It was late 2010 when Tony Dorsett started feeling the pull, and strong: Family. Roots. Blood. Part of it was his mother, Myrtle, mind honeycombed by dementia, rattling around in the house in Center that he’d bought with his rookie bonus check. He was flying in from his home outside Dallas nearly once a month now, the plane’s approach sometimes taking him over the stadium in Hopewell that was renamed, in 2001, in his honor. Each time he found himself visiting old haunts—the childhood playground in Mount Vernon, the twelve-mile training route he used to run up Monaca Road, Jack Chapman’s bar in Plan 11 where that window broke and everybody scattered. He recognized fewer faces. He was pushing sixty, starting to forget things, too. Often, he felt like he was the ghost.
“The thing I’m disappointed in?” Dorsett said one golden, leaf-strewn September afternoon, gunning his Chrysler 300 up Fifth Avenue, eyeing the chunked asphalt, the crumbling curbs, the growth spilling between slats and pressing in from woods once beaten back. “I understand that it’s hard to get jobs. But see the side of this hill? It’s like the weeds are overtaking the community. People used to have a sense of pride about themselves, and it seems like that’s diminished. My mother used to tell me: ‘It’s not what you got. It’s what you do with what you got.’
“But see it now? It’s never been like this, man.” He rolled through the old heart of Plan 11, corner of Fifth and Jefferson, the sun-bleached lots that used to make up the Funky Four Corners. “There used to be stores and clubs. The city or somebody should be able to clean this up, but people just don’t give a damn anymore. It’s just gone, man.”
He drove half a block. “That’s the funeral home my brother was in,” Tony said.
That, just a month earlier, may be the biggest draw. The death at sixty-one of the original “TD” stirred something in Tony, if only because any idol’s fall will trouble the soul. The first time Tony noticed was during his playing days, a Cowboys road trip to Philadelphia: Tyrone’s eyes glassy, attention shot. Tony started giving his brother money, pried him out of Aliquippa, got him placed in rehab in Dallas. Tyrone checked himself out. “Okay,” Tony said. “Just stay here with me then.”
But Tyrone had to get back to Aliquippa. “That’s the problem,” Tony kept telling him. “Don’t go back.”
“I can fight it,” Tyrone would say.
He couldn’t.
“It was hard to watch him decay,” Tony said. “Here was my brother who’d been one of the best dressers, beautiful girls, nice cars. Then I see him go completely down, just don’t even care, it seemed like. I had to force myself to understand what an addiction like that can do. I’m a mama’s boy and I’ll fight a herd of elephants for her. I couldn’t understand why my brother was stealing from my mother.
“You’ve to understand the disease, what it does to people—because it’s not really them. Ooh, I got this real bad feeling in my mind about my brother. I was never taught to hate. You know what I’m saying? I can’t hate my brother. But I had a strong dislike for my brother because of what he was doing. I stopped giving him money, because I was, like, ‘This is all you’re going to do with it; I’m not going to feed that.’ But he couldn’t even see what I was talking about.”
Now Dorsett was steering his way back down to Franklin Avenue. He went on to speak of the way his father died of a stroke at sixty, back in ’84, how it broke him to see such a strong man, with that big, proud gut, helpless in Aliquippa Hospital. “Daddy, get up,” he pleaded to the prone figure. “Get up. . . .”
But seeing Tyrone was worse. Tony’s voice was a croak now.
“Those last days when I was here? I swear to God,” he said. “I’m going to tell you the truth: The smell of, of . . . him. Because he was passing stool and I’ll never forget . . . I’ll never forget the day when the nurse pulled back the cover on him and was checking him. I was standing in the room and I had to turn away from looking. It was horrible, man. He was skin and bone.”
Aliquippa could look that way, too. The hospital had been gone since 2009; of the 9,438 people still living nearly a quarter were age 65 or older and 36 percent of those below age 18 lived below the poverty line. Dorsett rolled past the police station, the monument “to the workers of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation and LTV who made the impossible possible in the production of steel.” He parked nearby, wandered the downtown’s dustied emptiness, recognized some faces. “Man,” he said to the men. “Everything’s shut down.”
“Only one thing that ain’t shut down, Tony,” one of the men replied. “The bullets.”
Yet, during the days of Tyrone’s funeral, for the first time Dorsett told his wife, “Let’s look at some houses. I think I want to move back closer to my family.” Maybe somewhere near Pittsburgh. Maybe someplace closer. He didn’t trust the town anymore, not to live in anyway, but maybe being near would ease some of the ache.
“Every time I come back, the feeling’s there more and more,” he said, heading again up Monaca Road. “It hurts me to see it, but this is Aliquippa. This is me. This is where I got everything.”
