A Town Where Football Is the Glue and the Hope

By JERE LONGMAN

BELLE GLADE, Fla., Nov. 22 - The sugar cane harvest is under way, as trucks line up to transport the sweet stalks, acrid fires burn off the leafy undergrowth and smokestacks puff from the sugar mills. In a verdant town where the welcome signs say, "Her Soil Is Her Fortune," this is the money season.

The nation's largest crop of sweet corn also grows in the rich black muck on the northern edge of the Everglades and the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee. Equally reliable is the annual bumper crop of football victories produced by Glades Central High School. The Raiders have won all 12 games this season, and 47 in a row, advancing to Friday's quarterfinal round of the playoffs and toward a fourth consecutive state championship.

Seven former players are now in the National Football League, including running back Fred Taylor of the Jacksonville Jaguars and receiver Reidel Anthony of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. No other high school has produced as many current professionals, according to the N.F.L. Eight of this year's 31 seniors are Division I college prospects, and numerous Glades Central graduates are participating in some level of college ball, coaches said.

"It's more of a way of life here," said the assistant coach Larry Antonacci, who grew up in the football-consumed coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania. "Kids eat, drink, sleep, dream football."

The sport exists as the primary diversion in a town that lacks even a movie theater - "There's nothing else to do," running back Marrio Fraser said. It provides a potential opportunity for a college education, a professional career and an escape from a life of seasonal and migrant farm work.

These are familiar themes in many high schools. Yet here, football occupies a particularly complicated position in a community of 14,000 that exists in a kind of social time warp.

In some ways, Belle Glade is a reminder of the separate-but-equal days of the segregated South. Glades Central High School is largely non-white, attracting 1,400 African-American, Haitian, Jamaican and Hispanic students. The city's smaller private school, Glades Day School, is predominantly white.

The city manager, like 60 percent of the voting-age population, is black, but four of the five city council members are white.

Belle Glade is also a symbol of the striking disparity in wealth between the affluent eastern coast of Palm Beach County and the poor rural areas 45 miles to the west.

On one hand, Palm Beach County has the state's highest home values, with a median value of $134,099, according to a 2000 Census survey. Yet the shopping salons of West Palm Beach might as well be in a different country, much less county, from economically depressed Belle Glade and Pahokee, where workers average $12,000 or less in yearly salary, according to James (Hank) Harper, the local state representative.

"It's like a third world country out there," he said.

The Legacy of 'Shame'

It has been 41 years since CBS broadcast Edward R. Murrow's withering documentary "Harvest of Shame," which depicted the deplorable working and living conditions of migrant workers in this region. Improvements in wages and housing have occurred in recent decades, but the vast majority of the top salaried and supervisory jobs in the local sugar mills go to whites and Cuban- Americans, said Greg Schell, managing attorney for Florida Legal Service's Migrant Farmworker Justice Project. The cane harvest is automated now. African-American and Caribbean workers are mostly relegated to planting sugar cane and harvesting corn by hand, and traveling 50 to 100 miles by bus to pick oranges and tomatoes during other months, he said.

"In many respects, employment prospects for farm workers are worse than they were at the time `Harvest of Shame' was filmed," Schell said.

While middle-class public housing exists, many blacks in Belle Glade live in rooming houses with communal bathrooms and kitchens that were built decades ago, mainly for single guest workers. Santonio Holmes, the top receiver at Glades Central, said he lived with eight other family members in four rooms, with a bathroom down the hall. The families of some players sleep in shifts because of a lack of bed space, said Derrick Manning, the principal at Glades Central.

In that light, football is embraced here as a harvest of fame, athletic hope amid social hopelessness.

"I see it as my job to go out and make enough money to take care of my mom," Holmes said.

Willie Bueno, who is in his second year as head coach, describes football not as a desperate way out of town, but as a dependable opportunity to succeed. Current players know that many of their predecessors have gone to college and the N.F.L., and that the same is possible for them.

"They want to be part of it," Bueno said. "It might be the greatest thing they've ever been involved in."

