The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  "When those six-foot wooden sticks come out," says Iroquois at-tackman Drew Bucktooth, "they know we're there." That's why, a month before the start of the 2010 world championships, Sid Smith felt compelled to make his way to Jacques's workshop. Smith, a 23-year-old defender from the Six Nations reservation in Ontario, led two NCAA championship teams and was a onetime All-America at Syracuse; he capped his college career by stripping the ball and setting up the game-winner in overtime of the 2009 title game, against Cornell. Smith grew up playing almost exclusively with plastic and has never used a six-foot wooden stick in competition. But he wants one now.

  Jacques isn't ready for Smith's request: each stick is different, and players always want a batch from which to choose. But Smith is less patient than most Nationals ("I want to win all the championships I can," he says), and this year's roster is coming in thin and disorganized. He's going to need help.

  "I'm here [again] next Thursday," Smith says to Jacques. "Will you have it done by then?"

  "I'll try," Jacques says. "I'll get done as many as I can—maybe four. I got other work too. I was thinking, like, July. I wasn't thinking now."

  "Even one," Smith says. "I'll take whatever one you finish."

  The game is older than the country, they say. It goes back 900 years, maybe more; what's certain is that Native Americans in the Great Lakes region invented lacrosse, began the massive gatherings involving anywhere from 100 to 1,000 men playing one game over days on a field with goals spread as far as two miles apart. But the ceremony known as Dey Hon Tshi Gwa' Ehs (To Bump Hips) was less a substitute for war than a way to honor the Creator. When an Iroquois dies, the first thing he does after crossing over is grab the stick laid in his coffin. "You'll be playing again that day," says Lyons, an Onondaga faith keeper, or protector of Native traditions, "and you will be the captain."

  In the late 19th century a Montreal dentist named William George Beers, following the usual white man's practice of appropriating all things Indian, codified the modern rules of field lacrosse, giving it a time limit and replacing the leather ball with a rubber one. By 1880, after it was discovered that some Native Americans had accepted pay to play the purportedly amateur sport, all Natives were banned from international competition by the sport's governing body. Shut out from the 10-on-10 field game at the highest level, Natives competed in obscurity until box lacrosse—a faster, more violent, six-on-six version invented in 1930 to take advantage of unused hockey rinks—swept across the reservations.

  What ensued over the next decades is one of sport's shadow tales, unseen by a world entranced by Ruth and Unitas and Ali, played out by hard, proud men steeped in privation. Their names are famous only on reservations in New York and Canada: unstop-pables such as Oliver Hill, Ross Powless, Edward Shenandoah. The Mohawk great of the late 1940s, Angus Thomas? He had a shot so hard, they say, that it killed two goalies. Banned from box leagues for more than a year after one of the deaths, Thomas played his first game back against the Onondagas in the old Akwesasne box near St. Regis, New York—with 19-year-old Lyons between the pipes. Lyons, armored with two chest protectors and a wad of sliced fan belt, saw Thomas wind up and heard the ball sizzle just before it cracked into his midsection, snapping three ribs, leaving him down and breathless for 20 minutes. But Thomas didn't score. "There was no way the ball was going to go in," Lyons says.

  Some non-Natives tried coming over from their elegant, wide-open field game to slum in the dusty outdoor box on the Onondaga reservation, where cross-checking was legal and anyone lingering along the boards was begging to be hurt. "I wanted to play their game their way, but I wasn't tough like that," says Roy "Slugger" Simmons Jr., who played for Syracuse in the 1950s under his father, the legendary Roy Simmons Sr., and later coached the Orange to six national championships.

  The scene at Slugger's first box game was cockfight crazy: Native women ringing the boards, shaking the chicken-wire fencing as he passed with the ball, stopping their unnerving screams just long enough to spit at him. After a line change Simmons dropped to the bench and was approached by an old Indian named Percy Lazore, who had played against Simmons's dad in the 1920s and '30s. "Roy, you mad," Lazore said.

  "Yeah, Percy, look at all the gobs of spit on me," Simmons said. "What the hell's wrong with them?"

  "Roy, they spit on good players. What you worry about is if they don't spit on you."

