Photo by Craig Carlson

"You establish lifelong friendships that you never forget."

Late August: On this muggy morning, the air hangs thick under a gray, un-comforting sky. In a small hollow among small hills m East San Diego, several-score teenage boys and a few men gather at Colts Field, home to Crawford High School’s football team, for two-a-days, practice sessions held every weekday morning and afternoon in the last few weeks before school starts.

Coach Dan Armstrong: "To tell you the truth, I’d sell my soul to be able to go through it again."

Photo by Craig Carlson

A handful of spectators, including some boys too young to be in high school and two teenage girls with babies in strollers, dot the rickety bleachers on the field’s south side and observe the practice as quietly as if they were watching lawn bowling. Their passive demeanor belies the barely contained mayhem erupting a few yards away.

In the locker room the players finish suiting up. The mood is quiet but nonchalant.

Photo by Craig Carlson

"RUN! RUN! I NEED SOME HELP! LET'S HUSTLE, GENTLEMEN!" Echoing off the banks of ice plant, across the field into the bleachers, comes the screechy, house-on-fire voice of one of the men. "MAN TO MAN! PICK ONE MAN AND STAY WITH HIM!" The field is loosely divvied up, each sector occupied by a different squad — varsity in red jerseys and junior varsity in blue — each running a different set of drills. The loudest exhortations come from the area where players are being run through intrasquad scrimmages — rehearsals of offensive and defensive plays. The offensive squad tries various pass patterns and running plays, and the defense tries to read them and react.

"When you get hurt is when you don't go all-out."

Photo by Craig Carlson

The piercing voice belongs to the defensive coordinator for the junior varsity. He screams at his players almost nonstop, not angrily, but just because everything on the field is at a level where adrenalin counts more than words. His own intensity would no doubt consume his lean frame if it weren't allowed to escape in this way. "HEY. WAY TO WRESTLE IM TO THE GROUND OVER THERE! HEY. WAY TO HOLD ON. MAN!" The players are learning the particulars of the game, to be sure, but they are also being initiated into a rock-hard world where muscle and animal urgency mean the difference between prevailing and submitting, between elation and despair. "HARD HARD! HARDHARD HARDHARDHARDHARD, COME ON. GO!"

A crowd of seniors, some dressed casually, others more elegantly, begins to realize they will not have their homecoming dance.

Photo by Craig Carlson

"GO BALLS OUT! COME ON. GET ANGRY!"

The offense tries a run. The ball earner slips a tackle and picks up speed on his way down the side of the field. Short, powerfully built, he swivels his hips as he easily shifts his weight to change course and elude more pursuers. Finally one defender draws a bead on him. The bodies fly at each other in the open field and meet with a trebly, plastic thwaack that echoes through the neighborhood. A herd suddenly thunders up; other bodies soar into the heap; pads helmets arms cleats, a rapid succession of muffled thwaacks, a crowd of unhhs, grass and dirt spraying over the pile, a momentary stillness and quiet, during which the sounds from other squads can be heard.

"NICE TACKLE!" The coach exchanges a few hand slaps as the bodies untangle.

"WAY TO GO, DEFENSE! GOOD JOB, D! HELLUVA JOB ... DEFENSE. YOU GUYS ARE DOIN' A HECK OF A JOB OUT HERE! GETTIN' BURNED A LITTLE BIT, BUT YOU'RE PLAYIN' SOME BALL!"

But the offense is playin' some ball too. A pass: The receiver streaks down the sideline The ball is underthrown. The receiver holds up, leaps a little into the air. The defender dives to knock the ball away. The receiver snatches it, spins, and prances the few steps into the end zone. He slows and turns around and jogs back. His smile visible the length of the field, he says simply, "Touch... down." They are the words of a victorious man. but they are uttered in the gentle, high-pitched voice of a boy.

On a run up the middle, one ball carrier is about to break free, when from the mass of thwaackmg bodies rises a pair of hands. They reach for him from behind, grasp him by the neck, and snap him backwards to the ground. He does not get up at once. He does rise after a few minutes, while the tackier is made to do 20 push-ups as penance.

The scrimmages wind down. All players now race through punishing drills designed to forge their bodies and reprogram then: reflexes. Several groups are made to run repeated 40-yard sprints, nearly halfway up V the field, full-out, to a specified yard line, then wheel and sprint back. If any one of them gives less than his all or stops short of (or overruns) the line, it doesn't count. The first sprints are run with spirit; the players shoot by. By the fourth or fifth circuit, there is little air in those lungs and the coaches must provide the motivation.

