norman’s Twitter feed would explode with people calling him a variety of things thug, gangster, goon— a second-rate nothing of a cornerback.

It didn’t matter. The man kept working. He used his helmet to insulate his thoughts and block out anything that might obscure his focus. Do the work, he told himself.

Photo: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Later in the season, they’ll call him clairvoyant, but that’s because they didn’t see him put in the work that made it so.

Back at practice, relying on instinct and spatial awareness that sometimes appears supernatural, Josh Norman continues to pluck balls out of the air. The contact is so rapid you can hear the smack of the ball against his gloves. Sometimes, his eyes are closed — knowing without seeing. Anticipating instead of reacting. He never misses.

Later in the season, they’ll call him clairvoyant, but that’s because they didn’t hang around practice long enough to see him put in the work that made it so. Deadline reporters will tell you he came out of nowhere. That’s not exactly how he sees it. Norman’s been playing this game a long time - this is his fourth year in the league, and third, really, as a starter — and nothing about the way he plays is an accident — - not the drill and not even the calling out of his own quarterback. Norman knows, more than anyone, that his fate is his own, no one else’s and he entered the 2015 season feeling both underpaid and underappreciated. So what he wanted, and who he wanted to be, he would have to take between his own two hands.

When asked later about his end of practice routine he pauses and flips through the rolodex in his mind, wanting to credit the right veteran. “I’m always looking for ways to get better.”

The five Norman brothers live vicariously through one another. Four of the five participated in sports at the professional level, and they often watch one another’s plays and offer constructive criticism. They are notoriously, viciously competitive (their mother has a video of them singing “We Are the Champions” in three-part harmony after a Thanksgiving game of Taboo to prove it), but the fact that as children they had to go back to the same house and sleep under the same roof of their double-wide trailer isn’t lost on them.

It is perhaps the only thing that kept them from being sports cannibals, threatening to consume one another, drunk on adrenaline and athletic delusion. They know that at the end of the day it’s the Normans against the world. “We’re five strong” says Orlando. It’s been that way since they were children, running barefoot through the grass on the 35-acre homestead they called home. This is where they cut their teeth and cut their limbs on branches and brush and brambles. In a large clearing between the road and the front door is where they held their races, arms pumping, legs focused, slicing through the landscape imitating the horses that their father let them ride.

The five spent every moment they could outdoors, tossing balls until the lightning bugs signaled that it was time to come inside. On rainy days when they couldn’t go outside they tied socks around their knees to lessen the thud, and played football in the house, much to their mother’s bemusement.

All five boys within five years of one another, Marrio and Renaldo would take one side, Orlando and Josh on the other. Phillip, the youngest would always hike the ball and took turns playing for each team, three-on-two, the defense always at a disadvantage. Each Norman remembers those halcyon days, before the threat of serious injury and malice. Before there was money on the line. Before things got complicated and the world expected things out of them that perhaps, just perhaps, it wasn’t its place to ask for. This was before musings about the ethical complexities of simulated combat or worries about actual brain damage.

It is these moments, when ecstatic celebrations did not yet end in fines for excess, that Josh Norman most appreciates. There are elements of that world he misses — riding the tractor with his grandfather, eating a Southern breakfast of biscuits and liver mush with his grandmother. Even now, these memories override the dark façade he projects today, using that shield before his face to protect the memories, so fragile, that he carries them around inside of him like precious glass.

It was a world before iPhones and Twitter and being constantly, chronically attached to the media that could mold or shatter a career.

Years of playing both sides of the ball with his brothers showed up in tangible ways. Running track in high school changed Josh from being “real flat-footed” to a prospect.

Norman was the only two-way player on the 2006 Greenwood High School team that won the South Carolina state championship, an offensive lineman’s attitude wrapped in defensive clothing.

After winning state, there were no Division I offers — none of the Greenwood players had any. The University of Georgia offered Norman a scholarship contingent upon his SAT score, but he didn’t make the necessary threshold, and the Bulldogs passed.

He took the SATs again and beat the standard. It didn’t matter, though.  The scholarship was gone. Raw talent wasn’t enough, and coaches couldn’t see the commitment and dedication, not encapsulated in a test score.

The delay left Norman wanting.

He trained while he worked out what he was going to do. He moved in with his brother Marrio, who was studying and playing at Coastal Carolina, until he could form a long-term plan.

During the day, he went to class at Georgetown Tech, and worked part-time at a mental health facility. At night he ran sprints in the road in front of his brother’s condo, each footfall pounding character and discipline into his frame, catching his breath in ragged clips before running the drills again. When it was time to rest he took up residence on his brother’s unremarkable chocolate-colored couch — comfortable enough for a couple of hours, but not comfortable enough to linger too long.

This is not how the story is going to end, he thought. Not on a couch in Myrtle Beach.

The next year he would walk on at Coastal Carolina. His first game his freshman season he made an interception, and by the end of the season he had nine pass breakups and two picks.

By his senior year, he had the numbers: a Big South Conference-record 35 career pass break-ups, 13 career interceptions, ,fifth on the NCAA’s career passes defended list (48), sixth in pass breaks. All this, all that, all league, All-American the first player from Coastal Carolina and only the second from the Big South Conference to play in the Senior Bowl.

Still, analysts were all over the place about his prospects. The numbers at the combine, do they lie? A 4.66 in the 40-yard dash, 14 bench-press reps, a 33-inch vertical, 7.09 second 3-cone drill marks and an unimpressive 4.23 second short shuttle time. Solid, nothing stellar. Pro Bowl potential? Hmmmm.  Eventual starter - likely, eventually. Just a solid prospect from small-school Coastal Carolina, second round, third, maybe fourth.

He went to New York City with his family and waited for his named to be called.

Nothing happened.

Never questioning his fate, but biding his time, Norman and his family flew back to Myrtle Beach and decided to eat dinner at Red Robin. That is when he got the phone call. Panthers, day two, round five.

Training camp is over and the season has started. It is early September, and after an exciting victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars, and winning three of four preseason games, the Panthers’ fan base is quietly optimistic. Norman is back in Charlotte, living in the shadow of Bank of America Stadium.

He is seated at his dining room table, leaned over a plate of peach cobbler. He sips a homemade Arnold Palmer and sets the glass on a coaster — of his face. No false idols here. Nothing made of flesh is sacred. Still cautious after a concussion he acquired during a preseason game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, he sits in the dim light and answers questions. He admits that his most recent head injury isn’t as bad as the one last season that forced him to sit out for two games, as if this is consolation to anyone that knows the impact of this brutal sport.

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Mitigate the risk. Play smart. Don’t add your body to the pile just for fun. Marrio taught him these lessons the hard way. They played football together at Coastal Carolina for just one game, against North Carolina A&T, brothers in pursuit of the same distant dream.

Midway through the contest, Marrio’s ankle was crushed. Their mother was there, and knew her son’s season was over. One Norman handed off to another. Josh took Marrio’s place on the field and finished the game. They won and he understood: football can either be a platform or a graveyard for dreams.

Why play? Why play at a college that isn’t Division 1, where scouts rarely come to the games and few players make it into the draft, let alone go on to play in The League?  What is the point?

There are some things you feel destined to do. The quest is bigger than football, perhaps even bigger than yourself. What happens when talent meets hard work? Who can I be? He had to find out.

A portion of the answer came on that day in training camp.  Another came after the first game of the season, against the Jacksonville Jaguars, when he discovered hundreds of missed messages and his voicemail box was full. More came two weeks after that, when Norman made the game-clenching interception on a pass that was meant for Brandin Cooks of the New Orleans Saints. His twitter feed is suddenly full of memes — in one he is catching a rocket for a ride into outer space.

His family is perhaps the only group in America already familiar with the man everyone else is finally seeing on screen. While at Coastal, Josh once made a catch just like that, somersaulting in the air, defying gravity, rotating mid-leap to snatch the ball from the grasp of the intended receiver. Marrio knew Josh was a once in a lifetime player before he became a Chanticleer, but that play cemented the idea that his brother was a once in a lifetime phenomenon.

It’s the middle of October, and Norman and the undefeated Panthers are having one hell of a ride. He’s had four interceptions, two returned for touchdowns. He was named the NFC’s Defensive Player of the Month in September and Defensive Player of the Week the first week of October, the first Carolina corner to earn the honor since Ricky Manning Jr., and that was in 2003.

“I was in Jacksonville, and man, I went crazy,” Renaldo says, speaking of his brother’s interception in week one, his first career touchdown. “I was running up and down the stadium steps, unable to keep it together.”

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Josh consumes the retelling of the event hungrily, voraciously even, unsure that this day would ever come, not sure how long it will last, and enjoying the lingering moment.  Norman knows there is no loyalty in the NFL — his contract tells him that, the one he turned down before the start of the season, the seven million-dollar offer to replace the initial, non-guaranteed, 4-year, $2.3 million contract he signed when he was drafted, the one he signed before everything.  He knows the business:  he could be traded, injured, or if doesn’t work out and he watches too many receivers show their back to him in the end zone, simply be cut from the team. In the end, he bet on himself.

Things are different now. Suddenly everyone wants a piece. The same people saying he was a fool for passing up seven million now praise him for his wisdom — he will be a free agent at season’s end.  Those that called him a thug before now stand in line to gain his favor.  The next interview has to be pushed back — he can’t help it — to take a meeting.

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He has his first real battle with the Fame Monster. For those that don’t know what that is, it’s the one thing that can derail a player from reaching their peak potential. It’s different for everyone — sometimes it’s money, drugs, women … or in Josh’s case right now, the opportunists that want him to buy into the hype, to let them make him a superstar. There is talk of making a reality television show but his life that already feels like one.

At the next interview there’s a book from a sports agency on his coffee table. They’ve created a fat volume with his image on the front, and all of the opportunities they believe they can offer him between the covers if he leaves his longtime agent Dave Butz and signs with them. Sitting on the edge of his seat he looks fatigued by it all, tormented by concepts that slip through his hands like BBQ smoke — too heady to ignore but impossible to contain. Someone that he’s never met wants to write a book about him. His phone buzzes constantly until he reaches in his pocket and holds the power button, powering down, if even just for a little while.

He waves away talk of the NFL rankings, his accolades and his impeding contract. He just wants to to breathe, and take the season one game at a time, reacting without thinking, knowing without seeing, believing. The contract will just have to wait. Everything, now, just needs to wait.

He knows where he thought his loyalties lay, but … with more opportunities maybe he could make a difference in lives that the media thought held little value. He could have an avenue to what he wants to do after football — acting.

Does he switch management? He never says. He wants to stay a Panther, of that he’s sure, but he admits that is the one thing that’s not up to him. He was raised in the Carolinas, and played college ball here. His family is within driving distance. Yes, you can get Vienna sausages in Oakland or Chicago, but it just isn’t the same without the yellow stoneground grits to go along with them.  “I could be traded tomorrow and I would have to get on a plane and leave all of this here until somebody could pack it up and deal with it.”

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How does he deal with the uncertainty? One game at a time. Pray. Do the work. The rest will reveal itself in time. Right now he is the stuff of legends. Two years before, America discovered Richard Sherman when he spoke out loudly after a game, and then suddenly became hyper-visible.  This season, the same thing has happened to Norman.  He stood up to his quarterback and now EVERYONE is watching.

But Richard Sherman filled in the gaps of his own story and now sells soup to grandmothers on daytime TV, warm and fuzzy.  Norman has not.  To most, he remains dark, face behind his shield, mysterious, unknown, more Batman than Bruce Wayne.

Myths (and misinformation) take root and sprout. We have to create lore for our gladiators, and when the ascension happens as fast as it did for Norman, things are bound to get a little tangled up.

When his creation myth is brought to his attention, that trademark Norman smirk is his only response. All of the brothers have the smirk — as if they can mask the pride of their discipline by keeping their mouths closed. It appears to be their way of reckoning, of attempting to remain humble. Omissions and fabrications add to American myth making — craft the story, give them a performance. Who was he to take away their entertainment? “Win the crowd and you win the day,” he quipped.

And now, a few questions for the man behind the myth:

He’s obsessed with Batman? Definitely true — memorabilia hangs on the wall behind him.

He role-plays different characters on the field — from Spartacus to The Dark Knight? Also true.

He wears contacts that paint his entire field of vision red? The smirk. No comment.

That he pantomimes riding his horse, Delta 747 when he makes a big play? Often.

That he’s an adrenaline junkie who likes to drive race cars and jump from airplanes? Mostly true.

That he sleeps in a chamber, like Superman? Well, not exactly like Superman, but there is a chamber.

That he fears nothing? Of course it’s more complicated than that, but with God who can stand against you?

The myth-busting session is short and he gives clipped answers — he knows this type of work is part of the business. He didn’t even have a Twitter account until an impostor said noxious toxic things under his name. Then he was forced to go through the motions of getting verified and figuring out what to say for himself, @J_No24, but when he took control with his own two hands, he began to appear. Even modern day gladiators have to watch what they put out into the universe. Of course, before this year very few paid attention. During training camp, he had around 10,000 followers. At the start of the season, the number ballooned to 25,000. Now almost 90,000 people follow him, wondering whether they’ll get Josh Norman or The Dark Knight. It’s an uneasy resting place. Still he enjoys the poetry of it all, the strategic narrative drama played out in iambic pentameter merging with the din and clamor of the game.

He’s not scared of the media attention; he realizes that every reporter has a job to do. Even as he stands surrounded by microphones, peppered with questions, he just tries to give them something else, something neither accident nor act. As a communication and dramatic arts major at Coastal Carolina, he understands the art of the well-placed teaser, the tension of a cliffhanger. The melodrama — the smack talk, the fines, it’s all happening on the biggest stage a drama student could ask for, and he uses that to his advantage. If he is acting, it is method acting, taken to its highest level.

It’s just he’d rather be interacting with fans or sifting through DVDs at his local Best Buy. He makes little eye contact and stares at his hands… until he gets to Batman.

Oh yes. Batman. Batman is his favorite. Here is where Batman, aka The Dark Knight comes in, using his strength, his will — no superpowers here — to do good, to overcome, for others, for his city. What is it they say in the movie? He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector.

It is still early in the season and Josh Norman is hungry. The world was telling him no, and he refused to take that for an answer. If football was a war without death he would not resolve himself to being a footnote, if he could help it. In a sense, he picked up the pen in his own hand and chose to write his own story, in longhand, crafting a part for himself that only he can play, fully aware of his new role.

ESPN Sportscenter comes calling. Bruce Wayne answers, and Norman appears on the show decked out in his Sunday best. He looks at home there, in the studio. He can’t manage the trademark smirk — he has to smile. For a moment — just a moment, it seems the 27-year-old seem like he has accomplished everything he could ever want. But there is more.

There was another part of Norman’s training camp routine that the average fan might have missed, something telling that will not be missed in the future. After all of that work, no matter how hot it was, or how long he’d been at it, Norman signed autographs afterwards until the last fan went home. He signed in the corners, away from his teammates and spent time with the fans that otherwise wouldn’t get much face time pressed up against the fence that leads from the field to Wofford’s dorms.

Why?

Norman counters that sometimes other teammates don’t see the little guys by the fence. It’s not their fault: Norman has trained to see what most people don’t, on and off the field. He credits his parents with that. His father is a minister at a prison complex, and his mother is a registered nurse. Their professions taught him that that every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, and that the poor and damaged were still rife with potential. His faith taught him that a saint is just a sinner who fell down, and got up. So he takes his time with the fans, answering their questions, no matter how invasive, posing for as many pictures as they request. He is resolved even when his legs tremble from fatigue, and when his handlers tell him it’s time for the next meeting. Just one more autograph, one more picture. He considers himself fortunate to be in his current position.

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Still, even as he does so, he never takes his helmet off.

He knows what it’s like to meet an icon. “When I got to meet Zlatan Ibrahimović (the Swedish striker for French club Paris Saint-Germain) I had the same tingly feeling that little kids get when they meet me.”

Zlatan Ibrahimović makes Josh Norman stare up in wonder like a little boy meeting Batman? He knows what that feels like, to be recognized by someone he never thought he’d have the chance to interact with. Norman flashes that electric smile the cameras love to capture when they can.  His excitement can’t be diminished to his trademark smirk, and he spends more time talking freely about Ibrahimović than he does Batman, which is a pretty big deal. He’s an avid soccer fan, and often squares off against his brother Phillip in the game FIFA 2015 to decompress.

He relaxes when he talks about soccer, about his brothers, and about Greenwood, the South Carolina town that is home. About things that aren’t football. It’s easier to talk about the woods, and the way he feels when he’s riding horse, Delta 747. It’s easier to describe the deep green foliage of the Norman homestead, with pine trees so tall they threatened to tickle heaven — at least they did when the Normans were little.

Even though everyone is well past grown, the pecking order of their youth still exists — from oldest to youngest: Renaldo, Orlando, Marrio, Josh, then Phillip. “Aww man, those guys still make me sit in the back when we go places.” The brothers have made it clear: it doesn’t matter how much you’re worth, you’re still the little brother.

“They used to call us the bottom feeders, we could never get enough” Phillip recalls. Always underrated, underestimated, undervalued. Forever the underdog. Even as the Panthers surge through the season threatening to go undefeated, coach Ron Rivera admits that his team is treated like they crashed the party. It seems nobody expected them to end up in this position and the Panthers are treated as a happy accident instead of the collision of hardworking individuals, aligned with the divine. It was as if they hadn’t earned the potential to be legends — they just got lucky. Norman knows better  —   and fits right in.

There’s the constant push and pull. When a reporter calls him “the next Richard Sherman,” Norman is quick to correct him.

“I’m not the next Richard Sherman — there’s a Richard Sherman. I’m Josh Norman.”

His tone articulates things that players aren’t allowed to say in the NFL: black bodies aren’t interchangeable, and writers should not get comfortable creating lazy parallels. To him comparisons begets conformity, which isn’t far from cliché, and before you know it you’re a stereotype, a caricature of your former self, crafted in someone else’s image instead on being the man of standards that your parents nurtured.

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“I’m not the next Richard Sherman — there’s a Richard Sherman. I’m Josh Norman.”

That’s the hitch though when it comes to describing phenomena, there’s got to be something close, something familiar to compare it to. When comparisons fail, when metaphors and similes lose their value, what words can capture the soul-stirring exalted moments of poetry in motion.

How do you create the linguistic equivalent of a meteor shower, of a comet?

There is an uneasy balance, he concedes. God has a plan. If there’s anything the meandering journey to the top has taught him, it’s that discipline and patience pay off.

His actions have made him a trending topic on Facebook more than once. He talks hot and sounds mean, building a reputation for standing up what he believes in. During the November Salute to Service game against the Green Bay Packers, he wore red, white and blue cleats with the words “proud” and “brave” emblazoned on the side. He explained the reasoning behind his shoe choice and later donated the shoes. He was fined over $5,000 for violating the No Fun League’s uniform code.

He’s not afraid to clap back at critics on Twitter or in interviews, whether it’s about the Confederate flag, or an opponent’s grandstanding. He was taught to absorb the criticism. Reflect. Work Harder. Keep Pounding — that mantra is the Carolina Panther’s motto, and on social media it’s usually displayed with a hashtag. He’s been proving analysts wrong since college, when scouts wondered via the internet if Norman could make the transition from small school star to the big leagues. There’s a thin line between being confident and being arrogant. It comes from being underrated for so long. A terror on the field, slim, agile and lethal to any offensive player he covers, but underneath all of that, despite everything that is happening, even as he reaches out for more and catches bullets blindly, he keeps a hand in Greenwood.

