TAMPA, Fla. — From the time he was in elementary school, Santonio Holmes knew he had a choice for how his life would turn out.
Every little boy growing up in Belle Glade, Fla., knew the options. They see the examples everywhere around them.
“Either you’re going to sell drugs, or play football,” Holmes said. “Play sports, or stand on the corner.”
It’s a blunt description, yet this is reality for young men living in Belle Glade and neighboring Pahokee, small rural towns on the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee that together go by the unofficial name of Muck City.
The people here subsist on agriculture, because the rich, black soil — the “muck” — is ideal for growing sugar cane, sweet corn and other vegetables.
But Muck City is more famous for growing football players.
The two towns have not even 25,000 residents combined, yet they have five active players in the NFL. Two of them, Holmes, a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Pahokee native Anquan Boldin, a wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals, play each other in Sunday’s Super Bowl.
If the most important game of the year in Muck City is the Friday night in early November when Boldin’s alma mater, Pahokee, plays Glades Central, Holmes’ school, in the annual Muck Bowl, this Sunday is the runner-up.
Forget Steelers vs. Cardinals. In Muck City, the battle that really matters is Holmes vs. Boldin. Consider it the “Super Muck Bowl.”
“These are small, low-economic towns, but the athletic program gives them something positive they can brag about, gives them some notoriety,” said Eddie Rhodes, a Belle Glade native who retired in 2005 after more than 30 years as an administrator and coach at Pahokee Middle- Senior High School. “You look at guys like Rickey Jackson, Fred Taylor, Anquan, Santonio. If it weren’t for those guys, you would have never heard of Belle Glade or Pahokee. Or you would only hear negative things.”
Surviving tough youth
Holmes knows all about those negative things.
He knows all about the drugs. He said Tuesday that he spent about a year dealing drugs when he was in elementary school because that was what his friends and older relatives did. He used whatever money he made to buy shoes and snacks, but he said he quit when a friend was arrested and sent to jail.
“I’m not proud of it, but it definitely showed me that there’s a different way to go about living your life, and that’s not selling drugs,” Holmes said. “I couldn’t risk my chances of my life going down that same path.”
Holmes knows about poverty. He was raised in Belle Glade by a single mother in a public housing project. Patricia Brown was 16 when Holmes was born, and she worked in the corn fields throughout his childhood.
She would leave for work by 4 a.m., and Holmes would wake his three younger brothers, make breakfast and get the brood to school.
“He was the best babysitter,” Brown said. “He never grumbled. And if he minded doing all that, he never showed me.”
These days, Brown’s phone will not stop ringing. It has been that way for more than a week, ever since the Steelers beat the Ravens to win the AFC championship.
For an hour Sunday afternoon, she lets each call go to voice mail. She’s content to sit in the small Belle Glade home she shares with her husband, Little Miles, and flip through years and years worth of newspaper clippings and photographs that have chronicled her son’s football career from Glades Central High to Ohio State to the Steelers.
Though Brown said she always viewed her son as being too small to play football — even now she thinks he’s not big enough (189 pounds), she said — there was never denying Holmes’ speed.
He developed it by chasing rabbits in the sugar cane fields with other boys, and he refined it by running track in high school. He was the anchor leg on three state champion 1,600-meter relay teams. And of course, he excelled at football, where he was a receiver on three state championship teams.
Holmes was one of at least nine players from his senior class to earn a college scholarship and is one of two in the NFL. The other is Ray McDonald, a defensive end with the 49ers.
“Those were the great years,” said Curtis Holley, the quarterback on Holmes’ high school team. “That generation put Glades Central on the map.”
McDonald’s grandfather, Willie, has taught and coached football and track in Belle Glade since before schools there were integrated. He’s the town’s unofficial athletic historian, and he recently commissioned a mural to be painted at the entrance to the school’s football stadium that lists every Glades Central graduate who has reached the NFL. There are 31 names on that wall, including the four current players: Holmes, McDonald, Jacksonville running back Taylor and Cleveland defensive tackle Santonio Thomas.
Yet Holmes will be the first to play in a Super Bowl.
“This is history. History!” Willie McDonald said. “It’s already huge now that he’s playing in it, but if he wins it, it’s only going to get bigger.”
Sunday best
The congregation of Rev. Robert Banks’ Bible Church of God in Okeechobee was rocking for 90 minutes before Sunday’s sermon inevitably turned to football.
