What strikes me on a fall evening in 2019 is how calm they are. Yeah, Kenlein Ogletree throws his helmet, and a few of them weep. But it is as if with their bowed heads, the Clairton Bears high school football team knows this weight well, knows what it is like to lose — not on the field (they were the winningest team in Pennsylvania over the past 15 years) — but in life. Losing fathers, losing mothers, losing homes. Clairton is 12 miles up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh and full of boarded-up stores, its largest employer U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, which poisons the air more than any other polluter in Allegheny County.
The Bears lost the 2019 state semifinal to the Farrell Steelers by only three points — 13–10. A win would have sent them to Hershey to compete for the state crown.
Now, they kneel before Coach Wayne “Rinky” Wade in the end zone in which Kenlein had scored. It is over. No one moves. Coach Wade doesn’t need to say anything. They know that two months from now they will start again, congregating in that tiny weight room in the elementary school on Waddell Avenue to prepare for next season.
Wayne Wade, the Clairton Bears’ head coach, addresses his team after their loss to Farrell, Friday, Nov. 29, 2019. (Video courtesy of Jonathan Callard)
From 2009 to 2013, the Bears won a record-setting 66 straight games and four straight state titles. In 2014 and 2016, Wade’s squads reached Hershey to vie for the championship. Both times they fell short. And now their dreams of returning to Chocolate City are done.
I am there with the team because Coach Wade has welcomed me. I taught writing to three of his former Bears players at the University of Pittsburgh, where I work; one of them, Tyler Boyd, now stars in the National Football League.
The theme of my class was place.
They wrote about Clairton. They said it was family.
I live alone. I, too, was seeking family. That search would make me the unlikeliest member of the Bears’ extended family and drive me toward the story I’m now striving to write.
![Coach Wayne Wade gives a pregame speech before leading the Clairton Bears in prayer ahead of their first home game of 2021 on Sept. 3. “[Football] almost means everything, because it's an avenue, it's an outlet,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is their opportunity to normalcy.”](https://i0.wp.com/www.publicsource.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Glabicki_Clairton_FinalEdit_Football-1.jpg?resize=2000%2C1334&ssl=1)
Remember this feeling
Standing behind the kneeling Clairton Bears players in that end zone at North Allegheny that Friday after Thanksgiving, I taste once again what it feels like to want something and to fight for it and lose. I am not alone.
It is what it is, Coach Wade says. He stands facing the goal posts after that Farrell loss, gesturing with his right hand, his headphones hitched to his waist, his muscular frame in a coach’s jersey. Now in his 40s, he had competed in the Arena Football League before a career-ending injury sent him back home to Clairton, where he ended up as the head coach of the Bears.
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As he speaks, I remember playing high school football 30 years before — the exhilaration when a hole opens up between the tackles and for a moment no one can touch me as I grip the ball under my right arm and accelerate into the end zone. Or the desolation of waiting to receive a punt, the ball forever in the sky and then bouncing off my facemask to the ground and I barely pick it up before someone slams me onto my back and knocks the wind out of me.
For Clairton, it isn’t just about football. The players need Wade’s guidance for their future. Good luck on the next level, he says to the seniors as they stare at the ground. Because all you guys should go. To Wade, football is the ticket to college, which is the ticket to greater opportunity.
It didn’t go our way tonight, he says. For all you guys coming back, remember this feeling.
Following the ‘Killer T’s’ home
A year before, when I meet Coach Wade for the first time, he bursts through the doors of the Clairton Education Center, round face, Clairton football jacket on, all smiles. I’m interviewing him for a magazine story I’m writing about my former Pitt students and Bears players Tyler Boyd, Terrish Webb and Titus Howard, known as the “Killer T’s.”
Wade points out a younger version of himself, poker-faced, in a 1989 team photo on the wall. He’s made his peace with not making it to the NFL. What’s most important is being happy with what you have, he says. For him, that’s family. A father of four, married over two decades, he’s an alternative education principal at McKeesport High School when he’s not coaching.
