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year, mighty John J. Jefferson High traveled eighteen miles to Bassfield to face Boston’s team, which now only had seventeen active players. “Somehow we whipped them, nine to six,” said Boston. “And everything changed.”
    In 1963, Jefferson High was led by a sports-crazed principal named W. S. MacLauren. Though the black schools could never match their white counterparts in scholarship winners or academic achievement or future college graduates, there was an unspoken goal of stepping ahead in athletics. Columbia High would, of course, never acknowledge Jefferson’s on-field achievements. But Jefferson’s staff and players knew they could be the better program. Hence, in the aftermath of the young coach from Bassfield showing up his team, MacLauren presented Boston, a married father of two, an offer he could not refuse: a four-hundred-dollar raise and the chance to continue teaching P.E.
    Boston accepted—and the blacks of Columbia quickly turned against their new leader. The previous coach at Jefferson was Scott Jones, an ornery, unpleasant little man who wore a pair of spiked-toed shoes to practice in order to kick players who made boneheaded mistakes. Jones also kept a two-by-four piece of wood in hand, and never thought twice about slamming it into backsides. Such was what parents in the black communities expected of their leaders; a tougher-than-dirt approach to discipline. If your son came home from practice with black-and-blue welts across his arms and legs, well, he surely deserved it.
    Boston never physically abused a player at Bassfield, and he would not do so at Jefferson. “I thought I was doing right,” he said. “To get a guy in front of eight hundred people at a game and kick him . . . that has to be degrading.” Boston won four games in his first season at Jefferson, and fared little better the next two. In the community, he was increasingly dismissed as a softie. But the players loved and respected him. Boston was the rare male authority figure who didn’t do his talking with the backside of a hand. He drove his players home after practices and games, found them jobs in the community, and checked on their schoolwork. “When I played for Coach Boston I lived way north of Columbia, so on some days I wouldn’t get home from school until ten or eleven at night,” said Joe Owens, a former Jefferson lineman who went on to spend seven years in the NFL. “One day he showed up with a car—a 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air—and he let me keep it. I dropped off all the guys who lived in the rural areas, and we were all home by eight. He changed the whole way people thought about sports and attitudes toward players.”
    The following season, Jefferson’s football team was graced by the arrival of the transcendent Eddie Payton, who teamed with a fullback named Ray Holmes to give the Green Wave one of the state’s best backfields. With Eddie as the star, Jefferson won thirty-four games over four years. “Eddie changed a lot for us,” said Boston. “He was the type of kid you hope for. Simply put, he was a ballplayer. He was short, but I used him at middle linebacker. I’d walk him up on that center’s ear, and if you weren’t ready Eddie would be all over you. And on offense, he was just unstoppable running the ball. I went from a dumb coach to a smart one overnight.” Over time Boston developed an intimate relationship with the Payton family—he lived a few houses down on Hendricks Street, and gave Eddie a job playing alongside him on the Laurel Blue Sox (Boston was an accomplished semipro baseball player). On his daily walk to school, Boston would chat with Alyne and Peter. They embraced him as someone who had their sons’ best interests at heart. “He was a good man,” said Eddie. “He was very, very decent.”
    Walter, however, remained an enigma. He was attached to his mother—Boston could see that. And unlike Eddie, he didn’t share absolutely every thought that floated through his