The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  Michael’s secondhand bus—its destination sign reads SPECIAL—pulls an old trailer he refitted himself, while his son-in-law drives a battered truck with another ancient trailer in tow. With his own pickup, Fugzi peels off to stock up on chilled cans of bourbon-and-soda for the road, reappearing to speed ahead of the caravan, honking and pointing and laughing.

  Michael bought the Special for $2,000, and it has no heat, air conditioning, or shower. He is proud that his road show is “patched together with tape and glue” in contrast to the upper-class Bells with their shiny thrill rides. He forgoes modern conveniences not just because he’s on a tight budget, but because it’s a way to re-create a bygone era when Roy Bell and his boxers traveled dirt tracks, forded rivers, hunted game, and camped in the bush for weeks on end.

  The bus lacks a “roo” bar to protect against the kangaroo’s suicidal hops into the path of passing vehicles. When he spots one, Michael flicks off his high beams and slows to a crawl. The Special passes thousands of kangaroo carcasses. It’s not just roos he must avoid; there are wallabies, goats, donkeys, porcupines, emus, Brahman cattle, boars the size of boulders, and flocks of bush parrots that dive-bomb his windshield. One morning, the crew awakened at a roadside camp to find a dead 30-foot python hanging from a nearby tree.

  Averaging 50 miles an hour, the Special is an obstacle for the diesel-powered semis known as road trains. Hauling as many as four trailers, the freighters can be as long as a 14-story building. Drivers resist applying their brakes to prevent jackknifes as they bear down on lumbering vehicles like the Special.

  After a long day on the road, the piercing headaches from his jaw can leave Michael testy. One moment he’s calm, and the next he’s clenching his fists, ready to scrap. The time he considers most sacrosanct is when he retreats to the bus to prepare for a show, making his transition from truck driver to carnival showman. Everyone knows to leave him alone. The pressures Michael faces are substantial. Unlike the days of Roy Bell, he has only two boxers accompanying him, Mauler and Fugzi, and at every stop must recruit fighters to represent the tent. He also negotiates with show officials, keeps the books, and does his share of the cooking. His biggest stress, though, is that his audience is diminishing; with each tour, fewer whites are coming out to the bouts. He views this as a personal insult—a rejection of the thing he loves the most. Without white audiences, he’s convinced, the tent is in peril. “In the small towns, there’s just not enough money going around,” he says. “It’s bad for the other showies as well.”

  All of this can make him desperate. One morning in Alice Springs, a wiry white teen with a shaved head asked to fight for the tent. Michael had him throw a few hooks and jabs and liked what he saw. He nicknamed the kid “Jailbait.” Michael boasts he can instantly size up anyone’s ability to fight, a necessary expertise when volunteers try to downplay their skills to gain advantage inside the tent. He looks at their nose and knuckles. Have they been broken? Do the men have balance, a fighter’s stance? He knows matching boxers of equal strength will ensure a good match and bring customers back.

  That afternoon, Michael matched Jailbait up against an Aboriginal challenger nearly twice his size. Once on the mat, Jailbait never threw a punch. He ducked and danced to avoid his opponent, who was slow and powerful and relentlessly moving forward. By the end of the first round, the crowd was jeering. In the second round, the challenger caught up with Jailbait and connected with a straight-on blow to the nose. “Why does he have to punch so hard?” Jailbait yelled. “Now I’ve got a headache!” The crowd erupted in laughter. Michael had seen enough. “Take the gloves off him!” he shouted to Mauler. “Throw him out!”

  Later, Michael admitted he selected Jailbait because he was white. He sat in his tour bus, flicking ashes from a cigarette into his palm. “Nobody wants to come watch the black fellas,” he says. “My kids, they won’t want to run this—it’s too much work. This is the hardest show there is. It’s as rough as guts.”

  * * *

  Before each tour, Michael puts the word out that he’s going back on the road. For years Mauler and Fugzi have answered the call. When they join the caravan, there are long man-hugs and backslapping. But once en route, Michael becomes a cloying perfectionist.

