In the image, Maddux is in that state of perpetual present tense. Flow. The Zone. He spent four years, from 1991 to 1995, operating in that state of grace. I’ve only brushed against it briefly.
On game nights, I touch the Maddux card before turning off my dorm room lights and heading across campus to the gym. Intramural basketball at Young Harris College in the spring of 1997 is as unglamorous as you might imagine. But it’s basketball. And I’m wearing Jason’s white Adidas basketball shoes. One March night, late in the season, we take the court against the Brothers of Alpha Xi, whose capacity for talking shit transcends their hoop skills. The talk is white noise, background.
The tip goes to Dustin Goode, our wing, who finds me at the top of the key, 20 feet out. I catch, shoot, and drain a three. On the next possession, I run off a screen on the baseline and get open in the corner for a deep three. Good. Throughout the first half, the ball keeps finding me and I keep shooting. Splash, splash, splash. The basket looks huge. There is no basket. Shooting the ball requires no more effort than skipping smooth stones across Lake Chatuge.
In the second half, if I’m doubled, I pass. If I’m open, I shoot. With 30 seconds left and the outcome long decided, the ball comes to me on a fast break. Instead of laying it up, I dribble out to the wing, 25 feet from the basket. With all the arrogance my 20-year-old self can muster, I wait. Dribbling, I wait. I wait for the defense to float back down the court. And when it finally does, with a defender running toward me, closing me out, his hand flashing in my face, I rise, release, and . . . splash. Holding my follow-through, I point to the sky until the buzzer sounds and the game is over.
Later, after a few teammates hug me, after we stand in line to shake hands with Alpha Xi, Leah, the director of intramurals, who keeps the books, comes over and shows me. I’d shot 12 three-pointers and made 10. She flips back to the year before. There it is. Jason’s high for the year: 30 points. I smile. He scored it in a variety of ways. Flying through traffic, elevating, attacking the rim. Spinning drives morphing midair into reverse layups. Jumpers at the elbow. Three-point bombs. The night he scored 30, he was smiling. It’s still the way I try to see him now—rapturous with joy, one with the moment, the game.
My own game is limited. I can do one thing, and looking at the notepad I realize that I’ll never again do that one thing any better. I thank Leah, pull my hoodie on, and walk out into the vibrating air.
The comet Hale-Bopp streaks across the sky each night in March 1997. I want a shower, but I don’t want to go inside. So I walk across campus, down Maple Street, and over Corn Creek to the darkened baseball field. The chain-link gate clicks open. I step across the diamond, onto the perfect green, and take a seat in center field. Thin trails of clouds ring the mountains. I untie the knots, loosen the laces, and remove Jason’s basketball shoes. Shoes off, socks off, my feet sink into the soft grass. The comet—a silver-white ball of iridescence hurtling 100,000 miles per hour through interstellar space with dusted-up foul lines—looks close enough to touch. I put my head into my hands and fall apart. I’m not ready as the feelings, all the colors of feelings, wash over me.
12. Man, Myth, Maddux
Twenty-three seasons, 740 professional starts with four different clubs—there are endless ways to look at Greg Maddux. So many chances for accidental poetry, mixed metaphor, tongue-tied tautologies. In the televised broadcast of Game 1, in the seventh inning, Al Michaels is reduced to, “That is Maddux being . . . Maddux.” Who is Maddux? What is Maddux? Do you know Maddux?
He’s a Magician. Modest. A Surgeon. Savant. Unassuming. Born in Texas, the family lives in Indiana, North Dakota, Spain. His first Little League team is in Madrid. His dad, an Air Force officer, is the coach. The jerseys are green. In Spain, under a diffuse yellow sun, many years earlier, Hemingway writes, “Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel.”
He’s a Choir Boy. The Bat Boy? A Prankster. When he is 10 years old, the family settles in the desert city of kaleidoscoping lights. He has a brother Mike. A sister Terry. His mom is a Henderson County dispatcher. Dad deals poker. His first love is basketball, but he can’t, in his words, “guard anyone.” So it’s baseball. He can pitch. From guru Rusty Medar, he’s taught movement over velocity. Deception. He is a Viking of Valley High.
