Boys Will Be Boys by Jeff Pearlman Read Free Book Online Page A

games and would complete the regular season with a November 30 home matchup against Notre Dame. Entering the game, the Fighting Irish were 5–5, a record that had the South Bend faithful desperate for redemption. If there was any hope of defeating the Hurricanes, it was that maybe, just maybe, the playerswould win one last game for the Gipper—er, Gerry Faust, their inept outgoing coach.
    Instead, the Hurricanes humiliated their once-proud visitors, 58–7. The nationally televised game was a coming-out party for the “new” Hurricanes. Miami’s players taunted and strutted, trash-talked, and end-zone danced. When safety Bennie Blades intercepted a second-quarter pass and returned it 61 yards for a touchdown, he slowed at the 2-yard line to high-five a teammate. When the ’Canes closed the third quarter with a 37–7 lead, Johnson demanded that his quarterbacks continue to throw the ball. With 71 seconds remaining, Miami ran a reverse. From his seat in the CBS booth, broadcaster Ara Parseghian—the former Notre Dame head coach—asked whether Miami had heard of this thing called decency. “It’s time for Jimmy Johnson to show some compassion,” said the man who, in his day, had led the Irish to a 69–13 win over Pittsburgh, a 48–0 win over Purdue, and a 44–0 win over, ahem, Miami. “This is not right.”
    From that day forward, the Miami Hurricanes were no longer another collegiate football team. They were thugs. Hoodlums. In an era when many universities still instructed their coaches to recruit black players but not that many black players, Johnson prowled the state of Florida seeking out great athletes, race be damned. “Jimmy got us,” said Brett Perriman, an African-American and former Hurricane receiver. “He understood what it takes to win.”
    As long as his players attended classes, showed up on time to practices and games, and dominated the opposition, he could not care less how they carried themselves. At, say, Notre Dame or UCLA or Florida State, black players were asked to conform to a white society. At Miami, white society would conform to the players. “I really would have run through a wall for Coach Johnson,” says Bernard Clark, an African-American and former Miami linebacker. “He took a chance on us, so we owed it to him.”
    In late September of 1986, top-ranked Oklahoma came to town to play the No. 2 Hurricanes at the Orange Bowl. Switzer’s Sooners were led by linebacker Brian Bosworth, the brash Sports Illustrated cover boywith the multicolored flattop haircut. The night before kickoff, neither Miami tailback Melvin Bratton nor his roommate, fullback Alonzo Highsmith, could sleep. “It’s five-thirty in the morning and I’m just lying there looking around,” Bratton said. “Me and High are like kids at Christmas. We are so ready to get their ass. Oklahoma’s been getting all the hype. It’s Bosworth this and Bosworth that. I said, ‘High, fuck the Boz and fuck that fade haircut of his. Let’s call that sonofabitch and wake his ass up.’”
    Bratton had heard the Sooners were staying at the Fontainebleau Hilton. He called the front desk and was patched through to Bosworth’s room.
    “Hello?”
    “Is this Boz?” Bratton asked.
    “Yeah…”
    “Well, this is Melvin fuckin’ Bratton and Alonzo Highsmith, and this is your fucking wake-up call, motherfucker! And at high noon we’ll see your sorry ass in the Orange Bowl and we’re gonna kick your fucking ass!”
    As soon as Bosworth hung up, Bratton and Highsmith told Hurricane defensive lineman Jerome Brown of the “exchange.” Brown summoned the entire defense to his dorm room, from which they called the hotel and asked to be connected to Sooners quarterback Jamelle Holieway. “ Ja-may-yal, come out and paaa-lay-yay, ” Brown taunted. “Come on out, Ja-may-yal .” When he later learned of the calls, Johnson nearly fell over laughing. And why not? His Hurricanes had won, 28–16.
    Johnson was now known as a