Salt Smith and the rest of the Democratic establishment felt the threat rising. More people were talking about Dwan Walker as the May 2011 primary loomed. Maybe it was just words, but Walker never let up, never stopped the sell that didn’t feel like selling; besides, maybe change alone could bring about change. The kid promised to try to bring jobs, start a lottery, be visible and accountable, to find options for kids besides football and drugs. He told reporters and citizens how he wanted to work with Chuck Betters—Mayor Battalini’s longtime foe—to revive the mill site and town. Yet he didn’t seem bought and paid for.
“I did not contribute one cent to that campaign—although I would’ve dumped a lot of money in it if somebody had come to me,” Betters said.
Through the winter and spring of 2011, things got nasty. One rumor had Battalini calling Walker a racial slur; Dwan accused Battalini of lying and stealing. Despite the fact that his ticket was aimed squarely at his own cousin, councilwoman Lisa Walker, some wondered if Dwan’s family ties to the likes of Vance Walker—whose sex-on-prison-furlough episode brought down Peep Short—and Ali Dorsett (cousin of his first cousin, Anthony Dorsett Jr.) would give criminals the run of City Hall.
The Democrats’ dominance had long rendered the November general election a formality: primary day is Election Day. On May 17, 2011, Walker crushed Battalini, Smith, and the Democratic machine 1,604 votes to 805 to win. Battalini refused to endorse the ticket in the upcoming general election but, he said, “This kid: I give him credit. He worked. The white people didn’t come out to vote. They just took for granted that I was going to win. I never thought that I’d see a black president; he’s here now. And I’m probably going to be the last white mayor in Aliquippa. I think it’s shocking.”
And, then, for six months . . . nothing. It wasn’t until election night, November 8, 2011, that D’s prediction officially came true: Dwan Walker, thirty-six years old, former Quips receiver, became Aliquippa’s mayor. With no Republican opponent, he spent the day moving precinct to precinct, inviting folks to the victory party at Captain’s Corner, the runty tavern down the road from where Big Mike Ditka drank and James Naim’s body fell.
That night, Walker smiled and hugged everyone in sight. His grandmother Rose, seventy-seven, clutched his arm. “I lived to see it,” she said. “I lived to see a black mayor.”
Folks started leaving near midnight. Walker stepped into the parking lot; every few seconds, the bar door banged open and another face called out good night. He smiled at each, but soon his voice cracked: it was unbearable, really, how winning felt like loss. Then Mayor Dwan Walker began to weep.
“I was trying to be calm but . . . I miss her,” he said. “I know she’d have walked in that door and been happy for me: I told you you could do it! There ain’t nothin’ in this world I want more: Have her put her arms around me and tell me, ‘Brah, it’s going to be all right. I’m with you.’”
Yet, even by then their accomplishment had become old news. Whether Walker’s election could even slow Aliquippa’s demise was the only question.
“Twenty-five years? At the rate it’s going now, it won’t be here in five years,” Battalini said. “I should be maybe a bit fairer to this kid and give him a chance. I just see that he don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. He’s got the wrong people behind him. He’s got people that are worried about themselves. Chuck Betters has already got his claws in his back. Kid has no experience whatsoever: Betters is going to end up running this town.”
Not immediately, though. Four months after Walker’s election, in March 2012, Betters’ holdings of more than 75 percent of J&L’s old seven-and-a-half-mile stretch along the Ohio River were rejected by Royal Dutch Shell as the site of its new, $2.5 billion ethane catalytic cracking plant. Aliquippa, like much of Western Pennsylvania, sits atop both the Marcellus and Utica shale fields. Though the natural gas boom has far less community-building clout than Big Steel—the finished cracker plant calls for only a few hundred permanent workers—the project still would’ve provided an estimated 10,000 direct construction jobs and created a secondary market for perhaps 6,000 more. But Shell chose a site just a few miles away, on the Potter/Center Township line.
“I still think we’re going to get some bounce-back,” Walker said after. “We’ve got a pipe-coating plant that’s looking to get some of that land, an ethynol plant. Only Aliquippa’s got two miles of riverfront that’s ready to go. The new docks are right there. So anybody that wants to come here, we’re ready.”
By then Walker had lost his marriage, his job at FedEx, and forty-two pounds, but he still bubbled with hope, tinged with a bit of desperation. “One thing I’m trying now, I got a production favor I’ve called in and I’m going to start making DVDs and sell my city to everybody who’s interested,” he said. “General Electric? I don’t care who it is. I’m going to try to mass-produce fifty thousand copies and send ’em off to top execs and let ’em know that Aliquippa’s here to do business, man. I don’t know what they’ve heard before, but we’re here now.”