"SOMEBODY'S NOT RUNNING! YOU'RE GONNA COST THIS GROUP 20 SPRINTS!"

A little more effort on the next sprint. By the tenth time around, there is no more horsepower to be gotten out of their straining muscles. "THAT ONE DIDN'T COUNT!" A player lets out. "Shit."

The head coach alerts an assistant. "COACH. IF ONE GUY DOESN'T GO A MILLION MILES AN HOUR. IT DOESN'T COUNT." (Coaches address each other as "Coach,” the mutual recognition of a priestly order, as one senator might call another "Senator.”) The assistant replies quietly, as if receiving a sacrament — "Got it." The sprinters grunt, and cry out, and stagger, and sprint some more.

Finally, the practice ends. As the coaches offer a few last pointers and reminders — which may or may not be heard — the players collapse on the grass and strip their helmets, jersey, cleats, shoulder pads. Their faces are sweaty. Their uniforms are bruised with grass stains and caked with mud. Their breathing is heavy — almost desperate. Eventually, one by one. they find their feet and begin to file across the street to the gym, where they will dress and head home for lunch They will do it all over in a few hours and again tomorrow morning.

"To tell you the truth, I’d sell my soul to be able to go through it again. I still miss playing." Dan Armstrong is not kidding. He loves football, and it is an informed love. Now 36. Armstrong played fullback and linebacker at Kearny High School, Mesa Junior College, and San Diego State and has coached high school teams in San Diego and in Akron, Ohio, for a total of 11 years. He has coached at Crawford for the past 7 years, as head coach since last year He leans his chair back in the coaches' office, just off the locker room in the Crawford gym. In his tank top and gym shorts, he looks the part of a lifelong jock. His broad shoulders and powerful legs, though softening a little, clearly belong to someone who has spent many years in rigorous training. He carries himself with an easy, confident gait, sits relaxed, alert, and is content now to wax philosophical about this head-banging game. This is a man in his element.

What is it about this game that engages him so deeply? He smiles, his warmth and openness contrasting sharply with the roughneck tone of his sport. "Probably the controlled violence. It's a physical game, and there’s a lot of hard contact, hard hitting. But there's also a lot of strategy involved. It's very stimulating to sit down and scout somebody and break down film" — Armstrong and his colleagues spend every Sunday reviewing game films of upcoming opponents — "and try to find a weakness and exploit it." And then there is the aesthetics of pure athleticism "You can see some kid go down the field'and jump above everybody and catch a ball, and it’s like watching Baryshnikov When we're out there, and we see stuff like that." he adds, laughing, "we say, 'Great coaching.' "

For Armstrong, there are three indelible things football gives its devotees. "First of all. you establish lifelong friendships that you never forget. My high school football buddies are still my best friends. When you go through what these kids go through and what we went through, day after day with these guys, it's like going through the service together. And you form bonds that'll never be broken. Second of all. you learn the team concept and how to work together with a group of guys for one common goal. And thirdly, you learn that you get out of life what you put into it. If you absolutely refuse to lose, that only leaves one option. you have to win. But if you do lose, and you don't learn something from it, then you've lost twice."

Because it is played in a fever of teeth-grinding ferocity from start to finish, football can be seen as a fundamentally more emotional — Armstrong calls it "inspirational" — game than most. It both requires and produces a mindset that can only be called Fired Up. The player succeeds to the extent that he is aroused beyond himself, beyond his normal state of consciousness. "That's what they always say about guys who ‘play over their heads,' " Armstrong agrees. "That's because they get so pumped up. And that's what we try and do. We believe that if we are more inspired and more fired up, we're gonna win more ball games."

The largest part of the coach’s job is generating that arousal in his charges. In Armstrong's case, it often means providing motivation where none exists in a player's life; some Crawford students, he says, come from single-parent homes and are often unsupervised or otherwise left with little to deflect the temptation to hang out with local gangs. And for some of these same students, Armstrong says, football represents the only genuine chance to escape a life full of dead ends, the only potential ticket to a college education and a prayer of earning a decent living, in or out of sports.

In 1986, UCSD student Lorimel Arabe studied Crawford football players and their counterparts at University High School and found the predominantly white and more affluent University team less intent on football as a long-term career or short-term means of getting an education than was the Crawford team. So while Armstrong and his fellow coaches may have to spend a good part of their time cajoling players to keep up their grades or attendance, once the players are on the field and getting positive reinforcement for their efforts, they take to it with an abandon suggesting they have found a productive outlet for the violent urges experienced daily on the streets of the inner city.