  Setting up the tent, with its rusty spikes and iron bars, is arduous work. The tear-down is no easier; heavy ropes, banners, and wooden planks are stored in cramped, hard-to-access compartments on the trailer’s sides and undercarriage. “Here, let me do it,” Michael invariably tells his men. “That way it’ll be done right the first time.” He brags that he could put up the tent by himself, a claim that might have been true years ago but not anymore. And nobody touches the wooden box that holds the electric wiring, a relic once used by Roy Bell himself. Along with the canvas fighter portraits, it’s Michael’s most treasured possession. While he observes no color line, he follows a generations-old rule that places showies above their workers. “I’m the boss,” he reminds them.

  By nature, Michael is a loner, but the boxing tent requires him to manage Mauler and Fugzi, men who size up every stranger through one prism: Can they knock him out? Fugzi is Michael’s best worker, but he’s also an agitator and complainer who picks fights in camp. Mauler, though, presents the bigger challenge. He’s a self-destructive slacker but impossible to dislike. Michael has a strict set of rules. No alcohol on the bus or in camp. Everyone showers before hitting the road. No urinating near the tent. No women allowed. Before the tour is over, Mauler breaks every one.

  He showed up in Alice Springs fat and out of shape. Arriving by bus from Katherine, 735 miles away, his small duffel bag containing all he owned, he immediately bummed a cigarette, helping himself to four from the offered pack. Mauler has spent much of his life “long-grassing,” sleeping in fields or public parks, scrounging cigarette butts and money for liquor and pot. He met Fugzi growing up in Moree, a rough New South Wales town split along racial lines. He never met his father, he says, and his mother rejected him at birth. Raised by his grandmother, who ran a gambling house, he was expelled from school at 15. “Teachers hated me. I hated them,” he says. “My grandmother was angry. She wanted me to get the best education. I let her down.”

  He committed petty crimes—breaking into cars, getting drunk in public—and has spent several years in prison. His body is covered with scars, the vestiges of street fights, pub brawls, and the time a girlfriend hit him with a brick that left an angry pink welt below one ear. He was long-grassing when he joined Michael’s tent in 1993. “He was a big black fella with a few scars on his head,” Michael recalls. “I thought, This bloke will be all right in the tent. He’s got a bit of character. He can mix with any crowd. Back then he wasn’t drinking like he does now.” For several years, Mauler has collected government disability after doctors diagnosed fight-related brain damage. “But really,” he says, “I’ve been this crazy all my life.”

  The first morning in Alice Springs, Mauler vanished as the men labored to set up the tent. On past tours, he’s pulled “a midnight,” abandoning the tour. Michael rarely allows anyone back who’s left him, but he always accepts his feckless fighter. “He’s like family,” he says. Mauler is also fiercely loyal to Michael. “It seems like the day of the tent is over, but it’s not,” he says. “Success will come. And I want to be by his side when that day happens.”

  In Tennant Creek, the tour’s second stop, the crew sets up camp beneath a copse of eucalyptus trees on ground crowded with anthills. The bush flies immediately descend, invading the men’s eyes and mouths, drawn to the sweat and stink. Mauler makes do with a World War II–era iron bed with stained, hand-me-down cushions, blankets, and pillows. While others do chores, he lounges in his tent reading a newspaper, discoursing on discrimination against indigenous Australians, and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, a money-saving habit in a country where singles sell for $1.50 each and packs go for up to $40.

  When Michael last came to Tennant Creek, in 2013, an official told him that his tent
attracted only “drunken Aboriginals.” “I’m a man of color,” he says. “I was offended.” Tempers flared, and police were called, with officers ordering him to leave town just before his first show. He stalled for time, saying he needed to pack up, but when the police left, he told the crowd he would defy the lawmen even if it meant going to jail. “I’ll have my bacon and eggs behind bars!” he proclaimed and went on to stage several matches. Officials first told him they didn’t want him back this year but eventually relented.

  Mauler had refused to box in Alice Springs, claiming he’d lost his mojo. But after Fugzi’s fight with Justin appeared on YouTube, his competitive spirit was aroused. Sitting around the campfire the first night in Tennant Creek, Michael offers a bit of advice. To outdo Fugzi, he says, Mauler should take on two contenders at once and post his own video. Mauler likes the idea and the next morning trudges over to the public bathroom to shave his head as part of his prefight routine.

