The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  Will struggled early in high school, compiling a string of F’s and skipping class, sometimes to care for his tupye. But a teacher named Jennifer Jilot helped him, and he raised his grades enough to be academically eligible by his junior year. Then he made the all-state team for Class C. He didn’t say much, but when he spoke, teammates and opponents alike listened closely. When it came to basketball, Will said, “pretty much everyone in the state knows who me and Phillip are.” But in Jilot’s classroom, Will curled up on her couch and hugged a pillow like a child. Jilot was deeply proud of his academic progress. She thought she might cry when he graduated.

  Arlee beat Mission by 18 points, but in Pitts’s and the other coaches’ estimation, it was a lackluster night; the Warriors played selfishly. At the next practice, an assistant named Francis Brown-Lonebear accused the boys of playing “Missoula ball.” That was about as exciting as watching Flathead Lake freeze. “I want to be gone,” Brown-Lonebear said. “If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand about Indian ball.”

  * * *

  John Malatare sat in his friend T. J. Haynes’s truck, hurtling through the darkness. T.J. wore a wool cap with elk teeth affixed to the brim. A tribal cop who worked with Big Will, he grew up with John. Now each was a foster parent; it was T.J.’s wife who committed suicide the previous February, before the state tournament. He was raising nine kids.

  John and T.J. had heard that buffalo were moving out of Yellowstone National Park, so they had loaded up T.J.’s trailer with snowmobiles and rolled south at 2 a.m. In the 1870s, the Salish moved a few calves into the Flathead reservation, building up a herd that was later used to revive the flagging Yellowstone population. Now the Salish are one of six tribes with treaty rights allowing them to hunt Yellowstone’s bison when they move out of the park.

  On the ride down, the men rubbed their hands and whistled in anticipation. Sometimes the hunters just stood in line waiting for the bison to cross onto Forest Service land, and sometimes animal rights protesters tailed them. Even so, John would rather hunt buffalo than anything else. “The first time I shot one of these, it was a whole different feeling,” he said. “It was just the respect.” He and T.J. talked about their disdain for trophy hunters who sell the hides. “Phillip, he sleeps on his,” John said. “Got to keep the fan on just ’cause he stays so warm!”

  He considered his son’s college prospects. He wanted Phil to get back to the Montana Tech coach. He knew Phil wanted to play for the Grizz, but he didn’t know what to do. Should he go knock down the coach’s door and ask what it would take? He thought of a friend who had played college ball. The coach had given him a hard time. “I said, ‘They’re testing you out,’” John recalled. “‘They’re seeing how tough your willpower really is.’” But his friend quit. John said, “Proven point right there.” Native kids got one shot.

  A track star in high school, John always wished he had pursued athletics more seriously; Terry Pitts, Zanen’s father, a retired coach and former tribal councilman, thought he could have been an Olympian. John met Becky, who was a descendant of European settlers and played basketball against his sisters, at age 22. Becky went on to work for a Missoula hospital, handling accounts, while John was hired by the Forest Service, digging breaks around wildfires. When he started out, “We heard a lot of, ‘What are you Indians doing here?’” he recalled. “I had to work extra hard to prove that I could do the job.” John became a supervisor, earning a good living, and when Phil was in sixth grade, four of his cousins, including Dar, came to live with the Malatares and their three children. After that the Malatares kept getting calls from the tribe, asking them to foster more kids. They came and came, sometimes for days at a time, sometimes more. Mounds of laundry piled up in the kitchen.

  When Phil was six, he told his parents he was going to be a professional athlete. By the time he was a freshman, he said he wanted to be the best basketball player Montana had ever seen. John realized he hadn’t considered his own life once his son’s career ended. “What are we going to do if he doesn’t continue and play through college?” he asked. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve thought that far.”

  Dawn revealed a blue, snowed-in landscape. T.J. and John parked at a pull-off, stepped out of the truck, and fired up their snowmobiles. A wolf ran past. The men hopped on the sleds and tore off into the lodgepole. They wound up a long curving track to an overlook from which they could see wide plains and craggy peaks, but no buffalo. They descended into low timber and split up. T.J. wound his way a bit farther, then stopped. A herd of bison moved slowly through the trees, followed by hunters on foot and, behind them, a group of animal rights campaigners documenting the kills. Shots rang out, and the herd split up, some moving toward private property, some back toward the park boundary.

