The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  “They shook my hand,” Pat said. “Coach Smith did all the talking. I can’t remember his exact words. I was half-listening. I was so bummed. I’m getting cut. The thrust of it was that of all the players in camp, I was one of the guys who’d improved the most from week to week. He said: ‘You played your heart out last night. We really feel you’re going to be playing in this league somewhere. Unfortunately, we’re releasing you. We just don’t have a spot available for you now, but if anything changes, we’ll call you.’ I thanked them for the opportunity, and that was about it.”

  Downstairs, he noticed a group of five players sitting off to one side.

  “I went over and asked them what’s up,” Pat told me. “They said they were being kept around for the practice squad. That’s when it all really hit me that I was finished.”

  At 11:56 that morning I received an email from Pat’s father.

  “C, Patrick was released. He’s not in the mood to talk to anyone at this time. FYI Pat.”

  On the hour-drive south that afternoon from Flowery Branch to Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, my typically text-happy nephew numbly watched as one message after the next came in. The veteran linebackers Stephen Nicholas and Sean Weatherspoon both texted to say how great he played against the Jaguars and that he shouldn’t be surprised if he got picked up by someone right away. Pires, the linebacker coach, phoned as well. None of it was helping.

  Back home that night, his parents wanted to take him to dinner. They purposefully chose a place in Elgin, a couple of towns over. “Mayor Schiller” couldn’t bear the thought of coming face to face with any of his eager hometown followers. His reputation, however, clearly extended beyond one suburb’s borders.

  “We’re just sitting down,” Pat told me, “and sure enough, this waiter comes over. ‘Hey, you’re Pat Schiller. You play for the Falcons, right?’ And I’m like: ‘Well, not anymore, dude. Just got cut.’”

  In his old bed that night, beneath the framed photo of the Blond Tiger that he keeps above a pair of bronzed boxing gloves, Pat felt deeply conflicted about being back home. He said he hated himself for liking it so much, right down to the warm heft of his dog Champ and the chance to just hang low for a while and heal.

  He slept well into the following morning, got up around 11:00 A.M., and shortly after noon headed out the front door with his father to shop for a new laptop. By then, Pat told me, he was beginning to take some stock in what Smith, his teammates, and his agent all told him: he had made good film.

  “But, dude,” Pat told me, “I’ve got to admit, I was thinking, If someone is going to call, I hope it’s two or three weeks from now. I was really looking forward to some time off.”

  Pat and his dad had just climbed into the cab of his pickup when his phone rang. It was the Falcons. They wanted to know if Pat would consider coming back to be on their practice squad.

  “Consider?” Pat told me. “I mean a couple of weeks off would have been nice. But to play for the team whose guys and system I know?”

  He was back in Flowery Branch by nine that night, having never unpacked his bag.

  Six weeks later, I flew down to Atlanta to watch the Falcons’ away-game matchup, against the Washington Redskins, on TV with Pat. There’s a certain ghostly quality to being on an NFL practice squad. You work all week with the team, attend all the same meetings, eat the same meals, accrue all the same weekly bumps, aches, and bruises, and yet walk the sidelines in the team’s official civilian clothes for home matchups and don’t travel for away games. An injury to one of the Falcons’ five active-roster linebackers could have Pat dressing for the next game. He could also be dropped at a moment’s notice for a needed backup at another position. Or he could be picked up by any of the league’s other teams for their active roster, forcing Pat to pack his things and break the lease he signed on the two-bedroom town house in Atlanta’s northern suburbs.

  The farthest Pat had previously lived from home was the place that he and Chandler Harnish shared near the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University, just 25 miles from Geneva. His parents took care of most of his bills, including car and gas and his auto and health insurance. His mother did his laundry at home. He never balanced a checkbook. Now, before a small whiteboard in his narrow kitchen, the two of us stood reviewing the monthly cost of living his dream.

