The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

—

  The stretch run is a test. With just 20 games left in the season, Riley has done the math. The Heat need to go 13–7 to beat out the Pacers and Bulls for the eighth seed. Tonight, in March, Cleveland is in the building, photographers hanging in the private underground concourses, trying to snap a photo of LeBron. Watching the digital clock in his suite, Riley leans back on a red chair with his arms crossed. He’s holding court with one of his oldest friends, Peter Guber, who sits on a low-slung couch to his left. The playoffs are within reach.

  “You’ve crept up from the bottom,” Guber says. “You’re right on the cusp.”

  “Are we really the 11–30 team or the 17–4 team?” Riley says.

  LeBron doesn’t play, resting, and the Heat blow out the Cavs. There’s almost a fight at the end of the game, and after it, Miami flies to Cleveland for an immediate rematch. Already, Riley is thinking about setting the table one last time, not necessarily winning a title but putting the pieces in place. He isn’t going to Cleveland, he says when asked, because that time in his life has passed. In 1985, for Game 6 of the Finals, he wanted to wear a white tuxedo and a shamrock bow tie in Boston—“a lot more hubris then,” he says—but now that belongs to Spoelstra and the players.

  “I will go work in the garden and pick some fresh vegetables and play with my grandson while they battle,” he says. “We will have a great meal as we watch the game on TV.”

  “You have a garden?”

  “A major plan,” he replies. “Right now all imagery, but I see it.”

  He sees the vegetables, with Chris in those thick gloves with a shovel, yet he also sees one more title run. The competing visions leave him conflicted. “I NEED ONE MORE,” he writes in a text message immediately after talking about the garden. “AND I KNOW THIS WILL BE THE TOUGHEST TO GET.”

  The team wins that night in Cleveland and keeps winning, muscling past Chicago and Detroit. On the second full day of the NCAA tournament, the Heat finally make it to eighth place alone.

  Riley flies west to scout games.

  That first night, he stops over in Malibu before a flight to Sacramento in the morning. He lounges on the deck. The clock on his phone reads 4:48 p.m. It’s the “golden hour,” as he calls it, which usually means he turns on the “R&B 2” playlist, watching the sun set to a soundtrack of the Chi-Lites and Frankie Beverly. But today, he listens to just a few songs on repeat, by singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, “Something More Than Free” and “Traveling Alone.”

  They’re about loneliness and labor and the emptiness of being made to travel a road not of your choosing. I’ve grown tired of traveling alone. The ocean is close enough that the waves drone white noise instead of rising and falling swells. His two lives flash through his mind, the one he keeps dreaming about and the one he’s actually living. The songs repeat again. He calls Chris to talk about what he feels. Three decades ago, they planned a life here, in their heart home, with this view every day. He wants more Malibu and less Miami, feeling his “tipping point” close at hand, as he puts it, but there’s another flight to catch in the morning. He stares out at the sunset.

  “Instead of this,” he says, “I go to work!”

  * * *

  —

  The memories come again, punching walls in Miami after losing a playoff series, unable to face the team; headlines in New York when he left—“PAT THE RAT”—back to 1985, a cramped, un-air-conditioned locker room beneath the Boston Garden. The Lakers screamed and poured champagne. They’d finally beaten the Celtics—and in Boston—avoiding three straight Finals losses and the likely end of Riley’s career. No more newspaper stories about the “LA Fakers.” Pat had wanted only to find Chris. Where was she? Then he saw her, leaning against the wall by the training room. “I was across the room by the shower entrance,” he says years later, “but noticed she was watching and waiting for me all the time to free myself of the others. When we finally locked eyes and moved toward each other, that path opened like the Red Sea. The tears just flowed before we could embrace. Tears just flowing with happiness, joy, and relief at the sight of each other and this big moment. We embraced hard, and I lifted her up. My Girl Chris, man. She said we earned this. She said this is ours forever.”

  These things come to him on a barstool on the next-to-last day of the 2016–17 season.

  He orders a double martini.

  The story doesn’t end with the embrace, he says.

