The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  Nainoa Thompson remembers Eddie putting on a lifejacket, “and then he paddled off. And I swam out to him. I was so conflicted with this idea. We’re tired, we’re somewhat in shock, we’re in denial. Emotionally, it was an extremely draining situation. But he was like a miracle man—he could do anything. So if he says he could go to Lāna‘i, he’s gonna go.”

  Tours and guidebooks tend to present admirable historical figures as statues—static, immobile, their good deeds and bravery things of the past. Visitors sit on the bus, or the beach, admiring these surfers, but they often miss the real message—the messy, sometimes depressing story of conflict that defines the place they’ve gone for an exotic escape. Tourists don’t need to adopt local customs to honor the history of their destination. But they do need to make an effort to learn about them.

  Today, Eddie Aikau’s legacy is commemorated in the Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau, the surfing contest I first learned about when I was working as a tour-guide writer. The competition takes place on Waimea Bay on a day when waves are consistently over 20 feet tall. When the Eddie is on, thousands head to the North Shore to watch surfers climb and descend these rushing walls of water. At the first Eddie competition, in 1985, the surf was especially forbidding. Surfer Mark Foo insisted on paddling out, telling contest organizers, “Eddie would go.” Nearly 30 years later, this tribute to Eddie’s fearlessness is emblazoned on T-shirts and bumper stickers across the island, universalizing Foo’s sentiment: IF EDDIE WOULD GO, THEN SO WILL I. A visitor to the North Shore can find Eddie’s legacy in the protest banners on lawns that decry “illegal statehood,” and the sunburned foreigners wearing T-shirts with his name on them. Tourists eat it up, and locals wear the shirts and tell the story with pride. Everyone seems to love Eddie. But not everyone loves him for the same reason.

  JONATHAN SEGURA

  The Game of His Life

  FROM GQ

  MY WIFE GOT ME the best Valentine’s Day gift ever last year. Surprise trip to London with a surprise-within-a-surprise double bonus of tickets to the Manchester United–Manchester City match. Bear with me here—this isn’t about soccer, really, but you do need some grounding: I am a Manchester United supporter, and this was one of the premier matches of last season. You may remember it as the one where Wayne Rooney scored that amazing goal. A goal so incredible, so fantastic, so unreasonably and gloriously perfect, that it got covered here, in America, where nobody gives a fuck about the sport.

  Three years ago, I couldn’t have explained offsides or told you who that twat from Argentina was, or why. And yet. And yet shouting myself hoarse at that match is one of the very few highlights of my short life. Without question. My hit list goes something like: getting married to the woman who would later score tickets to the February 2011 Manchester derby, and then going to the February 2011 Manchester derby. That’s all I got. Naturally the triumph is not without tragedy: my cruddy little heart broke in the East Stand before kickoff as “Glory, Glory Man United” played over the loudspeakers and I dumped an ounce or so of cremated human remains under my seat. Not quite an hour and a half later, it felt wrong to be jumping up and down on that small mound of ash, but holy shit, that goal.

  Martin was a big guy, maybe 250. Scottish. Brilliant ad man. Drunk. Bipolar, occasionally unmedicated. Had gout, some plague-looking psoriasis. Lots of expensive dental work, taken care of by a previous wife, pro bono. Old enough to be my dad. Kind of guy you can’t not love and are afraid of sometimes but just won’t say no to about anything, not even another round at 3:00 A.M. on a Tuesday, which was the case about once a week. He lived down the hall, and surely we were the least favorite people on the ninth floor of our uptight building. That’s how we met, actually, six years ago: at a meeting to shoot down a rule the building board wanted to implement, something about banning dogs from the lobby.

  One of the good ones, Martin. Taught me important, basic stuff I’d somehow missed out on, like that it’s okay—necessary, in fact—to say, “Fuck them, what do you want?” and to not believe that ridiculous bullshit about how you shouldn’t take your single malt on the rocks. He’d actually put together and lived by a set of commandments. There were 12 of them, if I recall, and they boiled down to this: don’t be an asshole, and do good work. For him, that was doing ad stuff and supporting Manchester United. Glasgow-born, Manchester-educated, Martin was a fearsome supporter of Manchester United. He believed in Manchester United. He also believed, much to the misfortune of his neighbors, that the louder he shouted at his TV, the more he could influence a match. He had framed newspapers on his wall from when United had won the league or the cup or whatever. He skipped work when it interfered with him watching his team.