Armstrong doesn’t shrink from this; in fact, it fits nicely into his program — he wants his players to go all-out. Asked whether this doesn't encourage injuries, he answers that the opposite is true: "When you get hurt is when you don't go all-out. You get someone going half-speed and someone going full-speed, and someone gets hurt." Beyond that, the team has, and wants to maintain, a reputation for being a "pretty physical football team." Eavesdropping offensive line coach Roger Engle nods approvingly. "We feel like we gotta out-hit a team to beat 'em."

Crawford's streetwise players take to this approach, continues Armstrong. "When you get a tough kid like that, it's easy to preach that mentality to 'im and get that pride developed that says, 'Hey, I'm gonna knock someone’s head off. and I’m gonna physically intimidate people.' I tell these guys something they can relate to. I say. ‘It's a goddang war with rules. It's a street fight with rules.’ " As the summer practices began, the coaches were frankly disappointed that the workouts weren't physical enough, but by this afternoon, "there were some big-league collisions and guys likin' it. We always kid 'em, we tell 'em, ‘If you're not half-dinged with snot runnin’ down your nose, you're not hitting anybody.' They like that, and they joke around; they'll get up and do this” — he wipes his nose on an imaginary sleeve with an exaggerated motion — "and see if there’s any snot running out of their noses. They're a good group of kids."

What they get for throwing themselves so wholeheartedly into the fray — for managing to. as Armstrong exhorts them to before every game, "go out and fly around and knock some butt out there" — is the evanescent joy of winning, of having prevailed, of being recognized by the tribe as an alpha male. Armstrong has been at both extremes, both as player and coach. "Winning is the greatest feeling in the world And so consequently, when you lose that one on the last second ... I mean, I’ve gotten sick to my stomach after a loss." But oh, those wins. The thrill never pales. "Probably the closest feeling you can get to it is when you have a kid. You actually think to yourself, 'It doesn't get any better than this. I'm as happy as I can be.' "

Late September: The Colts are preparing for their third game. They will play the Sweetwater High Red Devils at Sweetwater, having lost the opener to Patrick Henry High, 14-12, and won the second game, against Madison. 5-0 (a score more likely in a baseball game; "We pitched a six-hitter," jokes Armstrong).

In the cramped team room, under a sign that says "Dedication," eleven players are in various stages of dress. They don most of their uniforms here but carry the shoulder pads and jerseys with them on the bus to the site of the game and finish dressing minutes before taking the field. So a dozen or so shoulder pad sets, wearing their respective jerseys, now sit on the cement floor, like headless behemoths buried up to their chests, the jersey numbers half-visible. A player takes some aspirin, perhaps in anticipation of the pounding he will shortly receive.

The coaches enter for a few words before boarding the bus. Jeff Olivero, the defensive coordinator, speaks first. "All week long I been hearin' about ‘They got 11 guys comin' back,' " he begins, referring to Sweetwater's many returning seniors. Crawford's young team could be intimidated by this. "So what? They also got a quarterback who averages 232 yards a game — but he ain't gonna if we put pressure on him." He goes over a few defensive configurations and specific assignments and urges the team to “fly around and have fun out there."

Coach Armstrong has the last word. His voice starts out loud and gets even louder. "We been slidin' on offense," he admonishes the silent team. "There’ve been times when it seemed the best we could do was tie 0-0. But I'll tell you what. I know that no team in the county can go around us." The Colts' strength this year has been defense, and he wants them to maintain their stinginess with opponents while revving up their offense. Sweetwater has lost its first two games; tonight’s game is a perfect opportunity, he says, for Crawford to assert itself and all aspects of its game. And he doesn't want to have to tell the team twice. "We're not gonna have a half-time talk about smash-face football. We're gonna come out, we’re gonna stomp the shit out of 'em from the opening whistle. This is their back yard, and it's a pivotal game for us. Awright, let's go down and have a good game and knock the snot out of 'em. Any questions?"

"NO, COACH!"

Above the concrete bleacher stands on the home-team side of Sweetwater's stadium is a modest press box. Mounted above the press box is an aging .wooden sign. It depicts an endless chain of autos riding into infinity. Flanking the cars are the legends "National City Mile of Cars... is RED DEVIL COUNTRY." Added below, for good measure, is another legend, offering the simple, hyperactive ejaculation, "RED DEVILS!"

The Devils and Colts each take half the field for pregame calisthenics. Stretching. Jumping jacks Pivots. Players call and respond across the field, everyone gradually turning up his own and his teammates’ internal amps. Eventually, a few taunts cross the invisible border between the two teams. The Red Devils look big and sound mean, their voices low and gruff compared to the Colts'. "Num-buh 56, you a cry-baby!" shouts someone from Sweetwater. Before anyone from Crawford can reply. Armstrong forbids it: "Let those pads do the talking."