  He stirs his drink with a spear of olives.

  Twenty-one years later, in 2006, he mistakenly threw away the ring he won that night, along with all his Lakers rings, the real ones mixed together with dozens of worthless samples for the Heat championship ring he was designing. The company gave him exact replicas, but they felt too shiny, with not enough dents and scratches, so he put them in a bag and beat them against a wall. Instead of adding scars and patina, he just knocked loose a bunch of diamonds. When he got them fixed, he locked the replicas in a safe at home. With Pat Riley, there’s no self-curated shrine to his own former glories. The past can’t possibly compete with the season he’s living and breathing today, waiting out the next-to-last afternoon with a martini in a South Beach bar.

  It’s April 11, five days since the Heat slipped out of that eighth playoff spot they’d worked so hard to earn. He feels tired and depressed. The losses and the shrinking math have pushed Riley into a hole, drowning in the darkness. He hates how a loss, even after all these years, crushes the joy he’d felt hours earlier playing with his grandson. One game remains, tomorrow night. Miami needs to win, then hope for Chicago or Indiana to lose. Inside, he already knows the truth. In about 18 hours, they will come up one victory short of the playoffs—all these months culminating in exactly nothing, just a guy coming home and staring at a quote on his mirror: Warriors don’t live in the past; the past is dead; life is now and the future is waiting.

  Over drinks, the day before that 82nd and final game, next season comes into focus. They’re not good enough to beat the Warriors with the current lineup. He’s not good enough. The team needs at least one star, and probably two, to compete.

  The sun makes the waterfront room feel light and easy.

  A bartender talks with a singsong Dublin lilt.

  Sitting on his stool, Riley tells stories about the Native American chief Tecumseh, and about an old Thoroughbred horse who broke his leg in the homestretch and got a bullet to the head instead of a garland of roses. Finished with his martini, Riley orders one more before heading home to dinner, planning his goodbye speech to this team he’s grown to love. The simplicity of tomorrow clarifies him. He smiles. In the late-afternoon happy hour glow, he sees himself clearly, not as he wants to be but as he is. No roses for him, just a long stretch of track and a bullet with his name on it, one day, when he can’t run anymore.

  “You know the greatest lie in the world?” he says, starting to laugh. “Pat’s retiring to Malibu.”

  APRIL 2017

  Holy Ground

  Walter Wright Thompson died before he could fulfill his dream of walking Augusta National during the Masters. His son took that walk for him.

  AUGUSTA, GA.—Most everything makes me think about my daddy, and this morning, of all the stupid reasons to fight back tears in public, it’s chipped beef on toast. I’m sitting at the corner table on the clubhouse veranda, waiting for Arnold Palmer to hit the ceremonial first shot of the Masters. Man, my father loved watching Arnie. To do it from the veranda with a plate of chipped beef? Hotty Toddy, brother. Only, the excitement of incredible moments like this is muted for me now. I’ve learned in the past three years that I did many things solely to tell Daddy about them later.

  The crowd stands on Washington Road, waiting for the gates to open. For a moment, the course is quiet. Birds chirp. Mowers drone. Soon, another lucky diner asks if he can join me. His food arrives first. As we talk a bit, bundled against the chill, he looks at the empty sp
ace in front of me.

  “What did you order?” he asks.

  “Chipped beef on toast,” I say. He laughs. “Breakfast of champions,” he says.

  “It was my dad’s favorite meal,” I explain.

  “Did you ever bring him here?” he asks.

  There is a silence. “No,” I say, turning away.

  Daddy watched the Masters every year. He dreamed of attending just one, and he’s always on my mind when I come here for my job. Indeed, for all of us lucky enough to actually walk through these gates, we cannot leave without having thoughts of our daddies, for Augusta National is a place for fathers and sons. Davis Love III navigates the same fairways as Davis Love Jr. New fathers carefully hold toddlers’ hands. “Can you see?” you’ll hear them say. Strong arms tenderly steer stooped backs. “Look out, Dad,” you’ll hear them say softly. That is Augusta.