  Rent: $975

  Furniture rental: $400

  Gas/power: $55

  Car: $310

  Fitness: $30

  Cable: $40

  He knew he could save more of his weekly $3,500 paycheck (after taxes) if he bought furniture. But to stay as mobile as possible in case of a sudden call to another team, he chose to rent: the headboard and clothes dresser in the bedroom; a spare wood table with four metal chairs in the dining room; and the L-shaped leather living-room sofa with a coffee table/ottoman. All the pieces seemed to barely touch the carpeting, as if they, too, were somehow keenly aware of just how provisional the life is that they’re furnishing. The air mattress in his guest bedroom was a last-minute donation from his former practice-squad mate Bryce Harris. Harris was signed by the New Orleans Saints to fill a hole in their roster during the first week of the season, just days after he moved into a condo a few doors down from my nephew’s.

  “It’s not easy,” Pat said, “having to pick up everything just like that, break your lease, go to a new town, and learn a whole new system. But, hey, for $390,000 a year, you break your lease.”

  He told me he feels much more relaxed now with his teammates, more like one of the guys, but is still very aware of where he stands in the NFL’s strict hierarchy.

  “You have to know your place,” he told me. “And believe me, I know. I’m always the first guy at meetings, and I’m the first guy back in the room after breaks. I still get the vets water and Gatorade. I dropped over $100 at Costco the other day on bulk candy, fruit roll-ups, Starbursts, beef jerky, sunflower seeds. We’re in there watching film for hours, so that’s my contribution.”

  He occasionally goes out with some of the other guys on the practice squad, but not much with the veteran linebackers.

  “I talk more now about the game with them,” he said, “and they’re all cool guys, but I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, you want to hang out?’ You don’t want to be that guy. Everybody does their own thing. They’re living their lives. But it’s not like I sit at home and say: ‘Oh, this is so sad. I don’t have any friends.’ It gets lonely at times. But I just kind of chill, and I find things to do.”

  That afternoon, Pat and I sat in front of his new flat-screen TV—the only thing in his place other than a coffee maker that he bought—watching his teammates’ come-from-behind victory over the Redskins, the Falcons’ fifth win against no losses. Pat watched like any modern-day, tech-savvy youth: a MacBook Air propped on his belly, an iPhone beside him, deftly surfing the Internet, fielding and sending texts between plays and during commercials, eyes darting between multiple screens until a play propelled him off the sofa with a thunderous roar.

  “That’s it!” he yelled at the tight end Tony Gonzalez. “Give me more of that YAC” (yards after contact).

  Somehow it wasn’t until we were watching postgame highlights that either of us noticed the backup linebacker, Robert James, whose former place on the practice squad Pat now held, had come into the game sometime during the fourth quarter. Pat sat bolt upright, grabbed the remote, and scrolled back through the game to determine the precise moment James entered. He then went to the Falcons’ game thread on his computer, eyes narrowing, lips slightly parted in anticipation.

  “Stephen Nicholas,” he muttered. “Ankle.”

  For the next two days of my visit, we were on the Stephen Nicholas ankle watch. Texts and calls came from all directions. Everyone Pat knew, it seemed, was aware of Nicholas’s ankle. Gruder, with whom Pat had only exchanged a couple of text messages since Gruder was released in August, wrote, “You getting called up this week?” Chris Browning of ProForce phoned to ask
the same thing. Over dinner the following night, the number of Dave Lee, Pat’s agent, flashed up on Pat’s cell phone. Pat held the phone to his ear. A protracted silence.

  “No, dude,” he finally interrupted. “That’s a funny story. I just thought you were calling about something else.”

  He hung up. A moment later he looked down with a quizzical head tilt at another call coming in.

  “Crazy,” he said. “You see a number pop up you don’t know, and you think: This is it. A team calling to pick me up.”

  Nicholas’s ankle injury turned out to be less serious than originally thought. But in the Falcons’ seventh game of the season, the linebacker Sean Weatherspoon was carted off the field with his own ankle troubles. He was out of the lineup for the next two games. When I checked with Pat a few days before the Falcons’ game against the Arizona Cardinals, Weatherspoon’s status was being listed as questionable, and the Weatherspoon ankle watch was still on.

