Dante's inferno: Life was hell at one time

B.C. Lions defensive lineman Dante Booker Booker grew up on the west side of Akron, Ohio. And then one day an angel appeared and showed him the road to happiness.

Saturday, October 16, 2004

A RUSTY GUN

"Don't move or I'll shoot," he said.

The long-barrelled revolver in the old man's right hand was shaking. So was Dante Booker. All he could think about was dying and how he didn't want to, not this way, not in some poor sap's garage trying to steal a lawnmower.

And not at 12. God, who wanted to die at 12?

"Don't shoot," Dante prayed. "Please, please mister don't shoot."

What were Dante and a buddy known as Little Dodie doing in the old man's garage anyway? You could blame that one on Dodie's uncle who promised the boys $40 if they could find him a hot mower somewhere. Forty bucks! To grab a lawnmower?

Be right back, the boys told him.

The old man might not have caught Dante that afternoon had it not been for his buddy. As soon as Dante heard the garage door opening, he slipped underneath a car parked inside. Little Dodie, as he was known in the 'hood, wasn't as fast on his feet and was spotted by the old man as soon as the big metal door flung open.

"Anyone else with you?"

Little Dodie pointed underneath the car.

"Get out from under there," the old man screamed.

Seconds later, Dante was also staring at the old rusty gun.

The old man called the police and soon the two kids were being loaded into the back of a squad car heading for police headquarters. Dante and Little Dodie would spend the next two weeks in a local juvenile detention centre for their crime. It wasn't the first time Dante had been incarcerated. He'd been in and out of juvenile detention for an assortment of petty crimes over the years. Still, he dreaded the thought of his mom, Valarie, coming to pick him up when he got out.

"You get your ass upstairs," she yelled at him the day they got home. "I'll be up in a minute to give you a good whupping."

Dante went to the tiny bedroom he shared with his three brothers and cowered under the blankets of the top bunk, waiting for the sound of his mother coming up the stairs.

Clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk.

She was on her way.

"Come out of there son," Dante heard his mother say.

"No," came the muffled reply from underneath the covers.

"Come out of there."

"No."

"Please son," said Valarie. "I'm not going to hurt you."

Then she began to sob.

Dante came down from the bed and was quickly pulled into the arms of his mama. She was now crying so hard her whole body shook.

"I love you Dante, I love you so much, but you can't keep doing this," she said. "I'm tired of it and I can't take it anymore. You'll end up in prison the rest of your life son. Please, please . . . ."

Dante looked into his mother's eyes and saw a hopelessness he'd never seen before. Valarie Booker's life had been full of sadness, but this was different. Now she looked like a woman pushed to the very edge of her limits.

"Okay, mama," her boy said softly. "I won't hurt you anymore."

BADLANDS

It hurt to live sometimes. It hurt right in the pit of Dante Booker's stomach, where the pain would begin early in the morning and grow through the afternoon and peak when night fell and his friends were being called for dinner and Dante knew there was likely little or nothing waiting for him at home.

It wasn't always like that, of course. Sometimes Valarie Booker would bring food home from the French Coffee Shop, where she worked as a dishwasher. Dante and his three brothers used to love the big bags of biscuits and bread and chicken Valarie would walk through the door with, scraps the restaurant was going to throw out. But there were other days, too many other days, when there were no scraps.

No food, period.

A single mother, Valarie Booker did her best to raise the kids, but there were times when it was too overwhelming. There was a spell early on in Dante's life when social services had to put him and his brothers in foster care. Being ripped from your mother's arms by strangers is the kind of event that stays with a person for a lifetime. It would be no different for Dante.

Valarie would eventually get the boys back, but there would be other occasions when she'd have to leave them with her mother, Grace, sometimes for months. When Valarie got back on her feet, she would come and collect the kids and head off once more to continue grinding out a living in another small, rundown house that often had no telephone, no electricity, no heat, no nothing, because they couldn't afford to pay the bills.