Walker spent the rest of his first year trying to craft a recovery plan that would move the town into solvency and shed, after twenty-five years, its Act 47 status as a distressed municipality—an uphill slog with ever-declining revenues. Meanwhile came this cosmic slap: in September 2012 Battalini hit on six scratch-off Pennsylvania Lottery tickets and collected $15,000; two months later, he won top prize—$300,000—in the state’s “Trim the Tree” game. Sure, Aliquippa’s new mayor was young and eager. But the loser had all the luck.
Meanwhile, the tragedy that pushed Walker into politics remained raw in Plan 12. More than two years later kids were still congregating on the corner where Tiquai Wallace died, and no one dared paint over the graffiti tributes. Up at the high school all eyes were on running back Dravon Henry, who each week took the field with a dedication, “RIP WALL,” scrawled by a black Sharpie on the white tape strapped to his wrists.
The afternoon of his last day alive, Tiquai had played pickup basketball with Henry. He didn’t have fun. The thirteen-year-old Henry’s athletic gifts had already marked him as the heir to Law and Revis, and that Friday in 2009 he was having his way with Tiquai, a year older but starting to realize that the implied dominance of age was a lie. “I was winning and he was getting mad, kept trying to throw the ball at me, and I just kept going around him, scoring,” Dravon said. “And then he told me, ‘I’m going to go to this party. . . .’”
Now it was a November Sunday, 2011, and Dravon was sitting with his parents on a thick couch in the front room of the family home. His sophomore season was nearly done; he had proven himself an explosive offensive force, and an even more devastating ball hawk on defense. Aliquippa High would go on to win its fourteenth WPIAL football championship later that month, with Dravon more than redeeming himself for his two fumbles in the failed title game the year before: He would make the key crushing tackle on Jeannette’s live-wire quarterback Demetrious Cox on fourth and 4 to set up Aliquippa’s game-winning, 96-yard drive in the final three minutes; he would rush for 96 yards; he would intercept Cox’s last-gasp pass with twenty seconds to play to seal the 14-7 win.
Already, recruiters from Alabama, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, and West Virginia were circling hard. They would hang there, of course, for the rest of his high school days as Dravon racked up 5,454 career yards rushing—the all-time Aliquippa record —and established himself as one of the nation’s best prospects at defensive back. Talent was only one reason; Dravon hadn’t gone with Tiquai to that party. His parents kept a tight grip. They had a firsthand feel for Aliquippa’s dual nature.
Dravon’s dad, Roland Henry, had won a WPIAL title in ’96 as a tight end and a state title in basketball in ’97, went on to get a business degree at Thiel College; his mom, Shanell Askew, grew up in Valley Terrace in a family fractured by drugs, jail, and death. She was fifteen, still a student at Aliquippa High, on the October day she had Dravon. Soon after, she took her baby to class.
“I didn’t know what else to do; I had nobody to keep him,” Shanell said. She kept going, too, even after school officials told her it wasn’t allowed, and the following spring Aliquippa High gave in and opened a student day-care center. “So he’s been in school all his life,” she said. “Dravon, I believe, from day one to now probably missed five days of school. His attendance is perfect. That’s what he knows.”
It wasn’t until the next morning, after he woke, that Dravon heard about Tiquai’s awful end. Text after text filled his phone—Wall St. died. . . . Wal died. . . . Wall is dead—and Dravon panicked and ran out of the house and up the street, where his teammate, Jyier Turner, told him that it was true. “I just stood there,” Dravon said. “Shed a couple tears.”
He didn’t go to the funeral. But before every Aliquippa game, Dravon would point to the sky, he said, “for all the people who’ve passed away in ’Quipp.”
As he explained this, the sound of a motorcycle sputtering into silence could be heard outside. Footsteps fell, the front door cracked: David L. Askew III, Shanell’s thirty-year-old muscled and smiling brother, appeared in the room. He was wearing a New York Jets jersey, No. 24, with “REVIS” stitched on the back. The Jets had won this afternoon, and Darrelle alone had forced three turnovers. Talk turned to Aliquippa’s football genes. Shanell and David’s dad played at Aliquippa High; their grandfather, Ossie Foster, became its first 1,000-yard rusher in 1979; an uncle, Chad Askew, was talented enough to earn some tryouts in the NFL. Not David, though.
“No, no,” he laughed. “I just look like I played.”
Still, he has more of a claim on local football lore than most. His son, Kaezon Pugh, a running back two years behind Dravon, has been tagged as the next “Next One.” And in December 2010, Askew married Diana Gilbert, Darrelle Revis’s mother, tying even tighter the bond between the town’s once and future stars. That raised eyebrows in town, and not just because of the age difference.
In December 2002, Askew and twenty-seven-year-old George Horton—both aligned with Jamie Brown and Tusweet Smith, each fingering the other as the triggerman—pleaded guilty to the third-degree murder of Eddie Humphries, twenty-six, in August 1999. Humphries had been found up the hill on Tank Road, dumped over the border in Hopewell, dying of a gunshot wound to the chest and gasping the words, “George . . . David.” The case languished for nineteen months, until the killing of Officer James Naim and the subsequent grand jury investigation flushed out three witnesses who saw Humphries on his final day with Horton and Askew.