  An hour or so later, John and T.J. met back at the truck. John hadn’t caught the herd. “Everyone without sleds killed ’em,” John said.

  “Them protesters must have pushed ’em all onto that private property,” T.J. said.

  Over dinner that night at a sports bar, they joined a group of Salish hunters, who talked basketball and hunting and foster-parenting. At one point, one of the men tried to imagine life with endless buffalo. “Used to be a perfect world,” he said.

  “Sure ain’t now,” T.J. said.

  On the way home the next day, John considered the state championship in Butte, six weeks away. With seven games remaining in the regular season, the Warriors were undefeated. John had already booked his hotel room. “Stars are going to have to start falling out of the skies,” he said, “for us not to be there.”

  * * *

  By early February, Phil was averaging 23 points, 10 rebounds, seven assists, and six steals a game. He needed to decide about Montana Tech, but he didn’t have a clear feeling. Then one day he was driving out to one of his horn-hunting spots, hoping to clear his head, when he received a text from a coach at the University of Montana. Phil called the coach right away, and the coach asked if he wanted a spot on the team. Phil pumped his fist and politely said that yes, he’d like that very much. In a follow-up call with Phil’s parents, the Grizz offered Phil a “preferred” walk-on spot, meaning he was guaranteed a place on the team but would have to pay his own way. Phil told the coach he was in. (Rachi Wortham, an assistant coach at the University of Montana, said, “We can confirm recruitment,” but he declined to comment further.)

  After the call, John sat down in his leather recliner and exhaled. Becky was still partial to Tech—the school had great academics, and the free ride wouldn’t hurt, given that the Malatares still had two more kids to put through high school and college. But Phil had made up his mind. He called Adam Hiatt to relay his decision, but he asked his parents not to share the news widely. He didn’t want to disrupt the Warriors’ playoff run.

  The season came down to three weekends in late February and early March: the district championship, the divisional championship, and state. By this point, Will had rediscovered his shot, and the Warriors played with devastating joy. In the last regular-season game, Phil and Will combined to score 72 points.

  Pitts called a coach from a Montana college, gushing that Will had a 35-foot shooting range, defense that can’t be taught, strong grades. The coach wanted to know about Will’s family. Pitts said that Will’s father was a cop and that if the coach gave him a chance, his mother would “have him there tomorrow.” Assuming his most authoritative sales voice, Pitts declared that Will would make it: “I’d stick my job on the line for him.” The coach said he’d think about it. Pitts hung up and shook his head.

  On Tuesday, February 20, just before divisionals, word spread of a suicide: a teenage basketball player from Two Eagle River, a competing team on the Flathead reservation. Pitts was worried. “The next week or two, another kid might do it,” he said.

  The divisional tournament was held in Hamilton, in the Bitterroot Valley, the ancestral homeland of the Salish. On the bus ride down before the first game, Pit
ts asked the players if they wanted to make a statement about the suicide. The boys thought it was a good idea and settled on a video as the way to do it. They decided that Phil would speak first and Will last, but when the camera rolled, Phil got nervous. One player didn’t: Greg. His voice was calm and resolute. “I was focused on helping these people,” he later said. “It felt awesome.”

  * * *

  In the locker room, after the camera turned off, Phil and Will coughed violently. After catching his cold, Phil had gone out to check some cows on a cousin’s ranch in subzero temperatures earlier in the week. Will, meanwhile, had some as-yet-undiagnosed illness that had caused him to lose 25 pounds since the beginning of the season. In recent weeks, blood had showed up in his urine. He sought medical attention only after his mother, his coach, and Pitts’s wife, Kendra, an emergency medical technician, insisted. “If you tell me I can’t play,” Will recalled telling a doctor, “I’m going to play.”

