The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  By custom Tigers cheerleaders support any player at the foul line by shouting his name. In the first half Bolton was fouled twice. H.S. had been cheering as usual, but each time Bolton went to the line, in a peaceful protest, she folded her arms, stepped back, and remained silent while her squad cheered, "Go, Rakheem!" After the halftime buzzer, H.S. was scolded "in front of God and everybody," says her father. H.S. had not "abided by the Cheerleader Constitution," according to Hunt. The code requires cheerleaders to shout equally for all. Rather than cheer for Bolton, she chose to go home.

  The violation was apparently so egregious that as H.S. walked into cheerleading class the following Monday, McInnis met her with this hello: go to the principal's office. H.S. was kicked off the squad. Within an hour her father was in Bain's office. "I asked him, 'Are you telling me that my daughter had to cheer for her [attacker]?'" recalls the father. "He told me that if it means she had to cheer for Bolton or be removed, then that's what I'm telling you."

  Though H.S. was later permitted to rejoin the cheerleading squad if she would follow its rules, the family filed a civil suit against the school district, and on September 16 the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that H.S.'s silent protest was not protected speech under the First Amendment. However, the court wrangling distracts from the bottom line: a school is supposed to be an emotional safe haven for all students, and educators should help, not harass, students in vulnerable positions. Why force H.S. to do something that made her uncomfortable? Why not err on the side of compassion? "For all anyone knew," Hunt says of the protest, "it was a girl mad at a boy." By this rationale a rape charge is no different from a text-message breakup.

  "They chose to support the athlete," says Larry Watts, H.S.'s attorney, who last week asked the court to rehear the constitutional case. "They chose to support the male. It's just good ol' testosteronic East Texas."

  The students involved in the controversy are gone now. H.S. graduated and has college plans. She vows to keep pressing ahead legally to "make it easier for other girls if they have to go through this." Bolton is on probation and entering an anger management program as part of his plea deal. He is also trying to enroll in college. However, lessons remain to be learned—by the educators. "If there was something to apologize for, we would," Hunt says. This is not Glee. This is sad.

  Gentling Cheatgrass

  Sterry Butcher

  FROM TEXAS MONTHLY

  THE MUSTANG HAS EYES that are large and dark and betray his mood. His coat is bright bay, which is to say he's a rich red, with black running down his knees and hocks. He has a white star the size of a silver dollar on his forehead and a freeze mark on his neck. He cranks his head high as a rider approaches, shaking out a rope from a large gray gelding. The mustang does not know what is to come. His name is Cheatgrass, and he's six years old. In May he was as wild as a songbird.

  The little horse belongs to Teryn Lee Muench, a 27-year-old son of the Big Bend who grew up in Brewster and Presidio Counties. Teryn Lee is tall, blue-eyed, and long-limbed. He wears his shirts buttoned all the way to the neck and custom spurs that bear his name. He never rolls up his sleeves. A turkey feather is jammed in his hatband, and he's prone to saying things like "I was out yesterday and it came a downpour," or, speaking of a hardheaded horse, "He's a sorry, counterfeit son of a gun." Horse training is the only job he has ever had.

  Teryn Lee was among 130 people who signed up this spring for the Supreme Extreme Mustang Makeover, a contest in which trainers are given 100 days to take feral horses from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), gentle these creatures, and teach them to accept grooming, leading, saddling, and riding. Don't let the silliness of the contest's name distract from the difficulty of the challenge. Domestic horses can be taught to walk, trot, and lope under saddle in 100 days; it's called being green-broke. But domestic horses are usually familiar with people. The mustangs in the Makeover have lived on the range for years without human interaction, surviving drought, brutal winters, and trolling mountain lions. The only connection they have to people is fear. Age presents another challenge. A domestic horse is broke to saddle at about age two, when it's a gawky teenager. The contest mustangs are opinionated and mature. The culmination of the contest is a two-day event in Fort Worth in August, where the horses are judged on their level of training and responsiveness. The top 20 teams make the finals. The winner takes home $50,000.