Calisthenics finished, the team runs through drills The defensive line's chore is to drop flat, bounce up, and wiggle forward. Their coach is Dave Grissom, and his voice is right on top of them. "GET THROUGH GET THROUGH GET THROUGH! COME ON, HIT 'IM! HIT 'IM! I LOVE THIS PART!"

The offense runs a pass play. Vernon Shaver, Crawford's talented, heavily recruited wide receiver, glides along in a graceful stride, easily adjusting his gait to catch a ball thrown over his shoulder.

The Colts gather in the end zone just before the coin toss. Already, they are breathing heavily and wiping then brows on their jersey tails. Armstrong reviews the toss choices with the captains who will attend the coin toss, then has a few last admonitions for his Colts. "Remember these guys — we scrimmaged them last year — they’re cheap-shot artists. I don't wanna see you guys fightin' these guys. I will not tolerate it, it’s not joart of our program." The players nod compliantly. Fight? Us? Armstrong continues. "Were in their back yard. What does a dog do in your back yard?"

"SHIT!" yell the players. "Yeah.” a few voices add. "that's what we're gonna do, we're gonna shit in their back yard!"

"When a team comes out and does jumping jacks in my face," says Armstrong, "that pisses me off!"

"YEAH!"

"Awright. We’re gonna come out from the opemng gun and smash then face. If we hit 'em hard from the first drive, you just watch them hang their heads."

"YEAH!"

From here the playing field looks so wide, so long, and — worse — so flat, with nowhere to hide.

Crawford kicks off, and Sweetwater begins its first drive from its own 30-yard line. Two quick runs take the Red Devils to midfield. Then the earth opens under the Colts as a Sweetwater running back breaks free and romps into the end zone. Barely a minute has elapsed. The Crawford team and coaches are thunderstruck.

Redemption: The play is called back as Sweetwater is penalized for holding. The reprieve enlivens the entire Crawford sideline. Olivero screams, "PLAY THE FOOTBALL!” Grissom merely yells, "Loosen up! Loosen up!”

Sweetwater's offense stalls, gaining little. They punt and Crawford begins a long, grinding drive from its own 10-yard line. More than a dozen plays later — most of them head-down, ram-the-wall runs — Crawford is deep inside Sweetwater's territory. Colt running back Peter Ervin takes the ball at the 30 and is barely brought down by the last Sweetwater defender at the 7. He slams his fist into the ground. He gets up to try it again. This time he's tackled behind the line of scrimmage, and a Sweetwater player soars onto the pile after the whistle has blown, driving his helmet between Ervin’s shoulder blades. Ervin lies breathless.

The officials whistle the penalty, and flags fly, but Armstrong races to the pile-up and begins berating the officials. The umpire will have none of it. "You come out here and take care of your injured man," he tells Armstrong, "but don't bad-mouth the officials or I'm gonna tag you. That’s half the distance to the goal on them, but five yards on you.”

If Armstrong is called for unsportsmanlike conduct, it will cost his team more, at this position on the field, than Sweetwater's late-hit violation. But clearly the penalties are not the issue. Armstrong has prohibited his players from retaliating against cheap shots, but he must back that up by defending them himself And he, no less than his players, must assert his claim to the entire expanse of contested territory — physical and psychological .

Crawford now has the ball a yard and a half from the end zone. A running play nets nothing. Armstrong calls time out, sprints onto the field, and joins the huddle. When play resumes, Ervin roars over the line for a touchdown. The sparse Crawford crowd, studded with parents and teachers in blue Colts jackets, erupts A successful point-after kick makes it 7-0. The air is thick with adrenalin.

The rest of the first half proceeds sloppily and uneventfully Sweetwater nearly returns a kick for a touchdown. Its beefy fullback at first seems unstoppable, but the offense can't get any momentum going Shaver fumbles a punt, and Sweetwater recovers but cannot capitalize. Crawford recovers a fumble only to throw an interception. This is not precision football. But the air is thick with adrenalin.

Halftime. Both teams leave the field through a single gate On their way to the gym, a few opposing players exchange curses. The Crawford coaches hustle their team away.

What do coaches tell their teams at half-time? About what you'd expect As the players sprawl on the floor and benches for some rest, Armstrong hammers at them, "We gotta go out there and put together the same kinda drive we scored on! We gotta go up 14-0! We can't let them think they’re back in the game.

