Content area
Full text
Like so many dreams that come and go here, this one began with the harvest under a brutal sky.
It was a late afternoon in August, 103 degrees outside, and the boys from the McFarland High cross-country team had been at it since 5 in the morning. They had spent the day in long sleeves and bandannas working without words alongside their parents deep in the fields. They were spread across farms for miles around, but the toil did not vary.
They stooped and crawled. They knelt under vines powdered with sulfur and climbed high into trees. They cut, pulled and snapped. Up and down, row after row, the boys lugged the yield of the San Joaquin Valley--grapes, peaches, plums, nectarines, bell peppers and watermelons--until the crew bosses called it a day.
And now the sun was setting and the fields were silent, and they were going back into the orchards, this time in running shoes.
They stretched their calves and hamstrings under a big hay barn at the edge of town, 15 long-distance runners in T-shirts and shorts. Their tall, blue-eyed coach, Jim White, was spooning out drops of a herbal "voodoo juice" to rub away the aches.
"How long do we go, White?" one boy asked.
The group looked up from the exercises, awaiting his verdict.
He was seated atop a worn bicycle, his rickety ride through the fields, and he smiled a wicked smile.
"Until I get tired."
Summer after summer, the footprints hardly change. McFarland High's dream to bring home a state championship begins the same way: The families from rural Mexico finish another day in the fields and hand over their fleet-footed sons to Coach White, aka Blanco. And they watch as he leads the boys back through the fields, to championships and other miracles, too.
With runners drawn from farm worker families too poor to buy racing shoes, the McFarland High cross-country team has won five state titles in a row, a feat unmatched in any sport by any high school in California. They've beaten the rich kids from Carmel Valley and the surfer kids from Laguna Beach. They've beaten prep schools, suburban schools, Indian reservation schools and the big boys from L.A.
Now a new season had come,...