The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  Oh, I know. What about the readers? That’s the one thing, the only thing, the single essential truth that we’re not gonna change.

  Since most readers are already writers who were once paid to write, we plan on continuing to take you for granted. You can take that to the bank—I already have.

  * * *

  But until this inevitable scenario unfolds, alas, we must proceed under the current model, one that, somehow, is still working. Each year I read every issue of hundreds of general interest and sports magazines in search of writing that might merit inclusion in The Best American Sports Writing. I also contact the editors of many newspapers and magazines and websites to request submissions, and I make periodic open requests through Twitter and Facebook. All year long I search for writing all over the internet and make regular stops at the online sources Longreads, Longform, and SundayLongReads, as well as any other place where notable sports writing is likely to be highlighted or discussed. In trying to keep as many doors open as possible, I also take this opportunity to encourage everyone who cares—friends and family, readers and writers, editors and the edited—to send me stories they would like to see appear in this series. Although many writers are loath to do so, you are encouraged to submit not just your own work but also work you encounter that you admire. Work must be seen to be considered, and this invitation is open to everyone. Each story submitted to the upcoming edition must meet the following criteria:

  It must be column-length or longer

  It must have been published in 2019

  It must not be a reprint or book excerpt

  It must have been published in the United States or Canada

  It must be received by February 1, 2020

  All submissions from either print or online publications must be made in hard copy and should include the name of the author, the date of publication, and the publication name and address. Photocopies, tear sheets, or clean copies are fine. Readable reductions to 8½″ × 11″ are preferred. Newspaper submissions should be of the hard copy or a copy of the same as originally published—not just a printout of the web version. Individuals and publications should please use common sense when submitting multiple stories. Because of the volume of material I receive, no submissions can be returned or acknowledged, and it is inappropriate for me to comment on or critique any submission. Magazines that want to be absolutely certain that their contributions are considered are advised to provide a complimentary subscription to the address listed below. Those that already do so should extend the subscription for another year.

  All submissions must be made by U.S. Mail. I use a PO box because I have a really long driveway that makes winter delivery difficult, compounded by the fact that, after the town changed my street number, the GPS now sends UPS and FedEx drivers into the middle of Lake Champlain. Do not simply submit a link or PDF by Twitter email—some form of hard copy only please. The February 1 deadline is real, and work received after that date may not be considered.

  Please submit either an original or clear paper copy of each story, including publication name, author, and date the story appeared, to:

  Glenn Stout

  PO Box 549

  Alburgh, VT 05440

  Those with questions or comments may contact me at basweditor@yahoo.com. Previous editions of this book can be ordered through most bookstores or online book dealers. An index of stories that have appeared in this series can be found at glennstout.net, as can full instructions on how to submit a story. This year I played an extremely minor editorial role in two selections, yet as with every other selection, those two were forwarded to the guest editor blindly, not identified by source or author. All submissions are subjected to the same basic criteria that every other Best American title uses. They are chosen according to “literary merit,” the definition of which is entirely up to the guest editor, who is responsible for the contents and is never confined to selecting stories from among the 70 stories or so I put forward; my selections are only suggestive. For updated information, readers and writers are encouraged to join The Best American Sports Writing group on Facebook or to follow me on Twitter @GlennStout.

  It was a great pleasure to work this year with Charlie Pierce, whose work I have long admired and who has appeared in these pages many times. My editor called on him to edit this edition after our original guest editor was forced by a small medical issue to withdraw—she’ll be on board next year. I also thank all those at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who have helped with the production of this series, especially editor Susan Canavan and her assistant, Mary Cait Milliff. This marks the final edition under Susan’s steady direction, and I thank her for her skillful patience, faith, and trust in me to oversee the production of this series. Siobhan and Saorla have once again shared our home with the rough cut of this edition stacked in boxes tucked all over the place. My greatest thanks go to the writers, both those in these pages and those elsewhere doing this kind of work, who together provide evidence of the value that remains in words.

  Glenn Stout

  Alburgh, Vermont

  Introduction

  TESS HARDING [attending a baseball game]: Are all these people unemployed?

  SAM CRAIG: No, they’re all attending their grandmother’s funeral.

  —Woman of the Year, 1942

  Sometimes I think that I am the lost child of Tess and Sam. Not the refugee child who serves as a pivotal plot point in George Stevens’s romantic comedy classic, but a son they had and then abandoned in the newsroom of The Day, the dying newspaper that Humphrey Bogart tries to save in Deadline USA. (Turner Classic Movies has had a terrible impact on both my self-image and my work ethic.) Tess Harding, modeled reportedly on journalism giant Dorothy Thompson, has a job trying to make sense out of politics, both national and international. Sam Craig has a job trying to make sense out of sports in the big city. Over the course of my spotty career, I have tried to make sense out of both. Ever since 2011, almost completely on the internet, I have tried to do so simultaneously, and believe me, we will get to this whole internet thing later. Some days, I’m Tess. Some days, I’m Sam. Some days, I’m a little of each of them. At least both of them wore pants.