He’s an Accountant. Math Teacher. Confident. A Nose-picker. Hardworking. Everyman. He’s No One You’ve Ever Seen Before. He is an Iowa Cub with a sad mustache. A perm. A mullet. He marries Kathy, his high school sweetheart. He gets The Call and promptly gives up a homer to the Astros’ Billy Hatcher in extras. Cubs lose. He is 20 years old.
He works hard, but not that hard. He pees in Andre Dawson’s hot tub. He loses 14 games his first full season. Off-season, Winter Ball, Venezuela, he works on his change. He wins 18 the next year. He gives up a grand slam to Will Clark in the ’89 playoffs. He spends time with Mr. Dorfman and learns, in his words, to “like himself” and to stay within himself. The following year he wins 20 games. He wins at least 15 games every season for the next 17 years. In a postgame shower, he chats up rookie Chipper Jones while peeing down his leg.
He is a Brave. A dad. Two kids. A dog named Baxter. A multimillionaire. Four straight Cy Youngs. He is relaxed. Intense. He is not juiced. Many juice. “Shit!” he yells after missing to Jim Thome in Game 1 of the 1995 World Series. At that game, in the nosebleeds, an 18-year-old boy in a gray hoodie tries to use The Force. “Fuck!” he screams after ball three to Sandy Alomar in the eighth. That boy’s friend watches him watch Maddux. Are they in a trance? How does trance work? Baxter is a Yorkie Terrier.
He is carving up the Yankees under the lights, in New York, in October, with such savage lucidity that the friend’s hands are shaking. A Gold Glover. An Older Ferris Bueller. He’s Genius. Gross. A Bobby Fischer. A Van Gogh. Professor. Mad Dog. Doggie. A scar runs under his double chin. He is a Cub again. Briefly a Padre. Twice a Dodger. The friend plans his days and nights around each Dodger start so he can listen to Vincent Edward Scully paint pitches and outs. He is 42 years old. He retires.
He is back in Vegas, back home. Follow him on Twitter @gregmaddux. With Kathy, he runs a foundation for battered women and kids with cancer. Hall of Famer. His induction speech opens with a fart joke. He can’t stop smiling. Chicks might dig the long ball, but in a besotted game, during a craven era, he was the best. Follow Baxter on Instagram @littlefellabaxter. In interviews, he says the most satisfying performance of his career was Game 1 of the ’95 Series. Of that night, he says nothing, everything: “It was my first crack at a World Series game, and I was lucky enough to get to pitch. And we won too.”
Now, he golfs. Plenty of time in the desert for golf. From dawn to dusk. All that light.
13. And I Feel Fine: Summer 1999
We were at the end. Goners. All of us—just sucking down the very last of our Starbucks Grande Triple Shot Caramel Frap with Whip. Evidence scattered everywhere. The plastic cups with bent green straws were abandoned on sofa armrests, near the Harry Potter overflow, next to Conversations with God, and left upside down in the urinals at the Barnes and Noble near North Point Mall in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Home from college, I worked as a “bookseller,” saving for a future where multinational banks, utilities, and communications systems faced certain catastrophic collapse. Famine, Genocide, Global Chinese Takeover, and other untold horror awaited. We stacked title after title on a center display table, next to Oprah’s Book Club, in perfect pyramids—Y2K Cookbooks, Y2K Survival Guides, Y2K for Dummies.
Can your vegetables.
During those summer weeks, fat men in Italian loafers read Guns & Ammo and Car and Driver as the espresso machine at our Starbucks annex hissed like an assembly-line whistle. In our parking lot, adjacent to an AMC 14 theater, caffeinated teens in polished, combat-ready Hummers and luxury SUVs blasted Limp Bizkit and Offspring.
Offer children and older family members measured reassurance.
Soccer Moms, Senior Citizens, Youth Groups—all of Metro Atlanta, it seemed, was
devouring the “Left Behind” book series as if it were free Chick-fil-A. The books depicted a fiery future where real Christians ascend and the rest of us—Jews, Catholics, Followers of the UN, Muslims, Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists, Other(s)—claw out each other’s eyes. But I tell you, that first-century Mediterranean Jewish Peasant said, love one another.
Arm yourself.