“When the Naim case happened, the brutality of it, I reminded my boss of this previous homicide,” said Timmie Patrick, the Beaver County detective who would go on to be Dravon and Kaezon’s running backs coach at Aliquippa High. “I said, ‘If we don’t solve this case, we’re going to have more bodies.’ So my boss asks for cooperation from Hopewell police, they turn over their material, and I produced a material witness within two days that observed George Horton, David Askew, and the deceased getting into a van before he was found murdered.”
Askew served seven years of a maximum fifteen-year sentence for the crime. “At first I tried blocking it out,” Askew said of the killing of Eddie Humphries. “I blocked it out for four years, and tried to justify in my head that what I did was kind of right—because if I didn’t do it he was going to get me. But I was in prison watching Oprah, and a lady there had lost her son in a fire—little boy died in a fire—and the look on the mother’s face and the way she was crying, I was like, I made somebody’s mom feel like that? That’s the first time I really understood how big it was what I did. . . . And I still feel bad for what I did.”
After he paroled out in 2008, Askew bumped into Revis’s mom at an Aliquippa tire shop. Gone were the wiry frame and flamboyant braids of his criminal days; prison had bulked Askew up, lent him gravity. “He was different,” Diana Gilbert said. “We went on a date and I could tell by the way that he talked, his demeanor. He was talking to me from his heart and I’m looking in his eyes and I was like, He is so genuine.”
Many are convinced that Askew has left his old ways behind. “Got caught in that spiderweb,” said Sherm McBride. “Great guy now.” Still, when Diana finally brought Askew to New Jersey to meet Darrelle, Revis’s first question was, “How’d you hook up with him?” Later, Darrelle pulled Askew aside.
“The only thing I ask is that you don’t hurt my mother,” Darrelle said. “She’s been through a lot. You treat her right.”
Askew has spent his time since working as a personal trainer, cheering Revis and Dravon, monitoring Kaezon, critiquing Aliquippa’s coaches, and posting the occasional pro-Quips rant on message boards. Sometimes he speaks at area schools, because few can testify more vividly about how Aliquippa’s boys are, as he says, “born with one foot to success and one in turmoil, one foot on the field and one in prison.” He hates the place nearly as much as he loves it.
“’Quipp got its own thing that don’t nobody else got,” Dravon was saying that Sunday afternoon. “It’s something . . . I can’t explain it.”
“Like a mystique,” Askew agreed.
Asked how the town would react if the population kept shrinking and Aliquippa High shut down or, worse, merged with Hopewell—if, that is, Aliquippa football disappeared for good—everybody stopped talking.
“I couldn’t imagine it,” Askew said finally.
“I couldn’t imagine it, either,” Shanell said.
“I don’t know what I would do,” Dravon said.
“For there not to be football, they would have to change the water system,” Askew said. “It’s in the water. If I give you a cup of water right now, you would run a forty in four flat!”
Everyone laughed except Dravon, but his mom wasn’t surprised. She found out, long ago, that no punishment was harder on him than the slightest threat to move out of Aliquippa. “It’s worse than a whuppin’,” Shanell said. “You don’t even have to put your hands on him.” Even the idea of vacation hits Dravon like a horror; after his freshman year, when his parents went to a North Carolina beach for a week, he begged off.
“Aliquippa just do something to me, inside,” Dravon said. “I went to Cincinnati, on the road my stomach was hurting and I was, like, carsick. But as soon as I saw that ‘ALIQUIPPA’ sign? I was smiling and happy as ever. There’s something about the town.”
Maybe it takes a native to see it. Because if you didn’t grow up there—or, like Tony Dorsett, you’d been gone a while—the place looked exhausted, beaten. Once past the day-care center, the police station, the library, a minimart and gas station and a few bars, there remained a whole lot of empty on the old stretch heading toward the J&L tunnel. Truck after truck rolled through without stopping. Any new business gravitates to the commercial cluster up on Brodhead Road, closer to Interstate 376 and away from the flash floods that, twice in the past decade, left the county’s onetime business capital under four feet of water.
“Franklin Avenue? The best thing that could happen is bulldoze it and push it into the river,” said Chuck Betters. “Because its infrastructure is inadequate for today.”
There were die-hards, of course. In the spring of 2012, there was still Uncommon Grounds, a Franklin Avenue coffee shop/ministry/arts showcase/halfway house planted in a ravaged storefront by an Australian missionary. Inside, addicts manned the register and poured drinks, and the warm vibe felt nothing like the world beyond. Weekly open-mic shows, usually on Thursday, provided the same rare, safe opportunity to gather that football does on Friday.