To understand the Dark Knight, you have to go there, to his place. What does the Dark Knight say, anyway? It sounds like New Testament verse, a calling:

“People are dying … what would you have me do?”

Renaldo and Orlando remember the early days, when their parents used to shoot basketball at Stockman Park, attempting to outdo one another, practicng until the sun went down. Their mother, Sandra, ran track in high school and their father, Roy, played baseball.

All five of the Normans believe they were destined to play sports, and each of them has played at the collegiate and semi-pro level. The eldest, Renaldo played basketball overseas, in places far away from Greenwood, like China and Germany. If his brothers didn’t get out, Greenwood could suffocate them, the way it had so many others — he’d seen it happen. He had to show his siblings that their athletic prowess could pay off. There were four sets of eyes watching his every move, wondering who he would become.

Greenwood is the type of place that bred strength and toughness because the alternative meant being fed to the mills or pulpwooders, which chewed up cotton, lumber and bodies at an alarming rate. More than one man in the local grocery store was missing a finger, or an arm. There had to be another way.

It’s impossible to talk about Josh Norman’s dreams and not talk about his hometown. He knows it doesn’t look like much — not yet anyway, but he knows that there’s so much that can be done with this place.

One hundred forty miles southwest of Charlotte, wedged between the mountains and the sea, in an area known as The Midlands, sits Greenwood, South Carolina, population 23,222, half white, half black.

It lays nowhere near the landmarks of Southern travel tourism. The cities of Greenville, Columbia and Charleston, are hours away. However, if you continue down Highway 25, you’ll find yourself on the dark side of the Lake Greenwood, where fearless young men with fast cars and too little to occupy their time meet in small pool halls for jumbled up stories, quick laughs and, even quicker, reach for their guns if you aren’t careful. If you ask the right person, a fair amount of bootlegging happens on roads the color of cracklings frying in a wash pot, stories of fortunes won and lost from running in behind whiskey tucked into ridges and creases of dirt roads.

This is the Greenwood newspapers will eagerly tell you about. Yet in this area in the not too distant past, each day a handful of lives would be reaped from the earth and ground into dust to the rhythm of a semi-automatic. Violence begets violence. Formed from dust, to the dust we return.

This was once the murder capital of South Carolina, even though storefront churches and places to pray almost outnumber the population. This is not the genteel and parochial South of literary lore, and here Southern-ness is not a trend or fashion sensibility picked up on Pinterest — it extends beyond a devotion to monograms and making tablecloths from burlap found in the local Hobby Lobby. This Southern-ness is earned, not bought.

Greenwood’s old reputation as a mill town is treated like a dead man’s clothing — too worn to be vital, too precious to condemn and throw away. But this year Christmas came early for some families here.

It’s a Friday night in mid-December. There is no football game this evening, but there is still a crowd at Greenwood High School. One of its own has come back. To Josh Norman this isn’t a big deal but to the people he’s going to meet tonight, the fact that he’s made the effort after a long day of practice makes a difference.

Photo: Scott Cunningham/Getty Images

As he emerges from his black Dodge Hellcat, the one he calls his Batmobile, the Dark Knight is nowhere to be found — there is no swagger here. His helmet is off, his face open. For the first time all season, Josh Norman looks nervous. He fiddles with his glasses, tugs on his shirt tail and smooths his sweater repeatedly.

Tonight it’s just Josh, please call him Josh, accompanied by his older brother Marrio and his mother Sandra who serves as coordinator, and she’s warm but harried. They want everybody to have a good time. These folks need to have a good time. This was the chance to spare children, who have had enough pain in their young short lives, from the torment of having nothing during the holidays. They will have food. They will have toys. They will be treated like VIPs.

Starz24, Josh Norman’s non-profit, even rented a bus to chauffeur children and families that might not have a ride. It seems they’ve thought of just about everything. Each family gets a bag of food, a picture with Josh, an autographed headshot and each child gets two toys.

For the folks invited, the experience starts the moment they reach the auditorium — Starz24 has teamed up with Glenda’s Gals, a group of local teachers and guidance counselors that perform community service around Greenwood.

Volunteers flash welcoming smiles while offering everyone dinner. The mood is jovial and calm. BoyzIIMen’s rendition of Silent Night plays over the loudspeaker and sponsors and local media personalities vie for Josh’s attention, for a sound byte they can use on the local news. The world is paying attention to Josh, and to his mission. Everyone wants to get as close as they can.

At the end of the night, 24 families will leave the event with food for their table, thanks to BI-LO, a local grocer.  One hundred fifty children receive toys. The families were chosen by guidance counselors at local schools — those the adults knew whose needs were greatest, and whose children could use a little encouragement, if not a little magic.

His mother admits there was always enough to go around in the Norman house, but the extras, the luxuries were harder to come by, especially after Norman’s parents ended their marriage.

Gifts cover the stage and as families enter the auditorium there are audible gasps, punctuated by “Oh-Mai-Gawd” s and “Look, it’s Josh Norman!” The latter usually comes from little boys, overwhelmed by the chance to be so close to someone they’ve only seen before on a screen.

A couple of families arrive in their Sunday best. Still more come in Carolina Panthers colors. People take pictures to prove that they were here, so when the story breaks in Greenwood’s Index-Journal, they have tangible proof of they’re involvement. Pictures, or it didn’t happen. A lanky relaxed volunteer in a Starz24 shirt near the stage morphs latex balloons into animals and wrist corsages. The majority of the crowd asks for a tiger, shorthand for Clemson — the only other undefeated team in the area.

Rhonda Ricker is in attendance with her grandsons, Levi (10), Gavyn (8) and Wyatt (7). Each boy twirls a football and talks on, words tumbling out of their mouths, too excited to worry about manners or protocol. Rhonda tries to suppress her emotions, but fails. Her son is going through a divorce and she wasn’t sure what the boys were going to eat for Christmas, let alone what they might receive as presents. Since Thanksgiving, she worried about how to stymie disappointment. There is one less thing to worry about. Thank God.

Later in the night, Josh takes time to pray with Miss Glenda herself, whose sick grandchild was just released from the hospital. She desperately wants the prayer to work, and is appreciative for the entire event, but the time Josh took with her family was the highlight of her evening. At 8:52 p.m. he signs his last autograph — waiting til the end, again — and eventually makes his way back to the Batmobile. He’s got to head back to Charlotte, but his heart stays in Greenwood.

Nights like these are mixed for Norman. He takes pride in the work his nonprofit is doing, but it is tinged with the terrible sadness that work like this needs to be done.

According to the New York Times, when the textile mills that at one time supported the economy of Greenwood closed, the county experienced the sharpest economic decline of any in the country. He knows not much has changed. He cannot keep eye contact when he talks about the children of his hometown.

Norman isn’t after platitudes, he’s after solutions. He’s searching for real world tangible help. Throwing money at the problem won’t solve anything without a strategy. Money runs out.

He wants to change lives, alter generations, leave a legacy. This is what God ordains him to do, what football allows him to attempt, what his role entails. To take the rich darkness of orchestrated violence and make it bear fruit every time a child walks offstage with a toy.

He accepts the pain for moments like this, accepts the hazard and the isolation and yes, accepts the money. That is what the fight is for. In this place, Josh Norman is dreaming in reverse. He wants to fix his childhood — well, not his childhood specifically, but the childhood of the kids in Greenwood. He realizes how fortunate he was to have a mother that kept all of her children in athletics, that chauffeured them from game to game to make sure they stayed active and out of harm’s way. Many of the kids in Greenwood won’t get the chance to have that experience. The local YMCA is cost prohibitive for many low income families. Frustrations and tensions bubble close to the surface, and there are few constructive outlets that allow youth to blow off steam. Years ago you could settle a score with a game of pick up basketball, but no longer.

Norman wants to change that. He wants to re-open “The Rec.”

“In the summer my mom would drop us off and we would pair up to make sure nobody got left behind,” says Renaldo.  Armed with money for snacks, the Normans would spend the day in the relative safety of the “The Rec,” or the Y. “We would play basketball, then go swimming, the go back to playing basketball,” Renaldo remembers. Too young to enter the weight room, they would try their luck at baseball and other sports that might not have held conventional appeal. “The Rec,” the R.L. Stevens Center on Seaboard Avenue, stands in a central location for many black residents of the neighborhood, and it is vacant.

Weeds jut from cracks in the cement and the pool sits empty, lines exposed, the bright blue interior fading from years of neglect. The Rec closed in 2009, in dire need of repairs that the county couldn’t afford. It was granted to a nonprofit for renovation and re-opening, but little has changed, and the original property holder cited higher than expected renovation estimates as the holdup.

The center was once a major gathering place for the community. In 2005 the center held Thanksgiving dinner for those relocated by Hurricane Katrina. It is in this setting Norman learned gratitude. This is where he found out starvation and desperation didn’t have a color.

It is the sentimentality of a sound bite, the notion of sleeping on the couch that really grabs people — the type of rags to riches stories that makes Americans want to better themselves. Everyone wants to believe that they have it in them to work their way out of adversity, they just need to be given the opportunity.

Once upon a time, the greatest cornerback in the NFL slept on a couch (and at times in his car) and waited to show the world his God-given talents. The young man from Greenwood walked on at Coastal Carolina his freshman year. Now he’s a starter in Charlotte for the Carolina Panthers. Bruce Wayne to Batman. One city to save and another to fight for.

Talk about a come up.

Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images

The Dark Knight might have finally met his match. It is Sunday afternoon, week 15, Panthers v. Giants, the game is on and half of the Norman family is sitting in the sunny living room of a family friend in Atlanta, watching.

“Did you see the way that man hit my baby?!?” says Sandra. Her voice slides up the scale into its highest octave, becoming little more than a squeak.  When she looks at that television she doesn’t see The Dark Knight, she just sees Josh. “I don’t know who Josh is when he gets on the field — when they start doing that smack talk. I know it’s part of the game …” she couldn’t finish the sentence. When she looked at that screen she saw Josh — not the hot talker, just Josh — without the helmet, the pads and the hoopla, on a field that on this day has seen bloody, twisted, tortured bodies by the score. The trash talk started a week before, when Odell Beckham wore cleats with The Joker painted on the side — Batman’s nemesis. This had symbolism for Norman. He was ready for this matchup.

Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

Everything has a cost. Everyone has fears for Josh — that he’ll get comfortable, that he’ll get caught up, that he won’t know what to do after football. Mrs. Norman knows the psychological and economic hazards that come with this game. She knows the statistics about bankruptcy, divorce, and concussions.

In a culture that searches for signs from the divine and talismans and cloaked in superstition, there are signifiers all around us. So when Beckham wore The Joker cleats, the world rightly inferred what they wanted to.  The imagined taunting started early. Norman and Beckham traded quips all week. Media outlets prepared for a battle and writers, anticipating the match-up had already declared it to be one for the ages. Beckham’s speed against Norman’s mental dexterity and aggressive nature, their fates intertwined before before they hit the field.

Norman saw Beckham’s Joker-inspired shoe design for what it was, a challenge. He put on his mask.

Beckham couldn’t shake him. In New York’s first possession in the second quarter, Beckham hit Norman in the head, helmet-on-helmet, drawing an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty and several smirk-filled taunts from the Dark Knight—he was in his opponent’s head. That made for an abysmal first half for Beckham. He made no catches on three attempts, and the Panthers were up 21-7 by halftime.

Beckham couldn’t take it. The back-forth-jawing, that hot talk got the best of him.

Then came the meltdown — the world watched him devolve in real time. The media captured that, too.

Beckham isn’t ejected from the game. This is what the crowds came for — they call it blood sport for a reason. Bad blood will eventually leave a bad taste in both of their mouths. The incident even made the CBS Evening News — the footage of helmet on helmet contact replayed over and over again. The Panthers win, 38-35. The incident will cost Norman almost $26,044 in fines. But Beckham is suspended for one game.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, right?

The hits that Norman and Beckham dole out that afternoon are too much for his mother to stand, and for much of the game Sandra paced around the first floor of the house, at times with a shawl wrapped around her face, at others on the phone handling the social media that’s flooding in. In smaller, quieter moments she spins her grandchild in a circle, holding her hands, eliciting giggles and a toothy grin.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

The littlest Norman did “the dab” every time Carolina scores, arms flailing, the beads in her hair creating constant clacking. Mrs. Norman fears the rough games, like this one against the Giants, and the one that would come after. The night after a loss is the hardest. The Panthers finally fall to the Atlanta Falcons 20-13. Two weeks previous they’d trounced the Falcons 38-0. As the post season approaches, Norman declines to be interviewed any more. Now is the time for deeds, not words.

Before the regular season was underway, while the Panthers were still on their winning streak, he was asked what it was like to lose.

He described a bottomless hunger, an empty clanging that makes you part radical, part reactionary. It’s not his favorite place to be, but he does his best not to sulk. For a hole to heal, he has to stop touching it. Remember the fundamentals. Work hard. Pray harder. Keep pounding.

Soon, it will be game day, the playoffs. There are no do-overs here. There never have been, not even with his brothers in the living room of that double wide.

He waits.

It is twilight in this hemisphere, and soon it will be time to play. In the darkness he can hear his heart beat and he moves towards the light, picking up speed, gaining momentum, the crunch of his cleats ringing on the cement.

He is coming.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

As he hovers in the shadows, he takes inventory of the things he carries in him—Greenwood, his brothers, the rapidly approaching future, his dreams, the team. Things that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Josh Norman is the man behind the mask. Not quite Bruce Wayne, but not just Batman. Body searing and crackling with pain underneath his pads — he’s worked so hard to be here. He wonders how to take hold of the scene before him, how to harness the electricity in the crowd, the deafening sound of the cheers. There will never be another moment like this one.

How do you describe outer space to someone who has never been there?

He bursts forth, shooting out of the darkness of the tunnel, escaping gravity, hurtling, spinning out into the universe. This world is his stage. It is rife with contradictions and snap judgments, but now, maybe just for this season, just for today, it is his. There is no need to separate fact from fiction anymore. For a few minutes they can be one in the same.

In his view of the stadium, the lights of Charlotte as its backdrop, up in the stands, on jerseys that seem to glow as prominently as No. 1 and No. 59, is No.24, in black and white.

And there is joy.

He raises his hands, spreads his arms and the stadium rocks. The drums beat louder. He takes a leap into the spotlight — no regrets.

Action.

Note: All quotations are either from original interviews or from deposition testimony in SoBe Entertainment International, LLC v. Paul Wight, Bess Wight and World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., an ongoing civil lawsuit in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

One day in late October 2007, professional wrestling superstar Paul “The Big Show” Wight found himself growing increasingly terrified by the second. There was nothing unusual about where he was: He was at home in Miami, sitting in his car in front of his house. The problem was that he was parked in the driver’s seat of his Hummer with the keys in the ignition and had no memory of driving there, much less ever stepping foot into his car. The last he remembered, he was at the gym in the middle of a workout.

How did he get home? Why couldn’t he remember? What the hell happened?

When seven-foot tall Wight walked out in front of the crowd at the Joe Louis Arena a dozen years earlier in 1995, almost to the day, it was the beginning of the rest of his life. Dressed like Andre the Giant and billed as his son, to that point he was the most impressive physical specimen in the history of professional wrestling. Stories from the gym had already become the stuff of legend, with fans and wrestlers alike speaking in hushed tones about this kid who was like a young Andre if Andre could do backflips off the top turnbuckle.

“They wanted to make me a player,” Wight later explained. “They said I was the son of Andre The Giant so I had a little bit of credibility with our fans going into it, which was always kind of a rough thing for me because you get some dedicated fans that were very rural that would [say], ‘Oh, I loved your dad,’ and I’m thinking, oh, my dad was an airplane mechanic, but, thanks. But I know who they’re talking about. They’re talking about Andre.”

For all intents and purposes, it was his first real match. He had technically made his debut 10 months earlier in a converted shopping center in Clementon, New Jersey, only to be quickly scooped up by Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) to hone his skills in their Atlanta training center. His lone match against Frank Finnegan at the Route 30 Market didn’t really count. After all, it couldn’t possibly prepare him for what WCW earmarked for his debut: A pay-per-view main event against Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea), who had taken the sizable youngster under his wing. And when the dust cleared that night in Detroit, Wight had defeated Hogan to become the heavyweight champion of the world. The win was designed to be controversial, part of a convoluted storyline that involved Monster Trucks, his “father’s” wardrobe from The Princess Bride, Hogan shoving Wight off the roof of Cobo Hall and a mummy named “The Yeti.”

It was obvious that the man best known these days as Big Show was going to be a big star for a long time. What had taken place was unprecedented. Winning the heavyweight championship of the world in his first real match? From the biggest star in the history of pro wrestling? Wight was made.

Twelve years later, on the fateful day in 2007 when Wight found himself in his Hummer in front of his home with no idea how he had gotten there, it all came full circle. As he tried and failed to rebuild his memories of the day, he eventually would come to realize that this could all be traced to a question that Hogan had asked him about a year earlier.

“Paul, have you ever boxed?”

Wight’s path to the ring can be traced back to when he was nine years old, when the symptoms of acromegaly first manifested. An excess of growth hormone caused by a tumor on the pituitary gland caused Wight to grow to 6’2 tall by the time he was 12 years old. He grew another six inches in the next two years, and by the time he was a college freshman playing basketball at Northern Oklahoma College, he stood 7’1 and had become a cartoonishly big eater: His metabolism was so accelerated that McDonald’s staffers were regularly wowed as Wight downed enough Big Macs and fries for five. Wight was officially diagnosed with acromegaly during his freshman year playing college ball, at which point he learned that he wasn’t “blessed” the way he thought he was. If he didn’t stop growing, he risked enlarged internal organs, spinal problems, diabetes and scads of other medical issues. Although surgery at age 19 stopped his unchecked growth, after transferring to Wichita State, injuries derailed his basketball career

Alfredo Lopez/Jam Media/LatinContent/Getty Images

He floated around doing odd jobs, getting a few offers to box and having a brief flirtation with small-time pro wrestling before settling in Chicago. There, he worked as a phone bank employee by day and a karaoke host by night. The karaoke job led to a friendship with Partridge Family moppet-turned-morning-radio-host Danny Bonaduce, who enlisted him as his secret weapon in charity celebrity basketball games. “I got to meet Hulk Hogan. He took a liking to me, because of my size,” Wight recalled. “He saw that I was a good athlete and could move. He told me at the time, he says, ‘You got a big dollar sign in your forehead, kid,’ and I said, ‘Well, please show it to me, because I’m broke.’” After his debut he rapidly became a major star, a WCW main event mainstay during one of the company’s hottest growth periods. In 1999, he signed what was reported as a “10 year, $10 million” contract with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), WCW’s main competition.

Privately, Vince McMahon had constantly criticized WCW for not presenting Wight as a special attraction the way his father, Vincent James McMahon (a second generation promoter himself) had once used Andre the Giant. Yet when given the opportunity to do so himself, McMahon the younger proceeded to have the newly named “Big Show” lose to Stone Cold Steve Austin on national television in his first match with WWE. That set the tone for the rest of his career: Big Show was someone who could be plugged into main events, but was never made a true “special attraction” like Andre. Why McMahon went back on his plans for Wight have never been made clear. There was also another issue: Big Show’s weight kept yo-yoing, something usually chalked up to not cleaning up his eating habits after the tumor surgery.

