A Moving Violation

Randall Mackey wasn’t talking.

His home, his family, his football future, all had been split apart and carried away by Hurricane Katrina. Words couldn’t describe it, or fix it. So he gave them up.

At every stop on the escape from the tiny south Louisiana town of Port Sulphur, workers tried to comfort the 15-year-old boy, but he wouldn’t talk.

“They all thought he was retarded,” said his mother, Carla Ragas. “We thought he would stay in that shell forever.”

Then Randall Mackey found Bastrop, another small town on the north end of the state, the new home of a teammate who had followed his preacher there.

It was safe. It was dry. His mother could rent a home. The teammate could give him a friend. And the football team could give him a jersey.

“Within a couple of weeks he was smiling and laughing again, and I’m like, are you people putting something in his drink?” said his mother.

And then Randall Mackey returned the favor, becoming the school’s starting quarterback and leading the Bastrop High Rams to an unbeaten season and their first state championship in 89 years.

“The night they won, I cried and cried,” said his mother. “My boy had come so far. We had been so blessed.”

This week, on Katrina’s one-year anniversary, she cried again.

Only this time it was because the blessing, like so many things blown upside down there, had become a curse.

This week the Louisiana High School Athletic Assn. stripped Bastrop of the state championship and declared her son ineligible after it was ruled that he and four teammates from Port Sulphur had been recruited there.

The specific violation was that Bastrop assistant coaches had driven the boys to town from their temporary homes around the state.

The rule was enacted after the hurricane because, with 4,100 student-athletes displaced and 19 high school athletic programs being washed away, some coaches saw tragedy as opportunity.

There were coaches trolling rescue shelters for studs, pointing to big kids on cots and asking them whether they wanted to play for their team.

There were coaches working the phones, digging up names from box scores from demolished schools and inviting them to their town.

“I even had one coach call and say, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a quarterback and wide receiver, what do you have?’ ” said Tommy Henry, commissioner of the Louisiana High School Athletic Assn. “I told him I was not in that business.”

The folks at Bastrop say their case is different. They say it wasn’t conniving, it was charity. There were 47 evacuees admitted to the school. The football players were just part of that group.

“During this whole process we taught kids to trust us, to call us, we would be there when they needed us,” Bastrop Principal Tom Thrower said. “But when we do, we get punished for it.”

The news came down Monday. By Tuesday night, outraged citizens called a town meeting, a crushed head coach was crying to a reporter over the phone, and a mother was vowing revenge.

“Right now, I feel like killing someone for hurting my child,” said Carla Ragas.

And, oh yeah, Randall Mackey isn’t talking again.

A year after he was forced to flee his home, he fled it again Monday night, only this time voluntarily, running into his backyard, pacing back and forth, refusing to be consoled, trapped in a storm that will never end.

*

You knew there would be problems. You could see it as clearly as a white swirl on a hurricane map.

When the five kids from Port Sulphur took the field for Bastrop High, they wore their Bronchos shirts under their Rams jerseys.

When they led the team to the state 4-A championship game in Shreveport, several hundred Port Sulphur fans showed up to cheer, calling them the “Bastrop Bronchos.”

When they won, 41-12, over Breaux Bridge, a story in the state’s largest newspaper, the Times-Picayune, read, “ ... That hardware needed an asterisk.”

You saw it coming. What five kids saw as sentimentality, adults saw as sinister. When kids have sudden success, adults have sudden envy.

“This is all about jealousy, you bet,” said principal Thrower.

Bastrop’s longtime rivals, one of which complained about them, certainly had enough ammunition, with all five evacuees contributing to the championship, led by MVP Mackey’s 251 yards and two touchdowns.

Seemingly half of the blue-collar town of 13,000 showed up to cheer. Later, down North Washington Street in Bastrop, there was a parade, the players waving from flatbed trucks.

Amid rumors that the local paper mill would be closing, football was a daily swallow of optimism, a victory for the soul.

“It’s like football carried this town for months,” said Aaron Chunn, team captain and center who works at the Citgo U Pak It fast-food gas station. “People would come into the store and recognize me and go, ‘Wow, how did you guys do it?’ It was a very cool thing for everyone.”

Too cool to be true, according to the critics, who question how five players could end up 354 miles from home, even at the front of one of the meanest winds in history.

Like all good Southern soap operas, it started with a minister.

Jeremy Sylve, a Port Sulphur receiver, moved to Bastrop right after the storm because his family’s former preacher was here. They were initially sheltered in the church gym.

Also in Bastrop was a former Port Sulphur assistant coach, D’Carlos Holmes, who had taken a job there before the storm.

Sylve became a salesman, calling all of his old friends in hopes of enlisting them as new teammates.

“We were driving all over the place looking for somewhere to live, and Jeremy kept calling my son and telling him to come on up,” recalled Carla Ragas, Mackey’s mother. “He was so torn up, about the only thing that made any sense to him was football. So we went.”

Yes, she admits, Holmes drove her son there, and she joined him a couple of weeks later.

“We were living 11 to a hotel room, I had things to take care of, I couldn’t just leave, but I wanted my son to be happy,” she said.

And, yes, all five players initially lived with Holmes, although that issue was not contested.

“All these kids wanted was a place to live, and a place to play, and we gave them that,” said Coach Brad Bradshaw, haltingly.

The coach apologized for crying, and added, “I’m not saying I did everything perfectly. But under the circumstances, we did a lot of good.”

Henry, the retiring commissioner, wonders.

“When I think of recruiting, I think of adults walking through shelters only picking out athletes to bring to their schools, and that’s wrong,” he said. “What about the little girl sitting there? How come nobody picked her? Does she have to be an athlete to count for something?”

It is with this passion that he made his ruling. It is with equal passion that Bastrop is appealing.

Randall Mackey, meanwhile, cannot compete in any athletics in Louisiana this season, and can only compete for a school other than Bastrop next season.

Once again, the adults throw the punches, and the child hits the canvas.

“I was watching the TV today, seeing all that terrible video of Katrina, and you know what I thought?” asked Carla Ragas. “I thought, one year later, and it’s happening to us again.”

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.