"We're not fooling anybody lining up," he continues, his voice softening for a moment. "Get your butts up! We gotta get off the ball! Come on, guys." his voice rising, "we said we gotta get better from week to week! On kickoff teams" — getting sterner — "we don't have 11 guys wanna fly downfield. We've got 4 or 5 guys flyin’, and 4 or 5 guys sayin', ‘I hope those guys in front of me make the tackle.' Lemme tell ya. that happens again, we're gonna make wholesale replacements!”

Olivero chimes in, "DO WE WANNA PLAY HARD-NOSE FOOTBALL?"

"YEAH!"

The players have a few minutes to relax. Most use it to keep hyping up themselves and each other. "Know what?" lineman-linebacker Jorge Brathwaite asks of no one in particular. “They (Sweetwater) told me the game ain't over yet — and it ain't over! We ain't scored yet! We gotta get fired up!"

"YEAH!"

Before they leave the locker room, Armstrong has one last admonition. "Awright, let's show some maturity out there — let’s ice somebody!"

"YEAH!"

The Colts do just what Armstrong wants. They score to open the second half, covering nearly 70 yards in a drive capped by a long pass to Shaver. Ervin bulls across again, from close in, for the touchdown. 14-0. Sweetwater fumbles on its next possession, and Crawford recovers; a few plays later and another obstinant run by Ervin and it's 21-0. The Crawford side of the field is happily riotous.

But the game’s physical toll is becoming evident. Legs are cramping up. Guys are "flyin' around" out there, but some are making crash landings. On one running play. Colt tailback Richie McClees is tackled at the sideline and spun backwards off his feet, his head slamming to the ground as he slides on his back. Mike Hwozdek, a short, quiet guy built like a brick wall, is looking for another helmet; his is broken.

Crawford pours it on. Sweetwater grows desperate and attempts a long sideline pass. Colt cornerback James Hester reads it perfectly, keeps himself between the ball and the intended receiver, then flings himself through the air and comes down with the interception. right in front of his jubilant teammates. He walks to the bench to catch his breath. "I saw it was overthrown, and he didn’t," he gasps.

Meanwhile Crawford is driving. Quarterback Chris Townsend scrambles and hits tight end Allah Hillie, one of Crawford’s few big players, with a pass Hillie turns into a long gain. In the space of three plays. Crawford has two touchdowns called back for penalties. The first time. Brathwaite is called for illegal motion. In the exultant atmosphere, it barely matters. "Jorge is trying to keep it even," Armstrong jokes. They settle for a field goal. 24-0.

The coaches are not interested in letting up.

"GET TO THE QUARTERBACK!" they yell at their defense. "YA GOTTA BE READY TO GO! SUCK IT UP!" It works: Crawford sacks the Sweetwater quarterback on three successive plays for losses totaling 30 yards. The Colts dominate the field. The game ends without further scoring.

The coaches are the last to board the bus. The team is ready to tear the roof off. Armstrong quiets them long enough to say, “On behalf of the coaching staff. I'd just like to thank you guys for one helluva effort." The players roar in self-congratulation. On the way back to Crawford, they hoot out the windows, slap each other, joke and holler and sing. Brathwaite stands in the aisle and swings a pom-pom he has gotten from somewhere. "Jorge is kind of our spiritual leader," says Armstrong. "Reverend Jorge?" he is asked. "Yeah — the Rev," he laughs, finally starting to fully enjoy himself. He turns and quiets the team once more. "Hey, Jorge, you got a new nickname: Reverend Jorge — The Rev!" Deafening cheers.

As the bus turns down the street leading into the parking lot behind the Crawford gym, a single player prompts his confederates with "One! Two! You know what to do!" With that, they burst into the school’s alma mater, the credo of all Crawford Colts, the undying pledge of fealty to all that is Crawfordian:

• All hail. Crawford High School
• Crimson, white and blue
• Loyalty and honor
• We will pledge to you — FOREVER!
• Our banners always waving
• Crowned with victory
• All hail. Crawford High School
• We will be true to thee

These guys sing it as if their lives depended on it.

Before the team files off the bus, Armstrong wants just one more moment with his players. "I just wanna say, go home, get some rest, enjoy your weekend, stay outta trouble, and Monday we go back to work."

"YEAH!"

Late October. Crawford has won its next three games, two by scores of 29-0 and 36-0. They have won five straight. Their defense has remained strong, and the offense has improved — in the parlance of the game, "gotten untracked.'" They now prepare for their homecoming game against St. Augustine High, to be played at Patrick Henry High.