Dante would recall walking blocks to his grandma's house with his brothers to fill up buckets of water so Valarie could have a bath before work. Sometimes they had no water in the Booker household either.

Akron, Ohio, wasn't Compton or East St. Louis, but the area around Noah Street, on the city's west side where Dante spent most of his life growing up, was plenty tough. There were drug dealers on the corners at night, dead people on the corners in the morning. Punks with joints in their mouths; they were the "role" models in Dante Booker's world.

Dante had met his father a few times when he was young, so he knew what he looked like. Sometimes Dante would be out on his bike pedalling around the neighbourhood when he'd see a car drive by with his dad behind the wheel. "That's my old man," Dante would tell his friends. Another day, Dante would be in a store across town and bump into his dad. "Do you have any money?" Dennis Lucy would ask his son before slipping him a few coins.

Of Valerie Booker's four boys, Dante was the one always getting into trouble. The one always in his mother's prayers. Yet he was also the only one of the boys who regularly cut lawns in the summer, raked leaves in the fall, shovelled snow in the winter and then would give his mother every cent he made.

"I knew she needed it," Dante would say.

NEW SHOES

None of the Booker boys had much time for school. Valarie wasn't home to make sure they got out of the door in the morning. She was already throwing dishes into a tub of dirty water by the time the school bells rang. Somehow, Dante still managed to get to Grade 8.

When Dante did go to school, he could often be found in the gym. He was big for his age. Heck, he was a monster. A six-foot, 200-plus-pound child trapped in a man's body -- at 13. On the basketball court no one could stop him when he slashed towards the basket. Those who dared often ended up as roadkill.

It wasn't long before Dante's prowess on the court, and challenges off it, came to the attention of a man named Sam Serves. Sam the Old Man, as Dante would come to call him, knew of a Christian athletic organization called Team Jam. Jam stood for Jesus' Athletic Ministry, a group that tried to steer at-risk kids in the right direction through sports and God.

Dante Booker was just the kind of person the organization was trying to help.

Sam Serves knew a bit about Dante's story. He knew where he lived and the problems often associated with an address on Noah Street. He knew Dante didn't go to school much. He knew he'd been in and out of juvie. He also knew that no matter how much time was invested in a kid like Dante, you might not have anything to show for it in the end.

There were lots of Dante Bookers out there who had no time for stories about God.

Still, Sam thought it was worth a try, so he phoned John Saucier, a former youth minister who ran Team Jam. "John," Sam told him. "I think I've got a kid for your youth basketball team. You won't believe him when you see him." Sam told Saucier about the streets of broken dreams Dante had been raised on. He also told him about the warm-hearted boy he thought existed beneath an often cold exterior.

By the end of the conversation, John Saucier had his rope ready. The one he would throw between two worlds -- his and Dante Booker's.

One day, not long after meeting Dante, Sam Service brought up the subject of school. Dante was in Grade 8, missing lots of classes as usual, and in danger of failing. Sam had a proposition. If Dante went to class the second semester, if he did his homework, if he passed his tests and graduated with good marks, he'd buy him a new pair of running shoes.

Any pair. No matter what the price tag said.

For the next five months, there was hardly a day that went by Dante didn't think about those shoes. He attended classes, stayed out of trouble and got good grades. His teachers were happily perplexed. And when the final report card was issued that June, Dante had a column full of Bs.

It was time to collect.

He and Sam went to the local sports store and Dante began eyeing all the new shoes. It didn't take long for his eyes to stop at a pair sitting on the top row. Years later he would still be able to describe them in detail, like someone recalling the exquisite features of a first love.

"They were Air Jordans," Dante would remember 12 years later. "They were black suede with the velcro straps on the front. They had that logo of Michael Jordan doing his dunk thing on the back. It was red. I remember that -- bright red. And they were $150. That was so much money back then. There was no way I could have had them any other way."

For the next year, Dante Booker would rarely take them off.

DANTE JR.

