The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  "Wait," said his father, emerging from the boy's bedroom, holding that dusty blue binder covered in stickers. "If you're going to be a sportswriter, you have to have a notebook."

  "Oh y-y-yeah," the boy said. "My n-n-notebook."

  And so he toted that binder to the baseball game, to a high school track meet the next day, somewhere new every weekend, wiping the dust off his giant glasses and pulling chewed pencils out of his wrinkled shirt pocket and filling that binder, reveling in words that worked, shouting in a voice that didn't stammer, adding exclamation points for the drama, Bobby Kleinart hit the heck out of that baseball for a home run off the concession stands for Westport Chevron, boxes of Good N' Plenty went flying, what a play!

  Soon the white pages became full, and so more pages were carefully added, more baseballs clearing the fence, more snacks falling out of the sky, words written by a nobody for nobody, words meaning everything, the binder and the boy growing together.

  "W-w-what is this?"

  The gift sat in the basement, unwrapped, shiny and cluttered and weird. It was an electric typewriter given to a ninth-grader who had no idea how to use it. This wasn't a Christmas present, it was a third-period class.

  "I-I-I can't type," the boy said.

  "But I can," his mother said. "Bring me your binder."

  Its stickers had worn down into bits of shiny strips, and its vinyl was cracked and frayed, but the binder's pages still exhaled the cluttered breath of scribbled observations—the Ballard High cross-country team is one tough cookie! His mother opened to his most recent story, turned a switch, started a strange whir, and began pecking.

  "W-w-what are you doing?" the boy said.

  "Don't you want this in that newspaper?" the mother said.

  Oh yeah. That newspaper. It was a neighborhood weekly that needed stories to fill the space between school announcements and mortuary ads. A month earlier, the boy visited their storefront offices, opening his binder, showing the balding old boss his stories, watching him slowly shake his head.

  "Your handwriting is terrible," the boss said. "Did you know that newspapers use typewriters?"

  He could not begin typing class until the summer, so his mother spent hours every weekend tapping his stories to life. He scribbled, and she typed, word for word, her third full-time job, sometimes falling asleep between paragraphs, but always finishing in time to say, "Great story" and "Let's go."

  Then, together, in the middle of every Sunday night, the mother and the boy would ride through the darkened city to that newspaper's storefront, where the boy would slide that week's stories into a mail slot, then rush back to the car for the relieved drive home, the sportswriter and his ghostwriter.

  "W-w-what is this?"

  The gift was covered in light blue tissue paper, held together with a frayed red ribbon. The young man opened it carefully, forced a smile, scratched his head.

  It was a scrapbook. But it was an empty scrapbook. It was two covers of ornate brown leather held together by dozens of empty pieces of gray construction paper. It was silly.

  "Th-th-this is great, but w-w-what's going in it?" the young man asked.

  "You," his grandmother said.

  So for the next seven years, she put him there, filling the scrapbook with everything the young man wrote, for now he was an amateur sportswriter being published in any newspaper that would have him. The grandmother carefully cut and pasted every volleyball feature, shuffleboard column, and flag football game story, everything from the neighborhood weekly, the high school newspaper, and soon even from the tiny college newspaper. She underlined phrases in her careful handwriting. She drew her own exclamation points after words with more than one syllable. The book grew fat and messy as she grew old and frail.

  The young man thought she was saving stories about other people. The grandmother knew better. She knew these would wind up being stories about a young man, chronicling his increased confidence, his diminished stammer, the slow realization of his dream.

  "Dad, what was your best gift ever?"

  The middle-aged man is sitting with his three children around a Christmas tree. He has been a sportswriter for more than half of his life now, still chasing that dream, still thankful it is a journey he has not taken alone. He looks at his children sitting amid the shiny torn wrapping paper, the kids covered in the solitary pleasures of iPods and Uggs and software programs that do things mothers and electric typewriters could never do. He wonders if he can ever give them what was given to him. He wonders if they will ever understand. One of them asks him again.