  “Who knows?” Pat told me. “But if the call comes, I’m ready.”

  My last night with him in Atlanta, we went back to his town house after dinner to watch a little Monday Night Football. During a break in the action, he led me into his clothes-and-sneaker-strewn bedroom to show me the huge walk-in closet he felt would allow him to send back his rented dresser. I noticed that the dresser was topped with all manner of balms, unguents, and painkilling medications: a 23-year-old with the medicine cabinet of a septuagenarian.

  Somehow, it was only then that I felt the full weight of what my nephew had managed to pull off: the ridiculous odds he overcame; all the excellent players he beat out. I suddenly felt more like one of his hometown acolytes than an uncle to a kid who grew up a thousand miles and, in terms of life experiences and career pursuits, a world away from me. A kid I only came to know at this juncture because he is so good at a game that I, like millions of others, so love to watch.

  “Dude,” he said, as I stood staring at his dresser. “I swear to God, if someone tells me right now there’s some miracle body cream out there that would make me feel 100 percent and prevent me from getting hurt but that could also cause cancer or liver damage down the line, I’d use it in a heartbeat. I would.”

  He picked up an empty bottle of anti-inflammatory pills and tossed it in the trash.

  “Even if I make it,” he said, “the average career is what, three or four years tops. But if I get hurt now, I’m gone. It’s nothing personal. If I’m injured, I’m deadweight. I’m stealing their money. Do you know how many linebackers there are sitting home right now that want my job? Hundreds. I mean, let’s get real. As much as Coach Smith or Coach Pires might like me, it would be: ‘Hey, it’s been a fun ride. You’re a good kid. But see ya, Schiller!’”

  DAVID SIMON

  Fear the Bird

  FROM SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

  THEY DRIFT ON YOU. They do.

  One minute, they’re belt high and shading their eyes with a Rawlings mitt, brows furrowed at the green of the field, listening intently as you explain how the infield fly rule gathers the shards of an otherwise broken universe. Next minute, they realize that girls have a fundamental purpose, and they’ve parsed their last box score for a decade or so. Next moment after that, their minds are racing down deeper, wooded paths of their own choosing, and the batting splits for Wieters or the merits of trading for another corner outfielder cannot possibly matter when, say, the fearful symmetry of Monk’s chord voicings are to be admired, or the macroeconomic to-and-fro of Keynes-Hayek waits to be argued.

  My son was born in 1994. Three years later, long before he could buy me a Natty Boh and bring it back to my bleacher seat, the Orioles went to the playoffs for the last time. I’m not sure I remember what happened with that. Something about some kid in the stands, Maynor or Maier or whatever. I don’t want to talk about it.

  For a decade or so, he waited for our turn, and—as kids still do—he planned for the moment when it would be his turn as well. A southpaw, he’d heard me joke often that if he could get some movement on the ball, I wouldn’t have to pay for college. So he was out in the yard all the damn time, making his mother catch him when I wasn’t around. Once, when she told him not to throw so hard, to try to control his pitches, he shook his eight-year-old head in fierce disgust.

  “Mom, don’t patronize me. I’m trying to do this for a living.”

  Life was Ripken and a cast of thousands, and a wait-till-next-year mantra that began to rival anything ever heard in Brooklyn. But then, at 15, he had a cell phone and Facebook and, finally, a girlfriend. It was over. He had grown up in a losing town, with a losing team, and there were other passions in this world.

  A month ago, as the Orioles were still strangely late for their summer swoon, I drove him to college in Boston. August slipped to September, and two weeks ago, finding myself pumped and alert at two in the morning, I pulled out my cell and fired him a text:

  O’s win again on a run in bottom of ninth. Still tied for first.

  The Apple phone made that hopeful airfoil noise as it sent the news north. Day after, nothing came back on it. Next game, I tried again:

  Ok I need you to focus. O’s win today in the 14th. Thirteen extra inning games in a row they’ve won.

