The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  Sometimes as I’m running I thank the bears and moose for allowing me to run through their territory. I devise little songs I sing and these soothe me, keep me company, because it’s easy to fall to fear. Once, I encountered a sow with two cubs and my dog took off after them as I helplessly shouted for her to return. Then a growl like I’d never heard, a fierce and wild cry as the sow charged my dog. It was a fake charge and my dog held her ground as I stood paralyzed by fright, my bladder releasing, the bear turning and heading back toward the woods with her cubs. I collapsed on the trail in the mud, sobbing, the dog whimpering, both of us scared yet strangely exhilarated. Because to see such fierceness, such wildness. To see it, feel it! To be there!

  Mostly, though, I see bears as they slip off into the woods, I see the backs of their haunches or the jut of their snouts as they peer out from the trees as if wondering who I am and why I run through their trails without ever once stopping to snack on grass and berries. A few years ago, running in Kincaid Park before dark, I heard a rustle, glanced over and in the woods parallel to me a sow and a cub ran, all three of us loping along, lost in our own world, our own thoughts. I don’t know if that bear saw me. Her gait never altered and for a few seconds I ran along with her, hundreds of yards separating us yet it was as if we were running together. I quickly veered off on a side trail, picked up my pace and put as much distance as possible between us. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, when I’m restless and worried, I remember running in the same direction as that bear and I feel a twinge inside my chest, a thump that is as fierce and persistent as hunger.

  There were years in my adolescence when I didn’t run, years when I was too depressed or angry to run; years when I thought I didn’t deserve to run and instead I walked, a moody, introverted girl with sun-bleached hair, cut-off denim shorts, and bare feet. I rode my horse deep into the woods, sat against an oak tree and read books about sex and dying, the only subjects that interested me. Sometimes I smoked the cigarette stubs I picked up from ashtrays around the house but most of the time I chewed on my hair, that grainy, horsey taste, and how it filled me up.

  That’s a lie, nothing filled me those years. I starved myself down past 80 pounds and when that didn’t work, swallowed a bottle of pills, crept behind my bed, and waited to die. I sought nothingness, blackness. I wanted to escape from my body, that burdensome shell that locked me inside of my life. I don’t know how many pills I swallowed before the colors began, but they came and flashed inside my eyelids until my hands felt calm and blue and real.

  The next thing I remember is a cold, white light in my eyes and a doctor’s breath in my face as he forced the tube down my throat to pump my stomach. Imagine the violation, the taste of rubber, the choke of it against the larynx, the sudden ugliness of consciousness returning, along with the flawed hands, the insubstantial chest. The body is puny but it wants to live, will fight to live. It is fierce and animal; it has little sympathy for the mind. I tried to kill my body and it called my bluff, called me a liar, and I was. I never wanted to die. What I wanted, what I needed and longed and wished for was someone to show me the beauty of my own body, the wonder of my own strength.

  As soon as I got out of the hospital, I started to run. It was winter and cold and dark, and I had never run seriously before. This was back before the running movement, before you saw people out jogging, before there were stores devoted solely to running shoes and gear. Still, I must have known or sensed that I needed to move, that motion would keep me safe. Each night I laced up my cheap sneakers and headed down to the basement with a portable radio and, with the Top-40 station blaring, I ran around that concrete floor, in that dusty and mildewy basement, running around the pool table and the Ping-Pong table, past the workbench, the shelves of canned goods, the old couch in front of the fireplace and then back to the pool table, over and over, 40 and 50 and 60 times, until my mind cleared and my breath burned and I felt, I thought: Yes, now I can make it through another day.

  What I love best is distance running, 15 or 20 or 25 miles. I love the challenge and the pain, love the fight between the body and mind, love the various moods that flood my head. I can be young again, wearing a plaid dress on my first day of school. I can be old and dying. I can be fighting my way through childbirth and that helplessness that leads to giving in, to letting the body open up and show the way.

