Read Muck City for Free Online Page A

five thirty and eat breakfast, then go to the fields and do laps,” said Cook. “All day, nothing but work and practice until you dropped. But we was gung ho, excited to be there.”
    Coach Vereen, a former soldier, cut the boys no slack. After lunch, he’drun the team through one-on-one pick drills in a dirt courtyard outside their dorms. A weight program was fashioned using rebar and concrete blocks. And when work was finished in the afternoons, the serious practicing commenced.
    “We had no proper field. We were on a pickle farm,” said Cook. “There was no boundaries. You had twenty yards of cucumbers this way and twenty yards that way. Out of bounds was that fifth row. We’d just run and dart between those rows.”
    “We had no pads and played barefoot, but we tackled,” remembered Dawson. “Coach Vereen was hard. He’d stand there picking the hair bumps on his face and shout,
‘Hey hamfat, the hell you thinkin, bwah?’
The man demanded respect and you gave it to him.”
    On weekends the team would travel to nearby Bay City or Saginaw to play softball, compete in fishing tournaments, or go clothes shopping with their pay; once they all bought matching mohair sweaters to wear on the first day back to school. During the week they conditioned their bodies with fieldwork and weights, the cucumber rows providing a natural obstacle course for agility. They developed such plays as “Coconuts,” “Sugarcane,” and of course “Pickle,” learned formations, and built the mechanics of a team.
    “We were in sync,” said Cook. “We bonded and got to know what each man was capable of doing. And when we finally got back to Belle Glade, we were unstoppable.”
    The teams on the Bobcat schedule were probably expecting just another rusty squad of beanpickers. What they got instead was four quarters of humiliation. That season the Bobcats went 9–0 before crushing the Pahokee East Lake Hawks 28–0 to become Southeast Atlantic Conference champions. Lake Shore would suffer no more losing seasons, but little did they know the program they’d worked so hard to resurrect would soon come to a contentious end.
    By the time the Bobcats staked their place as champs, the civil rightsmovement in the South had reached unstoppable momentum. Surprisingly enough, the roiling violence, murders, and intimidation happening in places such as Selma and Birmingham never manifested in the backwaters of the Glades.
    In 1961, Lawrence Chester and friends had staged a sit-in at the Rexall drugstore in Belle Glade, which ended without violence or arrests. There had been trouble in Pahokee following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. A white movie house downtown closed rather than open for blacks, sparking a riot in the streets with boys throwing rocks and bottles through shop windows. Sheriff’s deputies then found themselves pressed between a group of black desegregationists marching downtown and the whites who raced to stop them, many clutching machetes and rifles and threatening war.
    Pahokee had integrated its schools in 1965 without great incident, but Belle Glade remained stubbornly defiant. Many whites simply pulled their kids out of Belle Glade High and enrolled them in the newly opened Glades Day School, which was private and solidly white. Others moved out altogether, relocating to predominantly white Clewiston and Okeechobee, or to West Palm Beach and its lure of gated communities and better services.
    In terms of day-to-day life, both blacks and whites in Belle Glade seemed to fear any grand upheaval or change. Blacks maintained their own city within a city, and rarely ever mixed with whites. Each side had its own groceries, restaurants, juke joints, churches, and beauty parlors. Black police officers patrolled the black neighborhoods, while whites saw to their own. Aside from the drugstore, one of the few places where athletes remember ever having to use a separate doorway was in the office of a local doctor who