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old tires in place of padding. Tackle dummies were handmade and hung from chain hoists otherwise used to pull engines from vehicles. Few players even had shoes.
    “When guys would come off the field in a game, they’d toss you their shoes,” said Elsie Dawson, who played for the Lake Shore Bobcats. “We’d keep a cardboard box in the locker room that was full of shoes. First come, first served. Maybe you got one size nine and another size eleven and then have to trade.”
    Being migrants also gave the boys a reputation throughout Palm Beach County. “Down on the field, other teams would tease us by calling us ‘bean-pickers,’ ” Dawson said.
    In 1959 the Lake Shore Bobcats managed to defy the odds by going undefeated with the help of now-mythical players who stand as pillars for the storied tradition. Rosailious Hughley was a head-busting lineman who’d been raised in an Everglades boys’ home. He conditioned himself by ramming his forearms into cinder-block walls until they dripped blood and the skin hardened like elephant hide. Later on, those forearms became weapons, once splitting a boy’s helmet and sending him out on a stretcher.
    The team also had C. W. Haynes, a quarterback in the mold of Randall Cunningham or Vince Young: six foot six and powerful enough to launch eighty-yard bullets with either arm, while also running for eighteen touchdowns in a season. Teammates called him “the Mummy” from his insistence on wrapping his arms and legs entirely with brown tape, even when playing basketball.
    The Bobcats of the early 1960s also had Lawrence Chester, a topflight receiver who later became the first black player from Belle Glade to go to the NFL (the first white player was Marvin Davis from Belle Glade High, drafted by the L.A. Rams in 1965). In 1967, after playing four years at Allen University in South Carolina, Chester was drafted by the newly formed Atlanta Falcons. When he arrived at camp, he was informed of a quota on black players—they could keep only five, he said. After spending a season on Atlanta’s minor-league team in Huntsville, Chester tried to play in Detroit. He ended up leaving football and spent the next twenty years as a manager at Ford.
    In later years, without playmakers such as Chester, Haynes, and Hughley, the Bobcats struggled.
    The team had ended the 1964 season with a dismal 5–6 record; the year before, they’d lost every game, partly due to increased academic standards that made certain players ineligible. Heading into the 1965 season and facing yet another autumn of incomplete rosters, head coach Willie Irvin had an idea. That year the H.J. Heinz Company—unable to find enough migrants to work its vegetable fields in the North—had started recruiting high school students in black neighborhoods across the South, offering attractive pay and a little adventure. Hearing this, Irvin contacted the company and signed up the entire Bobcat team. If his boys were going to leave town anyway, he reasoned, they might as well go together.
    With defensive coach Alonzo Vereen serving as chaperone, twenty-seven members of the Bobcat squad squeezed aboard a bus in late May and headed up to Bay City, Michigan, where Heinz grew cucumbers for its pickles. Gazing out the bus windows were young Ronald Cook, a defensive end who was sixteen years old, Dawson, and a host of players with colorful nicknames such as Poochie, Scuffle, and Gatemouth, this last given the boy because he had no teeth.
    In Michigan, the wooden bunkhouses the farmer provided were crude and sparse. Seven boys squeezed into one room. The toilets were ripe, stifling outhouses, while showers were taken cold in a barn. The workdays were long and hot, spent mostly on hands and knees dragging bulging hampers of vegetables down the rows.
    To the boys, it was absolutely exhilarating. Not only were they earning $175 a week to work with their friends, but for once they could finally play some real football.
    “You wake up at