by Glenn Stout
No, Xavier finally said.
No: Wes was their season. It lived and died with him. They coexisted in perfection. They should be buried together, undisturbed, in a field west of town, by a wall of maples, under a heart-shaped headstone.
No? Let’s ask his parents, someone said.
Gary and Jocelyn were mourning in their house with the television off when Coach Klingler came to call.
Yes, Jocelyn said, without hesitation.
Yes: Wes would have wanted them to play. No matter the sport, he always wanted one more game. If he could play football with a busted shoulder and basketball with a double-sized heart, his fellow Blackhawks could play through a few tears.
Xavier and some other players slept at the Leonards’ house for the next week or so, up the dogleg hallway from the carpeted garage gym with the indoor hoop where he and Wes used to play in their socks. They spent time with Wes’s 13-year-old brother, Mitchell, who played on the Fennville junior high basketball team. Xavier slept all he could, just to turn his mind off, because he knew his days as sixth man were over. It was a simple matter of subtraction. On Monday the boy who wanted to bury the season would replace his best friend in the starting lineup.
If Maria could wait three bone-aching hours in line for tickets at the Hope College field house, afraid of being trampled, begging people not to jostle her, conspiring with her younger son to hustle for a good seat, as if it were the Oklahoma land rush—
If Gary and Jocelyn could show their faces for the television cameras with their 16-year-old son not yet in the ground—
If the Trappist monks of New Melleray Abbey in rural Iowa could build a walnut casket from their own sustainable forest and send it free of charge 365 miles to Fennville in a minivan that drove through the night—
If the opposing Lawrence Tigers could look at Wes in that casket one day and still try to beat his team the next—
Then maybe Xavier could hold it together.
His stomach churned as he knelt before the scorer’s table, waiting to check in as a ceremonial substitute. No matter: everyone knew he was starting at point guard, just as Wes would have done.
Nine boys stood at midcourt, wiping dust from the soles of their shoes.
The substitution buzzer sounded.
Now entering the game for the Fennville Blackhawks, number 33, Xavier—
Applause drowned out the announcer’s voice. Xavier had never heard such a crowd: about 3,500 people, more than double the population of Fennville, most of them screaming for the Blackhawks.
Xavier looked shaky on the first possession, after Fennville won the tip. He nearly lost the dribble at the top of the key. But after an awkward series of passes he found Pete Alfaro open in the left corner for a three. Fennville 3–0. The crowd roared.
Then, after Lawrence responded with a basket, Xavier was called for carrying the ball. He kept picking up his dribble too soon. He threw a clumsy pass that a defender knocked away. He back-rimmed an open three. He threw another tipped pass. Even as his teammates—Alfaro, Adam Siegel, DeMarcus McGee, Reid Sexton—fought through the grief and played above themselves, Xavier fell apart. He threw a ridiculous one-handed pass from midcourt that was easily stolen by a Lawrence defender. He played lazy defense and let a Lawrence player hit a three in his face. Finally, after Xavier committed a two-shot foul, Coach Klingler mercifully pulled him out.
“I don’t wanna play anymore,” Xavier said, starting toward the locker room.
The coach grabbed his arm. “If Jocelyn and Gary can be strong for you,” he said, “you can be strong for them and stay on the bench.”
Xavier sat down and sobbed.
About 15 rows back, where he sat holding his wife, Gary Leonard thought, This was a mistake. Next fall he would work up the courage to attend a Blackhawks football game, in what would have been his son’s senior season at quarterback, and make it partway through the national anthem before leaving in a panic to sit in his truck. And then he would come back the next week and find a way to sit through the whole song.
Down on the bench, as the basketball game went on, Coach Klingler put a brawny arm around Xavier. “If you don’t wanna go back out there, you don’t have to,” he said. Xavier lowered his head. The court reflected a grid of searing white lights.