  For Teryn Lee, however, there's more at stake than money. Most of his clients bring him horses that buck or bully, horses that have developed bad habits that stymie or even frighten their owners. Teryn Lee enjoys this work, but his goal is to become a well-known trainer and clinician who rides in top reined cow horse and cutting horse competitions. To step up to that level, he'll have to do something dramatic. Transforming a scruffy, feral mustang that no one wanted into a handsome, gentle, willing riding horse would make people take notice. Winning would get his name out there, he says.

  How does that work, gentling a wild thing? How do you convince a nomad that a different life is possible? Teryn Lee picked up Cheatgrass on May 8 from a BLM facility in Oklahoma and hauled him to his training operation near Marfa, a 50,000-acre ranch leased by his father and managed by Teryn Lee and his wife, Holly. Two days later, standing in a round pen, Cheatgrass looks runty and ribby, like a cayuse from a Frederic Remington painting, still wearing the BLM halter.

  Teryn Lee rides a gelding called Big Gray. The mustang eyes them. Horses are prey animals that are vulnerable by themselves; as social beings, they seek out friendship. They feel safe with another horse, even if it's a stranger. Cheatgrass allows Big Gray to step close. Teryn Lee leans down from his saddle and drops the halter off the mustang's head.

  "There," he says. "Now he's a wild mustang."

  Teryn Lee begins swinging a rope behind the mustang, who zips frantically around the perimeter of the round pen at a dead run, mane streaming. As Cheatgrass flies past, Teryn Lee occasionally flicks the tail of the rope into the horse's path to make the mustang change direction. Cheatgrass nimbly tucks his knees and wheels away, deft as a cat, fleet as a thought.

  "I want him to move around," Teryn Lee explains. "Breaking a horse is all about controlling his feet. If I can control his feet, I've got him. Later I'll try to touch him all over, but we'll see. You can't hurry a horse."

  Cheatgrass's adrenaline slows down a tick as he considers his options. Thousands of generations of flight instinct course through a mustang, but he is also a survivor who comes loaded with a keen ability to adapt. Running away isn't working, so Cheatgrass slows to a fast trot. He is small but spring-loaded, muscles bunching and jumping under his coat. His inside ear and white-ringed eye never leave the man deciding where he can go and how fast. With a swing or two of the rope over his head, Teryn Lee sends a loop and catches the horse around the neck. As the loop tightens, the mustang roars and rears, his hooves momentarily striking the sky. He faces Teryn Lee, sides heaving and nostrils flaring. They stare at each other. There is the sound of the horse's breathing and the wind sliding by. Moments pass. Teryn Lee asks the gray gelding to step forward, his hand moving up the rope until the two horses are neck to neck. The loop loosens. Neither slow nor fast, Teryn Lee's hand reaches forward and lightly rubs the star on Cheatgrass's forehead. The first touch. The mustang is canted backward, every muscle straining, but he stands. His world has just changed.

  The ranch where Cheatgrass lived this summer is high and remote, an hour from Marfa and deep within Presidio County. Great treeless hills roll and fold to the mountains on the horizon: Chinati Peak, humped and blue, not far from the ranch house; Mount Livermore and the Davis Mountains in the north; Haystack, Paisano Peak, Twin Sisters, Goat Mountain, Santiago to the east. Summer monsoons carpet the desert with grama. From most points on the ranch, no homes or roads are visible. No power lines, no vehicles, no buildings for mile upon mile—just grass, rocks, and the impassive, tenantless sky. On a high hill, with the chorus of mountains and wind all around, it
's possible to imagine these unsettled plains as they were 200 or 400 or even 1,000 years ago: open, ancient, and achingly beautiful.

  Bountiful land like this nurtured the mustang. Horses were native to North America until about 11,000 years ago, when evidence of them tapers out. They didn't return to the main continent until 1519, when Hernán Cortés famously flummoxed the Aztecs with 16 horses that landed with his men on the Mexican coast. More Spanish explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and settlers came, and they all brought horses. Animals that escaped or were loosed onto the prairies multiplied and changed the lives of Plains Indians, whose culture would become as fully integrated with horses as it was with bison. During World War I, ranchers responded to wartime's increased need for horses by turning their well-bred stallions onto the range to better the native herds, which were later gathered and exported to the European front. It's from this array of purebreds and mongrels that mustangs are descended.