  As it turned out, Manchester United was the one thing I could say no to him about: his constant invites to join him—just once!—at some punishingly early hour at Nevada Smiths (“Where Football Is Religion”) to watch Manchester United play those cunts from wherever. I never went. Not ever. I hated sports. I couldn’t give a shit less about Liverpool or Chelsea.

  He got me a Manchester United jersey anyway. An enticement, unrequited, to join him in support of his team. I wore it, once, to watch the 2008 Euro final when Spain beat Germany, 1–0. I didn’t have anything else going on, so I threw on the jersey—why not?—and walked down the hall to watch the match at Martin’s. He was patient in explaining things I would soon forget—the same things everyone new to the sport doesn’t understand and soon forgets. (On injury time: “A few extra minutes to make up for the time they spent fucking about.”) That was the only soccer game—sorry: footie match—I ever watched with Martin.

  It was around Christmas 2008 when Martin and his wife separated. He’d been working in the U.K., and upon his return to New York City, Martin and his MacBook became a daily fixture in our household. I would wake up, miserably hungover from having been carousing with Martin, and there Martin would be, sitting at our table, chatting with my wife, using our Wi-Fi, happily pouring a dash of vodka into his coffee.

  “Want some?” he’d ask, all sunshine. I’d decline, and then the day’s soccer report would begin. I’d tune out and make coffee and nod along and politely decline his invites to watch whatever matches were on tap for that weekend. Martin was especially keen on someone named Rooney, whom, he said, I had to see and whose brilliance would convert me, instantly. Surely! But I nevertheless passed. My excuse: I was closing in on finishing a draft of my second novel and couldn’t spare the time. (The novel is long since finished and remains unsold. Ha!)

  Also, he was tough to be around all the time. This is a stupid thing to say, but it’s true that whatever he did, he did the shit out of. As a bachelor, that consisted of herculean drinking. Some blow. Breaking our furniture. He’d show up with strange new bruises, but he didn’t know how he got them, or why, or from whom. We would set out to walk our dogs, and it’d turn into a drink, and then another, and then—well, you get the idea. I took a silly pride in being able to hack, but then I couldn’t anymore. I started avoiding him. I lied. I was busy. I had work to do. I had so much work to do I couldn’t even walk down the hall to have a drink. He’d ring the bell and I wouldn’t answer it. I loved Martin, but I could no longer do it. Self-preservation kicked in.

  As March rolled around, Martin started getting his shit together. He was launching his own agency; his first potential account was a laundry detergent, and he was cooking up a campaign involving motocross racers. He began fostering shelter dogs and doing some work around his apartment that he’d been putting off. He got a better handle on his drinking and seemed to be getting on just fine. I saw him a couple of times, and it didn’t end in a blackout. He seemed happier. Good stuff. One night, I ran into him in the hallway. He was coming back from walking one of his foster dogs and said that my wife and I were overdue for dinner at his place. I said yeah, sure, we’d figure something out, and that sounded good to him.

  A week later, give or take, he jumped out of his window. I spent a few moments a
lone with Martin before the cops or EMTs or shrill neighbors showed up. I hope you never have this sort of opportunity, because it is fundamentally devastating. It changes you: your friend, dead, on some stranger’s ruined patio in the rain, and what do you say? I said, inexplicably, “Oh, sugar pea. What’d you do?” Jesus, it’s like the world’s worst country song.

  There was hardly any blood. He must’ve bounced, because he was faceup. His glasses were smashed and lying a few feet away. If it weren’t for the split running down his forehead, he’d have looked like he was sleeping one off. The cops found his driver’s license, passport, and a note, all of it wrapped in plastic and tucked in his inside jacket pocket, presumably so the rain and trauma wouldn’t ruin the documents and slow down the identification process. The note itself wasn’t Martin’s best work.

  Martin wanted to be cremated. His wife arranged it and left a bit of him with us, and my wife and I occasionally talked about finding him a more dignified home than a plastic bag in our liquor cabinet, but there he remained, near his quaich and my whiskey.

