Never Ran, Never Will

Winner of the New York Society Library's 2019 Hornblower Award. Finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award. One of BuzzFeed's "Best Books of Fall 2018" and "Best Nonfiction Books Of 2018." One of Booklist's "Top 10 Sports Nonfiction: 2018." Adapted into the Netflix docuseries We Are: The Brooklyn Saints. 

This deeply reported story of a youth football team shines light on a group of preteen boys fighting for upward mobility in a community eroding from gentrification, revealing how the brutal dangers of America's most popular sport disproportionately fall on those with the fewest options.

Never Ran, Never Will tells the story of the working-class, mostly black neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn; its proud youth football team, the Mo Better Jaguars; and the young boys who are often at the center of both. Oomz, Gio, Hart, and their charismatic, vulnerable friends, come together on a dusty football field. All around them their community is threatened by violence, poverty, and the specter of losing their homes to gentrification. Their passionate, unpaid coaches teach hard lessons about surviving American life with little help from the outside world, cultivating in their players the perseverance and courage to make it.

Football isn't everybody's ideal way to find the American dream, but for some kids it's the surest road there is. The Mo Better Jaguars team offers a refuge from the gang feuding that consumes much of the streets and a ticket to a better future in a country where football talent remains an exceptionally valuable commodity. If the team can make the regional championships, prestigious high schools and colleges might open their doors to the players.

Five years in the reporting, Never Ran, Never Will is a complex, humane story that reveals the changing world of an American inner city and a group of unforgettable boys in the middle of it all.

Albert Samaha is an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News. He has written for the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly, and the Riverfront Times, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Pop-Up Magazine live storytelling tour, and the Best American Travel Writing anthology series. His stories have won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Education Writers Association, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and others. He is a graduate of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and lives in New York City.