  Distance flattens me out. It wears away my ego. Usually I run alone. I prefer it that way. I love the solitude, the miles stretching out ahead of me. I love the way my head locks tight within itself and how for the next two or three or five hours, there will be nothing between me and my mind. What I love most is the moment of holy terror, when things fall apart and my chest aches and my legs stiffen and my mind becomes a dark space without shadow, and I struggle and fight until I want to quit more than anything in the world.

  But I don’t. My pace remains even, though effort increases. And right when I’m sure that I can’t go on, that I must (I must!) stop, my mind unfolds, it’s like magic, my mind opens and I’m somewhere new, somewhere deep and wordless and primitive, someplace where I’m totally and purely myself, in that space before language or time. It’s like sex, when it goes on and on and on. It’s like the color green, the smell of rain, the way a lover’s fingers curl inside your mouth. It’s like licking the moon.

  In high school and college, I ran competitively, training each morning over dark country roads where no cars passed and my breath rose white in the air until I understood the true meaning of loneliness. Back then, I felt no love for running. I ran because it was something I excelled at, something that came with little effort. I was fast, yes, but mostly I had endurance. I could start off a pace and hang on, no matter what. I wasn’t smart or kind or particularly good-looking, but I could run. I had the body for it, and the feet. It was how I identified myself, and all my friends were runners; it was my whole world.

  That came crashing down the end of my sophomore year in college, when I hurt my knee. At first the team coach shot me up with cortisone and I ran regardless of the inflammation, regardless of the pain. Each meet I gritted my teeth and raced, my knee hot and fiery so that it was as if I were on fire, and sometimes deep in a race, as I flailed and fought, I imagined flames blazing up my leg. Finally my knee gave out in the middle of a meet, and I lay on that track staring up at the sky, my eyes blurred with pain. I was sure my life was over.

  There are places along the Lost Lake Trail down in Seward that are haunted by voices, places haunted by the past and the rain and the steady sound of my breath as I run through. I hear these whispers each time I run the Winter-Summer Loop, two miles straight up the mountain, followed by a mile through the valley and four glorious miles of downhill. The trail is so wet and muddy that I often lose my shoes, and as I lean down to pull them out, I smell the ground, old and pungent and alive; when I lick my hands the mud tastes slightly salty, like blood. The climb is rough and arduous, and no matter the weather, I strip down to a sports bra, the cold air soothing my hot, damp shoulders.

  The voices come to me halfway up, teasing my ears like wings, like the flutter of moths. As I run higher and higher, they follow until I feel companionable and safe, as if someone is running behind me, though there is no one around but the dog. Sometimes I even imagine these people, a woman dressed in clothes from the 1920s and a man holding a hat in his hands, his forehead slick with sweat as he tries to explain something to me, but I’m too far in the future to hear. These voices or people or ghosts follow until I reach the creek before the first clearing, and as soon as I clear the water, there is only me and the dog and the mountain, and if I turn, a far-off view of the small town of Seward, the bay stretching out in silver-blue shadows. The voices never follow up the next brutal hill or through the small strand of spruce or along the final hill. I don’t know where they go or why, I only know that they leave as I near the top, wind hitting my face and the sky opening up.

  When I reach the forest service cabin, I stop and eat a sports g
el, sip from my water pack, pet the dog, and then I’m winding through a valley so perfect and still and immense that always it stuns me, and always I feel tears in my eyes and always, I reach down and grab a leaf, a piece of bark, a small stone, and place it in my mouth, a rough and gritty communion. I lodge that bark or pebble against my cheek, where it is moist and dark and secretive, and I keep going.

  For years after I had my son, I didn’t run. I worked out at the gym. I swam. I biked. Sometimes, rollerblading around the inlet in the summer twilight, I’d pass a runner, watch his or her legs and think: Why run when you can roll? I’d feel haughty and self-important and I’d go too fast down the next hill, as if to challenge myself. Yet later that night, I’d feel loss rising up from my stomach, and after my son went to bed I’d sit in the quiet living room with the dog and cats and stare at my legs. Some mornings I’d even decide to run again, and I’d tie on my shoes and take off but I could never find a rhythm or joy because, face it, beginnings are tough and I was impatient and life was hard enough without struggling through three or five miles of pain.