  Sports is often considered the journalistic equivalent of hooky. Often, the people whose job it is to make sense out of our games are seen as attending an endless parade of funerals for an endless parade of phantom grannies. I confess. Sometimes it feels that way to me too. In the late 1980s, when I was writing columns for the Boston Herald, I remember flying to Detroit to cover an NBA playoff series between the Celtics and the Pistons. I was waiting at the rental car counter amid the various species of American Business People. They all looked like walking ulcers. If they fell over, I thought, they’d shatter like delicate glass. Me? I was waiting to get a car, drive at a leisurely pace to a hotel, stretch out on a bed, take a nap, order some room service, and cover a basketball game. It was the go-go ’80s and I was standing by the side of the road, waving at the maniacs going by on their way to whatever stress-related disease awaited them.

  On the other hand, nearly 30 years had passed from the previous time I covered a major political campaign and the snowy New Year’s night in 2012 when I drove from the airport to downtown Des Moines. Back in the day, I had been working for the Boston Phoenix, one of the country’s great alternative newspapers. (As I was driving through the light, dancing snow that night in Iowa, I was unaware that the poor Phoenix had only a year to live.) Now I was the recently installed curator of Esquire’s new “Politics” blog, which appeared on the sturdy old magazine brand’s website, and we will get to this whole internet thing later, I promise you. Back at the Phoenix, I’d had a desk and a telephone with six lines and a great old Royal typewriter on which you typed as though your words could crack the earth.

  (This was the second of these lovely beasts on which I’d worked. The first one had died a horrible death. During my senior year at Marquette University, I was one of the editors of the student paper. That year the Coll
ege of Journalism was still in the process of moving into larger quarters on campus. We worked in the basement, and they were remodeling the floor above us. One afternoon I got up to fetch some more copy paper—ask your parents, kids—and I hadn’t taken two steps away from the old Royal when a huge chunk of the ceiling fell down and smashed my noble critter into a bent and dented pile. A head popped through the hole above and a guy in a safety helmet said, “Whoa. Sorry, man.” This was my introduction to unplanned obsolescence, something with which the profession became sadly familiar as the years went by.)

  I walked into the lobby of the downtown Des Moines Marriott, and the first thing I noticed was that the lobby bar was full of people, most of them younger than me, and all of them were huddled over laptops and cell phones like postulants at prayer. Nobody was Hanging Around, and Hanging Around was one of the big reasons I got into the business. Hanging Around was how you learned things. When I started at the Phoenix, thanks to Marty Nolan and the late Dave Nyhan of the Boston Globe, I got to Hang Around with David Broder and Jules Witcover and Alex Cockburn and everyone else who was on the trail in 1980. Three years later, as I moved to cover sports full-time, I tried to Hang Around with people like Dave Kindred and the late Ed Pope and Furman Bisher, the columnist from Atlanta who was the subject of one of those newspaper stories that you never hear unless you Hang Around properly.

  In 1974 a guy named William H. Williams, speeding his brains out, kidnapped Reg Murphy, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution. He demanded a $700,000 ransom, and a guy was dispatched from the newsroom with the cash in a suitcase. Legend has it that, as he was leaving, the guy with the money stopped, looked at the suitcase, and said,

  “I feel like Furman Bisher going to spring training.”

  Hanging Around is a lost art. I worry that, in less than a generation, the people in this business are going to be no different than those incipient coronary occlusions at the car rental counter, measuring out our lives in Keurig pods. Hanging Around is more than a perk. It’s also the whole damn job.

  * * *

  Hanging Around, Scene 1: The Churchill River runs out of Hudson Bay through the city of Churchill in Manitoba. On this September day, the water in the river is slate gray and the whales sliding beneath it are pure white, belugas running out of the bay and down the river. There are four people in the boat. Two hockey players, their father, and one reporter hanging on to the gunwales for dear life, Hanging Around because that’s the job.

  The hockey players are brothers, Terence and Jordin Tootoo, Inuit sons from Rankin Inlet in the new Canadian province of Nunavit. Jordin is the first Inuit player ever drafted into the National Hockey League, and he is preparing to move to Nashville to play for the expansion Predators in that most unlikely hockey outpost. Terence plays for a minor league team in Virginia. Today, though, dressed in black wetsuits, the brothers are here to ride the little white whales, burly and jovial young Ahabs with no malicious intent at all.

  After a while, their father spots something else swimming in the river. He hauls the boat around, and we gradually come up on what on close observation is the head of a very healthy-looking polar bear. (Churchill lies on the primary migratory route for polar bears, and there is a thriving tourist economy there based on them.) We circled the bear once, twice, three times. It kept swimming, blithely ignoring us until, at one point, it rolled over on its back and sniffed loudly into the air. It wanted us to know it was there. As far as concentrating the mind wonderfully, Dr. Johnson is full of giblets—being hung has nothing on being dinner at close range.

