Lamar Jackson and his Super Bowl ‘obsession’
When Lamar Jackson is back home in South Florida, training with his private coach in the offseason, old friends will come around to watch him throw, and Jackson will start to laugh.
Together they’ll reminisce about the old days in Broward County, all those years spent growing up and goofing off, when nothing was more important to a 10- or 11-year-old kid than his next youth football game. Jackson is the NFL’s reigning Most Valuable Player, the face of the Ravens, but he is also a proud Northwest Broward Raider, and it is that legacy he perhaps holds dearest.
“It’s the purity of it all,” said Ed “Bubba” Jones, who coached those Raiders teams. It’s a feeling Jackson has spent his career chasing, those closest to him say. Saturday’s AFC divisional-round playoff game against the Buffalo Bills is important not only because of where it could take the Ravens, but also because of what it could take Jackson back to.
“We didn’t win a Super Bowl; we’re trying to get there,” Jackson said recently. “Nobody is peaking, or nobody feels like we’ve done
anything, because we’re still fighting.”
If Jackson has an “obsession” with winning the Super Bowl, as Ravens quarterbacks coach James Urban suggested before this season, it’s partly because he’s already won it. In November 2008, Jackson and his Raiders team traveled to Fort Lauderdale’s Dillard High School. Awaiting them in the South Florida Youth Football League’s Super Bowl were the mighty Fort Lauderdale Hurricanes.
Jackson would go on to win the Heisman Trophy, college football’s highest individual honor, at the University of Louisville. He’d lead the Ravens to AFC North titles in his first two years in the NFL. He’d become just the league’s second-ever unanimous MVP selection. But there is little he treasures more than his memories of the Raiders’ upset win that day. He still has the championship ring, his name inscribed on the band.
“His favorite moment of all time is winning a youth Super Bowl,” said Joshua Harris, his longtime quarterbacks coach. “I think he can only imagine what it would be like to win the real Super Bowl. You know what I mean? And I think that’s what really drives them. Like, ‘My greatest memory and feeling was winning the Super Bowl with my teammates, right? That’s coming together and winning. How could it be if we did the real thing?’ “
‘A rite of passage’
In South Florida, parents raise their toddlers to win the Super Bowl. “Waiting for 6 is too long,” Harris explained, so across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, 4- and 5-year-olds play in tackle football leagues. Sometimes a bigger, older 3-year-old will be sneaked onto a roster. Other parents, their young boys still closer to potty training than skills training, will ask for help with a head start.
“Coach, can we just have him practice with y’all this year, and he’ll play next year?” Jones recalled being asked.
As Jackson grew up in Pompano Beach, a city of about 112,000 just north of Fort Lauderdale, football was less a pastime than a social obligation. “It’s a rite of passage,” Harris said. Young boys are expected to play at least one year in an organized league; it’s “almost shocking” to find one who doesn’t, Harris said. They might as well say they’re from Mars.
Every neighborhood squad, every park team, is a symbol of civic pride. When Jackson first started playing, he wore his hometown across his chest: Pompano. Bill Tomé, the former longtime director of the Boynton Beach Police Department’s Police Athletic League, recalled that when he started a youth football program, he had 200 kids playing every day.
“The whole community was running this league,” Tomé said. “And they’re like, ‘We just want to play football.’ “
On Saturday mornings every fall, neighborhood parks stir to life, turning into what
Harris described as football fairs. There are food trucks and trash talkers, cold beverages and hot tempers. Early-bird parents will arrive at a field around 5 a.m., a pop-up canopy tent in hand — the sooner they arrive, the better their view. Some will watch every game, from under-5 leagues to eighth grade matchups, the kids and the music playing until 7 or 8 p.m.
It is serious business, Harris said, sometimes illegitimately so. When his son, Hezekiah, was 6, his team advanced to a Pop Warner league final. Before the game, a man approached Hezekiah. “Come on, y’all,” Harris recalled the stranger saying. “I got $4,000 on you guys.”
Sometimes the bets are so extravagant that, when they pay off, the high roller will think nothing of handing the team’s game-winner $100, or covering the bill for a pizza party. It can be a powerful affirmation, Harris said, to hear an onlooker say, “Man, that boy got something.”
“That’s the phrase, right, when you see a kid with some talent,” Harris said. “Just to hear somebody from another community say, like, ‘Man, you got talent’ — what better feeling is there for a young man?”
A stunning triumph
Jackson was abundantly talented. He could throw a football 20 yards by age 8. He was named MVP in his first season playing. But he wasn’t winning what he wanted to. A broken hand doomed one championship push. Another postseason run ended in defeat.
Before the 2008 season, Jackson and his brother, Jamar, joined the Northwest Raiders. There was a familiarity with Jones, who’d known Jackson’s late father as well as his mother, and there was good talent on the roster. James Pierre, now a Pittsburgh Steelers
cornerback, was among a handful of teammates who went on to play Division I football.
Jackson was a “horrible loser,” Jones said, but that team rarely lost. A two-way standout, Jackson played safety like Ed Reed and quarterback like Michael Vick. In one 2007 highlight Jackson shared on social media, he catches a trick play pass in the left flat, cuts back toward the right sideline, then shakes a final defender with two head fakes. “Oh, he dead,” Jackson narrated, cackling. In a 2008 highlight, Jackson rolls out and throws a 30-plus-yard strike to an open receiver downfield.
When Tomé’s Boynton Beach Bulldogs faced the Raiders in the 2008 SFYFL 110-pound playoffs, he twice thought they’d snuffed out Jackson on a fourth-and-long, only to see the quarterback escape for a 60-yard touchdown. Tomé remembers the Raiders winning by double digits.
“This kid single-handedly beat us, basically,” he said.
“He was great,” Jones said. “What you see [in the NFL] is what he was pulling back then.”
The Super Bowl pitted the Raiders against the juggernaut Hurricanes, who’d won over 40 straight games, including the teams’ first meeting that season. Jackson wouldn’t be denied. Before an estimated 5,000 fans, he threw two touchdowns in a 14-6 Raiders win. The team could’ve gone to Disney World, Jones said; the kids wanted rings instead.
The next month, the Raiders played the Pompano Chiefs in the SFYFL’s Ultimate Bowl, a matchup of the league’s two division champions, both brimming with Broward County talent. “They’re right down the street, so that’s playing against our childhood friends. And we put it on them,” Jones said, laughing at the lopsided victory. “We had to. We had to