At least 8,000 fans are expected for Friday's home game against Rockledge, the state's second-ranked team, and those who cannot get into the stadium will watch from the hoods of their cars.

The Burden of Expectations

Belle Glade's players are enrolled in what is called "football class," a recreation period during school in which they watch film or lift weights, Bueno said. Florida permits 20 days of spring practice for high school football, which allows players to remain sharp in the off-season. A number of them also participate in track and field, another sport in which Glades Central is the defending state champion. Fred Robinson, a running back and kick returner, is the state's 100-meter sprint champion. Linebacker William Beckford has been a state wrestling finalist. The team's top player is Ray McDonald, a 6-foot- 4, 245-pound defensive end who has committed to play at the University of Florida.

An enduring myth here is that the players are so fast because they grow up chasing rabbits that sprint out of the burning cane fields in the fall. A few players actually do "run rabbits," hunting them with a dog and a stick and selling them for $2 or $3 apiece.

Expectations of victory are so high, according to Manning, the principal, that a previous coach who lost a playoff game in the early 1990's after blowing a three-touchdown lead was not allowed to ride home on the team bus. Bueno said the story has been embellished, but no one disagrees that the home crowd can be tough.

"Sometimes you think the community is harder than the coaches," said Al Royal, a receiver and defensive back. Said quarterback Curtis Holley, who has thrown 28 touchdown passes and only 4 interceptions this season: "You don't want the streak to end; you want to be able to pass the torch."

Inadvertently, football might provide a false hope for the Glades Central players, said Schell of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project. Many athletes are unprepared for the rigors of a college education, he said, and the chances of reaching the pros are statistically slim.

Glades Central has experienced years of insufficient funding and other resources, including a shortage of quality teachers and low expectations from the county school board, Harper, Schell and school officials said. According to Lavoise Smith, the vice principal, Glades Central is the only high school in Palm Beach County ever to have received an "F" grade from the state for its standardized test scores.

The school has special challenges. Its students speak seven languages. Many come from single-parent families and spend much time unsupervised. It is a struggle for some kids just to find clean clothes to wear to school, Manning said.

"If this was happening with white kids, someone would be screaming and yelling, and someone would be listening," Schell said. "Some people are screaming, but they're being ignored. They have football. You wonder if that somewhat detracts people from looking at the underlying problems and the low achievement."

A Controversial Coach

Last year, Manning, 40, came here from Atlanta to serve as principal. He is credited with a no-nonsense approach that has created a safer environment in the school and a greater urgency for academic achievement. Standardized test scores have risen slightly, but, Manning said, "We have to create that academic balance, so that the school can be noted for something other than football and track."

That balance, though, will have to be created without him. Manning said he was planning after this school year to return to Atlanta, where his wife lives. That may lend some uncertainty to football, as well as to academics.

When he became principal, Manning decided to bolster the teaching staff by requiring all assistant coaches to be full-time instructors. Previously, a number were community volunteers. This mandate upset a former coach, Mickey Freeman, who resigned over the issue of naming his own assistants a week before practice began last season.

Bueno, 33, was elevated from defensive coordinator to head coach. This created tension in the black community. Freeman is black, while Bueno is of Cuban descent. Not only that, but the new coach had attended the rival Glades Day School. Two assistant coaches brought in as teachers are white.

"The community was outraged," Manning, who is black, said of the decision to make Bueno head coach. At a contentious meeting to announce the coaching change, Manning said, "They wanted to barbecue me."

Bueno has never lost in 27 games as head coach, yet some black community leaders wanted him released even after he won a state championship a year ago, Manning said.

"If we don't win the state championship again, they're going to expect me to fire him," Manning said.

He did not worry about community reaction, Bueno said, only about winning and keeping his players' best interests in mind.

"I haven't lost yet," Bueno said. "They might string me up if I do. I just keep winning, don't worry about it. One time I thought I lost, but I woke up real quick. It was only a dream. A nightmare."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company