  That changed the Fourth of July when I was sent down to Seward to cover a news story on the Mount Marathon Race, a brutal 3,022-foot climb with sketchy handholds, slippery footing, and ankle-deep scree. The night before the race it rained and I slept in a leaky tent, and I huddled in a ball, wet and cold and depressed because a few years earlier, my sister had died of an eating disorder on the Fourth of July, and all I wanted to do was rock back and forth and weep.

  Maybe it was lack of sleep or maybe I had a hint of a fever, but as I climbed those steep cliffs to the halfway point on the mountain the next morning, I felt renewed. The rain cleared and the air was fresh, and up so high I could see out over the bay and the harbor, the boats tiny and snug. Later, as I shot photograph after photograph of women running down the mountain, muddy and bloodied and punching their fists triumphantly in the air, something opened inside to me. My head swirled and the bright light flashed behind my eyes and I heard my sister’s voice, low and sardonic and husky from too many cigarettes; it was as if she were right there beside me. “What happened to you, Cin?” she asked. “You used to be so brave and fearless.” And it all came back, those summer days of running through the fields with my bare and tough feet, and how when I fell down I got right back up and ran again. I felt a stab of grief so deep and pure that I cried out, not only for my sister but also for that fierce and wild girl I had once been. Why had I given her up so easily, so carelessly? Why had I left her so far behind?

  After that, it was as if there were a hum inside of my chest. All winter I worked out at the gym and when spring came, I began running again, a few miles at first, each step awkward and clunky so that my knees shook and ankles ached with effort. Soon I was up to five and then eight and finally 10 miles, and the next Fourth of July I stood at the starting line of the Mount Marathon Race with 300 other fierce and gritty women, and when the gun went off I was running again, running up Fourth Avenue and Jefferson Street to the base of the mountain, where I pulled myself up over roots and fell and cried and sweated, leaving a trail of blood over those cliffs like something holy, an initiation or a communion.

  I collapsed at the finish line and the woman ahead of me threw up on my shoes. I sat there, and the sky was blue and the air shimmered with heat and the blood from my knee dripped down on the pavement, and I was so happy that I couldn’t stop smiling.

  During a mountain race out on Knoya Ridge a few years ago, a young man collapsed and died. It was an overcast day in late spring, the air damp and moody. About 30 of us lined up at the start and ran through curved and wooded trails that slowly evened out the higher we climbed. Our pace slowed and sweat ran down our backs, and during one fierce ridge I leaned down and rubbed my fingers in the dirt and stuck them into my mouth, just to have something to taste. Up above the tree line the world opened and the breeze picked up and there was nothing but silence and mountains and a stuttered line of runners.

  A small group huddled near the finish, and a woman yelled that someone was hurt, to please go around. I thought of broken bones, bruised legs, the usual running injuries, until I saw the fallen man’s face, slack and blue and unmoving as a woman leaned across his chest and uselessly administered CPR.

  We gathered around him, all of us. We took off our shirts and windbreakers and covered his body, and then we stood sentinel, we stood near the top of that mountain, surrounded by valleys and sky and clouds, in that place of unimaginable beauty, and nothing moved but our breaths and the flutter of windbreakers across the young man’s stilled legs.

  After the rescue crew arrived, after the hellish arranging of the body over the stretcher, after the liftoff and the final silence, after the run back down the mountain and the days and weeks that followed, I read in the newspaper that the man had been just 22 years old and had had a preexisting heart condition. I knew even then that I would never forget that day, not only the young man’s death but everything else too: the clouds pressing close, the silence, the mist of cold air rising around us.