  "Dad, what was your best gift ever?"

  He looks up at a photo on the mantle. It is a 30-year-old family photograph. It contains the images of the father who still calls every other day to ask what he has in his notebook, the mother who now types him encouragement in emails, and the grandmother who died during his first year at one of this country's biggest newspapers. Before passing, she insisted that he stay on the job and skip her funeral. She insisted he write one more story for that scrapbook.

  "Daaad! What was your best gift! C'mon."

  He points to the photo. "They were," he said.

  New Mike, Old Christine

  Nancy Hass

  FROM GQ

  CHRISTINE HAD THE EYES all the girls wanted, translucent turquoise marbles fringed by strawberry blond lashes. And the smile. Wide and natural, but somehow coy and elusive too. You could work for years and not get that right. Her peach-colored blouse draped just so on her six-foot-one frame, the silky skirt skimming her calves. She had let her sun-streaked blond hair grow to chin length, and she helped it along by pinning on a little hairpiece that grazed her broad shoulders.

  Amy LaCoe was an earthier, more androgynous type. At 59, a decade older than Christine, she didn't even bother to dye her hair as she grew it out, just wore it straight and silver, and stuck to jeans and pastel cotton V-necks, with a modest pink cameo on a chain around her neck. Like the rest of the transition group at the Los Angeles Gender Center, she marveled at Christine's feline grace in the summer of 2006, how everyone seemed to turn toward her, unconsciously, like a source of heat on a cold day.

  Not that that would make it any easier for Christine when she went full-time, as she was planning to do in the coming year. Probably the opposite. The others had more marginal careers or at least less glamorous ones. Some were self-employed. Others, like Amy, a career counselor at a community college, could hide in academia, which was full of sympathetic hippie types. Christine's transformation from Mike Penner, a name that had appeared in the sports pages of the Los Angeles Times for 25 years as an NFL writer, an Angels beat reporter, a tennis columnist, was likely to be cataclysmic. Others could change their identity and never again speak their male names aloud, but a byline haunted you forever.

  Anyway, Christine, who had chosen her new name to honor Christine Jorgensen, the first well-known transsexual, and two iconic Chrissies, Evert and Hynde, had no intention of living in anonymity as a diner waitress in Fresno or a 7-Eleven clerk along the Las Vegas strip. Being a sportswriter at the Times was everything she had wanted since she was a boy back in Anaheim, interning at the local daily while still at Cal State Fullerton.

  But a transgender sportswriter? As a reporter, she knew it would be a big story. She remembered Renée Richards's transition in 1975, how the caustic tennis player who went to court to compete as a woman had been a media obsession for decades.

  And then there was Lisa to worry about. Most of the 10 or so in the group had wives, but none had a marriage as symbiotic as Mike Penner and Lisa Dillman's. They'd been together for two decades, ever since they fell in love covering the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows, New York. They even worked side by side—he'd long ago helped her move to the Times, where she covered tennis and had become the lead Olympics reporter. And because they'd never had children, they seemed even closer. Lisa played midfielder for the Scribes, a rec-league soccer team that Mike had cofounded and coached. On weekends their
apartment in Long Beach shook with the sounds of Mike's music—he followed punk and indie rock, everything from the Clash to Nirvana to the Rapture, as closely as he did his beloved Arsenal of the English Premier League, and regularly sent his pals mix CDs labeled with his own personal radio call letters, KPEN. When other couples had dinner with Mike and Lisa, listened to them retell the story of how they fell in love, the wives would fuss to their husbands: Look at them. So nice, so loving. Why can't we be like that?

  Lisa had known for years that her husband sometimes dressed as a woman, and she'd accepted it reluctantly as long as it was out of sight. But going full-time was a completely different thing, and Christine refused to dwell on how Lisa would react. Living without her was unthinkable, Christine told Amy on that first afternoon they went for something to eat after group. Lisa had been the best part of him for 20 years. Since they were kids. Since that day when he first met her, an open-faced midwestern girl barely out of her teens with Minneapolis Star Tribune press credentials dangling around her neck.