New shoes couldn't change his life however. Dante Booker still lived where he lived. That is, until his family was evicted and was forced to move somewhere else. Now in Grade 9, Dante once again struggled to get up most mornings to catch the bus to school. When he did go he often felt embarrassed walking down the hallways in the same clothes he had worn the day before and the day before that.

New shoes didn't come with miracles.

Dante lugged a pretty fair grudge around with him those days. He was suspicious of anyone who looked at him longer than a second. What were they staring at, he'd wonder. What was their problem? When people asked him why he didn't smile more, he'd often shake his head and walk away.

Why didn't he smile more? Maybe it was because he was too busy thinking about where his next meal was coming from. Maybe it was because he knew when he got home from basketball practice as hungry as a summer bear the fridge would be empty. Maybe it was because he knew he'd leave the house the next morning without so much as a raisin in his gut for breakfast.

Why wasn't he smiling like the other kids? That's why, Dante thought. That's why.

Dante played a few downs of football in his freshman year of high school, but that was it. His grades weren't good enough for him to continue playing beyond that. That was the rule. Unless you were passing all your subjects you couldn't suit up.

The rules weren't as stringent for basketball, so Dante ruled the hardwood instead. He was a dunking machine. One day he smashed one of those clear, plexiglass backboards. It became the stuff of legend because he didn't take a running start before smashing the ball through the rim. He simply stood underneath the basket, jumped straight up and dunked.

Smaaaaaaash!

Did you hear what Booker did? Did you hear what Booker did? Word of the feat coursed through the hallways of Ellet Secondary within hours of it happening.

Dante often spent his nights in the company of his girlfriend, Nicole Hartman. She understood Dante, understood his life, his pain. Before their freshman year of high school was over, they would both understand the facts of life, too. She was pregnant with Dante's child, a boy she would have the following year.

Dante was in Grade 10.

And a dad.

The couple named the child Dante Jr. He looked just like his father. Dante felt torn. He knew it was wrong, having a child at that age, but he didn't want to dwell on that. What was the point? What's done is done, he thought. Instead, every time he looked into his child's eyes it stoked this fire burning inside. He had responsibilities now.

He had to amount to something -- for his kid.

That was all good in theory, of course, but the fact was Dante Booker was still in high school, had no money and had to worry about feeding himself each day. His girlfriend's family looked after Dante Jr. while the young couple continued to navigate teenagehood. Dante, meantime, had lots of time to think about his situation, about not wanting to be like his own father.

Dante realized his own story of abandonment was one that was repeated from one generation to the next in many African-American families. He was determined to stop that cycle in his family. He would be a presence in his son's life, not some shadowy figure occasionally seen drifting through the neighbourhood in a car.

Dante made it through Grade 10 and Grade 11 and he continued to star on the basketball team. He found odd jobs to help his mom put food on the table. But eventually Dante would succumb to the inexorable odds stacked against him, even with angels like John Saucier sitting on his shoulder rooting him on.

In his senior year, Dante got into a fight with another student. Beat him up pretty bad. Now almost 19, he would go to court and be given a short time in jail and a lengthy term of probation. He wouldn't graduate with his classmates.

Life was slipping away.

LEAVING HOME

But John Saucier wasn't ready to give up on Dante Booker. That would have been too easy. After all, Dante was just another kid from No Hope Avenue who was likely going to raise his own kids on the same scary streets he was raised on, in the same cramped and broken-down houses. He wouldn't have been the first disadvantaged kid Team Jam failed to save. But John Saucier wasn't ready to take his arm off Dante Booker's shoulder just yet, regardless of how many times the kid disappointed him.

The Bible said: "But whoever has the world's goods and beholds his brother in need and closes his heart to him, how does the love of God abide in him?" The Bible said: "My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth." Those were the words by which John Saucier lived.

While Dante didn't graduate from high school, Saucier convinced him to get his high school equivalence at night. Dante did. What was the goal? Where was this going? At 6'3" and 270 pounds, Dante crushed kids on the high school basketball court, but to get to the next level in the American college system you had to be a lot taller than 6'3" if you wanted to be a power forward. He'd have to find another sport if he wanted to go to school on an athletic scholarship.

