The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  But then—and even the cops couldn't figure out why—Harrison answered questions at the Central Detectives Division for about an hour, accompanied by his lawyer, Jerome Brown, and his stepfather. When it was over, he signed each page of a typed seven-page statement: a single M for "Marvin," its points like the peak of a crown.

  In the statement, excerpted here for the first time, Harrison admits that his fight with Pop took place "five to ten minutes before" the shooting. He says that immediately before he heard the gunshots, he was "sitting in the doorway of my garage." The detectives ask him if Pop had a gun that day. Harrison says "no." In his own words, then, Harrison establishes his motive, puts himself at the scene of the crime, and eliminates any possible self-defense defense.

  The real doozy, though, is that Harrison admits to continuous and unbroken custody of the gun.

  Q. When was the last time you or anyone else fired your FN 5.7-caliber handgun?

  A. Probably the day that I bought it.

  Q. What day was that?

  A. In 2006 or 2007.

  Q. Where do you store this weapon?

  A. In a safe at my home in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.

  Q. Today, you had it at the car wash? Do you know how it got there?

  A. I brought it today, 20 minutes before you came.

  Q. Are you saying that the 5.7-cal. handgun that you own was in the safe at your home up until today, when you decided to bring it to your shop in the 2500 block of Thompson Street?

  A. Yes.

  That yes is the sound of a trap snapping shut. Harrison says his gun hasn't been fired since 2006 or 2007. That's impossible. Fresh casings exist, so the gun had to have been fired. But by whom? Harrison says he doesn't know. All he knows is that the gun couldn't have been lent or stolen, because it was locked away the whole time in his suburban safe. Only it couldn't have been in the safe either, because it had to have made an appearance at the corner of 25th and Thompson.

  Harrison's story makes no sense.

  On May 2, three days after the shooting, Robert Nixon contacted the police. It went against his instinct, but he felt he was out of options. He was scared.

  According to Nixon, who spoke to me in November—his first interview with a reporter—he was scared because he had been contacted by intermediaries of Marvin Harrison. The intermediaries offered to pay for surgery to remove the bullet. And if Nixon stayed away from the police, he says, they might also compensate him. He was ready to make a deal: "I really wanted it to be over." Then, according to Nixon, he was summoned to a meeting in West Philly—specifically, in the woods across from the Philadelphia Zoo—at 2:00 A.M. Nixon shut off his phone. The next thing he knew, news of the shooting was all over the papers, and his voice mail was filling with threats: "You think you slick. We gonna kill you."

  There was no way for Nixon to know if the threats were serious, he told me. That was the problem. Nixon was a low-level hustler. He was overweight and shuffling, with eyes hidden behind heavy glasses and a low, scratchy voice. Even his transgressions were small-time: weed, cough syrup, pills. He was a nobody, and he knew it. But now he had a Very Important Bullet in his back. The gap in wealth and stature between Marvin Harrison, a pillar of the community, and Robert Nixon created an inherently unstable situation. Harrison wouldn't have to say a word for something bad to just ... happen. "The streets pick it up," says Malik Aziz, a North Philly activist who spent 10 years in jail for dealing drugs. "Some a-hole, he's puttin' pressure down there? You'd be surprised how many people would take care of it, just on general principle."

  On May 3, then, Robert Nixon sat down with detectives and prosecutors at the office of the Philadelphia district attorney and gave a formal statement. He told them about the fight in front of the water-ice stand, Harrison and his guns, and the aborted meeting at the zoo. Afterward, he was placed in protective custody in a downtown hotel, and detectives started to kick the tires on his story.

  There were a few discrepancies. For one thing, Nixon claimed that Harrison had two guns—same as Pop had eventually claimed, despite his initial stonewalling—but the neat, even spacing of the recovered shells along the street convinced the cops that the shooter had been gripping a single gun with two hands on the stock, keeping it steady. Then there was the tale of the zoo meeting. According to one source close to the investigation, it didn't happen the way Nixon claimed. It wasn't Harrison's people who asked to meet Nixon at the zoo at 2:00 A.M. It was Nixon who asked them, in a ploy to suss out their intentions; thugs from North Philly never go to West Philly, and vice versa, so Nixon only suggested the meeting spot in West Philly because he thought they'd never agree. When they said yes, that's when he knew he was in trouble and panicked. (Nixon denies this.)