  Six months later, I was at a friend’s birthday party at a bar and saw a poster advertising the Premier League matches they’d be showing. Why not? I thought. I didn’t have my would-be footie mentor around any longer, but I was going through a rather dark period and thought the experience might provide something in desperately short supply: fun. Plus, I missed Martin and thought, in a yucky bit of sentimentality, it’d be a nice tribute. The first match I watched was Manchester United’s 2–0 victory over Blackburn on Halloween 2009. I didn’t understand much of what went on, but I didn’t have a horrible 90 minutes either. So the next weekend I went to a bar and watched the 1–0 defeat at Chelsea. I wish I could point to a pivotal match or a crucial goal and say that that was what converted me, but it wouldn’t be true. Manchester United grew on me, quickly and mercilessly, like the Devil claiming your soul. I welcomed it, particularly the predawn bar crowds, whose passion and dedication were foreign and fascinating to a Midwestern-reared boy.

  Soon I was fully in the sway, pounding pints before breakfast, and by Christmas—spent with my folks in Omaha—I was frantically calling around town to find somewhere to watch the match against Hull. I began to have an emotional investment in the team and the outcome of matches. I started referring to the Red Devils as “we.” I developed superstitions about attire to wear, and in which fashion, to ensure victory. Alone at home, I cheered—raucously, at length—at goals. My blood pressure would shoot up if the opposition took the ball into the box late in a tight match. I started reading British sports sections online. I shopped in vain for a Manchester United scarf fitted for my bulldog. My wife—a lovely, patient, and understanding woman who deserves saint status—pretended to be interested when Paul Scholes knocked in that brilliant header in injury time to win the April 2010 Manchester derby and I kept rewinding the DVR and insisting she watch it one more time to fully appreciate the glory of it. Can you imagine, I asked her, what it must be like to be there?

  Fast-forward to that Valentine’s Day weekend. My wife had been planning a trip. All I officially knew was I had to take off a couple of days from work and pack a bag. She would take care of everything else. True, I had my suspicions she might be plotting a pilgrimage to the holy land—there’d been seemingly innocent questions about the stadium, and if the seating area was covered, and what happened if it rained—but I also knew there was no way in hell, ever, she’d be able to score tickets to one of the biggest matches of the season. Just in case, I scooped a bit of Martin into a film canister and tossed him in my suitcase. Worst case is I’d end up muling a bit of dead Martin to some quaint upstate B&B. Instead, we were soon marching up Sir Matt Busby Way alongside the other believers in red and white, weaving through a phalanx of police horses, and as the shouts of “Fuck off, City!” grew louder and more frequent, I felt at home and on fire with that white-hot zealotry reserved for converts, children, and suicide bombers.

  We were tied 1–1 going into the 78th minute when Rooney misplayed a pass and then, seconds later, got the ball lobbed back to him and pulled off this unbelievable maneuver: with his back to the goal, he jumped a few feet off the ground, wheeled his leg up and over his head, nailed the ball, and sent it rocketing into the top-right corner of the net. The sound in the stadium was like a napalm strike, and yes, I did one of those frantic I’m-so-excited-I-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-to-do jumping-hug things with the guy standing next to me. I like to think I ground a few grains of Martin into Old Trafford right then, and that he’ll have those crazy-good seats forever.

  Sir Alex Ferguson, United’s manager, called it the best goal he’d ever seen at Old Trafford, a quote heavily featured in the near pornographic next-day coverage in the British papers. You have to understand that Rooney’d been having a fairly crappy game that was rather emblematic of his abysmal season—beset by injuries, a hooker scandal, and a silly tantrum about maybe leaving the club. That goal was his redemption, and I’ll merely mention that a case could be made for a touch of divine Scottish intervention in it—that that goal happened in that match, right in front of us, on the day Martin came back after a long time away, and that Rooney, the limping front-man of Martin’s beloved team, got the boost he needed to shut down those cunts from across town in such mythic fashion. Pretty cut-and-dried, I think, but you can do with that what you will.

