The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  The authorities characterize the crime as random, but a month later, a police spokesperson uses the term vydírání—translated as “extortion” or “blackmail” in English-language reports. Under the Czech penal code, the word can simply mean a forcible, violent act, and it carries a higher possible sentence when grievous bodily harm is inflicted.

  In the semantic swirl and the absence of hard information, theories flourish, some fueled by Kvitova’s early and successful comeback. Was it really possible that one of the most celebrated athletes in the country could have been an arbitrary target? Were her wounds really that serious? Did police bungle the investigation?

  Kebrle gets calls from colleagues asking if the whole thing is an insurance scam. He is unequivocal about the nature of her wounds: “The way it’s done, it shows it was a defens[ive] injury. That’s the biological reaction of the body. Less for more. I lose my hand, but I will save my life.” In August 2017, a frustrated Kvitova decides to release the surgeon’s graphic before-and-after photos of her hand, shortly before the U.S. Open.

  Radio silence persists until November, when another police briefing is held to announce that despite hundreds of interviews, tips, and a sizable reward for information, there are no new leads, and the case has been shelved.

  Police spokesmen stonewall ESPN’s inquiries this spring. A harried but polite receptionist at the Prostejov police station makes phone calls, comes out from behind her desk, and explains there is an embargo. Emailed requests to regional authorities in nearby Olomouc get the same answer.

  But there is movement behind the scenes. According to recent Czech media accounts, a cold-case unit tackles the case early in the year. On the eve of Roland Garros in late May, an unidentified man is taken into custody. News outlets in the Czech Republic report that he had a criminal past, including being a member of a gang that preyed on elderly people. Kvitova initially identifies him through a photo, and then, after she’s finished playing in Paris, returns home and picks him out of a lineup.

  “I think I [will] feel relief when everything is done,” she says after the arrest becomes public knowledge. “Obviously, it’s great news so far, but—when you play, and for example, you have one game to serve for the match, or you have match point—it’s close, but it’s still far away. So that’s how I feel it.”

  Czech law gives authorities wide latitude in holding suspects during investigations, closing hearings and withholding information. Specific charges could come in late July, according to the latest police statement.

  Kvitova, who continues to refrain from detailing specifics of the attack or discussing legal aspects of the case, says she will not be afraid if and when the time comes to open up. “I think I will, I can, but I just can’t now because of the police,” she says in Prague this spring. “But I think I am okay to tell it. I don’t have anything to hide.”

  * * *

  The numbness the knife left might never completely dissipate. Kvitova has learned to make a celebratory fist with her other hand. She sometimes kneads the fingers of her left hand with her right while she’s at rest, trying to coax a little bit more flexibility from them.

  “From my view, it’s not really improving much, but I think I’m pretty happy with the way it is anyway,” she says after one of her matches at Roland Garros in May. This is Kvitova’s new ordinary. It can be traced back to that long car ride when, with her career in limbo, she seized on what she could do rather than what might be lost.

  Wimbledon is almost upon her again. Simply making the trip will not suffice this year, not after a 38-7 season that includes titles on hardcourts, clay, and grass, raising her own expectations as high as they’ve ever been.

  “I’m kind of surprised how I handled everything,” she says. “Obviously, I’m a pretty positive person, but to be positive in this kind of case was just so different. When you lose the match, you can be positive that you have a chance next week. But when I’m going to the hospital without knowing if I can ever have all my fingers back—of course, I didn’t want to think too much how bad it can be.”

  Kvitova would not wish what happened to her on anyone, yet the scar tissue that temporarily bound her also led to a profound discovery. The surgeon’s skill salvaged her grip, but it was her own handiwork that mattered most in loosening the physical adhesions and conquering the fears that could have held her back. Consider the strength that led her to fight with her dominant hand and then fight for that hand, in the service of an obstinate and ardent notion: no one was going to pry her away from what she loves.

