The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  The Sleight of Hand

  The quarterback lines up behind the center and takes the snap. But as he drops back we see that he's holding not a football but a basketball. This causes the defense to hesitate, and the quarterback lobs the basketball deep to the wide receiver. The receiver catches it in stride for a touchdown—at which point the ball turns into a bouquet of roses. If, however, the ball is intercepted, it turns into bees.

  Buried Treasure!

  After sacking the quarterback, a defensive lineman "accidentally" leaves behind a tattered parchment scroll that turns out to be a sixteenth-century treasure map. In the second half, the quarterback is consumed with visions of rubies, silver coins, and gold bullion. He recruits a party of his most trusted offensive linemen and together they embark on a two-week journey to a forgotten island off the coast of Guadeloupe. They return, bedraggled but successful, bearing a treasure worth nearly $80,000—only to discover that the combined lost salary for the weeks they missed added up to $4.3 million. The season ends badly, with the team slipping into last place and the starting left guard succumbing to wounds sustained in a cutlass fight.

  West Coast Misdirection

  During the offseason, the opposing quarterback is again approached by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. The quarterback warns Gyllenhaal to keep his distance, but Gyllenhaal tells him that it isn't like that—he wants to offer the quarterback a part in an independent film he is producing, called The (Quarterback and the Dame, about an unlikely romance between a gridiron hero and the English stage legend Judi Dench. The quarterback reads the script, and he has to admit it's pretty good, so he signs on. The quarterback arrives on the set for the first day of shooting, only to find Gyllenhaal costumed in shoulder pads and eye black. The quarterback goes berserk, believing that he'd been promised the part.

  "No, no," Gyllenhaal coos, "you're playing Judi Dench."

  The End of Days

  In the waning seconds of the first half of the NFC championship game, the pious visiting quarterback leads a masterly 80-yard drive, culminating in a 15-yard touchdown strike. As his teammates celebrate, the quarterback drops to one knee to thank Jesus. Just then, the Rapture comes, and the quarterback is instantly beamed up to Heaven, leaving only his cleats behind. The visiting team is forced to play the second half with the inconsistent journeyman Billy Joe Hobert, who throws three interceptions, and they end up losing the game, 42–10. The home team advances to the Super Bowl—only to lose in heartbreaking fashion, when what would have been the winning field goal caroms off an apocalyptic horseman and falls wide right.

  The Short History of an Ear

  Mark Pearson

  FROM SPORT LITERATE

  THE KNEE HIT HARD, crumpled the vinyl halo, not much in the way of ear protection, but enough to pass the safety standard. The full force of the knee brought to bear upon the ear inside the halo. The bruised ear echoed with pain, skin separated from cartilage, and blood filled the space between. Within moments, the ear transformed itself into an overripe plum, split and dripping thick red nectar.

  Weeks later, the doctor said: "I can still get a few milliliters of blood out of there."

  His hypodermic needle poised on the examining table like a massive mosquito. I had seen ears, drained again and again, only to refill and harden, moonscapes, pocked with craters, rimmed with ridges. This ear was mine, earned, and paid for; he would not deflate it with his hungry hypodermic. On purpose, I waited too long, a week, maybe two, as the sharp twinges of my heart beat in my ear. When I walked outside, the midwestern winter wind felt good, iced the skin, and numbed the pain. The ear, once soft, a pliable blood balloon, overflowed its rim then it shrank like a receding flood and hardened. Fissures formed like drying mud flats.

  "That's okay," I said. "Leave it."

  He looked at me. Slightly amused, he asked, "Where are you from?"

  "Pennsylvania."

  "A tough guy from Pennsylvania, huh?"

  We weren't quite from coal country, but we were close enough. Twenty-five minutes away they fired the Bethlehem Steel mills with the coal that was mined a little farther north. Next town over, Allentown, they bent and shaped steel into Mack Trucks. An hour away they were ripping slate and shale from the mountains and turning the hillsides into black stick forests of dead trees and mud. I grew up wrestling against the sons of the men who worked in those places, tending the furnaces, shoveling the coal, and bending the steel.

