The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  This Jill could do. She'd always liked being in charge. One of her first phrases as a toddler was, Me do. Not long after, she began bossing around her older brothers. The way Jill saw it, life was too short to wait for things to come to you. While most of her teammates at Cal had a tough enough time juggling crew and school, Jill worked with Habitat for Humanity, was in a sorority, and was vice president of the Panhellenic Council, which governs campuswide Greek life. At times her mother, Mary, found Jill's intensity exhausting. Even when shopping for clothes, Jill wouldn't buy a pair of pants unless they were perfect.

  Such traits might have been grating in someone else, but pretty much everyone liked Jill. How could you not? If you looked sad, she'd puff out her cheeks, pull out her tiny ears, and make monkey faces until you laughed. If you were the new kid, she was the first to come up and start a conversation. When her roommate and best friend at Cal, K. C. Oakley, left school for a semester to go to Colorado, Jill texted her every day to say good morning and good night. It was Jill who nicknamed Cal crew head coach Dave O'Neill "the Coif" for his gravity-defying puff of blond hair and did a perfect imitation of the "jiggle-jaw" face he made when exasperated. (From anyone else O'Neill might have chafed at the jokes, but his bond with Jill was so strong that he asked her to be the godmother of his son, Dash.)

  A goofball? Sure, but a dedicated one. As a sophomore Jill went to the DMV and took the test for a Class B license so she could drive the team van, and then she rose at 5:30 A.M. six days a week to pick up rowers for practice. And while most coxes avoid workouts—after all, their only physical requirement is to make weight (110 pounds for women)—Jill joined the team for cardio sessions and training runs. "She's as good an athlete as I've ever had as a coxswain," says O'Neill.

  That's why no one thought twice about her stomach pain, including Jill. It came as a shock, then, when Linda "Smitty" Smith, the team trainer, told her that Friday after nationals, "Got some bad news, Jill. Turns out your lab tests are out of whack. Your white blood cell count is pretty high. You need to get to an ER, and you need to do it tonight. It's probably nothing serious, but better safe than sorry."

  Jill called her mother and her aunt Kathy Morello, both nurses, and they drove her to the emergency room at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. There Jill received a blur of diagnoses, each more frightening than the next: first she was told she had a serious infection, then grapefruit-sized cysts on her ovaries, and, a few hours later and most ominously, masses in her lung, liver, clavicle, and one breast. Radiologists came from across the hospital to peer at the results, disbelieving: a perfectly healthy 21-year-old nonsmoker with no family his lory of the disease had lung cancer, which three days later would be diagnosed as stage IV, the most advanced form. In just a few days Jill had gone from being a carefree college student to being told she probably had nine months to live.

  There is no such thing as a good cancer, but lung cancer is just about the worst. The survival rate is 15.5 percent, and making matters worse, the disease comes with a stigma. Patients with lung cancer are assumed to have earned it, having inhaled toxins for years. Yet 20 percent of women diagnosed with lung cancer each year—about 21,000 in 2010, roughly the same number as new cases of ovarian cancer—never smoked. Because of lung cancer's reputation as a self-i nduced illness and its low survival rate, it rarely attracts big research money. In the last 40 years the survival rate hasn't budged.

  Theoretically, at least, Jill stood as good a chance as anyone else of surviving. She was young and fit, so she could endure treatments that most other patients—whose average age is 71—couldn't. The chemo began within the week. Jill was told, as she wrote in her on-line journal, to use only baby shampoo and soft toothbrushes, to get those protein shakes down and that weight up, to try on this wig and that hat, and to stock up on a list of drugs so long you'd think I was a dealer. Her summer plans went from hiking in Tahoe to being spoon-fed blueberries in bed by Aunt Kathy.

  When she asked her doctors about rejoining the team, they looked at her as if she were crazy. Crew? She'd need all her strength just to make it through each day. Jill didn't care. She told her mom she saw cancer as "just another thing on my plate." Besides, she'd had three goals for the better part of her adult life: to graduate from Cal, to cox the first boat, and to win nationals. She saw no reason to change them.