As we speak, sneakers squeak on the gym floor next door.
Maybe I am in Clairton to escape my bubble. I once thought academia was going to be my career, but I’ve hit a wall. Too many hours for too little pay. I’m beginning to realize I can easily lose myself in grading papers and then wake up and discover I am alone.
Aside from my Pitt composition class where student athletes like the Killer T’s mingle with single moms, military vets and non-native speakers, Pittsburgh silently stratifies. Nestled in hills and hollows of river valleys, white and Black neighborhoods rarely intersect.
Wade is a natural entertainer, gesturing, his voice rising and falling. At first, I feel suspicious. What does he want from this? Why is he trying so hard to reach me? Media often reduces Clairton to drugs, murders, pollution. I’m white. He’s Black. Why should he trust me? But there he is, eyes alight, sharing another story.
Even though he now lives in McKeesport, Clairton is home — his sisters and brother are still here, his mother, his grandmother, cousins, uncles. I never knew one place as my home. My father’s position as private-school educator took us up and down the Eastern seaboard. Maybe that’s made me less trusting, more guarded, always saying goodbye.
I found friends — and home — through sports. If I could outrun my opponents, I could outrun anxiety. These days, an arthritic knee and a full teaching schedule make it harder for me to connect with others this way. I have many safety nets — white skin, peaceful neighborhood, social capital that keeps me employed and insured. I can leave Clairton anytime I want. Yet I can’t help feeling that I want to follow Coach Wade and the Bears for more than just a good story. Growing up, I did not have this visceral experience of one community supporting its members like Wade and his players did. Maybe that’s why I am lingering with him here in Clairton. No one here knows my academic failures or successes, nor do they care.
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Almost a year after they lost to Farrell in the state semifinal, the Bears must contend with COVID-19.
I return to Clairton for the Imani Christian game on Oct. 9, 2020. Coach Wade spots me on the sideline. He walks over, masked, and reaches out to shake my hand. I pause — I have avoided touching anyone since the lockdown began. But I won’t leave him hanging. I take his hand and shake it.
Once when I followed the Bears out onto the field through the stadium fence, young boys slapped each player’s hand. They slapped mine, too. Maybe that’s another reason I keep returning: Not only to get out of my own head, escape my own emptiness, but to join something bigger. People look out for each other here. You can’t be a loner and expect to survive.
Mushy and the 700th win
After Clairton’s historic 700th win, a 45–10 blowout over Springdale on Oct. 23, 2020, Coach Wade looks to his left, raises his arm, calls for the “equipment manager” to join them. From the stands, a stooped man with a white mask under his chin shuffles down the steps and onto the grass. He is Wade’s mentor, Davlin “Mushy” Mullen, who played for the Bears during the ‘70s, then Western Kentucky, then for the New York Jets in the NFL.
As he approaches, Coach Wade pauses. His voice catches. Tears fill his eyes. Mushy, Wade explains to the team, is the first person who told him he had a future. It was Mushy who stopped his car when Wade was a kid playing in the projects and gave him an official NFL football, some NFL jerseys. Wade’s eyes widen. Mushy was the one, he says, who took him aside, gave him a path he could follow. Wade played Division One football and competed professionally and returned here to Clairton because of Mush.
Mushy just stands there next to Wade, a small smile on his face. Cocoa skin, slender. Gentle eyes, though I can see the athlete under his hooded sweatshirt, chest out, confident, hands hanging at sides ready for anything. His life is in the balance. He needs a heart transplant, possibly a new liver, too — they’re awaiting the biopsy. But it’s as if in Mushy’s appearance, Wade has become young again like his players before him, and it’s 1989, Wade’s running the stadium steps, up and down, again and again, because Mushy told him to. Because Mushy said this is what he must do to get to the next level — not just Division One football, or the NFL, but the next level of life, up and out of the mentality that said you can’t and into a fresh mindset of possibility, that with hard work and dedication — and education — you could give yourself a chance to grow.