  * * *

  So, go ahead, hang out with Joel Embiid, the talented, merrily eccentric Cameroonian center for the Philadelphia 76ers, as he tells Clay Skipper about how he once faced down a lion, and then hang out with Skipper while he tells you about it and about how it’s a really good story, the only flaw of which is that it isn’t remotely true.

  Read enough stories about the Philadelphia 76ers’ star big man—or speak to enough people who know him well—and eventually this legend will come up. It’s a well-worn thread in the fabric of the myth surrounding Joel Embiid (pronounced jo-ell em-beed). That he has continued to tell it suggests both a playful charm and deft cunning at the heart of the seven-foot man. But keeping such a tale alive also seems unnecessary given the wild and improbable life that Joel Embiid is actually living right now. “I always say, ‘My life is a movie,’” Embiid tells me. “Everything happened so fast.”

  Or hang out with Ichiro Suzuki, the great Seattle Mariners ballplayer from Kobe in Japan, a city destroyed by merciless U.S. firebombing in World War II, and then hang out with Wright Thompson as he discovers by degrees the way Ichiro’s native culture shaped the competitive fire in him, and the cost of what it has burned away within him.

  Father and son both appear to be modern men, but their vastly different upbringings offer little common ground. They can’t see each other. Just as Nobuyuki cannot understand the pressure of being Ichiro, who once had to be smuggled out of a building wrapped in a rolled-up rug to avoid photographers, Ichiro cannot imagine the bleak early years of his dad’s life. Nobuyuki was born during the war in 1942 and grew up in a bombed-out world dominated by hunger, privation, and the shame of defeat. He wears threadbare slacks and cries when he talks to a reporter about his son. This off-season Ichiro hosted an event in his hometown. He visited only with his mother, Yoshie.

  And just like that, you’ve been around the world.

  * * *

  Hanging Around, Scene 2: The orphanage was on a flat plain outside of Mexico City. The man who ran the orphanage was a priest who also worked as a luchador, one of the famous masked Mexican wrestlers. He had been born Sergio Gutierrez, and he wrestled under the nom de grapple Fray Tormenta. He wrestled to support the orphanage, which housed around 300 children. The boxer had come to the orphanage to visit with Fray Tormenta to entertain the orphans. His name was Jorge Paez. He grew up as an acrobat in a circus, and he was famous for riding escalators while doing handstands. He was a talented boxer who, ultimately, never quite became a titleholder.

  On this day, as he glad-handed the kids, I wandered out behind the main building and found some of the orphanage’s kids playing baseball as the sun was going down and the whole place was aflame all the way to the darkening mountains. The ball was a battered thing with strings hanging off it like a floor mop. One of the kids caught one on the nose and his bat shattered. Long ago, on this empty, scalded space, there had been a slaughterhouse. The kids were using the spinal cords of long-slaughtered cattle as their bats and having a grand old time doing it. Little bits of bone flew through the air as the landscape went blood-red around us in the last spasm of desert daylight before night fell out of the mountains on all of us.

  * * *

  So hang around with the victims of a man named Larry Nassar, whose crimes against children went on for decades and nearly destroyed the prestigious sport of U.S. gymnastics when he finally was run down to justice. And hang around with Kerry Howley as she tells you about the human destruction that was so much more terrible and tragic.

  She had known how young the other accusers would be, but somehow it hadn’t struck her until she walked into that room full of them. They were little girls. Her rage was such that she spoke slowly and almost in a whisper: “What. Have. You. Done.” Between sobs she looked him straight in the eye, cocked her head, and raised her eyebrows, a look of profound disappointment and deep familiarity. Larry had sat emotionless, listening to other women he’d abused, for hours prior to this. Sometimes he shook his head, as if to deny their claims. During Trinea’s testimony, something changed. He started to shake, and then he started to cry.

  “I think his heart broke because my heart broke,” she tells me later. “I was worried the other girls would hate me because of his reaction to me.” There’s pride in her voice, the triumph of having been the one, out of the hundreds, who actually broke through. This may be her win, or it may be his. There are a lot of way
s to make a person feel special, and Larry Nassar knows all of them.

  Or hang out with Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriots tight end who murdered a man, was acquitted of killing two other people, and then killed himself in his cell at a Massachusetts maximum-security prison. And hang out with the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team as they explore Hernandez’s life when he was a child caught in a strange and violent home.

  Dennis Hernandez had long had concerns that Aaron, as a boy, had a feminine way about him—the way he stood or used his hands, his brother said. He also remembered one of Aaron’s early ambitions that sent their father over the edge.

  “I remember he wanted to be a cheerleader. My cousins were cheerleaders and amazing,” Jonathan said. “And I remember coming home and like my dad put an end to that really quick. And it was not okay. My dad made it clear that . . . he had his definition of a man.”

  The home environment, in general, was deeply homophobic.

  “‘Faggot’ was used all the time in our house,” Jonathan said. “All the time. Standing. Talking. Acting. Looking. It was the furthest thing my father wanted you to even look like in our household. This was not acceptable to him.”

  And just like that, you realize that you’ve toured the dark energy that lives in all human beings, that caused us to create angels and demons in order to have someone, anyone, to share the blame.