  Rowing appeals to certain personality types. Converted swimmers do well at it, for example, because they are accustomed to monotonous practices. As O'Neill says, "It's a fitness sport, not a skill sport," which is another way of saying it's about desire. Consider: Cal has one of the best programs in the country, but its team includes both Olympians and women who are just discovering crew—as if the 12th man on the Duke basketball team were learning the game a month before the season.

  The rewards are few. Crew has no professional league, no endorsement contracts, little glory even at big events. Rare is the sports fan who can name even one Olympic rower. What's more, crew is rooted in suffering. As David Halberstam wrote in The Amateurs, his excellent book about 1984 Olympic hopefuls, "It was part of the oarsman's unwritten code that one did not mention the pain. That was considered unseemly and, worse, it might magnify the pain and make it more threatening and more tangible. It was as if by not talking about it, the pain might become less important."

  Few sports, then, rely so much on inner fortitude. It is the coxswain's job to intrude upon each rower's silent battle, to find a way to get the most out of eight disparate personalities. O'Neill, a former rower at Boston College, understands the difficulty of this task. A thin, energetic 41-year-old whose staccato laugh masks the seriousness with which he approaches his job, O'Neill likes to say that "there is no defense in rowing." So while bitter rival Stanford has sent assistant coaches to scout Cal—marking the team's splits and the timing of its "moves" (power strokes)—O'Neill never changes strategy from race to race. He likens his approach to that of a golfer who plays the course, not the opposition. (O'Neill even refers to rival crews not by their school names but by their colors: Stanford is Red. Virginia is Orange.)

  When it all comes together and eight oars are in sync, a crew can reach a Zenlike moment referred to as swing, when the boat seems to lift out of the water. This, more than anything, is the goal of rowing, when the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. O'Neill's job is to put together boats that can achieve this chemistry, and it is a constant juggling act. At major competitions such as nationals, points are awarded to each boat in three 2,000-meter races: the varsity eight (the boat with the eight strongest oars and the top coxswain), the second eight, and, finally, the four, a smaller craft with only four rowers in which the cox must lie supine in the bow. This means that from his pool of almost 50 rowers O'Neill can choose only 20 to compete, and from his eight coxswains, only three.

  More so than most crew coaches, O'Neill recruits coxes. If a prospect is shy, she doesn't stand a chance. He wants a firm handshake and a ready opinion. He wants leaders who are prepared to sacrifice for the team, and he's a staunch believer that there is no place in crew for prima donnas. When recruits ask him what it's like to be on the Cal team, O'Neill is fond of saying, "In one word: hard. In two words: really hard."

  This is his way of weeding out the women who aren't sure about the sport or who want to gain admission to Cal through crew and then, a year later, quit the team. When he gave Jill his one-word, two-words speech, she didn't blink.

  "Cool," she said. "That's the kind of team I want to be on."

  There are plenty of clichés about team sports, about the mystical nature of bonding and camaraderie. Sometimes they're even true. When Jill learned of her diagnosis, most of her teammates had already gone home for the summer. For many that meant Los Angeles; for others, such as Iva Obradovic, an Olympic-level rower, it meant Serbia. Still, within weeks, under the guidance of O'Neill, the team had filmed and sent her two videos. One was a collage of testimonials, the other an inspired mélange of karaoke an
d air guitar to the tune of Andrew W.K.'s feel-good song "Got to Do It." As W.K. sang, "When you're down on your luck, you gotta do it," rowers strummed their oars and assistant coaches played the drums on steering wheels. Watching from her hospital bed, IV lines protruding from her arms, Jill was overcome by emotion.

  The support was only beginning. When Jill went home from the hospital, she felt as if the team had gone with her. During that summer and fall the Costellos' modest two-story house in southwest San Francisco often looked like a commune. Twenty, 30 kids—Cal rowers, Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sisters, classmates from St. Ignatius, friends from the Bears' rugby team—camped out there. The Costellos would return from chemo appointments to find piles of food on their doorstep, full meals of salad and pasta and chicken. Letters and emails poured in from rowers at Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Rivalries evaporated on the spot. The Stanford coach contacted Jill and said, "Whatever you need, just let me know." Her response: help her get in touch with this one oncologist at Stanford. Within a week the president of the university had assigned his assistant to Jill. Give her whatever access she needs, he said.