  Louisa Thomas

  Game Plan

  from The New Yorker

  It was August 2012, and Becky Hammon, the point guard of the Silver Stars, San Antonio’s franchise in the WNBA, was on her way home from the London Olympics. While waiting to board a connecting flight in Atlanta, she spotted the craggy face of Gregg Popovich, the head coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs. Popo­vich is widely considered one of the greatest coaches of all time, and is known for a capacity to inspire selfless team play even among players of colossal ego. One of his many fans, Barack Obama, has said that if he were a free agent in the NBA he’d sign with Popovich. Hammon was far less famous, but Popovich was an admirer, and he recognized her too. He had been watching her play since 2007, the year before she led the Silver Stars to the WNBA Finals. From time to time during the next few seasons, Popovich would call or text Dan Hughes, the Silver Stars’ coach, with comments about her performance.

  Though only five feet six, Hammon was a commanding presence on the court: gum-snapping, energetic, her quick cuts and jab steps to the basket punctuated by a swishing ponytail. She could slip through a narrow space between two defenders and drive to the hoop, scooping a shot that would skim the rim and slide through the net. Like Magic Johnson, she flipped no-look passes over her shoulder, and, like Stephen Curry, she hit shots from half-court. But Popovich was most struck by her prowess as a court general: she had an uncanny ability to direct her teammates around the floor. “I’d watch the game, and the only thing I could see—it’s an exaggeration, I mean, but—was Becky’s aura, her leadership, her effect on teammates, her effect on the crowd, the way she handled herself,” Popovich told me. “She was, like, the ultimate leader. Energy, juice, vitality. At the same time, she was doing intelligent things on the court, making decisions that mattered.” In the NBA, a woman in charge was almost unthinkable, but he was considering hiring her.

  Hammon and Popovich managed to sit together on the flight to San Antonio. They talked until the plane touched down, but not about basketball. He wasn’t interested in whether she could diagram a play. Popovich has a more character-driven view of coaching—and of coaches. “I wanted to find out who she was,” he said. “What did she think? How intelligent is she? How worldly? What goes through her mind? My ulterior motive, if that’s the way to put it, was that I wanted to find out whether she had the interest and the tools to be a leader, to run a team.”

  Rebecca Lynn Hammon, who is now 41, was born in Rapid City, South Dakota. She has a heart-shaped face framed by chestnut hair that falls below her shoulders, and she speaks in a cheerful, sincere voice with a Midwestern accent. She was raised, and remains, a devout Christian. She is unapologetically American. And yet at the London Olympics, she told Popovich, she had played in a red uniform for the Russian Federation. Four years earlier, she’d been passed over for the U.S. team’s first round of tryouts for the Beijing Olympics, and Russia had offered her a spot on its national team; she also played in a Russian league. Popovich, who had been a Soviet-studies major at the Air Force Academy, was fascinated. He told Hammon about touring the Soviet Union with the U.S. Armed Forces basketball team in the seventies, and, as she drank a beer, she told him what it was like to live in Moscow and to lead players who were, at first, wary of an American teammate. “I was a proud, arrogant American,” she later recounted. “But, at the end of the day, you live in the world with billions of people, and everyone has a unique upbri
nging and experience.” Hammon had become a naturalized Russian citizen in order to play in Moscow—a difficult decision. Some Americans called her a traitor. Even the U.S. head coach, Anne Donovan, said that she was unpatriotic, though later she backed off, saying, “I hold no grudge, and more power to her.”

  As their flight neared its end, Popovich could barely conceal his interest. He said, “So, if I ever hired you and I asked you something, you’d tell me the truth?”

  Hammon found the question curious. “I don’t know why else you’d ask if you didn’t want me to tell the truth,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “I don’t want a bunch of yes-men.”