  Will and Phil had carried two pillowcases into the locker room. In them were a pair of war bonnets adorned with golden-eagle feathers, which Will’s grandfather, who worked at the Salish language school, had made by hand. When the boys put on the bonnets, their teammates stared. Then Will’s grandfather hit the drum and started the honor song, and the cousins sprinted onto the floor.

  The Arlee crowd stood, everyone scrambling for their smartphones to capture the moment. Phil’s grandparents, Bear and Irma, weren’t sure about the bonnets; if a feather fell out, they might have had to do a ceremony on the court. But it was different for John. He hadn’t always felt that his son had fully embraced Salish culture. Now, seeing Phil in the war bonnet, shaking the opposing coach’s hand, he thought his heart might burst through his rib cage.

  A couple of minutes into the game, Phil sprinted into the locker room, where he threw up. Then he checked back in, and the team ran an isolation play pitting Phil against Manhattan Christian’s best player, Caleb Bellach, a six-foot-five junior and the coach’s son. Phil dribbled between his legs three times as he approached Bellach, then feinted a hard crossover to the left but brought the ball back to the right and was gone. Another defender came to meet Phil, but he spun and jumped to his left, rising toward the rim with two hands, then pulled the ball down and scooped it to the right. His body moved one way but the ball went the other. The defender followed his body, and Phil softly laid the ball in.

  At halftime, Arlee was up 39–30, and Phil threw up again. So did Will. In the third quarter, Manhattan closed the gap. Then, in the span of a minute, Will hit a three-pointer, made a layup, stole the ball, and threw an around-the-back pass to Greg for two points, at which point the crowd detonated. Arlee won, 69–60. The announcer, a white man, marveled at the noise. “You think this many people lived in Arlee?” he chuckled, out of range of the microphone. “Nobody’s guarding the stores tonight.”

  The next day, the Warriors released their suicide-prevention video on Facebook. As the team warmed up before the divisional finals, Anna Whiting Sorrell, who helped oversee the tribe’s response to the 2017 suicide cluster, was sitting in the stands. She considered the video in the context of the teenagers who, after the Parkland shooting, advocated gun control. “Maybe,” she said, “it’s kids saying: enough.” She continued: “Maybe these kids can. I want them to just be happy and enjoy their lives. They chose to engage. They’ve all been there. They say, enough.”

  The team hoped a few thousand people might view their video. But within 24 hours, it had been watched nearly 86,000 times. On Monday, the team, inspired by the reception, skipped practice to make another, this one an elaborate production with alley-oops and war bonnets. As they were finishing, a coach from Two Eagle River arrived in a black suit. He had come from the wake for the boy—his player—who committed suicide the week before divisionals. “I just wanted to say thank you, guys,” he said in halting breaths. His chest heaved, and he told the Warriors to bring home the trophy.

  A long silence followed. Then someone asked: “Can we hug him?”

  Phil embraced the man, and everyone else followed.

  * * *

  “I’m not scared one bit!” Phil screamed. It was halftime of the state semifinal game, and the Warriors were losing by six to Scobey, a fast team from near the Canadian border. In the locker room, Phil coughed rapidly. “I like it when we’re down!” he yelled. “When we come back and beat their ass, that’s going to be better!” Then he threw up and took the court.

  In the third quarter, Pitts unveiled a brutal press. The team’s defense was designed to tire the opponent out until, all at once and in a great rush, the boys unleashed. With less than three minutes remaining in the quarter and Arlee losing by four, Pitts hopped up and down on the sideline and screamed. In a moment, the boys were everywhere. The next 60 seconds passed in a blur of steals and turnovers. Greg and Will each hit a long three-pointer, the second giving Arlee its first lead. Then, as Scobey brought the ball up, Greg and Phil smacked the floor. Phil took off in a straight line for the ball handler, who looked terrified; he ripped the ball away and flew off for a layup. He sprinted back down the court, beckoning to the crowd. The cheers sounded like the inside of a breaking wave.

  In just over two minutes, Arlee had scored 14 unanswered points. After the game, Pitts teared up, thanking the boys. Then the Warriors watched Manhattan Christian win, setting up one last rematch. A couple of hours earlier, in a hallway of the Butte Civic Center, the father of one of Manhattan Christian’s players said he just wanted everyone to have fun. “It’s not life,” he said.