  ERIK MALINOWSKI

  The Making of “Homer at the Bat,” the Episode That Conquered Prime Time 20 Years Ago Tonight

  FROM DEADSPIN.COM

  ON FEBRUARY 20, 1992, more American homes tuned in to The Simpsons than they did The Cosby Show or the Winter Olympics from Albertville, France. A foul-mouthed cartoon on a fourth-place network bested the Huxtables and the world’s best amateur athletes. Fox over NBC and CBS—its first-ever victory in prime time. New over old.

  Why the shift? Well, the Olympic programming that night featured no marquee events, and Cosby was just two months away from ending its eight-season run. Meanwhile, The Simpsons, airing just its 52nd episode out of 500 (and counting), had put forth its most ambitious effort to date, an episode called “Homer at the Bat.” Months of work went into corralling nine baseball players, a cross-section of young stars and established veterans, to guest-star as members of a rec-league softball team.

  Sam Simon, the co-creator of The Simpsons, originally pitched the idea, and it was put into words by John Swartzwelder, a charter member of the show’s writing staff, who would eventually pen 59 episodes, more than anyone else. On a staff full of fantasy baseball junkies, Swartzwelder was the über-geek, a fanatic who had rented out stadiums for hours at a time so he and his close friends could play ball. (Years after Swartzwelder’s departure from the show, it’s easy to see his influence endures. During the episode’s roundtable DVD commentary, the word “Swartzweldian” is used with a deference and awe usually reserved for long-dead Nobel laureates.)

  If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the episode, the premise was relatively simple: Mr. Burns’s company softball team, having lost 28 of 30 games the previous season, goes on an incredible run when Homer starts hitting, well, homers with his WonderBat, carved from the fallen branch of a lightning-struck tree. (Sound familiar?) As the season winds down, it becomes a two-team race for the pennant: Springfield vs. Shelbyville. While dining at the Millionaires’ Club with the owner of the Shelbyville Power Plant, a cocky Burns agrees to a handshake bet worth (you guessed it) $1 million.

  To fix the game and secure his victory, Burns orders Smithers to enlist ballplayers like Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, and Jim Creighton. (Swartzwelder’s choice of Creighton was particularly inspired. The ace pitcher for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in the 1850s and ’60s, Creighton supposedly didn’t strike out once while batting during the 20 games of the 1860 season. Creighton died two years later. He was 21.) Upon learning that his entire suggested lineup is dead, Burns instructs Smithers to come back with real ballplayers. And so he sets off across the country: nabbing Jose Cans
eco at a card convention, accosting a Graceland-touring Ozzie Smith, nearly getting shot in the woods by Mike Scioscia, and stopping by Don Mattingly’s pink suburban house to interrupt his dish-washing.

  Before “Homer at the Bat,” The Simpsons had used guest stars only sporadically—and never more than four of them in a single show, that I can remember. Recognizable voices popped up now and then, but no athlete had appeared until Magic Johnson on October 17, 1991, five episodes into the third season. (Exactly three weeks later, Johnson held a press conference to announce he was HIV-positive and would immediately retire from the NBA.)

  Now it was using nine guests, some of whom were obvious baseball Hall of Famers. The end result was not only an iconic piece of pop culture but a loving satire of baseball that looks downright prescient today, here on the other side of the Mitchell Report. Our heroes got drunk in bars, ingested odd substances because they were told to, and mindlessly clucked like diseased poultry. “Homer at the Bat” felt vaguely forbidden, like an animated addendum to Ball Four. This was the side of the sport we never saw.

  We couldn’t pull our eyes away then. We still can’t.

  Despite all the planning and prep, “Homer at the Bat” wasn’t easy to put together. Of the players with guest-starring roles, only the Dodgers’ Darryl Strawberry and Mike Scioscia were local. The script was pretty much locked down by summer 1991, but the writers and producers had to wait throughout the season for players to swing through Los Angeles to play the Dodgers or the California Angels so they could record their lines.

  Aside from the Yankees’ twofer of Don Mattingly and Steve Sax, each athlete coming to the Fox studios was booked for a single voice-over session, which often got cramped when friends and family tagged along. Ken Griffey Jr., then 21 and easing into his third season in the majors, showed up in early August with his father and Mariners teammate, who was a few months from retirement. (In the show’s DVD commentary, show-runner Mike Reiss recalls Griffey Jr. laboring through his lines and getting increasingly upset. He “looked like he was going to beat the crap out of me,” Reiss says.)