But even there, amid a jokey, biracial crowd of the amiable, the earnest, and the aging, light moments came tinged with a sense of foreboding. One March night, a teenage boy sang “Never Gonna Give You Up” as a girl gyrated inside a Hula-Hoop; a woman recited a screed against “Shallow America”; Stephen “The Poet” Suggs provided volcanic readings of his “Police Knockdown”—and the audience cheered them all. It felt like the junior college play you attend because your kid is cast.
Then a middle-aged black man edged toward the stage. The emcee announced Paul McDaniel, and the sight of him was a caution: drooping black pants, broken shoes, a baggy, soiled T-shirt. McDaniel took the microphone, squinted into the spotlight; one or two teeth remained. Humiliation seemed certain. Then the music began, and McDaniel opened his mouth.
The sound was so beautiful that, at first, it seemed like a lip-sync stunt, some cruel incongruity played for laughs. But the wondrous voice kept rising out of that shabby figure, high and raw, Billie Holiday and Marvin Gaye fusing into this hair-raising keen. Many in the place knew McDaniel’s story: there was no greater singer in the county, maybe the state, but word was that you couldn’t ever pay him a cent up front—because then McDaniel might never show.
“I always tell people: You never got it worse than the next man,” Mayor Dwan Walker said a few days later. “But that dude got it worse than anybody, and he’s a great guy. But Aliquippa’ll catch you. It’ll pull you back in with run-ins, or the people around you will pull you back in. Just the nature of this beast.”
McDaniel raised his seamy hands to his face. By then the shock of that jarring sight and sound had faded some, enough to let the words made famous by Nina Simone sink in:
Everything must change
Nothing stays the same
Everyone will change
No one, no one stays the same. . . .
His face crinkled, mouth gaping like a tunnel, McDaniel wasn’t just singing, but it wasn’t exactly performance, either. He was being the song. He looked ready to weep.
. . . The young become the old
And mysteries do unfold
For that’s the way of time
No one, and nothing goes unchanged. . . .
The audience went still. McDaniel sang on about winter’s turn to spring, the healing of wounded hearts, rain followed by a warming sun. Hopeful ideas, but not when delivered as a dirge: McDaniel’s fingers trailed down his cheeks, pantomiming tears. “Everything must change,” he kept repeating, and there was nothing to do but sit there and take it.
Yet if the town seemed stuck, economically and demographically, if it couldn’t—like many former mill and mining centers—retool or even reimagine a way out of its thirty-year rut, the knack for winning remained. Generations of steelwork, labor and drug wars, ethnic pride, and racial grievance had left a toughness—a cruelty, even—that endured well after the furnaces went cold; call it the final residue, hard and valuable as buried slag. More than any sport, football unearths, sorts, and refines that toughness, providing a continuity found nowhere else. And Aliquippa’s impassioned network of grandfathers, fathers, cousins, uncles, and brothers who once played The Pit demands that each new generation maintain the standard.
So each fall Saturday 160 boys, ranging from five to twelve years old, come to Little Quips field at Morrell Park to suit up in pads and helmets. Each August former stars like Peep Short, Sherm McBride, and Timmie Patrick—along with a dozen other unpaid volunteers—show up to coach Aliquippa High, where 40 percent of the boys, and more than 60 percent of its seniors, play football. And each year the greatest link in the chain, the man who has attended every WPIAL championship football game in the town’s history, who saw Willie Frank and knew Carl Aschman and learned from Hollywood Don, keeps coming back, too.
“This is why I do what I do,” Mike Zmijanac said before each winning playoff game in 2011, and then again in 2012, when the Quips—led by dual 1,000-yard rushers Dravon Henry and Terry Swanson—cruised through the postseason and crushed Washington 34-7 to win its fifteenth WPIAL title. In September of 2013 Zmijanac turned seventy, but neither he nor his team showed signs of slowing. Another undefeated regular season unrolled, capped by Aliquippa’s sixth straight appearance in November’s WPIAL championship game, at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field.
All over America, then, the view of football was changing fast. That was the month Tony Dorsett revealed that he had been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the latest retired NFL player in an ever-lengthening line to blame the game for memory loss, depression, thoughts of suicide. “Football caused this,” Dorsett said during a spate of national interviews. “Football has caused my quality of life to deteriorate.” A week later, the country’s largest youth football organization, Pop Warner, reported that participation had dropped nearly 10 percent from 2010 to 2012, and cited fallout from the game’s concussion crisis as “the No. 1 cause.”
Even smashmouth icon Mike Ditka was going soft; soon he, too, would admit that he wouldn’t let a young son of his play now. “I wouldn’t,” Ditka said on national television in early 2015. “And my whole life was football. I think the risk is worse than the reward.”