  To the wider world, NFL legend Jim Brown is the most famous Syracuse lacrosse player, often deemed the greatest of all time, supposedly never knocked off his feet. But on the reservation they remember the pickup game in 1957 in which the 155-pound Irving Powless, a future chief, sent the 230-pound, new-to-the-box Brown tumbling with a brutally precise hip check. "Brown never left his feet the rest of the day," Simmons says. "He just destroyed them."

  By then Lyons had become one of the trailblazers of the route from the rez to Syracuse. He co-captained the Orangemen's undefeated 1957 team with Brown and Simmons, earning All-America honors in front of the net with his deft hands and sawed-off goalie's stick. He graduated, worked in New York City as a greeting-card illustrator, and was inducted into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame. He became a faith keeper in '67, moved back to Onondaga in '70, and taught U.S. history at SUNY Buffalo. In 1977 he designed the Iroquois passport and verified its acceptance on a group trip to Switzerland.

  The Iroquois's independent streak and their players' lack of field experience earned them a cool reception when they tried out for U.S. or Canadian teams. A few Iroquois became stars in the college game, but as a group they "were kind of snuffed out," Simmons Jr. says. Decades in the box had cut the nation off from its own game; generations of Iroquois had never learned team defense. When, in 1983, Simmons asked Lyons to bring a squad to Baltimore for a series of international friendlies, he heard one of history's saddest replies. "We don't have a field team," Lyons said.

  Still, along with Tuscarora stickmaker Wes Patterson, Lyons cobbled together a disparate mix of box, high school, and college players for the inevitable thrashing. Syracuse crushed the first Nationals 28–5, and Hobart handled them 22–14. But a spark caught. "The guys didn't like to get beat," Lyons says. The Iroquois hosted a special tournament in Los Angeles before the 1984 Olympics and earned their first victory, over the English national team. They went to Engl and the next year, won several more games and lost only one. Two years after that Lyons got a 3:00 A.M. call from England: the century-old ban was lifted. The international federation had accepted the Iroquois as a full member nation. "It was our game," Lyons says. "So here we are 100 years later, back up again."

  Box lacrosse remains the game of choice for most Iroquois, so it's no shock that their best international result has been indoors: second place, ahead of Team USA, in the last two world box championships. But a growing stream of Division I stars, such as Loyola's Gewas Schindler and Syracuse's Sid Smith, Brett Bucktooth, Cody Jamieson, and Jeremy Thompson, has made the Nationals an increasing threat on grass, and it's not as if outdoor play had been excised from the Iroquois DNA. Throughout the year "medicine" games are played for the health of all players, the traditional way: two poles are jammed in the ground on each end to serve as goals, an unlimited number of males from ages seven to seventy ranges about, and the first team to score a certain number of goals—sometimes three, sometimes five—wins. Any male can call for a medicine game to deal with personal strife; a runner goes out to contact the players, and the food is gathered and a deerskin ball obtained that day. The caller doesn't play, but he keeps the ball. "The ball is the medicine," Lyons says.

  The Iroquois don't like talking in detail about the medicine game, at least not with outsiders. But 20 years ago Nationals offensive coach Freeman Bucktooth called for a medicine game on The Greens at Onondaga to help him and a friend fight an illness. "It helped," Bucktooth says, so he renews it each year. "Whatever illness you have, it pushes it away. It's amazing how well it cures you."

  Only wooden sticks are allowed in medicine games.
Familiarity, the long break-in time, and the sheer beauty of a prized lacrosse stick partly explain why some Iroquois cry when one splinters. But a deeper reason for their grief is the belief that the stick is a gift from Mother Earth, that a living thing died to make it, and that its spirit has been transferred to the Iroquois player, who honors the tree's sacrifice by playing humbly, calmly, "in a more spiritual manner," Jacques says. "Nobody likes a dirty player, and the energy from that tree is transferred to that player who knows how to use it."

  One evening last January, Lyons, soon to be 80, stick in hand, hustled along the darkened hallways of the Onondaga Nation Arena. A $7 million facility that opened in 2001, Tsha'Honnonyendakhwa' (Where They Play Games) is the modern centerpiece of the Onondaga reservation and a far more practical statement than the tattered billboard on I-81 whose faded message reads, WE THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OWN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE!