  On June 14 Jill began a blog just so she could keep everyone up to date. In unflinching detail she described her treatment: the radiation and the body molds and the chemo. Well, it's Day 11, one entry read, and despite the warnings to prepare for extreme nausea, vomiting, low platelet count, depression, poor appetite, constipation, mouth sores, and numbness/tingling, I've just been dealing with some aches and fatigue. I guess this cancer wasn't aware that I'm used to doing six-minute elbow bridges, have sat in the bow of a boat in eight inches of freezing water for an entire two-hour practice, have climbed Half Dome three times in under 3V hours, and can hold my own as 60 girls attack a feast of Kappa study snacks during finals.

  While some patients might be embarrassed by the invasive treatments, Jill, ever the competitor, considered it a source of pride to weather each new round. That's why she had her mom and aunt keep track of every pinprick and every IV, the numbers scratched into a notebook. Then, when those became too numerous, she settled for a record of every treatment. When the alumni magazine at St. Ignatius wrote up her story and sent her an advance copy, she read it with pride, then immediately emailed the writer. Thanks for the story, she wrote, but you got the number of treatments wrong. It's 14, not 9.

  Just as she had directed her boat, Jill now drove her treatment. She spent hours researching drugs. She emailed two top oncolo-gists at UC San Francisco so often and struck up such a relationship with them that she began her messages, "Hi, boys!" With Heather Wakelee, the Stanford oncologist, she exchanged texts and took particular glee in pointing out whenever a Cardinal team lost.

  As all-encompassing as her treatments were, though, Jill couldn't get rowing out of her mind. When school started again in the fall her teammates began informal 6:00 A.M. workouts. While the rest of Berkeley sipped Peet's coffee and blinked its way through the fog, 50 young women in spandex met in the ergonomic room, a cold, bare space under the track stadium. As techno music thumped, the girls warmed up and, on O'Neill's cue, all began to row as one, like one giant organism with ponytails. Jill used to love those moments, walking from machine to machine, offering encouragement, checking erg scores, and then, when the workout was done, drawing laughs by mimicking her friends, the tiny girl on the big rowing machine. Now, staring out at the Pacific during short walks on the beach with her mom, Jill thought about being on the water again. O'Neill had told her he'd save a spot on the team for her. What he didn't expect was that she'd take him up on it.

  The winter brought encouraging news: the mass in her liver had shrunk, as had the tumor in her left lung. Still, the unrelenting treatments were taking a toll. Jill was back living on campus and taking two classes, but she spent a lot of time napping and used a scooter to get from class to class. The only way I can describe the fatigue, she wrote, is like waking up the morning after running a marathon, but not having trained for the marathon, so your whole body is sore, weak, and achy. Most of all, she hated not being able to schedule her life.

  She had delighted in organizing her world, color-coding and endlessly updating the calendar on her iPhone, but now she was at the mercy of her body. She'd been the kind of girl who told her boyfriend at Cal, Bryce Atkinson, a tall and handsome former rower, to start planning a Saturday-night date a week ahead of time. Funny story, how they met. She'd chased Atkinson down when she was a sophomore, back when he was intent on not having a girlfriend. "Here's my number," she said one night, smiling and holding out a piece of paper. "You better use it." He was smart enough to comply. The two bonded over rowing, spent weekends in Tahoe, nights eating sushi. By junior year he was at every one of her meets, roaring from the shore.

  Now, knowing it sounded nuts, Jill was telling Atkinson and her former roommate, Oakley, that she wanted to rejoin the crew team. She needed the connection. She'd kept in touch with her teammates during what they called "family dinners," at which a core of seniors and juniors would meet at someone's house each week. At one she brought the body mold she'd used during radiation treatments to use as a piñata. The rowers all took turns swinging at it, as if trying to smash the cancer right out of Jill.

  In February she talked to O'Neill about returning. There would be plenty of obstacles. She'd be weak and susceptible to the tiniest illnesses—a common cold, for instance, could lead to pneumonia. And first, of course, she needed to convince her doctors and family that she could handle the rigors of competition.

