May, 1988

One

In the month since I met Ali at his mother’s and he gave me his phone numbers, I haven’t called, not wanting to bother him, and feeling intrusive simply for having this access to his life. After all, it’s not like I’m a close friend:  Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people (this isn’t an overstatement) have known Ali better than I. And as he himself admits, his kindness has been abused in hundreds of ways by untold legions.

Photo courtesy W.W. Norton Co.

Click to buy Approaching Ali, by Davis Miller

On Wednesday, which is my day off from the store, when I’m through writing for the day, I tromp down to the basement and find two big boxes of newspapers and magazines I’ve carried with me as I’ve moved from place to place over the past two decades. I lug the boxes upstairs and sort through every yellowed, musty item: hundreds of articles that date from January 1964 to the present. Going through these stories and looking at old photos, I can’t help but consider how the young Ali’s seemingly endless energy had promised that he would never get old, and how in many ways he is now older than just about everyone his age.

Yet I don’t feel bad for him. Ali’s life remains huge. He seems less than fulfilled only when we see him in the smallest of ways, when we don’t recognize that his Parkinson’s and its aura of silence enlarges his legend and his life, that it completes his mythology. Most of the writing (and the talk) about Ali, not only now (about his health) but over the decades, has served to inaccurately limit him, to minimize him and his existence.

I don’t have to be what you want me to be. One of the major themes of Ali’s life is that he doesn’t fall into our notions of who he is; he can’t be capsulized, cannot be accurately defined. His life and spirit ooze out of the sides of the containers we try to stuff him in.

Sifting through these boxes of decay, I put aside a few items I care about — the program and ticket stubs from when Lyn and I tried to get married at the Shavers fight; a few posters and magazines; a copy of the classic 1970 Ken Regan head shot in which jeweled planets of sweat ride Ali’s countenance like cold water poured on a hot copper frying-pan sky.

I carefully lay the bundle in my bottom desk drawer, reseal the boxes and call Rahaman [Muhammad Ali’s brother] to ask if I can stop by for a few minutes.

At Mrs. Clay’s, Rock comes out to the car and helps carry the 100-pound boxes up to the house. Sitting on the sofa, I show him a few items: newspaper and magazine pieces about the Liston fights; Ali’s conversion to Islam; the arrest for refusing military induction; the epic first battle with Frazier; the Supreme Court overturning the draft conviction; Foreman being voodooed by Ali; the Thrilla in Manila; the boxing lesson he gave Spinks in their second contest; a recent article about Ali buying buses for Chicago-area public schools (immediately after seeing a TV news story about how Dade County had no money for new buses, Ali sat down, wrote a check and mailed it, not using the gift as a tax deduction); and one about helping a young man wearing a hooded dark sweatshirt and jeans who crawled out on a high window ledge of a Wilshire Boulevard skyscraper in Los Angeles to kill himself. Police arrived, and, as this man began yelling that Viet-Cong guerillas were coming to get him, a large crowd gathered in front of the building. Police officers asked him his name, he told them that it was Joe and that he was twenty-one years old; they tried to talk him in but quickly came to understand that they needed help from more appropriately trained professionals. They brought in an experienced psychologist. No help. A police chaplain talked to Joe at length. No luck. “Jump! Jump!” the crowd chanted as Ali slowly drove past, saw what was going on, got out of his car and ran into the building. Ali leaned out of the ninth-floor window, promised to help Joe and took his hand to bring him in. He bought Joe clothes, gave him money, got him counseling. “Joe knows my address,” Ali later said. “I’ve told people to bring him to me. I’ll help him. He knows he’s got a home, my home.”

Rahaman asks if an enlargement can be made of a Newsweek photo of Ali, himself and their father with Gerald Ford at the White House. “Never seen a collection like this,” Rock says. “Nothin this big.”

David R. Lutman/Getty Images

L-R: Rahaman, Muhammad and Lonnie Ali, 2005

He gets up from the sofa and walks to a closet, coming back with a long cardboard tube. “These are my paintings,” he says, popping a metal seal from the end of the tube. “Pictures of my brother.”

He unrolls canvas after canvas, most crumbling with age and abuse, some water-damaged, a few in top condition. He has a strong sense of color and form, and I tell him so.

“Ain’t nothin compared to my daddy,” he says.

I say I’ve heard that his father is a real painter.

“Aw, man, he paints be-yuuuu-tiful,” Rahaman says, stretching the “U” sound like a giant rubber band. “Be-yuuuu-tiful,” he repeats, leaning his head skyward as if speaking to an audience in the clouds. “I’ll never be nothin compared to Cash.”

I tell Rock I need to head home. “Let me help with your boxes,” he says.

“They’re yours now,” I say. “I wanted to give them to someone who’d take care of them. Too bad there’s no museum to donate them to.”

“Maybe there’s gonna be,” Rahaman says. “A fella’s tryin to start a boxin museum in Louisville. Ali’ll be in town this weekend to help out. We’re all gonna meet at a gym downtown. Why don’t you come?”

Two

Saturday afternoon around 1:30, armed only with a street number and a general idea of the building’s whereabouts, I drive past twice, first overlooking it then saying, “Nah, that can’t be it,” but, maybe, that tiny little box over there, over near the river and nothing else except some abandoned warehouses with shattered windows and a few wind-whipped scrub pines, that rundown shack over there with the rutted dirt parking area and the fish market behind it, maybe that’s the gym. Yes, it is! The third time by a black Cadillac limo pulls into the parking lot and Ali’s father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Senior, steps from the right rear door.

There’s only one sign on the crumbling concrete block building: a swinging, creaking, rusted metal Royal Crown Cola advertisement that at one time had been red, white and blue. The windows have been covered with sheets of plywood. Neon-green spray paint to the left of the door reads, “Boo! Scary Spook Place.” If Ali saw this upon entering, surely he had some fun with it. I imagine him putting on an open-mouthed grimace. “Spook? I’ll show ya’ a scary spook!” he shouts.

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

Above: Muhammad Ali in 1988

The first thing I notice upon opening the door is that the bowling-alley-long, garishly lighted room smells ripe, slick and sweet with worn leather, old sweat and oft-used liniments. In the right corner stands a small, abused, blue-roped ring, its large-pored, once-bleached canvas stained by body salts, blood and Atomic Balm. Near the rear of the room is a heavy bag, its thick black leather cover split open at the seams and nearly ripped from its body. Sinners have certainly left this bag enlightened.

Today, though, this building is not a temple for the body, not the abode of mad warrior monks at communion with the gods of violence; the mood today is festive, up-front celebratory: Red, yellow, blue, and orange balloons hang from the ring’s corner posts; rolls of red and white crepe paper have been strung throughout the gym; three sliced watermelons and a punch bowl filled with a thick pink fruit drink occupy a long card table near the center of the floor. About seventy-five noisy people are present — men, women, children — some dressed in Sunday best, others in T-shirts and jeans. An eight-millimeter movie projector to the left of the ring is clacking and spinning, throwing sepia-tinted images onto a blank area of the crumbling plaster wall: films of the roughly sixteen-year-old Cassius Clay jumping rope and blistering a heavy bag and a speed bag.

A couple of ancient boxing trainers are sitting on straw-backed wood chairs beside the projector, one at each corner, as rooted, gnarled and self-contained as Bonsai trees. Ali’s boyhood gym mate, opponent, friend, and former world’s heavyweight champion Jimmy Ellis is standing to the right of the ring and beside one of the trainers, his big hand tender on the old man’s shoulder. Ellis wears dark glasses these days, having been blinded in the left eye in a final fight.

Ali’s father has taken a spot next to Ellis. At five-foot-nine or so, Cassius Clay looks like a miniature, much less benign, version of Rahaman. In his youth, Cash had a darkly handsome rascality about him; in his middle years, he was a brooding and troubled hard mahogany knot of a man; in his seventies, he is bent, razor-thin, and his eyes are deeply yellowed and clouded. Cash is crooning “For the Good Times” in a Vegas-fakewise voice that sounds of dusk and spent charcoal, performing for anyone who’ll listen; at this moment, it’s for a tall grinning white man who looks like a game show host or politician and who is being led around the room by a camcorder.

Ali is sitting on a folding metal chair beside Cash, appearing to ignore his father and looking as distracted as a ninth grader in algebra class on the day before spring break. Rahaman is to Ali’s right, holding a clear plastic cup of punch and sporting a grin as big and goofy as the guy’s with the camcorder — Rahaman’s face intrinsically different in that it harbors none of that cracker’s gleaming, old/new Southern “Can-you-believe-what-these-crazy-niggers-are-doin?” half-submerged malice about it.

“This is borin,” Ali suddenly yells and stands, immediately commanding the attention of almost everyone in the room. He’s dressed as some sort of emissary, in a manner beyond fashion, with quiet, near-timeless elegance: custom-tailored blue-pinstriped suit, lightly starched white shirt, royal-red patterned silk tie, polished black leather uppers. For almost his entire public life, even Ali’s haircut has transcended fashion: It’s seldom been either short or long; today, it perfectly halos his features.

Ali steps up to the person nearest him, a burly, red-bearded, tough-acting country gent in a Hawaiian shirt. “Did you call me niggah?” Ali yells.

The recipient of the accusation jumps back, startled and scared, instinctively putting his hands up and out to protect himself, then embarrassedly laughing. “Just joshin,” Ali says, looking sheepish and very young. He offers the man his hand, then whirls away, searching for the next soul to incite and cajole.

Within seconds, he’s playfully winging clownish punches at several people near him. Although he’s in play mode, his moves come fairly loose and reasonably fast.

“Did you used to box?” he whispers respectfully to a middle-aged midget who’s wearing big sunglasses and a black baseball cap with red stitching that reads ELVIS FOREVER.

He sneaks up behind several people, startling them with his cricket-in-your-ear trick, he blows on the tops of heads, tickles the insides of palms as he shakes hands. He pretends to get knocked down by a blond eighty-pound girl who’s wearing a pair of gold, queen-bed-pillow-sized boxing gloves that Ali has just finished autographing for her. As he rises from the floor, he turns and recognizes me and walks over and gives me his hand. “Didn’t know you’d be here,” he says, his tone determinedly innocent. “You surprise me.”  It’s me who’s surprised. With Ellis, his dad, Rahaman, the old trainers, and so many people in the room with whom he seems to share history, I’m stunned he knows who I am, much less that he pays any attention to me.

Dabrowski/NBCU Photo Bank

Like in his yard the day we met, he motions to me with his eyes and puts his hands up beside his head. I dance to my left in exactly the style I learned from him twenty-five years before.

“You found a live one,” somebody yells to Ali.

“I could be your daddy,” Ali says to me, “if I was white.”

Ali and I slip and move around the old wood floor for probably forty-five seconds. Like before, he seems a little surprised by my speed and style. As he tries to fire at me, I beat him to the punch. “You don’t like black folks, do you?” he shouts. I find myself smiling. I feel good.

He points at a big blond late adolescent, a heavyweight, who’s wearing a green polo shirt and who looks like a fraternity kid. The boy comes over and asks advice: “What’s the best way to find a manager?” he says. “What do I do to go pro?”

Ali’s answer is to pump a jab toward the kid’s chin. The boy is put off for only a moment. Ali throws a second punch then waves the kid in with both hands. The boy hesitates a moment, then launches slow, careful punches and slips mechanically but nicely as Ali throws back.

“Do the shuffle, Champ,” I shout. For two seconds, he is once again hidden rhythm’s dancer: His shiny street dogs blur into his own private dance step.

After thirty seconds of moving around with the college kid, Ali motions toward the ring and removes his jacket. I’m sure he must be joking, but he picks up a pair of licorice-colored Everlasts and walks to the ring apron.

As he steps between the ropes, he pulls his tie from his neck and the sixteen-ounce sheaths of leather are strapped onto his wrists. “Gowna do five rounds,” he yells to people gathering ringside. The volume level in his voice has greatly increased. And the sound no longer issues from high in his throat; there’s roundness to his words.

“Gowna teach you what it’s all about,” he says to his smiling opponent, then turns his back and can’t suppress a smile himself.

In his corner, the big grinning cracker with the camcorder pulls Ali’s shirt tail from his trousers; the top button remains fastened. No one anywhere produces a mouthpiece; someone somewhere shouts “Ding,” and then it’s actually happening — for conceivably the last time ever, sick old Muhammad Ali is really boxing.

A slow-moving cockroach of sweat crawls fat down the small of my back. Although in some ways I don’t want to watch and feel almost ashamed to be a witness, I have to admit to myself that I ache to know if he can still really do it.

Three

For the first thirty seconds, I want to wince with each blow thrown. Ali doesn’t seem able to get up on his toes; his balance doesn’t look good. He regularly slings quick-seeming jabs, but every punch misses. I believe the frat kid may be holding back in order to avoid hurting our ailing legend.

Suddenly, one minute into the round, The Champ drops his gloves to his sides, exposing his chin, and when his opponent tries to reach him with punches, he pulls his head back and away, just like the Ali we remember, causing the kid to miss by less than an inch. I hear myself say, “Ooh,” and find I almost immediately relax some.

At the beginning of Round Two, Ali’s face is animated, centered, serious. “No excuses,” he says to himself, looking toward the canvas. “No excuses,” he repeats.

The kid comes out hard, apparently wanting to make it a real fight. He thumps Ali with stiff punches to the chin and to the chest. Ali covers up. “Keep movin,” he says, “keep punchin.”

The college kid steps in to throw another shot and Ali stabs him with a perfectly timed, teeth-rattling counter jab that’s as sweet as a bite from the last tangy apple of autumn. The kid’s head is turned ninety degrees by the force of the blow. It’s a quick, very subtle shot, not thrown for audience reaction; almost no one in the room recognizes that the kid has been stunned. Fifteen seconds later, Ali shivers the kid’s legs with a straight right lead. “Don’t hurt him, Champ,” Rahaman yells, but there’s no need: Ali has backed off.

The kid gets on his bicycle; for a few moments he wears the expression of someone who has just been given a bright first taste of his own mortality. Ali boxes the rest of the round at a level slightly above the boy’s abilities (although the boy himself may not recognize it). With twenty seconds left, he zings in a series of eight jabs and a razor of a right, all designed to make only surface contact, but to confirm that, at least in this moment, he remains Ali.