As a self-serious English major, I kept a poetry journal in my pocket. Poems? Just words really, some my own, some others, mostly half-memories of Jason. I wasn’t alone in thinking of the dead. Each night, bleary moviegoers wandered into the bookstore with The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project still in their eyes.
Store gallons of fresh, distilled water.
We wished to see dead people and each, in our own way, wished for The End. Mostly, though, we wanted to see Celebrity. Ringed by gated country club communities, golf courses, and horse farms, Alpharetta was haunted by pro athletes and musicians. It turned out Celebrity—just like us!—preferred to be surrounded by books while skimming magazines.
Don’t forget the batteries.
Look! Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston! Is that Falcon QB Chris Chandler? There’s Terance Mathis. Shhh . . . those are the parents of slain child beauty pageant contestant JonBenét Ramsey. Over there—NFL linebacker Cornelius Bennett! Elton? Elton John?
Maintain constant vigilance. Keep a checklist.
Among the staff, we made Celebrity Spotting a game of rhetorical Jeopardy! clues only. Don’t go chasing waterfalls over in Self-Help. No names. Hey, you might be a redneck if you’re shopping in Bargain Books. When Celebrity breezed by, customers cleared the aisles, removed their oversized sunglasses, and set their Starbucks down.
Are you good with your hands?
I tried to Maddux Up and focus. Taped inside my tiny locker in the break room, I kept a 1987 Maddux Topps baseball card and a Xeroxed passage from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Late in the summer, on a slow weekday evening, I was working the front registers alone when I looked up and saw Greg Maddux—plaid golf shorts, canary yellow golf shirt—standing behind the red-velvet rope, a few feet away, waiting for me to look up.
In the Gospels, Jesus goes hiking with several disciples when he’s suddenly lit up, arrayed with light. The shining forms of Moses and Elijah appear. A shout-out from the past. Transfiguration. As Maddux walked toward me, I didn’t see the illuminated bodies of Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson. Instead, on either side of Maddux, I saw Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams. Not their ghosts. Not Mantle leaking tears to Bob Costas or Williams riding a golf cart with Tony Gwynn. But The Mick in ’56 and Teddy Ballgame in ’41. They were in black and white, as if stepping out of a book, and then they were gone.
Years later, driving my pickup down I-15 in California, it connected: as a boy, at meals, my father switched his fork from his right hand to his left and back again, in an endless quest to emulate the switch-hitting Mantle. In his west Atlanta boyhood room, Charles kept a picture of Williams beside his bed; in his office now in Montana, an advertisement for “Ted’s Creamy Root Beer” graces the wall. Both men still recite volumes of Mantle and Williams statistics and stories.
Maddux set his books on the counter—two Dr. Seuss titles, a traveler’s guide to Tuscany, and a copy of Golf Digest.
Words. I had to say something, but what? You almost singlehandedly saved the life of my friend. Could I say that? During my own bad time, you helped steady the days. Could I ask about October 21, 1995? Did the ball feel lighter that night? What could I say?
I asked Greg Maddux if he’d found everything he was looking for.
He nodded and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
My hands moved deliberately and I felt the pressure not only of the past, but the future. This moment, right now, leaned in. Years from 1999, I’d be trying and failing to say what Greg Maddux had meant to Jason and me and what it was like standing face-to- face.
I rang up his books and asked if he needed any of the items individually gift-wrapped.
He shook his head.
I asked if he wanted a bag.
Again, he shook me off.
I announced the cost and Maddux paid in cash. Making change, I slid his receipt inside the travel book.
“Sir?” I said.
Maddux raised his eyebrows.
“You’ve mastered your craft. Your flame burns clear and bright.”
Hack-Hemingway with a splash of Bad Updike. Sorry—it was all I had.
Maddux kind of smiled.
“Cool,” he said, before pausing a beat and then saying the one word I wish I’d said all along. “Thanks.”
ELIZABETH MERRILL
Being Tommy Morrison’s Son
FROM ESPN.COM
MIAMI, OKLA.—His daddy’s life was violent, disturbing, and R-rated, and that was on a normal day, but Trey Lippe’s mom swore their son would live an average boy’s life. He’d play with Transformers, run through the aisles of Wal-Mart looking for Ninja Turtles, and toss footballs in a fenced yard. He’d carry her name, to keep him safely out of the public eye. But ultimately that didn’t matter because his daddy was Tommy Morrison. When Morrison was diagnosed with HIV, a group of parents wanted to ban the little boy from kindergarten because they were convinced that he would infect them all. “Mom, am I sick?” he asked Cristi Lippe.