  My father worked with steel in a different kind of factory. He was a furniture designer for Knoll International. He made sculptures in his spare time, and our living room was filled with his plaster, plastic, and wood found-object sculptures. His Pearson Chair was in the Louvre in Paris in a Knoll exhibition. The Pennsylvania Dutch kids, whose fathers were farmers and factory workers, thought we were weird, but they liked to look at my father's creations, filled with branches and plastic action figures caught in plaster like some abstract re-creation of Pompeii.

  To add to it, we lived in what they called a modern house. It was more than 100 years old. What was modern about it, I wasn't sure. When my parents bought it, it had no plumbing and its heating system consisted of black potbelly stoves. They bought the house from an old man who used to shoot deer from the living room window. He would come back to the house sometimes to pick wild mint to make tea. My father gutted it before we moved in. He and a friend took an electric saw to the outhouse, then kicked it over and it rolled down the hill. He knocked a hole in the three-foot-thick stonewalls to put in a kitchen window. He rounded the corners of the new window instead of squaring them. This was apparently modern to the neighborhood kids.

  We lived in the middle of the woods on the side of a steep hill that ran down into a narrow valley split by a trout stream where I spent most of my springs fishing for rainbows.

  One time when I was six or seven, I made a model chair like the ones I saw him make. I used scraps of leather and balsa wood. It was covered in white glue and crooked. My father looked at it and said, "It looks like a dancing chair." It hurt when he said it. Later, when I wondered if I should follow him into design, he just said, "It's too hard to make a living at it."

  Growing up, we didn't have much more than dreams. Knoll shut down its design department and my father found another job. When that company closed down, he tried to freelance. It didn't work out. That winter we had a cold snap and our electricity was shut off. I'd shower in the gym each morning when I got to school. When I got home, I would carry tin buckets in the dark to the top of the hill behind the house to get water from the spring. The water line had frozen and we had no running water in the house. I'd fill 10 one-gallon buckets and leave them in the living room, so my brothers and sister could take baths the next day. The hillside was frozen over and the spring looked like a miniature glacier.

  Years later, it was still with me. "Your ear doesn't bend," the barber said. One finger pressed the back of it, scissors snipped hair, and each cut exposed it more. There is not much hair to hide it anymore and just as well. I never wanted it hidden.

  "Cauliflower ear," I said.

  She nodded and said: "I don't like people playing with my ears." She held the ear gently between her thumb and forefinger, and trimmed the hair around it. The electric razor hummed in my ear as she worked. She was unfazed, not like the girl at the coffee shop, who stared, and asked: "Is it a birth defect?"

  "No."

  "Does it hurt?"

  "No."

  "Can you hear okay?"

  "What?"

  She looked down, counted the change into my palm, made eye contact with the next customer.

  The folds of skin and cartilage that make up the external ear are what got damaged. The external ear is there to protect the eardrum, collect and guide sound waves into the ear canal to the eardrum. It's an intricate system designed to catch sound waves. It did its job of protecting the middle and the inner ear, those delicate internal mechanisms where the eardrum passes its vibrations to the middle ear (ossicles), t
hen on to the hammer (malleus), then the anvil (incus), and then on into the labyrinth where eventually the sound passes through a liquid chamber where nerve impulses transmit to the brain.

  The internal mechanisms of my ear are intact.

  I can hear just fine.

  People ask: Can you get plastic surgery?

  I ignore it.

  In Japan where they have a cultural respect for martial arts it is seen as a badge of honor. Here, people just think it's ugly.

  Medical sources refer to it as a deformity, prescribe treatments: ice, drain, and pack tightly.

  What I hear is my father's story about wrestling in the national finals in Laramie, Wyoming. It's 1958—a year before I was born. Thirty seconds from the end of his final match, he's winning and he has a vision of himself stepping to the top of the awards podium and accepting the national championship plaque. The image floats there for a moment and then it's gone. A last-second takedown erases his lead and he loses 7–5.