The old master does three more rounds with less capable students than the frat kid (chasing a hugely rotund guy who’s wearing glasses around the ring, spanking him on the seat of his workout pants instead of punching his face or his jiggling body; cartoonishly winding up and lampoonishly telegraphing all of his punches while letting a 140-pound pointed-nose novice push him around all-four square), then he steps awkwardly from the ring and immediately begins to walk his great-granddaddy walk.

I take a seat with him on the apron. “H-h-how did I look?” he asks. He has to repeat the question twice before I understand. Both of his arms are shaking, as is his head. “D-d-did I surprise you?” He chuckles and nods, satisfied to have kept the world in orbit.

He trudges over to the refreshment table, looking for something to drink. The punch is gone. He pulls a chunk of watermelon from the rind, juice dripping between his fingers, stuffs it in his mouth, turns the entire half-melon sideways and lets juice slowly drip into a cup, which he expeditiously drains.

He tugs on his jacket and, in front of a big mirror that’s used for shadowboxing, takes probably five minutes to convince his fingers to knot his tie, showing no impatience. We walk from the gym into a thin mist. The sidewalk is empty. A wet and shining blue Chevy pickup with a camper attached to the bed is at the curb. A short, thin, older black gentleman wearing a straw hat and holding an umbrella is leaning against the truck. Ali walks to the Chevy stiffly, silently, and with great dignity. He has trouble getting into his seat on the passenger’s side. I close his door. He waves to me.

“Be cool,” he says. And then he surprises me once again. “Remain wise,” he says. With a trail of blue smoke shining in the air, the pickup pulls from the curb.

Let’s just get this out of the way: Football, as a game, is really kind of dumb. Eleven men on each team line up, run into each other, fall down, get up, and do it again. Sometimes someone throws the ball, sometimes someone catches it and keeps going in the direction the ball was headed. Less often than that, someone else catches it and runs back toward where the ball came from.

The 22 men repeat this over and over, ad infinitum, or until a little bitty guy kicks the ball through two metal poles to win. Or wide of the poles to lose.

And many of us love it. We gather in front of the glowing shrines in our living rooms to watch, to imagine those giants are us, to curse their sins and glory in their wins, to live and die with every point, every play, every game. And we don’t just watch. We talk and tweet and read and watch the waiver wire and brag about the epic fantasy football trade through which we fleeced that yutz.

The hopes and dreams of entire cities rise and fall upon this frivolity, not just on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and not just in those cities but all day, every day, inside, outside, online, offline, everywhere.

Or so it seems. My attempt to boycott football in the last month and a half—to never see anything about it, hear anything about it, read anything about it, in any way, in any medium, in any setting—failed so spectacularly and in so many ways and so many places that it has left me questioning how 11 men trying to move a ball across a line, and 11 more trying to stop them, has come to so dominate American life.

At the very least, I wish we had better things to talk about as we stuff ourselves with turkey.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, part one

The first thing I do in my quest to hide from football is make a list of the obvious ways it might find me: TV, radio, newspaper, Internet. Avoiding football on TV and radio will be easy—I hardly ever turn either one of them on anymore. The newspaper will be easy, too. We cancelled our subscription a few months ago because the newspaper couldn’t consistently execute the delivery part.

Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

The Internet will be much harder, especially considering how much I use it for work. It’s not a coincidence that the last story I read before cutting off all football contact is about the death of Paul Oliver. I overhaul my reading routine, vowing never to go to any sports website unless I know there won’t be football news, like MLB.com and NASCAR.com. ESPN.com, CBSsports.com, BleacherReport.com, FoxSports.com, yes, even SBNation.com all make my verboten list.

I think that will be enough to insulate me. But I soon learn it’s like trying to stop gravy from spilling off my plate with a fork. Logging onto Twitter is like sticking a needle in my arm and injecting football into my blood. I unfollow all the sportswriters I follow, plus friends, family and anybody else who tweets about football a lot. That leaves me following theologians and “regular” writers. Yet after a few hours, something remarkable happens, or more to the point, doesn’t happen: There doesn’t seem to be a decline in the football news traipsing across my timeline.

I unfollow everybody.

Aside from those changes, I decide I will live my normal life. I will not leave my family and flee to the mountains. I will not hide in my office. If my friends bring up football, I will tell them I can’t talk about it.

Full disclosure, as I start I have a few hours of work to do on a story about the rising value of Super Bowl memorabilia. I give myself time outs when I need them to finish that over the first few weeks. But I will turn down every new football assignment that comes up—which, much to my chagrin as a freelance writer who is almost always in search of work, happens more than once.

Whose idea was this anyway?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, part two

I thought TV wouldn’t be an issue. My cable package is so basic I don’t even get ESPN, the NFL Network or any other sports channel. I haven’t watched more than a few minutes of a non-Lions-on-Thanksgiving regular season game in a long time. But I learn, not for the last time, that avoiding TV will be a huge problem for me in maintaining this fast. Televisions, it seems, are everywhere.

I got a haircut at Sports Clips. The name should have clued me in. There was a TV within arm’s length as I sit in the chair. I refused to look at it—closing my eyes, even. But I heard Herm Edwards yelling at some player, and by extension me, because that player turned his hips or his shoulders too soon. My kingdom for a mute button.

I refuse to set foot in Sports Clips again until the fast is over. That thought makes me want to get more ambitious. If I want to really boycott the NFL, to make a statement about the state of the game right now - (bad) and its power and influence in society (also bad) relative to its merits (worse still), I have to stop buying products that sponsor the NFL and stop buying products from companies owned by team owners. I have to speak truth to the powerful in the only language they understand: money.

I find unchartered waters here. There are three “boycott NFL sponsors” pages on Facebook … but they combine for only 150 likes. By means of comparison, a Facebook page called “An Arbitrary Number of People Demanding That Some Sort of Action Be Taken” has more than 2,600 members.

Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

I make a list of NFL sponsors so I can stop doing business with them either forever or until this story gets published and … uh-oh. Without me realizing it, the NFL has already insinuated itself deeply into my life. To boycott the NFL, I would have to get rid of my business and personal credit cards, bank, cell phone carrier and cable company, which would be hard enough, but many competing companies in those fields are NFL sponsors, too.

I would have to throw out (almost) everything in my fridge because I bought (almost) everything in it at the official grocery store of the Carolina Panthers. I could not eat Quaker Oats, Sabra hummus, Doritos or anything made by Mars Inc. I could not drink Starbucks, Pepsi, Coke, Dr Pepper, Snapple, Coors or Budweiser. I am grateful that I couldn’t find evidence of Yuengling being an NFL sponsor, and by “couldn’t find” I mean, “didn’t look for.”

I would have to rip the Michelin tires off of my 2007 Pontiac Vibe, because Michelin is the Buffalo Bills’ official tire. Then I’d have to throw the rest of the Vibe away, too, because the Vibe was half made by Toyota, which has sponsorship deals with several teams, and half by GM, which was the NFL’s official car manufacturer for 14 years before losing the deal this summer.

I would, unfortunately, be able to keep my 1997 Mazda Protégé.

Because of the relationship between the NFL and Dairy Management Inc., I could not pour milk in my kids’ cereal or dump half-and-half into my coffee or eat cheese … and that’s where I give up. There is no story in heaven or hell worth not eating cheese to complete.

I try to find something less than a full-scale boycott and more than not watching games. What if I just ignored the NFL—acted like it didn’t exist? That might be the NFL’s worst nightmare anyway. Well, scratch that. The NFL’s worst nightmare is that one team owner will have one less dollar tomorrow than he has today. But the NFL would certainly hate to be ignored.

I decide to try to never find out who wins a single game, never find out who’s playing whom, when or where they are playing, never see or hear an advertisement, never see or hear a highlight, never have the word “NFL” or any of its variations cross my eyes or ears.

I throw college football into the mix, too, because I live in the South, and I love a challenge.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

Kevin Burrell, one of the associate pastors at my church, takes as his text Acts 17:23, in which the apostle Paul preaches in Athens about coming upon a statue dedicated “To an Unknown God.” It was one of many statues there, all examples of the idolatry that inflicted Athens in the first century.

As Burrell’s message draws to a close, he tells the cushy, comfortable congregation of Stonebridge Church Community in suburban Charlotte, of which I am a member, to imagine Paul walking around our city and analyzing our statues. Rewriting Paul’s text to fit our city, Burrell says, “I saw your eight altars to the Great Black Panther, where many of you worship on Sundays.”

As Burrell says this, he clicks a remote control. The screens bookending the stage flicker to life. Everybody immediately recognizes the statue that appears there: a giant Panther outside Bank of America Stadium. A nervous murmur circulates through the crowd as the members realize we’ve just been called out for violating one of the Ten Commandments.

Craig Jones /Allsport

After Burrell’s sermon ends, I walk over to tease him about breaking my fast. A friend intercepts me before I get to Burrell. As we’re both from Michigan, he starts talking about the Detroit Lions. (Summary of the many conversations we’ve had on the subject: Me: “They suck.” Him: “Totally.”) I tell him I can’t talk because of the boycott.

After church, I fly from Charlotte to Erie, Pennsylvania, with a stop in Philadelphia. I count 10 NFL teams represented on clothing I see. I decide not to consider spotting people wearing football gear as a violation of the fast because if I did my fast would be broken nearly every time I leave the house.

As the plane taxis in Philadelphia, I overhear a man saying the Cowboys are winning. On a shuttle bus, as I look at the floor, a man moves his smartphone into my line of sight. The live box score he is watching reports a score of 24-7; I avert my gaze before I see the teams involved. As I approach my gate, I hear Joe Buck’s voice, so I know an NFL game is on. I stay far enough away so I don’t see or hear who is playing.

I’m up to five violations, and I haven’t even eaten dinner.

As bad as the day has been so far, dinner gets much worse. I have an interview to conduct. I didn’t want to be rude (or sound like a nut job) by insisting we eat somewhere with no TVs, so I let the interview subject pick the place. Besides, it is his town, what do I know of the restaurant scene in Erie, Pennsylvania? All of which is an attempt to explain why, while trying to boycott football, I find myself in a Buffalo Wild Wings on a Sunday evening.

Maureen Sullivan/Contributor

I feel like Jonah fleeing from Nineveh. I open my eyes inside the whale’s belly, and I’m surrounded by who knows how many televisions, all of them showing NFL games or NFL news or NFL highlights. NFL pictures cover the walls, and men, women and children in NFL jerseys fill every seat.

There is almost nowhere for me to look that won’t count as a violation of the fast. I double down on eye contact. However, I must confess, I fail—a lot. When the entire restaurant starts hollering, I look up. I try not to, but I can’t help it. And sometimes I look up just because there are so many TVs in front of me.

The interview subject is a Bills fan, so I know the Bills crush the Dolphins today, as well as multiple other outcomes.

To recap: In one day, my football fast is broken at church (twice), on a plane, on a shuttle bus, in an airport terminal and at dinner (so many times I couldn’t count them). I go to bed feeling like football’s favorite prey, its talons sunk deep into my neck and its beak ready to pluck out my eyes.

O, Where can I go that it isn’t already there?

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29

I eat at a Bob Evans. I bring a USA Today with me. I close my eyes, grab the sports section and throw it onto the seat across from me so I can’t see it. The waitress comes by a few seconds later. Thinking she is being helpful, she picks it up and puts it back on the table. I push it back off.

I will not touch another newspaper throughout the fast.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2

I wake up in a hotel in Paducah, Kentucky. My daughters, wife and I walk down to the breakfast buffet. I sit facing away from the TV to avoid highlights, even though I doubt there will be any because it is turned to The Today Show.

I overhear Matt Lauer say something about how much toilet paper the New York Jets will take with them to London.

I just … what?

Of all the places I thought the NFL fast would take me, the Jets’ john was not one of them.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4

Hurricane Joaquin soaks North and South Carolina. A photographer friend posts scary pictures of flooding in Charlotte. I’m on a working vacation in St. Louis, and I worry my house in Charlotte might float away. I click on CharlotteObserver.com, thinking that historic flooding surely will be the lead story. Instead, I learn from the lead story that the Panthers have beaten the Buccaneers to move to 4-0.

Because of that, in addition to not visiting sports websites and not reading newspapers, I will no longer visit local news sites.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9

My wife offers to take me out for lunch to the best barbecue place in St. Louis. I cringe. I love barbecue. But there will be TVs there. And TVs mean football. Enticed by glowing reviews, I vow to exercise self-control. I promise myself I will look at my wife, not the TVs.

We get our food, sit down, and dang-it-all, I steal a glance at the screens. But they’re safe. The TVs all show baseball. The Cardinals are alive in the postseason, so St. Louis is only vaguely aware that football exists.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11

On the way home from St. Louis, we stop overnight in Cookeville, Tennessee. You know you’re at an awesome hotel when a sign on the desk reports how much your bill will go up if you steal the alarm clock. As a fast-related sacrifice, we did not stay in a Marriott, the official hotel of the NFL, which means no points, which for a sports writer is like … is like … well, I can’t think of anything worse.

At breakfast I see a man wearing a Carolina Panthers jersey, another man wearing a Buffalo Bills jersey and what I assume is his young daughter wearing a Buffalo Bills cheerleader outfit. I don’t understand that combination of teams, considering Cookeville sits only an hour from where the Tennessee Titans play home games. I don’t know if the Titans, Panthers or Bills are playing today, home or away. I’ve lost track of what NFL week it is—are there byes yet?

As I climb in the car to head home, I think this will be an easy Sunday to avoid football. To get home to Charlotte, I have a 339-mile drive, which, with my two daughters in the car, translates into approximately 426 hours. To avoid football, all I have to do is not turn on the radio.

I fill my gas tank before heading out.

On the gas pump is a screen.

On the screen is a commercial.

In the commercial is J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans.

It’s 9:30 a.m., and my fast is broken already.

Thomas B. Shea/Getty Images

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13

I blame travel for most of the violations so far. I’ve been to Erie and Toronto, and driven from Charlotte to St. Louis and back. In two weeks, I stayed six nights in hotels and ate out far more than I normally do. From what I can tell, every restaurant in North America has 46 TVs, and all of them, except the ones in St. Louis, are tuned to football. At home, with more variables under my control, I resolve to do better.

Using my stringent Internet restrictions—following nobody on Twitter, never checking Facebook, no sports pages, no local news pages—my anti-football ramparts seem to hold. I start to think the boycott might succeed.

