The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  Over a period of months, I did exchange many emails with Litton, but he refused to speak or meet in person. My questions were mainly biographical or running-related. His responses were verbose, well written, and cleverly obfuscatory in a way that left little room for doubt.

  Last fall, a message, posted by someone using the handle ActuallyThisIsTheWayItIs, appeared on LetsRun:

  Some of us are runners, and we fully understand how races operate. Kip has been very open about addressing accusations with us. They have all been discussed and he has provided logical and credible explanations, in many cases backed by evidence and/or witnesses. He has shared with us email correspondences with reporters and race directors that contradict posts here that pass for gospel. We are quite satisfied. We don’t want to put words in his mouth but the chances are less than zero that he will personally respond on a forum where people are anonymous.

  I wrote to Litton, asking whether he’d seen the post and suggesting that we “help each other.” I wanted to speak with this blogger, I said, and was eager to read excerpts from the correspondence cited in the post.

  Litton replied:

  No I didn’t see it. How long ago was it from? I actually don’t know who it is yet, but it certainly narrows it down—I’ll have to check around. I will not be able to disclose any names unless it is ok with them. I will say you have piqued my curiosity—but I will not make the mistake I made many months ago when I checked out LetsRun. Engaging in negative rhetorical sparring with anonymous strangers may be entertaining for some, but it is not where I choose to spend my time.

  “I am running Boston,” Litton wrote to me, on March 7, 2012. “Training has been hit & miss. I have had nearly PR”—personal record—“runs mixed with times when I was unable to run at all.” I assumed that “unable to run” referred to the auto-accident injury that had been his pretext for not running the Cowtown Marathon.

  His only race within the 2012 Boston qualifying calendar had been the Charlotte marathon, in 2010, and attached to that performance was a bold asterisk. Nevertheless, the Boston Athletic Association, aware of Litton’s problematic history, had checked with Tim Rhodes, the Charlotte race director, and been told that the result stood.

  Two weeks before Boston, I asked Litton to give his expected finishing time. “If all goes well, 2:47,” he wrote. “If not, a bit slower.”

  I planned to be in Boston, I said—two of my sons would be running—and suggested meeting. Given Litton’s prior elusiveness, I was surprised when he said, “How about after, that way I can introduce you to a few people also.” The odds of that happening, I suspected, were roughly zero. Still, I appreciated his gamesmanship.

  Race day was Monday, April 16. For weeks, the prevailing sentiment on LetsRun had been that Litton would not show up. Yet, at some point over the weekend, either he or someone authorized by him had picked up his racing bib at the marathon’s headquarters. I gleaned this from LetsRun—a runner in Boston had volunteered the information—rather than from Litton, who for several days had ignored my emails.

  As with most major marathons, the size of the Boston field—more than 22,000 runners—required a staggered start. Some 200 wheelchair and elite female runners were first out of the gate, with the rest of the participants organized in “waves” and “corrals,” according to their qualifying times. There were three waves, each with nine corrals of roughly 1,000 runners, and Litton had been seeded in wave one, corral two. By coincidence, so had my son Reid and a couple of other runners I knew.

  Monday morning was cloudless and unseasonably hot, heading to the upper eighties. I found a seat in a shaded section of the grandstand at the finish line, and felt open to possibilities. I might be on the brink of my first live Kip Litton sighting; a flock of green flamingos might happen by. My anticipation lasted less than an hour into the men’s race. I’d signed up for a mobile-phone service that offered text-messaged 10-kilometer, half-marathon, and 30-kilometer split times. After receiving 10-K results for my sons and another runner in Litton’s corral, but nothing for Litton himself, I allowed a decent interval before concluding that he was most likely in Davison, Michigan, drilling teeth. A phone call to Litton’s office confirmed this.

  My oldest son, Jeb, who is 30, somehow made friends with the heat and ran his best marathon: just under three hours and four minutes. Reid, the faster qualifier, finished a couple of minutes behind him. Post-race, I found them in a designated meeting area across the street from the John Hancock Tower. We hung out there for an hour or so, as runners in varying states of elation and walking-woundedness wandered past, wearing ribboned medallions. This was what Litton was missing: the bonhomie and collective uplift of one of the world’s great athletic events, and the rewards that come to anyone who goes the full distance and crosses the finish line—never mind how long it takes.

  Eventually, Jeb and Reid’s perspiration dried sufficiently to allow for an exchange of manly hugs, and then I went to catch a plane.

  Shortly before eight o’clock the next morning, Litton parked his metallic-blue GMC sport-utility vehicle (vanity license plate: DDLOVER) outside his dental office. I was standing at the building entrance, and as he turned a corner I introduced myself. “No, no!” he said, and moved past me into the building. I followed him, through a glass vestibule and past the reception desk. He went inside his office and closed the door. As I was about to knock, he opened it and said to his receptionist, “Call the police. It’s a trespasser.” I said that I was leaving, and retreated to the Flag City Diner, down the street, where I ordered scrambled eggs and began drafting an email to Litton.

