Free Muck City by Bryan Mealer Page A

lined up outside Jessie’s house in their cars waiting their turn,” remembered McDonald, who was also being heavily recruited at the time.
    The Ohio State recruiter actually slept out front, remembered Roger. They’d already found Jessie hiding at his girlfriend’s, so to avoid them he started staying at his grandmother’s and wearing whatever clothes were there.
    Bowden’s relentless pursuit of Hester finally broke him, but he’d been comfortable in that decision. The Seminoles were a serious bowl contender, but most important, after carefully studying campus maps of FSU, the University of Miami, and the University of Florida, he’d determined that FSU was “compacted together” enough to feel the most like Belle Glade.
    In his freshman year in Tallahassee, Jessie did all he could to transport the little world of Zara’s tiny two-bedroom. He called home every other day and found rides on weekends back to Belle Glade. Home became the theme of every term paper Jessie would write. “How Much I Miss Home,” by Jessie Hester; “How Much I Miss Home Cooking,” by Jessie Hester; “How Much I Miss My Room at Home,” and so on.
    “Looking at him, one saw the product of a lifetime of adoring women,”wrote Caroline Alexander, a former tutor at FSU who later profiled several of her student athletes in the book
Battle’s End
. “He was extremely good-looking, with the even, clean-cut features of a matinee idol.… His were the playful, unthreatening good looks of a best friend’s older brother.”
    In Tallahassee, Hester clocked the fastest forty on the Seminole squad, along with the fastest one hundred. We see him as an eager freshman receiver, shortly after catching his first touchdown in a 17–0 victory over Louisville. In front of fifty thousand fans at Doak Campbell Stadium, with a late-summer mist shimmering off the lights above, Hester shot from the eleven-yard line on a fade route, but was bumped by cornerback Roger Clay just as the ball was thrown. Off balance, he leaped into the end zone, curling his body around Clay’s legs, and came up with the catch.
    “I thought I was in a dream,” Hester told the
Lakeland Ledger
. “Coach Bowden has always told us that once your number is called, you have to drive to the top.”
    “When he made that diving catch,” joked Bowden, who was standing nearby, “I became a better coach.”
    In his four years at Florida State, Hester caught 107 passes for 2,100 yards, leaving behind electrifying memories, such as running a seventy-seven-yard reverse for a touchdown in a victory against number-one-ranked Miami, and against South Carolina making ten catches for 170 yards. But despite lofty predictions during the early eighties that Bowden’s Seminoles had the bones to be national champions, the team never went farther than the Orange Bowl.
    At the end of his senior season, Hester was standing with friends at a fraternity party when somebody pinched his butt. Whipping around, he saw Lena Derouen, whose friend had committed the offense and dashed away, leaving her alone. The two instantly clicked.
    Lena was just a freshman, eighteen, beautiful, with light mocha skin that she’d inherited from her Creole father, a career naval officer who’d settled his family in Jacksonville. Lena could be loud and sassy, and her bubbly confidence perfectly offset Jessie’s stoic shyness. Probably moreappealing to Hester was that Lena knew nothing of football, or of Jessie the Jet.
    “I had no idea who he was,” she said. “He never even talked about football. He was a homebody. Most of the time we’d just stay at his apartment and watch TV.”
    It wasn’t until weeks after meeting Lena, during her first trip to Belle Glade, that Jessie even allowed her a glimpse of the athlete he was. Standing in the backyard, dressed in tight jeans, he’d started executing double backflips off the wooden fence, leaving her in stitches. So it was an even bigger surprise a month later when he