  Mauler loves the mat, but he also suffers from terrible stage fright. “I’m just a brawler,” he says. “I don’t know any moves or repertoire, but I do have a big right punch.” He’s convinced he can’t fight unless he’s drunk or stoned. “It gives me the wind,” he says.

  On the morning of fight day, he starts swigging from a fifth of rum. He wears sunglasses, a black knit cap, a faux-gold chain, and a STRAIGHT OUTTA MOREE T-shirt.

  “Mauler,” Michael snaps, “you can’t wear that beanie or glasses on the lineup board. When you’re in the tent, you dress like a boxer. Go put on a gown.”

  “I’m on it,” Mauler replies, finishing off the bottle. “I’m confident now.”

  He fights two men—a white cowboy whom Michael nicknames “Rampaging Ricky” and an athletic young black man named Darryl. Dripping from a rum sweat, Mauler plays to the crowd, jokingly running about the mat. The two men buzz around him, careful to avoid his powerful swipes. “Look out for the little fella behind ya, Mauler,” Michael warns. “Don’t run around too much, you’ll run out of air!”

  Mauler dashes between the pair, extending his arms to throw a simultaneous punch at each. By the second round, he is gasping. He knocks down the cowboy with a left hook, but Darryl sends him to the mat with a flurry of short punches. In the last round, woozy from the alcohol, Mauler goes down twice without even being hit. Michael awards the bout to the challengers, but Mauler insists his mojo is back. “At least I didn’t cough up any phlegm,” he says. “That’s gotta count for something.”

  * * *

  At Katherine, the next stop, both Fugzi and Mauler pull a midnight. Michael isn’t entirely surprised they took off, he says, but “it’s a kick in the guts. You carry them along, and then they’re not there for you on show day. You need them just for that one hour so you can earn enough money for the week.”

  The day before the matches, several of Michael’s old boxing pals arrive to help out. Lucas “Cool Hand Luke” Warren, a 65-year-old concrete worker and former pro boxer with gray dreadlocks, volunteers to take on challengers half his age. Ken “Rocky” Couzens, a former tent boxer who coached Michael in a few pro fights, agrees to referee. “How can you put up a tent like this and announce you’ll take on anyone in town when you don’t have any fighters?” Rocky asks, letting out a huge laugh. “Now that’s balls.” The men sit around the camp on lawn chairs trading stories as Michael plays his guitar and sings a song he wrote about his father.

  That night on the lineup board, before Michael starts to spruik, a fighter rings a cowbell in honor of a professional boxer who had recently died—10 times, one for each round of a fight. “That’s the 10th bell,” Michael tells the crowd, “and he’s not getting up.” Then, as he promotes the evening’s first match, Mauler appears in the crowd. He’s been partying for days. Somebody asks him if he’s ready to fight. “I can’t,” he says. “I’ve got a headache.” He disappears before Michael can spot him.

  The fights are a success, attracting a large, mixed crowd, many of them ranch hands who participated in the rodeo next door. After the last bout, an indigenous Australian named Norman George approaches Michael. Decades earlier, George had fought for Roy Bell under the nickname “Crow” before he left to earn a college degree and a good government job. On this night, he’s nostalgic. “I loved the tent,” he says. “I loved being around the other boxers. For all of us Aboriginal kids, the fights gave us a way out.” As Michael squats on the lineup board, Crow reaches up to shake his hand. “I miss the drumbeat,” he says softly. “Boom-ba-boom-ba-boom!”

  On the final morning, as Michael breaks camp, Mauler shows up to collect the money he says is due him. Sitting in the bus stairwell, smoking a cigarette, Michael doesn’t look at the boxer, a gesture meant to wound. “So, ya come for your money after we’re all packed up,” he says, exhaling smoke. “You let us down, Mauler. We needed you, and you weren’t there.”

  “Aw,” Mauler says. “It was just the grog and the cones”—bong hits.

  Michael hands him a tight wad of bills, and Mauler takes it without looking. He suggests he might show up in Darwin, the tour’s final stop. “We’ll see how I go,” Mauler says. “Well, we won’t need ya,” Michael lies. It’s a rerun of the same sad scene. Mauler walks away in a Bob Marley T-shirt, his head already sprouting gray hairs.