Next to Gary, Jocelyn looked down at Xavier and wished she could hold him in her arms. Letters from other bereaved parents were rolling in. Across America, a trail of enlarged and broken hearts: a football lineman in Nebraska, a wrestler in Oregon, a basketball player in Georgia, a swimmer right there in Michigan, and on and on. Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio. A defibrillator might have saved them, just as it might have saved Wes. Jocelyn blamed herself. She thought she’d been too slow, too indecisive, too uninformed. Well, never again. By summer she would be running a foundation to give schools and sports teams brand-new defibrillators and the training for their proper use. It would be called the Wes Leonard Heart Team. She would carry a defibrillator in her car and stand before group after group of teachers and coaches, showing them how to save lives by showing them how Fennville lost Wes. This is what I did wrong, she would say, the scene playing again and again like a movie in her head.
Maria looked down at her weeping son. When he was three years old, still rubbing her hair between his thumb and forefinger for comfort, Xavier got sick and had to stay in the hospital for three days. He was kept in a crib that looked like a cage. “Please, Mommy,” he kept saying, “take me home.” Now, with great effort, Maria stood up. She was going to take him home.
Weeks later, still bedridden on most days, Maria would receive a text message from Jocelyn inviting her to join the Wes Leonard Heart Team. This invitation would be her own defibrillator, the shock to bring her back into rhythm. Still too disabled to hold a regular job, she would make the Heart Team her volunteer occupation. Every day it would give her the strength to get out of bed.
Now, as she prepared to go get Xavier, someone asked her to sit down and give him a few more minutes. She did. The first quarter ended, with Lawrence leading 16–13. The fans chanted about Blackhawk power. They were still in the game for one reason: Siegel and McGee, two of Wes’s best friends on the team, were playing like wild beasts.
A young assistant coach named Mike Raak put his arm around Xavier and tried to think of uplifting words. “He’s here with you,” the coach said. Xavier thought about Wes. They used to play in three-on-three tournaments in which players had to call their own fouls, and Wes never called a foul. It was a matter of principle. “If I can’t take the pain, I’ll just get out of the game,” he’d say. Once the opponents realized they could get away with anything, they would hang on his arms every time he went near the hoop. Still, no call. He desperately wanted to win, but in those games he seemed to want something else even more: proof that he was strong enough to fight through anything.
The second quarter started. Jayson Hicks watched Xavier from across the court. With his paralyzed wife and his nerve disease, Jayson knew a few things about pain. Five years earlier, when the doctor cut off his lower right leg, he declined the epidural so he could get home sooner and see his kids. Now Jayson looked at Xavier and willed him to stand up. It had nothing to do with the final score. Jayson imagined Xavier at age 30, looking back on the biggest moment in his life and wishing he’d fought a little harder.
Xavier sat there, cubical scoreboard flashing above him, 3,500 fans roaring around him, the sneakers of other boys singing like birds on the polished wood at his feet. The burden of perfection was too great.
The Blackhawks would ride an emotional roller coaster for 11 days. They would beat Lawrence and then Bangor and then Covert, reaching the regional semifinals before losing by 24 points to Schoolcraft, the eventual state champion. Xavier would blame himself for failing in a task he never wanted.
That fall, with Wes gone, Xavier would get his chance to be the finest three-sport athlete in Fennville. He would start at quarterback, go down with a shoulder injury,
come back as a receiver, and finally quit with one game left in a dismal season. He would join the basketball team late after threatening to quit. Once in a while he would walk into the gym, the last place he saw Wes, and feel on his skin a mild charge of electricity.
But as he sat on the bench in the second quarter with his team trailing by four points to the Lawrence Tigers, Xavier knew none of that. Nor did he know he was about to play the finest game of the season, with 11 points in the fourth quarter and 18 altogether, or that he’d come back two nights later and pour in 25, or that his playoff scoring average would nearly match the regular-season average of the all-state point guard who at this moment was back in Fennville, in a lonely chapel, surrounded by Trappist-cut walnut, wearing his warm-up jacket.
No, Xavier didn’t know what was next. What he knew was this: six minutes remained in the second quarter, and the season was still perfect, and the Blackhawks needed someone to step in for the boy they would bury tomorrow.
Xavier stood up.
CHRIS BALLARD
Mourning Glory
FROM SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
WHY DID HE TURN onto Lappans Road?
That’s what Zach Lucas wondered as he watched the silver Honda S-2000 driven by his best friend, Brendon Colliflower, veer to the right on the way back from the senior prom just before midnight on Saturday, May 5. Everyone knew the faster route was Downsville Pike, with its wide lanes and broad shoulder. Oh, well, Zach thought, who knows with Brendon?