I go for a hike. As I walk, I listen online to a sermon I missed while on the road. It is titled “Blindspot Idols.” Assistant pastor Tim Mascara talks about our collective obsession with football in a way that makes Burrell’s Panthers-idolatry zinger sound like an ad campaign for the NFL. “How excited do we get, to say, cover our kids in the colors of our team?” Mascara asks. “Dare I say, baptize our kids in the membership of that team?”

The institution that invented fasting keeps screwing my fast up.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18

We have friends who are diehard Ohio State fans over for lunch. As we talk, their son watches an NFL game on an iPhone in the next room. He’s far enough away that I can’t hear anything distinct, so I let it pass as a violation.

They ask whether news of the Michigan-Michigan State game has penetrated my anti-football shield.

I say no.

Christian Petersen & Rey Del Rio/Getty Images

I’m guessing the game was yesterday, but I don’t know. This is the first I’ve heard of it. My friends hint it would be worth breaking my fast to look it up. I don’t. In coming weeks this game will make me feel like the only spouse at a class reunion who didn’t go to the school.

These friends, and others, laugh at my boycott idea (or maybe at me, I’m not always sure). They often follow-up with a one-word question—why? The tone suggests I am doing something unwise, like fasting from Marriott.

Part of the reason is a social experiment. Nothing in American life comes close to football’s ubiquity. But it’s not just an exercise in cultural criticism. I’m not going to lie: I don’t really like football anymore.

Growing up and as an adult, I was a normal fan. I watched on Sundays and went to a game every couple of years. When I became a sportswriter, I joined the Pro Football Writers Association and enjoyed writing about football because readers devoured the stories.

As a staff writer at Sporting News, I was assigned to write about concussions in 2007. I flew to Atlanta to “interview” Larry Morris. He had been a star at Georgia Tech and for the Chicago Bears and was 73 at the time. Only I didn’t interview him at all. I didn’t even talk to him. We played ping-pong, and he was quite good. He was otherwise incoherent. Dementia had robbed him of himself, and his doctor traced his years-long mental decline to head injuries suffered in football.

Diamond Images/Getty Images

When we finished playing ping-pong, I interviewed his wife, Kay. In two hours, Larry Morris, who died in 2012, said only two words that made sense. “Shucks,” after he missed a shot. And “Kay.” When he said her name, she exulted, pure, instantaneous happiness. She told me he never said her name anymore.

He never said her name because he no longer knew it.

They had been married for 50 years.

In 2012, I polled 125 former players about whether they were suffering from concussion-related issues. One told me he thought about killing himself, another told me he heard voices and two told me they got hit so hard the world changed colors.

I won’t watch a game that does that to the men who play it.

During Super Bowl broadcasts in 2012 and 2013, the NFL ran a commercial that purported to trace how the game had become safer.

The ad started with a man catching a kickoff in 1906. As he ran down the field, he and the other players moved forward in time, morphing from stars of one era to stars of the next era, with the ad culminating in Devin Hester waltzing into the end zone.

At least three players whose likenesses were used in the commercial sued the NFL over concussions.

One of the players was Hall of Fame running back Ollie Matson, who died in 2011. According to the Washington Times, researchers at Boston University told Matson’s family that he had the worst case of CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the neurodegenerative disease associated with repeated brain trauma—they had ever seen.

And yet the NFL used Matson’s image, after he was dead, to congratulate itself for making the game safer.

I refuse to watch a league that does that to its players.

I refuse to watch college football, for the same reasons I won’t watch the game in general, and also because this is the NCAA’s straight-faced position: It is OK for universities, beer vendors, T-shirt salesmen, coaches, parking lot attendants, TV stations, TV networks, radio stations, radio networks, bloggers, TV reporters, newspaper reporters, idiots who boycott random things, and every single other person in the entire world to make money off of college football games—except for the men who play them.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22

The two most annoying jobs to have as far as people wanting to talk to you about them are therapist and fantasy football writer, because everybody always wants to talk to you about their problems.

Sports writer is not far behind. I bring this up because my career made this fast marginally more difficult to maintain. For example, today a new client asks me to write an obituary for a football personality who is still very much alive (though admittedly very old).

News outlets often prepare obits in advance, though I’ve never done it. I think it is funny that this happened today because “got asked to write an obit about a guy who isn’t dead” is the weirdest fast violation in this whole experiment—so far, at least. I decline to write the obit about the football person who isn’t dead yet and instead talk my way into writing one about a baseball person who isn’t dead yet.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24

“What is going on with Detroit?” a good friend asks when I run into him on a sunny, warm day at a fall festival. This is the first of four times in the next 16 hours that someone will bring up football either to me or close enough to me for me to hear. At that exact moment, his daughter is wrapping mine in toilet paper as part of a mummy-making contest.

I tell him I don’t know and don’t want to know. Still, even from those six words, I learn enough to consider this a fast violation. After a lifetime of being a Lions fan, I know “What is going on with Detroit?” doesn’t mean, “Why have the Lions won so many games?” Because they are the Lions, I know the Lions season has been a disaster.

Later that day, while watching my kids ride bikes in front of our house, I say hello to my across-the-street neighbor, a Penn State grad. A man walks by wearing an Ohio State shirt. Penn State guy mentions to Ohio State guy the fact that Ohio State recently pummeled Penn State.

As we drink a Yuengling together after that, Penn State guy’s phone plays the SportsCenter music—he has it set to chime after every score in the Penn State game. He pulls his phone out and announces the score.

I am the Detroit Lions of football boycotters.

This boycott is starting to get to me, and not in a good way.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25

I got into the journalism business because I like to know stuff. The older I’ve gotten, I’ve found that I enjoy the way stories connect us as much as anything. I don’t just mean the stories that I write, I mean the stories of our lives.

This presents my lone struggle throughout this fast. I feel twinges of regret when I sense my friends are excited about something. I want to experience their excitement with them, even though I don’t share it.

Scott Cunningham/Getty Images

Which brings me to the one time I violate my own fast. It is an accident, and the fast has already been violated five times this week, but still. A friend tells me he went to the Georgia Tech game. I know how much he loves Georgia Tech, and I know how much more fun the trip would be with a win instead of a loss, so instinctively I blurt out, “Who won?”

I realize my mistake immediately, but he says Georgia Tech beat Florida State before I stop him. I tell him not to tell me anything else.

He says the ending was on par with Michigan-Michigan State.

I walk away from that conversation feeling something like guilt. I just told a friend not to tell me something that brought him joy. This fast is turning me into a jerk. I don’t want to break the fast any more than I already have. But I want to know what makes him smile like that because I want to smile with him.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, part one

I’m starting to crack under the isolation. For weeks, I have severely limited my online news consumption—in addition to no sports or local news web sites, now I don’t visit any news websites at all.

Some arrows pierce even that shield. I find out who won a Monday Night Football game by reading about the latest Star Wars trailer. Other things I learn and I’m not sure how—as if a series of fractions of words coalesced into a completed thought. I think I know that Steve Spurrier quit. FanDuel and DraftKings did something either good or bad, and whatever it was, they did it a lot. I still don’t know what happened in Michigan-Michigan State, but I think Michigan State won and that whatever happened involved Michigan’s punter, though what a punter could do that was so bad I can’t imagine, and as a Lions fan, I can imagine a lot.

I wanted to fast so I could hide from football and instead football is all I think about. Confirmation bias overwhelms me. I see pigskins and gridirons everywhere. I notice a commercial on the TV in the Bank of America lobby while I am filling out my deposit slip. In it, Jeff Gordon talks about how to conserve fuel, with a plug for Bank of America at the end. I rant in my head: I can’t even make a deposit without the NFL sinking its claws into me! And besides that, it’s a Bank of America commercial playing INSIDE BANK OF AMERICA!

I hear a second voice inside my head, which is a little weird.

HEY! the second voice says, JEFF GORDON DOES NOT PLAY IN THE NFL.

Oh, yeah, right. I guess this doesn’t break my fast.

I still want to know why Bank of America plays Bank of America commercials inside Bank of America.

OCTOBER 29, part two

Since the fast started, the TV has been on in my house only twice—once so I could watch a NASCAR race and once so my kids could watch It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

The Great Pumpkin airs for a second time today, and my girls want to watch it again. The TV is on for one second, and in that one second, I see Tom Brady. I’m fairly certain it was NBC and that a game was on, but I don’t know that for sure. I quickly change the channel, and soon I see Lucy pulling the football back from Charlie Brown.

How long, O Lord, how long?

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, part one

I take my daughters to the park. Two other dads, one a friend, one a man I’ve never met, show up. The man I don’t know, who seems like a good dude, talks about his weekend.

“The Panthers are off, the Bills are off,” he says, introducing two facts to me that I didn’t already know, “what am I supposed to do tomorrow?”

Then he says, “My fantasy football team sucks because …” and I feel myself tumble headlong into a cliché wormhole.

He isn’t talking to me, so asking him to shut up in deference to my fast would be rude. Instead I do something I previously thought was biologically impossible: I shut off my ears. He keeps talking, but I will myself not to hear another word. I’ll go to my grave not knowing why his fantasy football team sucks.

OCTOBER 31, part two

My girls put on their Halloween costumes (Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker) and I lead them around our neighborhood for trick-or-treating. I see a man taking his kids from house to house. He tells me he is a Bears fan and he is wearing the scariest costume he could think of … a Jay Cutler Bears jersey.

We walk to the end of a cul-de-sac. A man and woman sit on lawn chairs at the end of a driveway. In the driveway is a pickup truck. In the bed of the pickup truck is a flat-screen TV. On the TV is a football game, which the man and woman can’t see because the TV is behind them.

At the next house, a man wearing a Mets hat is sitting in his driveway. Because my football blackout has become a news blackout, I don’t know the status of the World Series or even if there’s a game tonight. Guessing there is because it’s Saturday, I ask the man if he is going to watch it. He says he hopes to talk his neighbors into turning it on the TV in the back of the pickup, which he can see and they cannot. Otherwise, he’ll go inside and watch.

We trick-or-treat more. Less than a block later, we come to another house with a TV in the driveway. This time, men sit in chairs around the TV. The woman handing out candy says the TV is there so the “boys can watch the football game.”

I try to decide if the two TVs, or being asked to write an obit on a football person who isn’t dead, constitutes the weirder violation of my football fast. Whatever the answer, I remember the good old days, when you trick-or-treated and lamented the licorice and ignored the curfew your parents set and nobody watched football in the driveway as you did so.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4

Initially, my goal for this fast was ambitious: I wanted the Super Bowl to come and go without me finding out who played in it. I’ve had more impossible ideas, I’m sure, but I can’t think of any.

First I downgraded that to not finding out who plays whom and where or who wins through Nov. 8. I did not make it through the first week. Then I downgraded my fast to simply making it through one week without learning football news. I never made that either. With the end near, I abandon all ambition and simply want to make it a few days without my fast being broken.

All along, I have resisted going to (for example) the mountains, climbing into a tent and never coming out as a way to make my fast successful. That feels like cheating. But I inch close to that idea. I devise a plan and call it “the nuclear option.” I will read and send emails, because I have to, but that’s it; otherwise, no Internet. I will, for the first time, pre-emptively tell people not to talk to me about football.

I think I have a workable plan.

Then I leave the house.

I interview a NASCAR driver in his trophy room, where he has a San Francisco 49ers helmet displayed. Desperate to keep my fast alive, I don’t count it as a breach because we don’t talk about it. It’s the equivalent of a shirt at the airport, I tell myself, and not proof of my thesis that there’s nowhere I can go where football can’t find me.

A few hours later, I open an email from an editor, and it contains information about two football stories other people have written. I stop reading when I see the word football, so I’m not counting that either.

Then I meet a friend for lunch, and there are TVs all over the place. It’s not Buffalo Wild Wings on a Sunday, but it’s bad. I try unsuccessfully to avert my eyes. I see a fragment of a blurb that says Ron or Rod or Tom or Todd, last name Chud-something, was either hired or fired by Indianapolis.

In 3.5 hours of the so-called nuclear option, football blows up my fast three times.

George Gojkovich/Getty Images

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5

Nuclear option take two. I write all day. I leave the house only to have coffee with a friend and to hike, and this time I don’t listen to an anti-football sermon.

SUCCESS! A full day!

But I’ve had intermittent football-free days like this before.

I need, I want, two in a row.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6

By late afternoon, I look to be well on my way to my second straight football free day. I just have to get through a small-group Bible study at my house. Church has been a problem. Every time I set foot in the place (and even when I don’t) somebody violates my fast. While most of the references lament football’s role in society, it still makes me wonder if Christianity is the official religion of football.

I know the people in my small group well, and most are not football fans. One of the men hasn’t watched the Super Bowl in 20 years. Some of the rest would not know Cam Newton if he showed up at the meeting wearing his jersey.

The two biggest football fans in the group will not be here because, no lie, they are on vacation at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I consider their absence the first fast-related break I catch all month.

And then I answer the door, and the first person I see in 32 hours violates my fast. It’s a teenage boy. He hands me a McDonald’s cup and asks me to throw it away. I look down at it, and it is a commemorative Super Bowl cup, celebrating the 50^th Super Bowl even though it’s three months from happening and nobody has the slightest idea who will play in it.

Then the wife/mother of the Hall of Fame vacationers mentions the Bengals and the Panthers having home games this week. When she also mentions the election that was held in Charlotte earlier in the week, I laugh. I early-voted then forgot the election even happened. I had no idea who won. My football fast has kept me from important news, but not from football news.

Now that I think about it, I wore a Detroit Tigers hat to the polling place and an election official, also a Detroit expat, wanted to talk about their disaster of a season.

I wanted to hug him for loving baseball.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8

Football roams around, seeking whom it may devour, and for more than a month, that has been me. I’m defeated. I give up. I try to make it through one last Sunday without anything football-related happening, like a team trying hard while getting blown out, just to put a period at the end of what has started to feel like a sentence, not the kind you write, but the kind that keeps you behind bars.

In trying to deflect a football conversation, I tell a friend about the boycott. I tell him I know something crazy happened in Michigan-Michigan State but I don’t know what and please don’t tell me. I feel like I’ve had to do that a million times. I tell him I don’t know anything about the NFL, either, and I don’t want to know anything.

“So you don’t know who the undefeated teams are?” he asks, apparently not understanding the point when I said I don’t know anything and I don’t want to know anything.

Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

I note that he said teams. Plural. I had been pretty sure there was one. Last week, while watching the NASCAR race online in preparation for an interview with the 49ers-helmet-having driver, I didn’t close my laptop fast enough before the commercials started. The announcer said something about a battle of undefeated teams, and there was an image of Peyton Manning. That strongly suggested the Broncos were undefeated as late as the day after Halloween.