The Crawford campus is clean and tidy and received a fresh coat of paint a couple of years ago, so its institutional plainness is mitigated somewhat by an undeniable cheeriness. Sandwich boards in pathways and courtyards and the senior quad are emblazoned with inspirational mottoes: Your Thoughts Today Become Your Tomorrow. Organize for Success. I Am a Success. I Deserve the Best.

Whether because of or in spite of these signs and other official entreaties, the student body files into the gym for the lunchtime pep rally. Much of the student body, anyway. Twenty years ago, Crawford had more than 3000 students, all but a handful from middle-class white families. Today, the school serves roughly 1500 students, about one-third of whom are Indochinese. There are about as many-black and almost as many white students, and a few Hispanic, South Pacific, and other minorities. Blacks and whites remain keen on football, but the Indochinese students evince little interest in the sport.

Still, the rally is well attended. But the program comes off as perfunctory. (Maybe the ritual is wearing thin.) Conducted essentially by cheerleaders and emceed by one whose words were not made more lucid by the PA. system, the rally is a short course in why and how to root for the home team. First, the assembly sings the alma mater, the words to which are painted on a large wooden sign high on the east wall. Many of the girls form a kind of V-for-victory salute with their right hands and slowly wave then: arms back and forth while singing. (This may help propagate the supernatural mystery of homecoming, for it too has no apparent meaning.) Next come a succession of cheerleader chants, formations, exercises, incantations. A cheerleader displays a handkerchief, or sock, urging all to wave same during the game. "Our goal is for everyone to have ’em so we can wave 'em and really impress whoever we're playing."

Finally, the rally climaxes with the introduction of the homecoming court — the underclass representatives and the senior couples who are candidates for homecoming queen and king. These students are preceded by two faculty couples, who take the floor arm-in-arm to raucous hoots and cheers, the mock sexuality of their momentary companionship apparently too much for the easily aroused audience. The couples all enter through a makeshift portal, festooned with sequins and the legend "Crawford Colts." The seniors rotate to different parts of the floor so all can get a good look at them. Of the four eligible couples, three of the boys are on the football team. The only one who isn't seems to have his own booster club. From high in the bleachers comes a strident cheer as several girls unfurl a banner saying simply "Jeremy/King." The 500 or more students in attendance take all this seriously, dutifully filling out ballots and depositing them in sanctioned receptacles on their way out. Within a couple of minutes the gym is empty, the student body presumably pepped to the max.

In the team room, before boarding the bus. Armstrong is revving everyone's engine. "They’re popping off," he says about St. Augustine, "but if ten guys hit 'em on the first play, they’ll stop popping off. They won’t set the pace, we will. It’s our homecoming."

"YEAH!"

In the locker room at Henry, the players finish suiting up. The mood is quiet but nonchalant. A trio of Colts eyes with scorn the posted school records for Henry’s baseball teams. "Most home runs — 7?" A smirk. "We killed all those records."

Allah Hillie is fussing with a helmet. "Had to get a new one." he deadpans. Did his get cracked? "Naw, I do the hitting." The team is loose.

In the end zone before the coin toss. Armstrong inverts the alien-canine metaphor. "We re in our own back yard. Nobody shits in our back yard!"

"THAT'S RIGHT!"

"Awright guys, let's go out there and represent your school real well and have some fun. Let's do it all on the field, fellas." And they trot off toward another shutout.

Only this time the Colts are too loose Within the first few minutes, it becomes clear that Crawford's game is in disarray. The players seem listless, on the field and on the sideline. St. Augustine’s game consists almost entirely of sending an ox-like running back (with the lawyerly name of Hunter Buckner) up the middle or around the end with the ball firmly in his grasp. Crawford is unable to contain him. It takes until the start of the second quarter for the Saints to score — their band plays "When the Saints Go Marching In" — and the wonder is why they haven't scored several times by then. Crawford is making mistakes big and small. A long pass down the sideline, intended for Vernon Shaver, is overthrown, one of many errant passes that night by Chris Townsend. Shaver and the defender collide, but nothing comes of it. When the offense comes off the field, Olivero educates him: "You gotta hit the ground, Vernon! You tnp and it's interference; you keep runnin’, the officials don't see nothin'!"

Midway through the second quarter, Armstrong is yelling at Olivero. No one seems to know why, and everyone is unnerved — unnerved at the sight of it. at the shellacking being administered to them, at the prospect of being whupped at Our Homecoming. The five straight wins and four shutouts are a vapor, a phantom. The only thing that seems real is the sight of Buckner’s meaty calves plodding through the Crawford defensive line, slowly but inexorably.

