It is hardly overstatement to say that Brice Brown is a hero, as he often represents the best hope for the football players he coaches at Edna Karr High School, in the rugged Algiers section of New Orleans. That he has also made them wildly successful on the field is almost incidental. What he has done, again and again, is save lives. What he has done is provide guidance and direction, in an environment where that is tragically lacking.
Kent Babb of the Washington Post chronicles this brilliantly in his new book “Across the River: Life, Death and Football in an American City,” which comes out Tuesday. While Brown seems to care little about his own well-being — friends believe the former offensive lineman’s weight has soared beyond 400 pounds — he cares deeply about that of his players. If somebody’s hungry, he buys them a meal. If somebody needs a place to stay, he arranges lodging. Particularly poignant are those scenes Babb depicts where Brown dials his guys during the hours when they are not under his direct tutelage, just to hear their voices. Just to know they are alive.
That is no small matter in New Orleans, where, Babb writes, 18- and 19-year-old Black men are 56 times more likely to die of gun violence than is the national average. Brown lost a close friend and one of his favorite players in that fashion, and his father died as a result of a knife attack. That goes a long way toward explaining why Brown eats terribly, sleeps sporadically and frets constantly. And why he and his staff deal with the players directly and often profanely. They are, in Karr-speak, always “bringing the real.”
When I spoke to Babb in June for the “After the Buzzer” podcast, he expressed surprise that those at Karr so readily let him into their world, for a 2018 Post piece about the team and for this book, which covers the 2019 season. Still, he had to execute. He had to dig deep. He had to develop an understanding of a place completely foreign to him — a place that sits on New Orleans’ West Bank (hence the book’s title). It is not all that far from the French Quarter, but in another sense it is a world away.
That he so deftly takes readers there should come as no surprise. He wrote a terrific book about Allen Iverson called “Not a Game” in 2015, and is forever breaking new ground in his work at the Post. He was the one who in a ‘15 piece about then-Eagles coach Chip Kelly revealed that the notoriously private Kelly had once been in a marriage to which he had never subsequently admitted. Two years later Babb wrote movingly about former Penn State running back Larry Johnson, who suspects he has CTE. And in 2018 Babb rode in a helicopter while profiling Kobe Bryant; he believes it might have been the same one that crashed in January 2020, killing Bryant and eight others. (Not to be forgotten, either, was a piece last year about Shawn Kemp. Who would have guessed that the long-retired NBA star performs Shakespeare in the Park?)
In taking on Karr’s story, Babb introduces us not only to Brown but Destyn “Fat” Hill, a headstrong wide receiver who has since gone on to Florida State; quarterback Leonard Kelly, whose penchant for inconsistent play and “podium talk” (i.e., fudging the truth for reporters and, sometimes, coaches) irks Brown; and cornerback Jamie Vance, who dubs himself “Greedy,” after Cleveland Browns corner Greedy Williams.
Kelly is now at Nicholls State, Vance at Louisville. But one player who had few college prospects entering that ‘19 season was linebacker Joe Thomas. His mom, Keyoke, raised him as a single parent, and according to Babb gave new meaning to the phrase “tough love.” One example: To harden her son in his younger years, she paid other kids in their neighborhood to pick fights with him.
Joe is eventually left on his own when his mom is incarcerated, surviving on McDonald’s meals and remembering her advice to, among other things, never follow the same route home, lest someone seek to follow him and do him harm. (Such survival skills pay off in various ways, not the least of which is that Thomas has since gone on to Texas Wesleyan.)
All of this makes for compelling reading, but when I talked to Kent I recalled something author/writer Jeff Pearlman asked Babb’s colleague at the Post, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eli Saslow, on Pearlman’s podcast “Two Writers Slinging Yang.” Amid a discussion about immersive journalism, Pearlman wondered if there is not some level of discomfort when a writer parachutes in to tell the tale of someone who is in desperate circumstances. As Pearlman put it, isn’t the writer bound to feel “shitty,” since he or she is not effecting any real change?
Saslow acknowledged that there have been times he has felt that way, but also said that it is not his role to be an activist, but rather to raise awareness by relating the story, in the hope that someone with greater wherewithal could come to rescue. Kent said much the same thing on “After the Buzzer.”
“The more people know about and care about places like this or issues like that, that’s how change happens,” he said. “In order to make somebody change something, you first have to make them care. And how do you make them care but through people?”
This book is not unlike others that have enabled readers to peek behind the curtain of high school athletics as they are contested in a less-than-ideal environment. Particularly notable are Adrian Wojnarowski’s “The Miracle of St. Anthony” (2006), which examines the work of legendary boys’ basketball coach Bob Hurley Sr. at that now-shuttered Jersey City-based school; George Dohrmann’s “Play Their Hearts Out” (2010), a deep dive into AAU hoops in Southern California; and S.L. Price’s “Playing Through the Whistle” (2016), which delves into the proud football program in the dying steel town of Aliquippa, Pa.
Now Babb has added to this canon.
“My whole policy with this book,” he told me, “was to do no harm. These people have it hard enough. I didn’t want to make it harder. That was my whole thing.”
At the same time, he has done a service. He has opened eyes, humanized deep-seated issues. That has value. That has force. There is always a place for such tales. Always.