James Sullivan - Island Cup: Two Teams, Twelve Miles of Ocean, and Fifty Years of Football Rivalry

Seven Dirty Words
The Hardest Working Man
Jeans

Two Teams, Twelve Miles of Ocean, and
Fifty Years of Football Rivalry

James Sullivan

Copyright 2012 by James Sullivan

This electronic edition published in June 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

ISBN: 978-1-60819-906-8 (ebook)

First U.S. Edition 2012

www.bloomsburyusa.com

For Carolyn, teacher

Football is an incredible game.
Sometimes its so incredible, its unbelievable.
TOM LANDRY

This kid was something special. All year long, hed carried the football team from Marthas Vineyard on his shoulders, scrambling from the quarterback position for two or three touchdowns every game. When he gained the edge and sprinted up the sideline, he seemed electrified, struck by lightning. Defenders who thought they had an angle on him were left chugging out of bounds, craning their necks to watch him score.

He had a million-dollar smile on his face and a new haircut on his head, with jagged racing bolts shaved into the sides and a large star etched in back. He did well enough in the classroom, taking a handful of honors courses. When he was named homecoming king during halftime of the Vineyards ugly loss to Somerset, he had the poise to express his embarrassment that it had to take place during such a poor showing. Randall Jette, one of the best high school football players in the state of Massachusetts in 2010, even had a marquee-ready nickname: the Jette Stream.

Now the final game of the season was under way. The Vineyarders had received the opening kickoff, and they were feeling their way downfield. Senior running back Brian Montambault fought for a couple of first downs, and the team in purpleby legend a remnant of a long-ago donation from the purple-clad Crusaders of Holy Cross, where a school superintendent on the Vineyard had once gone to collegewas marching toward midfield.

On the other side of the ball were the Vineyarders archrivals, the blue-and-white Whalers of Nantucket. The two teams practiced and played on islands off the southern shore of Cape Cod, where the proud, stubborn, self-sufficient locals referred to the vast wasteland on the other side of the ferry terminals as America. The two islands were forever linked; once, in the late 1970s, they banded together in a half-serious attempt to secede from the state after legislators had proposed an unfavorable redistricting. Yet like feuding brothers, they coexisted in a perennial state of high pique toward each other. For fifty years they had brawled, taunted, and scuffled over one of the countrys best, and strangest, high school rivalries.

Most people from Nantucket knew next to nothing about their counterpart island. You went over on a chartered ferry once a year for the so-called Island Cup game. You drove off the dock at the Steamship Authority in Vineyard Haven and followed Edgartown Road straight to the high school. The edges of the properties along the road were lined with hundreds of hand-lettered signs designed to make you feel not quite welcome: MV RULES! and WE STILL EAT WHALE MEAT.

Whats the Vineyard like? Its nothing but an eyesore, Nantucketers have insisted for generations. All theyve ever seen are the ferry landing and the scrubby bushes along Edgartown Road. Families from the Vineyard have equally little regard for their neighbors to the east, where the football field abuts a cemetery and the team has been known to erect funeral crosses marked with their opponents names.

On the field, Randall Jette ran the option. His speed, quickness, and uncanny ability to elude tacklers made the teams offensive playbook relatively easy to design: more often than not, Jette rolled to the right, with a halfback on his flank. If a defender broke free of his blocker and lined Jette up, hed pitch the ball to his trailer. If the blocks were there, hed tuck the ball under his arm and burst upfield.

Nantuckets left end was one of the visiting teams key players, a looming six-foot-six-inch man-child named Terrel Correia. A sophomore, he was, absurdly, still only fifteen. Coaches drooled at the prospect that the kid might be even bigger and stronger by his junior and senior years. You should see his younger brothers, said Steve Murphy, a former Whaler player now coaching the islands Boys Club team of junior high schoolers, at a Nantucket home game a few weeks before.

Correia had been coached hard all week. Randall was his, they said. Keep him inside! Contain, contain, contain. Whatever it takes, do not let the kid get outside.

Nearing midfield on the opening offensive series of the game, the Vineyarders were methodically testing the opponents defense with basic run plays. This time, Jette hung back, keeping the ball after the snap. He strung himself along toward the near sideline, in the direction of the Vineyards two thousand or so eager fans. All season long, hed played as if his internal clock was set on half speed. Plays that seemed like a chaos of collisions to everyone else on the field unfolded like dream sequences for Jette, slow and inexorable, as if he could manipulate the players on both sides through sheer will. Hed glide, biding his time. Then, boom! A patch of green would suddenly present itself, and hed cut toward it and be gone.

Correia, though, had him in his sights. With his height, he had everyone in his sights. But hed flinched inside, however momentarily, when Jette faked a handoff before he started to move. Now he was lunging toward the outside, but he had two Vineyarders blocking his path. As bodies clashed and feet pounded the turf, Correias long arm took a swipe at the purple jersey from between the two blockers, like something from beyond the grave. But Jette was already outside his grasp, blazing to the sideline and upfield. To the 30, the 20, the 10. Touchdown, Marthas Vineyard!

The packed stands on the Vineyard side erupted in delighted cheers. The drivers of the fire trucks parked behind the end zone nearest Edgartown Road cranked up their sirens and sounded their fog-cutting horns. From the far corner of the field, the toy cannon fired with a resounding crack, startling even those whod been coming to games for years and were well aware of the tradition.

Senior Dhonathan Lemos, an affable, heavy-legged Brazilian kid who had played soccer until his junior year, split the uprights with ease on the point-after try. Over by the huge inflatable football, which identified the Island Cup game as the newest addition to the Great American Rivalry Series, the scoreboard lit up the number 7 on the home side.

Nantucket, once the dominant team in this inter-island rivalry, hadnt won a game against the Vineyard since 2002, and few of the games in the interim had been close. Was the team resigned to another rout?

There was a time when the Whalers made Thanksgiving miserable, year in and year out, for the boys in purple. Nantucket won eleven of twelve head-to-head matchups from 1966 to 1971, when the teams still played each other twice each year. Between 1972 and 1990, the blue and white won fourteen of nineteen.

But the tide began to turn in the early 1990s. Down 120 late in the fourth quarter in 1992, big-game Vineyard quarterback Jason Dyer, who was now an assistant coach for the team, engineered an exhilarating comeback on the opponents home field. Before the Vineyard put any points on the board, one of the announcers handling the game for the Vineyards local television station, MVTV, sagely predicted that it would be hailed as a pivotal moment in the history of the rivalry. This is a game that will be remembered for an awful long time, either way, hed said.