  * * *

  The following year, Hammon suffered a torn ACL, a season-ending injury. While she recovered, she asked Popovich whether she could sit in on a few Spurs practices. The team is famously reluctant to grant access to outsiders, but he agreed. Soon, she was attending coaches’ meetings and film sessions, analyzing games and discussing strategy. To the untutored eye, basketball seems infinitely more improvisational than football, in which each play is conveyed in a kind of committee meeting, the huddle. And yet both the offensive and the defensive sides of basketball involve extensive planning and preparation. The most gifted coaches, like Popovich—or, in their time, Red Auerbach, of the Celtics; Red Holzman, of the Knicks; and Phil Jackson, of the Lakers and the Bulls—can make even the greatest soloists harmonize with their teammates. By the end of the season, in the spring of 2014, Popovich noticed that Hammon was confident enough to argue with him about the finer points of, say, offensive ball movement and floor spacing. “That’s when I knew, if I had an opportunity, I wanted to put her on staff,” Popovich said.

  That summer, Hammon retired from the WNBA, and the Spurs announced that they had hired her as an assistant coach, making her the first full-time female coach in big-time American men’s sports. Popovich and his general manager, R. C. Buford, insist that they had no intention of making a political statement. “It has nothing to do with her being a woman. She happens to be a woman,” Popovich said.

  But professional sports are the last major area of American culture in which the segregation of the sexes is not only tolerated but sanctioned. On the field, the ice, and the court, the reasons are obvious: differences in size and strength can make it difficult for female athletes to compete against their male counterparts. In the famed Battle of the Sexes, in 1973, Billie Jean King caused a sensation when she crushed Bobby Riggs, but King, at 29, was in her prime, while Riggs was 55. Few, if any, tennis fans believe that King could have defeated Jimmy Connors or Arthur Ashe. But sex discrimination on the sidelines is also taken as a matter of course—at least when it comes to women coaching men. (Men coaching women is common in the professional and the college ranks.) On social media and sports talk radio, the reasons that women could never coach men are presented as if they were as inevitable as differences in testosterone levels: women won’t tolerate the locker-room culture; men’s teams are “more athletic” than women’s, making them incomprehensible to the female imagination; and women simply cannot command young men. Mike Francesa, one of the most popular sports-radio hosts in the country, once said of Hammon, “What would qualify her to be a coach, on a professional level, of a men’s team?” He added, “It’s not even something that would make sense to aspire to.” Nearly half a century after Title IX, the belief persists: women cannot coach men, particularly at the professional level.

  By hiring Hammon, Popovich challenged the idea that the best male athletes in the world would be diminished by the leadership of a woman. “I was, like, Hallelujah,” Julie Foudy, a former captain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team and an ESPN analyst, told me. Also among those who cheered the decision was Adam Silver, the slender, savvy lawyer who has been the commissioner of the NBA since 2014. While the NFL struggles to position itself between its activist players and its more conservative fans, Silver has expressed a desire to make the NBA progressive and inclusive—a league of the woke. Silver first made his political mark by forcing out the owner of the LA Clippers, who had been caught on tape making racist remarks. Silver has supported star players like Le­Bron James and Stephen Curry in criticizing Donald Trump. Two years ago, Popovich attended New York’s gay-pride parade and saw Silver riding an NBA float. In October, Silver hired a retired Air Force lieutenant general named Michelle D. Johnson as the head of referee operations. “It’s not inclusion for its own sake, or diversity for its own sake,” he told me. “It’s the consequence of expanding the pool of candidates.” Last year, he said that he expected to see a female head coach “sooner rather than later.”

  James said last week that he and his teammates on the Cleveland Cavaliers would welcome a female head coach. “If she knows what she’s doing, we’ll love it,” he said. “I mean, listen, at the end of the day, basketball, it’s not about male or female. If you know the game, you know the game.” Many people speculate that Hammon will be the NBA’s first female head coach, not least because she has Popovich’s support. Talking to Hammon, though, I was struck by her ambivalence about her role as a pioneer. She recognizes that she is an inspiration for many young women, and a target for many wary men. At the same time, she resists the attention to her gender. “If you don’t want a female coach, don’t hire one!” she said, with some exasperation. But, she continued, if “you want to hire somebody who’s qualified and will do a good job, then maybe you should consider me.” Like Popovich, Hammon believes that coaching involves more than drawing up plays or breaking down defensive schemes. “You shouldn’t get into coaching unless you care about the people you’re leading,” she said. That doesn’t fit the popular image of a successful coach—your Belichicks and Lombardis. But it is, as it happens, the philosophy of the Spurs.