I go to the grocery store. Nearly every clerk and every bagger is wearing a Carolina Panthers T-shirt or jersey. This is at Trader Joe’s, in the land of tree-huggers and hippies, not football fanatics. I’ve been here many Sundays, and I’ve never seen so much Panthers gear.

I overhear a bagger say, “Every time I go uptown I can feel the energy,” and I deduce she is talking about the Panthers because only football causes fans to think the air in a city has undergone a chemical and/or physical change so profound that they can feel it.

Her comment makes me think there is something going on with the Panthers—I remember the 4-0 headline … could they still be undefeated, right under my nose, and I don’t know it?—and at the exact second that thought crosses my mind, another clerk clangs a bell five times.

“ALL RIGHT! THIRTY MINUTES UNTIL GAME TIME! GO PANTHERS!” she shouts.

This confirms to me that the Panthers are undefeated. A grocery store clerk is not going to ring a bell for a team otherwise. Or maybe ringing the bell as a countdown to kickoff became a thing while I was fasting and I missed it. It could be true—Charlotte has a new mayor and I had no idea. Maybe she issued a mandate.

I have been looking for something to tell me it is time to end the boycott. I decide the bell marks the end of the fast, and the final violation. The bell tolls for me.

Scott Cunningham/Getty Images

EPILOGUE

When the fast ends, I do not try to find what I missed, football or not. The escape from the incessant blather is so freeing I try to maintain the mental purity. I continue to follow zero people on Twitter. I will read the news now, just nothing about football. I have become skilled at not seeing headlines I don’t want to see, so I hope to maintain my obliviousness.

Football information finds me soon enough anyway. I check Facebook for the first time in weeks, and the very first post I see reports the Panthers are, indeed, 8-0.

I never check to see what ridiculousness has befallen the Lions. It’s more fun to imagine it anyway. I don’t look up that Michigan-Michigan State play, either.

The sun has still come up every day, even for Michigan’s punter.

I

One day before Halloween, Oct. 30, 2015, 11 p.m., 9 Bleecker St., New York—

Bathed in a vaguely hellish infernal glow emanating from red light bulbs burning in protective caging, Overthrow Boxing owner Joey Goodwin, dressed as Donald Trump, climbs between the ropes to announce tonight’s “underground” main event. Despite the wardrobe and socio-economic status of the mob around me, it’s demonstrably clear we’re all mainlining a dear and familiar narcotic from my childhood: 1980s WWF professional wrestling. What was the most obvious feature of wrestling back then? The same one anyone on the WWF payroll was forbidden to mention—that it was fake. But what an incomparable high to suspend disbelief and buy into it all anyway. And model underground boxing—an only in NEW York cottage industry featuring male fashion models posing as fighters—is to boxing what the soap opera of spandex was to Olympic wrestling, only without the wink. Here the cream of New York’s Millennial society rises to the surface, rich and thick.

Having been flown across the continent for a guaranteed purse of $200, a real fighter, North Vancouver’s “Maharajah” Mac, with an unblemished record of 1-0 in the Canadian amateur ranks, is led half-naked and by spotlight through the cramped, costumed, mostly fashionista-esque (and by now quite intoxicated by event-sponsored liquor) invite-only crowd of 200 to the ring. I feel like I am visiting a boutique-style sideshow, a performance art boxing tent offering at Burning Man. After climbing through the ropes, the Maharajah stands, nervously panting, under a chandelier awaiting the arrival of tonight’s centerpiece of underground boxing. He laughed, telling me beforehand in Overthrow’s impromptu dressing room that he expected to lose.

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

Suddenly, “Rockstar Charlie” is announced over the speakers to roars from the audience as the lights dim and cameras pop and an ESPN E60 film crew follows the lanky, former nursery school teacher turned model-boxer, somehow both as bouncy as Tigger and serene as a lullaby, throughout his ring entrance, preening before the crowd with his tats and Sid Vicious chain-and-lock necklace while models squeal out his name. A girl in a red wig and white Ray-Bans, screaming his name next to me, has makeup applied over her face to give the impression of a drug overdose, blood running down from her nostril. Or maybe she just had some shitty cocaine or meth after enduring the previous bout, one featuring two feisty midgets squaring off with a referee earnestly delivering his fight instructions on his knees. One of the little people had DOPE scrawled across his trunks. Having trouble seeing over the crowd, I originally mistook him for a mildly distasteful Halloween-inspired costume of a pugilistic Dope-y, a Disney hallucination. I arrived late and missed the opening act with breakdancers and a DJ performing in the ring.

As the opening bell tolls to the first of three one-minute rounds—it’s model-boxing after all—my first “underground” event, more or less billed as New York’s answer to Fight Club,sure feels a whole helluva lot closer to Zoolander. A little more intriguing, nobody seems to care. Or notice. They’re all too busy posing for the cameras, whether there are any cameras or not.

II

So who the fuck is Charlie Himmelstein? At first blush, I had him pegged as a modern, updated Edie Sedgwick, New York City’s mascot frog preening and posing for a selfie while being publicly boiled to death in our pot of water. From what I’ve learned of Charlie so far, he’s a social savant and devious knuckle ball thrown down the middle of the plate, but what does he really stand for? Hell, what does New York stand for these days?

Nearly every week, instead of getting on a New York City subway train, somebody decides to jump in front of one. If you buy a handgun here or anywhere else in this country, statistically you’re more likely to shoot yourself than anyone else. When the Twin Towers fell, our president used his first public address after 9-11 to state, “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

Fourteen years later, New York recalibrated as the world’s favorite shopping mall, and gave birth to this 25-year-old Renaissance man “Rockstar” Charlie, a veritable private-petting zoo for media consumption. The sacred and the profane were always Siamese twins to begin with, but this manically hair-triggered commodification of self has a way of making those twins seem in heat for each other. Even with all our technology and government spying ensuring that it is impossible for anyone to get lost in America ever again, since Charlie Himmelstein came on my radar, somehow I’ve managed to lose myself anyway.

One night late last spring, I was urgently marching up the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, 10 minutes late to give a talk on Cuba at an NYU MFA program when a flier, scotch-taped to the side of an old local dive bar that had gone out of business, caught my eye. At first I thought some wacky sequel to the bizarre (and, according to various media reports, apparently wildly successful) “Looking for a girlfriend” ubiquitous New York City flier.

I was wrong. Very wrong, it turned out. This flier had its own unique undertow of meaning.

Beneath the crinkled-up photograph of a lanky, blank-faced hipster kid, hilariously bare-chested under a leather jacket with cartoonishly-oversized boxing gloves hanging down like lobster claws over his spread-apart skinny-jeans in the pose of a would-be, rough-trade, rent-boy, sat the amusing invitation: “Meet CHARLIE.”

I tore the flier off the wall and studied it closer under a flickering street lamp while undergoing some kind of satori gazing into Charlie’s Bermuda Triangle stare.

Charlie was leaning back against the sepia mural of a sweaty, heavily tattooed half-naked boxer lighting up a cigarette in some fashion-usurped karaoke of anarchy-inspired underground ring.

At first I wasn’t sure if it was performance art or simply a cruel prank at some local kid’s expense. I mean, even in today’s New York-as-shopping-mall experience, could anyone actually intend to project this image?

I squinted to read the text and discovered Charlie, born and raised in the city, had been boxing since he was a kid, fought as a novice in the 2012 Daily News Golden Gloves, and was now offering his services as a boxing trainer. In addition to his boxing exploits, Charlie had modeled for Marc Jacobs and was a photographer for the Andy Warhol founded Interview Magazine. And then the final sentence of the flier brought home Charlie’s most curious third-person selling point: “Oh, and he’ll f*ck you up if that’s what you’re into.”

It was like being confronted with an invitation for a Tijuana donkey and chica show on some gigantic digital billboard in the middle of Times Square.

I teach private boxing lessons around New York City myself, and the biggest money I’ve ever been offered—by far—was $250 an hour to “beat to a pulp” a prospective lawyer client who proposed signing any legal paperwork I felt necessary before beginning regular sessions. Clearly, Charlie was an infinitely better businessman than I was in seeking out this kind of well-heeled, masochistic demographic.

I read Charlie’s last line over again to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated it when my phone began to vibrate in my pocket with the crossfire of three simultaneous texts. They all addressed the same pressing issue: Who thefuck is Charlie Himmelstein?

“Have you seen this fucking guy’s poster yet?” three more texts asked, accompanied by photos taken of the same flier I held in my hand, but from other points around the East Village and Lower East Side where friends had encountered it.

And when I got to NYU and apologized for being late, I couldn’t help but ask the kids in the crowd if anyone had ever heard of Charlie Himmelstein. It started a laughing fit.

“Rockstar Charlie?” one girl giggled.

“Ummm,” I shrugged. “Yeah, that’s him.”

“Of course. Before he started fucking that Sports Illustrated model he tried to fuck half my friends at school.”

That night I went home and did some research. I learned 24-year-old Charlie was already something of a cottage industry operating out of his parents’ Park Slope home. The subject of numerous local articles already, he had promotional videos, a considerable Instagram following, and, of course, those fliers strung up like some kind of vaguely sinister, highly sexualized cobweb to lure fame, all before it was clear precisely on what substance fame should come calling.

If Don Quixote and Lolita were caged and forced to breed, I was convinced New York City’s “Rockstar” Charlie Himmelstein—underground boxer, model, photographer, and burgeoning “celebrity”—would encompass every last chromosome of that arresting creature’s DNA. With America in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown (our suicide rate surpasses even our murder rate, if there was any doubt on that score), the American Dream has been reduced to a mental patient strapped into an electroshock therapy bed clenching our flag between gritting teeth.

Something behind Charlie’s eyes gives every impression—provided he could post the selfie on Instagram and Tinder—that he’d love nothing more than to ride it to climax like some haywire mechanical bull. It’s not so much that Charlie treats life like theater, it’s that he treats New York as his own private art gallery, with himself as the centerpiece exhibit. As the late art critic Robert Hughes once pointed out, “The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.” Charlie’s doing that, and like all the best stuff at the MET, everyone can take their own selfie with him, too. With coverage in The New York Times, Vice, New York Magazine, Papermag, and, soon, ESPN’s E60 documentary series, his Quixotic quest isn’t just being taken seriously; like all good copy, he’s being egged on. And, who knows, maybe he’s onto something. All it took for Paris Hilton was a name, a night cam and oral sex. Charlie’s powder keg to launch into the celebrity stratosphere seemed to have a lot more fuses ready to ignite.

Losing our innocence every 10 minutes seems to be the new national pastime, and today’s New York seems to consist of the rich, the help, the destitute, and a whirlpool of distraction to keep you from noticing. Charlie’s ingeniously constructed identity incorporates a healthy portion from each of these segments into his stew and gives the ingredients a devious stir. Maybe he’s recognized if you gaze long enough into America’s cultural abyss, the cultural abyss refuses to simply stare back. Instead, fully loaded with enough ammunition to mow down a generation, it’s gleefully taking aim. More illuminating still, according to several studies going back to UCLA in 2007, for the first time in American history, an entire generation of children has nearly entirely abandoned any other ambition apart from fiendishly clamoring to be caught in fame’s crosshairs. Within contemporary New York, Charlie’s in the right place at the right time, and with as much premeditation as preternatural instinct, entirely calibrated into the right state of mind to hit the motherlode. But the competition has never been more fierce.

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

It was Andy Warhol who in the early 1960s first put the virus under the microscope, identified what we’re really dealing with and jotted down his findings in his diary before infecting the collective water supply:

“The people I loved were … the leftovers of show business, turned down at auditions all over town. They couldn’t do something more than once, but their once was better than anyone else’s. They had star quality but no star ego. They didn’t know how to push themselves. They were too gifted to lead ‘regular lives,’ but they were also too unsure of themselves to ever become real professionals.”

An Instagram photo of Charlie posing on the subway in a pair of American flag speedos and what looks like an L. Ron Hubbard Sea Org captain’s hat suggests, regardless of whether he’s sure or unsure of himself, he’s absolutely certain about us.

P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. Charlie has his head up the birth canal and is chewing at the placenta for all it’s worth.

III

Before Andy Warhol was anyone in New York society, he used to mercilessly stalk Truman Capote all over town and leave endless embarrassing notes and letters in his mailbox and under his door in a desperate bid to befriend him. He pretended to be Capote and even insinuated he’d been mistaken for him now and then. Warhol, despite all his gifts, never had any for narrative, but soon enough he made up for that shortcoming with his genius for immediacy. Capote wanted nothing to do with him. He sized him up, as did New York’s art world, as exactly the kind of loser who would never amount to anything.

After discovering gravity along with a host of other scientific breakthroughs, Isaac Newton spent the last 20 years of his life believing in the Philosopher’s Stone and researching alchemy along with calculating the dimensions of Noah’s Ark based on close biblical observation.

Which is just to illustrate that even some pretty clever people, with the best of intentions, often still get it horribly wrong after an initial scratch and sniff.

The same week I followed up with “Rockstar” Charlie, Kim Kardashian was on the cover of Rolling Stone. I learned this because Charlie had posted a heartfelt objection as a harbinger of cultural doom on social media.

Johnny Nunez/Getty Images

I gave the star of the 2012 viral sensation “Boxing Lessons with Eric Kelly” video a call. Kelly, aside from still training well-heeled white-collar Wall Street types and working for Vice Sports as a host, had been a four-time US national amateur champion. More than anyone I’ve ever met since I moved to New York in 2010, Kelly’s constitutionally incapable of not telling the truth to powerful people. Somehow he even managed to turn that into a lucrative selling point for himself as a boxing trainer. If we throw in the towel on democracy—and with barely half of Americans bothering to vote, perhaps we already have—and go back to a having a king, for my money we could scale back our expenses on hiring a court jester and poet and nominate Kelly to occupy both roles. His fame and notoriety around the city has been built on that genius. Since I profiled him here in early 2013, we’ve become friends.

“You ever heard of a guy named Charlie Himmel—” I asked.

“Sure,” Kelly laughed. “Charlie’s my nigga.”

“Whoa.” This was a curveball. “You sure we’re talking about the same Charlie here?”

“Rockstar Charlie?”

“That’s him,” I sighed.