  When Jack Nicklaus finished his final round ever at the Masters, his eyes welled on the green. He glanced at his son, who was caddying for him, and repeated his own father’s last words, “Don’t think it ain’t been charming.” As Jack ended his relationship with this special place, he looked at his son and thought of his father. That is Augusta.

  When Tiger Woods won for the first time, his eyes searched the gallery near the scoring shed for Earl Woods. They hugged, Tiger’s head cradled on his father’s shoulder. And when he walked off the green almost a decade later, and Earl Woods was no longer there, Tiger remembered that shoulder and he mourned. That is Augusta.

  This, too, is Augusta: me, needing a daddy more than ever, finishing the chipped beef on toast, walking the grounds in search of fatherly wisdom. Me, a 30-year-old man, who failed in my promise to bring Daddy to this place he longed to visit, unable to control my emotions when I see a father and son standing by the first fairway. The boy is a half-head taller and growing. Both wear blue Penn State gear. I see myself in that boy, standing with his father, both thinking they have all the time in the world.

  THE FIRST TEE

  We were a father and son in my dad’s imagination before my parents even knew I was a boy. On the day I was born, he sat down and wrote a letter to himself, cataloging his thoughts as his first child came into the world. He called me his son, with daughter written each time in parentheses, just in case. When I arrived, before my mother even cleared her head, he had already filled out the birth certificate. There was never even a discussion of what I would be called. “Walter Wright Thompson Jr.,” he wrote.

  Walter Wright Thompson Sr. had grown up in the Mississippi sticks with three brothers. Many of the traits my friends would recognize in me came from him. He loved to be the loudest guy in the room, and he loved telling stories, and hearing them too. He loved his favorite places to eat beyond any normalcy and the sound of the ocean and the hum of late-night conversation. He loved working hard.

  His own dad was a tough man with unfulfilled boyhood dreams. Nothing was good enough. When my daddy, a star quarterback, would run for three touchdowns and throw for two more, Big Frazier would be waiting after to ask why he’d missed that tackle early in the third quarter. Daddy decided that when he had a son of his own, he’d do it differently. He’d give his whole heart, shower all the love and attention and approval he could muster. He would be a good daddy. A sweet daddy.

  I remember tailgating before Ole Miss football games, him throwing passes just far enough away that I’d have to dive. I remember Destin, Florida, when I dropped my favorite stuffed animal, Sweetie, and didn’t tell him until we got back to the condo. He spent hours looking for that rabbit, and he found it too. I keep it around, but I don’t ever tell anyone why. When I look at it, I can feel how much he loved me. I remember skipping school to go fishing, and I remember promising not to tell Mama. I remember him always reminding me that “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” and “if it feels wrong, it is.” I remember him taking me to see Superman the night it opened, even though I was in trouble; I remember watching The Guns of Navarone a thousand times with him. And I remember, as clear as if it happened yesterday, that April day in 1986 when Jack Nicklaus charged toward his sixth green jacket.

  I was playing in the other room, probably with that G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, when he called my name. I didn’t want to go. He called again. So I went into their bedroom. He was lying on his stomach.

  “Jack Nicklaus is going to win the Masters, son, and you’ve got to watch this. You will remember this for the rest of your life.”

  So we lay there, my feet only coming to his knees, watching. I was 9. He was 40, six years younger than Jack, and he cried when the final putt went in. I can’t remember now if I’d ever seen him cry before.

  The years slipped away, but every April, we lay down on our stomachs—tumbuckets, he called ’em—and oohed over the azaleas and aahed over Amen Corner. Each time, he’d smile and mention that, one day, he’d sure like to see what such a place must look like in person. He grew older. I went to college and, as a freshman, called him to ask if he was watching this kid named Tiger Woods. He was. I sat in the Phi Delta Theta house three states away. I could picture him lying on his stomach.

  Home didn’t feel so far away.