Wade turns and gives Mushy the game ball marking the 700th win. Says he wants him to have it. Mushy steps forward to address the team, cradling the ball with both hands.
I learn later that after his NFL career, Mushy returned to Clairton and drove a Port Authority bus for 30 years. Character — that’s what you need to make it in anything, he tells me.
When Wade was growing up in the Millvue Acres part of Clairton, Mushy explains, he gave him his red Schwinn bike. When he came to collect it later, Wade told him he didn’t have it. Someone had stolen it off his porch. Then Mush gave Wade weight bells. When he came back to collect those, Wade said, “I need that” — he was training, serious about building his body and mind.
When Wade returned to Clairton after playing football professionally, he asked Mushy to help him coach. He’d be having trouble getting through to a kid, and he’d turn to Mushy. “You talk to him.” And Mushy did.
Football is just a game, Mushy tells me. The most important thing? “You belong,” he says, pointing at me, then pointing at himself.
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‘Family together’
It’s a miracle we’re playing at all on Nov. 14, 2020. Central Catholic High School just forfeited its playoff game due to a coronavirus outbreak among its students. But COVID doesn’t seem to be a concern here at North Hills High School’s Martorelli Stadium, where the Bears arrive Saturday morning to take on Jeannette in the WPIAL Class A championship.
The players hunker down in front of their lockers. The room is twice the size of the Bears’ own, making them farther away from each other than usual, as if each boy were on his own island.
In the last 96 hours, people have been lost. Coach Jeff’s sister is dead. A former midget league teammate has been shot. Bears players broke curfew the night before. Five of them almost missed the bus this morning. They’ve lost focus.
Coach Wade senses this. He’s got to feel like everyone is “Family! Together!” as they cheer before and after every game and practice. “Like I gotta feel that,” he explained to me earlier. “‘Cause even when they’re down, or they’re not having a good day or something’s going on, that’s energy that we don’t need. I need to figure out what’s wrong with you. What’s wrong?”
Things turn against Clairton when Bears star player Dontae “Buck” Sanders dislocates his shoulder in the first quarter. Coach Wade won’t let him go back in. He wants to prevent re-injury. He knows football is Buck’s ticket to college.
Halftime. Jeannette 21, Clairton 7. Clairton has never been down like this all year.
Wade gathers the Bears in a huddle. He points at Buck, his arm in a sling. “For this cat there.” He points at his cousin Iyanna, his uncle Carlton’s daughter and top middle school basketball player, standing in the locker room with them. “For this young woman here.” Then he points at Coach Jeff, who has not even buried his sister yet. “For this young man here. I don’t need to say any more.”
A voice calls out “One, two, three — ”
“Family!” the team shouts.
The voice again. “One, two, three — ”
“Together.”
Jeannette stuns the Bears, 45–14. The team goes to the buses. Coach Wade and I stand in the empty stadium behind the end zone. I can see the pain in his eyes above his mask, which he keeps tugging up over his nose.
My ancestors died for this, he says — they died so that my players can do what they do.
“It’s a fight,” he says. “But I’m willing to fight it.” Tears spring to his eyes.
Maybe that’s what draws me to Clairton — people aren’t afraid to love. There is arguing, there is fighting, in every family, but in the end, everyone shows up to watch the Bears. Together.
And I see Wade at the end of last season, that loss to Farrell in the state semifinal. How he grabs one player as he slumps off the field sobbing, the young man’s whole body shaking, the seconds ticking down in their 13–10 defeat, unthinkable. And Wade, standing there, how he clamps both his hands on the athlete’s facemask, looks him in the eyes, talks to him, brings him back to the moment. I’ve got you. You’re here.
This is what Clairton is at its core: a place that — if you show up for others — gives you back to yourself.
Jonathan Callard writes and lives in Pittsburgh and can be reached at jonathan@jonathancallard.com.
