Heart of the Marleys

Heart of the Marleys BY MICHAEL MCKNIGHT This story appears in the September 15, 2014, issue of Sports Illustrated. Subscribe to the magazine here. “Not one of my seeds shall sit in the sidewalk and beg your bread.” -- Bob Marley, “So Jah Seh,” 1974 You’ll have as much luck finding a cellphone signal at the Marley Coffee plantation, draped on a remote mountainside in Portland Parish, as you will finding Wi-Fi, which is as much luck as you’d have had finding any kind of telephone here in the 1940s, when one of the 20th century’s most influential musicians was born the next parish over. The narrow dirt road to this property in northeastern Jamaica is flanked by vegetation of so many shades of green that the eye’s rods and cones strain to distinguish them. Former All–Big East linebacker Rohan Marley, 42, is watering the smallest and most fragile of these green things: one-inch coffee seedlings planted under a cloth canopy. His unlearned hand strafes the earth beneath the plants, until his head farmer, who is known as Painter -- a grinning ebony-skinned man in his 50s -- gently takes the can and flicks it back and forth at head height, sprinkling the seedlings as gently as rain. One day Marley would like to pass along his rapidly growing international coffee business to his eldest son, Nico, 19, a sophomore linebacker and business major at Tulane who is standing nearby. Nico and the rest of the group stand with one knee bent at a right angle on the farm’s unyielding 45-degree slope, pocked by the deep crags and moss-covered minisummits that make Blue Mountain beans among the most flavorful in the world. Nico’s deep voice, bearing the famous rasp of his grandfather, Bob Marley, is barely audible over the rumble of an unseen water-fall. He says he’d be “humbled” if the Marley Coffee enterprise were offered to him, “but I’ve got other plans.” “This is hallowed ground, seen?” says a barefoot Rastafarian elder named Brenton in the local dialect, the gaps from his lost teeth making those three s’s whistle. And it’s true: Hundreds of years earlier, runaway slaves hid on the fertile soil being imprinted by Nico’s muddy Jordans. Or as Brenton puts it, in five more whistles, “Slaves dem escape from plantation near town and run to the mountains to get dem liberation.” These hills are also where Rohan, considered the most restless and reckless of Bob Marley’s 11 known children -- the “bad son” who at 12 was sent to live with his dad’s mother in Miami, where he found an outlet for his aggression in –football -- discovered a new sense of purpose. His second outlet. www.ganolifevo.com/ganoforlifeusa