  The following morning, Becky and John Malatare staked out their seats for the final by 11 a.m., nine hours before tip-off. By game time, Senator Steve Daines, whose son previously attended Manhattan Christian, was in the crowd. Shortly before tip-off, Chasity did Will’s hair by center court. Phil got an IV of fluids, his third of the week. Then he joined his teammates in a practice gym, where Pitts told the boys to enjoy the moment and prayed to God and the Creator. Then Phil spoke.

  “It was a pretty short year, wasn’t it?” he said to his teammates in a dry, cracking voice. He turned to Lane Johnson, who would be guarding Bellach: “Hound that guy!” Then he turned to Isaac. “Dunk it. Rip that rim off! Will, Greg, freaking rip that net off!” He told them, “Don’t get down if we go down by two points. We’ve been down. All right, boys? Come out, battle for me. Battle for Will. Battle for each other. Let’s make that crowd happy.”

  Now the long, slow cadence of Phil’s voice changed. It got small and rushed, and he started to cry. Normally the team ended these huddles by chanting “brothers” and “family.” Now, though, Phil said, “‘Love you’ on three.” He counted—one, two, three—and his team chanted: “Love you.” Then Big Will and Will’s grandfather and uncles hit the drum, and Phil and Will sprinted onto the floor in war bonnets, Greg trailing them in a Navajo headband. On the east side of the Civic Center, the town of Arlee rose as one.

  Bear and Irma Malatare sat in the second deck. Nearby, David Whitesell held up a smartphone, filming the game. Down below, Becky, sitting near Adam Hiatt, looked on calmly. Chasity sat courtside with her five other kids. She knew Will was risking his health, but rest was not an option: “It would kill him.” Nearby, Will’s tupye sat in a wheelchair, wearing a pin showing her great-grandson’s face. John Malatare’s jaw rotated in small movements, a beaded Warriors medallion around his neck.

  Manhattan Christian won the opening tip-off, and Bellach hit a three-pointer. Then Phil threw a no-look pass off Isaac’s hands, Will missed a three, and the game turned ugly. Phil missed his first five shots; Will made only one of four. At the end of the first quarter, Bellach blocked Phil’s shot, and the game was tied at 10.

  In the second quarter, Will missed two more three-pointers, and Manhattan’s boys began to nod their heads. With a few seconds remaining in the first half, Phil dropped the ball to Will about 10 feet behind the three-point line. Will eyeballed the waning clock and fired a wild shot toward the rafter
s. The ball ripped through the net, the buzzer sounded, and Will pumped his fists and screamed. He made two more three-pointers in the third quarter, and the score was 40–36 Arlee going into the fourth. Then Phil took over.

  He rebounded a missed three-pointer and bullied in for a lay­up. While nearly lying on the floor, he tossed the ball to Isaac for a basket. When Manhattan closed to within two, Phil drove, scored, and was fouled. With a four-point Arlee lead and less than one minute left, Phil whipped the ball to Isaac for another layup. But in the season’s final moments, it was Will who stood at the free-throw line, preparing for two shots to seal the state championship. In the stands, Jennifer Jilot whispered to Will: “Just breathe.” Twice the ball rolled through the net, and Jilot wept.

  On Sunday, the Warriors returned to Arlee led by a fire truck and tribal police escort. Afterward, the team gathered on the bus to listen to an elder. She said that the kids would crash, and that a time would come when they would feel alone. She asked them to forgive themselves. “It’s temporary,” she said. “It’s like the breeze. It will be gone.”

  * * *

  The next day most of the boys called in sick to school. The second prevention video was on its way to reaching one million views. Pitts started receiving congratulations from public officials: a call from the governor’s office and letters from all three members of Montana’s congressional delegation. Senator Jon Tester released a video saluting the Warriors’ efforts alongside Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. The team was arranging to speak with the Tribal Council and younger students at neighboring schools. Pitts called it “the Warrior movement.”