  Hadn't other wives made their peace and stayed on, Christine reasoned as the waitress brought them their blueberry pie. What about Jennifer Finney Boylan, the Colby College English professor and novelist who had written that memoir, She's Not There, detailing how her wife stuck by her? It would be hard, sure, but not impossible: Lisa would come around. Surely she would realize that it wasn't about her; it was something Christine had to do to survive. She was the same person inside. She still loved soccer and the Raconteurs. She still needed Lisa as much as Mike had, maybe more.

  Amy was quiet as the waitress refilled their coffees. In her experience, that just wasn't how it worked. The year before, when Amy told her wife of 39 years that she was a woman and planned to live as one, she had screamed obscenities and thrown Amy's estrogen tablets out the garage door. Called her a queer, a freak. Not that Amy blamed her for being upset. The poor woman hadn't signed on for this. Sure, she had known that Amy dressed on the sly for decades, that she kept plastic tubs of girl's things in the back of the station wagon. But hormones—that was too much. She had every right to expect to get old with the man she married, rely on retirement benefits from his job, play together with the grandkids, die with him. Amy couldn't imagine how Christine thought it would all work out. She would be transgendering in the same workplace as her wife, something no one in the group had ever heard of. Lisa might not be the type to heave things, but that didn't mean she was going to adjust to it and carry on with a woman for a husband.

  Still, it was hard not to get swept away by Christine's enthusiasm, her optimism. She clasped her hands to her chest at the sight of slingbacks that fit. She cooed at the flared poodle skirt on a rack at Countessa's Closet, a store in Studio City that catered to cross-dressers and transsexuals and let them keep lockers there. She never got tired of watching Legally Blonde. "I just feel so good," she would say, squeezing the arm of Amy's cardigan.

  "It was contagious," Amy recalled recently. "She could make you forget all the things you came in worried about."

  Maybe Christine would be the one in a million who could pull it off, Amy recalled thinking back then, watching Christine take out a compact—who used those anymore?—to put on fresh lipstick. Maybe she could do this and not lose everything. Wouldn't that be amazing?

  ***

  "Old Mike, New Christine." That's the headline the editors chose for her coming-out column, which ran on April 26, 2007. Christine spent much of the previous night on the phone with Susan Horn, a pal she had met through Countessa's Closet. Horn, 49, a former lawyer who had been living full-time as a woman since January 2006, stayed on the line with her as Christine paced the tiny studio on Sepulveda Boulevard in West L.A., where she'd moved a few months earlier, each of them checking the Internet compulsively to see if the news had leaked out. "She was terrified," recalled Horn. "She was sure the response would be devastating, brutal." The column began:

  I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words. I realize many readers and colleagues and friends will be shocked to read them.

  That's OK. I understand that I am not the only one in transition as I move from Mike to Christine. Everyone who knows me and my work will be transitioning as well. That will take time. And that's all right. To borrow a piece of well-worn sports parlance, we will take it one day at a time.

  The emails started streaming in at 2:00 A.M. By 6:00 P.M., there were more than 500, all but a handful supportive. Christine spent most of the day in tears, elated, says Horn. "She couldn't believe it; she just kept reading through them, weeping."

  At first she hadn't wanted to write about it at all. It had been hard enough to tell her boss, sports editor Randy Harvey, a guy she had known since the 1980s, when they had both come to the paper as young pups: Randy a hotshot from the New York Daily News, Mike from the Anaheim Bulletin, the shitty little hometown daily where he had been made sports editor at 23. But Harvey had taken the news with remarkable equanimity. Christine later marveled to friends that he leaned back in his chair and said simply, "Okay, wow, how are we going to deal with this?"

  Announcing the change to the entire world, though—that seemed overwhelming. Mike had never liked a lot of attention. Within the paper, he was widely acknowledged as one of the section's most stylish writers, a favorite of Harvey's but notoriously circumspect. Whatever emotion he had he seemed to put in his columns.