  * * *

  As a kid growing up in South Dakota, Becky Hammon had two great passions. One was basketball. When she was a toddler, she learned to dribble. She later played for hours with a Nerf ball and a small hoop nailed to a door, battling her older brother and her father, who played on his knees. When she was older, the games moved to the driveway, where there was a hoop mounted to the deck. Her parents installed floodlights so that games could go into the night. From the age of 10, she took hundreds of shots a day. “Playing basketball for me is like breathing,” she said.

  Her other passion was her faith. Every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night, the family attended services at an evangelical church. When Hammon was seven, the church showed a movie based on the Rapture, called A Thief in the Night. She thought of being separated from her family, and she was terrified. Soon after, she went to the front of the church and declared that she had accepted Christ into her heart.

  Becky’s mother was convinced that she would become a minister or a missionary. Becky wanted to play in the NBA. Her father had to tell her, gently, that it wouldn’t happen—but she might aim for a college scholarship. Even that seemed unlikely. Hammon was under five feet until around eighth grade, and a growth spurt sputtered out at five feet six. “I’ll never be able to compete athletically,” she remembers realizing, “so I have to learn how to beat people with my mind.”

  She told me that Christianity gave her “courage and comfort,” a sense that there was a purpose to her life. “You can’t separate the two,” she said, of her faith and basketball, as we sat in the kitchen of the Spurs’ training facility, in San Antonio. “It would be like trying to strain my white blood cells from my red blood cells. It would be like trying to separate my personality from my soul.”

  * * *

  At Stevens High School in Rapid City, Hammon became the school’s all-time leader in scoring, assists, and steals, and she was voted South Dakota’s Player of the Year. There was no clear road from Rapid City to a top college program, but, after Hammon’s junior year, she got a break. She was invited to an elite training camp in Terre Haute, Indiana. Soon, it was clear to everyone there that the diminutive guard with the long ponytail
could shoot.

  One of the people watching was an assistant coach at Colorado State, who reported back to the head coach, Greg Williams. Williams went to Rapid City to watch Hammon play; he then offered her a full scholarship. “Though she was not arrogant, she believed in herself,” he told me. In 1995, when Hammon started her freshman year at Colorado State, the team had rarely finished a season with a winning record. During her senior year, the team finished 33-3 and made the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament. “Nothing bothered her,” Williams said. “Becky always wanted to take the tough shot.” She became the school’s all-time leader in points, assists, and threes, and the leading scorer, male or female, in Western Athletic Conference history.

  When Hammon graduated, the WNBA was in its third season. It was not the first women’s professional basketball league, but it was the starriest, with NCAA and Olympic legends like Lisa Leslie, Rebecca Lobo, and Sheryl Swoopes, and it had the full backing of the NBA. On the WNBA’s draft day, Hammon was in Fort Collins, waiting for her agent to call; the phone didn’t ring. There had been an influx of established players as a rival league folded, but the real problem was that Hammon was considered too small to compete. Though she wasn’t drafted, the New York Liberty offered her a spot at its training camp, where not every player would make the team. She survived the cuts and signed a contract for $25,000.

  The Liberty had some of the best players in the league, like Teresa Weatherspoon, an energetic ball handler, and Vickie Johnson, a silky-smooth scorer. Hammon challenged herself to match up against them in practice. Before long, she had made herself indispensable as a substitute player, coming off the bench to score and to guide the team. In 2003, she became the starting point guard. “Her size never mattered,” the Liberty’s head coach, Richie Adubato, said. “When she drove to the basket, it didn’t matter who was in there. She had one shot blocked, I think, in four years.”