By 2006, Big Show was in an odd place. From a skills perspective, he was the best he’d ever been, having evolved into a skilled and accomplished wrestler capable of telling compelling stories in the ring, and he was being properly presented as an unbeatable giant. Yet physically, he was a complete wreck. From 350 pounds at the time of his surgery, he had ballooned up to around 500 pounds, and years of wrestling had taken an increasingly heavy toll on his already overburdened frame. “So that was, what, 11 years straight, 290 days a year,” he later testified. “I just needed a break. I never got vacations. I mean, I would have two, three days off, and that was it. I wanted to step away and take a break and heal. My back was bad, I was smoking, I was taking pain killers, I was grossly overweight. I needed to get healthy.” His mother, Dorothy, shared his concerns, and around this time told The State newspaper in South Carolina that he also had an enlarged heart.

Bobby Lashley, one of Big Show’s regular opponents around that time — now a Bellator MMA fighter — recalls what kind of state the giant was in. “He says, ‘Sometimes my back goes out.’ [I said] ‘What happens when your back goes out?’ He says ‘I can’t feel my arms.’ [or] ‘I can’t feel my legs.’ Something like that. I was like ‘Oh … alright. That’s basically it. And I remember, I think it was sometime during the end of the match [on Dec. 4, 2006, in Charleston, South Carolina] where that happened.” As bad a problem as one half of the match going numb below the waist would be in and of itself, the planned ending to the match called for Lashley to hoist Show over his shoulder and slam him down on the mat, a move difficult enough to accomplish with Wight’s cooperation. When that time came, it was obvious to viewers at home that something was not quite right. “I picked him up for my finish, and hit him for my finish without any help [from him]. I had to lift his enormous body up and throw him down.” Wight was unable to provide any help at all.

The match marked Big Show’s last television appearance in his initial WWE contract, which would expire two months later. As much as he clearly needed to let his injuries heal, strengthen his body and get into shape, his finances were as unhealthy as his physical condition, including an IRS tax bill of $405,068.55 and a lien against his home. What few people knew, either watching at home or even within WWE, was that he had a backup plan in place, one that nobody could have expected.

In the latter part of 2006, Hogan and Big Show were keeping in touch regularly, with Hogan becoming increasingly aware of how beat up and frustrated his protégé had become

And then the Hulkster had an idea.

“I said, ‘Paul, have you ever boxed, you know, have you ever gotten in the ring?’ He was so fast, you know, in the wrestling ring. If you’d try to run away from him, you couldn’t get away from him. He was quick. I thought if he had some heart, you know, and we could get him to get in good shape and if he had the killer instinct, I thought there’d be no stopping him.” Yes, the version of Wight that Hulk Hogan met in 1994 was uncannily athletic for his size, and he even got some boxing offers back then, but all wrestling fans knew Wight wasn’t that guy anymore. Hogan’s notion was almost delusional. Even as a younger wrestler, “The Big Slow” was a common nickname for the giant. True, he still had some explosiveness, but even when he was doing flips in wrestling schools, he was never exactly fast. Besides, how many people, no matter how big they are, take up boxing past the age of 30 and have professional success?

Michael Buckner/Getty Images

Wight in 2006.

Those who knew Wight were surprised by and skeptical of the plan, to say the least. WWE executive and performer Stephanie McMahon-Levesque, Vince McMahon’s daughter, bluntly said it didn’t at all fit the man she knew, describing him as “a bit of a gentle giant” who “doesn’t really like to get hit very much.” How did she know this, exactly? “I remember a story line,” she said, “when Trish Stratus, one of our [female wrestlers], slapped Big Show in the mouth; and he was very upset it and complained about it for a long time that it cracked his tooth. So to me, if Trish Stratus’ slap bothered him so much, then it doesn’t seem like he would be cut out to get hit in the face by a professional boxer.”

Hogan, though, was confident, to the point of the absurd. He had Wight’s boxing career all mapped out in his head, including who would finance such a misguided venture: Miami entrepreneur Cecile Barker, founder of SoBe Entertainment. “I said, ‘Cecile, you got to see this guy,’” Hogan recalled. “Can you imagine if — there’s nobody prevalent in boxing. There’s no Tyson, no Foreman. What if we had this guy?” He imagined Wight as a kind of modern-day Toro Moreno, the ersatz contender based on boxer Primo Carnera who served as the protagonist of the classic fight film starring Humphrey Bogart, The Harder They Fall. Except Hogan envisioned Wight somehow earning the title for real — eventually.

Barker was managing the singing career of Hogan’s daughter, Brooke, and while Hulk didn’t know it yet, he also happened to be the father of her boyfriend, rapper Yannique “Stack$” Barker. To most, Cecile Barker is probably known best as the “black billionaire guy” Hogan ranted about on a racially charged 2007 recording, the transcript of which was leaked this past summer, on which Hogan also repeatedly uses a racial epithet and concludes, “I guess we’re all a little racist.”

As far as Cecile knew, though, he and Hulk were “best friends,” nicknaming themselves “Crockett and Tubbs” after the two main characters in Miami Vice. “Hulk introduced me to Cecile,” Wight recalled in a 2012 deposition. “Hulk was talking to me on the phone, ‘[You]’ve got to meet this guy,’ because Hulk was a big promoter of me going to boxing. He said that he knew a guy in Miami that was very interested in helping me start a boxing career and I need to meet him. He had, supposedly, boxing contacts and what not.” Wight just knew what Hogan told him, that Barker was “a mover and a shaker in Miami” financing Brooke’s singing career.

Barker didn’t volunteer much more information himself. Why?

“[I] didn’t have to,” Barker testified. “[Wight] was enamored with SoBe. There was a crazy black man spending millions of dollars on Hulk Hogan’s daughter. And [he] was willing to put up millions of dollars for him to change his profession.” According to Barker’s own testimony, he had put up one million dollars just to fund a Hulk Hogan energy drink, and all told, he lost “probably ten million” on Hogan’s various business ideas. Meanwhile, Wight wasn’t alone in not knowing much about Barker. There’s little information about him to be found online (he claims that’s by design) other than the most barebones biographies: He’s a purported billionaire who worked in aerospace for decades before selling OAO Corporation to Lockheed Martin in October 2001 and eventually forming SoBe Entertainment, making the improbable career move from outer space to recording and promotions. Improbable enough that as of 2012, he couldn’t say whether SoBe had ever been profitable.

At the first powwow between Wight, Hogan and Barker, described as a “sales meeting” by Wight, Hogan laid out the plan to make Wight a boxer so convincingly that the naive giant started to really buy into it. “Hogan was pumping me up to Cecile that I have all this potential because of the hands and hand speed and I believed it too.” Wight said Barker was just as enthusiastic, going on about how “with my size and the fact that I’m white I could be a Great White Hope, and he knew Lennox Lewis and he could give me fights with Klitschko and get me a title shot and all these other ludicrous things.”

Well, in 2012 he knew it was ludicrous. In 2006? “I had no idea what the boxing world was really like.” In the meantime, though, “I was a little leery about this whole thing anyway, but, you know, between the confidences that Hulk, who I trusted very much, and then Cecile seemed very excited and enthusiastic about this.” Hogan was to serve as, if not the actual promoter, as Wight’s mouthpiece and the promotional face of his boxing endeavors. With his celebrity, charisma, speaking ability and overall salesmanship, he was, in theory, the perfect hype man for “The Great Wight” (a name Barker protested was inappropriate in the event Wight faced a black opponent).

Barker then enlisted Miami-based “nightlife baron” Antonio Misuraca and boxing matchmaker Michael Marchionte to find the man who would teach Big Show how to box. Marchionte already had someone in mind, immediately suggesting Artie Artwell, a onetime heavyweight with a career record of 3-3-1 who had stopped working as a trainer several years earlier and was teaching boxing for fitness in Providence, Rhode Island.

Marchionte told Misuraca that if anyone could convert a pro wrestler to a boxer, it would be Artie, and asked Artwell if he could board the next flight to Miami. “The next thing I knew is someone calling me from SoBe Entertainment telling me about dates, flight and car service,” Artwell testified in 2012. He flew out a couple days later. Everyone involved went out to dinner together, where the plan was discussed further.

Artwell was presented to Wight as someone who could not only teach the sweet science, but was capable of training larger fighters and whipping them into shape. During the meeting, Wight’s braggadocio got the better of him, making a statement that came back to haunt him later. He spoke of having an iron jaw, with Barker quoting him as saying, “No man can knock me out. I’ve been hitting my head with steel chairs in the WWE. I’ve never been knocked out in my life. And nobody can knock me out.”

After dinner, the decision was made to take Wight to Miami’s Phantom Gym to work out. At Artwell’s suggestion, he didn’t spar at first, but Artwell did lead him in a basic workout mixing squats, push-ups and rudimentary punching. Before long, Wight was sweating bullets and starting to breathe heavily. The wisecracking giant joked about how he felt as if he had just finished delivering a baby.

Good spirits or not, it certainly seemed like it would take a while to get him into even decent condition, but Artwell was undaunted. “I told him that, you know, he’s probably in shape for wrestling, but it’s — it’s always skill specific. You know, I explained to him how I used to play basketball and I could play basketball all night, but I couldn’t do two minutes [in the boxing ring], and I was wondering what the hell’s wrong with me? I’m in shape, but I was in shape for basketball but not for boxing. I couldn’t do two minutes in the ring and vice versa. And I told him that, you know, we’ll take it slow and work it out.”

As naive as it all sounds, at least Barker, had a backup plan in mind. Artwell recalled, “What he told me was that he just wants to see if I can convert this wrestler into a boxer and if it didn’t work out, maybe it could transition into a reality TV show or something of that nature. He just told me what he wanted to see if I could accomplish in six months with him and then we would re-evaluate and determine whether he could be a boxer or whatever else was in the situation.” Barker’s testimony confirms Artwell’s account that, going in, he had the reality show idea in his back pocket if Wight couldn’t be fast tracked to a pro boxing career. And according to BoxRec, that same year, Marchionte went to work with Mark Burnett Productions and DreamWorks Studios, serving as matchmaker for the boxing reality show The Contender.

That was October. Everything was in place. Three months later, in January 2007, a few weeks after Wight’s final appearance for WWE (but with a month or so left on his contact), he embarked on his new career in Miami.

Like many wrestlers, Wight had settled in the Tampa area, about four hours away from Miami, where Barker, Phantom Boxing and Hogan were based. He planned to commute, stay at Hogan’s house during the week and then return home for the weekend to rest with his wife and dogs. That arrangement only lasted about a month, as “after the Super Bowl, it was apparent that “[Hogan’s then-wife] Linda didn’t want me to stay in the house anymore. It was making Terry’s life crazy. Then it was up to me to find, to get a place.” Barker temporarily put Wight up in a hotel in Miami, while Hogan was constantly in the giant’s ear with incessant requests of “Brother, you got to move down here. Brother, you got to move down here. Brother, you got to move down here.”

There were big problems with that. Wight’s unique size required a home that could be adapted to his needs, rather than a rental. On top of that, even with Barker paying him $84,000 a month to box, he was still deep underwater with the IRS and still had to pay the mortgage on his Tampa home. Barker then offered to advance him $400,000 and procured the assistance of a local realtor to find a new home. Wight settled on a place in South Beach at Barker’s request, but first, Barker drew up a contract to show to the bank so Wight could secure a mortgage. At Wight’s insistence, “Hulk Hogan Promotions, Inc.” was included as a third party to the agreement, which Hogan never signed.

Manuel Velasquez/Jam Media/LatinContent/Getty Images

In the meantime, Big Show tried to learn how to box. Regardless of how plausible this all was, he took it seriously, diligently showing up every morning and working his ass off in training. At first, the goal was primarily weight loss and conditioning while slowly learning the most basic boxing concepts.

Artwell and Wight were well-matched. The trainer, for instance, didn’t believe in the distance running traditionally preferred by coaches and Wight was a terrible candidate for it anyway. The two also hit it off quickly as friends. “I loved him. Loved him,” Artwell testified. “And I told him that our relationship was going to be much different. I said, ‘I don’t care who your manager is, who your trainer is, I mean the trainer/fighter relationship, you’re an extension of me.’” Which isn’t to say that he didn’t get tough with his new pupil: When Wight strayed from Artwell’s prescribed high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet and dined on matzo balls at Jerry’s Deli on South Beach, the coach had to give his gargantuan protégé a very specific list of what he was allowed to eat.

In the ring, Artwell started to lead Wight in “phantom boxing” (his term for back and forth shadow boxing) sessions, which he described as “the closest to boxing that you’re ever going to get without getting hit.” So as Wight started to get into shape, he was building a foundation of boxing concepts that would aid him when he started live sparring. In April, he began highly controlled sparring with Artwell defending himself in pads. Concepts like basic blocking were apparently coming along fine, because, well, he was so oversized it was hard to get a punch through to his chin “He had big enough shoulders, big enough arms that he didn’t need to do the Floyd Mayweather, Muhammad Ali head movement,” Artwell noted. He also shed so much weight Wight joked to his wife, Bess, that she better watch out when she touched him or else she might cut herself.

Later that spring Wight started live sparring with heavyweight contenders Attila Levin and Timur Ibragimov. Former WBC World heavyweight champion Oliver McCall even stopped by to get some rounds in, and sparred with Wight three times a week while he was there. McCall, in fact, did the honors of giving Wight his first black eye, but the experienced fighters knew this was not a normal sparring session. They were all told in advance to take it easy on Wight, to pull their punches.

Most of the time that went fine, but there were some notable exceptions. “He [Wight] really wanted Levin,” recalled Artwell. “He thought Levin … wasn’t following the protocol to take it easy. He thought Levin was pushing it. And Paul said to me that he was going to take care of him. I told him he had my permission to take, you know, take care of him if he gets out of line again.”

If that sounds like an accelerated program for a rookie with zero amateur experience, Artwell disagrees. “I had an expectation of Paul being more aggressive. I was looking, I was really looking for Paul to — because of size, weight, especially Levin, because that’s who he said he had it out for — to give those guys a good, at least him, a good beating. … I didn’t think much of Levin even though he had a good record, but the quality of opponents he fought weren’t anybody.”

That was Atwell’s plan, which he explained not just to Wight, but also to Hogan and Barker. He wanted to bring Wight along slowly, just as had been done with former football players Ed “Too Tall” Jones and Mark Gastineau when they tried to become boxers. Gastineau’s first victim was a well-known regional pro wrestler who took a theatrical spill and later admitted to taking a dive. That said, Artwell wasn’t necessarily talking about fixing fights, and he laid out the age old blueprint to turn Wight into a contender that promotors and trainers boxer have followed for generations. Citing Gerry Cooney and others, Atwell said, “You can line up what’s termed in the business tomato cans, guys that should be able to [be] beat. Every once in a while, that gets thrown out of whack, but yeah, it has happened and that’s how they bring fighters along. … The other term they use for them are ‘opponents’ and ‘opponents’ is code for guys that you should be able to beat.”

On the surface, everything was going well. Artwell was happy with his pupil’s progress and there was a plan in place to protect him. In reality, though? After sparring with McCall and having his eye blackened, Wight started to realize just what he was getting into. “[That] was a little bit of a wakeup call.”

At the six-month mark Barker watched some sparring sessions and was concerned: He felt Wight didn’t have it. Artwell agreed, but tried to reassure him that it didn’t matter. “Even though he hasn’t shown anything in the gym right now, but we can get this thing started with getting him opponents, and sometimes you use sparring partners as your opponents.” That satisfied Barker for the time being, but as the summer went on, Wight started to become more disenchanted as his support system vanished. At first, Hogan was a regular at the gym, but as his marriage began to self-destruct and his son, Nick, was in a car accident that maimed his best friend and landed him in jail, Hogan left Miami. Regardless, Wight kept going. What else was he going to do?

In late October, super heavyweight T.J. Wilson, a former Olympic alternate just a few days removed from a huge first-round upset win over Travis Walker in only 15 seconds, came in to spar with Wight. A big wrestling fan, he was familiar with Wight going back to his time in WCW. When he first saw the giant sparring, he watched him handle an unknown amateur. “I don’t know the guy’s name, but he was sparring with him, and [Wight] was beating him up pretty bad,” Wilson recalled. “He was hitting the guy with some good combinations.” Wilson felt Wight was coming along fairly well, but with obvious signs that he was a beginner. “He was kind of robotic. He’s a big guy, he wasn’t the fastest, but he had pretty good hand speed, and was moving pretty good.” As for punching power, that was as advertised, Wilson remarking that “You know, he’s a big guy, he hits pretty hard.”

David Leeds /Allsport

Wilson(L) at the U.S Olympic Box-Off, 2000.

So when it came time for Wilson and Wight to spar, Wilson knew what he was getting into; at least as much as he could sparring with someone that big. For Wight, however, it was different: Wilson was the first left-handed fighter he had faced. This not only changed the angles of the punches from what he was accustomed to, but also the distance each is thrown. Even many experienced fighters are troubled by southpaws, and Wight, who at this point had only been sparring for about six months, was completely befuddled.

The two squared off, and after only a few minutes — Wilson can’t recall if it was the first round or the second — he threw an overhand left at his oversized target. He was mindful to pull the punch as he had been instructed by Artwell, but it didn’t matter. The placement was perfect, and it came from an angle that Wight had not expected and never saw coming. They say the punch you don’t see hurts you, and Wight went down, toppling backwards. “He landed face up,” Wilson recalled. “He may have made the count to be on his feet, but I would have stopped it [if I was the referee or his cornerman].”

Wight later recalled, “Artie made it very clear and very apparent to me that it takes one punch to win a fight, one punch to knock you out, one punch to kill you.” And in spite of Wight’s bragging about his iron jaw, Artwell told Wight from the start to get out of that mindset. “I explained to him that for all of his bravado about never being knocked out that you have a nervous system, Big Show.” Artwell gave a colorful example: “I said, ‘If a baby would punch you in the nose right now, you would tear up and feel some pain. So you’re not impervious to that happening.’ I said, ‘I’m glad you had that experience, so now you know that, you know, it can happen.’” That’s what everyone else in the gym told him after the KO: “Welcome to the fraternity.”

Artwell thought it was a flash knockdown, where a fighter gets dropped but quickly recovers and doesn’t seem worse for wear or concussed. Wight seemed fine, but it was enough to stop the training session for the day. When Artwell saw Wight exiting the gym a short time later, he wasn’t concerned and continued working with the other boxers.

Wight was not fine. He later said, “I remember trapping [Wilson] in the comer, him getting out of the corner, and then I remember waking up in my Hummer with the keys in the ignition. Apparently, they had taken my gloves off, called the match, and I had taken my bag and walked out of the gym and was sitting in my car with the car running, when I woke up.”

How did he feel when he came to?

“It scared the shit out of me.”

Wight soon told his wife what happened. “She was worried. She asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no. I told her that I was woefully out of my depth. I remember saying that.” He was done sparring for good. He had never been knocked out in over a decade of wrestling and was ill-prepared for the realities of boxing. Now, it was just a matter of being able to officially end the relationship. “I was trying to get a hold of Mr. Barker to have a meeting with him. I wanted to be done. It wasn’t for me anymore. I was very limited in my lateral movement, because of my bad foot. Standing toe to toe with another fighter I could probably do well, but a smart fighter is not going to stand toe to toe with me and they’re going to move to a weakness. I didn’t want to die. Artie made that very clear to me from day one’s training — one punch to win a fight, one punch to knock you out, and one punch to kill you.” And for Wight, that one punch was one punch too many.

In the meantime, Wight spoke to Hogan, his longtime mentor who got him into this mess in the first place. As much as Wight tried to explain that he had been knocked into a dissociative state and it scared him, it didn’t faze Hogan. “I think [Hulk] thought that I was not aggressive enough. I don’t know how to explain it.” When recounting their talk under oath more than four years later, it was the emotions that stuck with the gentle giant more than the content. “I don’t really remember much of the conversation other than Terry being disappointed and I was embarrassed.”