“Yeah, he’s my boy,” Kelly snorted. “I worked his corner a couple times with those bullshit underground model fights.”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“Don’t get me wrong, he’s a crazy motherfucker. But I dig him.”

“Seriously?”

“Serious as cancer. He’s cool.”

“Can he fight?”

“Is he better than I was? I got four kids, but if a motherfucker was stupid enough to ask me that to my face I’d knock them out where they stood and serve my time in prison. This of course includes you. Is he gonna become the next light-heavyweight champion of the world? You’re out of your fucking mind. But is he good enough to win the Golden Gloves?”

“Is he?” I asked.

“If his heart was in boxing I’d say he’d have a decent chance. That goofy motherfucker on all those posters around town that everybody and their little sister thinks they could beat the shit out of has the skills to win the gloves. Facts.”

“Jesus Christ. Will you come and meet him with me this weekend?” I asked.

“I’ll text his punk ass right now. He’s dating a Sports Illustrated model these days so he’s up in that. When he comes up for air we’ll make it happen.”

Kelly texted me the next morning with a time and place to meet Charlie: Washington Square Park at noon under the arch. From there we could walk over to his new gym on the Lower Eastside, the Overthrow Underground Boxing Club, and walk up the stairs to his photo studio one floor above. Drenched in a red glow and candlelight, Charlie taught $34/hr classes in the basement, including Friday’s “Box and Booze social.” Overthrow’s building, at 9 Bleecker Street, had once been home to the Yippies (the 1960s counter-cultural free speech and anti-war group), a coffee shop, and comedy theater in the basement. Someone named Joey “the Soho Kid” Goodwin, had taken over the lease after the previous tenants, the Yippies and the National Aids Brigade, couldn’t keep up the payments and were evicted. Oh well.  New York Magazine confessed that to the casual observer, Charlie’s fighting lessons appeared “like we’re all learning choreography for Boxing! The Musical.”

I arrived under the arch at noon and Charlie, posing like an ambassador for an anarchy-chic Gucci campaign while leaning against a fire hydrant, a choker with a $3 swimming pool lock around his neck, was smoking and pouting for some unseen set of Truman Show cameras, his suspenders flung down limp over his skinny jeans. Standing nearly 6’4 and weighing around 180 pounds, Charlie was built more like Michael Phelps after a couple months vacationing from Olympic training than most active fighters I’ve encountered. There aren’t many light heavyweights that tall. Or skinny. Then again, I’d never met a “model boxer” or an “underground” fighter before. As Charlie had pointed out in his promotional videos, “I’m not your typical boxer who’s gonna spar and go home and have a protein shake and take a nap. I’m gonna go outside and have a cigarette and go get wasted that night and show up the next day hungover and still kick someone’s ass. I’m addicted to the nightlife and the wildest available is Friday Night Throw Down.”

“Hey Charlie,” I said, offering my hand.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little out of it. There’s this fucking English guy on social media whose been calling me out and posting videos of himself training on a heavy bag to kick my ass. He tags Vice and HBO on these videos. He’s offering me $4,000 if I can kick his ass. Wanna see his video on my phone?”

We watch the video of this English guy attacking a heavy bag like an old woman fighting off a thief via hurling her grocery bags and purse.

“How many of these kinds of videos are out there calling you out?” I ask.

“More and more. I’ve got a bullseye on my back with all this publicity bullshit going on.”

We both spot Eric Kelly down the block talking up a girl and some of her friends. They all smile and both Charlie and I do, too. Just then Kelly spots us out of the corner of his one good eye, the other having never recovered from a bar fight where a pool cue was cracked over it in exchange for a wisecrack. Kelly was an alternate at the Olympics and then his professional career was over before it started. But now, many years later, his viral video led him into being repped by the William Morris Agency.

As we walk over to the East Village, Charlie retells his genesis into New York’s consciousness. His dad took him to a Stones concert when he was a little boy and he was hooked becoming Mick Jagger. His dad has been to over 24 Stones concerts in all, and both father and son have matching Andy Warhol-designed Rolling Stones mouth tattoos on their shoulder. Charlie is interrupted telling his story by a few gorgeous modeling friends he knows and, it turns out, they’re both on the way to Overthrow as well.

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

When we arrive at the gym, Charlie gives me a tour while Kelly makes the rounds greeting everyone. There’s a chandelier hanging over the ring on the main floor. Charlie tells me that pro fighter Alicia Napoleon also trains people here. He shows me some of his photography on the walls that he shot upstairs in his studio and on the building’s roof. I’m steered toward a collage of maybe 60 impossibly beautiful women with bags over their heads bent over the edge of the roof with their pants pulled down exposing their asses to the camera. Beneath each picture is a caption offering their Instagram hashtags.

Eric Kelly comes over and directs my attention to one photo in particular.

“Recognize that ass?” he slaps my shoulder.

I look where he’s pointing and it’s a freakishly appealing portion of some girl’s anatomy, but no, I can’t place it.

“You directed a movie on the girl and you don’t even recognize her?”

I looked below the pose at the caption and recognized the name: Mel. As in former world champion female boxer Melissa St. Vil. I’d directed a documentary short profiling her for Vice largely based on her courage overcoming nearly being murdered by Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s uncle Roger, along with a slew of horrific abuses, both sexual and physical, she’d endured growing up in her family home.

“C’mon,” Charlie says. “I’ll take you up stairs to my studio and we can talk.”

As we walk up the stairs the gym’s owner, Joey “the Soho Kid” Goodwin—who has fought a couple underground fights himself—greets Charlie and introduces himself to me. Charlie’s studio is enormous and well equipped, and after inspecting his pack of cigarettes and finding it empty, he asks to bum one off me before we start the interview. I motion toward the open window, revealing an ample fire escape for us to smoke on and he waves me off.

“Fuck that,” he says. “We can smoke in here.”

“I guess I’m still trying to get my bearings with all this, man.”

Eric Kelly enters the room and bats the smoke out of his face. A year younger than me at 35, he’s still never touched tobacco, booze, or any drug. “Loving the hood,” he once explained to me, “was always my vice.”

And yet, with our shared addiction to boxing, we’ve both ended up here.

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

“Look,” Charlie begins. “I guess in terms of where I’m at right now? You can’t be a sex addict, ridiculous person, and expect everything to go right. Losing friends and dying going on around you and getting fucked up the night before a fight? But in the end? Am I happy right now? Yeah. I am.”

“I guess I’m trying to figure out what you’re fighting for.”

“The secret crown of New York, man,” he smiles wide.

“How did that come about? What planted the seed?”

“The Golden Gloves. After my first fight at the New York Gloves, literally the next week, I was partying and got invited to do this underground fighting. I shouldn’t have been partying in between the Golden Gloves. But what it got me was the underground fights back several years ago. And what the underground fights got me was a modeling career. What the modeling career got me was a photography career and all these beautiful friends I have now around me. What photography got me was a photo studio and an income. The photo studio landed me in this building above my boxing gym.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“With my parents right near Park Slope.”

“Not exactly your typical background for a fighter.”

“In a couple years, I see myself owning three or four more photo studios. Quadrupling my income. Being a part owner of some more gyms. Continuing underground fights and hosting them. You know, sticking to my roots.”

“I asked Eric to come down here because when I saw your poster he was the first person I called to figure out what you and underground fighting were all about.”

“What did he say?”

“He vouched for you.”

“I told him this goofy nigga can fight,” Kelly smiled.

“That’s one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever had, having someone like Eric vouch for me. I started this underground shit when I was 18. I can’t stop boxing. It’s not in my blood to stop fighting. I’ve had my nose broken. I’ve shit myself in the ring after getting hit with a body shot. Had my jaw broken. I’m a counter puncher. I don’t fear the pain. Every moment could be the last you remember in a ring. After my next fight the last thing I remember could be talking to you and Eric right now. I’m a 6’4, lanky, goofy, dickhead. I enjoy being laughed at and laughed with. But this shit ain’t no joke.”

“Where did that flier come from?” I asked.

“I didn’t make that. Joey made that to advertise the gym. I look like a fucking idiot. Did my poster bother you?”

“It intrigued me. Because I didn’t know if there was something wrong with you or if you were inviting what seemed like a pretty negative response to offering to fuck people up given how you looked. Like a bored rich kid from Park Slope, frankly. I mean, maybe I’m way off, but what does your dad do?”

“He’s a partner at a law firm. But he defends tenants against slum-lords. I mean, you’re right. I’m getting challenges for some serious money from around the world based on the attention I’m getting these days. But I’m confident about what I can do in the ring. All the great rockstars of boxing were cocky. But let the numbers speak for me. Look at my videos. Nobody in the boxing community has seen anything like this. But they watch me fight and I’m not a joke.”

“Are you gonna fight that English guy who challenged you in the video?”

“Who? GR7?”

“Who the fuck is GR7?”

“The guy in the video calls himself GR7. He speaks about himself in the third person.”

Kelly gets Charlie’s attention and slaps me on the shoulder. “If that punkass makes it over here and I work your corner and we beat his ass, I want you to ask him something after.”

“What’s that?” Charlie laughs.

“How does it feel to lose to a Jewish model?”

“I’ll wear my American flag speedo and maybe I could bring a bagel and lox into the ring before the bell.”

“See,” Kelly slaps his knee and turns to me. “I tol’ja you’d love this corny motherfucker.”

“I’m not sitting here talking to you because I fought in the Golden Gloves. I’m sitting here talking to you because I’ve won a helluva lot of underground fights. I’ve traveled to Texas and in Miami I fought in the Versace mansion against a pro fighter. They lowered the fucking ring from a 300-foot crane into the backyard of the mansion. We were the only fight. It was fucking hilarious. The guy I fought had 23 pro fights.”

“How’d you do?” I asked.

“That was the most nervous I’ve ever been. I was like 21 and there were hundreds of Miami’s most famous and moneyed people all around me watching. The guy hit me so hard in the face I actually forgot where I was and said, ‘Yo, chill.’ I have no idea how that even came out. This guy I was fighting was like, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Forget it.”’

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

IV

After I’d asked Charlie about interviewing his parents at their home in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, he laughed and gave me his mother’s phone number. Charlie still lives with Mom and Dad in the family home a block away from Prospect Park, in a three-storey house his parents had bought in the mid-1980s, shortly before Charlie, their second son, was born. Sam Himmelstein, a Brooklyn-native who grew up in low-income tenements, now defends New York City tenants. His wife, Amy Herrick, teaches nursery school and writes books for children.

Amy texted back promptly after I suggested an evening to possibly meet her and her husband:

“We will show you baby pictures and tell you how close to the edge of insanity Charles has driven us.”

I took the F-train over to their sleepy neighborhood. They’d left the porch light on for me and its friendly glow illuminated a Bernie Sanders yard-poster behind the gate and a retro-motorcycle I safely assumed belonged to their youngest son. Amy warmly answered the door and introduced me to their sweet and arthritic dog, Autumn, whom Charlie had originally picked out as a puppy at a shelter. She pointed out Charlie’s room on the main floor—nothing too see here—before leading me up the stairs to her kitchen where her husband—who looked like Bernie Sanders only 20 years or so younger—had just gotten home from work and was waiting with a bottle of wine on the dinner table. Chicken soup was on the stove.

“Charlie worked in nursery school for a while,” Amy began, shaking her head as she and her husband smiled. “Several years in fact. He liked it. I guess you could say he was a very interesting nursery school teacher. But I don’t think he ever considered it as a career path. Then it all just veered off into this other world.”

“Did you see it coming?” I asked.

“Charlie,” Sam Himmelstein—who it could now be confirmed also sounded eerily similar to Bernie Sanders—paused and laughed, “from a very young age, had issues with aggression. We felt he needed to channel it elsewhere. So we tried martial arts. He was diagnosed with ADD. Somehow he got involved in boxing and he had some talent at that. He’s fast, agile, and he’s very long. He’s almost 6-foot-4 yet he’s only 175 pounds. He’s this nimble guy and opponents just can’t reach him. When I watch him fight it’s almost as if people are jumping up to reach him.”

“You’ve seen his fights?” I asked.

“I’ve been to all his fights except when I had tickets to the World Series. I’ve been to all the underground fights even though, you know, I’m a lawyer. I’m on the stream so when they announce where the fights will be, I’m there. There’s videos of him hugging me after the fights. My wife went to one of his fights.”

“I went to his first underground fight,” Amy confirmed. “I couldn’t bear to go to any more.”

“He’s done pretty well so far from what I hear,” I said.

Amy reached over and rubbed my elbow. “No mother really wants her son to be a boxer. And I have a different take on his aggression. He’s the kind of person, the kind of male, who right from childhood had this very strong need to, like a dog, pee on every hydrant and leave his mark. He needs to make sure he’s paid attention to. It was always about bringing attention for himself. His temper was quick and he’d easily get riled up and he always and still has poor impulse control, but it was more about attention than aggression. And combined with all his other aspects of odd, frenetic, ADD-type behavior, he ended up in boxing. I think part of the boxing, whatever it is with his chemistry, the ADD-ness, that there’s something about boxing that gives a great deal of immediate feedback. That feedback-loop was very satisfying to him and I think that’s why he took off on it.”

Sam got up and poured himself a glass of cranberry juice and topped it off with some vodka. After he’d screwed on the cap he scratched his face. “He’s told us stories over the years where he’ll get into confrontations on the subway or on the street or on a bus. You know, the way he looks and his swagger can rub people the wrong way. He attracts attention, negative and positive. He’s been assaulted several times on the subway.”

“It just happened last week!” Amy hollered.

“She’s right,” Sam laughed.

“He was assaulted in Chinatown by a gang of kids or something.”

“They often don’t realize because of how goofy he looks, this tall model-looking white guy, that he can actually take care of himself physically the way he can. He’s a trained fighter. When these altercations happen, he always comes home and tells us about it.”

“I mean,” Amy sighed heavily, “you never know when he tells stories about himself. He embroiders and embellishes everything. We never really quite know. And he can tell some real whoppers. I don’t think he looks for this kind of trouble, but of course the swagger kind of brings it on.”

“There’s this theatrical aspect to how he interacts with people that’s a big part of him. He’s not been easy to raise. It’s been hard with him and we worry about him despite him lately making this kind of splash in the world. We worry about where he’s eventually going to land with all this.”

Amy refilled her glass of wine and shared an uneasy silence with her husband for a brief moment.

“My father was bi-polar,” she said. “My husband is very social and really likes people to pay attention to him. Charlie has that aspect to him in spades.”