But if such talk circulated back in his hometown, it wasn’t very loud. There was still a waiting list to play on all four levels of Little Quips—Twerp (eight and under), Termite (ten and under), Mighty Mite (twelve and under), and Midget (fourteen and under)—and any criticisms of the game focused on Zmijanac’s seeming inability, of late, to claim big titles. People began carping again about his run-first/run-more play-calling after Aliquippa failed to score four times from inside the 20-yard line and lost to Wyomissing, 17-14, in the 2012 AA state title game. Then came back-to-back defeats in the WPIAL AA championship to South Fayette in 2013 and ’14.
It didn’t matter that South Fayette’s enrollment was twice as large; that with just over 300 students—138 boys—Aliquippa was a Class A school facing the second-largest school in AA. It didn’t matter, either, that Zmijanac hadn’t lost a conference game going back to 2009, or that he would run his regular-season winning streak up to sixty in 2015. For some parents and fans—and especially the Little Quips coaches who’d handled the players before they hit high school—it meant more that Aliquippa went into that 2014 clash averaging a Class AA–leading 50 points per game and scored just 22. To them, Zmijanac was too stubborn, too predictable: the second coming of old King Carl.
“I guarantee you, a Yannessa-coached team would have never gone to Heinz Field three times and only scored twenty-one points,” said Mayor Dwan Walker, a longtime Little Quips coach, referring to Aliquippa’s total output in the 2008, ’09, and ’10 WPIAL title games. “Frank Marocco? It would have never happened. But you see Zmijanac on our sidelines: everything he says goes. He doesn’t listen to nobody but himself. This is a basketball coach being a football coach, and all these ex-players are there coaching with him—and you don’t listen to them? To me, that’s selfish.”
Indeed, when things went wrong—even slightly—things got personal, fast. For some, Zmijanac would always suffer in comparison to his predecessors, and his standoffishness—summed up all too easily by his residency in tony Mt. Lebanon—only made questioning his methods easier. Most parents loved Coach Z’s my-way-or-the-highway stance on grades and comportment, but a small faction complained that he didn’t do enough to help second-tier players land scholarships. Never mind that more sophisticated high school scouting, a deeper talent pool, and the reduced size of college rosters had made Division 1-A far more discerning since Yannessa’s day. Or that a marginal player’s marginal transcript usually overrides any coach’s glowing comments about the kid’s “character.” It had to be him.
Zmijanac, typically, shrugged all that off. Privacy laws, not to mention his own discretion, prevent any comment about student test scores, and, frankly, he figures his string of D-1 players speaks for itself. And X’s and O’s? For years he had stressed, publicly, how much he leans on assistants Sherman McBride and Peep Short; if people weren’t ripping him for being a control freak, they were griping about him being little more than a figurehead. Which one was it? As for Aschman, Zmijanac says he overhauled the offense after Yannessa left—and, anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s not his play-calling that wins or loses games, he says; it’s the players’ talent and drive, and the way his assistants monitor, teach, and keep them playing clean and tough.
“They think they’re fuckin’ Vince Lombardi,” Zmijanac said of his critics. “The correlation between Little Quips and the high school team is like the one between the high school team and the fuckin’ NFL. I’m not angry with those people when I say that, but that’s typical. They want the credit. It’s silly. And here’s my real attitude: They want to make themselves feel good about it? Fine. I don’t care.”
Still, by the time of the 2015 season, the heat was on. If Zmijanac had nothing to prove, everyone else felt it. Civic pride mattered, as always, but more than ever football was seen as the town’s clearest path to success—and suddenly, the path didn’t even seem that tortuous. Dravon Henry and Terry Swanson had wasted no time breaking in at name-college programs, West Virginia and Toledo, respectively; in 2014, Henry was named a freshman all-American at safety and Swanson rushed for 732 yards. But the most dazzling example played Sundays: fresh off a Super Bowl championship with New England, Darrelle Revis was back in uniform with the Jets under a contract guaranteeing him at least $39 million. His career earnings, at thirty, now totaled $124 million.
“I guess I have a golden ticket,” Kaezon Pugh said one night in October, sitting on the porch of his dad’s house in Plan 12. “God planned this for me, and I’m just taking advantage of it.”
He was, indeed, The Next One: The previous Friday Pugh, a senior now, had rushed for 313 yards and two touchdowns as Aliquippa breezed to a 35-14 win over Quaker Valley. And that was an off night; his calves had seized up with cramps nearly from the start of the game. At 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, with a 4.4 time in the 40-yard dash, Pugh was bigger than Henry and Swanson and just as fast. By then he had sorted through three dozen scholarship offers and all but decided to follow the Ditka-Revis pipeline to Pitt, where the coaches project him as a linebacker.
