Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City

In an inspiring tale of sports and inner-city youth, Samaha, a criminal justice reporter for Buzzfeed, chronicles a season in the lives of the members of a Brooklyn youth football team, the Mo Better Jaguars, and its devoted coaches in the high-crime neighborhood of Brownsville as it was becoming gentrified. Of the team’s six coaches, some of whom work two jobs, Chris Legree and Vick Davis are the standouts as they struggle to keep the floundering team afloat throughout the 2013–2014 season. Davis’s son, meanwhile, was in jail, charged with armed robbery. The Mo Better players—ages eight to 13—prove to be determined and are eager students thanks to their dedication to football, and, indeed, at a time when one in three boys in the neighborhood were entangled in the criminal justice system, nearly all of Mo Betta players kept out of trouble. Samaha recalls key episodes, showing the coaches teaching the kids life lessons through football (“Start thinking big.... You don’t have to get a job; get a business, own something,” Legree told the players in the huddle at the end of the first week of practice). At the heart of Samaha’s unflinching book are the life-affirming themes of sports, transcendence, courage, and manhood. (Sept.)