Poverty, hope duel on gridiron

Karen Krizman, Special To The News

Published October 10, 2003 at midnight

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Journalist Robert Andrew Powell tackles the surprisingly tough topic of youth football - and in the process writes a hard-hitting social commentary on Miami's black community.

In We Own This Game: A Season in the Adult World of Youth Football, Powell documents a year spent following two teams in the Pop Warner program.

As football's version of Little League, Pop Warner is open to players between the ages of 6 and 15. But, as reflected in his book's subtitle, Powell found that at least in Miami - where football is worshipped like the sun - the adults have more invested in the league than the kids.

He also discovered that in this city described as a former segregated "redneck outpost," blacks see football as their "greatest pride."

"Someone a long time ago came to the idea that this - football - was the very best way to show that we could make it out, that we could rise above the slave mentality, segregation, and really be what we want to be," the uncle of a Pop Warner player tells Powell. "With the generations that have passed since then, over time, things have gotten stronger and stronger. It's not a part of the culture now. It is the culture."

As such, black players dominate football in Miami, where it is not uncommon to have crowds in the tens of thousands show up for high-school games. Intrigued by this phenomenon, Powell spent the 2001-2002 Pop Warner season shadowing players, coaches, parents and boosters of the Liberty City Warriors and Palmetto Raiders.

The result is a moving narrative of a community using the pigskin to escape poverty and crime.

Nowhere is the plight of the black community more evident than in Liberty City, an area where, Powell writes, "tourists are specifically told, in no uncertain terms, to never, ever go." However, Liberty City's residents are proud of their neighborhood.

"There ain't no place like it," Luther Campbell says.

The former 2 Live Crew rapper donated money to start the Liberty City Warriors. He credits football for helping the community survive the riots, drugs and gang wars that riddle his neighborhood.

"At the end of the day (football) might be the most therapeutic thing for us . . ." he says. "We be coming out here leaving our worries, our troubles, our problems with the election and how they f--- us over, how they rob us for our land and everything. We come out here and we focus on this here, playing football, camaraderie. That's the only thing we got."

The land robbers and others whom Campbell blames for his community's woes include wealthy white city leaders who, over the years, have coveted real estate in black neighborhoods. But he also blames Caribbean and Latin American immigrants who compete for jobs and affordable housing.

Powell supports Campbell's claims by intermixing snapshots of Miami's historic past with quotes from current residents, leaving the reader with a portrait of a city that seems as racially divided today as it was 50 years ago.

"Being black in Miami is almost - not quite, but almost - like it was being black in the fifties and the sixties in America," says Richard Dunn, a preacher who is old enough to remember those times. "We have second-class citizenship. Limited opportunities. Segregation in certain tiers of life, segregation in government."

Football offers a means for outrunning this oppression by perhaps one day making a name for yourself - not to mention millions for your family and friends - in the NFL. This explains why 9-year-old fatherless boys such as Diamond Pless have relatives running them through an hour or two of practice each day in the parking lot of their public housing units.

Dreams of making the pros also inspire parents to feed their sons nothing but Crystal Light, a head of lettuce and two cans of tuna each day to guarantee that they don't surpass the maximum weight for their Pop Warner division. Teams are broken down by weight instead of age. Come game day, if a player is even a half-pound overweight, he doesn't play.

That same NFL fantasy is why 8-year-old boys who barely know their multiplication tables are running what Powell calls "one of the most complicated offenses in football history," devised by a powerhouse Southern college team.

And, it's why coach Raul Campos lures top players from across Miami to play for the Palmetto Raiders by promising rides in a deluxe motor coach, on-field oxygen tanks, steak dinners and varsity letter jackets. After all, if you're going to play like the big boys, you might as well be treated like them, too.

Just like the pros, winning is everything in Miami youth football. Powell witnessed firsthand the extreme measures that fans will take to ensure that their teams are victorious.

Accompanying Campos' team to an away game during the playoffs, Powell was among those who hit the ground when someone fired a gun in the air in an attempt to rattle the opposing team and end the tied match.

With nobody hurt and surly spectators threatening to riot if the game was called, play continued. However, not before a county cop moonlighting as a referee parked his squad car on the field and announced: "I got a shotgun back there. I got six hundred forty rounds. No one in the crowd is better armed than me. I could take down everyone here if I have to."

The Raiders ended up losing the game, and as the team hurried back onto its luxury bus, Campos told Powell, "If I were to tell anyone about this . . . they wouldn't believe me. If this were anywhere else in the country this s---'d be on the six o'clock news. Here I bet you anything you don't even hear about it."

Sure enough, almost no one did hear about it except maybe for Mark Peterson, commissioner of the Greater Miami Pop Warner football league. Peterson earnestly tries to keep things in perspective.

"Everyone likes to win," he says. "Hell, I like to win. It's just that football at this level shouldn't be so much about winning. I think they're forgetting that this is supposed to be a recreational sort of thing."

Try telling that to black Miamians who are banking on the gridiron to take them away from their troubles.

Karen Krizman is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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