Marc Serota/Getty Images

“I just couldn’t believe [Wight] quit and walked away.”Hulk Hogan

Hogan remembered the gist of the conversation similarly, though he recalled a lot more detail. “I said, ‘You got to go back. You can’t quit.’ And Mr. Wight says, ‘Well, I can’t do this. My heart’s not in it.’ And, you know, I basically said. ‘Well, you know, Cecile has paid you every month to train and you’ve been asking about fights and we’re trying to get you ready and everything’s going to be set up.’ … I pretty much beat him up, telling him he had to go back.” The next day was more of the same for Hogan. “He had a different attitude, almost like a different persona. He wasn’t even listening when I talked to him.”

Wight also felt like he was talking to a wall, but for different reasons. “I think Terry had a different view of what he thought it was and what it actually was.”

So, what was Wight’s next move? For the moment, he wasn’t considering a return to WWE. “[Paul] told me he — never mentioned wrestling,” Hogan recalled. “You know, he basically told me he was done and he was going to produce this cooking show with Bess. You know, he just told me she was going to be bigger than Rachael Ray, and I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing.” In a 2010 deposition, Bess described her occupation as a “host of a cooking show” seconds before answering the question, “Is that a TV show?” with “I’d like it to be.” Although WWE did survey fans to gauge interest in a similar show featuring both Wights in late 2011, the show never got off the ground

“I just couldn’t believe he quit and walked away,” Hogan continued. “Even if the guy wasn’t a champion, if you had a fight with him, that would be huge, you know. And there would several other fights against normal-sized guys and all of a sudden you’d be fighting for 10, 15, 20 million bucks, is what I told him. I said, ‘You got a lottery ticket in your pocket. You can’t leave, you can’t walk away from this.’” It caused a schism between the two, with Hogan saying they didn’t talk much afterwards. “I mean, he quit and there’s nothing really to talk about.”

Due to health issues that put Barker in the hospital, he and Wight didn’t meet up at the gym to square things away until Nov. 14, more than two weeks after the fateful knockdown. Remembered Barker, “On the assumption that Paul Wight was going to ask for money, because he was always broke, and on the assumption that he was going to ask for money, even though he was already paid a month in advance, I walked in there and had my checkbook and proceeded to write him a check [for December] and handed it to him after we shook hands and sat down. I said, ‘I guess this is what you’re looking for. Here’s your check.’”

Of course, that wasn’t the only reason Wight was there. “Paul Wight then proceeded to tell me that he had been doing some soul searching; that he had, had a long conversation with his wife, Bess; that his wife Bess had become concerned for his safety; and that I was sick and not around in the gym, he had gotten into the ring one night and he had been knocked out.” According to Barker, Wight then broke down. “He started crying; saying one of the most — probably one of the most unexpected events of my life; to see a 7-foot, 450 [pound] man sitting there at a desk crying, telling me that he didn’t know what he was going to do. He had to get on with his life. He knew he owed me money.”

In spite of Wight owing the money advanced towards the purchase of his house (and depending on which of them you ask, his 10 months of salary, which were advances from future earnings), they never spoke again, only exchanging a few emails in the weeks following the meeting. With Wight’s ongoing financial issues now including the monies from Barker for his house, it was time to become The Big Show again.

Alfredo Lopez/Jam Media/LatinContent/Getty Images

Believing he had dissolved his agreement with SoBe at the Nov. 14 meeting with Barker at the gym, four days later Wight met with Vince McMahon and WWE Talent Relations representative John Laurinaitis at a WWE event in Miami. By now, he had decided to return to wrestling. According to Wight, WWE offered the same $1 million annual guarantee he had before, but he asked for $1.25 million plus a $250,000 signing bonus. WWE insisted on a “weight clause” in the contract to protect their investment.

When Barker found out, he eventually tried to stop Wight’s return to WWE, claiming that he had Big Show under contract, but that claim went nowhere until SoBe sued WWE and the Wights more than a year after he had resumed wrestling. That’s the only reason the details of Wight’s flirtation with boxing are accessible. The case has now dragged on for more than six and a half years, with the next hearing scheduled for April 2016.

When Wight, now an ex-boxer, returned as The Big Show on WWE programming in February 2007, he made his surprise comeback in Las Vegas, the boxing capital of the world, flaunting his new, svelte physique end route to setting up his match for that year’s WrestleMania in Orlando. First, he attacked Rey Mysterio, his total opposite, WWE’s smallest star and someone being written off TV due to a legitimate injury.

Rob Loud/Getty Images

As Big Show menaced Mysterio that February night, the fans knew that someone certainly, would come out to make the save and protect Mysterio from the returning giant. What they didn’t expect was that Las Vegas’s own Floyd “Money” Mayweather, considered the best boxer in the world, would come to the rescue, a role in stark contrast to his villainous public persona. Less than a year removed from setting pay-per-view records, he was a perfect “special attraction” for WWE’s Super Bowl of wrestling, a flashy celebrity athlete with a track record of drawing money and attention.

Mayweather, however, was not much bigger than the diminutive Mysterio. As Mayweather stood in the ring, Big Show got down on one knee and dared the champion pugilist to hit him. Mayweather, a defensive fighter hardly known for his power and giving up about 300 pounds, lit the giant up with a combination.

This time, Big Show, already on one knee, didn’t go down. The punch woke something in him, something that had probably been festering since he came to in his car a few months before. As Mayweather and his entourage fled the ring in a panic, Big Show, his nose bloody and broken, rose in hot pursuit, giving chase and moving faster than he’d ever moved before in pro wrestling.

Even when you know they are coming, it seems that punches can still hurt.

I. The Patsy

Super Bowl XXV, January 27, 1991: Tampa Stadium, Tampa Florida.

“Too tough for them, just right for us,” Marv Levy implored his players before his team’s first Super Bowl appearance, just as he had done before all others of vastly less significance all season. Soon enough, it was about to get a whole tougher.

In the blink of a bloodshot eye, we’re 25 years from that moment and 16 since the Buffalo Bills last went to the playoffs, the longest active drought in American professional sports. Buffalo, the beaten down, blue-collar Rust Belt town, gutted of both industry and over half its population since 1950, remains fiercely proud and hasn’t given up on itself or its beloved Bills. What Buffalo continues to prove to America is that when enough people continue to reach out for something, sooner or later they end up finding each other.

Who is the most famous man in American consciousness ever to put foot to ball? It’s not Pele, Maradona, Zidane, Beckham or Messi. The rest of the world has them. For millions of Americans who witnessed the dying moments of Super Bowl 25, it remains Scott Norwood.

If we could hop on a plane and fly back in time to that moment, anyone suffering from a bad case of nerves could still console themselves with a cigarette on a flight back to that January day in 1991, the last year it was legal to smoke on commercial airplanes. The Gulf War began 11 days earlier. Three weeks before, on Christmas Day, the USSR collapsed. Home Alone is atop the box office, Macaulay Culkin-cute. O.J. Simpson is on the sidelines after taking a break from filming The Naked Gun 2 ½: the Smell of Fear andstill a few years away from not killing his wife and Ron Goldman.

And the previous week Joe Montana’s tenure leading the San Francisco 49ers came to an end after being blindsided and flattened by New York Giants linebacker Leonard Marshall, breaking my 11-year-old heart. It was the only time I ever saw my best friend cry. And the week before that, Bo Jackson put on his football uniform for the last time after suffering a career-ending hip injury against the Bengals.

With eight seconds remaining in Super Bowl XXV, standing on the sidelines, there was nothing remote or abstract about Scott Norwood’s potential nightmare, the horror was entirely wedded to both its immediacy and specificity. The defining moment of his life would be witnessed by nearly 100 million people.

How narrow is the boundary separating his dreams from that nightmare? On that day the dimensions and geometry were perfectly clear to everyone watching: a horizontal cross bar elevated 10 feet off the ground, two perpendicular uprights reaching another 20 feet skyward, separated by 18 feet and 6 inches of air.

The New York Giants lead the Buffalo Bills 20-19. In just two minutes and eight seconds worth of playing time in the fourth quarter, quarterback Jim Kelly has marched the Bills nearly two-thirds of the field to the 29-yard line, just in range for a come-from-behind field goal and victory. There have been some missed opportunities for both teams—the Giants gave up a safety and the Bills had a drive stall deep in the Red Zone—but nobody in 59 minutes and 52 seconds of play has done anything so egregious as turn the ball over to the opposition. There have been errors of effort and calculation, not heart.

Now, everything rides on a successfully launched leather ball soaring 47 yards through the humid air delivered somewhere, anywhere between the uprights. Regardless of the contest so far, whatever the outcome of this final event, the role of scapegoat or hero has now irrevocably been cast, and his name is kicker Scott Norwood.

Peter Brouillet/Getty Images

Norwood—his wife and relatives watching in the stands—steps onto the field having successfully kicked a 48-yarder that season—but not on grass. Norwood is in his sixth year playing in the NFL for the Bills. He entered the league in 1982 and was cut by the Atlanta Falcons. After signing with USFL’s Birmingham Stallions he blew out his knee and was let go. He moved back in with his parents but refused to give up. At age 26, the Bills invited him to try out and he made the team. Three years later he made the Pro Bowl and led the league with 125 points. Kickers in the NFL routinely have the lowest average annual salary of any regular player, even less than punters. As Norwood takes center stage at the Super Bowl, an instrument of fate, he has all the physical presence of an earnest high school hall monitor reporting for duty during recess.

Years later, Norwood says of that moment, “I had no doubts in my mind.”

Bill Parcells calls a timeout, presumably so Norwood can ruminate a few moments longer on the implications of missing this kick for the rest of his life. Maybe, if Parcells is lucky, the ghost of Bill Buckner and his error in the 1986 World Series will join the dog pile on Norwood’s psyche along with the millions of people either watching or hiding their eyes all around the country. Three and a half years later, only two weeks after the O.J. Simpson murders, Columbian defender Andres Escobar scored on his own goal during the FIFA World Cup and handed victory over to the United States. Five days after returning to Medellin, on July 1, 1994, he was executed in a parking lot for his folly with six bullets.

Pacing around, head down, brow furrowed, Norwood doesn’t betray much of a reaction. Eventually he clenches his jaw and grinds his teeth into his mouth guard. Like a timid teenager working up the courage to ask a girl out to the prom, his squinty eyes mostly remain on the torn up grass before him.

Doubts or not, for his career, Norwood has only converted one of five field goals beyond 40 yards on grass. Now, 47 yards lie between where Frank Reich will receive the snap and spin it around, holding it upright with a finger of his left hand, and victory for the Buffalo Bills, hovering a long, long way down field between the uprights. Hold your hand out and spread your thumb and forefinger about three inches apart—€”that’s about how far apart the goal posts appear from 47 yards away.

Across both sidelines, hundreds of men, players and staff alike, hold hands as they kneel together, heads bowed, eyes vised in prayer, penitents, their desperate wishes invisibly ascending from the stadium for and against the kick. Nearly 74,000 fans in the stands silently or violently petition the football gods with their pleas. If God wasn’t tied up with other matters—maybe the Gulf War thing or the fate of the Soviet Union after the fall—and was paying attention, all He or She would have received was a mixed message. Nearly 80 million people in America are tuned in for perhaps the zenith of dramatic moments in Super Bowl history. With the Super Bowl continuing to be the most bet on event in American sports, more than a few of those prayers, presumably, belong to people with skin in the game: billions of illicit and legitimate dollars across the country ride on the outcome.

Norwood’s plight only highlights everyone’s helplessness to sway the outcome.

A whistle is blown. Twenty-one men assume their positions on either side of the line of scrimmage.

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

Norwood is the 22^nd. He stands beside a kneeling Reich and reaches down to his left cleat to rid it of some dirt he then tosses away. He goes through the motions of one mock kick. He bows his head while his hands hang down at his sides. The expression on his face oscillates between earnest and stern. After glaring some more at the grass, he mops some sweat off his brow and absentmindedly bumps the ridge of his hand against the edge of his helmet. He matter-of-factly returns to his left cleat to nudge some more dirt loose. Finally, he briefly gazes down field at his remote target, 18 and a half feet reduced to three inches.

Suddenly Norwood seizes an enormous breath just before taking five paces back from his teammate and stepping once to his left. He’s finally alone as the last man back and the last hope for everyone who supports him. Once settled in, he braces himself for the moment at hand and leans forward, arms hanging limp, as unreachable as rescue ladders dangling from a helicopter over a burning home.

Five of Norwood’s teammates on the sidelines, along with their coach, are destined for the Hall of Fame. Together, they brace for the moment, each relieved or frustrated in his own way that the fate of the game lays elsewhere. Whatever games Jim Kelly has given up throwing interceptions, or James Lofton and Andre Reed have lost to dropped passes, or Thurman Thomas squandered fumbling away the ball, or Bruce Smith let slip away with a missed tackle, or coach Marv Levy lost with some failed strategy that cost his team victory—history will only remember their triumphs.

Even if Norwood splits the uprights, he’s probably not getting the games’ MVP trophy—€”that would likely go to Thomas, with 190 all-purpose yards and a touchdown. And Norwood’s not going to the Hall of Fame either. There are very few placekickers in the Hall of Fame and only one, Jan Stenerud, whom Marv Levy reluctantly cut after accepting a coaching position for the Kansas City Chiefs in 1978, exclusively played kicker his entire career . Others, such as Lou Groza and George Blanda, played another positions. No, despite being stranded on a very fragile island in the football universe, kickers are never honored or remembered for the great kicks they make, only the vital ones they miss. Whatever successes they’ve enjoyed, after even one disappointment or failure, no one is on a football roster is more expendable.

The ball is snapped. Norwood’s life, before and after, receives a demarcation point barely a second long.

Scott charges forward to forever leave behind his past identity and embrace his fate…

II. The City of No Illusions

After a couple weeks in a warm place outside the country, on Jan. 2, 2016, I flew home to New York and then took a train from Penn Station eight hours north and west, to catch the Bills’ final regular-season game, this time against their division rival, the New York Jets.

It was yet another losing season for the Bills. They had already been knocked out of playoff contention. The game was another meaningless dead end. For the Jets, 10-5 for the year, a final victory at Ralph Wilson Stadium, named after the Bill’s beloved former owner, was vital to making the playoffs.

The Amtrak train was stuffed with Jets fans making the trek to suburban Orchard Park to support their team. With tens of thousands more fans bussing down south from Canada in virtual motorcades, the game would be a sellout.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

When I arrived the night before at Buffalo’s Exchange Street Station, several inches of snow was on the ground from the first significant snowfall of the year. More was expected the following morning. The county was offering 10 bucks an hour to anyone who wanted to help shovel out the stadium.

I knocked on the passenger side of a cab’s window and startled an older, dozing-off, walrus-mustached driver. He waved me in.

“O.P.?” he asked.

“Come again?”

“Orchard Park,” he said, and turned the engine. “You’re going to the game tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I need to find a place near the stadium and if you have any ideas about finding tickets I’d appreciate it.”

“Buffalo doesn’t roll out any red carpets to welcome outsiders, but we do have the Red Carpet Inn not far from Ralph Wilson. Game’s sold out but I’m sure if you’re willing to cough up some bucks the scalpers will help you out.”

Bon Jovi’s “Living On A Prayer” came on the radio and before I could ask to turn it down, the driver shut off the radio.

“You hear about that asshole trying to buy the Bills and move them?” he said, referencing the singer from New Jersey. “Pissed a lot of people off. Every bar in Buffalo swore off playing that asshole. I even heard on the Twitter they created a hashtag ‘#fuckBonJovi.’ Serves him right.”

“If they black list Billy Joel, too, I might have to move up here in solidarity.”

“Bon Jovi deserved the flack he got. They’re the heart and soul of this city. Really are. I mean, everybody else just comes up here for Niagara Falls. Every time I take a fare over to Niagara Falls, it just makes me wanna take a leak. You’re a Jets fan?”

“I hate the Jets.”

“The Bills aren’t going to the playoffs, so why the hell you come all this way on a train to watch a pointless game in the freezing cold?”

“Working on a story about Buffalo 25 years after Norwood’s kick.”

“I worked security for the Bills during their heyday and all those Super Bowls they went to. When the Cowboys thumped them that second time at the end of their losing run at the Super Bowl was my last year on the job. It’s those damn Canadians that are the real menace at games. Twenty or twenty-five thousand of those jokers come down for most games. They’re a menace.”

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

“Word around the league is we have the drunkest fans in the country. ”

“They burned down the fucking White House 200 years ago,” I added, keeping my own Canadian heritage under wraps. “Violence is just in Canada’s nature.”

“Unless it’s supporting us in Nam.”

“Gutless.”

“Iraq, too,” he lamented gravely.

“When Trump’s elected, he’ll give Canada what they’ve got coming to them.”

“Oh, they love the tailgate though. They’re drunk out of their minds before sunrise on Sunday. All they come down for is just the action in the parking lot. Word around the league is we have the drunkest fans in the country. I don’t think it’s the Buffalonians so much as the Canadians that drink like that. They just drink until they black out. I hit one of those poor bastards a few years ago with my cab. Just jumped right in front of me on the highway.”

“How’d he make out?”

“Thumped his head right on my windshield. Died a few days later when they took him off life support.”

Time to change the subject.

“I’ve never heard of a team getting a parade for losing.”

“It’s as close as we’ve gotten to a winning team. It’s unfortunate, but you know, I wish we did have a winning team. At least once. Once in my life time would be nice.”

“Think it’ll ever happen?”

“I wouldn’t bet on a better team than we had back then. But you know, Jim Kelly, when he was in his prime, was a total asshole.”

“Why do you say that?”

“There’s a nice café where we’re going in Orchard Park, Danny’s, all the Bills people used to go there. When my boy was 5 years old, my kid went up to him for an autograph and Kelly blew him off. Ever since then I just couldn’t forgive him. Total asshole. He’s gotten religion and had cancer and really mellowed out in his middle age—like we all do—but you don’t do that to little kids unless you’re a world-class asshole. That’s my memory of the guy.”

“You see Norwood around town much?” I asked.

“His wife is from here. So he visits the in-laws.”

Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

Above: Norwood in 2011

“Do you remember what you were doing when he missed that kick?”

“I wasn’t watching, I was at home with the game on prayin’ behind my couch. Forty-seven yards on grass isn’t an easy kick for anybody. He didn’t have a great boot. But goddamnit, he tried. It was wide, but he sure as hell didn’t come up short.”

“How hard was it after he missed?”

“Every year afterwards it was just, the Bills are there again? We just couldn’t get over that hurdle to win. Look outside your window, there’s our stadium. We’ve got a winter storm watch for tomorrow.”

“Will the tailgate still happen?” I asked.

“Those idiots will tailgate in anything. Seriously. Blizzard. They’re like an armed encampment, pretty much. Even the Bill players, from time to time I pick them up from bars and they throw up off the side of my cab. The NFL isn’t the same anymore. There used to be a real camaraderie but now it’s just about the money.”

I saw the ruby-glow of the Red Carpet Inn’s sign glazing the ice along the highway. There was a big sign about having sold out rented spaces in the parking lot for tomorrow’s tailgate.

“Listen, don’t plan on going far out there in this cold, you’ll freeze your nuts off before you end up as road kill with the way people drive around here on the ice. Especially at night, it’s treacherous. There’s always somebody getting hit.

III. Willy Loman

And after one and a half seconds of hang time, even 25 year later we all know Norwood missed. My cabbie was right — the kick was more than long enough, but wide right by about a dozen or so inches.