  He was in a jam of his own devising, I wrote, and I wanted him to have the opportunity to explain how it had come about. He did not reply that day, but the next evening he offered to meet with me the following day, after work.

  Litton chose a Wendy’s a few miles from his home. Arriving before I did, he took a seat at a corner table, with his back to the wall. Hanging above the table was a framed photograph of Dave Thomas, the departed founder of Wendy’s, bearing the caption “When it comes to VALUES, I’ve never been one to cut corners.”

  Litton wore a blue windbreaker over his work uniform: a black V-neck tunic, a red T-shirt, loose-fitting gray cotton pants. Tanned and clean-shaven, he had fluffy sandy-blond hair that fell across his forehead, brown eyes, and generically handsome Nordic features. Across the table, at last, was the man at the center of one of the strangest controversies in amateur sports history. Our common aspiration, I assumed, was that this conversation would yield a counternarrative to the caricature of the heinously unscrupulous Kip Litton suggested by the less genteel posters on LetsRun. In addition to “Why?,” the question I most hoped Litton would answer was “How?”

  He told me that he was born in 1961, the third of four children, in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, and moved to Grand Blanc when he was seven. His father, an engineer, worked for General Motors, and his mother was a homemaker. They were frequent churchgoers, but not devout. Summer vacations were station-wagon excursions, typically to historic sites. His adolescent cohort had not been earnest strivers—“There were a lot of kids in my neighborhood that were delinquents, normal delinquents”—but that changed after his father introduced him to tennis. (“We went out and he said, ‘Hey, why don’t you try this?’ And he probably let me beat him, and that got me interested, like, ‘Hey, I’m good.’ . . . That took me away from the crowd I was with.”) Academically, he was “a decent student, but I really had no direction.” When a high school guidance counselor suggested dentistry, he responded that it was “the one occupation for sure that I can eliminate.”

  Litton arrived at the University of Michigan in 1979, planning to major in engineering. His most enduring impression was of feeling daunted by the ambitions of his dorm neighbors. “Just hanging around those people, I felt like if I wasn’t going to be a neurosurgeon I would be a complete failure,” he said. “I would be the least successful person—I probably still am the least su
ccessful person—who lived on my hall. So that inspired me to do something more with my life.” Engineering, he said, had too few women majoring in it, so at the end of his sophomore year he switched to pre-dental. (If other factors had guided this career turn, he didn’t mention them.)

  In 1983, he matriculated at the University of Michigan Dental School, and five years later he completed his degree. At 28, he married Lisa Hoscila, whom he’d met on a blind date nine years earlier. She had a law degree and a job at a firm not far from Davison. After commuting for a few years to a dental office in Saginaw, Michigan, he joined the practice in Davison that he eventually took over. The older dentist who had started the practice supplemented his income by working as a salesman and distributor for Amway, the multilevel marketing company, and he recruited Litton. During the next several years, Litton said, his Amway income—from direct sales to consumers or to his own “30 or 40” new recruits—at times reached into the six figures, surpassing his professional income.

  Amway still generated a lot of income for him, he said: “I don’t want to say exactly, but in the thousands every month. And that’s way down from where it was.”

  Throughout its existence, the company has defended itself against allegations that its marketing program is essentially a pyramid scheme; in 2010, it agreed to a $56 million settlement in a class-action suit accusing it of exactly that, along with fraud and racketeering. When I asked Litton whether he’d ever been disillusioned with Amway, he said, “No. And I know a ton of people gave it a bad rap.” His wife had joined him in Amway, he said, and it made for “a nice diversion—something we could do together. She made friends in the business, I made friends in the business.”

  Their first child, a son, was born in 1995, followed by a daughter in 1997. When their younger son, Michael, arrived, in 2001, he immediately received a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis and remained in the hospital for weeks.

  “He knows exactly what’s going on with him,” Litton said. “But he can’t possibly understand the scope of it . . . He has to take tons of pills every day. He won’t take pills in front of other people except family members. He has a feeding tube. There’s a lot of breathing apparatuses he uses. And he will not do what he is supposed to do if there are people other than our family members over at the house. He just desperately wants to fit in.”

  To sidestep questions about various running performances, Litton often invoked his personal tribulations. Some of the indignities that he said he’d recently suffered seemed straight out of high school, circa 1977: his tires had been deflated on several occasions, his house and his mailbox had been egged, threatening and profane messages had been left in the mailbox. His family felt unsafe.

  These stories reminded me of a series of messages that had been posted anonymously on LetsRun. One said:

  My wife’s friend worked at Dr. Litton’s office and was recently let go. She was telling my wife about all the things that have been happening recently due to the cheating scandal . . .

  In addition to his business failing, Dr. Litton’s wife was so embarrassed and it caused so much strife that they have separated. His one kid got in a fight at school in response to the other kids taunting about the cheating and was suspended.

  And another:

  Perfect—we have him just where we want him.

  Personal life destroyed—check. Business destroyed—check. Family destroyed—check. Kids—check. Just think what could happen if we keep the pressure on even more.

