'Fourth Down in Dunbar' explores NFL players, history

Life on the streets just east of The News-Press and across the railroad tracks can be cruel. But love, pride and joy also fill homes in the neighborhoods known by many as Dunbar.

The ironies, such as how Velasco Village, where many residents still dry their clothes outside on clotheslines, harkening back to the pre-1969 era of segregation, could produce one of the NFL's most-feared and best defensive ends in Jevon Kearse, drew me to Dunbar.

I have witnessed a unique perseverance over the past 20 years in Fort Myers while researching, reporting and writing the book "Fourth Down in Dunbar," published by the University Press of Florida, The book is available now and releasing nationwide Tuesday.

I have stood outside of the corner of Henderson and Michigan Avenues, where Deion Sanders lived as a child in a house that is vacant and needs to be razed.

Almost every day I drive past a home next door to the Thomas Edison winter estate, knowing that the long driveway there helped inspire Sanders to make millions while redefining the NFL's cornerback position. And I have sat in Sanders' former mansion in Prosper, Texas, on 100 acres with two swimming pools and a driveway that measures more than a quarter of a mile long.

On May 8, after finishing the book but for two final sentences, I stood in the childhood home of Sammy Watkins in the Harlem Lakes neighborhood in Dunbar. His family already had moved out, but maintained ownership of the house, never forgetting their roots after Watkins signed a four-year, $19 million contract with the Buffalo Bills.

So many who had so little grew up to have so much. I wanted to find out how. I needed to find out why.

The book's premise evolved in 2010, when I quit pursuing what would have been called "Tales and Tailbacks from the (239)" and jettisoned almost 100 pages about former NFL running back Edgerrin James, who grew up about 40 miles east of Dunbar, in Immokalee. I wrote 30 pages about NFL safety Corey Lynch, who grew up in Cape Coral. Those pages were left on the cutting room floor.

Instead, I developed a theme that had been staring me in the face since arriving to Fort Myers as a 22-year-old graduate from the University of Kansas in 1994.

Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated captured the theme on the book's back cover. He wrote: "A moving mediation on hope and despair, wealth and poverty, dreams and reality, a book that answers the worthwhile question: How could one troubled American neighborhood produce so many NFL players?"

I focused on Dunbar, as Fort Myers city Councilman Levon Simms told me: "Fort Myers is unique. There is only one Fort Myers. No matter where you go, you'll never find another place like it."

I did not write a book about football. I wrote a history book about how our society has evolved over the past 60 years, through the prism of football.

I spent hours with Sanders in 2011, covering his path to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I learned he has forsaken his hometown in recent years because he can't love something that won't love him back.

I spent two years pursuing the cooperation of Ronnie Tape, a Riverdale High School graduate who originally was sentenced to life in prison for dealing drugs, because I could not write the book I wanted to without him in it. Thankfully, Tape relented and granted me exclusive interviews at Coleman Correctional and numerous email conversations thereafter. He did so because he saw the book's value in reaching our youth and their parents and coaches at making better decisions. Tape's story appears in Chapter 7, titled "Tape's Time." On Wednesday, one day after the book's official release, Tape will be released from a halfway house near Tampa following almost 27 years in prison.

I learned how two brothers, with the same parents growing up in the same household, could take such divergent paths. Earnest Graham excelled at football at Mariner High School, at the University of Florida and with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But he was helpless in keeping his brother Brandon Graham from making poor decisions and spending five years in prison.

I learned how the first player from a Dunbar neighborhood to play in the NFL, Johnnie Wright, later struggled with drug abuse, suffered a fractured relationship with his mother, but in recent years he has pieced his life back together.

Eighteen chapters, many of them action-packed, provide not just a character study of current and former NFL players. They also describe how a city once known as the most segregated in the nation came to glorify football as the best way out of poverty.

Here's another vital thing I learned about Dunbar. Every NFL-bound athlete lacking a father figure had strong women behind them — namely their mothers. They also had multitudes of coaches and community members loving and supporting them.

Others profiled in "Fourth Down in Dunbar" include Jammi German, Anthony Henry, Phillip Buchanon, Noel Devine, Mario Henderson and current Baltimore Ravens defensive tackle Terrence Cody. They exemplify the upbringings of many NFL players on all 32 teams, but only they can claim Dunbar as home.

These men all grew up within a three square-mile radius in one of the most unique communities in America, a place that gave rise in the mid-1980s to the crack cocaine epidemic and gave birth to the man convicted of killing the late Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor.

Edison, Fort Myers' most famous former resident — sorry Deion — once proclaimed 90 million people would find out about Fort Myers. I hope "Fourth Down in Dunbar" proves Mr. Edison correct.

I wrote the book shooting for the stars, hoping it would someday join the pantheon of football-related books such as Michael Lewis' "The Blind Side" and Buzz Bissinger's "Friday Night Lights."

It will take time for such a fantasy to become a reality.

For now, the reality is that readers of "Fourth Down in Dunbar," which I hope include the leaders of Lee County, recognize the vibrant history and passion and resiliency of the Dunbar community. It seems like fourth down in Dunbar. But it doesn't always have to be that way. Dunbar deserves a first and 10.

IF YOU GO

• What: Book signing for "Fourth Down in Dunbar"

• When: 5:30-7:30 p.m. Tuesday

• Where: Broadway Palm dinner theater, 1380 Colonial Blvd., Fort Myers.

• Cost: Free including draft beer and pizza for the first 75 guests. Books will be sold for $24.95 each.

• Info: 278-4422 or broadwaypalm.com

• Learn more about the book and Dorsey: Follow Dorsey on Twitter @DavidADorsey or visit FourthDowninDunbar.com, a website expected to become active next week.

• Where to buy: "Fourth Down in Dunbar" is available on Amazon.com, at Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, Walmart, MacIntosh Books on Sanibel and wherever else books are sold.

WHY FOURTH DOWN IN DUNBAR?

Struggling to come up with a title, I settled on "Fourth Down in Dunbar."

I wanted fourth down in the title because of the sense of urgency faced and the sport of football played by the men profiled in the book.

I wanted Dunbar because I wanted a sense of place.

I knew there might be some local confusion about the title now that we have come full circle in terms of segregated schools in Lee County. From 1969, when Dunbar High School closed, until 2003, when the court order to desegregate schools expired, the neighborhoods surrounding the original Dunbar High School came to be known as the Dunbar community.

The book explains more about this, but in short, and to clear any confusion, no NFL players, so far, actually have graduated from Dunbar High School, because for three decades, the school was closed.

Athletes from the Dunbar community who were good enough to play in the NFL were sent on school buses to high schools in surrounding Lee County areas during the era of desegregated schools.

Almost two dozen NFL players, however, did grow up in what came to be known as the Dunbar community. Most of their stories are told in "Fourth Down in Dunbar."

Connect with this reporter: David Dorsey (Facebook), @DavidADorsey (Twitter).