After all, Brendon wasn’t like most kids in Williamsport, a town of about 2,100 in the northwest corner of Maryland, just across the border from West Virginia. Hemmed in by interstates, it’s a place young people dream of leaving, a town on the way to everywhere but seldom a destination. Here U.S. flags dot porches, families swim in the muddy green Potomac River by the power plant, and jobs have been scarce since the leather tannery shut down eight years back. It’s a baseball-mad hamlet where adults sit in their pickup trucks beyond the left-field fence at Williamsport High and where the local newspaper streams Little League state tournament games on its website. A place where someone like Brendon, the 2011 all-county pitcher of the year, can become a hero.
Brendon was the rare high school ace who “pitched backward,” relying on his precipitous curveball rather than his fastball to start off each hitter. But more than that set him apart. Tall and skinny, with fine, almost elfin features, he wore crisp Nike T-shirts and spotless Air Max shoes while his friends sported sleeveless camo and cutoff jeans. He went to all the parties but didn’t drink, seeming both younger and older than 17. On Saturdays, when the other baseball players trolled for catfish, dips wedged into their lower lips, Brendon instead wandered the banks, hurling rocks over the hulking power plant. Life was too short to sit on a plastic bucket all day.
On May 5, though, he wanted to stretch out the night forever. So if Brendon took a longer route back from Shepherdstown, West Virginia, if he dallied for the sake of dallying, it was with good reason, for Sam sat next to him. With dark blond hair and large blue eyes, Samantha Kelly was homecoming queen and the star of the volleyball team. She mingled with adults as easily as with teenagers and took to Twitter not to gossip but to post maxims such as Don’t be afraid to stand up for what you believe in. That she’d chosen Brendon—the kid who’d never had a serious girlfriend, who’d been shy and a bit of a goofball much of his life—came as a surprise to many. She attended all his games, and she was the only girl allowed when the players gathered at the Waffle House on Saturday mornings to eat syrup-drenched chocolate-chip waffles and fire spitballs. Brendon’s teammates teased him—“She’s too good for you,” they’d joke, or “You better wife her up”—but they all saw how happy he was.
Now, driving home from the prom with Sam, she in a blue strapless dress and he in a white suit with a powder-blue tie, Brendon must have been exhilarated to rocket through the countryside, windows open to the warm spring air. From Lappans he turned left onto Sharpsburg Pike and then left again onto Rench Road, which wound through darkened farmland, with only grass and trees abutting the white lines. As they crossed the railroad tracks, Brendon accelerated. If he saw the yellow sign at the top of a small hill, the one that read 30 MPH with a left arrow, he didn’t heed it.
Five hours later the cell phone of Williamsport High baseball coach David Warrenfeltz beeped, jolting him from an uneasy sleep. Upon grabbing the phone, he saw a backlog of text messages and missed calls and felt nauseated with fear. Please, not again, he thought, remembering a call he received at this time of the night three years earlier. That one was about Nick.
The two had met in 1994, on the baseball field, when David was seven years old. Though neither tall nor strong, David was the son of a coach, the kind of smart, unassuming player who would earn the tag of gamer. Nick Adenhart was the opposite, the boy the coaches talked about in low, admiring whispers. Whereas most kids threw in loops and arcs at that age, Nick reared back and cracked the mitt. Plenty of kids were afraid to catch him, but not David. Over the next half-dozen years the two would be a tandem, the cocky right-hander and the smaller kid known to many only as Nick’s catcher. They spent summers long-tossing, Nick pushing to throw from farther each time. Later David would look back on this time and credit two men with instilling in him the love of baseball: his father and Nick.
By the time Nick and David reached Williamsport High, Nick a class ahead, they were two of the best players on the team. But even though David was good, a savvy defensive catcher with in-the-gap power, he was nothing like Nick. By the spring of Nick’s junior year, in 2003, major league scouts were flocking to his starts. They weren’t disappointed; Nick’s fastball was clocked as high as 95 miles per hour. The Washington Post sent a feature writer to see him, the local cable channel carried two of Williamsport’s games, and Baseball America dubbed Nick the top prospect in the country.