  The cops, however, saw these as minor flaws in a largely truthful tale. The crucial story beats were 100 percent verifiable. Through hospital records, detectives verified that Nixon sought treatment for the bullet wound on May 1. They talked to the cop who had originally patted Nixon down, and the cop remembered him, placing him at the scene. Overall, Nixon's story proved "incredibly consistent," according to one detective who interviewed him multiple times. It also matched up well with the statements from the other witnesses. "They all had different pieces of the same story," the detective says. "And here's a case where you don't need to believe anybody." You have a gun. You have casings. You have ballistic tests. You have Harrison's own words. You have probable cause for an arrest warrant. But the prosecutors saw the case differently. They had been burned before by witnesses who changed their stories between the interview and the trial. (Their last big case against a Philly athlete, a 2002 gun charge involving Allen Iverson, blew up when a key witness recanted his story.) During "balls-out fuckin' arguments" with cops, the Philly prosecutors fixated on the criminal records of the witnesses and slight discrepancies in their statements. They thought it would be hard to win the case on the backs of such blatant pieces of shit.

  Piece of shit is a versatile bit of law enforcement slang. It can mean something as specific as "hustler with a record" or it can mean something rounder, like "person who won't cooperate with us" or "person who lied to us" or "person who will not be trusted by a jury." All of the witnesses, for various reasons, could be grouped under this same heading. Nixon was a piece of shit. Pop was a piece of shit. The father of the wounded boy was a piece of shit. McCray was a piece of shit, albeit an intelligent piece of shit, because he never signed a statement. And Harrison, although he had no record, was a piece of shit too. The prosecutors and cops were in agreement on the piece-of-shit front; the only difference was that the cops believed that there were degrees, with Robert Nixon being what one of them called "the least piece of shit."

  The cops also thought it was wrong to drop the case just because a piece-of-shit famous person might be guilty of shooting a piece-of-shit unfamous person in a piece-of-shit part of the city. If prosecutors required every witness to have a pristine record, one detective says, "most of the cases in the city wouldn't be solved." None of the cops doubted for a second that if Harrison was a plumber or a UPS driver instead of a famous athlete, he'd have long since been arrested. "Everybody has their career-anticipation light on with this," says veteran Philadelphia detective Michael Chitwood, now a police chief in Florida. "'If I go forward with this and this guy's found not guilty, I may not get promoted'...and I just think that's wrong."

  In the end, though, it wasn't the cops' call. It was Lynne Abraham's. After investigating the Harrison case for more than eight months, the veteran Philly DA called a press conference on January 6, 2009. A diminutive woman with frosty white hair, Abraham has built her career on making life miserable for "punks with guns." Toughness is her brand. But at her press conference, at which no detectives were present, she spent much of her time impugning the credibility of the witnesses who had cooperated (Nixon, Dixon) and lamenting the ones who had not (the father of the two-year-old boy, who never spoke to police; anyone else who may have seen the broad-dayli
ght shooting). The case would not be going forward, Abraham said, due to "multiple, mutually exclusive, inherently untrustworthy, and sometimes false statements by the people present." (Abraham declined to be interviewed for this story.)

  As for Nixon, he was back on the street. The DA had apparently forgotten to pay his hotel bill after a month, so he wandered off.

  "I'm gonna get Lynne Abraham if it kills me." This is Pop's mother, Pearl Bronson, a middle-aged woman wearing gray Nikes and her braided hair back in a bun. "I truly believe that because Lynne Abraham did not arrest that son of a bitch, my son is dead," she tells me, eyes aflame. "Just like she pulled the trigger herself."