“But I think what’s somewhat disturbing to both of us is that we’re both fairly academic. Amy has an MFA and I’m a lawyer, right? So we both got graduate degrees and are successful professionals. So, you know, to have a son who is not exactly academically inclined? He dropped out of college fairly quickly and we aren’t exactly expecting him to go back and get a degree. If he navigates the world it will probably be through some other means.”

“Chutzpah most likely,” Amy laughs.

“He’s incredibly entrepreneurial and smart and I still worry about him. He has all these talents. He models. He’s a photographer. Maybe he’ll make it! When I describe him to people a lot of them respond, ‘Holy shit! He must be making a lot of money!’ And here and there he does. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. He’s still living at home at 25. Despite his amazing talents he’s not able to pay his own way which leads to a lot of parental nervousness.”

“There’s something very primitive in his desire to make a mark and then it fastened itself on celebrity. I don’t know how much he consciously thinks about the fame thing, but he loves entertaining people and getting people to react to him. He’ll do the stupidest 8-year-old kind of things.”

I asked Charlie’s father how hard it was to watch his boy get hit.

“It’s hard to watch him get hit. But, you know, on the other hand I feel very proud of him. It’s a mixed bag. We all know that boxing and people getting hit, concussions, it’s dangerous. He doesn’t get hit much. But the few times I’ve seen him really get hit, it’s very, very hard to watch. I hope he doesn’t do this much longer.”

“Do you think he will?” I ask.

“We think boxing is a way to help promote his modeling and photography for the most part,” Sam smiled. “I’m hoping the boxing doesn’t go on that much longer.”

“Charles is a very cheerful person,” Amy smiles sympathetically. “I envy his temperament and, at the same time, I wish a great deal he’d just worry more. He moves through life with this great good cheer about him.”

“But he’s got a girlfriend now, who models in Sports Illustrated. He’s been a terrible womanizer. A lot of models have passed through our house. But we really like this girl. She’s smart and doing really well.”

“We adore Charles,” Amy laughs, rubbing her husband’s shoulder. “But of course he also drives us absolutely bat shit crazy most of the time.”

V

Looking for meaning in Charlie’s story reminds me of that military exercise where they blindfold you and shove you into a pool to swim around and try to find the bricks down at the bottom.

Charlie Himmelstein was 19, lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn, a nursery school teacher and college dropout, when he lost in the novice division of the New York Golden Gloves. Then another door opened when Bekim Trenova, a serious player in the underground model-boxing scene, invited him inside. “Hey man,” Trenova said to Charlie. “We like kids like you. Fight for me.”

Six months later, Trenova finally followed up with a phone call. Charlie had already forgotten who Trenova was.

“Hey kid, you’re fighting in three days.”

They hired off-duty police officers to work security at secret locations across New York City. “For the last five years I’ve been building a backstory that you can’t deny,” Trenova was quoted as saying in Bedford and Bowery in 2014. “It’s like a traveling circus … I think that’s what helps it. We’re pioneering something new to the entertainment world that combines performance art, boxing, sport, music. It’s literally anything.” He’s saving “the genesis” of the Friday Night Throwdown he founded for a documentary film he’s been producing, showcasing the fights and after parties. He’d like the film to make the festival circuit. It’s a set piece for a Hollywood sendoff, the same way Warhol intended to use his coterie of edgy “superstars” from his “factory,” fodder for his own grab at fame. Maybe it would work out better for him than it did for Warhol.

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

Going through all of Charlie Himmelstein’s oeuvre—interviews, promotional videos, Instagram photos, and shared material on Facebook, it’s clear he’s identified and harnessed the abiding obsession of our age to his every advantage: gaze. My guess is his hyper-sexualized posture masks the fundamental, almost fairytale purity and innocence of the need even his parents have identified: pay attention to me. And, obviously, he’s far from alone in that longing. Living more and more in a surveillance-addicted society, the friction between privacy and publicity is an internal struggle each of us confronts every second of our lives. Candid Camera popped society’s cherry and it turned out we were more than hungry for another roll in the hay. The blueprint was laid for reality TV and it hasn’t evolved much since. The Truman Show was a dystopian look at a fraudulent-utopia, a modern Greek tragedy about a baby not yet having left the womb, already condemned to the fate of an entire lifetime under the glare of thousands of cameras’ 24-hour, 7-day-a-week siege. Whereas Truman finally risked death to break free, now a generation of kids will do and risk anything to break in. J.D. Salinger was considered a nut for rejecting fame and celebrity. Now he looks like he may have been the last private citizen in American life, and maybe the last sane one.

“We all need someone to look at us.”— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

Working backwards from a desire to be seen is the fear of being invisible. A desire’s deepest fear is to be content. Our bucket is leaking and instead of fixing the hole, we need more and more to perpetually keep refilling it. Facebook has turned well over a billion lives into aquariums on display, but we’re fresh water fish guzzling seawater to quench a thirst.

That’s where I wonder if “Rockstar” Charlie’s labyrinth has a center. Leaving aside the shallowness of his pathological narcissism, his depth arrives the moment you ponder the emotional riptide that awaits him after he’s run out of ideas to keep the culture’s notoriously brief attention satiated. He needs some hits while he’s young to underwrite bringing the band back together 30 years from now for the arthritic, comb-over reunion tour and inevitable memoir.

What’s next? Where can he go? In some ways Charlie’s quest reminds me a lot of the little boy in the movie of The NeverEnding Story. Reeling after the death of his mom, the child protagonist takes refuge inside the pages of a stolen book, lost in a magical and cursed world called Fantasia with “The Nothing” threatening to consume and erase all existence forever.

“We all need someone to look at us,” Milan Kundera observed in Unbearable Lightness of Being. He goes on to identify four categories of gaze human beings long for. The first is the infinite number of anonymous, unknown eyes—the public. The Internet? The second category is comprised of people with the need to be seen by known eyes. Next are the people who need to be held in the gaze of the person they love. And, lastly, in the fourth category, are those, like Charlie I think, who “live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.”

I interviewed Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek over the summer when he came to New York to teach at NYU. He repeated an observation that seems germane, “Fantasy is for those who can’t cope with reality while reality is for those who can’t cope with their fantasies.”

It’s tough to know with Charlie, or the legion behind him embarking on his quest, whether reality or fantasy is responsible for the real lasting damage.

Leading up to Charlie’s main event fight on Oct. 30 at 9 Bleecker St., I got spooked just before the “midget fight,” when I spotted who I then thought was “Dopey”—given what was visible sprawled across his trunks—rest his forearm on the ropes before being allowed to enter. Dopey’s hands were wrapped up in the same stars and stripes hand wraps that several of the combatants wore that night. Charlie likes to drape himself in the American flag after Friday Night Throwdown fights. It looks good in photos and catches the eye and tosses up meaningful alley-oops to greedy, groping little meaning-perverts like me. The boxing photographer I’d hired took some photos of him looking dejected and sad and showed me some from her camera with a frown. “What the hell is all this?” Marilyn asked me. “I shoot boxing. What the fuck kind of event have you taken me to?” Of the 200 or so people on the list to be let in building that night, Dopey was noticeably the only one who seemed genuinely embarrassed to be there.

I ducked out of the crowd and climbed the stairs to Charlie’s photo studio where an open window offered access to a fire escape for a quiet cigarette break to regain my bearings.

Right then Eric Kelly gave me a call and asked how everything was going. He was unable to attend.

“What is this thing?” I asked him.

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

“Charlie’s gotta ride this wave for as long as he can and then get the fuck off, because they’re real sharks in the water out in the depths. I was a flavor of the month when my video dropped with those Wall Street boxing lessons and maybe I’ve done a few things since. But that was the first time people saw what I was dealing with.”

“What the hell does any of this have to do with boxing?”

“Nothin’,” he growled, like he’d finally just figured that out and was mad it had taken so long. “All of it is just making a mockery of my sport. Charlie’s just using it for his own thing. For a fighter, the worst thing you can do in life is just live. Charlie’s life is taking over with a lotta girls, popularity, partying, drinking, basically a lot of fun. A lotta the devil and flirting with disaster. A fighter is a complete 180 off that shit. You gotta be stern and Spartan. Otherwise temptation is killing you and it’s coming from all over and all angles. It’s raining down like a tropical fucking storm and if you ain’t right, that storm of envy, temptation, greed, spotlight, sex, booze and drugs is gotta batter your poor little ass umbrella until your ass is soaked wet.”

I watched it all and I still don’t remember if Charlie Himmelstein even won his fight that night at Overthrow Underground Boxing Club on 9 Bleecker St. Maybe the outcome was beside the point all along. All I could think about watching him move around the ring, cautiously counter-punching from his lanky frame as models squealed and cameras popped was something he’d told me—a stock quote of his, but a good one—about the initial germ biting him. He was nine and his dad took him to watch The Rolling Stones. He realized he sucked at singing, couldn’t play guitar, and needed to find another way to be a rockstar. Then, during his first real fist fight, he was losing and someone yelled out to him, “C’mon Mick Jagger!” Everything changed. He’d found his path. More importantly, he’d found his role.

Marilyn Paulino/MVPBOXPICS

Oscar Wilde once observed, “The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.” A strange thing to remember is that it was the inventor of modern boxing, the Marquis of Queensbury, who sent Wilde to prison for sleeping with his son. I’d asked Charlie if the character he played on stage felt like a Warhol invention and he laughed it off, countering, “I’d never wanna be a Warhol superstar. I’d wanna be Warhol, man.”

Whether he won, lost, or drew, “Rockstar” Charlie’s fight against “Maharajah” Mac, from a boxing standpoint at least, didn’t arouse much enthusiasm with the crowd. I’m not sure if anyone in attendance especially cared about experiencing the evening so much as being able to say they attended, just another box to check.

But after the fight was over—all three, 60-second rounds of it—I will never forget Charlie impishly staring out across the room, his face completely unmarked, coyly waiting for the decibel level to reach fever pitch. A costumed Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan were standing next to me along with Goose and Maverick from Top Gun. What a strange sandbox this whole ordeal had been to witness.Whatever void or gaping hole was at the heart of this annexed colony of Never-Never Land, you could feel a chilling breeze leaking out of it that gave me a shiver. Underneath everything sprung an innocent primal urge to conquer reality, an unchecked power to never grow up. Finally Charlie slung himself off the top rope like a human crossbow bolt out into a crowd of drunk, flamingo-limbed models, all of them spilling their drinks and laughing with their legs spread out wide as they collapsed helplessly to the floor, not trying to catch him or even break his fall as he fell to the ground.

It was the sure money shot for whatever trailer the ESPN film crew will create to market whatever it was we witnessed on Friday night. I’m sure it will look great, even 20 or 30 years from now.

But all boxing stories end the same, don’t they? And maybe somehow, miraculously, that’s how this one will, too. Already, you can almost hear the ghost of Charlie’s future while watching the footage of himself “boxing” that night at Overthrow and lamenting: You don’t understand … I coulda been somebody!

Kenny Stabler learned he had colon cancer in February. He was in Phoenix, Arizona, where he had been renting a home since the fall of 2014 so he could watch his two grandsons play football for Chaparral High School. One is a receiver. One is a defensive back. Stabler called them his “grandsnakes.” In January, he had called Kim Bush, his partner for the last 16 years of his life, and told her of a consistent pain in his stomach.

She now suspects it had bothered him for months. Bush, who works in Mississippi, told Stabler to go to the doctor, something he avoided. She had made him numerous doctors’ appointments through the years. “And he would always cancel them,” Bush said, not so much with sadness, but with the annoyed tone women can take when discussing stubborn men in their lives. This time, Stabler went to the doctor. Scans were done. Bush flew to Arizona to go with him to get the results.

It was cancer, Stage 4. Stabler was told he had two years.

The way home from the doctor’s office in Phoenix took about half an hour. Stabler drove. Bush sat in the passenger seat. She is an attractive woman, in her late 50s, with an olive complexion and dark hair, and as they traveled the interstate, toward both home and the unknown, she looked out the window. Her eyes met a jagged line off in the distance, where mountaintops joined the Arizona sky. Bush was raised Catholic, and during a silence she said to herself and to any higher deity that may exist, “Let this be a peaceful journey.”

They told no one except the closest of family. Not good friends, not former teammates Stabler respected, certainly no one in the media. Despite being an iconic football player known for his flair, he was always a deeply private man, especially with matters of health. It was rooted in a Southerner’s sense of independence and masculinity, and Stabler took it to a superstitious level. Even John Madden, the coach he once said he would play for anywhere, was never told of the colon cancer.

When a reporter on Raiders.com later asked Madden why he thought his former quarterback had not mentioned it to him, Madden relayed a story. During playing days in Oakland, Stabler never wanted teammates to see him getting injuries treated after games. Madden arranged it so his star could come to the team’s facility late, after the other players had left for the night, to meet with the team’s trainer. “He didn’t want any of his teammates to ever see him in the training room,” Madden said. “And I think that probably followed him through life.”

Stabler told his three grown daughters, Kendra and Alexa and Marissa. He also called his sister, Carolyn Bishop, in Alabama, and told her of his diagnosis. While her big brother was still on the phone, she had a “good little cry” and after gathering herself, asked what the plan was.

“He told me, ‘I’m going to give it hell,’” she said. “‘I’m going to give it all I got.’”

In early March, Stabler and Bush went home to Gulfport, Mississippi, where they had lived together about six years. There, about three miles from the Gulf of Mexico, Stabler dug in for the fight of his life. “We knew we were facing an uphill battle,” Bush said. Every other week, Stabler would sit in his favorite leather chair for the chemotherapy. It sapped his energy. His appetite was not much. He would need three days to recover from a session before feeling like himself again. Bush said he never complained.

One afternoon Bush got home from work. In the foyer were several cardboard boxes that had been opened and strewn about. On each one was the word “Everlast.” Puzzled, she called out to Stabler.

“What’s all this?”

“I’m going to start working out,” he responded.

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

He had bought some boxing equipment — a speedbag and a heavy bag — and he set them up in the garage, beside a stationary bicycle. For the next four months, when he had the energy, Stabler walked alone into the garage and threw punches until he couldn’t throw anymore. Faced with his own mortality at 69, that is how he responded. By balling up his fists and swinging.

“In his mind,” Bush said, “he was going to beat the hell out of cancer.”

The fight lasted until July 8, 2015, when Stabler died at a hospital in Gulfport.