“A blur,” Norwood recalled of that moment to ESPN cameras last month. In the quarter century since the kick, he’s rarely granted interviews. “I almost relate it to some kind of accident where you try to—it’s almost a shock—the magnitude of it not working out.”

Above his lone crossbar, as he watched his missed kick veer off, behind Norwood’s narrow eyes you could almost see the cruel Gordian knot devilishly being tied inside his heart. Head down, Norwood gravely wanders off and circles free of teammates seeking to console him, unable to acknowledge the pleadings of his friends. He finally removes his mouth guard and lifts off his helmet, exposing the torment on his dejected face. It gives every indication he’s the loneliest man on earth.

“I get choked up thinking about it,” Norwood sighed. “It goes wider—the sidelines, organizational level, to the city. The city of Buffalo is nothing but a winning city and it deserved it.”

Winning city? Buffalo native Harold Arlen, the world-renowned composer most famous for composing “Over the Rainbow”—voted by the Recording Industry Association of America as the 20^th Century’s greatest song—once grimly proclaimed of his hometown, “Suicide in Buffalo would be redundant.” The city once had the eighth largest population in America and thriving industry in both steel and manufacturing. With most major factories shut down, it’s been gutted on all fronts, the population plummeting from 580,000 in the years after the war to only 260,000 today, and still dropping. It makes the news every winter only because it’s buried by an average 110 inches of snow and frigid, wind-driven cold. The Buffalo Bills haven’t won a postseason game since 1995, and last made the playoffs in 1999. They’re the NFL equivalent of a car wreck rusting away by the side of the road, only two seasons over .500 since the millennium.

Winning city? What could Scott Norwood, according to many the patron saint of football losers, possibly be talking about? Wasn’t his entire life ruined by that kick? Isn’t he just a sordid punchline from a tired joke of a battered Rust Belt city?

Maybe. But maybe not …

George Rose/Getty Images

Whatever urge Norwood felt after the game to run and hide, he felt a larger responsibility to his teammates and the city of Buffalo to stand his ground in the locker room. He did so before he even had a chance to be consoled by his family. After all of his teammates had fled the area to mourn their loss, Norwood remained for a couple hours under siege from reporters and cameras, patiently and earnestly answering every last question put to him before taking time for himself to embrace his wife and father. The scene conflicts a great deal with the popular notion—peddled endlessly in the world of sports—that winners show more character than losers. Even the Giants’ victory wilted under the shadow of Norwood’s narrative.

Contrast this defining moment of Norwood’s career with, say, Michael Jordan’s notoriously bitter, tone-deaf, and thankless Hall of Fame acceptance speech, which felt like the ending of a Godfather movie as Jordan opened both barrels on everybody. How could someone like Norwood, branded across the country as the perennial choke artist, demonstrate such decency, character and grace while Jordan—who mesmerized me and everyone I knew growing up with his transcendent ability and resolve—shocked the world with an incredible monument to bitterness despite his legacy of triumph? There are differences in men.

Most of us aren’t aware of the most important moments in our lives ahead of time, or even notice when they actually happen. It’s even more remarkable how little we act at these moments since, so often, there’s no one to perform for. Yet Scott Norwood knew. His entire life was irrevocably going to change and be defined forever with this one action that likely could never be redeemed, at least on the field.

We all lose. There’s no escape. All victories are few and fleeting. Life is a process of enduring loss, one of the more cruel lessons existence imposes on us. The longer we stick around, the more familiar with loss we become. Loss ensnares us with big and small hooks. Whatever dent we leave in the world, the vast majority of us are lost footnotes in history. We’re periphery, faces in a crowd, clutter in a subway or an airport or a supermarket or a line at Starbucks, or even to our neighbors in modern life. Yet we all dream of leaving our mark on the world in some meaningful way, of making a difference or at least mattering after we go.

Scott Norwood, only 30 years old, stepped onto the field with eight seconds left in Super Bowl XXV knowing anonymity and insignificance would never again be an option for himself, his family, or anyone who cared about him. One way or another, he was going to remembered. And while Norwood’s canvass was as large as you can get in American sports, his moment was as personal and intimate as a single brushstroke. All that was required of him was doing what he’d always done so brilliantly since childhood with his father’s assistance and loving devotion: kick a ball.

Instead of kicking the game-winning field goal to win the Super Bowl, he instead booted his narrative into two immensely successful movie scripts: 1998’s Buffalo 66 and 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. In Buffalo-native Vincent Gallo’s indie classic, also featuring Christina Ricci and Anjelica Huston, Norwood became Scott Wood, reimagined as the bloated, shirtless strip club owner of Scott Wood’s Solid Gold Sexotic Dancers. Gallo’s character, after losing a $10,000 bet on the Bills’ Super Bowl loss, then hunts Wood down to kill him. Gallo even approached Norwood to appear in a cameo and offered what he described as a “large sum” of money. Norwood declined.

In Jim Carrey’s star-making vehicle, Norwood was reimagined as a kicker named “Ray Finkle,” institutionalized after missing a Super Bowl winner for the Miami Dolphins. He then murders a woman and assumes her identity, living as a deranged transgendered psychopath hell-bent on exacting on revenge against Dolphin quarterback Dan Marino.

Scott Norwood did none of these things, not even close. Fiction has to make sense, but reality doesn’t. The real Scott Norwood played one more year of professional football and then remained in Buffalo with the wife he’d recently met there. In his last game as a Bill, in the 1992 Super Bowl against Washington, he made the only field goal he tried, this time from 21 yards, to make the score 24-3 in Buffalo’s eventual 37-24 loss. For the playoffs that year, he was a perfect 5-for-5.

He retired after overtaking O.J. Simpson that year as the Bills’ career-scoring leader, and the team went on to run their streak of consecutive Super Bowl losses to four, but never as gallantly or as painfully as in 1991. Yet Norwood wasn’t bitter or vindictive about his career. He never blamed anyone. He quietly left Buffalo, ducked reporters as best he could, then sold life insurance back in his home state of Virginia, close to his family.

But before the Bills and professional football cut him loose to work as a salesman, driving around in a Chevy Prizm with a cracked windshield, cold calling unsuspecting people in his native Virginia, Norwood first had to return to Buffalo immediately after Super Bowl XXV, seemingly in disgrace. The city, buried under snow that froze a million tears, did something so counterintuitive and contrary to American values that the surprise was so overwhelming to Norwood, he could not face it. After the loss, after having their teeth kicked in and their dream denied, Buffalo chose not retribution, but gratitude.

And most of that was reserved for Norwood. At a post-Super Bowl rally in the heart of Buffalo at Lafayette Square, 25,000 people (or maybe twice that according to Marv Levy’s memory) endured the frigid temperatures and snow to reserve their loudest cheers and chants … for Scott Norwood, professional football’s biggest loser.

“Scotty! Scotty! Scotty!” it began, Norwood hiding behind his teammates, out of view from the masses.

But the mob continued with even more ferocity and urgency and finally Norwood relented and peeked out to show his face.

Now, 25,000 Buffalonians roared louder, demanding his brief cameo would not be sufficient under the circumstances. So Norwood gave in and took the stage, snow stinging his face, standing alone before the crowd at the podium. The cheers erupted and the chants altered immediately to “We love Scott! We love Scott!”

“I’ve never felt more love than right now,” Norwood’s voice cracked, wiping the corners of his eyes.

IV. The City of Good Neighbors

What other city in America would stage a parade in the bitter cold to celebrate the losing team? And then reserve the loudest cheer for the man blamed for the loss? It was the closest the Bills ever came to winning and over the next three years were famously blown out of one Super Bowl after another. And they still haven’t won a Super Bowl or, from the looks of things, anything else.

After I checked into the last room available at the motel and navigated through the arriving vehicles that had stocked up on beer, I went in search of a warm meal under a starless night. All the sidewalks were buried under a foot of snow, so I schlepped up the side of the highway to Abbott Road and turned off toward the looming hypothermic mass of Ralph Wilson Stadium opposite the barren, dimly lit winter-scape of parking lots and piles of snow. It was apparent, after a half-mile and being questioned by two separate police cruisers, I was likely the only pedestrian in all of Buffalo.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

A handful of Go Bills! converted “Want some candy?” kidnapper-style vans and rusty school buses were out there in the distance, bonfires illuminating small cabals of fans already pining for game time. “Where else would you rather be?” was written on the back of one vehicle. After the wind kicked up and dismantled any feeling in my body, I finally got to a corner with some habitation and lights on. Just beyond a couple residential houses with ghostly Bills flags fluttering beneath the American flag, the Big Tree Inn bar sat next to three crude totem pole-like carvings of Chris Berman, Jim Kelly and Andre Reed standing guard out front. I kept walking. A little further on was Danny’s South restaurant. Both of these establishments were Buffalo Bill landmarks I’d been told to stake out.

Once you get inside Danny’s foyer you’re greeted by stadium seats pulled out of the WPA-era War Memorial Stadium that was demolished after the Bills moved to Ralph Wilson in 1973. Go a little farther and a shrine dedicated to Jim Kelly—framed autographed photos, cereal box, clippings, the works—is piled up against the wall next to the entrance of the bar. Another sign informs customers of Magic Mike Seege’s weekly magic act, “Buffalo’s best table side magician,” and “Kids eat free.” In the dining area, none of the New Year’s decorations or Christmas trees had been taken down yet. Local sheriffs were clustered by the television eagerly filling their bellies with Danny’s famous Buffalo Chicken Wing soup.

Lumbering over to a table in the corner I took off my gloves and blew some feeling into my hands. The dining room walls were covered with a strange assembly of framed photos of Hollywood celebrities of the 1980s and ’90s in their most famous roles, and Bills players in their prime. The window overlooking the parking lot featured cartoonish illustrations of Bills players frosted onto the glass, including O.J. Simpson beaming in his pads, helmet off, his head gargantuan and a smile frozen on his face.

A wiry, cheerful blond waitress in her 50s wearing a Bills T-shirt rushed over with a smile and a raised pot of coffee. I flipped over the cup on my table.

“You’re shivering love,” she said in an English accent, filling my cup. “Drink this up.”

“What are you grinning at?” she asked, rubbing my shoulder affectionately.

“Just that O.J. Simpson was allowed to stay on your window.”

“Right after the killings, every morning in fact, when we’d come to work and open up, the first thing we’d have to do is remove the knife people would tape into his hand and clean up all the ketchup they splashed against the window.”

Some of the sheriffs looked over from their table and shook their heads.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

“Well,” the waitress said, handing me a menu. “If you walked here at this hour of the night you can’t be from here. Can I get you some of our soup?”

“Sure. I came up from New York City to do a story on Buffalo and the Bills 25 years after Scott Norwood’s missed kick.”

She tensed up and more of the sheriffs looked over to see if something was wrong.

“I’ve got something I’d like you to put in your story. Do you have a notebook?”

“Yep,” I laughed nervously, bracing myself for the set up and punchline. I took out my notebook and pen. “Shoot.”

“I came to Buffalo 25 years ago from England and started a family here with my husband. I’ve worked at Danny’s the whole time. Seven years ago my daughter was hit by a tractor-trailer on Route 63 after she was studying all night for a paper. She was exhausted and stepped onto the road without looking. Lindsay died four days later from brain injuries. It was a terrible accident. I hate the man who did it but we didn’t sue him. We could have, but it was just a horrible accident. She was only 19 and a sophomore at Geneseo College.

“There is no town America that could have supported me through that unspeakable tragedy like this one right here. What this community offered my family after the worst day of our lives still makes me cry. Whatever else you find out about Buffalo, the Matthews family would appreciate if you could include that.”

“You just trivialized anything I could ever find out about Buffalo.”

“They started a benefit to help us with all the medical bills. There’s an annual run in my daughter’s name to raise money for a couple of scholarships in her name. Without this town and the girls I work with in here and everybody, I couldn’t have gotten through that. She was that special. But so are these people right here for what they did.”

I dropped the pen and fell back in my chair.

“Well? Aren’t you going to write that down in your notebook?”

“Yes. I’m just struggling to process what you’ve told me.”

“It’s easy,” she smiled, wiping the mascara from the corners of her eyes. “These are the most decent people on earth. I’ll grab you your soup.”

A couple minutes later the waitress returned with a beautiful older lady, also wearing a Bills T-shirt. Her nametag read “Linda” and she had served at Danny’s for 40 years.

“Karen told me you’re working on a story about our town and the Bills. We used to serve the Super Bowl team here all the time. Bruce Smith and his wife were always such an elegant couple. Thurman Thomas was always Karen’s favorite. But both of us adore Marv Levy.”

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

“Oh my god,” Karen gushed. “I love him. Every time he would come in with his wife they’d request us. One of the finest men you would ever meet. A true gentleman. I have goose bumps right now thinking about him. And his wife. Very fine, refined people.”

“Ralph Wilson used to come here all the time,” Linda laughed. “Always ordered—”

“—the same thing!” Karen elbowed Linda.

“Tuna Melt. We named our Tuna Melt after him, he ordered it so much.”

“I’m from England,” Karen shrugged. “I’m not even a fan of American football. But the camaraderie between those players back then was incredible. And it really infected the town. Maybe the town infected them. It’s that feeling that makes me love football here. I love all of it—except the drunks.”

“Too much alcohol. That’s the only downfall of Sundays in Buffalo. Too much drinking. They spend so much money to go to the game and I simply can’t imagine how you can enjoy anything when you’re that drunk.”

“I work doubles on Sundays here because we serve a brunch,” Karen explained. “The tailgating and everything, it’s too much. We don’t serve alcohol until noon, so if you’re here tomorrow and look out the window with O.J. Simpson smiling and see our parking lot, the drinking is beyond description.”

“It’s one of the reasons all these cops you see here? They all dine here for free. Always have. We look out for them, they look out for us. That’s another thing you can put in your notebook. It’s why our town is known as the City of Good Neighbors.”

V. Game Day

January 3, 2016: Ralph Wilson Stadium, Orchard Park New York

The next morning, before heading over to all the pre-game festivities, just for fun, I called Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada to see if Orenthal James Simpson cared to share any remembrances about his tenure with the Bills. No luck. Maybe he was sleeping in.

Outside my motel room’s front door, pigeon-shit sky above, 25 mph bone-chilling winds howling toward me through the icicles hanging off the roof, the festivities had already been going on for hours, greasy smoke from one of a dozen grills already clogging the air from roasting platters of sausages. Hundreds of people in Jets attire were already finding inventive ways to consume beer in ungodly quantities.

Making my way through the snow toward the stadium, the tribal commitment to alcohol exhibited by thousands of people huddled around bonfires and outside campers made last summer’s week-long bender during the San Fermin festival in Pamplona seem like an effete winetasting. Yet something about the good cheer and camaraderie everywhere I looked felt as if the whole morning was soundtracked by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

Seriously underdressed, I was freezing my ass off and noticed some discount, late-season Bills paraphernalia was being sold out of a tent along the side of Abbott Road—which the police had long since blocked off—so I loaded up for the afternoon at hand—gloves, hat, hoody—in full Go Bills!-carpetbagger mode. The parking lot opposite Ralph Wilson was receiving the last of a convoy of Canadian tourist buses coming in for the game. Next to a Bills school bus a handful of men were trying to knock over bowling pins with a football while others merrily played catch.

I asked someone nearby standing guard by some parked vehicles next to the tent about finding a scalper to buy tickets, and he asked if I wanted the last ticket he had available for the end zone, home of the rabid “Bill’s Mafia.” I took it, asked him a few questions, and then got to Norwood.

“You wanna hear the saddest thing about Norwood you ever heard?” he asked, shaking his head. “I was at Tampa for that Super Bowl when he missed. That was no easy kick. I know a few people who know Scott’s wife. She’s from Buffalo. After that kick he went back to Virginia to the same high school field he was first practicing on with his daddy. The both of them went out there again and in 100 kicks from the same distance he missed in Tampa, he split the uprights each and every time. That next year with the Bills, he hit a couple from over 50. Won that playoff game for us. Hell, he won us some close ones that year leading up to Tampa. Still, he could never shake missing that big one and after the Bills let him go, nobody else bothered to pick him up because of the stink on him. He was a helluva good guy. His dad died in a car wreck some years back. That musta hit him really hard.”

I roamed around the tailgaters for a couple hours reveling in the post-apocalyptic artic splendor of the parking lot. Some jokers practiced beloved WWF maneuvers, suplexing their friends into old furniture. Somebody brought out a can of gas to up the stakes of doing a somersault off the back of a truck into a table set on fire. This in turn set him on fire. Howls and laughter rang out amidst the frigid dystopian backdrop, something like Buffalo’s answer to spring break in Miami Beach.

Over at the sold out Ralph Wilson, not long after kickoff, the Bills, despite 18 players on injured reserve, got off to an early lead against the Jets with a quarterback sneak into the end zone. By the second quarter, they were up by 13 after a second rushing touchdown. The crowd was excited about denying the Jets entry to the playoffs but equally braced for the other shoe to drop.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

Then Buffalo’s kicker, Dan Carpenter, missed an extra point and moped off to the sideline only to slam his helmet with both hands against the ground. It bounced back up and ricocheted off his face. Everybody recognized the bad omen. Soon after the Jets finally scored in the second quarter, a few of their fans sitting a couple rows in front of me jumped up and roared in the direction of the Buffalo Bills marching band that was readying for their halftime show.

“Hey, Mohammad?” someone behind us chimed in. The tone was bizarrely warm and cheerful. A friend of his?

The standing Jets fans incredulously looked back in their direction.

The Jets fans weren’t white, but that was as close as I could get to their ethnicity. Most of the Bills fans in our section were clearly white. I didn’t like the looks of where this was going.

“Mohammad! Hey, you can sit down now. Sit down Mohammad. Just sit down Mohammad.”

No one joined in and no one spoke up, leaving only a strange, queasy standoff before everyone’s attention turned back to football.

After that uplifting moment in American race relations and a missed field goal by the Jets (wide right) going into halftime, New York came back in the third quarter only to have Ryan Fitzpatrick throw three heartbreaking fourth-quarter interceptions. That sealed the Bills’ 22-17 victory in the final game of their season, and sent the Jets and their fans back home where there would be no parade.

After the game, when Bills receiver Sammy Watkins, the hero of the afternoon, jumped into the loving arms of the Bills Mafia, none other than Vincent Gallo’s mother was there in the flesh to embrace him. Then she went a little further. True to form, Janet Gallo, the basis for his horrifying fictional mother in Buffalo 66, so ferociously devoted to the Bills that she famously laments ever having given birth to her son because it caused her to miss a Bills game, did not let the opportunity pass. Despite now being in her 80s, like a wolverine, she shrewdly seized the moment to peel off one of Sammy’s gloves as a souvenir.

VI. Coda

With my train leaving early the next morning, late that night I returned to Danny’s South and grabbed my last bowl of traffic cone-orange Buffalo Chicken Wing soup. Karen wasn’t working, but Linda, the 40-year veteran waitress, was just finishing her shift. I sat down at the table next to The Juice’s beaming smile frosted against the window.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

“You’re still here?” she laughed, bringing over the last of the night’s coffee.

“Leave in the morning.”

“Did you have a chance to speak to Marv Levy yet?”

“Over the phone,” I said. “Perfect gentleman, exactly like you and Karen described.”

“What about Norwood?”

“The Bills publicist said he’s not really inclined to talk much anymore.”