Not that Pugh cares where he lines up. “Growing up, I hated football,” he said. And though Pugh would soon become the fifth back in Aliquippa history to gain more than 4,000 yards, though he was starting to talk now about how he has come to revere The Pit, he had warmed up to the game only a bit. Like Revis and Jonathan Baldwin, he had lived for basketball as a kid. Like them both, he realized that it didn’t offer much of a future.
“To be honest, I’m only in love with football because I think that’s my only way out,” Pugh says. “Because I have to love it. You can’t succeed at something you don’t love; it’s just not going to happen—you can’t be great.”
His father, the rarest of crossovers, pushed him here. Aliquippans are as guilty as any outsider of portraying the town as a battleground for competing ecosystems: its spiderweb of violence and drugs versus that network of family and ex-players pushing their boys to play. But sometimes the two worlds mesh—and never more seamlessly than in the person of David Askew.
Until the eighth grade, Pugh was happy living with his mother, Katia Pugh, and two younger siblings in Ambridge, getting all the playing time he wanted against lesser competition. But when, in 2008, David Askew was paroled out of prison after serving seven years for the murder of Eddie Humphries, he kept stressing to his son that a growth spurt was coming—and that Kaezon needed to take full advantage. “My dad broke it down to me,” Pugh says. “Told me what I was going to become.”
That Askew had long been like a big brother to Pugh’s cousin, Dravon Henry, and was on his way to marrying Diana Gilbert and becoming Revis’s stepfather, only gave his words more weight. Pugh was struck, too, by his father’s determination to change, to serve as a cautionary tale. “They say jail is good for some people; you come out a whole different person. My dad was one of those who didn’t want to go back,” Kaezon said. “He’s been down that road, and I know I’ve got to go in the opposite direction. That’s a must. And that’s what I’m going to do—take my ticket, the way I want to take it.”
Pugh moved to Aliquippa. He started at linebacker his sophomore year and moved into the starting backfield his junior, amassing 1,626 yards and averaging nearly 11 yards a carry in 2014. His Quips running mate, Hopewell transfer DiMantae Bronaugh, rushed for 1,262 and a 9.3 average. The back-to-back losses to South Fayette in the WPIAL championship stung, and the two vowed to come back even stronger for their senior year.
But beyond the football field, a small crack had surfaced in the public bond between the football program and the community. For years, going back to Yannessa’s days, the program had enforced a policy of withholding players’ recruiting letters during the season. The practice helped tamp down runaway egos, kept the focus on team and the game at hand. But for those inclined to question Zmijanac, it also bred easy resentment.
In December 2014, a week after the Quips’ loss in the WPIAL final, David Askew visited the football office and was given a box of dozens of letters—none of them hard-core scholarship offers. But one, he said, was from the U.S. Military Academy and addressed to “the parent of Kaezon Pugh,” requesting permission for the player to visit West Point—for a game that was now past. Irate, Askew posted a three-minute Facebook video of himself sorting through the box, naming Zmijanac, and calling for “change” in the Aliquippa football program.
That led to a community meeting: Peep Short was invited and attended, and a petition was presented calling for Zmijanac’s resignation. The Beaver County Times published a story, another player’s mother criticized the coach’s perceived lack of interest in getting her son a scholarship, a Pittsburgh TV station ran a report. Word spread online. “That guy don’t like me,” Askew said. Bad enough that a star player’s dad had taken such a stand, but no one stated—publicly—the real curiosity: as Diana Gilbert’s husband, Askew was part of Aliquippa football’s most famous clan, two of whose members had been coached by Zmijanac. Perhaps Sean Gilbert and Darrelle Revis had no sway with David Askew. Maybe neither thought it worthwhile to cross sister or mother, and hoped that the issue would just die. But, publicly at least, neither Gilbert nor Revis said a word in Zmijanac’s defense.
Regardless, the movement gained little traction with the public or school board. But the program’s hard-line stand on recruiting letters did dissolve—players can now come by the office once a week to pick up any mail—and some wondered whether Zmijanac would bother returning. He and his staff never talked, publicly, about the letters or the petition—not even McBride, who had called the reformed Askew a “great guy now.” But Zmijanac’s longtime ally, schools superintendent Dave Wytiaz, said, “Mike had been under fire for various stupid things involving a guy who’s been in prison much of his adult life. It all died down because it was bullshit. But I think that’s driven him, too.”
Four months later, in April 2015, Zmijanac signed a new three-year contract that projected him still on the sideline at seventy-four. For the upcoming season, Kaezon would require some deft handling, to say the least; and only one starter each was returning to the offensive and defensive lines. Still, Wytiaz said, “I see a renewed vigor in Mike.”