The news made it to the world prematurely and awkwardly when the Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News tweeted out a draft of Stabler’s obituary before verifying the story. It was a minor thing. The paper apologized, the death was soon confirmed, and the mourning began. It felt fitting, though. Stabler, known since he was a teenager as “Snake” for his ability to elude trouble on the field, remained, in death, ever elusive.

Remembrances and condolences to his family spread across social media.

Gridiron heavies issued statements of respect.

Nick Saban, head football coach, University of Alabama: “I think anyone who had the chance to get to know Kenny would appreciate the great person he was and the pride he had for the University of Alabama. I have had the chance to be around some of the best to ever play college and pro football, and Kenny may have been one of the greatest competitors to ever play the game.”

Mark Davis, owner, Oakland Raiders: “The Raiders are deeply saddened by the passing of the great Ken Stabler. He was a cherished member of the Raider family and personified what it means to be a Raider.”

John Madden, member, National Football League Hall of Fame: “I’ve often said, if I had one drive to win a game to this day, and I had a quarterback to pick, I would pick Kenny.”

But the words posted by common fans — people who over the years knew him only from a stadium’s seat, through a TV screen, from postgame stories — showed his death shook loose, for some, echoes of cheers from a place they believed was long gone.

“Felt like I was punched in the gut.”

“RIP Kenny. I remember you playing when I was a kid.”

“My hero is gone and my heart is broke.”

“Saw you throwing the ball with a small kid (probably your grandson) in the park one day. All I kept thinking about was how I wanted to be that kid.”

“Some of my favorite times with my dad … watching those games with the Snake.”

And this: “You made growing up fun.”

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

“We all loved Snake so much. Snake could beat anything, you know? We thought he could always pull it off.”—Tim Russell

Tim Russell, who grew up with Stabler in Foley, Alabama, told me: “I don’t mind telling you, I openly cried. I openly cried.”

Russell played on the Foley High School team in the early 1960s when Stabler was the quarterback. A former mayor of Foley, Russell is a Baldwin County probate judge today. He counted Stabler as a friend late in life, and during a conversation in October he said something that explained why Stabler’s death registered so deep for so many who saw him play, how a little part of them left when he died.

“We all loved Snake so much,” he said. “Snake could beat anything, you know? It was going to work. We thought he could always pull it off.”

Russell was not talking about Stabler’s ability to pull off victories, which he did more often than not at every level of the game. He meant his ability to take the piss out of any anxious or uncomfortable moment, his way of talking back with attitude to life’s pressures. Somewhere the Southern poet James Dickey says, “You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.” Stabler walked that sentiment, and always seemed to make it just fine.

Old teammates and coaches tell of the moments on the field that have become part of the sport’s mythology.

The time in 1977 when the Oakland Raiders were in Baltimore, in the second overtime of a playoff game against the Colts, and during a timeout, Stabler, with a faraway look in his eyes, said to Madden, “These fans are getting their money’s worth today,” before throwing a game-winning touchdown. The time in 1983 with the New Orleans Saints, and the team was down one point in Atlanta, and he led the offense to the Falcons’ 18-yard-line with seconds left. The Saints’ kicker was a 23-year-old Morten Andersen and as he took the field to attempt his first possible game winner, Stabler leaned over and said, “Hey, Morten, let’s go home.”

He met life, away from the games, with the same understated, swashbuckling swagger.

The time in 1967 when, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a girlfriend, driving him home after beers, inadvertently popped his Corvette’s clutch, sending the car through a business’s front glass window. Later, after he had taken the wheel, backed the car out through the wreckage and driven his date to Smith’s Motel, a Crimson Tide teammate knocked on the door and said the police were looking for him. He responded, “Whatever it is, it’s going to have to wait.” The times late in his life, when people would bring up his absence in the National Football League Hall of Fame, and express disgust, and just before pushing the conversation a different direction, he would shake his head, smile and say, “It’s not going to change the way I put my socks on tomorrow.”

The centerpiece of those stories, the man who shouldered a devil-may-care attitude when others only dreamed they could, was being buried in the ground at Foley, Alabama, near his parents, and people simply could not believe it. Not that he chose to be laid down at home, they understood that. They could not wrap their hearts around the idea that Kenny Stabler, the coolest fucking quarterback to ever play the game, had gone down and this time would not be getting back up.

Stabler played football from 1961 to 1984. Find the footage of him on the field in the 1970s, when he played for the Oakland Raiders. Those clips will help you understand. That golden left arm, cocked like a pistol, holding the ball back, his eyes, somehow both calm and frantic, surveying the field for a flash of silver and black and a sliver of space that said “fire.” That sweat-drenched hair falling out from under his helmet. Those rickety, old man knees he slid across the pocket on, always just enough, even in his 20s. That suggestion of a gut — everyone, frankly, hoping it was borne of beer — pulling tight the bottom half of his No. 12 jersey.

And that shit-eating grin. It is nearly cliché now, propped against the NFL’s mythology, but that grin is one just returned from wicked times in an exotic port of call: The lure it holds is the same now as when we were young, dreaming of being buccaneers.

Set those images against the stories that sprang in his wake — training camp hangovers in Santa Rosa; Playboy Mansion parties at 4 a.m. the week of his only Super Bowl appearance; the studying of playbooks by the light of the jukebox — and Stabler’s figure was sharply cut as a renegade sprung from south Alabama just looking for fun.

The temptation is to see him as a frustrating character in a Guy Clark ballad, someone whose passions keep him grasping at failure but who, by dumb luck, succeeds. Cue acoustic guitars, a worn chorus sticky with hope, a late verse sing-along rising above beer bottle clatter.

Stabler’s tune never sounded that way to me.

I hear it more as a plugged-in, two-minute punk song, a blast of DIY attitude and dogged revamped twang. All Bay Area rock and black leather wrapped in Baldwin County roll. The same game produces losers and winners alike. The important thing, then, the thing that lasts longer than the final score, is the way you finish, the way the final chord rings out when you’re gone. Dave Casper, a tight end who played with Stabler in Oakland, told Paul Zimmerman, a former Sports Illustrated writer, “I don’t think (Stabler) ever cared about losing. Winning is fine. Losing? So what? He’d rather win the gamble and force a pass in there. He’d rather do it the hard way.”

When he played, people wanted to watch. When it was done, they wanted to remember.

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

What gets lost in the reality-swallowing myth is his play. Every year that Stabler started the majority of his team’s game — from Foley High School, to the University of Alabama, to the Oakland Raiders, to the Houston Oilers, to the New Orleans Saints — he only finished with a losing record once: 1981, when he went 5-7 as the Oilers starter. He quarterbacked Oakland to five straight conference championship games. He led the team to a win in Super Bowl XI behind a workmanlike 12-of-19 passing performance. He twice led the NFL in touchdown passes. He twice led the league in passing completion percentage. He was named the league’s MVP in 1974, and when the NFL put together the 1970s all-decade team chosen by the Hall of Fame Selection Committee he was one of three quarterbacks included.

Roger Staubach got the most votes. Stabler tied with Terry Bradshaw. No one else got any — not even Bob Griese or Fran Tarkenton. Staubach and Bradshaw are in the Hall of Fame. So are Griese and Tarkenton.

For decades after Stabler left the game, people would bring his successes up. Stabler, his hair white, would mention some of the Hall of Fame teammates he played with, and say, “I had a great car to drive.”

It was not all high times and smiles. Any car kept in top gear will be beset, at times, with engine trouble, and Stabler was not immune. During his playing days, there were two divorces. His celebrity attracted some undesirable acquaintances: Someone who thought they were a friend in the late 1970s planted cocaine on a prying reporter’s rental car in Alabama and scandal ensued. Some believed Stabler was responsible. Stabler always said he was not involved, though late in life he would say privately he believed he knew who was, but offered no names. Around the same time, the NFL investigated when allegations of too-tight affiliations with a New Jersey bookmaker arose. (Nothing much came of that, except Stabler was reprimanded by NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and sued NBC, receiving an undisclosed settlement.) And there was a feud with Al Davis, the late, enigmatic force behind the Raiders with enough grudge-holding ability to make a Roman emperor take a knee.

Following a tough 1978 season when Stabler threw 30 interceptions and Oakland finished 9-7, Davis publicly pointed at Stabler as the problem. Stabler demanded to be traded. Following a 9-7 season and 22 more interceptions in 1979, Davis obliged, sending him to Houston.

He spent two years with the Oilers, then two and a half with the New Orleans Saints, before retiring months before his 40th birthday. Pictures from the Louisiana years show a man who trimmed down, more measured gambler than daring pirate. His once-full face had fallen a touch and his hair had thinned, and began the gray turn. In the end, he slipped down a losing team’s depth chart.

David Madison/Getty Images

The last time Stabler made a crowd hold its breath while he played football was Sept. 16, 1984, in a game the Saints played against the 49ers in Candlestick Park. There, not far from the Bay where the myth was first made, the old Snake flashed.

The Saints were down 17-0 when the team’s starting quarterback, Richard Todd, after three interceptions, was benched. Stabler replaced him. At 39, he led the team to 20 straight points, throwing two touchdowns and setting Morten Andersen up for two field goals. Then the 49ers, behind quarterback Joe Montana, came back to win, 30-20. An ending had cracked open.

David Madison/Getty Images

In a book Stabler wrote with writer Berry Stainback later that decade, he remembered the game fondly.

“On that note I should have packed up the battered, raggedy pair of shoulder pads I’d been wearing since 1968 and said goodbye,” the books reads. “Rodger Bird, a Raider defensive back from Kentucky, had given me those pads that were now held together by nothing more than tape and history — much like myself.”

Stabler played, briefly, and with little success, in two more games that season before retiring. He later told Larry King, “I think I stayed 18 years old for 10 years.”

Trying to separate Stabler’s myth from the man, I looked Rodger Bird up and found him living in Henderson, Kentucky. He is 72. One afternoon I called to see if the shoulder pads story was true.

The Oakland Raiders drafted Bird in 1966. He had been a fine running back and kick returner at the University of Kentucky but professional coaches turned him into a defensive back. He lasted just three seasons because of a shoulder injury that originated at Kentucky, where his head coach, Charlie Bradshaw, was famously fond of grueling practices.

“I took some punishment,” Bird said. “That injury … it cut my career in half.”

Bird’s last season in Oakland was Stabler’s first: 1968. Both Southerners, they shared a friendship. Bird described Stabler as a “good ole Southern boy who could get along with anybody in the room.”

During Bird’s brief career, the Raiders had given him special shoulder pads to accommodate his left shoulder — the one that was damaged. When he retired at 25, after two surgeries had not fixed the gimpy shoulder, his pads went to Stabler, who threw left-handed.

“Kenny said those shoulder pads felt real good,” Bird, his old voice rising with humor, said. “Rather than go out and buy some more, they just gave him mine.”

After retiring, Bird went home to Kentucky, where he spent falls hunting deer in his native state’s western woods. Stabler, back in Oakland, became a legend wearing his old pads.

They kept in touch. The last time they visited was 2008, when a handful of former Raiders gathered after their teammate Gene Upshaw’s death. Bird said Stabler was, as always, a joy to be near.

When the conversation turned to Stabler’s death in July, Bird said: “I sit here and think he’s not with us anymore and I just about can’t make it real.”

Kenneth Michael Stabler was born in Foley, a small Alabama town near the Gulf Coast, on Christmas Day 1945. His mother, Sally Stabler, was a nurse. His father, Leroy “Slim” Stabler, was an auto mechanic who favored Chevrolets. His sister, Carolyn, was five years his junior, and there were no other siblings. Even after Kenny Stabler’s life reached into the outer limits of sports stardom, she always just called him, “Brother.” He called her “Lu Lu.”

Photo courtesy of Marissa Stabler

Above: Leroy Stabler in his shop

A family friend described them as “good folks,” salt of the earth people, a fine stamp in the South. It means something specific: Honest people bound by their word. They were in church every Sunday.

Stabler played baseball, basketball and football for the Foley High Lions. He averaged 29 points a game in varsity basketball. As a pitcher on the baseball team, he once pitched opposite Don Sutton, a future National Baseball Hall of Fame member, and won. It was Sutton’s only high school loss. The Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees sent scouts, and there were five-figure offers.

“Thankfully, he didn’t take them,” Ivan Jones, the head coach of the Foley High football team during Stabler’s time, said.

Jones is 89 today. He has lived in Foley for more than half a century. He was the high school football coach from 1955 to 1968. The Lions play home games today on Ivan Jones Field and Jones, speaking from his home recently, talked about a young Stabler’s abilities — fluid feet, uncanny accuracy — like the old coach he is.

“Well, he could throw going to his right as well as he could going to his left,” he said, noting that that sort of player makes a coach’s job easy. “He was a tremendous athlete.”

The team at Foley High was small, comprised of 35 players or so. Most weekdays, as the players left practice, worn and dirty, a familiar, wiry man who stood 6 foot, 5 inches tall would be there applauding their efforts, not by rote, but singling them out, one by one, for small, individual successes. This was Slim Stabler. His work as a mechanic had him going in and getting off early. He often watched his son’s practices from the sidelines.

He was a hard-drinking, moody man haunted by memories of his service in World War II. There was often a strain in his relationship with his son, whose rebellious nature came early. Sometimes Slim Stabler brought him to his job. The goal was lessons on discipline, work ethic and equality: A working-class man whose ancestors had come to America from Germany in the 18th century as indentured servants had no intention of passing along the ways of racial segregation that marked that place in time. Slim Stabler, when many fathers did not, taught his son everyone, no matter skin color or background, was equal.

The father also sensed football might take his son to college and into a future brighter than a mechanic’s. When a young Kenny Stabler harbored dreams of signing with a pro baseball team and was drifting toward the diamond, Slim Stabler bought a ‘54 Ford for his son on the condition that he continue playing football.

Kenny Stabler inherited from his father a love of music and fast machines, and kept at football.

It was at Foley High where he began wearing No. 12. Jones guessed there was no significance to the number. The quarterback ahead of him — Lester Smith — wore No. 11. Jones figures that when Stabler came along they simply handed him the next available jersey number.

It was also at Foley High that Stabler was tagged with the nickname he would carry his entire life. A coach named Denzil Hollis, who still lives in Foley but today is battling Alzheimer’s disease, watched Stabler run a punt back 60 yards for a touchdown during a junior varsity game. The path Stabler took was about 200 yards long, and Hollis, watching from the sideline, said, “Damn, that boy runs like a snake.”