  I waited an hour or so. No response. Then I walked down to the harbor and the nearest jersey shop, where, still, Ravens gear was selling better than O’s swag. I bought one of the cartoon-bird caps—glad they’re back; the ornithologically correct Oriole takes some of the blame for our long years in Babylon—and an Adam Jones jersey. I shipped them both with a note: “If you come home a Sox fan, you’re out of the will.”

  It was pathetic and cloying, I know.

  As a matter of rank expectation, this is supposed to be the man-in-the-street piece, the return-of-the-pride ramble in which the long-suffering, bone-weary common folk of a second-tier, rust-belt American city are brought to life again by the winning antics of their no-name baseball franchise.

  The grime and pain of losers and also-rans are washed away with each magical success at the ballyard. The metropolis begins to believe in itself again, to greet the new daylight with small glances upward toward the heavens, with laughter and newfound kinship among rowhouse neighbors, who regale each other with last night’s on-field heroics as the children tumble into the street and head for school in a seaflow of orange-and-black ball caps and jerseys. Fathers come home from work, drop briefcases, and grab mitts for a catch with sons, then adjourn to the den for a Talmudic reading of the latest box scores. Fresh graffiti is scrawled atop the RIPs and gang tags in the heart of the toughest Westside neighborhoods: ORIOLES MAGIC. FEAR DA BIRD. And come the night of the big game, the mayor leads the rally on the steps of City Hall, flicks a switch, and lights the ornate dome orange. A city rises as one.

  Well, it’s been sort of like a montage from Major League IV, only not so much. For one thing, we weren’t entirely ready when they cued the song and the cameras caught us. The Orioles have been so bad for so long that our eyes weren’t exactly fixed on Camden Yards from the outset, and as the one-run and extra-inning wins began to accrue we were still nurturing past resentments—over Angelos, over the Jon Miller banishment, over the Albert Belle contract and the Schilling-Finley-Davis trade and a dozen other miscues. We were wise to these charlatans, and our hearts were held in reserve as they are every year, waiting not for a pennant race but for the opening kickoff and the arrival of purple jerseys and real possibility.

  Three weeks to go in the regular season and the Orioles pull near-even with the hated Yankees and are actual favorites for a wild-card slot. And yet, good seats can be had at the Yard. With a rare Thursday day game on the television set in a South Baltimore diner, my cell phone rings and I find myself harangued by New York cousins, uncharmed by any Cinderella story. They’re watching the game as well, and they’re looking at empty seats along the baselines.

  “Pennant race. September. And you can’t fill the box seats? Don’t even talk about Baltimore being a gr
eat baseball town.”

  Through the phone, I can smell the arrogance, the entitlement. These are the people who used to outnumber us in our own ballpark, who could, on a bad day, drown out the locals with “let’s go Yankees” in the late innings. Once, writing for a television show, I conjured a story line in which a man was murdered at Camden Yards during a ball game. Stadium authority officials and Orioles execs shook their heads. Why would we let you show a murder at the stadium?

  “A Yankees fan is the victim.”

  They were intrigued enough to venture a second question:

  “Who kills him?”

  “Another Yankees fan.”

  Sold.

  Still, this is a blood relative. I try to reason with the sonofabitch. Eschewing the usual small-market inequities and hypocrisies, I don’t even bother bringing up elephantine cable television contracts or those $l,500-a-night box seats in the Bronx that are just as noticeably empty on the baseline camera pans. I go instead to the practicalities of a postindustrial blue-collar town:

  “This isn’t New York. People here work. They can’t get off for a day game.”

  “You guys are a half game out! The seats are f— empty!”

  “You’re drawing from what, 19 million? You know how many people are in the Baltimore metro area? Maybe a sixth or seventh of that . . .”

  “Sad, cuz. Pathetic.”

  “Bite me, O pinstriped whore.”

  I hang up, turning to the television in time to see the Orioles’ bullpen hold the line for yet another inning. I look around at the diner. Eight or nine people, a couple of waitresses, the cashier. All of them watching the television, quiet, pensive. No cheers, nothing demonstrable, but not a word of conversation either.