  J. Frank Dobie wrote the history of America's wild horses in his 1952 book, The Mustangs. Wild horses tramped across the plains and the western United States, but Texas was their true home. "My own guess is that at no time were there more than a million mustangs in Texas and no more than a million others scattered over the remainder of the West," he wrote. The mustang's history and our own are inextricable. Mustangs galloped in Comanche raids on the Llano Estacado, pushed Longhorns across the Canadian, busted sod at immigrant farms in central Texas, bore Texans into war. Their glory stirred souls.

  Among those who chronicled the mustang in Texas was Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1846 served as a lieutenant under Zachary Taylor in the U.S.-Mexican War. Grant rode a $5 mustang. He was a few days outside Corpus Christi when word came of an immense group of mustangs near the head of the column. "As far as the eye could reach to our right, the herd extended," he wrote in his memoirs. "To the left, it extended equally. There was no estimating the number of animals in it; I have no idea that they could all have been corralled in the state of Rhode Island, or Delaware, at one time."

  No one seems to have recorded when the last wild horse in Texas was roped and put to work. It might have been a horseman named Ben Green, who trailed a wild band from Big Bend into northern Mexico and Arizona during the Depression. Dobie closes his book by musing that the mustang's days were over.

  Well, the wild ones—the coyote duns, the smokies, the blues, the blue roans, the snip-nosed pintos, the flea-bitten grays and the black-skinned whites, the shining blacks and the rusty browns, the red roans, the toasted sorrels and the stockinged bays, the splotched appaloosas and the cream-maned palominos and all the others in shadings of color as various as the hues that show and fade on the clouds at sunset—they are all gone now, gone as completely as the free grass they vivified. Only through "visionary gleam" can any man ever again run with them, for only in the symbolism of poetry does ghost draw lover in hope-continued pursuit.

  The book is a wonderful balance of scholarly research and folklore, but on the utter demise of the mustang, Dobie was mistaken. A federal law passed in 1971 protects feral horses on public lands. Today the BLM oversees nearly 34,000 wild horses and several thousand burros that graze across 26.6 million acres in ten western states. For most of his life, Cheatgrass was one of them.

  Have you studied a person who can do something well? Have you seen how effortless the work appears? Teryn Lee has that with horses. He never hurries. He never seems indecisive. He never becomes angry or worried that he's messed up. One action to the next flows like water.

  "A horse has all the qualities I'd like to possess as a human," he said more than once this summer. "They're curious, not corrupted. They only know what they're taught. They're a mirror of the person riding them." That's not necessarily how horse gentling has always gone. There's a reason it's called "breaking." Dobie wrote that "one out of every three mustangs captured in southwest Texas was expected to die before they were tamed. The process of breaking often broke the spirits of the other two."

  Teryn Lee doesn't follow those old, brutal ways. "Every time Cheatgrass has seen men, he's been poked with a needle, been freeze-branded, or been castrated," he said. "If I were him, I don't think I'd like people very much. Horses are the most forgiving animal there is."

  On day two, not long after the sun has crested Goat Mountain, Teryn Lee walks into the pen, catches Cheatgrass by the lead rope, and rubs him steadily all over with one hand.

  "Here's where he'll get mad," he says, and his hand makes its way along the horse's belly. Cheatgrass bugs his eyes and begins to quiver. His ears swivel furiously, and Teryn Lee gives him a moment. Every time the horse does what he asks—or tries to—he gives the horse a release, whether it's a momentary rest, a stroke, or allowing it to slow. Once Teryn Lee starts an action, he carries it through very deliberately. He lets Cheatgrass sniff the saddle pad and smoothly drapes it onto his back. He rests the saddle on his hip and allows the horse to go over it with his nose, then carefully sets it on the mustang. The horse's head is jacked up and his nostrils flutter. Slowly, the cinches are tightened. Teryn Lee slips off the halter and backs away.

