Blackberry Bonds

Allen Bailey grew up on an island in Georgia you can only get to by boat. There is no school on it. He did not play organized football until the seventh grade. So the head coach at Miami got on the ferry and went to find him. Here is the whole thing. Sapelo Island sits off McIntosh County, Georgia. The community there is called Hog Hammock, and the people in it are Gullah Geechee, descended from the people who were enslaved on that island. Here is how he puts it. "We're all descendants of slaves there." A sign on the island listed the population at 70. He said the real number was 55, and only when he was home. He was the 55th. Getting to high school meant a van to the dock, a ferry to the mainland, and then a bus to McIntosh County Academy in Darien. In middle school he would leave practice early to catch the last ferry at 5:30. Twice it had already pulled out and had to turn around and come back for him. By high school he moved in with a teammate's family on the mainland during the week. He had never played real football until seventh grade. Before that it was the island, with his brothers and sisters and cousins. He is the second youngest of seven. As a junior he had 138 tackles, and he played fullback too, 323 yards and four touchdowns. Then a back injury ended his senior season early and took his film with it. Miami came anyway. Randy Shannon, the head coach, rode out to Hog Hammock himself. Bailey ruled out Alabama. He had been told who their incoming coach was going to be. "Who's Nick Saban?" Dave Hyde at the Sun Sentinel went out to the island in 2010 and got all of that firsthand. Here is what his mother Mary, who cooks at the hotel on Sapelo, said back then. "If he makes it in football, he'd be the first person born and raised on this island to make it that far." He made it. Third round, 86th overall, 2011. Ten years, 133 games, 22 sacks. In 2018 he recovered four fumbles, more than anyone else in the NFL that season. And then he went back. The Allen Bailey Foundation runs free football camps at McIntosh County Academy, the school he took the ferry to. By 2015 he was already on his second one, and Lamar Miller, Olivier Vernon and Allen Hurns came out to help him run it. It also puts money behind two scholarships, across McIntosh and Glynn and Camden counties. Now the honest part. He was never a star. Twenty two sacks over ten seasons is a good professional career and not a famous one, and most people reading this did not know his name. That is sort of the point. Fifty five people when he is home. No school. A boat or nothing. A college head coach got on that boat to go find him, and when the football was over he got back on it.