The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  . . . I happily sacrifice my bodily needs for the greater cause of economic and social justice and I would, without hesitation, sacrifice my membership on the football team and my enrollment at the University if it would result in the University administration recognizing and meeting the demands of the Living Wage Campaign . . . I wish you, the rest of the coaches, and all of my teammates nothing but the best and I sincerely love you all as my family.

  —Best, Joseph

  A few hours later, he ups the ante. His letter to his coaches becomes the heart of a “Why I’m Hunger Striking” post that he writes for Michaelmoore.com. In no time the Huffington Post and The Nation, upon discovering that he’s an athlete, publish it too.

  He decides to ignore his coach’s reservations and keep starving. Stairways grow daunting. His body grows colder. His sense of smell intensifies, a primal response to food deprivation: he can scent a ham sandwich a first down away. Over and over, the gut flashes the mind a message—I’m hungry—and the legs begin walking automatically toward the dining hall, and over and over the mind flashes back the same reply, Stop! You can’t eat, until finally the loop exhausts itself and the body says, To hell with it all, then, just let me sleep . . .

  Hunger’s fourth day dawns. The campus workers send word to the strikers—We can’t show up at the noontime rallies; we’re afraid of getting fired. But Miss Mary can’t be fired for riding by on her bike and smiling and waving her gratitude to Joseph. “Every time I see him,” she says, “it’s a joy to my eyes.” Mama Kathy can’t be fired for shaking a finger at him and crying, “Eat, gorgeous! Just eat when nobody’s looking and act like you’re hungry! Pretend you’re in the drama department and you’re going for the Academy Award!”

  “Aw, I can’t do that, Mama,” Joseph replies.

  He has lost a half-dozen pounds. His mind’s mush. He raises his hand three times in Martin Luther King’s Political Thought class and forgets each time what he meant to say. Fellow striker Breezy Pitts blacks out in economics class. The doctor orders her to eat.

  A dozen teammates keep tabs on Joe-Joe with texts or calls. “Some appreciate his hunger strike,” says wide receiver Miles Gooch, “and some think it’s a bit extreme.” All are stunned by the swelling media attention.

  Suddenly, a fourth-string cornerback’s being featured in the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, SI.com, Yahoo! Sports, Ebony, msn.com, AOL News—in 45 Google pages’ worth of websites! Suddenly the hunger strikers have a national bullhorn and UVA has a major publicity problem, all because of a walk-on football player of whom the school’s media relations department doesn’t even have a photograph in its files. All because sports is our obsession.

  But do our athletes have any more obligation to rush to the ramparts in the struggle for social justice than our bank tellers or mailmen or stockbrokers? No, probably not, Joseph says, but omigod, the platform and the wattage at athletes’ disposal if they do. The tidal waves of attention paid to sports are an energy stream that can be diverted anywhere, even to the plight of a janitor or a dishwasher, even by the most insignificant of athletes. Joseph emails his fellow strikers, expressing his worry that the media focus on him might rub them wrong. Rub them wrong? They’re thrilled. They’re reaching audiences they never dreamed they could. Joseph’s email account is about to explode, messages pouring in from professors and students and pastors and football fans across the country.

  “A rose will bloom even through the crack of a concrete sidewalk,” says Edwards. “That’s what has happened at the University of Virginia.”

  Day five for Joseph. Day eight for more than half of the 21 others now going hungry. They’re hoarse, frayed, frantic, marching to the doorstep of the university president’s house, screaming, You’re not meeting! We’re not eating! You’re not meeting! We’re not eating! Marching on the Board of Visitors meeting in the Rotunda and shrieking, The people, united, will never be defeated! The people, united, will never be defeated! Marching on the administrative offices, howling, When workers’ rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up! Fight back!

  The administration won’t budge, sending emails to tens of thousands of students and faculty explaining its financial predicament, pointing out that its minimum starting pay of $10.65 plus benefits to its direct employees is the second-highest in Virginia regardless of the fact that the university is hiring ever-growing numbers of contract workers from outside agencies that pay them as little as $7.25 an hour with little or no benefits. Outsourcing on the cheap, no different from many U.S. corporations. At their noon rally the strikers take turns on the bullhorn pleading their case and sharing their personal stories, then sag to the ground in exhaustion, a few dissolving into tears.

  It’s Joseph’s turn to tell his tale. So how did this kid slip through the cracks of the U.S. sports system—or bloom through one? Oh, it’s clear right away, he’s not been washed here by the mainstream. This is what it takes for a Division I athlete in 2012 to end up starving and chanting for human rights: a childhood lived in homeless shelters, transitional housing, a church basement, a friend’s attic, a tiny camper, fleabag motels, grandparents’ houses, cramped apartments . . . 30 homes in his 19 years. Got off easy: his older sister, Joy, tallied 50. Moving because the joint was infested or the landlord a creep or the plumbing pitiful or a job in some other town might actually pay just enough for them to survive. Four children and a parent sleeping in one bed at one shelter, piled in with families whose adults had addictions or physical handicaps, piled in with people wondering what was odd about this family, besides the obvious: it’s an interracial family in Virginia. Again and again, someone somehow materializing and offering them a hand, saving them from the streets and starvation.