  Cheatgrass is frozen for two beats and then, bam, he jams his head to the earth and his shoulders to the clouds in a series of seesaw bucks. Time slows into freeze-frames: the C-shaped horse suspended in air, the hip-high dust, the rigid-legged horse pounding the ground. Just as suddenly as he starts, Cheatgrass stops and looks at Teryn Lee, his ears tipped forward.

  "That wasn't too bad!" Teryn Lee exclaims.

  "We've had domestic colts that buck for much longer," Holly says.

  Teryn Lee leaves the horse to get used to the saddle and returns in an hour, pointing to the dust in the pen.

  "You can see where he got down and rolled on the saddle a few times," he says. "Horses can move left, right, forward, backward, up, and down. I'd like to get him comfortable moving in all those directions. He went up and down. Now I'll have him go forward and backward."

  Teryn Lee uses his body and the flicking of a rope to move Cheatgrass around the pen: more pressure and a kissing sound from Teryn Lee means lope; stepping into his path makes the mustang change direction; turning away from the horse makes him slow or stop.

  "A large part of training is feel," Teryn Lee says. "I can feel what they'll do before they do it. If you can't feel it, you can't fix it. You have to move with a purpose but be sensitive about it."

  Within a few minutes, he's at the mustang's side. He puts a foot in the stirrup and bounces a couple of times before standing up in the stirrup for a second or two. There's no preamble to this—he just does it, on both sides. The horse's mouth is clamped in a prim line.

  "He's pretty tight, but he's taking it real good," says Teryn Lee. "Confidence is a big thing. If he's confident, everything else will take care of itself."

  ***

  Wild mustangs forage on land that is populated by antelope, deer, and elk and share food and water sources with domestic cattle owned by ranchers with grazing leases on public land. Nowadays they live mostly in Nevada. According to the BLM, mustangs can double in population every four years, and when there are too many horses for the available acreage, the herds must be periodically thinned.

  "The land can only support what it will support," said Sally Spencer, the head of marketing for the BLM. "The land needs to stay healthy, and the animals need to stay healthy. We want to make sure the mustangs are there for all Americans to see forever and ever."

  From BLM holding facilities, captured mustangs are carted across the country to different public adoption events. Horses in unusual colors—pintos, buckskins, palominos—are likelier to get adopted than a plain bay or brown horse. Older horses aren't typically adopted either. Those that are deemed unadoptable are shipped for long-term holding to private ranches primarily in the Midwest, which contract with the BLM to maintain the horses for the rest of their lives.

  But the BLM has received biting criticism for its gathering practices, which sometimes result in injury or death to must
angs as they're rounded up. Mustang advocates argue that the horses are pushed off the range in favor of cattle that ranchers run on land leased from the government. Advocates also say there are too many horses in holding facilities. Cheatgrass, for instance, lived 15 months at a Colorado short-term holding facility before being picked for the Makeover.

  And none of this is cheap. The wild horse and burro program cost $63.9 million to run in 2010, 57 percent of which went to keeping horses in holding facilities. Adoption rates have fallen in recent years. "The program we have is not sustainable," Spencer said. "We need to figure out another way the horses can be managed on the range."

  Madeleine Pickens, the wife of oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, is among the people working on solutions. "The horses that are in short-term holding cost the taxpayer $2,500 per year, which is very costly," she said. "The conditions are pretty severe, when you consider they're animals that roamed freely and they're suddenly put in a temporary corral. They're only supposed to be there three months, and some are there for three years."

  Pickens is passionate about mustangs. She's been in talks with the BLM since 2008 on her proposal to place as many as 30,000 mustangs on more than 600,000 acres of public and private lands in northeast Nevada. In the plan, her foundation, Saving America's Mustangs, would oversee the ranch and develop it into an ecotourism facility. In return, the foundation would receive $500 per year per horse, which is about the same rate contractors receive for horses that live in long-term holding ranches on private property. According to Pickens, the deal would offer transparency that the privately run holding sites do not.