He coached a D.C. football team with 28 players. Only five are still alive.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Local • Perspective

He coached a D.C. football team with 28 players. Only five are still alive.


By Petula Dvorak
Columnist
July 25

The rec coach is getting tired of putting on his suit for funerals. ... “My 2001 football team had 28 players,” longtime D.C. coach Michael Steve Zanders said. “Only five are still living.”

Zanders went to just about all of those 23 funerals for Woodland Tigers, most of them killed in the waning days of D.C.’s crack wars. ... And then, for a while, it felt like the killing had eased up. ... “We were down to one, maybe two killed every year,” he said.

But this month? This month has been awful. Like back in the ’80s and ’90s, he said.

Last week, 11-year-old Karon Brown, one of the Tigers’ promising defensive ends this year, was shot in his Southeast Washington neighborhood after a beef between adults and kids battling over territory for their hustle — selling water and cookies to passersby.
....

Twitter: @petulad

Petula is a columnist for The Post's local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. Before coming to The Post, she covered social issues, crime and courts. Follow https://twitter.com/petulad

[empedocles]

1. Stunning

Last I saw, average life span of NFL vet was 55 years

[luvs2sing]

3. In the late 70s, I lived next door to an NFL player,

and was friends with him and several of his teammates for about five years. Last year, I googled all of them and found that, while most are still living and in their 60s to early 70s, they are all debilitated in some way. I came to hate football for the way it destroys bodies and brains several years ago, and this just reinforced that hatred.

[mudpuddle]

4. These are boys and young men dying, not retired players.

[mudpuddle]

2. This is the sadest thing I have heard in a long time.

It reminds me of Mogadishu. This is why I refer to large urban areas as prison colonies. Many believe there is no way out, so they fight over scraps.