  Not that Lyons doesn't believe that. Two 1794 treaties, one of them brokered by George Washington—the one that still pays each Iroquois descendant five yards of calico yearly—are the Iroquois's legal basis for sovereignty and the reason Syracuse police have no jurisdiction on the reservation. Casinos? Establishing a casino would entail asking the U.S. government's permission. Oren Lyons, for one, has never asked the U.S. permission for anything.

  He stopped in the lobby, at the trophy case, and pointed at its most eye-catching display, a lone blue warm-up jacket with red-and-white piping on the shoulders, hanging on a wire hanger. There's no placard, no list of accomplishments, no explanation. "Here's Lee," Lyons said.

  ***

  He was one of the best ever, they say. That mattered to Leroy "Lee" Shenandoah; whether he was doing ironwork or playing lacrosse or serving in the Army, nothing less than excellence would do. "I used to be afraid to fry him an egg—everything was perfection," says his sister, Beulah Powless. "And his temper: If [his wife] Deena didn't iron the pants just right? He'd rip them in half. She didn't get upset. She knew."

  From the late 1950s through the '60s, Shenandoah put his ferocity and skill to work in the box for the Onondaga Warriors, precursors to today's Senior B Can-Am Lacrosse League entry, the Red-hawks. Shenandoah was a lean and fast force who could shoot, dodge, pass, and defend. He could power or slash to the goal. "He was like [Alex] Ovechkin: he could score, he could run you over," says Freeman Bucktooth. "And when he spoke, you listened."

  It was easy, once he was dead, to make Shenandoah a symbol of the tragic Native experience, illustrating all the bad that could befall an Indian who ventured off the rez. After dropping out of high school at 16 and becoming a high-lron foreman on construction sites at 17, Shenandoah joined the Army and became so accomplished a Green Beret that he marched in the honor guard at President Kennedy's funeral. Less than a decade later, in March 1972, he died at 32 after being shot five times and kicked by Philadelphia police, who claimed he had attacked them and resisted arrest—until film of the incident surfaced that raised questions about the police version of the events. The two officers responsible were never charged with a crime.

  "The war's not over," Lyons says with a smile. "Not by a long shot."

  These days Shenandoah's legacy burns most fiercely with the Iroquois Nationals. He had a way of looking out for people, sometimes even white opponents in the box. "He knew I was naive and a target, and many times he could've leveled me," Slugger Simmons says. "But he'd come up and say, 'Roy, I'm doing you a favor: keep your head up.'" Shenandoah was close to the Bucktooths and kept an eye on young Freeman, first babysitting him, then teaching him all he knew about the game. Nobody, Freeman says, had better all-around skill, and from Shenandoah he learned most of what he knows about winning face-offs, the subtleties of stickhandling, the value of spying on the opposing goalie during warm-ups. "And he could fight," Bucktooth says. "Nobody would mess with him."

  No wonder, then, that fisticuffs became Freeman's trademark too. For a decade he led the Senior B League in scoring; he once rang up 19 goals in a game. But ask about him and the first thing everyone mentions is how he brawled in the box as a teenager, cutting through other teams' enforcers, leaving a line of 25-year-old men facedown, needing stitches. Bucktooth played two years at Syracuse for Slugger Simmons, who knew the effect that Freeman's "Geronimo look"—high cheekbones, shock of black hair—could have on nervous whites. Whenever the team bus rolled onto a new campus, Simmons made sure that Bucktooth was the first man off. "I'll scare 'em," Freeman would say.

  College life didn't take, but Bucktooth carried Shenandoah's perfectionist bent into adulthood. He put in 80 hours a week climbing poles, repairing high wire for Niagara Mohawk Power. He dragooned his sons into helping him build their log-cabin home with 140 precisely notched timbers—no nails. He overhauled the structure of kids' leagues at Onondaga to expose hundreds of young Iroquois to more and better competition and coached them at every level from Peanuts to Juniors, traveling with the six-year-olds into Canada one year, taking the U-19s to Australia another, making his voice heard on the Nationals' governing board.