  The vision, born in the old gym on the high desert plateau of Wyoming, blew east, across the western plains, and midwestern cornfields, and caught up with me when I was a boy in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Pennsylvania. It hovered above me until it became my dream. One day at my elementary school, the principal announced that the youth association was starting a wrestling team. I couldn't wait until the end of school. When I got off the bus that afternoon, I ran all the way home, clutching a sign-up sheet, and sat on the front door step until my father got home.

  It took me a long time to learn that wrestling was nothing but a fight with some rules to make sure nobody gets killed. It's a painful lesson, not just physical. I want to make my father proud, but early on, I get beat, and beat badly. I'm on my own.

  My father made a wrestling mat out of vinyl and foam rubber and vinyl tape he got from Knoll's design and development department. We rolled it up against the wall in our living room. We would unroll it twice a week to practice, my father putting my younger brother, Eric, and me through drills. He was an expert at the side roll and bottom wrestling in general, techniques that were nearly lost as American folkstyle later got closer and closer to freestyle—an international style. One night I got angry because I felt he was unfairly using more strength on me while letting Eric, who was younger and smaller, execute his moves with ease. I was about 12, a skinny kid. I weighed 75 pounds. We got in a flurry and I caught him off balance and shoved him into the wall, then I jumped up and threw a wild punch that grazed his head. He shook it off and then launched me into the air—my head skimmed the ceiling and my legs were moving before I hit the ground, and they didn't stop moving until I was up the stairs and in my room. A few minutes later, I was back on the mat, finishing the drill. Don't lose your composure was all he said. My ears burned with anger and the constant abrasion from the vinyl mat.

  It was just the beginning. From the time I was nine years old, wrestling hijacks my imagination. I dream of moves in my sleep. I walk through the days picturing my next match. I wrestle through elementary school and junior high school. Eastern Pennsylvania was a hot bed of wrestling and every weekend I faced opponents who went on to successful college wrestling careers. I got better, and then I got good. I started winning, but I was never a dominating wrestler, never did someone say: Man, that guy is great. That sort of notoriety eludes me, but it doesn't matter. I loved it. At first, I would make the finals of local tournaments, but end up second. Finally, I started to win.

  All that mat time primes the ear. It's a matter of repetition: a head butt, an elbow, bang, bang, bang, agitate the skin and the cartilage. All it will take is one solid hit and then: the big blowup. The ear as it was previously known will disappear.

  The ear isn't the only body part that takes a beating. I break my nose at least four times, tear ligaments in both ankles, snap my ACL, and tear cartilage in my knee and rib cage. I break my thumb—the same thumb I also dislocate—a dislocation so bad that when it happened all I could see of my thumb was the end of it with the fingernail sticking out of the other side of my palm. I almost puked. I held my hand up and my assistant coach snapped it back into place. Then my palm blew up to the size of a baseball. At the medical center, they shot my hand full of painkillers, and then a doctor cranked my thumb around in a full circle like it was the hour hand of a clock. "Yeah, I'd say you're done for a while," he said casually.

  One night freshman year, overheated and starved from trying to cut to 129, I stick my head out of my dorm window into a starless Michigan night and open my mouth to catch the snowflakes that sift silently to the ground.

  I once told my father I was going to Paris because I wanted to write and Paris was the place to go if you were young and wanted to write. He looked up, and squinting his eyes as if he was sighting a distant object, said: "If you want to write, go to Bayonne, New Jersey." Then he picked up a shovel and returned to tending his garden.

  His words have stayed with me all of these years although he had forgotten them long ago. At one point in the intervening years, I asked him if he remembered them; he said no. Clearly, he never gave the significance to those words that I did. They were a kind of sphinx's riddle to me, and I sensed that if I could grasp their meaning, I would have unlocked the secret to artistic success. I worshiped my father in the way that some sons do, so his words—not frequently or carelessly issued—had the gravity of important things.

