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PAHOKEE, FLA. - A generation ago, perhaps two, this city that borders Florida's Everglades for all of its 5.4 miles was known as "the winter vegetable capital of the world." Crops such as sugar cane, various citrus fruits, corn and soybeans thrive in the black, rich soil locals refer to as "the muck."

Michael DeMocker/The Times-Picayune
Rickey Jackson stands in front of the house at 759 Eisenhower Drive where he grew up with his mother and four siblings in McClure Village, part of a public-housing development in Pahokee, Fla.
Yet prosperity has long since disappeared from this quaint burg, the Native American translation of its name meaning "grassy waters."
The Thriftway supermarket is boarded up. There are no fast-food establishments. There's a bank and a drug store, and a small police force, and Poppa Jimmy's Catfish & More restaurant among the city's 6,000 residents. And Club 57, next to Sparkles Marketplace on Muck City Road, once a stylish club owned by one of this city's most noteworthy natives, named after the number he made famous in the NFL, sits empty.
But there remains Pahokee Junior and Senior High School, home of the Blue Devils' renowned football team, an athletic program that annually offers universities big and small some of the greatest talent in the country.
On Saturday, one of Pahokee's own will be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, a far cry from 759 Eisenhower Drive in the middle of McClure Village, part of one of the city's public-housing developments. It was there that he grew up playing tackle football, sans pads, on the patch of green space just across the street from the double house shared by his mother and four siblings.

Rickey Anderson Jackson is known here as "The King of the Muck" or "City Champ, " deified by those who have mentored him or called him friend or brother, noted for his athletic skills, feted for his accomplishments, revered for maintaining his direction on the path to places bigger and more robust, while avoiding the pitfalls of temptation that consumed so many in this town, including Jackson's oldest brother, Ernest.
"I'm getting ready to go to Canton, " Jackson said, "I've got a life right here ... growing up in Pahokee, I'm pleased where I came from. It might not have the big buildings, but everything I've got, I've gotten from here. I'm always coming back to Pahokee. Pahokee is home. It has that closeness.
"Right now, I'm in New Orleans. Everybody loves me. But everybody doesn't know me. You all knew me from a little boy growing up."
And those who knew Jackson growing up all point to the narrow focus on which his life centered: He wanted to be the best.
"Football has been his goal, his life, forever, from the time he was 6 years old, " said his middle sister Carolyn, one of three sisters (along with Deborah and Brenda). "It's been football ever since I remember. Mother always basically pointed out what we should do. She set our destiny. It was always that Rickey was going to be an athlete. He loved football. It's been football, football, football."
'A high achiever'
Leila Pearl Jones Lawson drove a school bus for 30 years while raising her five kids. Their father Van "Doc" Jackson, separated from the family but living in Pahokee, worked as a policeman and truck driver while maintaining a relationship with them, and the many other children he fathered.

Rickey Jackson with his mother and three sisters in an undated photo.
"They were very close, " Carolyn said of Rickey and their mother. "He talked to mother every day of his life. Every day. We didn't question what mother said. And Rickey always wanted to be above the minimum of doing just enough to get by. That wasn't acceptable. He always wanted to do more ... very much a high achiever."
No matter the sport, though football always was king, Jackson strove to excel.
"Once, " recalled Antoine Russell, his high school coach at Pahokee and a 1954 graduate of Booker T. Washington High School in New Orleans, "he was talking to Bo Schembechler (then coach at Michigan). And he asked him, 'Can somebody come up there and play first team his freshman year?' Coach said, 'Nah, not a freshman.' Rickey said, 'I'm not coming to your school.' And he was just a sophomore! He wanted to be the best. He told me that. He was determined he was going to be the best in Pahokee. That's why he called himself 'City Champ.'
"He didn't think anybody else could outplay him in anything. If he was pitching pennies to the line, he felt he could win.
"He just had that determination. And we were a small school, a (Class) 2A school playing big schools, 3A, 4A schools. We held our own. It was his ego. He wanted to be the best at anything he did. He'd say that all the time. He was the City Champ. Rickey never lacked self-confidence."
It was at East Lake Elementary School where Jackson's sixth-grade physical education teacher, Eddie Lee Rhodes, first noticed something special about the hubris the youngster exuded, the talent harbored within, his already impressive physique notwithstanding.
"He was a big kid, " said Rhodes, who would later matriculate to Pahokee High School where he said he "was blessed" to be reunited with Jackson as a defensive coach. "A natural. Good skills. I had a middle school team and let him play with them, eased him into a couple of games to get him some experience.
"He was quick. Agile. Good-spirited. He always had nerve. Wasn't scared of nothing. Aggressive. He'd come out to practice and hang around. One day, I just put on some pads to see what he could do. And he did a good job. In those days, we didn't have youth football. Just the last 10 or 15 years it came into fruition. There was a lot of sandlot ball, in the streets and things of that nature, but as far as organized ball, that was the first that he had."
Once Jackson arrived at Pahokee in the mid-1970s, his ambition was surging.
Russell already had one player with enormous potential, defensive end Remoise Johnson, and the idea of placing Jackson as a defensive end on the opposite side was tantalizing. But Russell bided his time.
"Even as a junior-high kid, " Russell said, "they'd dress in the same building as the varsity and the JV kids would pass the varsity kids going down to the practice field where the band practiced. The varsity team was on the big field. Rickey always wanted to be on the big field. 'I'll be up there one day, ' he'd say.
"Every day, he'd pass. He'd do calisthenics with us. I'd tell him, 'Get on down there! You call yourself 'City Champ?' Get on down there. He eventually came up."
And when he did, he opened more than a few eyes.
Johnson was one year ahead of Jackson in school -- "I have five brothers; Rickey is the sixth, " Johnson says today -- and the pair combined to form a fearsome threat for opposing schools.
"Once he learned the game, " Rhodes said, "there were times we couldn't let him practice. Him or Remoise. They were awesome. The last year, I think, we had six shutouts, those guys were so good. In practice, when we'd match the teams up, we had to keep them out. Rickey hit the quarterback once, I remember his name was Boris Banks. Rickey spun him around. Boris didn't want to come under the center anymore.
"Rickey could play both sides. He and Remoise, you could switch them up. You didn't lose anything. He was just a natural. He had a knack for the ball. You couldn't get around him. One of the good things about them was the containment. It was phenomenal. They were so quick and agile, they'd come off blocks and make plays, you were just in awe. You had to look at the film to see if it really happened. That's how impressive he was."
Recruiters had come to watch film of Johnson -- who eventually chose ministry over college football -- and noticed, on the film, the exploits of No. 88 on the opposite side.
"His instincts was good, his speed was good. But his instincts, for a high school kid, he just did things that were unexpected, " Rhodes said. "Matter of fact, when the college coaches came to look at Remoise, they'd ask, 'Who's this other kid?'"
Jackson eventually went on to the University of Pittsburgh, where he would, at times, be unable to separate himself from Hugh Green, the Panthers' end on the right side, a source of discomfort for Jackson throughout his career there, and, eventually, professionally.
Green went into the NFL as a first-round pick by Tampa Bay. Jackson was a second-round choice by New Orleans.
Green started immediately at Pitt, it took Jackson a year or more.
The right path
Throughout his time in Pahokee, Jackson was especially close to Johnson and Willie "Pack-up" Scott, a part-time trainer, confidante and surrogate big brother who looked out for Jackson, often getting Jackson extra food after games -- Scott was in charge of ordering the postgame sandwiches and he always had a couple more for Jackson.