Dante wanted to try football. What he lacked in experience, he figured, he could make up for in pure athleticism. He was certainly big enough and fast enough to play big-time American college football, but not many kids made it to that level without playing varsity football as a teenager. All Dante had to show recruiters was tape of him running over stick-like figures on a high school basketball court. Still, he and John Saucier believed that if he was given the chance, and with a little coaching, he could be great at football.

So they hatched a plan.

Dante didn't have the kind of high school transcript that could get him into a Division I NCAA football program, which is where he wanted to go. Besides, he would need to pick up some football experience before he could make a realistic pitch to America's top schools.

Junior college. That was the answer. He'd go to a junior college with a football program, get good grades, and then hope for the best.

In January 1998, John helped Dante enrol in a junior college in Pennsylvania that had a football program. It was essential for Dante to do well in the spring semester to open the door to the football program in the fall. It was the first time Dante had ever been away from home. Given everything he was leaving behind for three square meals a day, a bedroom he didn't have to share with three other people, hot and cold running water every day, you'd have thought he'd be ecstatic.

He wasn't. He hated it.

He missed his buddies. Missed Dante Jr. Missed his girlfriend, who missed him and was begging him to come home. He missed his mama. He really missed his mama. But John Saucier convinced him to stay and Dante finished the term with good grades. Still, he needed three credit hours that summer to fulfil the requirements necessary to play football that fall.

Dante got money from financial aid to pay for the summer course, but instead of handing it over to the school he bought a cheap car. Eventually, John Saucier found out. He pleaded with Dante to sell it and register for the class. He could tell his pleas were falling on deaf ears.

"Well then Dante," Saucier said. "I suggest you join the army."

John Saucier lost contact with Dante after that.

A CRY FOR HELP

Dante was on the loose. But it wouldn't be for long. As part of his sentence for the assault conviction he'd received a year earlier, Dante had to meet regularly with a probation officer. He'd missed several appointments as he bounced around in his car without an address to call his own. When he finally went to see his probation officer with no legitimate excuse for missing his previous meetings, Dante was shocked by the response.

Within an hour he was being piled into the back of a bailiff's car and taken to jail, where he'd spend the next few months.

Dante wasn't scared or angry or depressed. It was jail. He'd been in and out of juvenile detention centres, so this was no big deal. He'd probably know half the people there.

Sure enough, the first person he ran into was Little Dodie, his accomplice in the botched lawnmower heist years earlier. The two exchanged hugs and high fives and then spent the next several hours howling as they got caught up with one another. As it turned out, Dante knew lots of people in the jail, brothers from the 'hood. He spent time catching up with them, too.

One day, several weeks into his stay, Dante went to the jail chapel. There were other inmates there, all much older, hard-looking characters there for crimes much more serious than breaking probation. There were murderers awaiting transfer to federal security institutions, bank robbers, car thieves. And then there was Dante, there because he'd missed a few appointments with his probation officer.

There was a light hanging from the ceiling that suddenly started flickering on and off. Dante couldn't help but notice. About the same time, one of the older men in the room began to cry. First softly and then hard, like his mother had cried that day up in his room. It was the first time Dante had ever seen a grown man cry and he couldn't help but make a connection to the flickering light. It was a sign, Dante figured, that God had entered the man's life at that very moment.

Yes, his tears were for the sins of his past, Dante surmised, but also for the freedom Christ was now offering him.

Dante went back to his cell and grabbed a Bible. For the next several days, all he did was read and go over passages John Saucier had urged him to read. This was it. He knew it. His last chance to reclaim his life. He asked one of the guards if he could use the phone.

"John, this is Dante," he heard himself saying. "I'm ready."

At the other end of the line, John Saucier smiled.

A lifetime working with kids like Dante had taught him to be skeptical of all promises, but John Saucier wanted to believe this kid so much. He knew you didn't drown because you fell in water, you drowned because you stayed there. Dante Booker was screaming for help and there was no way Saucier was going to turn his back on him.