  On January 28, three weeks after Abraham's press conference, one of her deputies prosecuted Pop for making a false report to the police. It was surreal, carnivalesque—like when Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face and the friend apologized for getting in the way of Cheney's bullet. The judge imposed six months' probation. Pop was already on probation for another case, and the conviction meant he had to go to jail; he was briefly handcuffed, then immediately released pending appeal.

  Before that day, Pop seemed willing to let the system give him some measure of justice. He was suing Harrison in civil court for damages. Pearl overheard him one night talking on the phone; he mentioned Harrison's name, then said, "I'm gonna let it go, let my lawyer take care of it." But to be shot and prosecuted? Especially while Harrison walked the city a free man and the street was abuzz about how Pop had been punked? They were laughing at him. He told a friend, "He's not gonna run me out of my neighborhood."

  Pop made it a point to eat breakfast every day at the Chopstick & Fork, a diner on 28th and Girard, half a block from Playmakers. Pop didn't live anywhere near the Chopstick & Fork. Even to sit down over some eggs and pancakes was an act of defiance.

  On July 21, 2009, according to surveillance video captured from a nearby convenience store, Pop emerged from the Chopstick & Fork and walked to his car. He looked over his shoulder, then got into his car and made a phone call. Three minutes later, a six-foot-tall man in a black hoodie and white sneakers ran up to the driver's side and shot Pop multiple times through the window. Then the man sprinted around the hood to the passenger side and shot Pop again. The shooter fled.

  Pop spent the next two months in Hahnemann Hospital, a tracheostomy tube jammed into his windpipe, able to communicate with his family only by blinking. He died on September 4, 2009.

  According to multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation, the primary suspect in Pop's murder was initially Lonnie Harrison, Marvin's cousin. Acting on a tip, police searched Lonnie's apartment, looking for a gun. The apartment was a tiny room above Deborah's Kitchen, the soul-food restaurant on Girard run by Marvin's mother and aunt. But Lonnie hadn't been living there for a year. There was no gun or any other evidence to tie him to the murder, and no witnesses have ever come forward to identify Lonnie or anyone else as the shooter. On the convenience-store video, the shooter's face was obscured by shadow, making a positive identification impossible.

  The cops recovered a second surveillance tape, but it, too, was inconclusive. It came from Playmakers. This tape, according to police, showed a man crossing in front of the bar on 28th Street just below Girard. Detectives felt certain that it was the same man they had seen on the convenience-store tape: the shooter, walking toward the scene of the crime. But just as the man got close enough to the camera to bring his face into focus, the tape went blank—and skipped the next three minutes. "There are no coincidences," says one police source. "For the previous hour, that camera picked up every movement, and then it happens to go blank just at that moment?"

  In Indianapolis, when Marvin was still playing football, he ate most of his meals at a small cluster of fast-food joints off the highway. There was a Wendy's, a McDonald's, a sub shop, and a Chinese buffet. "This is me, right here," he once told ESPN's Suzy Kolber, who was riding shotgun in his car. "If Wendy's has a long line, I go right across the street to Mickey D's." He smiled, rubbed his hands. "That's how it works."

  The Kolber clip is on YouTube, and it's an amazing thing, because you get to see Marvin in a rare affectionate mood. He's talking about the perfect order of his world, from his mealtime routine to the way he keeps his favorite snack foods secreted around his condo. "Pillsbury Doughboy," he sighs, hefting a tube of cookie dough in the freezer. "Me and him get along just fine." Everything is in its right place. He seems so happy.

  How, then, did such a careful man end up making such a mess? What happened to him back home in Philly?

  It's a sunny afternoon in November, and I've gone to see a man I hope can give me some answers. I'm sitting in a white room in a prison I'm not allowed to name. I'm not allowed to name the prison because the man I've come to interview says he fears his fellow inmates might assault him if they knew he was the guy who snitched on Marvin Harrison.

  Robert Nixon's jeans are scuffed. His hands are folded in his lap. His glasses give him a sort of professorial, beatnik vibe—a pudgier version of Cornel West. He calls me "sir." In fact, Nixon is deferential to the point of meekness until the moment I ask him about Pop's murder. Does he think it was meant to send a message to any other potential witnesses? "Are you kidding?" Nixon says, startled. "Do you think it was a message?" Nixon shoots a look to his attorney, Wadud Ahmad, a powerfully built black man who is sitting in on our interview, and the two of them explode into howls of laughter, as if I just asked the dumbest question in the history of white people.