Michael DeMocker/The Times-Picayune
Willie Scott, left, a former assistant coach and trainer at Pahokee High School, where Rickey Jackson played, reminisces with former Pahokee head coach Antoine Russell at Russell's home in Belle Glade, Fla.
Scott also kept Jackson close to his father, Van.
"Him and his dad are getting along good, now, " Scott said. "I stayed on Rickey about his dad. I don't take all the credit for it. But I used to get on him all the time. I'd tell him, 'I don't care what your daddy did, that's still your dad. If it wasn't for him, you wouldn't have been here.'"
Van Jackson lives in a small, two-story wood frame house on West Second Street, not far from the boarded-up Thriftway and just around the corner from Poppa Jimmy's. There are no visible photos of his son, Rickey, in the house, though this day his father wears a black Saints' golf shirt embroidered on the side opposite the logo with "Mr. Saints' 57."
Sitting under a photograph of boxer Muhammad Ali, Van Jackson admits he didn't see many of Rickey's football games, but was part of all of his children's lives.

Michael DeMocker/The Times-Picayune
Rickey Jackson's father Van' Doc' Jackson, though separated from the family, maintained a relationship with his children while working as a policeman and truck driver in Pahokee, Fla.
"His mother and I had always been separated, " Van Jackson said, "but the children were always right here. We always had a relationship. I'd see them every day. We've always been close. He wasn't in town, but we'd talk. He'd call my mother, and she kept up with him. She's passed now, about 13 years. Everybody knows him. I guess they're proud of him. They should be. He got along with everybody in Pahokee."
It was football, Jackson said, that kept him on the straight and narrow, a positive outlet for his energies and emotions that, though also available to brother Ernest, there were other all-consuming seductions in Ernest's life which he could not control.
"I knew when I was 10 or 12 I'd be a pro football player, " Jackson said. "I always knew I'd be a pro football player. I stayed out of trouble because of that. But it was so easy. I was around it all, I knew about it all. Man, I'm telling you temptation was there but I knew I had bigger and better things ahead.
"Half of (the kids in his neighborhood) went the wrong way. Some of them better than me, could have played pro and stuff. About 20 of them could have played. Football always kept me straight. A lot of guys here had tried, but none of them had gotten that far. There was just something about it, just kept me going. Bad stuff was all around."
Jackson's brother, Ernest, was ensnared.
"He went the wrong way, " Jackson said. "He got out there in the fast lane. It was a turnoff. Seeing what he went through, and how great he was, it was a turnoff. It was bad. He had everything. My dad had him with a new car, he had everything. He was a nice guy. Had girlfriends and stuff. All of them liked him. He could catch the ball and could run. He went the wrong way.
"It shortened his life. All the way. He was into drugs. All that took him out. You see it happen all the time. A lot of times when you're in small towns, guys go the wrong way. They never get back on their feet. He was one of those guys who stepped in a hole and was never able to get out of the rut."
Despite his youngest brother's dedication to reversing his lifestyle and repeated trips to New Orleans for rehab, Ernest Jackson couldn't outrun his demons. He died, at age 56, three years ago.
For Rickey Jackson, his brother's addictions proved to be a source of his own resolve.
And has served to broaden the esteem in which those here in the land of grassy waters, hold their favorite son.

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