  In fact, Litton and his wife were still together. And the dental practice was doing fine.

  I asked Litton, “What happened in your life to get you into this situation?”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  His credibility was being seriously questioned, and the underlying facts were troubling.

  “I don’t know what facts you’re talking about,” he replied. “But the facts I’ve heard and seen, most of them are inaccurate.”

  As Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” played on the Wendy’s stereo system, he elaborated: he had never deliberately done anything wrong, never left a race course and reentered at a different point, never received money through Worldrecordrun, and never posted anything on LetsRun; had no idea who the anonymous people might be who posted in his defense, and no clue who might have posed as a nurse claiming that “Dr. Litton’s child has been given just a short time to live.” His delayed starts, he later added, were merely part of “a marketing gimmick,” on his website, to entice potential donors, who could pledge a particular sum for every runner he passed in a race. It was “a friend” who had posed online as “Richard Rodriguez”—despite the fact that Litton had used that alias in a previous race. Regarding his midrace shoe change at Deadwood: “I was doing my warm-up, and I got too far away from the starting line. As I was running back toward the starting line . . . I still had on my trainers. I couldn’t get back to where my shoes were, and then back to the start of the race, so I just started the race in those shoes. And, as I ran down the race course, when I passed my shoes I stopped and swapped them out.”

  Throughout our discussion, his tone remained steady and uninflected. He neither frowned nor smiled, and made no attempt to ingratiate. For a teller of tales, he was oddly unbeguiling.

  He acknowledged that he had been disqualified from several races, but only for unintentional infractions. He conceded only to having “been careless, not paying attention.” When it came to specific disqualifications—say, the 2009 Detroit Free Press Marathon Relay, where he had cut the course so maladroitly that he wound up in front of the pace car—he offered deflection, not explanation. In a follow-up email, he said that he had taken a wrong turn, adding, “How mentally handicapped would someone have to be to think that cartoon-like scenario would work? Did your research reveal this absurdity? It’s an excellent anecdote that could be reenacted for a scene in a top Hollywood comedy film.”

  Usually, when you interview a fabulist, there comes a moment when you can visualize his or her mental gears churning. It took a long time with Litton, but he finally rose to the challenge, and began expanding his alternate universe on the fly. Early on, when Scott Hubbard had challenged Litton about the identity of “Brian Smith”—who had written to Michigan Runner to extol his dentist’s achievements—Litton had claimed ignorance. But when I pressed him about it he paused, then said, “Now I remember more about that! I think that guy turned out to be someone who owed me money, and was hoping I didn’t pursue him, by buttering me up.”

  Litton told me that he had protested several disqualifications that he felt were unjust. And at Missoula in 2010, rather than being disqualified by race officials, he had disqualified himself at the finish line, informing a race official that a leg injury had forced him to take a shortcut.

  “So there’s no way you would have been in contention for an award at Missoula, right?” I asked.

  “Right,” he said. “Okay, what about it?”

  I handed him copies of two emails. The first, from him to Jennifer Straughan, the race director, was sent six days after the marathon: “Hello, Very nice race. I enjoyed it immensely. I was wondering if there was any award that I missed? I had to catch a flight right after the race. Thanks. Kip Litton, M 45-49.” The second was Straughan’s reply, which said, in part, “In reviewing our records for the top finishers of the 2010 Missoula Marathon, we notice that you do not appear in photos along the course . . . I regret that we had to remove you from the finishers listing.”

  All a misunderstanding, Litton said.

  The email had been sent to the director of the Missoula Marathon—what was the misunderstanding?

  “Okay,” he said. “But I probably got it from an email address that—I probably clicked on the wrong one or something. I don’t know. Because I disqualified myself. I told them at the race that I did not run the whole race.”

  “Why would someone who disqualified himself ask about an award?”

  “It was probably another race.”
/>   “But this was the week after Missoula.”

  “There were other, smaller races that I ran.”

  (In subsequent emails, Litton told me that he had witnesses to his self-disqualification—but none, unfortunately, who weren’t members of his family, and he couldn’t provide the name of a race official who would confirm his finish-line story.)

  Litton never removed his jacket. At first, this made me apprehensive, as it seemed that he might at any time stand up and bolt for the exit. As the conversation dragged on, though, I became the interlocutor eager to be on his way. Litton’s story could have been a small but admirable one: an out-of-shape Midwestern dentist who, on the cusp of middle age, had transformed himself into a competitive marathoner. But he had insisted on transforming himself further, inventing a heroic avatar, “Kip Litton,” that couldn’t be sustained. The ruse, quite possibly, had begun with a noble intention: a father’s desire to be an inspiration to his youngest child, or perhaps to his entire family. (Litton’s friends told me that he was a devoted husband and father.) But whatever glory he felt was surely short-lived. Not only had he become a consuming object of contempt in one of the blogosphere’s more obsessive neighborhoods; his family and neighbors had learned that the online tribunal had judged him a fraud. A scenario that once might have been explained away, with self-deprecating contrition, as a foolish prank had become something much darker: the story of a man running away from himself.