At halftime the score is still only 7-0, but looming larger is the question of what the coach can do to rally his team in the face of impending disaster. Anderson throws the score in their faces. "You guys are real good at makin' a show of how fired up you are," Armstrong begins, "and goin' out and playin' like dogshit. We should be genin' beat 21-0!

"We got a guy more concerned about his tuxedo and homecoming than he is about playin’ football! Mission Bay beat this team 29-6! It's gona get down and dirty, son!" He admonishes particular players, picks apart elements of the game plan that are not being executed, again threatens wholesale replacements in the lineup if improvement isn't quickly shown. Last, he puts the team on notice to cede bragging rights to the Saints, who. he says, have earned them for the moment. "We're gonna go out there and keep our mouths shut and take our medicine like men, and then, at the end of the game, we'll see."

But the view will not improve. Crawford seems unable to do anything right. St. Augustine's slower but bigger lineup has them stymied. Midway through the fourth quarter, the Saints take over on Crawford’s 35-yard line and throw a touchdown pass on the first play. The St. Augustine fans are the ones waving hankies. On the Crawford sideline, players offer up plaintive cries to their cohorts. "Get the ball, defense!" "Hey! Pump it up out here!" But there is no pumping up, and hope drains from the Crawford throng as the last minutes tick off the scoreboard. Several late Colt injuries show how lopsided the game is, despite the meager 14-0 final score. Vernon Shaver is tackled in midair on an incomplete pass play and is a long time getting up; when he finally does rise, he leaves the field slowly, clutching his shoulder. Peter Ervin limps off the field with a painful ankle, removes his shoe and sock, and sits grimacing on the bench. Chris Townsend, who has taken a terrible pounding tonight and braved a series of injuries throughout the season, sustains a concussion, his third to date, in the waning moments His doctor will later refuse to permit him to play again this year. Mercifully, time finally expires.

The mood on the bus... imagine a charter carrying souls to hell. A fight breaks out between two teammates, flares, and dies. The parking lot is jammed; the team may be trapped here in its misery forever. Weeks go by. Crowds mill about and stare at the traffic. Coaches eventually board. Armstrong gravely apologizes for his poor coaching, then blasts anyone who wants to blame a teammate. "We all got beat." he says, and that's that. Quiet prevails.

Halfway home, the mood still somber, Armstrong gets up and addresses the team again. "Hey, there's something I wanna say, and I want you to hear it from me. I did something tonight that was totally inexcusable, and I want to apologize in front of all of you to Coach Olivero for it. I don't want you guys blamin' anybody else, and I shouldn't either. I was just outcoached out there, and I had no right to take it out on Coach Olivero. So Coach, I'm sorry, and it won't happen again." Olivero gives him a brotherly jab. Hey. Coach. I'd already forgotten about it.

The street leading up to the gym is blocked off due to the homecoming dance, and the driver is instructed to park in the alley out by the baseball field. Heading down the alley, someone offers a morbid "One. Two. You. Know. What. Tb. Do." And the team responds with a dirgelike rendition of the alma mater. If their earlier version was jubilant and the students' version at the pep rally was merely rote, this one is positively funereal.

Armstrong is first off the bus, and the team follows him silently the 100 yards or so up to the gym Turning a corner and ascending a few steps right at the gym, the coach and the first few following behind him pass an apparently inconsequential scuffle involving three or four high-school-age boys. A growing crowd is milling in the parking lot just beyond. As more coaches and players pass by, the scuffle suddenly dissolves — or rather, all but one of the boys suddenly vanish. The last fellow is on his back and staggers to his feet. He emits a moan that may be an attempt at speech. His eyes look toward the unaware players passing by but settle on none of them. He cannot stand steadily. There is blood.

As Armstrong reaches the door, a few school staff members appear — a vice principal, other coaches, the head of campus security — agitated, alert. Someone says there was gang-related violence at the game... some arrests ... a stabbing... this scuffle a few feet away seems also to be gang-related ... apparently only the fellow staggering is a Crawford student, his attackers gang members...

The players are hustled into the gym, although several want to get into it. The combination of a humiliating loss and an ugly skirmish (victimizing, it is suggested, a friend of some players), right in their own back yard, is more than some can bear. But the adults are commanding, and the entire team is soon safely inside the gym.

The injured boy is carried into the coaches’ office. The police are called. A coach who has been at Crawford some 30 years allows as how "I was popped one, but I'm okay."