"Okay," he told Dante on the phone that day. "When you get out, let's make this work."

LEAVING HOME II

John and Dante picked up where they left off. The plan was still the same. Play football at a junior college. Get to a top-notch Division I program, one that would open the doors to the National Football League. At this point, he hadn't played a down in five years.

John phoned the coaches at Garden City community college in Kansas. Garden City's football program was known for producing players who would go on to play Division 1 football at big schools like Alabama, Auburn, Florida, you name it. Saucier told the coaches he had a kid who had all the physical tools to be a great player -- he just didn't have the experience.

"How little experience?" the coaches asked.

"Ah," John replied. "Virtually none."

Oh.

They told him to send a tape anyway, so the next day John and Dante went to a local high school and got the camera out. John filmed Dante lifting weights (he bench pressed 365 pounds) and running the 40 (which he did in 4.6 seconds) and dunking a basketball. It was the best they could do. The coaches at Garden City liked what they saw and phoned Saucier back. They'd give Dante a tryout in August. If he made the team, they'd give him a full scholarship.

It wasn't any easier leaving home a second time. Garden City was a place the likes of which Dante had never seen before. There were tumbleweeds blowing down the main drag. There was a big meat-packing plant in town that could make you heave in August. Dante put his head down and made the team. But then,before a regular season game was played, he was dealt another blow.

During an afternoon practice, a teammate landed on Dante's leg, ripping apart the anterior cruciate ligament in one of his knees. His season was over before it began. The injury also ripped Dante up emotionally. What was the point of staying in Garden City if he couldn't play? He wanted to return to Akron. To his boy. To his girlfriend, who was once again urging him to return home.

He phoned John Saucier.

"I'm coming home," Dante said.

"No, you can't," Saucier said. "You have to stay in school. Get your credits to return next year. There is nothing here for you Dante. You've come too far to turn back now."

Dante stayed at Garden City and completed his studies. That summer, he and John worked on finding another college that was a little closer to home. Eventually, they found a school in Maryland, about a five-hour drive from Akron. The football program was fine. There was only one problem. It didn't offer athletic scholarships. Dante could get financial aid to cover his tuition, but he'd need to find a job to cover room and board and other costs. No problem, right? Work full-time. Go to school. Play football. Anyone could do that.

Sure.

But Dante Booker was determined. He found a job as a cook at Denny's. He'd go to school from eight o'clock in the morning to three o'clock in the afternoon, then he'd go to football practice from three o'clock in the afternoon to five o'clock in the evening, and then he'd work from 6 p.m. at night to one o'clock in the morning. Five days a week.

Many nights he'd get home so exhausted from work he couldn't get his clothes off. He'd wake up in the morning still wearing his red Denny's apron.

Dante would study on weekends and during study blocks during the day. In the spring, he needed 23 credit hours to meet graduation requirements. He would take 20 hours, which was six courses, and get the other three in summer school. Six courses in which he earned a 2.7 grade point average while working full-time, playing football and dealing with all the other challenges life threw at him.

One day, Dante returned to his apartment after football practice to find his two roommates sitting on the front lawn -- along with all their furniture. They'd been evicted for missing a rent payment. Dante started laughing.

"How can you laugh man?" his glum-faced roommates said.

How could he laugh?

He could laugh because it was nothing. At least nothing he hadn't been through before. Try being a kid and getting evicted from your home. Try being a kid and going hungry for days. How could he laugh?

"We'll find another place to stay," Dante said.

And then he headed off to work.

THE ARRIVAL OF DANTE BOOKER

In the fall of 2000, Dante Booker played his first football game in seven years. Suiting up as a defensive tackle for Montgomery Community College in Maryland, he recorded two sacks and caused one fumble. By the time the season was over, he had averaged a sack a game. He was also being actively recruited by a number of big-name schools in the NCAA's Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12.