  Jill's biggest concern, however, was whether it would be unfair for her to return if she couldn't attend all the practices. "Look," said O'Neill, "you're the only coxswain we've got who's competed at NCAAs. You're the most experienced. If Iva got hurt and she couldn't practice until a week before Pac-10s, would she compete?" Jill nodded. O'Neill paused, then said, "Well, you're the Iva of coxswains."

  Her first practice back was a Saturday morning in early March at Briones Reservoir, 15 minutes from the Cal campus. The team began with a two-mile jog, from the boathouse to the reservoir entrance and back. Jill sat in the boathouse clutching a cup of tea and watched as, one mile out, her teammates began changing color. All 50 of them tore off their sweatshirts to reveal yellow T-shirts that read CAL CREW CANCER KILLERS. All doubts she had about her decision vanished in the cool morning air.

  After Jill's first practice the girls in her boat went up to O'Neill. Jill, they told him, had been awesome. Not because she was courageous or because she had made it through practice. Rather, because she was now a better coxswain. And as the weeks went on, O'Neill realized the rowers were right. He likes to say that there are three types of coxswain: the motivator, always rah-rah; the drill sergeant, ever demanding peak performance; and the airline pilot, cool and collected. Her first three years, Jill was more of a motivator, but now she had become an airline pilot. Maybe it was the cancer, maybe it was maturity, maybe it was a combination of the two. No matter what happened—a missed stroke, a slow start—Jill did not change her tenor. It would all be okay, she seemed to say.

  Then there'd been the matter of her timing. For someone whose job was to call out the stroke rate—some schools' coxes say, Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! but Cal used a call of Cha! Sha!—Jill had terrible rhythm. She was always losing the flow of it, like a wallflower at a party hopelessly trying to snap along to a song. So at O'Neill's urging, she just stopped doing it. Watching the team in erg sessions, he'd noticed that the girls could maintain a rhythm without prompting.

  O'Neill's other concern had been that Jill's illness might prove a distraction. That was clearly not going to be an issue. Not only did she refuse to use cancer as a crutch, but she didn't even talk about it. Before the first weekend of racing, in early April, Jill endured a round of chemo at Stanford on Friday, then called O'Neill—not to opt out of practice that afternoon but to say she'd be 20 minutes late because her treatment went long. The same day another rower called O'Neill to say she needed to skip practice: she had a f
ever of 99.1 degrees.

  Smitty, the trainer, kept a close watch on Jill, expecting to be called upon often. She never was. "Honestly, Jill did not require anything of us," Smitty says. "She took care of the rest of us. She let us know if treatment was going to interfere with something we were going to do. She didn't want to focus on the illness or on her. Her attitude was, I am a member of this team and nothing more. She wanted to be like every other kid." In a way, Jill was finally like her teammates. By not talking about it, the pain might become less important.

  By March, Jill had survived 14 rounds of chemo. The side effects included fatigue, night sweats, skin sensitivity, puffy cheeks, liquid retention, and swollen ankles and feet. Still, her attitude remained upbeat. I'm going to keep on believing, JILL IS HEALTHY! until the doctors tell me I'm absolutely right, she wrote.

  The news relayed by the doctors got progressively worse, though. Scans in March showed that the masses in her left lung and her liver had grown, and a new mass had appeared in her right lung. Hoping for a miracle, Jill had applied in December to be one of about 40 people chosen to go with the Knights of Malta, a charitable group affiliated with the Catholic Church, to Lourdes, France, where the water at the Grotto of Massabielle is said to have healing powers. She was accepted and, with her mother and aunt, prepared to travel there for a week at the end of April and beginning of May. There was only one downside: she'd miss the season-ending Stanford meet.

  So while Cal prepared to race its hated rival, half a world away Jill followed the team on Twitter and Facebook. When she saw a photo of the Cal uniforms for the race, she gasped. O'Neill had ordered special unitards in turquoise—Jill's favorite color—and navy rather than the familiar yellow and blue. Where there is usually a Cal bear, an emblem the girls like to focus on while rowing, there was now a silhouette of Jill, modeled after a photo of her taken the previous spring at nationals, holding high the team trophy. And where it usually read CAL in cursive, it now read JILL. The women's oars were also turquoise and navy. Inspired, the team swept Stanford. Jill read the news and danced around her hotel room.