“You can understand why,” she smiled consolingly, grabbing a bowl of cream packets from another table and sliding it over. “But if you’re not going to talk to him, I’ll make a guilty confession.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I was working here that Super Bowl night 25 years ago. The place was packed as you could imagine. People were holding their breath when Norwood got on the field with eight seconds left. The entire staff had some money riding on it and the way our pool worked out, by the end of the game, the score being what it was, I stood to make $4,200 if Norwood missed that kick. I felt so terrible about wishing this great guy would miss and our team would lose that I had to go outside in the snow and pray. But I went out there and prayed to God, ‘Please make him miss. Please. Please. Please.’ So when I heard everyone inside gasp and that awful collective moan, I was out there doing a victory dance. I still feel terrible.”

“You kept the money?”

She laughed. “Are you kidding?”

On the second Sunday in January 1997, while his Carolina Panthers teammates bundled up to face a minus-17 wind chill in the NFC Championship in Green Bay, defensive end Shawn King turned on a television set at a rehab facility in Charlotte. He was a force of a man, 6′3 and 290 pounds, and one season earlier he was the 36th pick in the NFL Draft.

His weakness was marijuana.

He failed a drug test within a day of signing his rookie contract in 1995 and landed in the NFL’s substance abuse program. He was forced to take regular drug tests, and he took them honestly until he devised a plan to beat the system. Throughout his rookie year, King stayed sober and filled empty Gatorade jugs with clean urine and stacked them in his garage. That offseason, he started slipping clean samples into the cups when the test administrators weren’t looking. The strategy, gross as it was, worked beautifully for most of the 1996 season. But few acts of mischief ever go unnoticed. Most of the season, the test administrator was a guy who “didn't bother to even look your way once I got the cup,” King says. “He would start filling out labels for the samples and getting ready to get out of there.” But near the end of the year, King ran into a test administrator who wouldn’t look the other way. “He wanted to see you pee in the cup, no ifs, ands, or buts.” He had to take the test legitimately, and when the results came back, he got caught.

Photo: Erik Perel /Allsport

The Panthers were enjoying a dream 12-4 season in their second year of existence. They didn’t need this kind of distraction from a backup defensive lineman. They gave King a choice: He could go to rehab and get clean, or he’d be kicked off the team. They told a different story in public, though. Dom Capers, coach of the year that season, said King was being suspended for being tardy tor workouts and missing weightlifting sessions.

The explanation made the team look great in the eyes of the national media, especially when you compared the Panthers to the Cowboys, their opponent in the NFC Divisional Round. The defending world champions from Dallas had gone through controversy after controversy that season, from future Hall of Fame receiver Michael Irvin’s suspension for cocaine possession to a young woman’s allegations that offensive lineman Erik Williams raped her. The franchise known as “America’s Team” was instead becoming a symbol of everything that was wrong with undisciplined athletes in America in the 1990s, an era when things like gangsta rap and grunge music were also being held up as symbols of what was wrong with America. There were lots of things going wrong with America in the mid-1990s, apparently. But the Panthers? Buddy, they’d boot you for being late to a meeting.

Carolina beat Dallas 26-17 on a sunny, 65-degree January Sunday in North Carolina in that Divisional game. Good beat evil. Discipline beat lawlessness. And Shawn King went to rehab the next week.

He had plenty of time to think there, and he didn’t come up with anything good. He believed, wholeheartedly, that using marijuana wasn’t worth the punishment he received. He’d smoked since he was 14 years old, but he turned down other drugs because he didn’t think they were safe. Weed, though? Hell, that should be legal anyway, he’d tell people. But now it was costing him a chance to participate in some of the biggest moments in an athlete’s life.

He’d watched his teammates win one playoff game without him already. He didn’t know if he could handle another. Within a few hours of entering rehab the week after the Dallas game, he made a deal with himself: If the Panthers lost in the conference championship, he’d finish his stay in the facility. If they won, though, if they somehow knocked off the Packers in that miserably cold bowl of twirling yellow towels and pompoms on his television, if they took a trip to the Super Bowl without him, Shawn King was going to kill himself.

“Tonight is going to be a bad night for the devil in Charlotte, North Carolina!” the bodybuilder on stage shouts. It’s a Sunday night in mid-November at The Praising Place Church of God in east Charlotte. All 200 or so seats are full for tonight’s show of the John Jacobs Next Generation Power Force team.

Jacobs is the man on stage. He’s friends with Chuck Norris. In fact, one of Jacobs’ most impressive claims is that Norris saw one single Power Force performance and accepted Christ right there and then. Jacobs is an evangelist who’s been taking teams of strong men around the country for a quarter-century or so, using them to break boards over their heads and rip phone books in half and chew through license plates, all in the name of God. The idea is to give people a show in hopes that they’ll see His power and accept God into their hearts. And maybe give a few donations to the church and the Power Force.

The team also spends quite a bit of time in schools, delivering a message that focuses more on motivation than religion. In any setting, Jacobs’ team was huge in the 1980s and 1990s, riding a post-Reagan tide of evangelical fervor to sell out arenas around the country. The crowds have dwindled, but the sanctuary is passionate tonight. Many people in the church are wearing Panthers shirts and jerseys, celebrating the team’s victory over the Tennessee Titans earlier in the day, a win that pushed them to 9-0.

The church’s senior pastor is wearing a jean jacket and stonewashed jeans and a T-shirt. He opens the service by telling the attendees that it’s ok to dance and scream and holler tonight. “When I move my feet, when I open my mouth, then the darkness flees,” he shouts. He says that Jacobs’ Power Force has helped 1 million people become accepted by the Lord. “The kingdom of God is expanding,” the senior pastor says.

Jacobs, now 56, limps on stage on shaky knees and delivers the line about it being a bad night for the devil here. Then he asks the attendees a question typical of a preacher, a question that at once empowers people to have their own answer yet leads them all to have the same answer, the only answer: “If God is for you, who can be against you?”

He introduces tonight’s two Power Force team members. He says they’re brothers who were born and raised in Louisiana. The Monday Night Football theme song begins to play in the background. One of tonight’s strongmen played briefly in the Chicago Bears organization. His name is Jerome King, and he’s going to chew through a phone book for them, among other things, praise Jesus. And the other played for the Carolina Panthers. His name is Shawn King.

Was it selfish of King to wish for his teammates to lose that day? Was it weak? Do you think he brought it on himself?

Nineteen winters later, tears spill down King’s cheeks as he remembers what happened while he watched that NFC title game from rehab.

Photo: Michael Hebert/Getty Images

His mentor, undersized linebacker Sam Mills, intercepted Brett Favre in the first quarter and returned the ball to the 3-yard line. Then Kerry Collins hit Howard Griffith for a touchdown. The Panthers, a 12-point underdog, were winning 7-0. The Packers came back with a Favre touchdown, but then Carolina’s John Kasay kicked a field goal. King’s teammates had not only scored first in the game, they’d responded to the Packers’ points, too.

This is one of those “Where were you when …” moments for Panthers fans.

King was in rehab, weighing his suicide options.

“I remember sitting in that room and thinking, ‘This is it. This is it,’” he recalls recently at a restaurant in Charlotte. He bites down on his napkin before continuing. “I was such a coward, I didn’t want to cause any pain to myself. I worried that if I did it with a gun, I would just mess myself up. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I just knew that if they went to the Super Bowl, I didn’t want to be here.”

Thank God for Brett Favre and Chris Jacke.

Favre pumped a 6-yard touchdown to Antonio Freeman to make it 14-10 in the second quarter, and the Packers kept going from there. Jacke added three field goals and an extra point the rest of the way, giving the Packers a 30-13 win.

“I don’t know if I was happy; I don’t really know what I was feeling,” King says. “But I was so glad they didn’t win that game. I wouldn’t still be here if they had.”

Where do you find happiness? Where do you find peace? A child? A God? A drug? A sport? Better yet, if you’ve found happiness and peace at all, does it matter where you found them?

Shawn King trots onto the stage at the Praising Place wearing a tank-top and a weightlifting belt. He’s still ripped, and even at more than 280 pounds he has a V-shaped upper body that many men of 43 could only wish for. He smiles at the crowd. After he and his brother perform a few smaller feats — little stuff like bending a metal rod over his head — he takes an HDX carpenter’s hammer and announces that he’ll break the fiberglass shaft over his leg. He grabs the head of the hammer with his left hand and the handle with his right. He presses it against his thigh. He knows exactly where the breaking point is, but even now, after a decade with the Power Force, it takes him a few minutes. He starts sweating. He pauses, straightens up, and sucks in a breath.

As he makes one more attempt, Jacobs speaks into the mic.

“It is so hard to snap a hammer,” Jacobs tells the congregation of Christians. “I want to dedicate this to anyone who’s going through a tough time. I want this to represent heaven being there for you.”

Everybody stands and cheers for King. The steady beat of the club music and the hands waving and shouting at a muscular man on stage makes this seem, at times, like a scene from a bachelorette party.

Finally, the hammer snaps. The congregation high-fives and points at King to tell him he’s amazing. He points to the sky, then takes the microphone to tell his story.

When he was a young boy, King would wake up on weekday mornings and walk to school in West Monroe, Louisiana. Before he left the house, he’d step into his parents’ bedroom to say goodbye to his father. The old man always watched television from a burgundy-upholstered recliner that sat next to his bed. He’d raise a coffee mug to his boy and tell him to have a good day.

The mug was filled with Seagram’s Seven.

Dad didn’t think his son knew. His son knew.

When King came home from school, he’d hear the results of his dad’s day of drinking. He’d sit in his room and listen to his mother “screaming for her life,” as her husband beat her. Then King and his little brother, Jerome, would take their beatings.

He thought this was normal. In fact, he thought he was lucky. Most of his friends were poor. He grew up in a single-story house on an oak-tree-lined street right near the high school. His mother worked for State Farm. His father somehow held a job with the power company despite being an alcoholic. They were middle class. They had a pool table.

“I grew up around a lot of kids who didn’t have their mom and dad,” King says. “I knew how fortunate I was. I just thought this was the stuff you had to go through to be fortunate. I thought it was normal to watch your dad beat on your mom.”

When King was 11, his father was working on a power pole when a live line crashed down on him. It sent a shock through his left arm and out through his leg. King’s father lost his left arm that day, and he still doesn’t wear shorts because of the way his calf muscle looks after the shock blew it out.

King wasn’t a perfect kid anyway. He remembers his first crime was stealing plums off of neighbors’ trees. Looking back now, the reformed man of God sees the plums as a sign of bad things to come. As he became bulkier and taller, shooting from 5-feet to 6-feet and more, the misdeeds grew.

He graduated from West Monroe High in the same class as Willie Robertson, the star of Duck Dynasty. (King still talks to Robertson every few months or so. “Willie’s the same as he was, man. He just didn’t have that beard back then.”)

Photo: Mike Windle/Getty Images for dcp

“Willie’s the same as he was, man. He just didn’t have that beard back then.”

Playing in a stadium where a water tower with “West Monroe” painted on it overlooks the field, King starred on the football team as a tight end. LSU recruited him. A college freshman basketball player named Shaquille O’Neal showed King around campus on his recruiting visit. He signed early and enrolled early, during what would’ve been the second half of his senior year of high school.

He was a 17-year-old boy and out with football players at a place called the Gator Bar in Baton Rouge when he laid the foundation for a reputation that would follow him for years. He was drinking. The football players were making fun of him for being a kid. He drank more to show them he was a man. He picked up a pack of matches and lit one after the other, flicking them at the bar. A bouncer took the matches away. King was within arm’s reach of a big bowl full of other matchbooks. “But I wanted my matches,” he remembers. He punched the bouncer. Fights broke out all over the bar.

That was the first time King went to jail.

A few weeks later, at the Louisiana state high school all-star game, King decided he was too much of an adult for things like high school curfews. After all, he already had college girlfriends. He went wandering the halls of a dormitory the night before the game. He grabbed a fire extinguisher, shoved the hose under the door of another player’s room, and unloaded it.

He got kicked out of the all-star game for that one. The next day, his father showed up holding a lawn chair, ready to watch his son’s crowning high school athletics achievement. King walked up to him in street clothes. His father asked him what the hell was wrong with him.

“All I knew,” King says now, “was that I was big enough that he couldn’t whip me anymore.”

Have you heard the one about Shawn King punching Shaquille O’Neal?

King and Shaq were friends when he got to college in 1990, King says, “but it didn’t take long for me to notice that me and him liked the same girls.”

By the fall of 1991, most of the reasons King came to LSU were gone. He’d moved from tight end to linebacker as a freshman. He played a few games. Then, after the season, the coach who’d recruited him, Mike Archer, was fired. Archer and his assistants had promised to be like fathers to King. “And just like that they were gone,” King says now. Curley Hallman took over the LSU job before the 1991 season. Hallman and King never got along. By November of that year, King had stopped going to class completely, hoping to fail out so he could transfer elsewhere.

Photo: LSU/Collegiate Images/Getty Images

Someone spread a rumor to Shaq that King wanted to fight him

Nothing in college is more important than relationship status, and what transpired that November sounds like something out of a teen movie. Here goes: King started to hang out with a young woman. Shaq liked her, too. Already on his way to being the biggest star in the history of the campus, Shaq told the young woman he wasn’t happy that she was spending time with King instead of him. Here’s how King remembers it: “She told me that Shaq said he feels ugly because she wanted to talk to me and didn’t talk to him.”

The drama continued. Someone spread a rumor to Shaq that King wanted to fight him for trying to steal the young woman away from him. One night in the fall of 1991, O’Neal walked across campus and into King’s dormitory looking for him. To this day, King believes they would’ve just talked it out. But Shaq went one floor too high. He knocked on a door. It wasn’t King’s room, but that of Anthony Marshall, a football player who would go on to play for the Bears. Marshall didn’t care for Shaq. Someone swung. The other swung back. Within seconds, all the big young men in the residence hall — football players and basketball players — were racing to the room.

Stories form crooked branches in cases like this one. Truth fades into the memories of people who have slanted views. It’s hard to tell what actually happened that night. But what King remembers — after about a quarter-century that included a lot of pot and hard football hits and many broken hammers in the name of God — is seeing one of Shaq’s friends, a basketball player named Clarence Ceasar, running down the hallway. King didn’t like Ceasar, not one bit. In fact King believed Ceasar was the one who spread the rumor that he wanted to fight Shaq in the first place.

King grabbed Ceasar. He beat him pretty good. King was one of four football players arrested that night. No basketball players went to jail. But Hallman and LSU basketball coach Dale Brown got into a shouting match in the hallway. Brown stepped into Hallman’s face and said, “Listen, rookie…” according to a 1994 story published in Sports Illustrated.

Years later, LSU fan message boards still spread rumors from the fight. In one thread from 2008, a poster said King “pulled Shaq’s shirt over his head and beat the tar out of him.”

King says that never happened. But his LSU career was over before the following fall.

The robbery was supposed to be simple. This was after King transferred to Louisiana-Monroe for his junior season. When he arrived, he couldn’t believe how loose the rules were. No curfews. Nobody telling him he couldn’t have women in his dorm room. With all this partying to do, he needed money.

One day he hopped into the driver’s seat of his white Chevrolet Chevette. His friend Lawrence Davis took the passenger’s seat. King handed Davis his .380 pistol. The plan was to have Davis run into the house where known bookies lived, rob the bookies, then run out, and they’d drive off in the Chevette.

The plan worked, right up until Davis opened the door to the house. A few minutes later King saw Davis sprinting out with two people chasing him. King drove the car toward him and pushed open the passenger’s side door. He yelled for his friend to hop in. But Davis looked at him and ran the other way. King couldn’t understand it. He inched forward and watched his friend stop running, watched him put his hands on his knees to try to catch his breath, and watched the men catch him and grab him. They called the cops and King drove off. A few days later, Davis was out on bond when King saw him again. King asked him why he didn’t get in the car.

“I didn’t want to get you in trouble,” Davis said.

Who’s helped you get to where you are? Has anyone ever sacrificed something to allow you have the life you have now? Who didn’t run to your passenger’s side door?

King believes his friend saved his future that day. Davis served 12 years in jail for armed robbery. He died three years ago at 40 years old from an overdose. King, meanwhile, turned his attention to football, and by the end of his senior year, he was projected as a fourth- or fifth-round pick. He was just the fourth Louisiana-Monroe player chosen to play in the Senior Bowl, and after the game experts had him going as high as the first round in the 1995 draft.

That spring, Warren Sapp from the University of Miami was the top defensive line prospect. But Sapp failed a drug test at the NFL combine, sending him down on everybody’s list. He landed 12th overall. Four other defensive linemen went off the board before King was selected with the fourth pick of the second round, 36th overall, by the expansion Carolina Panthers. For all of his transgressions before and after, this will always be true: Shawn King was the first rookie defensive lineman the Panthers ever drafted.

He didn’t know how to write a check when he signed his rookie contract of $750,000 a year, but he knew how to roll a joint. His friends warned him not to smoke before he reported to training camp, but if you’re a guy who’s already escaped an abusive father, survived being run out of your first college, and avoided being arrested in an armed robbery, you start to think you can get away with things.

King lit up the day before his drug test. He took something to cover it up. He doesn’t remember what it was; he’s taken a great many things to cover up marijuana in his life. Either way, it didn’t work. He was placed in the NFL’s drug treatment program before he played a game. At the time the first offense didn’t come with a press release or a public statement. In fact, King’s only penalty was that he was stripped of four game checks.

He bought a house on a lake just over the South Carolina line, not far from Charlotte. It became a party house. Friends came to visit. An old buddy from Louisiana, Rodney Harris, flew up to stay with him. One night, King gave Harris money to go to a strip club. On his way home, Harris was a mile away from the lake house when he ran off the road and hit a tree and died.

One friend in jail and one friend dead, King became a homebody. He wished for the days when he could smoke weed in his house without worrying about tests or suspensions. Throughout his rookie year, he saved clean piss in bottles in his garage, planning for his future.

That offseason, he took up smoking again. Every time he took a mandatory test, he snuck in a cup of the stuff he’d been saving in his garage. He did this into the 1996 season. The Panthers were one of the big stories in the NFL that year. They caught fire late and ran to the NFC West division title. King made a few big plays along the way, including a 12-yard touchdown after a fumble recovery in a shutout victory over Tampa Bay in Week 14. It was part of the Panthers’ season-ending, seven-game winning streak, earning them a 12-4 record and a bye in the playoffs.

After the last game, King showed up for another drug test with a sample of urine he’d saved from the year before. Once again, the enforcement officer that day watched him closely. King was unable to use the clean urine, and had to take the test.

When he learned he would be suspended, he was embarrassed. Then he was mad. As far as he was concerned, most of the league was smoking, and he was paying a price while they were having fun. The NFL’s relationship with drugs at the time was strained, though. In March of that year, Cowboys receiver Michael Irvin had been arrested for cocaine possession. He didn’t fail a drug test, but the league suspended him for five games. In fact, according to the book The Year of the Cat, by Scott Fowler and Charles Chandler, at the end of the 1996 season, six of the most recent 19 players who’d been busted for drugs were Cowboys.

King would’ve been known as the 20th player, but he says the Panthers told him to remain quiet until the investigation was done. They gave him the ultimatum about going to rehab.

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have now passed laws to legalize marijuana in some form, but in the mid-1990s, drugs were drugs, and in NFL terms, marijuana was the same evil as cocaine or heroin.

The difference, though, is that marijuana is easier to detect. King watched several players in the drug program switch to harder drugs that were less likely to show up on tests. That’s right, better to snort coke or shoot heroin or pound a couple 40s and test clean than take a toke and test positive. King was terrified of cocaine. He’s had asthma all his life, and he was just a teen when Maryland basketball player Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose after being taken No. 2 overall in the 1986 NBA draft. He was certain that if he tried cocaine, he’d die after snorting the first line.