Dante would eventually accept an offer from Auburn and arrive there in the summer of 2001. He would spend two seasons with the Alabama team, learning things about football his teammates were taught in high school.

Finally, his life felt settled. He'd split with Dante Jr.'s mother, but he still saw his son and each time he did it brought so much joy. Every so often he would stand on the sidelines at a game and look at the 90,000 people in the stands and wonder how he got there. It hadn't been that long ago he was sitting in a prison chapel watching a grown man cry. Now he was living the dream, at the top of the college football heap.

In his second and final season at Auburn, Dante turned 25, the old man on the team. "Daddy Book," the guys called him. Sure, the younger guys would ask him to buy beer for them or to borrow his ID, but more often they'd turn to him for life advice he was only happy to give.

Given his inexperience, it wasn't a surprise when Dante wasn't drafted by an NFL team in his last year at Auburn. Still, he showed enough promise to attract an invitation to the NFL's Indianapolis Colts training camp. At 285 pounds he was small for a defensive tackle, at least by NFL standards, but he had speed, which was an asset coaches coveted.

Dante signed with Indianapolis as a free agent and played in a couple of exhibition games before the team let him go. As much as head coach Tony Dungy loved his competitiveness and athleticism, he had other guys who just knew the game a whole lot better. After his release, Dante played for the Columbus Destroyers and then later the Florida Firecats of the Arena Football League.

He was one of those players the Canadian Football League loved. A sleeper. That rough gem that, in the right hands, could be shaped and polished and turned into something valuable. B.C. Lions personnel boss Bob O'Billovich had heard about Dante through contacts and went down to Indianapolis to take a look. Yes, he immediately thought, with a little guidance and tender loving care, Booker could be a beaut.

The Lions signed him.

TESTIMONY

On a grey September afternoon in a Surrey restaurant Dante Booker sits thinking about his amazing journey. He's just finished practice. He loves the Lions, he says, a team which in turn has come to appreciate his hard-charging ferocity on the defensive line.

It's hard to believe. Only four years earlier, he had played the first meaningful football game in his life. Only a year before that, he was sitting in an Ohio jail -- at first laughing about his lot in life and eventually crying about it.

"Jesus Christ saved me," he says before lunch arrives.

He talks about Noah Street and high school and Sam the Old Man. He talks about cold winter nights and cold winter days, sitting in the living room of his home lost and hungry and wondering if this was all there was to life.

There isn't a hint of self-pity in his words. The anger he once used to fuel his performance on the basketball court appears to be gone. So is the constant suspicion.

"There is a comfort in being where I'm at right now because I've finally caught up," Dante says as rain begins to fall outside. "You know what I mean? I was playing catch-up my whole childhood. I was always trying to catch up in school. I was always trying to catch up with friends who had more than me. Then when I started playing football in college I was trying to catch up again. Everyone had a huge head start on me. They'd been playing for years.

"That was hard, sitting in a dorm miles away from home, missing my son. There were many nights I thought about packing it in, I was tired of playing catch-up. But sitting here now I'm glad I hung in there."

Dante Jr. is turning nine in a few weeks. "Nine," Dante says, shaking his head. "How can my little guy already be turning nine?" Dante Jr. is already playing football and is the star of the team. His father says that if he had to hang up his cleats tomorrow, he could be content watching his son dash for touchdowns.

Dante Jr. often tells his father how much he misses him, how much he wishes he could come to all his practices and all his games and go bike riding with him. And when he says those things his father feels his knees get weak and his heart get heavy and he asks his son the same question: Do you want me to quit football, son? Do you want me to come home for good?

Every time Dante asks the question his son gives him the same reply. No dad, he'll say, it's your job. Maybe one day it will be mine, too.

"The last time I went home I had the chance to speak to my son's football team," Dante says. "I looked out at all the players and I saw my son looking at me with this great big smile, I could see the pride in his eyes. That made me feel good, that made me feel real good."

Tears begin to fill his own eyes.

"That made me realize just how far I'd come."

garmason@telus.net

Profile of and interview with Dante Booker.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004