Sporting News/Sporting News via Getty Images

After he posted a 29-1 record in three seasons at Foley, Stabler, who stood above 6 feet, was being recruited by college football teams. Carolyn said everyone around town believed her brother would go play at Auburn University. Then Bear Bryant, the coach at the University of Alabama, came from Tuscaloosa and sat down in the Stabler household.

The place Bear Bryant holds in football lore is understood to the point that too wide an attempt to describe it might only serve to diminish his stature. Suffice it then to share what a former University of Alabama running back named Ed Morgan said: If an auditorium was packed and Bryant walked in undetected through a back door, before anyone in the crowd knew why, the place’s air would tighten, voices would soften and backs would straighten.

Despite many stories of how it played out, Jones said he always understood Bryant’s pitch to a high school Stabler was simple: “Son, we’ve got to have you.”

In Tuscaloosa, the legend began.

Stabler’s nickname followed him the 230 or so miles north from Foley to campus and Snake, during his junior and senior years, went 19-2-1 as a starter, including the undefeated 1966 season. People still talk about the 53-yard “Run in the Mud” he made to score the winning touchdown in Alabama’s 7-3 victory over Auburn in 1967.

That same year, during spring practice, five African-American players broke the Crimson Tide’s color-barrier and joined the team as walk-ons. Andrew Pernell, a compact wide receiver from Bessemer, was one of them. In a 2013 profile on al.com, he described being welcomed, but held aloof, by the team. The ice broke, he said, following a small gesture Stabler made.

Alabama/Collegiate Images/Getty Images

“One day Stabler just walked right up to me before he had said a word to anybody else and said, ‘How ‘bout it, Pernelli?’ That always meant a lot to me. He was a guy the others looked to as a leader and I think he made them feel like it was O.K. to talk to us and treat us like regular members of the team.”

People who knew Stabler then say he carried himself with an infectious confidence on and off the field. He never seemed uncomfortable. He always seemed in control. And he kept a cool car, said Tim Russell, a University of Alabama student then. People were drawn to Stabler’s lead, and to him in general. During finals week players would gather in each other’s dorm rooms in Bryant Hall. A crowd often gathered in Stabler’s room, but not to open books, to hear Stabler’s stories.

“Snake probably kept me from getting a B rather than a C a few times because it was a lot more interesting to listen to his stories than study,” Morgan, who today is the chief executive officer of the Mississippi Department of Revenue, said.

Morgan shared the Crimson Tide backfield with Stabler for two years. The quarterback could enjoy himself on Tuscaloosa nights, and Morgan witnessed it — it was he who knocked on the door at Smith’s Motel following the Corvette crash. But on the field, Snake ran things as Bryant intended them to be ran, and it came easy. The teammates who sweated through the practices alongside him, who know how the uniforms and bruises felt, still get awe in their voices when remembering how he played.

“You cannot develop a talent like that,” Morgan said.

Ray Perkins was a wide receiver on those Crimson Tide teams. He went on to play for the Baltimore Colts and become the head coach of the New York Giants and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. There are stories and stories of Stabler, he said, and most show a person who enjoyed having fun. “That’s the way he lived his life,” Perkins said. Then he added: “But he demanded the people around him play at a high level, and he demanded it from himself.”

During Perkins’ career, he caught footballs thrown by Joe Namath, Steve Sloan, Johnny Unitas, Earl Morrall and Stabler. He is 74 now, back home in Mississippi, and talking of those old quarterbacks recently, he got to Stabler, and said, “He was the best to play with.”

The Oakland Raiders, fresh off a loss in Super Bowl II, drafted Stabler in the second round of the 1968 draft. Within months, he quit and went back south.

The public story is his knees, wounded at Alabama, would not get right, and he struggled to adjust to the pro game, arm strength having never been a high point of his game. He was also a 23-year-old newlywed with a child. Homesickness set in.

Stabler retreated to Alabama and settled in Selma, where his then-wife’s grandmother lived, and got a job at a sports radio station. In the spring of 1970, he decided to give Oakland another try. A local attorney named Henry Pitts helped him back onto the Raiders’ roster.

Pitts, after lunch at the Selma Country Club recently, described how it played out.

“This is just speculation on my part,” Pitts said, “but he felt like he wasn’t getting a fair shake.” He mentioned Stabler’s troubled knees, and the fact that Daryle Lamonica, who had a cannon arm and was known as “The Mad Bomber,” was entrenched as Oakland’s starter at the time.

Pitts and Stabler flew to Oakland to meet with John Madden, the team’s new head coach. Along the way, Pitts told Stabler to let him do the talking. At the team’s facility, they walked in to talk with Madden, who was sitting behind his desk.

“I had never met the man,” Pitts said of the former offensive lineman. “And he was about as big as a bear sitting there. I said, ‘Coach, Kenny wants to come back to the Raiders.’ Madden said, ‘I don’t take quitters.’”

At that point, Pitts said, Stabler spoke up and said, “I’m not a quitter, coach.”

Madden excused himself, and left the room. Pitts said he later understood that the coach went to the facility’s first floor and told the secretaries to lock the doors, because he was about to “get Kenny Stabler back.”

Sporting News via Getty Images

Stabler’s sole role for several years was as placeholder for the team’s kicker, George Blanda, then in his mid-40s. He griped about his lack of playing time, about his only needing a chance. Blanda, who had lingered for a decade on benches in Chicago before becoming, at 33, a regular starting quarterback in Houston, would have none of the complaining. He knew what it was like to wait.

In 1973, the wait ended. Stabler started the majority of Oakland’s game at quarterback that season and won eight games. For the rest of his time in Oakland, he won at least nine a year. Through the decade, the Raiders became a menacing, intimidating group of winning misfits and Stabler was their unquestioned leader. Along the way, his hair grew long, a beard covered his face, his thin frame filled out and off-the-field stories filled the notebooks of reporters.

The writer Peter Richmond wrote a book about those Raider teams titled, Badasses. Stabler, during an interview with Richmond, said, “It was a great time, and we’ll always have it. It was the greatest team to play for. There was a love for each other … a great bunch of characters. A great band of personalities. A fun-loving band of rogues. You played for John. You played for Al. You played for a city. You played for each other. You played for a great, big-hearted football team. What else can a football player ask for? It always stays with you. I loved being part of it then, and I love it now.”

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

Stabler’s falling out with Al Davis ended his time as a Raider. For decades they did not speak. Then, in 2009, Stabler, attending a Raiders game versus the New York Jets, exchanged brief pleasantries with Davis. On the plane ride back to home to Alabama, Stabler decided he wanted to meet with his former boss. The following summer, in Oakland for a celebrity golf tournament, Stabler arranged a meeting.

Kim Bush was there.

She remembers Davis, in his 80s, stooped and using a walker, asking if she was an “Alabama girl.” She told him she was from Biloxi, Mississippi, and Davis, an English major at Syracuse University, mentioned Neil Simon’s play, “Biloxi Blues.” He called her “Ms. Biloxi” the rest of the meeting. It lasted an hour and a half.

An initial chill between the old owner and quarterback eventually warmed when the conversation turned to those 1970s teams. At one point, Davis motioned at Stabler’s Super Bowl ring, looked at Bush and said, “He should have more of those.”

“You’re probably right, coach,” Stabler said. “I should have stayed.”

It was a subtle peace treaty. Then Davis said Stabler should be in the Hall of Fame, and added, “I need to do something about that.”

Davis died a little more than a year later and Stabler, though a finalist in 1990, 1991 and 2003, has never been elected to the Hall of Fame.

It’s an infamous discussion point — should Snake be in? His supporters point at his Super Bowl XI ring, five straight conference championship games and the fact that he is one of only three quarterbacks who played in the 1970s who are in the all-time top 50 of completion percentage (59.8 percent). His detractors point at the fact that he threw more interceptions than touchdowns in nine of 15 seasons, the hot-and-cold nature of his game, the lukewarm stretches in Houston and New Orleans, and, despite playing with four Hall of Famers on offense in Oakland, only one Super Bowl.

Stabler believed what voters held most against him was the mess involving the cocaine and California reporter, and the lingering effects of the New Jersey bookmaker link. But he did not linger on it. Marissa Stabler, his youngest daughter, said when talk about the Hall came up, he would “shut down that conversation.” He wanted it, but would not advocate for it. He wanted to remain humble, and not let that define his career.

“He never expected it in his lifetime,” Bush said.

A little more than a month after he died, the Hall of Fame Seniors Committee nominated Stabler as a finalist for the Class of 2016. The committee considers players who had been out of football 25 or more years. The day before Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, Stabler needs 80 percent of votes to come his way to receive a bronze bust in Canton.

Ivan Jones said that in his assessment the only sad part of Kenny’s story is not the Hall of Fame snub, but that Slim Stabler never got to see his only son’s success at the professional level.

In fact, apart from an exhibition game in Houston, in which Kenny Stabler only held a helmet on the sideline, he never got to see him play a professional game. Slim Stabler died in 1970, at 47.

“That,” Jones said, “is a tragedy.”

Kenny Stabler spent his years after football the way many retired professional athletes do: A few businesses began, then closed. There were appearances at charity events and celebrity golf tournaments. There were hiccups, too: Three driving under the influence arrests, IRS problems, another divorce.

In the late 1990s, he had a chance to work radio broadcasts for the New Orleans Saints and for the University of Alabama. He chose the Alabama gig, not only so he could drive to away games (he disliked airport crowds and loved driving), but because they would allow him to bring along his daughters. He kept the job through the 2008 season.

Michael Cohen/Getty Images

During the last decade, the figure that swaggered through the 1970s was replaced, slowly, with those of a man finding peace, if not slowing down. He stopped doing media interviews. At home, he favored pajamas, CNN and petting “Jack,” a five-pound yorkiepoo. He liked making awful soup. He indulged his sweet tooth. In Gulfport, where he moved in 2009, neighborhood children along Stanton Circle would come knocking at his door, asking him to toss a football. Afterward, he took them for milkshakes in his black Tahoe (every vehicle was either black, silver or crimson).

The center became his daughters, who have grown up and gone off into lives of their own in Arizona, Texas and Mobile. Marissa Stabler said football had been a gift to him “but he was born to be a father.” When she thinks of him it is not of the comebacks or records or the No. 12 jersey. It is his smile (“More of a knowing smirk”) and the words “I love you” coming from his mouth that she feels. Kenny Stabler’s sometimes less-than-perfect relationship with his father had stayed with him, she believes, and he relished his role as a dad.

“It was a second chance,” Marissa said.

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

He also loved his grandsnakes — Justin and Jake — who are twins and who each inherited his athletic genes: the Arizona Republic newspaper recently named them both among the state’s top 100 players. Justin today has his grandfather’s Super Bowl ring. Jake has his 1965 University of Alabama championship ring.

Around 2010 or so, Stabler started to show the signs so many ex-football players show of the lasting effects of the brutal game. His knees were never pretty — zipper-scars on both — and his left hand’s pinky rested at an unnatural angle. Marissa Stabler said her father sometimes would repeat himself in conversation, telling the same story two times inside of an hour. Sometimes, a ringing sound would begin in his ears and a restlessness he could not shake would have him tossing and turning through nights. If he stepped wrong, a pain — he described it as a “bullet to the brain” — would shoot from his heel to his head. And there were crippling headaches: Bush would be in their kitchen, making dinner, and he would call out for her to cool the clashes of pots and pans.

The people who loved him believed for a while it was only a man who had passed 60 showing the signs of getting older. Then the conversation about concussions and the NFL began, and he and his family understood.

In early May 2012, former NFL linebacker Junior Seau shot himself to death. There was speculation that he suffered from CTE, caused by undiagnosed concussions he suffered while playing 19 seasons in the NFL.

At the time, Stabler’s grandsons were beginning their high school careers. One night, while lying in bed watching the Seau coverage on TV, he made the decision to donate his brain and spinal tissue to Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center to help further research into athletes and degenerative brain disease.

Several months later, he was the first plaintiff listed out of 73 former NFL players who filed a federal lawsuit against the league. The suit accused the NFL of failing to act on a body of medical evidence showing that repeated hits to the head can cause long-term health problems. It is ongoing.

The Fourth of July weekend, 2015, was his last. His daughter Alexa came over from Mobile and they grilled hamburgers. The chemotherapy had taken a toll but that weekend he acted like himself. “You would have never known he was sick,” Bush said. On Saturday night, he drove Bush and Alexa down Highway 90, which runs parallel to the Gulf of Mexico, so they could watch the fireworks in Gulfport and Biloxi. He took pictures with his iPhone, so many, as if he knew he would not see them again.

Michael Cohen/Getty Images

On Sunday night, his stomach began hurting. He told Bush to let him sleep, but she insisted they go to Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, and he relented. Early Monday, Bush let his daughters know he had taken a bad turn and all three came to his bedside in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

Marissa Stabler said as long as she could remember, her father had said he wanted to die in Alabama. With that not possible, she figured the next best thing was to play “Sweet Home Alabama,” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, on her iPhone. He loved the song. When it ended, Bush played “When the Leaves Come Falling Down,” by Van Morrison, which they had passed many nights listening to together.

He died at 10:45 p.m. on July 8, his girls beside him.

They took him to Foley where a spot not far from his mother and his father was waiting.

His family says that in late January, they will make the decision on whether to release the Boston University findings and, if they do, there will be one more story about Kenny Stabler, and it may be the most important one.

Then, on Feb. 6, the Hall of Fame Selection Committee will cast votes on whether he should be let in.

His fans will tell the stories either way. And their talk, whether they know it or not, will be about how Kenny Stabler made growing up for so many, so fun. Their words will ring out like loud, open chords, and linger, as they remember the Snake and smile.

The XOXO Stabler Foundation supports colon cancer and sports-related head trauma research. For more information, see www.xoxostablerfoundation.com or the XOXO Stabler Foundation page on Facebook.

“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.

Eugene Garcia/Getty Images

“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.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

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.”

Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

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.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

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.”

Sean Gardner/Getty Images

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.

Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

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.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

“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 screen she doesn’t see The Dark Knight, she just sees Josh, the little “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 drive of the second quarter, as Beckham hit Norman in the head after a first-down rushing play, drawing an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty and several grinning taunts from the Panthers corner. It all made for an abysmal first half, with Beckham making no catches on just three targets as the Panthers lead 21-7 coming back from the locker room.

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.