Aside from one brush with ecstasy in the late 1990s, King stayed monogamous with marijuana.

“The program either pushes you to drink or to do a drug like cocaine that will get out of your system in 2-3 days,” King says. “I went in with a lot of guys who were in for marijuana, and they came out addicted to cocaine.”

He was suspended for the first six games in the 1997 season. He played the rest of the year. In the preseason in 1998, he says he tore a biceps muscle trying to tackle Jaguars running back Fred Taylor. Other reports have him failing another test. Either way, he missed the whole year. The Colts took him in 1999, and he missed four games because he was late to meetings. Then he failed one more test, and the league put him out for the entire 2000 season.

Tired of the embarrassment, he retired. In six years as an NFL player, he played in only 48 games. Depending on whether you believe the 1998 season was lost due to injury or drugs, he was suspended for either 26 games or 42. Either way, he missed nearly half his career.

That should be the low point, right? Bring on redemption! you might think.

But wait.

When he’s preaching in front of a church group, King slides all of that — LSU and the Panthers and the Colts and the suspensions — into a folder of “troubles.” Or, “I went through some stuff.” He hardly goes into detail at all. He defines those days, though, as the time in his life when he didn’t know God.

One day when he was 17, he tells the wide-eyed church crowd that night in November, a preacher at his Southern Baptist church in West Monroe was talking about heaven and hell and pointed at King and told him he wasn’t holy enough. “These are the words I heard come out of his mouth: You are not good enough for God,” King preaches. “So at 17 years old, I made a decision never to go back to church again.”

The fight with the bouncer over matches? Busting up Clarence Ceasar and getting kicked out of LSU? Driving the getaway car at an armed robbery?

Logan Cyrus / logancyrus.com

“I went through some stuff”

“I had a lot of anger issues,” he preaches. “But when I got to LSU … I knew the anger was out of control because any time I was out with my friends, if anybody pushed the wrong button, I was willing to give up everything I’d worked for and everything I’d dreamed about.”

Stories are kind of like drugs — the narrator is the user, and the more you mess with them, the more they affect your memory. King has told the sanitized version of his story so many times, he’d forgotten many of the details until we talked about them this fall.

The turning-point event in King’s life, though, remains the same every time he tells it.

Jordan King was born two months early in November 2000. Shawn King was at the end of his final year-long suspension in the NFL. After a few weeks in an incubator, the baby came home with his dad and mom to their house in West Monroe. King realized then that football didn’t matter all that much to him — a realization many people around him came to years earlier — and he decided to stay home.

When Jordan was 2 years old, he was lying in bed with his father and breathing hard. King thought it was just a cold. Then Jordan crawled up to his father’s shoulder with tears in his eyes. King took him to the hospital. Doctors said Jordan’s lungs were underdeveloped and that he’d have to stay a few nights. King went home to get clothes for the stay. When he was there, doctors called to say Jordan had gone into cardiac arrest.

King ran back to the hospital, where doctors had stabilized his boy. Soon they told him they’d have to medevac Jordan to another hospital that could better serve him. The hospital was three hours away by car. The helicopter took Jordan, and King went home to pack more clothes. He was digging through his closet, throwing shirts and shoes and cash into the bag, when he made another deal with himself.

“I remember looking up in that closet and turning to a God I didn’t know and saying, ‘This is all I can bear. If he goes, I go. I’m not going to stay here.’”

He drove through the night. When he got to the hospital, doctors met him at the door and told him his boy would survive. They wound up staying in that hospital for four months, and at some point, King decided that the conversation with God in the closet should keep going. Soon he was saved. A few years later, he was on Jacobs’ Power Force team.

As King wraps up the story and sermon at The Praising Place, the congregation shouts “Amen!” back to him. His last words are, “Thank you, God.”

Then he grabs two axes and holds them high above his head. The trick is that he will hold them by the handle and use his wrists and forearms and triceps to tilt the blades toward his face, then back up, over and over. After 10 reps, he starts to groan. After 20, his massive arms start to tremble. He’ll do it 37 times.

The first words spoken on stage after King says, “Thank you, God,” are these, from Jacobs: “If he has one slip, these axes could go plunging through his eye socket.”

One last feat of strength for the night.

It involves handcuffs.

Shawn King walks off stage with his arm around a police officer and opens a door to a hallway that leads to the church offices. The officer, who says he has 27 years of experience in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, was selected from the crowd to help with this trick, because who better to handcuff a man than the law?

In the back, King wraps duct tape around his wrists, and the officer locks him in on the third click of the handcuffs. Click. Click. Click. The officer opens the door and leads King into the church. The congregation rises to its feet. The dance-style music blares. They clap and shout, in rhythm with the beat, Go! Go! Go!

King’s brother, Jerome, shouts, “Break the chains, Shawn! Break the chains, Shawn!”

King grimaces. Veins show like rivers on his bald head. More clapping with the music. More grimacing. More veins.

“Don’t ever give up on Shawn King,” Jerome tells the crowd. “He’ll never give up on you.”

A man in the front row with a bright yellow shirt whips out his cell phone to record the spectacle with his left hand, while pumping his right fist like he’s in an old episode of The Arsenio Hall Show. Jacobs sits in a chair watching. King lets out a deep roar.

The chain snaps. Jerome throws a towel on his brother’s head to wipe the sweat.

The congregation rejoices, hooting and hollering and acting a little crazy. After a few seconds of this, Jerome interrupts and snaps them straight, back to the normal and quiet and virtuous churchgoers they are:

“Bow your heads with me now.”

There’s no trick to this, King insists. It’s not magic. It’s not even the power of God. It’s something more simple: growth.

“Once you’ve broken something once,” he says, “you understand how much pressure you need to put on it to break it without hurting yourself.”

Here’s Shawn King — 43-year-old man of the Lord, survivor of depression and suicidal thoughts, former NFL defensive lineman, fan of marijuana, breaker of chains. Father.

He lives in a brick ranch house on Sharon Amity Road in Charlotte, not far from the main intersection in one of the few middle-class neighborhoods remaining near the center of one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. He’s divorced now, but his ex-wife lives just a few miles away. They’re both raising Jordan, a shy 15-year-old who plays for the Myers Park High School varsity football team. King is an assistant coach for the team, of sorts. He doesn’t call plays or do film sessions, and he doesn’t always make it to the start of practice. But whenever he’s there, he’s the most positive person on the coaching staff, just a big man in a visor and sunglasses, walking the sideline offering encouragement to anybody he can find, coaches or players or cheerleaders or parents or whoever.

Logan Cyrus / logancyrus.com

He never scowls, just smile after smile after smile. Watching him console and celebrate the kids on the team, it’s hard to picture him as the young man with anger problems who pulled Shaq’s shirt over his head and beat the tar out of him — that’s how that story went, right? Or a young man who was going to kill himself if his team made it to the Super Bowl without him.

His number 96 Panthers jersey hangs in a frame on his living room wall. On an afternoon in late December, the Discovery Channel is on the television. A stick of incense is burning in a wooden holder that’s sitting on the hardwood floor. King has just finished raking the yard and filling nine bags with leaves.

“Yeah, man, and Jordan didn’t help me with a single one,” King says, waving his hand at his son. “He just stayed back there playin’ his video games.”

“Man, I was sleepin’,” Jordan says. “Had a long day.”

Today was the last day of school before the Christmas holiday break. “Man, you didn’t even have a full day,” King says, laughing at the next generation of him.

King moved here from Louisiana two years ago to be closer to Jordan, who was living in Charlotte his mother. King is one of several former NFL players who settled in the city to raise children — others include Randy Moss, Dre Bly, and London Fletcher.

King joined a group of plaintiffs in a recent class action lawsuit against the NFL, claiming he suffered mental and physical problems from concussions suffered while in the league. He is still waiting to be tested to see if he has football-related neurological issues. He saw the movie Concussion over the holidays. The most unnerving parts, he says, were the scenes of the former players switching from happy to depressed, almost without warning.

“I’m in pretty good place now,” he says. “That really scared me, man.”

Logan Cyrus / logancyrus.com

Here’s how good a place that is: Sixteen years after that January Sunday when he sat in rehab and vowed to kill himself if his Carolina teammates made it to the Super Bowl, King says he can’t wait to root for this year’s Panthers in Super Bowl 50 this weekend. In fact, he has a Power Force program that morning in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and he plans to hustle back to Charlotte — about a six-hour drive — to watch the game with a few old teammates.

King didn’t watch football for three or four years after he quit, but during that time when he found God, he says he realized he brought most of his problems on himself. “Hate the sin, not the sinner,” he says now.

King’s mother died eight years ago. But just before that, his father got saved and sober. Now the two men talk three or four days a week.

Mostly, though, his life is about the Power Force and Jordan. They grab pizza at the Pizza Peel restaurant near their house so often that the father says they ought to buy stock in the place. King also has a daughter, Rudy, who lives in Alabama. Rudy is the half-sister of Jordan. Her other half-brother, born to a father other than King, is Cam Robinson, an offensive lineman at Alabama.

“They’re the reason I live,” King says of Jordan and Rudy. “I did Shawn King a long time ago. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

King rises up from his couch and picks up the burned-out incense stick and drops it on the end table. He slides the wooden holder behind his framed diploma from Louisiana-Monroe. Although he says his views on marijuana haven’t changed, he won’t admit to smoking. He gives too many speeches to too many kids around the country with the Power Force, he says, to be known as a marijuana user. He worries it would be a distraction from his message, which is that everybody can make his own choices.

Looking at the person he is now, though — the man with the big voice and the beard shouting words of encouragement on the sidelines to kids, the man who makes congregations around the country stand and shout, “Amen!” the man laughing with his sniffling, sleeping, video-game-playing teenage son on a relaxed Friday afternoon just before Christmas — who cares what it is that’s making him content? Whether you think watching strong men break hammers over their knees is a sign of God or a silly sideshow or even just a trick to get you to tithe, whether you believe in the story of Jesus or don’t, whether you’re in favor of legalizing marijuana or not, whether you have kids or never will, here is a former defensive lineman who has twice thought about committing suicide, and he’s now free of chains and happy as hell.

Who are we to be the judge?

Logan Cyrus / logancyrus.com

Carrie Molnar leans forward on the bleachers in the gym at West Holmes High School in Millersburg, Ohio. The manicured nails of her right hand dig into her cheek as she stares at the court, watching her daughter Natalie, a senior, play.

“Oh boy,” she says. “Oh boy. This is way too close.”

It’s early December, and the Knights of West Holmes County are playing the Hiland Hawks of Berlin, in East Holmes. They’re playing in a gym that West Holmes calls “The Dungeon.” Everyone here has already walked through a lobby that features a huge rock with an embedded sword — a replica of Excalibur — and through a doorway to the gym designed to look like it will deposit you into the type of room that holds people against their will. But once you get through, you’re in a 15-year-old gymnasium, a hotbed that seats 3,000 people.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Holmes County, Ohio, is home to the world’s largest Amish settlement, bigger even than that of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Columbus and Cleveland and Pittsburgh are all about the same distance away — too far. There are no movie theaters in the county. The nearest mall is 30 miles away in New Philadelphia and takes about 45 minutes to get there — if you’re driving a car, and this being Amish country, many people neither drive cars nor go to the movies.

It’s also home to just two high schools, two schools with the most storied girls’ basketball programs in the state.

Combine the two schools’ records (Hiland started playing girls’ basketball in 1968, West Holmes in 1975), and you get a remarkable 1,517 wins versus 466 losses, a .765 winning percentage over more than 40 years of basketball. Hiland hasn’t had a losing season since they went 10-11 in 1983-84. West Holmes last losing season was in 1998-99.

Ohio first held a girls’ basketball tournament in 1976 and since then, the two schools have combined for 21 trips to the Final Four of their division, 15 championship game appearances and eight state championships. Hiland won three state championships over the course of four years, from 2005-08. In the 1980s, West Holmes won three state championships, and, in the last four seasons, it’s made the finals three times and won once.

When these two teams play, the game brings out the type of crowd you don’t normally see at a high school girls’ basketball game. It’s the type of game that can fill The Dungeon.

Despite their difference in size — Hiland (Division IV) is one of the smaller schools in the state with just about 400 students in grades 7-12, while West Holmes (Division II), has double that in just grades 9-12 — they play each other just once every year. It’s a game nearly everyone in the county looks forward to. Over the previous 10 years, the series is tied at 5-5. Every year, the game is ridiculously tense. Every year, the game seemingly comes down to the final moments.

This game is shaping up to be no different. On the court, the defense is relentless. Both teams are having trouble making shots, because every shot is contested. Indeed, at the start neither team scored for the first several minutes in the game, until Hiland’s Kennedy Schlabach hit a three with a hand in her face. West Holmes responded as the first quarter grinded on, with two three-pointers by Kacie Leppla. But other shots just weren’t falling, and defenders, emboldened by the fact the referees were not blowing their whistles, got just a little closer to the offensive player they were matched up against.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

In the stands, the fans are also tense. Hiland brought a large group, including about 50 students. Dressed all in white, they stood up at the tip and haven’t sat down since. They’ve been loud, and the West Holmes fans, dressed all in blue behind the team bench, have responded in kind.

“Oh boy,” Molnar says after a West Holmes player misses a free throw. “It’s much easier playing than watching.”

Holmes County is a place where half the farmers still till their land the way many of our ancestors did more than 100 years ago. It’s a county that has tiny villages — Charm, Walnut Creek, Winesburg — where you are more likely to see horse and buggies than cars. Here, in Holmes County, history is not just a thing to know to avoid repeating. History must be known, so it can be repeated. So it can be replicated, because what happened in the past is what was good and what was right.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Above: Mark Losinger

And in that way, in a world where everything is so focused on the present and the future, on technology and ways we can always make things better, many of the people in Holmes County, even those who no longer strictly adhere to their Amish heritage, think otherwise.

“It’s different here,” says Mark Lonsinger of the Voice of Holmes County, a Millersburg-based website that offers all kinds of media content covering the county, including live-streams of West Holmes and Hiland basketball games, both boys and girls.

Lonsinger, who lives in Coshocton County, which is just to the south of Holmes, has been calling basketball games on the radio and the web since the late 1970s. And while none of the girls (or boys, for that matter) who play basketball in Holmes County are Amish — the Amish drop out of public schools by middle school, if they go to public school at all — daily life is different from other places.

“There’s a work ethic, there’s a family life, there’s a community life that is a throwback to the way it used to be in this country,” he says. “Is it all perfect? No. But I’m just saying it’s a different type of raising that the kids get, a different type of community structure than what exists in a lot of places today.”

Take, for instance, Dave Schlabach, the head coach of the Hiland Hawks. He graduated from Hiland in 1984. He’s now been coaching the girls’ team since the 1991-92 season. In all that time, he’s had two players who came from families where the parents were divorced. Two. Out of more than 100 players. The divorce rate in the United States ranges between 40 and 50 percent. For the parents of Schlabach’s players, it’s less than 2 percent.

“High school is challenging enough,” Schlabach says. “This place makes it a little easier, but that’s also why I have to build some toughness too.”

Lisa Patterson, the head coach at West Holmes, graduated from that school in 1988. She played on a championship team, and now coaches the daughters of the girls who were once teammates.

Both Schlabach and Patterson moved back to Holmes County after going to college because that’s what, ultimately, people from Holmes County generally do. Because they like it. And neither coach has ever thought about coaching another team anywhere else.

These are the things that make Holmes County a different kind of place. And maybe it’s that strict adherence to what has happened in the past, or maybe it’s something different. But Lonsinger thinks the past holds the key, especially for the basketball programs.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Indeed, anywhere you go in the county, there are people who are willing to talk about girls’ basketball like they talk about the Packers in Green Bay or the Red Sox in Boston. Invariably, the talk drifts to two coaches — one long-ago retired and moved away and the other dead far too young. Both men are still equally present in their communities. Both are spoken of in reverence. Both have taken on a mythical quality that almost makes one wonder if what they accomplished was real.

Make no mistake. It was real, and that’s one of the things that make these programs so storied. Because it’s the stories each community shares that brings them both together.

Carrie Molnar wasn’t always Carrie Molnar. She was once Carrie Wells. Carrie Molnar is just as tiny as Carrie Wells was, and she still has the same short hair that didn’t need to be put into a ponytail when she played. But now, instead of being down on the court — at the real “Dungeon,” which now is the gym at the middle school — she sits in the stands and remembers what it was like to play while she watches her daughter do what she did so long ago.

Carrie was a scrappy defensive specialist for West Holmes, the type of player who head coach Jack Van Reeth put on the opposing team’s point guard, so she could press all the way down the court, swatting away the ball from the opponent when she had just the tiniest opening.

It was the late fall of 1983, and Van Reeth was a new coach for the girls’ team, although he wasn’t new to West Holmes.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Van Reeth, also the assistant principal, had been coaching the West Holmes boys’ basketball team for nearly a decade. He was known for always dressing with a shirt and tie, for standing on the sidelines with his arms folded, and stomping his feet whenever he wasn’t happy, which was most of the time. He would shout at the referees and growl at his players.

In the 1960s, he’d even coached a team of boys from Dresden to a state title. Before the 1983-84 season, though, several people came to Van Reeth and asked him to switch over to the girls’ team.

One of those men was Herm Cline, the father of a girl named Lisa. Lisa was a junior, and, as far as everyone in Holmes County was concerned, about to change girls’ basketball.

Van Reeth said no.

“I’m too outgoing,” he told Herm Cline. But by outgoing, he didn’t mean welcoming.  He meant just the opposite. He meant too loud, too hard on players, too tough, no nonsense. “They’ll never play for me,” he said.

“Let’s give it a try,” Herm told Van Reeth.

Van Reeth relented. He went to the girls on the team, which included Carrie Wells and Shane Ridenbaugh. Along with Lisa Cline, those three juniors would make up the core of the team — Cline the unstoppable scorer, Ridenbaugh the rugged rebounder and Wells the relentless, always-pesky defender.

“I’ve coached one way for 25 years,” Van Reeth told the girls. “I’m not going to change. You’re going to change.”

While this coaching philosophy might not cut it today, it worked back then. Each girl on an already good team got better. The Knights, coached by a man who coached girls like they were boys, went 28-0. In the championship game, a game played against conference rival Orrville (the home of Bobby Knight), Carrie was guarding the Red Riders’ point guard in overtime. In the final minute, she knocked the ball away and went diving for it, colliding with Lisa Cline who was also going after the loose ball. West Holmes got possession, Cline hit a layup and the Knights won by a single point, taking their first state championship.

They were just getting started.

The next season, the Knights of West Holmes would also go 28-0. In January 1985 against Akron Coventry, Lisa Cline scored 76 points, breaking the state record of 74, set three years before. That is still the record in Ohio, and nobody has really even come near it.

“Jack knew she was getting close,” Molnar says.

“Get her the ball,” Van Reeth told the girls in timeout huddles. “Hells bells, girls. Get her the ball!”

“We wanted her to get the record,” Molnar says, “because we wanted to be a part of that, too.”

With 56 straight wins, everyone thought the streak would end sometime the next season. Cline graduated as the third all-time leading scorer in Ohio and the record-holder for points in a season. She went on to Ohio State, where she played for four years and was named the Big Ten Freshman of the Year and later the Big Ten Player of the Year, leading the Buckeyes to three Big Ten championships. Ridenbaugh, the team’s leading rebounder, went to Ohio State where she was Lisa Cline’s roommate. Molnar graduated and played at Capital in Columbus.