  THE FRONT NINE

  It has been 10 years. I no longer watch the Masters on television, and I pinch myself each time I get the credential, though I try to hide it. Sportswriters are supposed to act jaded, right? I’m sitting right now with colleagues in the press center interview room. Tiger Woods is at the dais, no longer the kid he was a decade ago either. Normally, he’s full of boring blather, using a lot of words but carefully saying nothing. Only now he’s talking about fathers and sons, about losing one and gaining another. I lean in a bit. He talks about regret and the things he wishes he’d done. He talks about what kind of parent he’d like to be.

  “Here I am, 31 years old,” he says, “and my father is getting smarter every year. It’s just amazing. But hopefully, my child, down the road a little bit, will say the same thing.”

  That, to me, is the definition of growing up. There comes a time when every son starts the slow transition to father. Mine began four years ago. My dad felt pain and went to the doctor. A scan revealed cancer. He was 57 years old, with marriages to attend and grandkids to spoil. Instead? He was in a fight for his life. He pulled into a parking lot on the way home and read the report. It said something about the pancreas. He understood he was in trouble. Up a creek without a paddle in a screen-bottomed boat, he’d say.

  But the man had never backed down. Once, in college, he knocked out an All-SEC football player for messing with his brother. He attacked this disease just as viciously. After the first chemo session, he stopped at a greasy fast-food chain to get a sack of sliders, an f-you to the poison. To walk through a hospital with him was to understand his gift for life. All the nurses and doctors and patients—especially the patients who sat through the treatments alone—called him by name. For each, he had a kind word and a smile. He raised the energy level of every room he entered.

  We took a fishing trip he’d always wanted to take. I knew there wasn’t any time to waste. We spent a glorious few days on a river in Arkansas, filling our cooler with trout, talking late into the night. “I’m not afraid,” he told me. Before leaving the fishing camp, I made a reservation for a year later. This, he said, we had to do again. “We’ll be here,” he said, almost whispering. “I guarantee it.”

  Back home, he spent hours alone, at his spot behind the house. There was a canebrake out there, and a brick wall, and tall oak trees and a creek. He’d sit there, long past sunset, and he’d think about his life. It’s where he prepared to die. Once, my mom pointed out toward his silhouette, tears filling her eyes and running down her cheeks, and said, “It just breaks my heart. I think he’s scared.”

  Still, he read the right books, by preachers and by Lance Armstrong, and he’d make damn clear he didn’t want to know the odds. So we did
n’t tell. But we knew. And they weren’t good. I wept the first time I Googled pancreatic cancer. What would I do without a daddy?

  Only, sometimes, it does happen like in the movies. He responded to the chemo. The doctors saw the tumors shrinking and, finally, a scan revealed he was cancer free. We couldn’t believe it. He didn’t act surprised.

  Of course, I was at the Masters when we got the news.

  Daddy and I made immediate plans for a vacation. We’d go back to Destin, where he’d found my stuffed animal. I bought the tickets and, the day after the tournament, I drove to Atlanta, met him at the airport, and, together, we flew south. In the air, I gave him my Masters media credential. He collected them, kept them hanging by his bathroom mirror to remind himself that his son had gone places. He treasured the parking passes, too, and faithfully affixed them to his truck after I left Augusta.

  In Florida, we sat in lounge chairs by the ocean. We ate quail and grits, and Daddy talked the place into giving us the recipe. We drove in a Mustang convertible with the top rolled back, and we made plans. His reprieve made him realize that he needed to stop practicing law 16 hours a day and do those things he’d always dreamed of doing. He wanted to visit China, stand above those gorges. He wanted to see Tuscany, rent a villa.

  Mostly, he wanted to go with me to the Masters.

  “It’s a done deal,” I told him. “Done deal.”

  We celebrated his birthday. I picked up dinner, the first and only time I ever did that. We laughed, and I gave him a present: a black Masters windbreaker. He held it up before him, glanced at me, words failing. He slipped it on and went outside to read. I shuffled off to bed. With the cancer gone, time was no longer precious; we had all the time in the world. But something made me take one last look, seeing him sitting on the balcony, thin and pale, the waves crashing somewhere out in the blackness, a thin ribbon of smoke rising from an ashtray.