  How did Joseph’s mom, Rhonda—raised Jewish and middle-class and suburban in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania—end up a gypsy trying to keep four children out of oblivion’s clutches? Married to Bruce Williams, a burly, good-natured black man, a reformed drug addict from the hard half of Norfolk. Both had joined Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, done years of volunteer and mission work, and, still strangers to each other, committed to wedding in 1982 as part of the church’s plan to erase the barriers between races and nations through intermarriage. Bruce ricocheted from job to job, a security guard one day; a counselor at a home for troubled kids the next; a taxi, truck, and bus driver who kept crashing taxis, trucks, and buses . . . and then seemed to give up. There was never, because of all of his and Rhonda’s mission and volunteer work, a cash reserve to tide them over. And so Mom kept bursting through the door to announce, We’re moving again! Right now! Scavenge the dumpsters behind the grocery and liquor stores for cardboard boxes! Jam the sheets and towels in those plastic bins! Dismantle the cinder-block bookshelf! Heave everything else into those crates! Don’t forget the mousetraps! Leave the place cleaner than when we arrived! You know the drill!

  Truth was, they didn’t—it was usually helter-skelter, a ransacked army on the run, one eye out for the roaches and rodents that kept moving with them. Between the moves and job changes, Rhonda would round up the kids on weekends and summer mornings, dress them in donated clothes, funnel them into a clunker, drive past all the ball fields where all those kids in crisp unis were playing weekend tournaments, and find someone, somewhere, in worse shape than they were to help out. Or better off; didn’t matter. The Williams Crew cleaned up streets, parks, schools, hell, even rivers, wading into the Anacostia River in waist-high boots to have at the 20,000 tons of trash entering it each year. They planted trees, organized a summer school for underprivileged kids, made sandwiches for poor people, baked cookies for old people, sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem” in nursing homes.

  Somebody in that flock of saints had to rebel, so Joseph, in ninth grade, volunteered. Puberty had come, Dad had gone—Bruce and Rhonda had split six years earlier—his two older siblings had just moved out, and the feeling that everything was falling apart was confirme
d when his mother couldn’t scrape together the $200 to get Joseph’s heart murmur checked out, so his big love was lost too: no high school football. He started getting in fights and disrupting classes, then skipping them altogether, drinking and smoking pot at a pal’s aunt’s apartment, once even funding his mutiny by pocketing cash he collected for Hurricane Katrina victims. He landed in a youth shelter, slugged a kid there who blew on his neck, and was charged with assault and battery and hauled off in shackles to a juvenile detention center.

  Rhonda stared at her 13-year-old delinquent in disbelief. Sure, the kid had been hyper right out of the chute, had been class cutup and funkiest dressed, wearing a big green clock on a string as a necklace to school or picking his hair out into a puffy ’fro, then having his younger brother shave a bald stripe down the center and one down each side: Reverse Triple Mohawk, Ma! But he’d always been the Williams’s prodigy, spewing five-syllable words at age three, bypassing first grade altogether, and reading at an eighth-grade level at—What? He can’t be six! When he cursed his mother one day in the summer after his to-hell-in-a-purple-handbasket ninth-grade year, Victor, his best buddy as well as his older brother, beat him to a pulp and left him sobbing in a bush in the front yard of a town house they’d just moved into on government vouchers . . . and Joseph’s fever finally began to lift. Dominion High principal John Brewer, rather than expel him, gave him an eighth chance, the assault charges were dropped, Victor moved back home, Joseph passed his sophomore football physical, and the two brothers went on to become stars and leaders of their football team in Sterling, Virginia.

  Something else happened too. How, Joseph asked a man in the 100 Black Men society who mentored him on weekends, can we ever pay back all the people who’ve helped us? And the reply struck him in the heart: You pay them back by helping someone else. He began staying after school to tutor struggling classmates and signing up—even before his mother could—to help those hurting. When his college application landed at UVA, admissions officers panting over his volunteer-work list had no air left when they got to his 1420 SAT score, and they fell over themselves to help cover tuition, board, and books of an incoming 16-year-old.

  That’s how Joseph made it through high school still holding on to the strange notion that he’s not separate from other human beings, not different from custodians and dormitory maids. That’s why he’s the one in 444,000 U.S. student-ATHLETES standing at the hub of his campus imploring his peers and professors and administrators to care. He had to be incubated in a way that neither money nor poverty incubates in America, grow up differently from other fledgling white, brown, and black athletes. Grow up without the buckling weight of his extended family’s expectations, without his consciousness narrowed to the needs of kin and posse, chained to the lifetime role of Clan Messiah—the poor African American athlete’s fate ever since the 1980s, when the money got crazy—and without ever climbing aboard the middle- and upper-class striver’s conveyor belt of camps, clinics, private coaches, travel teams, weightlifting programs, and every-weekend tournaments. All of them, from both backgrounds, kept anxiously aware of their place in the pecking order by Internet scouting and ranking services reminding them what their height, weight, bench press, and time in the 40 needed to be, tunnel vision hardwired by their Sweet 16th.

