In truth, none of it--football, the town, life, fatherhood--was ever going to be easy for Jeff Baldwin to figure. Thick, strong and with a mammoth capacity for work, he was the latest in the series of Aliquippans with big-time talent. Soon he'd be drawing Division 1-A scholarship offers from all over the nation. But Baldwin had weaknesses. Maybe if he'd come up in a different decade--like Jimmy Frank or Ditka or Richie Mann--before drug use had become casual, before the black family began to implode, before big steel collapsed and the church and unions lost their clout, they wouldn't have figured so prominently. Weakness was nothing new. Maybe, like the lost or alcoholic or unskilled souls that had preceded him for generations, he would have found his worst impulses channeled by the mill or stunted by societal norms. Maybe he would've earned a college degree, or come home to find a stabilizing spot at J&L. Maybe. But as it was, Jeff Baldwin came up at a time when the old pillars were crumbling, and he wasn't strong enough to withstand the ensuing shockwaves. Indeed, he was fated like few others to live out the dual nature of Aliquippa just beginning to emerge--its pride and pain, its talent and trouble--and personify the year-by-year narrowing of its options until football and prison could seem, at times, the only two left. For him, even then, the narrowing had begun: Jeff Baldwin, the 15-year-old boy hurrying into his clothes in the Quips locker room that night, was already the father of a one-year-old boy named Jamie Mandel Brown. Excerpted from Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town by S. L. Price All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