The vice principal is bleeding on the cheek, blood dripping in a neat line down to his jaw, but he protests that he is okay. He will later take eight stitches in his cheek. The boy is lying on a desk. His broken nose is bleeding into his throat, making his breathing difficult. Someone is tending to him, calming him. He wants to get up and leave, but a friend who has come by urges him to "lounge, man. lounge."

A dozen, two dozen people are streaming in and out of the office. A few girls, who might have been hustled inside for then: protection, sit in the men's locker room, slightly embarrassed. Outside in the parking lot and in the street beyond. 100 or more young people hang around waiting — some for the dance, some for more dangerous fun. The police arrive. A white girl and a black girl embrace just outside the coaches' office and are consumed in tears.

The vice principal and the security chief confer; the chief adamantly declares the dance canceled. They will need more police to make the decision stick. More patrol cars arrive, and an ambulance. Slowly, the parking lot empties as a crowd of seniors, some dressed casually, others more elegantly, begins to realize they will not have their homecoming dance. The band hired for the dance must now reload the equipment they had just finished unloading. The police secure the area and gradually disperse the crowd without further incident.

Mid-November. The Colts have rebounded from their loss to St. Augustine with twin 28-0 wins, against San Diego High and Christian High. They finish their regular season with an 8-2 record, 4-1 in their league, the City Central League. Tied with archrival Lincoln for best record in the league, they have captured the title on the strength of having beaten Lincoln in their October 14 game. Crawford thus enters the countywide playoffs seeded fourth out of 16 teams in the 2A division (comprising schools with medium-sized enrollments). Their first-round opponent in the single-elimination tournament is Ramona High. Whether from the clear mountain air or the fresh apples, the Ramona players have a staggering size advantage over Crawford: The offensive line averages six feet four and 240 pounds to the Crawford defensive line’s five feet eight and 140 or so pounds "But I'll tell you what." asserts Armstrong, "these street kids, they're not intimidated by a big person in a football uniform. That's not the scariest thing they've seen. They're not afraid to go smash face into that." Once again the Colts promise to fly around and have fun out there. How much and whose butt gets knocked where ... that will depend on who is more fired up.

Compounding the task for the Colts is a curious psychodrama. Vernon Shaver has inspired doubt in him among his teammates and, in the process, come close to frittering away a golden chance at a first-class education and a career in the pros. The week following the loss to St. Augustine, Shaver abruptly quit the team under mysterious circumstances. A few days later, he came to Armstrong asking to be reinstated. It's not up to me, the coach told him; it’s up to the team. If they vote you in, you're in, if not, you're out. The team voted to take him back, on one condition: that he do 400 yards of belly-busters each day of practice. This grueling regimen calls for the victim to sprint 100 yards one way and then back, with the added feature that at any moment, at the sound of a coach’s whistle he must immediately flop to his belly, push himself back up quickly, and continue his all-out sprint Shaver did his daily belly-busters without complaint and went on to score a 56-yard touchdown in the last regular game After another absence from practice, this one excused, Shaver has shown dedication at daily workouts and appears committed to his team and his future.

Sometimes motivation is a slippery thing. Armstrong calls Shaver the most talented athlete he has ever coached. But anyone in the game can tell you that talent alone does not produce greatness. Shaver has the kind of athletic ability that could lead Crawford to a championship, if he finds the desire. If he waltzes away from his team, no major college in the country will have him. But that, as they say, is what makes a ball game. For every tale of unmaximized potential, Armstrong will tell you of a tough kid, this close to ruination, who found not just a meal ticket but salvation in football — like the Crawford graduate who now starts for San Jose State and who recently visited him to say, "If it weren't for you, I'd be dead by now.”

Finally, one sees it’s not just the love of sport, the delight m seeing a body hurtle through space and not only accomplish but repeat the impossible, that keeps Dan Armstrong motivated. Through endless sweaty practices. Through budget cutbacks. Despite working without a full-time teaching contract. In the face of crowd violence, which has again forced officials to reschedule games to afternoons, and gang warfare erupting mere inches from his office door. Dan Armstrong keeps at it and hopes to spend his life at it because, in a culture all but stripped of a sound means of ritually initiating boys into manhood, of welcoming them into the tribe, of endowing them with the powers and responsibilities of being a man, he has found a way. Not the best way nor the only way, but one way to turn aimless youths from self-destruction. He does it because it is a good way to bleed off excess testosterone at less risk to bystanders than, say, a war. He does it because "it gives me a chance to compete when my eligibility's gone," but more than that, he does it for the same reason his students and colleagues and everyone who's ever thrown or caught a ball or gotten up from a blinding tackle half-dinged, with snot running out his nose does it: because of the longing to be brave and strong and true: because he's a man. □