  Often when I run I think of how it would feel to die in the mountains. Part of me rejoices, not because I want to die but because I’m running over rocks and my arms are outstretched and my breath comes hard and I am totally and completely in my body. Yet each time I run I can feel the persistent and inevitable possibility of my own death, and behind it and before it and probably even because of it, so much fucking life.

  CHARLES SIEBERT

  Goal to Go

  FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

  LAST APRIL 28, a splendid spring Saturday that fairly begged you to be outdoors, I spent all afternoon in front of my living room TV, anxiously watching the last day of the annual NFL draft, live from Radio City Music Hall. As big a football fan as I am, I had never seen any part of a draft, to say nothing of its final four rounds, which are a roughly seven-hour marathon that lasts until sundown. And yet, on that day, I sat riveted.

  I had in front of me what’s known as a Draft Scout Player Profile: a starkly efficient, computerized summation of every draftable player’s past prowess and future prospects. I, however, was interested in only one, my nephew, my younger sister’s son. His specs were, of course, familiar to me. But somehow the officious, bare-bones alignment on my computer screen—in categories befitting a prize steer at auction—rendered him a complete stranger. And a rather impressive one at that.

  Name: Pat Schiller. Number: 53. Position: Outside linebacker. Height: Six-foot-one. Weight: 234. College: Northern Illinois. Under “Pro Day Results”—his audition, essentially, before several NFL scouts at the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University earlier in March—were 22 bench presses of 225 pounds, a 35-inch vertical leap, and, for a linebacker, a head-turning 4.65 seconds in the 40-yard dash. Under his “Draft Scout Snapshot” was a link to game-highlight footage: a rapid-fire sequence of heat-seeking-missile launches into ball carriers; the all-out, “high-motor” mode of play that garnered number 53 a team-leading 115 tackles in his senior year, along with second-team All Mid-American Conference and Northern Illinois’s Linebacker of the Year honors. As for Pat’s “Projected Round,” there was, after the word “stock,” a bright red, upward-pointing arrow, followed by the words “shot late.”

  Some 800 miles west, meanwhile, in a two-story modern colonial on a neatly etched cul-de-sac in the western Chicago suburb Geneva, Pat lay on the living room carpet, holding his golden retriever, Champ. Around the TV with him was his immediate family: his father, also named Pat, a longtime excavation contractor as well as an accomplished pianist and songwriter in the Billy Joel mode, with a couple CDs to his credit and a number 6 single on a 2004 adult-contemporary-music radio chart; Pat’s mother, my younger sister, Cathy, a doctor’s medical assistant; my niece, Stephanie, a classically trained vocalist who now works in the admissions office at Northern Illinois University, her alma mater as well; and her fiancé, Michael. My nephew, my sister had told me, wanted to keep things low-ke
y, wanted to avoid the roomful of slack faces and well-meaning condolences should things not go as hoped.

  He was, in a sense, already chosen. Of the 80,000 or so who play college football every year, no more than 1,500 are even scouted by pro teams. On average about 300 of those players will be invited to show their stuff at the weeklong NFL scouting combine held every February at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Hundreds more will perform at regional combines or at their college team’s pro days. Among the heads Pat turned was that of Ran Carthon, son of the New York Giants fullback Maurice Carthon. Ran Carthon was also a former NFL running back before becoming a scout for the Atlanta Falcons. The Falcons called Pat four times in the previous week alone, the final call coming that Saturday morning.

  “Stay by your phone for Rounds 6 and 7,” he was told.

  What followed was a slow-motion combo to the gut. The Falcons’ sixth-round pick went to Charles Mitchell, a safety out of Mississippi State. In Round 7, they took Travian Robertson, a defensive tackle from the University of South Carolina. Four picks later, the Indianapolis Colts took as the draft’s last selection Chandler Harnish, the quarterback at Northern Illinois and my nephew’s close friend and college housemate.

  “The room went kind of quiet,” Pat told me. “There was like this skipped heartbeat. And then the waiting started all over again.”