Then, in the final regular-season game of his senior year, Nick blew out his right elbow. Playing DH, he still led Williamsport to the state finals, nearly winning the school’s first title since 1975. After the season, he needed Tommy John surgery; as a result he dropped from a top-five pick in the 2004 draft to the 14th round, where the Angels chose him.
It took five years, but Adenhart regained his velocity, and he entered the 2009 season as the Angels’ third starter. On April 8, in his season debut, he threw six scoreless innings against the As. Back home in Maryland, an overflow crowd watched at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Hagerstown. Afterward, in the Anaheim clubhouse, Nick hugged his father, Jim, then headed out with three friends to celebrate. A couple of hours later, shortly after midnight in nearby Fullerton, a drunk driver in a minivan ran a red light and broadsided the Mitsubishi Eclipse in which Adenhart was traveling. Two of his friends were killed instantly; the third survived with serious injuries. Adenhart died two hours later at a local hospital. He was 22.
Warrenfeltz, by then a senior catcher at Maryland–Baltimore County, received the news when his cell phone woke him at 5:23 A.M. He’d stayed up late watching the game on TV and planned on calling Adenhart in the morning to congratulate him. Now Warrenfeltz was devastated. For eight hours he sobbed, inconsolable.
In Williamsport hundreds of people gathered at the high school field that day. Later 1,500 people showed up at Adenhart’s memorial. A shrine was fashioned at the field, a framed Adenhart Angels jersey was hung in the Buffalo Wild Wings, and the Little League diamond in nearby Halfway, Maryland—where Nick and David played growing up—was renamed Nicholas James Adenhart Memorial Field.
In the months that followed, Warrenfeltz was haunted by his friend’s death. He wrestled with why this happened to Adenhart, not to him—why he was allowed to keep playing baseball when Nick couldn’t. Even years later Warrenfeltz would be driving and suddenly have to pull over, tears blurring his vision. Maybe that helps explain why he returned home after finishing college, to make a life in the place his friends once dreamed of leaving. Why he became a coach.
When
Warrenfeltz was hired to lead the Williamsport program in 2011, some of the locals grumbled—at 23, he wasn’t much older than the players, and his only coaching experience was one season of jayvee. Heck, they said, Warrenfeltz even looks like one of the players: baby-faced, with short brown hair, freckles, and an unimposing build. He didn’t act like a player, though; during his first season Warrenfeltz remade the program, stressing discipline and structure. He posted a daily practice schedule broken into 10-minute intervals and drilled the team on fundamentals, from pickoffs to bunt defense to footwork on outfield throws. “Do the small things, and it’ll lead to bigger things,” he told the boys, sounding an awful lot like his father, Dave, a math teacher and former baseball coach at North Hagerstown High who valued ethics over flash, hard work over talent. The Wildcats, a sub-.500 team before Warrenfeltz, caught fire. They finished the 2011 season 17-5 and, behind Brendon’s pitching, advanced all the way to the state semifinals.
Warrenfeltz rarely talked about Adenhart, but he didn’t need to. The boys had watched Adenhart pitch, and when he died, they’d grieved too, if in a different way. Warrenfeltz had lost a friend; they’d lost a hero. So if their coach seemed stricter than he needed to be, they understood. Like at the beginning of the 2012 season, when Warrenfeltz suspended five of the team’s best players, including Brendon, for being out late at a St. Patrick’s Day house party that was broken up by police. It didn’t matter that Brendon hadn’t been drinking or that none of the players were arrested. To Warrenfeltz, it was about making good decisions.
Some parents, including Brendon’s father, Chad, didn’t like the suspensions. The boys would miss the games against Walkersville, a powerhouse, and rival North Hagerstown. The Wildcats had been moved up to Class 2A, making them the smallest school in the West region; they could ill afford to start 0-2. Yet they did, getting blown out in both games. From there it went downhill. Four key players got injured. Zach Lucas, the team’s first baseman and best hitter, went into a slump. Even Brendon struggled, giving up six runs in three innings against Brunswick the day before the prom. Heading into the playoffs, the Wildcats were 9-9-1 and had lost their final three games by a combined score of 31–3. All the promise of the previous season—the trip to the state semis, the magical team chemistry—had dissipated. The players were frustrated and the parents angry.