Here in the Muck, faith, family and football are intertwined.
“Are y’all excited about the Super Bowl?” Banks asks the congregation.
His question was met with another round of cheers.
“They said we couldn’t make it,” Banks said as he continued to preach. “But that’s what the devil said about you. That’s what people said about you.”
There was no need for Banks to specify the “we” he referred to. Of course he meant the Arizona Cardinals. This congregation is Anquan Boldin’s family. Banks is his uncle. There, in the second row, is his mother, Brenda Banks. A few rows behind her is his younger brother, D.J. Boldin. Various cousins fill other pews.
“I always thought he was the greatest football player ever,” said D.J. Boldin, a wide receiver who recently graduated from Wake Forest. “So to see him excel at every level, from high school, college, the pros, has been incredible.”
Pahokee has produced more than its share of NFL stars, such as linebacker Jackson, who won a Super Bowl with the 49ers in the 1994 season, and Andre Waters, former standout safety with the Philadelphia Eagles.
The Pahokee Blue Devils have won three consecutive state championships and five titles in six years. And more than 250 players have gone on to play at some level of college.
Yet no one is revered here as much as Boldin, who by the time he played his final down for the Blue Devils in 1998 was the first player in state history to accumulate more than 11,000 total yards. He started four years at quarterback and also played free safety, and he was named Florida’s Mr. Football as a senior.
Boldin’s mother still is convinced her son’s true athletic calling was baseball. That was the first sport he played as a child, though Brenda Banks said Anquan wasn’t allowed to pitch because other children complained he threw too hard.
“Anquan was gifted as an athlete. And I mean athlete. Not just as a football player,” Rhodes said. “Anquan could have played basketball, football, baseball, track. He could have been in the NBA. It just happened the doors to education and scholarships were much more prevalent for football.”
Coming back home
Boldin picked Florida State for college, and Seminoles coaches converted him to wide receiver as a freshman. Boldin was a second-round draft pick by the Cardinals in 2003 and that season set an NFL rookie receiving record with 101 catches for 1,377 yards and was the NFC’s rookie of the year.
It would have been so easy for Boldin to just enjoy the good life of the NFL and never come back. That’s what so many other athletes who have played their way out of Pahokee have done. But Boldin keeps coming back.
Every year, he visits elementary schools. Every year he buys equipment for the Pahokee High football team. Every year, he hosts a celebrity basketball game, inviting other NFL stars to join him. Previous guests include Terrell Owens and Randy Moss.
“Pahokee is home, it always will be. It means everything to me,” Boldin said. “Pahokee has a lot to do with the person that I am and the way I’ve gone through life. Just growing up in that place. My heart is there.”
Carl Boldin and Brenda Banks divorced when Anquan was 8. The couple’s four children stayed with their mother, living in a public housing project on the outskirts of Pahokee as Banks worked at a day care center. She picked up shifts at a convenience store to make extra money.
“I worked my butt off. I wasn’t able to give them everything they wanted,” Banks said. “But they never went without the things that they needed.”
Now Boldin has returned the favor. He’s allowed his mother to retire, bought her a five-bedroom house in West Palm Beach and flies her to his games in Arizona. She’s joined him on each of his first two Pro Bowl trips, and is accompanying him to Hawaii again next week.
“This has just been so fun and exciting,” Banks said. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do, I’m just so full of joy.”
Local heroes
Holmes and Boldin have yet to run into each other in Tampa, where the Steelers and Cardinals are preparing for Sunday’s Super Bowl.
But both know how much friends and family back home are anticipating the matchup. Both have secured tickets for a small group of immediate family members and friends, but expect hundreds more tailgating outside of Raymond James Stadium.
The fans have even made T-shirts with a picture of both players on either side.
“I know a lot of people are sending their best wishes to me and Anquan,” Holmes said.
A caravan will leave the Bible Church of God as soon Banks’ service ends on Super Bowl Sunday, and the group of fans that have followed Boldin from his historic career as a quarterback at Pahokee, then as a receiver at Florida State, will drive three hours northwest to Tampa to be there for their favorite son’s biggest day.
“I think it’s great that two guys from the area have made it to the Super Bowl. It gives people back home something to look forward to,” Boldin said.
Lindsay H. Jones: 303-954-1262 or ljones@denverpost.com