  My wife, who is studying acupuncture, has a poster of an ear with all its acupuncture points hanging on a wall in our home office. In another picture in one of her textbooks, the image of a baby—a curled-up embryo—is superimposed over an ear. All the acupuncture points in an ear apply to the rest of the human body. Picture the image of a tiny baby tucked in your ear with its head nestled in your earlobe. There are hundreds of acupuncture points on the ear. You can treat the whole body through the ear. The ear is like some mystical spiral that unfolds into an entire body, everything flows through it.

  "Ear" is even part of my name—Pearson. I've seen it spelled other ways too, Pierson, and Pehrson, the Swedish version. The name made its way from its Nordic roots to Scotland, down through England, and then on to the States when my father's parents immigrated here from the border of Scotland and northern England in the 1930s.

  The lights flash in my eyes and leave spots. I blink, blink, blink, bridge, bridge. I'm skidding across the black mat on my face. The arena is upside down. I see feet, legs of chairs, then people sitting in them, my coaches. They're screaming something at me, but all I hear is my heart pounding in my ears, intermittent yells, thuds, my own strained breathing, an opponent clamped tight to my chest, breathing in my face. I'm wrapped tight, fighting off my back. It can't end here, I think—in a pigtail match at the Big Ten's.

  How'd I draw the pigtail? Loser is out of the tournament, no chance to wrestle back. I twist, arch, drive with my feet, punch my hand across my chest, and I'm on my stomach, but two minutes have expired. A minute to go in the first period and I'm already down by five. 0–5. No time to waste. What happened? He was in on my legs. I tried to throw some junk move, but not the way I usually did it. I hipped to the side instead of rolling straight back and kicking him over me.

  Five years of my coach yelling: "Don't throw that crap," so I went a different route. Bad time to experiment. I should have known. I get a one-point escape at the end of the first period to cut the lead to four. In the second period, I start to score, first an escape, then a takedown, but he escapes for one point. He has riding time from the eternity I fought off my back in the first period, and he scores just enough to stay ahead by 5–4 going into the third. He escapes in the third, to go up 6–4. He still has riding time, but I rode him enough to cut it down.

  I get over-aggressive, as the clock winds down, and he scores a takedown, I'm down by five again, but I escape, score a takedown, run down his riding time. He's too hard to turn, so I cut him loose, but before I can score, time expires. I lose 9–7, and my college career is over.

  W
alking down the hall one day to teach a class at the University of Georgia, a middle-aged man, gray hair, squat, crushed nose, paused as I passed and asked: Where did you wrestle ... what college? I had been lost in thought, reviewing the day's lesson, and his voice sounded alien in the polished corridor.

  As he spoke, I heard the familiar singsong dialect of the Pennsylvania Dutch—the rising inflection at the end of the sentence. Living in the South, I had nearly forgotten it. He was a coach from the athletic department, arranging a tutor for an athlete. When I told him I wrestled at Michigan, he said: You don't see many ears like that around here.

  I go to the acupuncture clinic for the pain in my hips and knees, residual effects from wrestling. The Chinese doctor sticks a needle into my hardened, thickened ear. It burns and I flinch. "Your ear is very special," she says. She seems to think it's congenital, some miraculous sign from a blessed birth, not from a violent blow to the head.

  "It's from an injury," I say.

  She nods, but I'm not sure she understands that there are wrestlers, boxers, rugby players, and others walking around with the same injury caused by some similar brutal collision. There's nothing miraculous or strange about it. It's a brutal trademark of a sport I sometimes love and sometimes hate. For days after the treatment, I can feel the place where the needle punctured my ear. It's a vague burning that makes me reach up and rub it. It feels too thick, almost alien, and reminds me of the past.

  One day, I see a Knoll sign in the window of a furniture store. I turn the car around at the next intersection and go in. Max Pearson is my father, I said to the store manager. She seemed mildly amused. We sell lots of your dad's chairs, she said.