  Darwin brings more bad news. Fair officials won’t allow Michael to set up his tent. His application arrived late, they claim, but he is convinced he’s being blacklisted after the 2013 Tennant Creek incident. He parks his caravan outside the front gate in the hope that officials will change their mind. “If I drive away,” he says, “I’ve given up.” Fellow showies stop by to offer encouragement and a few dollars, which he refuses.

  In the end, the Darwin officials don’t budge. Michael was counting on the proceeds from Darwin to pay for the 2,200-mile drive back to New South Wales. To cut down on expenses, he decides to leave the pickup and trailer behind, but that isn’t enough. He will eventually have to ask his mother for a loan to make the trip home.

  By any definition, the tour has been a failure. Michael’s lost his boxers and was nearly banned from half of the four stops. Most of white Australia has turned its back on the tent. The indigenous people are the only ones who haven’t abandoned him, but he knows he can’t continue with them alone. Despite the tour’s abrupt end, Michael is smiling. Behind the wheel of the Special, he begins singing out loud and talking about the future—his plans to open a boxing museum and sparring ring in his hometown, how he’s going to keep the tour alive at least until 2024, the 100th anniversary of when Roy Bell started the boxing show. “This trip has shown that I’ve still got it,” he says. “I can still spruik. I can still get ’em in the door, just like I used to.” Before he is out of town, he’s on his phone, calling Mauler.

  Maggie Shipstead

  Another Voyage for Madmen (And, This Time, One Woman)

  from Outside

  On July 1, 17 skippers in 17 boats left the French port town of Les Sables d’Olonne and sailed west into the Bay of Biscay. Their destination? Les Sables d’Olonne, but from the other direction, a journey of about nine months and 30,000 miles. The boats are unremarkable. The sailors are a mixed bag: hotshot pro racers, ambitious yachties, ultracompetent old salts, young upstarts, dedicated adventurers, a hopeless dreamer or two—16 men and one woman representing 12 countries, all with a common intention. They’re racing around the world without stopping, without benefit of modern technology, and alone.

  This is the second-ever Golden Globe Race. The original, which has been immortalized in several books, including Peter Nichols’s classic account, A Voyage for Madmen, as well as the documentary Deep Water and the recent Colin Firth film The Mercy, began in the summer of 1968 and, by its end, turned into an epic blend of historic triumph, human tragedy, and utter shitshow. Nine sailors started and one finished. One killed himself. This race marks the 50th anniversary of that event, and besides some allowances for safety, the rules limit the racers to technology available in 1968. Sextant
s, not GPS. Radio, not sat phones. Film cameras and Super 8s, not DSLRs and GoPros. No digital anything. No high-tech materials like Kevlar or carbon composite. No electric autopilot, desalinization, or refrigeration. No blog posts, no video chats, no selfies at sea.

  Such restrictions might seem suspiciously like pedantic hipster nostalgia for all things analog, but the throwback nature of the race is an earnest attempt to reclaim radical simplicity in a world addicted to interconnectedness. Just think—no email, no texts, no news alerts for the better part of a year. But no family or friends either. No human touch. Just one person, one boat, one planet. This is a race about intangibles. The skippers will sail a very long way to see pretty much only a disc of water and a dome of sky, their progress marked by changing angles in the sextant mirrors, lines drawn on charts. Whoever wins won’t even win money—more on that later—but will be symbolically awarded a perpetual trophy.

  Not all will finish. If half the fleet succeeds, everyone will be pleasantly surprised. Following the fastest route, as the skippers are obliged to do, means sailing down the Atlantic, turning east around the bottom of Africa, passing below Australia and New Zealand, rounding Cape Horn, and crossing back up the Atlantic. This, in turn, means spending something like four or five months in isolated latitudes known as the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties, in the ring of water around Antarctica that sailors speak of, with caution and respect, as the Southern Ocean. Strong and reliable westerly winds, unimpeded by land, make for fast sailing but also build into severe gales and massive seas that will break anything on a boat that can be broken and wear on the physical and mental fortitude of any sailor. Boats will fail. Injuries will happen. People will decide they’ve had enough. It’s a war of attrition.