  Knowing that college lax was one sure route out of the rez, Bucktooth insisted on teaching field techniques in the box, guiding all the Iroquois boys to cradle and pass and shoot off both wings. And always in his mind he would hear Shenandoah's voice, preaching toughness, a hunger to win every ground ball. "We could never get through a scrimmage, couldn't go three minutes without the whistle stopping and him instructing us: It should be done right. Practice how you play in the game," says Freeman's third son, Brett. "And if you're playing against your best friend and you don't cross-check him or you let him pick up a ground ball, he said, 'I don't care if he's your best friend: go hit him.' The game's meant to be tough."

  Of course, all four Bucktooth boys and their countless cousins—"Go out in the woods," says Jacques, "and you'll step on one"—lived Freeman's philosophy. This year, with Freeman coaching the offense, Brett at midfield, and 29-year-old Drew at attack, the Nationals will again have Bucktooth marks all over them.

  The family's influence is pervasive; any afternoon at Onondaga Nation Arena, Freeman can still be found roaming the box during youth practices, even down to the Peanut division, where four- to six-year-old boys pump their little legs up and down the floor. Brett and other Nationals vets will be there too, coaching their own sons; every few minutes another kid will be sent sprawling by a vicious slash. The men give each boy a moment to lie there, then tap a foot with a stick: That's enough. Let's go.

  One June day Beulah Powless is sitting out in the lobby, waiting for her six-year-old great-grandson, Gabe, to finish Tykes practice. She's speaking about her brother, Lee Shenandoah, nearly 40 years gone: how his two children have scattered, how the family received a small settlement from the city of Philadelphia but no apology, how Lee came to their mother, Gertrude Shenandoah, in a dream. But then Gabe runs up asking for snack money, and she recalls a moment from two weeks before, when he got leveled by a shot to the neck in a game against Allegheny. She went over to the team bench where Gabe sat stewing and asked if he was okay, and he gave her a look that was so pure, so Lee, that for just a second it was as if her brother were still living.

  "I'm going back in," Gabe said, "and I'm going to fight."

  There's no team like it, they say. When the Iroquois Nationals travel, overseas especially, they carry a mystique born of Hollywood imagery and pure novelty. So English schoolkids ask Nationals coaches, "How does the smoke get out of your house? Do you still hurt people?" and Japanese opponents treat the players like rock stars and reporters flock to see the exotics in action. Thus is delivered the only message that matters. "We're still here," Smith says.

  "The Nationals are showing the world that we are on the map," Jacques says, his voice rising. "When you say Indians, Native Americans, what pops into mind? Out west, in a tepee, on a reservation, alcohol, drug abuse, drain on society, poverty, uneducated—beaten down. How many negatives can they put on this group of people? So to have a positive there on the
world stage is such a big thing for us."

  But the Nationals' singularity stems not just from their role as standard-bearers for all Native Americans; there are three roster spots for players from any other tribe, and this year's squad includes a Cherokee goalie and an Ojibwa defender. The Nationals also operate in ways that can mystify their own staff, let alone sympathetic outsiders. "They're an extremely funny group, sarcastic, love to talk and have fun and compete," says Roy Simmons III, Slugger's son, director of lacrosse operations at Syracuse. "But every time I walk away, I'm always scratching my head, wondering what happened."

  As the youngest member of one of sport's enduring coaching dynasties, Roy III grew up proud of his family's 50-year relationship with the Iroquois and couldn't have been more honored when the Nationals asked him last summer to join the coaching staff. But in early June, he and Bill Bjorness, the 2006 Nationals coach, who had been a member of the coaching staff since 1994, resigned because of frustration over management moves that had reduced training time, paralyzed the selection process, and left the team scrambling on the eve of the worlds.

  The Americans have beaten the Nationals in the last five world championships, Smith says, because they're "usually bigger, in a little better shape, [have] a lot more players to choose from—and [are] a lot better organized." This year the contrast has been starker than usual. Team USA set its 23-man roster last November and scheduled five tough exhibition games. The Nationals didn't announce their roster until June 20, by which time they'd had only two scrimmages, none since February. They finally held another training camp in the first week of July.

  The delays didn't allow newly appointed general manager Ansley Jemison much time to arrange airline tickets and visas to Great Britain; when the U.S. dropped its passport bomb, there were only three days left before the Iroquois's planned departure, and what could have been a challenging problem became a crisis. But long before the travel mix-up, the Iroquois's concern with self-definition had taken a toll on their lacrosse program.