They weren’t supposed to keep winning, and yet they kept winning. Even as the lineup changed, the approach and the results, did not. Another 28-0 record in the 1985-86 season. Another championship.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

It wasn’t until the team’s 23^rd game of the 1986-87 season that the streak came to an end, at the hands of Wellsville in a regional final game played at Muskingum College.

The team had won 108 straight games, still the record in Ohio. One girl who played on the third championship team, and who was also on the team that saw the streak end, was Lisa Straits. Lisa Straits would one day become head coach Lisa Patterson.

While there may be many ways in which Patterson is similar to the man who coached her, there is one difference: Unlike Van Reeth, Lisa isn’t overly concerned with getting lots of media attention. She doesn’t offer a lot of comments after games and she doesn’t make bold predictions about what her team will do next. Instead, she stands on the sideline, wearing West Holmes’ blue and red, pacing back and forth. She lets her team do all the talking, and it’s done a lot of that over the last few years.

Every November, anyone associated with basketball, girls or boys, in the East Holmes School District, gathers at the Der Dutchman Restaurant in Walnut Creek for the Perry Reese Jr. Tip-Off Banquet. The Der Dutchman serves honest to goodness Amish cooking — pan-fried chicken, mashed potatoes, noodles, green beans and pie — lots and lots of pie, apple, Dutch apple, blackberry, cherry, peach and more. It’s the type of cooking these families, or most of them anyway, have grown up on.

The banquet kicks off the high school basketball season for Hiland High School. All of the players and coaches, all of their parents and families, all of the boosters, they all gather in the banquet room to eat and visit.

But really, they gather to hear stories about Perry Reese Jr.

You may recognize Reese’s name. In 2001, Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated wrote an epic story on how Reese, a black man, ended up in Holmes County, which at the time, was 99.9 percent white. In the eastern part of the county, that number was actually 100 percent, with most of that population being either Amish or Mennonite. Both religions come from the Protestant tradition known as Anabaptism and are often confused by outsiders. While both groups believe in simple living, Mennonites express that belief differently from Amish, who believe one must remove him or herself from contemporary society as much as possible.

Smith wrote the piece after Reese died in 2000 of a brain tumor, a death that devastated the community. Reese had such an impact on the county that Dave Schlabach estimates there are about 50 kids running around the area with Reese as a first or middle name.

Reese however, coached boys’ basketball. Smith’s story details the magical season of 1991-92, one that started with four boys being caught stealing from local businesses and ended with the team winning the state championship.

Schlabach took over the girls’ varsity team that same season.

“It really encouraged me to build a good program and to provide the opportunity for our kids to play in a state championship,” he says, “so they could see what it was all about.”

In 2001, one year after Reese’s death, Schlabach, whose brother Mark coaches the boys’ team at Hiland, started the annual banquet. The sole purpose of the banquet was to keep the memory of Reese alive in Eastern Holmes County, to tell the younger generations about the man who meant so much to them, not just on the basketball court, but off it as well.

“At least my players get to hear, once a year, stories about Coach Reese,” Schlabach says. “But it’s harder and harder. You tell the story, but the kids don’t feel the effect. I don’t know what’s going to happen as the years pass by.”

Over the years, Schlabach has brought in 10 former players to tell stories about Reese. He’s also brought in other people from outside the district, people nobody in Holmes County likely had ever heard of, and yet everyone who talks was deeply affected by Reese. Every year, there’s someone else coming from somewhere around the country — from North Carolina, Atlanta, Canton — to sit and tell stories about how Perry Reese Jr. changed their life.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Many of those stories center on how much Reese screamed at his players, but they’re told with a knowing laugh and a smile, as if it’s obvious now why everything Reese was doing was for their own good, even if it might not have been so clear then. And all the stories always end in a one-on-one talk with Reese, where hearts are opened and lessons are learned and love, real love, is felt. If it sounds like a cheesy sitcom, so be it. Everyone who experienced Reese is still moved as they retell the stories.

In 2011, one of the people doing the storytelling was Junior Raber, the star of the 1992 state champions. Raber was part of the magic of 1992 as much as Reese was. In the state semifinals, the Hawks were down by two with just seconds to go. Hiland had to bring the ball up the court, and Raber heaved a shot from half-court at the buzzer. It missed, but he was fouled. Raber knocked down all three free throws and sent Hiland to the championship game, which they won handily.

But at the Tip-Off banquet, he told all those younger players, boys and girls alike, not about the last-second shot, but about the time Coach Reese sent him to the locker room with three minutes left in a game because the coach didn’t like the way he was acting. Raber, after all, had kicked a chair after being taken out of the game. The chair went flying, and Reese looked at him and said “Get into the locker room.”

After the game, which Hiland won, Reese came storming into the locker room and went right after his star.

“He comes straight at me and laid into me,” Raber said.

Then, after everyone had showered up and was ready to leave, Reese approached Raber again.

“Junior, you’re riding home with me,” the coach said.

“It was a heart-to-heart that we had on that drive,” Raber said at the banquet. “He taught me a whole heck of a lot more than how to play basketball.”

That’s what Schlabach wants his girls to hear. He wants them to hear about Reese, and to know that he strives every single day to be as much like Reese as he can be.

He’s hard on his girls. He’ll yank them out of games if they’re not playing hard enough. He’ll take away their iPhones if he’s not happy with practice. He’ll yell and scream at them at halftime or after a game. He’ll make them practice at 11 p.m. after a really bad game, and then he’ll kick them out of practice if they’re still not working hard enough. He’ll do anything it takes to get the absolute most out of every girl on his team. These stories about Reese show the girls why their coach acts the way he does, lets them know that once you get beyond that bluster, there is someone who cares so incredibly much about the girls on that team that he would do anything for them. And then they will do anything for him.

Because that’s how Coach Reese was.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

On the basketball court, it seems to have worked. Hiland has been to more Final Fours in Ohio than any other school in all divisions. They’ve won four state championships. Forty-three players from this tiny little school in the hills of Holmes County have gone on to play all levels of college basketball, including more than a few in Division I.

“I can probably do things here that I couldn’t do everywhere,” Schlabach says. “But our parents understand that we have 100 percent their best interest at heart. We’re not just trying to produce a good player or athlete, but great kids who are now business leaders in our community. Our kids need to be challenged and disciplined, and that buy-in really creates a strong bond. I doubt that happens at other schools.”

There’s another story about Reese that Schlabach likes to tell.

In 1994-95, Hiland was poised to have a great year. But then, as can often happen in sports, the Hawks’ two best guards both tore their ACLs about halfway through the season. The day Schlabach heard about the second tear, he was sitting in his office right before practice, moping.

Reese walked in and hit him upside the head.

“He reminded me that I still had 15 kids out there waiting on me to come to practice,” Schlabach says, “and how I walk out and approach that practice was going to determine the rest of our year.”

And, Schlabach says, “He reminded me that it wasn’t about me.”

“I finally figured it out,” he says now. “The year was never about you as the coach. It was always about your players and getting them to where they needed to be.”

Throughout the second quarter, Hiland runs a full-court press against the Knights. Natalie Molnar, Carrie’s daughter, finds herself guarding Kennedy Schlabach — Dave’s daughter — and attaches herself to the three-point shooter like her mom used to attach herself to point guards. West Holmes turns the ball over 10 times in the quarter. There are traveling calls and bad passes, all caused by how the Hawks fly to the ball. Hiland gets few points out of these turnovers, though, because every time they go to shoot, there is a hand, or multiple hands, in the shooter’s face.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Above: Natalie Molnar

At halftime of the West Holmes-Hiland game, the score looks like one from the 1980s. West Holmes leads 15-13. The Knights have two players who have already committed to playing college basketball. Hannah Clark, whose mother, Julie, played on the West Holmes team that made it to state in the mid-1990s, will be playing at Division I Northern Kentucky. Brittleigh Macaulay will be playing at Division II Ohio Dominican. Combined, they have two points in the game.

Fans mill about in the stands, talking. Molnar talks with Randy Martin. Martin, 51, has attended just about every West Holmes girls’ basketball game that’s been played, going back to when he was a student in the late-1970s and early-80s. Now he drives a semi, delivering lumber around the county. He graduated from West Holmes in 1981, and in the mid-80s, he was one of several men who Jack Van Reeth brought in to practice against the girls’ team.

Martin is a burly guy, and while he may not have been as burly just after graduating from high school, he certainly would have seemed burly to a teenage girl, at least on the basketball court.

“He said he wanted us to rough ‘em up a little,” Martin says of Van Reeth over the din of the pep band.

That’s the general consensus: John Coakley, the official scorekeeper for West Holmes, Van Reeth and Molnar, they all say those practices were designed to create toughness in the girls.

“Sometimes they complained,” Van Reeth says, “but they soon learned that they didn’t complain.”

If anybody had a right to complain, it may have been the men who were brought in to practice.

“Shane (Ridenbaugh) and Lisa Cline were so freakishly strong, they roughed us up,” Martin says.

Today, the West Holmes defense is roughing up the Hiland offense. Unfortunately, the same thing is happening on the other end of the court.

“Hannah is getting past that first defender and thinking she is open,” Martin says.

“They need to take advantage of their size,” Molnar says.

“They haven’t done that all season,” Martin says.

Basketball, more than any other sport, is one where excellent teamwork can beat pure athleticism. With ball movement and player movement and a keen understanding of what every single person on the floor will do in any given second, and with the energy and stamina to play harder than you’ve ever played before, a team of short girls from the relative middle of nowhere can beat any city or parochial team with super-athletic guards and towering post players in the paint.

In Holmes County, they get this idea of teamwork. And it starts with the Amish and Mennonite communities that call the county home.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

During the last census, 42 percent of Holmes County residents were Amish. There are even predictions that the county could be the first in the country to be majority Amish, and that it could happen by 2030.

You only need to watch a barn-raising to understand how the Amish, and their less conservative brethren, the Mennonite, work as a team. Last May in Wayne County, the county directly to the north of Holmes, a fire destroyed the workshop of an Amish shed and swing-set builder.

Two days later, while the rubble was still smoldering, the local Amish community already had a new and bigger workshop framed. Less than two weeks after the fire, the building was done.

Or consider healthcare. The Amish do not buy health insurance. If someone gets sick, everyone in the community chips in to pay the bills.

How does this translate to basketball success? Well, on the East Holmes side of the county, where the vast majority of the Amish and Mennonite live, Schlabach says that half his players speak Pennsylvania Dutch, which means they have Amish relatives. Even Schlabach’s dad was born and raised Amish. In fact, there’s a huge population in Holmes County of former Amish, folks who felt they could live simply and maintain that mindset while participating in other parts of society. Nearly all of those former Amish now attend one of the more than a dozen Mennonite churches in the county. The sect shares a similar philosophy but is not so strict.  Mennonites, for example, can wear regular clothing, drive cars … and play basketball.  Generally speaking, the Amish don’t play organized sports because they believe they promote competitiveness and immodesty.

Still, that work ethic and that desire to help one another and play as a team translates well into basketball, and has made its way to the other side of the county as well. When Carrie Molnar talked about why the teams from the 1980s were so good, she kept talking about how everyone knew their role and nobody ever tried to step outside of it.

Mark Lonsinger likes to talk about the fact that the county has no incorporated cities, and virtually no heavy industry. What it does have is independent villages with a lot of mom-and-pop businesses. You have, essentially, people taking care of themselves, until they need to come together. And then they do.

“It’s a really interesting dynamic,” Lonsinger says. “I can’t explain it. We’re not all Amish. We’re from completely different cultures, and yet we find ways, when we need to, to come together and do whatever we need to do.”

Lonsinger thinks that attitude has obviously been passed down, from generation to generation, to today’s basketball players. And that, he says, starts to explain why they’re so successful.

After halftime, the Hiland students pulled off their white T-shirts to reveal black shirts. Now, the whiteout behind the Hawks’ bench has been replaced by a black hole.

Offensively, both teams are able to make a few more shots. This includes one possession where Hannah Clark dribbles past a Hiland defender into the paint and lays a shot off the backboard, almost uncontested, a rare occurrence in the game.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

By the end of the third quarter, on the back of Clark who scored 10 in the quarter, West Holmes leads Hiland 29-20.

Lisa Patterson continues to pace to and fro in front of her bench. She’s not loud, at least not while play is ongoing. If she is loud, if she yells at her players during timeouts, it’s drowned out by the fans and the band.

At first, Patterson didn’t want to be the head coach of the Knights. But she’s been in that position for 10 years now. In each of the last four seasons, West Holmes has made it to the Final Four. They’ve been to three championship games and, in 2012-13, the team went 29-0 and won it all.

The last time a team from West Holmes had finished a season unbeaten, Patterson had been a sophomore.

After high school, she went and played basketball at Walsh College. She got a teaching degree and moved back to Holmes County, to Killbuck, where she grew up. She took a job at West Holmes Middle School as an intervention specialist and started coaching middle school volleyball and basketball.

Then the head coach position opened up, and not a lot of people applied. There was too much pressure to be great, it seemed.

“The athletic director at the time sought me out,” Patterson says. “He said, ‘I think you should do this.’ I said ‘No.’”

The athletic director asked three times, and like her coach, Jack Van Reeth, she finally relented.

“I did it because I knew what it felt like to win a state championship,” she says. “I wanted these kids who are so very talented, who are going through here now, I wanted them to experience that. I sat and watched some teams who I felt could have gotten there, and for some reason, there was something missing.”

What was missing, she thought, was that connection to the past.

“I felt like I could make that connection.”

Photo: Halee Heironimus

There were other connections, too.

One girl on those early teams of Patterson’s was Lindsy Snyder. She was the daughter of Shane Ridenbaugh, now Shane Snyder, from the first two state championships.

Then came Shane’s other daughter, Laina, and Carrie’s daughter, Emily. They were the core of the team that went 29-0. And the connections didn’t end there. In 2012, Lee Ann Race took over the athletic director position at the school. She played on the championship teams of the 1980s. And the school’s superintendent at the time, Kris Pipes-Perone, was a point guard on all three teams that won state championships.

When Shane Snyder talks about West Holmes basketball, it’s often hard to tell which team she is talking about, her teams or her daughters’ teams. It doesn’t really matter, because the same could be said for both.

“We expected to win,” she says. “That was a lot of pressure. They expected us to win. The drive that class had. They were workhorses. They know what it means to work.”

All of those connections have added up to 221 wins and just 37 losses in Patterson’s coaching career. In fact, the only West Holmes coach who has won more games than Patterson for the school is Van Reeth, with 321.

And while Patterson will say she’s very different from the man who coached her — she says if she coached like Van Reeth, she wouldn’t have a job for long — others aren’t so sure.

“She a good bit reminds me of Jack,” says Coakley, the long-time scorekeeper at West Holmes, who also grew up and lives in Killbuck and knew Lisa when she was just a little girl. “She’s the boss. You can have all the assistants you want, but she’s the boss. And them girls know it. Lisa is a good bit like him.”

Patterson, like Van Reeth, is quiet at first, giving just short answers to questions. But once you get both of them going, they open up. And Coakley, who accompanies Patterson on scouting trips and rides home with her after games just like he did with Van Reeth, says she’s just as friendly as the old coach, but like Jack, you have to get to know her.

Carrie Molnar knew that when Patterson took over, the program was going back to where it had been for so many years.

“It got intense,” she says. “She has expectations, and a plan in her mind. Everyone knew she had been around the program, and we figured she’s gonna wanna keep some tradition.”

One of those traditions was Coakley. He had stopped being the official scorekeeper when Van Reeth left in 1998. But when Patterson took over in 2007, she called him. She wanted Coakley to be her scorekeeper because she saw him as a good luck charm.

He hedged, until Patterson put her foot down.

“John,” she said, “you kept score when I played, and you can keep score when I coach.”

Coakley said OK. He said there was no doubt who was in charge. It was just like the days of Van Reeth.

In Hiland’s previous three games, the team has averaged 79 points per game. They won those games by an average of 60 points. But tonight, nothing is falling. The West Holmes defense is suffocating.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Schlabach stands on the sideline and watches, quietly. He’s changed over the last 25 years. If he has to yell, he’ll do it in the locker room, which he will do loudly and often when this game is over.

In the stands, Molnar continues to dig her fingernails into her cheek.

“The girls are tired,” she says. “The emotions are too much, and the game is just too physical.”

Hiland pulls within five points — 34-29 — with less than three minutes to go, and has the ball. Senior guard Brittany Miller misses an open three-pointer and West Holmes gets the rebound. On the next possession, Hiland misses an open shot but gets an offensive board, only to miss an open put-back. They get the rebound again and miss another open layup. And then again. They shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and can’t get anything to fall, as if the openness, something that was so foreign to this game, has thrown them off.

That series ultimately determined the game. West Holmes made a few free throws near the end and put the game away.

“I can breathe a little bit now,” Molnar says.

The final score: West Holmes 39, Hiland 31. Hiland made just 10 out of its 46 shots on the night.

It’s the lowest scoring game in Schlabach’s 25-year coaching career.

Before Schlabach built his home just northeast of Millersburg about 10 years ago, he first built a gym. He jokes that his wife says he’s just like an Amish man, who builds the barn before the house. The gym is a large brick building back behind the house, which itself is at the back of a long driveway. A separate drive leads to the gym, with enough parking for a dozen or so cars. Inside, there’s a full court, albeit a little shorter than regulation, and high ceilings. The floor is a rubberized surface, not a great as hardwood, but better than the tile on concrete you find in places like church gyms and elementary schools.

This building is almost always unlocked, and if it’s not unlocked, everyone knows where Schlabach hides the key.

Anyone from Hiland (or really anywhere, mostly) can sign in and work out in the gym. It’s a place where teenagers hang out in Holmes County, because, well, there isn’t much else to do.

“When I was growing up,” Schlabach says, “I was always looking for places to play.”

During the summer, anywhere between 50 and 75 kids will sign into the gym and shoot or workout on a given day.

In Gary Smith’s story on Perry Reese, a central theme was the fact that the coach’s door was always open. Players hung out at his house playing cards or video games all the time. It was a way for Reese to build relationships.

For Schlabach, that’s another reason he built the gym. It’s just one more way for him to show his players that he’s there for them. And as if the gym isn’t enough, he’s putting in an in-ground pool right beside it, so in the summer players can cool off after a hard workout.

Often times, he says, after a rough game, he will get home and sit down to figure stats, look out the window into the dark and see the lights pop on in the gym. It doesn’t always happen — Schlabach’s career coaching record is 552-87 — but it does often enough that he is not surprised. And when it does, he’ll look at a clock and see that it is 10:30 or 11 at night. Then he’ll check the video feed from the gym to see who is in there. Invariably, it will be one of his best players.

“When I was a player, the last thing I wanted to do was go home and listen to mom and dad talk about how I played. As a kid, that’s the last thing you want to do.”

The gym, he says, is kind of a sanctuary.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

In March 1984, the year West Holmes won its first state title, more than 7,000 people from Holmes County drove over an hour south to Columbus to watch the championship game. Less than 30,000 people lived in the county at the time, which meant just about a quarter of the entire county was in Columbus that night.

Molnar remembers the announcer at that game saying that he hoped the last person out of Holmes County had turned the lights off.

The thing about Holmes County, though, is that the light will always be burning, lit from the successes of years past. There will always be a light on, and it will usually be in a gym, as some girl heads out late at night to shoot baskets.

When Schlabach got home from the game against West Holmes, the light in the gym was already on. His daughter, Kennedy, walked down to the gym and joined three other girls as they shot and shot and shot. They went to work in that gym late at night, because that’s what so many girls in the past have done after a hard game, because that’s the right thing to do, to work harder, to get better, to shoot until you feel like you can’t shoot anymore, and then shoot some more, building something better, all together, after every loss.