  Developmental compression: that’s what the caretakers of psyche and spirit call a phenomenon that became normalized over the last few decades. Truth is, Agassi, perhaps the most developmentally compressed athlete of modern times, could never have wrought his groundbreaking educational initiative—which includes plans for more than 75 charter schools serving up to 50,000 students nationwide—if he hadn’t leaped off the compression track in his twenties for long stretches that outraged and bewildered sports fans. Truth is, any athlete of this era, unless he attended a tiny high school that had to scrounge up enough kids to field a team, probably had to be developmentally compressed for at least a few years if only to experience the simple joy of starting on the varsity.

  Joseph’s speech is slowing down, it’s growing difficult for him to form sentences. And still the story he tells on the steps of UVA’s Rotunda brings tears to the eyes of an English professor at the rally. He never even mentions to his listeners that he plays for UVA. He doesn’t want them to stereotype him as a football player.

  Hope surges through Joseph and the hunger strikers: UVA president Teresa Sullivan has agreed to meet with them. At an odd hour, 7:00 A.M., and two more days of hunger hence, but they’re desperate now, fearful that their sacrifice will evaporate in the dry air of apathy, praying that the national attention Joseph has attracted has finally begun to make the administration flinch.

  On his sixth foodless day he and a roommate who has joined the hunger strike, Peter Finn, can’t stop obsessing about food: sushi . . . pizza . . . chicken . . . steak, sushi, pizza, chicken, steak, sushipizzachickensteak. They go out to dinner just to watch their girlfriends eat. “Can we sniff your food?” Joseph begs his girlfriend, Kathy Storm. She hands him a french fry and he holds it beneath his nose, closing his eyes, swooning. “Can you eat one with your mouth open?” he begs. She complies. He’s getting lightheaded, goofy. He leans in to inhale another french fry and knocks over a glass, splashing water all over the table.

  He falls silent on his seventh day. Opening his mouth only now and then to say to Peter, “God, I’m hungry.”

  “Please,” their other roommate, Toye Falaiye, keeps pleading with them, “just eat.”

  LoVanté Battle, Virginia’s junior safety, comes by to check on Joseph. “You look pathetic,” he tells him.

  Joseph feels the pressure growing. He’s entering the final week before spring break, has papers due and exams to take for which he can’t possibly focus, and he has a flight to Belize in five days to co-lead a group of a dozen UVA students in renovating an orphanage, a commitment made weeks ago.

  He feels doubt arising. He knows that doubt always arises in movements like this one, and that here is where his heroes dug in . . . but their battles were so much more personal than his. Ali was getting drafted into an army during wartime. Walton’s friends were getting shot at in Vietnam. Jim Brown, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos had to go to the other side of town to eat and sleep. Billie Jean King was playing for prize money that was sometimes one-sixth of what men received and breaking the law to get an abortion in 1971. Their success as activists four decades ago is one more reason that today’s athlete doesn’t feel he must stand up. If he’s black, he can eat or sleep anywhere his wallet allows, make just as much money as any white icon, and, like everyone else, leave wars to men and women who choose to fight them. It doesn’t seem necessary to risk his playing time, reputation, or commercial popularity . . . unless . . . unless he fully understands the hero’s quest and wishes to fulfill it.

  It’s not enough, in that quest, to overcome all the obstacles and enemies in the forest and seize the Holy Grail. “The mystique of the hero is that he goes into a realm that the rest of us can’t go to, but he’s got to come back with something that’s important for everyone,” says Edwards. “If he comes back with the Grail and doesn’t use it to support the people and place he came from, there’s a huge chunk missing from his halo. Jackie Robinson isn’t a hero because he was a great baseball player or Ali because he was a great boxer. Joe Frazier and Larry Holmes were great boxers too. It takes something more than that. Heroism has been downgraded into a pursuit of celebrity, and celebrity doesn’t carry any obligation to anything except to fame and money.”

  Psssst. Here’s the secret that Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali discovered, the one that no agent or handler whispers into the modern athlete’s ear: when you play your sport for something much larger than yourself, than your wallet, than your ego or even your team, when you tap into that power, son . . . look out.

  Crunch time. Summit meeting with the university president. Eighth day of Joseph’s hunger strike. He crawls out of bed at 6:30, slogs across campus to stand vigil with
30 others outside Sullivan’s office. In the rain. For nearly two hours. Does she know that ESPN’s next, that Joseph and the hunger strike are about to be featured on Outside the Lines and ESPN.com?

  The meeting finally ends. Six Living Wage supporters walk outside, nearly empty-handed. The administration agrees to little more than to meet again. At the second meeting, two days later, it agrees to form a student advisory committee to look further at the issue.

  Joseph walks his hollow gut through the drizzle, feeling a little bit of everything. Hollowness spreading into his chest because the clock’s running out on him. Disappointment that there’ll be no fourth-quarter game-winning drive. Excitement about ESPN. Worried that “success,” even if it comes, might amount to little more than what previous Living Wage Campaigns have achieved: a small raise for the workers that’s not tied to the living wage, that doesn’t cover the growing legions of contract workers, and that can get swallowed in no time by inflation . . . which is, in fact, exactly what will happen two months later.