Then, a week before the first game, Bronaugh was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and ruled out for the season. The tone shifted: Quips Nation rallied. Bronaugh stood on the sideline in the opener, began a schedule of nauseating weekly chemotherapy sessions in Pittsburgh. Blood drives were held, blankets were knit, T-shirts were sold. The senior class donated $600 in gas cards for his hospital runs. Messages of hope poured in from California, Australia, Iraq. Former Quips like Mark Washington and Jon LeDonne, now coaching at Hopewell and Shaler High, respectively, raised money at their schools, and every road opponent chipped in at halftime. The team kept winning. The fundraising total rose to $9,000. Week after week, the players kept saying they were doing it all for DiMantae.
“The support has been overwhelming,” said Bronaugh’s aunt, Aliquippa High teacher’s aide Anita Gordon. “People I don’t even know walk up to me and say how much they’ve been praying and hoping he gets better. The community has been wonderful.”
By September’s end, Bronaugh was in remission. His teammates vowed to win him a championship and Pugh, meanwhile, shouldered Aliquippa’s offensive load. He didn’t complain. Any awkwardness with Zmijanac from the previous winter was gone. Between his dad going to prison and a thirty-one-year-old aunt dying of cancer in 2013, Pugh had survived worse. “I have a certain motor that keeps me going through anything,” he said. “Just straight ahead, no matter what.”
After rushing for nearly 1,300 yards during the Quips’ 9-0 regular season, Pugh hit another gear in the 2015 playoffs. He had plenty of help; with a fast-maturing line and quarterback Sheldon Jeter’s passing providing variety that Aliquippa hadn’t shown in years, Pugh shook off a concussion in their first-round win, romped for 253 yards against Seton-La Salle, and ran for 237 over Freeport. The Quips sailed into Heinz Field for their third straight WPIAL title shot against their recent nemesis, South Fayette—now riding a 44-game winning streak. Pugh ground out another 179 yards, but the game ended up being about nearly everything but him.
Five times the lead changed hands. Aliquippa held a 14-point cushion with less than six minutes left—and let it slip away. Then, facing a do-or-die drive on the South Fayette 47-yard line with the score tied 38–38 and 1:11 left, Zmijanac—who seemingly had no imagination, who seemingly had lost his big-game touch—answered his critics with a bang. Out came a trick play he hadn’t run in four years: Jeter flung a first-down lateral to wide receiver Jassir Jordan—who had never thrown a touchdown pass in his life—who then fired the ball downfield to a wide-open Thomas Perry. Perry raced the final 15 yards to give Aliquippa the 44–38 win, and its sixteenth WPIAL championship.
“Those are the kind of plays where if they don’t work you look stupid,” Zmijanac said after.
“He has been in this business a long time,” said South Fayette coach Joe Rossi. “That’s why he’s so successful.”
But if the breakthrough meant another paint job on the field house roof, it provided no relief. Aliquippa kept living dangerously. Now seeking its first state title since 2003, the Quips came from behind in the fourth quarter to beat Karns City in the state quarter-finals, then trailed Central Martinsburg in the fourth in the semis. Pugh had been laid out twice in the second half with blows to his elbow and upper body; now he took over. He scored the game’s next 16 points—two touchdowns and two conversions—to seal the 30–21 win and a trip to Hershey, Pennsylvania, for the championship. He finished with 160 yards on 28 carries—a bit below his playoff average of 192 yards per game. No one complained.
“This is not a giving-up team,” Pugh said after. “I was sitting there hurting and said, ‘No, I can’t go out like this.’ I just had to push—and keep pushing.”
Why? Winning was part of it. Helping DiMantae was part of it. Getting to college and the NFL, making millions someday, was a big part, too, but not all. Pugh has a dream, one he doesn’t talk about much. It involves the dodgy streets of Plan 12 and the corner where his friend Tiquai died, the crumbling Pit, his mom living up on a darkened street off Monaca Road. It involves, even, all the factors that pushed his dad to pull a trigger and go off to jail.
“My plans? If I ever make it, I want to talk to all the big celebrities that came from around here and together we’ll just rebuild Aliquippa,” Pugh said that night in October. “Make it new. Get it to start feeling, like: I’m home again. I would love that feeling. That would be the best—to have everybody who’s made it out come back and just . . . enjoy ourselves. Like a family again.”
A winter’s chill was already in the air. He let the idea marinate a moment; a shaft of light spilled from the living room window onto the darkened porch, enough to see Pugh nod and smile. “I think it can happen,” he said. “I’ll make it happen.”
The fight was four to one—four men with law on their side, to one wounded freebooter, half-starved, exhausted by days and nights of pursuit, worn down with loss of sleep, thirst, privation, and the grinding, nerve-racking consciousness of an ever-present peril.
They swarmed upon him from all sides, gripping at his legs, at his arms, his throat, his head, striking, clutching, kicking, falling to the ground, rolling over and over, now under, now above, now staggering forward, now toppling back.
Still Dyke fought. . . .
—Frank Norris, The Octopus