He was healthy and fine, but life would never be normal. Every child, especially a boy, needs to know his father. And that’s when things got strange.
Perhaps the best story Trey Lippe has to tell about his dad is kind of fuzzy. He was four or five years old, far too young to understand fame, eccentricity, or what made Tommy Morrison tick. The story involves a leopard, or maybe a cougar—Tommy had both in those days, so let’s just call it a large, exotic cat. Morrison, at the height of a boxing career that earned him millions of dollars and countless female admirers, had his son over for a visit one day when, for some reason, he decided it would be funny to place him in a cage, alone, with the cat. It was enormous to a little boy, but was also declawed and defanged, a detail Morrison declined to mention to his son. The cat closed in, opened his mouth—and licked Trey, sandpaper tongue on baby-soft skin. Morrison couldn’t stop laughing. The kid couldn’t stop crying.
Nearly 20 years later, Lippe still has questions about his dad, but he believes he knows why his father put him in that cage. He wanted him never to be afraid.
On February 15, in a smoky Oklahoma casino somewhere off Interstate 44, Trey Lippe made his professional boxing debut in front of about 1,000 cowboys, mulleted gamblers, and starry-eyed fans looking for the next Great White Hope. The fight wasn’t publicized much outside the eastern part of the state because, if word spread that Tommy Morrison’s son had taken up boxing, it would’ve drawn far too much hysteria for a young man who didn’t know how to jump rope six months earlier.
Lippe looks as if he came straight out of central casting, with a rock-solid body and boyish good looks that came from his father. A few hours before his debut fight, he walked through the lobby of the Buffalo Run Casino, and Morrison’s old trainer, Doug Dragert, got goose bumps. “I could’ve sworn up and down,” Dragert says, “that it was his dad.”
The reasons for Lippe becoming a boxer at 24 would be obvious if this were a movie, such as Rocky V, which Morrison starred in so many years ago. He’d be doing it for his father, to better understand him by following the same path. To make him proud. But Lippe insists he’s fighting for himself. He waited tables at a steakhouse before this, sold discount clothing, and worked construction 10 hours a day, a job that made him good money, but then he was too tired to spend it. Lippe, a former college football player at Central Arkansas, said he was at a crossroads in his life and
missed being an athlete. That’s why he’s doing this.
So maybe it’s merely a coincidence that he decided to pursue boxing late last summer, as Morrison lay dying in a hospital bed in Omaha, Nebraska. Lippe reached out to Tony Holden, Morrison’s old promoter, to hear stories about his dad and the good old days. But he also wanted to ask Holden what it would take to become a boxer. Holden hadn’t seen Lippe since he was a tiny kid. He immediately tried to shoot him down. “The industry is in the toilet,” Holden told him. He could waste four years on it, get nowhere, then ask, “What have I done with my life?”
Shortly after Morrison died on September 1, Lippe got ahold of Holden. He told him he was going to fight with or without his help. Holden sighed. He said he’d help him.
It hasn’t been easy, working alongside a ghost. Holden and Morrison grew up together, two young men finding their way around the ring in a golden time for heavyweight boxing in the early 1990s. Tony was Tommy’s big brother. He told him what to do, and Morrison, in turn, usually did the opposite.
Being around Lippe is both exhilarating and sad for Holden. In one of their first meetings last fall, just after Morrison’s death, Lippe walked into Holden’s office and saw a poster of his dad on the wall. Holden told Lippe that his dad loved him. He used to talk about him all the time. And then they cried like babies.
This wasn’t going to be like the old days. Holden laid down strict rules when they started: no entourages, no womanizing, no cell phone the day of a fight. If Holden didn’t think Lippe had what it took to be a fighter, he’d have to quit.
But Holden sees something in the 24-year-old who is starting way behind his father. He sees someone who will listen.
“The timing was—perfect, you know?” Holden said after a pause when asked why Lippe is boxing.
“I have no doubt he’s doing it for himself. I just feel like he’s been inspired by his father.”
The Best American Sports Writing 2015 Page 10