  Nixon is here on a misdemeanor drug conviction. Perversely, he says he's glad for it. "That's probably the best thing that happened to me. That's how fucked-up my life is with this. [Jail is] the safest place for me." Nixon says he would move himself and his family to another city if he could afford it, but he can't. He's now suing Harrison in civil court, claiming damages from the shooting.

  Nixon's civil suit is only one of several dangling threads in Marvin Harrison's life. There's also the civil suit filed by Pop, which is still alive even though Pop is not. If the lawyers in the two civil suits get a chance to depose Marvin Harrison, Harrison's words could, in theory, be used against him by prosecutors down the line. In January, Lynne Abraham stepped down after almost 20 years, making way for the incoming DA, Seth Williams, a young, passionate reformer with a grassroots political base. (Williams, who is black, has not commented on the Harrison case.) Harrison could avoid the depositions by settling the cases. As of press time, though, he hadn't done that. Nor had he announced his definitive retirement from football, though no team has demonstrated much interest in his services, given his declining stats and aging knees.

  Say this for Marvin Harrison: he tried to be his own person. He succeeded on a level that most of us can only dream of reaching. But he either never realized or flat-out denied the destabilizing effect of his presence in a poor and desperate part of the city. Much as he insisted that he was a normal working person like any other, he was never going to be seen that way. He was always going to be a target for the hopes, resentments, and ambitions of other people, a reality that rippled and swirled around him in unpredictable ways. And the proof is still there, scattered across the city, for anyone who cares enough to look.

  "Can I see it?" I ask Robert Nixon.

  There in the prison, Nixon pulls up his shirt. I spot it immediately. A dark bruise, oval-shaped. Remarkably clean-edged. Dark-bordered and slightly lighter in the center. Six inches from his jugular. I press my index finger into the bruise's soft center. I can feel the bullet. So close. So lightly embedded. As if I could pop it out with the slightest scrape of my fingernail. Not a hustler's tale, not a prayer uttered and revoked, but a truth awaiting a seeker.

  Old College Try

  Tom Friend

  FROM ESPN.COM

  THE RIM AND DARRYL DAWKINS used to have a relationship. They would meet at night, in crowded gyms across America, and each time, young, crass, muscle-bound Dawkins would beg the rim to go home with him. He'd taunt
it, attack it, and swing on it, but the rim always had the last laugh—until the 1979 night in Kansas City when he tore a backboard to a thousand pieces.

  The closest witness, Bill Robinzine (God rest his soul), had to have his head checked for glass. Dawkins's 76ers teammate Steve Mix rushed to the locker room, dug out a camera, and snapped pictures. Their coach, Billy Cunningham, bitched and moaned about the 90-minute delay. Dawkins, thrilled to see the rim fractured on the floor, did what he does best: he gave his slam a formal name.

  If You Ain't Groovin' Best Get Movin'—Chocolate Thunder Flyin'—Robinzine Cryin'—Teeth Shakin'—Glass Breakin'—Rump Roastin'—Bun Toastin'—Glass Still Flyin'—Wham Bam I Am Jam!

  It was a night the earth moved, just a little, and the NBA was never the same. The league ushered in breakaway rims later that season, and hanging on to the basket became taboo and/or a technical foul. It was the Dawkins Rule—he would live in infamy now—and young Darryl celebrated the moment by crowning himself "The Master of Disaster."

  But time moves on, ruthlessly, and 30-odd years later, 53-year-old Darryl Dawkins is standing in an obscure Pennsylvania gym, glaring at a basket, thinking the strangest, damnedest thing:

  I'm not sure I can dunk.

  The Man from Lovetron

  You evolve. Your body and mind change. A lot of players, coaches, and writers made predictions about "Chocolate Thunder," about how his life would turn out—and it's crazy how many were dead wrong.