  "Everyone thought of him as incredibly talented and really kind but standoffish," said Larry Stewart, a Times sportswriter for more than 25 years until he was laid off in 2008. "Sometimes halfway through a sentence you'd lose him. His eyes would go to the ground, and you'd wonder what had happened."

  Christine's original plan was to retire the Mike Penner byline quietly and start writing as Christine Daniels a few weeks later. She had mapped out the timing during months of phone calls with Christina Kahrl, her guru in such matters. Kahrl, now 42, cofounded Baseball Prospectus, the stats bible, in 1996 and transitioned seven years later. She had done it gradually, without fanfare, and hadn't done interviews. The plan had worked well; Kahrl's transition had been as seamless as these things could be. The baseball world was just as eager for her pronouncements as it always had been. Her divorce was amicable; both her best man and the maid of honor remained her close pals.

  "I told Christine that there's attention from every corner of your real life when you do this, that that's hard enough to deal with," Kahrl, a tall redhead with a square jaw, subtle jewelry, and finely arched eyebrows, recalled over tropical cocktails and tapas in a restaurant near her home in Chicago in January. "I thought that writing a column, doing this all so publicly, was a terrible idea, and I blame the paper for that. Christine wasn't ready for what it would bring."

  But Harvey, a bearish man with gentle brown eyes, made a good argument. It was important for her to own the story, to control it, he told Christine. Otherwise, speculation would spread across the Internet like a fungus. "I knew she didn't want that 'gotcha' thing to happen," he said during an interview in his glassed-in office in the ornate, slightly bedraggled Times building downtown.

  Christine's wasn't the only awkward, painful transition at the paper in the spring of 2007. Just two weeks before, the ailing Tribune Company accepted a buyout offer from Sam Zell, the irascible real estate billionaire. The specter of an unpredictable new owner and more layoffs made an already grim newsroom funereal. In that context, Mike Penner's travails seemed downright uplifting. "It gave people something to feel good about, made everyone feel as though they were breaking ground," said Kahrl.

  "People figured that we were sports guys, that we'd be Neanderthals, but that just wasn't the case," said Harvey. "Sure, it was unusual and some people had questions, but this is a pretty sophisticated place."

  The reaction of Christine's own family was more mixed. Joan Penner had sent her son Mike to Catholic school for nin
e years, and she was horrified. The Dillmans didn't want anything to do with Christine either. But Christine's 42-year-old brother, John, who had followed Mike to the Anaheim Bulletin and now worked on the Times copy desk, was still talking to her, which she considered a great victory.

  The national press, of course, went nuts. Hundreds of newspapers and the networks picked up the story, flashing the stilted snapshot from Mike's ID badge next to a blurry photo of Christine. There were countless interview requests, from NPR to the Toronto Sun. Evan Wright, an award-winning Vanity Fair reporter, was dispatched to do a profile. David Kuhn, a well-known New York literary agent, pursued her to do a book.

  Christine was exhilarated by the response. "She really blossomed," said Harvey. Billy Witz, an L.A. Daily News sportswriter who played for the Scribes, asked her to help coach his nine-year-old daughter's soccer team, and to everyone's surprise, none of the parents objected. A couple of trans friends persuaded her to join them performing a number from Dreamgirls for an AIDS fund-raiser at a local church. The annual CD compilation, cheekily re-labeled KGAL, arrived on schedule as spring melted into summer. Long plagued by writer's block, Christine told people she had never felt more at home in her prose.

  She even took Harvey up on his offer to write a blog, A Woman in Progress, about her transition. She began spending more time in the office than she ever had as Mike, stopping by colleagues' desks to chat and flirt. She laughed easily, covering her mouth with a well-moisturized hand. When she interviewed Vin Scully, the legendary Dodgers announcer, for a front-page profile, she gushed to colleagues that it was the best day of her life. "She hugged me on the walkway when I ran into her," said Larry Stewart, the former Times sportswriter. "She seemed really ecstatic."