The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  Those with questions or comments may contact me at basweditor@yahoo.com. Copies of previous editions of this book can be ordered through most bookstores or online book dealers. An index of stories that have appeared in this series can be found at my website, glennstout.net, as can full instructions on how to submit a story. For updated information, readers and writers are also encouraged to join the Best American Sports Writing group on Facebook or to follow me on Twitter @GlennStout.

  Thanks to guest editor Christopher McDougall for his attentiveness, to Michael Everett, Joel Reese, Wright Thompson, and Jon Gold for sharing their BASW stories with me, and to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for supporting this book. My thanks also go to Siobhan and Saorla for stumbling over the occasional carton of submissions and not complaining too much. And to the writers collected within, I hope this book helps you find more stories.

  GLENN STOUT

  Alburgh, Vermont

  Introduction

  DEATH-ROW CELLS have better natural light than the Rite Aid in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where you can only glimpse the sky through the sad slit of a window above the checkout counter. That’s where I was gazing one afternoon when two bodies suddenly sailed past.

  These guys had to be six feet in the air, flying by one after the other like they’d been slung out of a catapult. Moments later they reappeared outside the glass doors, this time swinging through the railings of the handicapped ramp. By the time I got to the cash register, I’d watched them hurdle, vault, tightrope-walk, and otherwise wring a crazy amount of movement out of those blue bars. I hurried outside to catch them, but they weren’t leaving any time soon. “You start practicing parkour,” one told me, “and whole nights disappear.”

  Technically, he was talking about l’art du deplacement, more universally known by the funkified version of its other name, parcours—French for “obstacle course.” Parkour was born in the late 1980s, when a band of mixed-race kids living on the outskirts of Paris got tired of being roughed up by bullies. Together, they created their own “training method for warriors,” as cofounder David Belle would explain. The original parkour tribe didn’t mind mentoring other true believers who were willing to submit to their punishing tutorials, but otherwise they had just about zero interest in sharing their skill with the rest of the world. They detested the idea of competition and produced no training videos or instruction books. Until very recently, you had only two choices if you wanted to learn parkour: go to France or try your luck with YouTube.

  Not surprisingly, the two guys I met in the Rite Aid parking lot got their start on the YouTube route. They studied videos of other self-taught parkour disciples and broke down lightning-quick sequences, frame by frame, into individual moves. Like the original parkour crew, they were using their own bodies to discover the most animal-efficient way to fly over, around, and under the hard edges of the city landscape the way monkeys tumble through the trees.

  “I got into it because I was so fat,” Neal Schaeffer told me. He’d begun partying after high school and by age 20 had bloated up from 175 pounds to 240. One afternoon he was in the park watching some strangers “Kong-vault” picnic tables—they’d charge a table, plant their hands, and shoot both feet through their arms like gorillas and fly off the other side—and Neal was talked into giving it a try. Neal was shocked to discover that even out of shape, once he got over his fear he could master skills that at first looked impossible.

  Well, maybe not master. “You’re on this endless trajectory where you’re always getting better, but it’s never good enough,” Neal explained. “That’s what’s so exciting. As soon as you land one jump, you can’t wait to try it again. You’re always looking for ways to make it cleaner, stronger, flow into your next move.” Neal became a member of a local parkour tribe that likes to train after midnight, when the city is all theirs. Whenever a police car prowls by, they drop to the ground and bang out push-ups. “No matter what time it is, no one bothers you when you’re exercising.” Within a year, Neal was so fit and trim he was able to scramble to the roof of a three-story building and hang off the flagpole like Spider-Man. You’re back, he told himself.

  Neal still doesn’t rank his skills on the level of Andy Keller, a recent college grad who returned to Lancaster to rejoin his local parkour homies. You can tell within about 90 seconds of meeting Andy that he’d probably be superb at any sport he tried. He’s strong and graceful, with a swimmer’s broad back and enough bad-assery, as I witnessed firsthand the day we met, to bust out a back flip in the middle of a crowded coffee shop because his buddy dared him. I’d come to see him because of a theory I was looking into that the sports that truly evolved from human survival were the ones with the smallest performance gap between men and women. Logically, anything our ancestors relied on to stay alive would be activities that both men and women, old and young alike, would be good at. Endurance sports fit the bill, as 64-year-old Diana Nyad demonstrated when she became the first person to ever swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. And what about parkour? With its emphasis on agility, control, and creativity, was it the tightest link we have in sports to our evolutionary past?

  Andy agreed to show me the ropes. Which is how, a few days later, I found myself facing a six-foot-high brick wall outside a bank during the lunch-hour rush on the busiest street in Lancaster. “You’ve got to learn to shut out distractions,” Andy said. “Forget who’s watching you. Forget where you are. Just focus, and go.” Then he broke into a sprint, hitting the wall full speed. He ran right up the bricks, grabbing for the top and vaulting over. As he trotted back, he was met with applause. An audience had formed, blocking the sidewalk.

  “Impressive, isn’t he?” I said to the guy beside me.

  “I knew he’d make it,” the man responded. “I’m waiting to see if you do.”

  Nosy Guy just bugged me at the time, but later—much later, when I was sitting in the middle of dozens of great sports stories from the past year and trying to put my finger on what connected them—I thought back to the way he’d watched me bang the tar out of my knees that afternoon and realized I was kind of glad he’d been there. In his own way, Nosy Guy is what sports writing is all about. Our games are at their best when they’re shared, when electricity jumps from the player on the field to the fan in the stands and a connection is sparked between what you see and what you believe you can do yourself.

  That’s what happened to me when I came across David Merrill’s wonderful story “The One-Legged Wrestler Who Conquered His Sport, Then Left It Behind” and Amanda Hess’s “You Can Only Hope to Contain Them,” her so-smart (and superbly titled) piece on, arguably, the most important breakthrough in athletic equipment of our lifetime: the sports bra. I felt the shock; the spark crackled between my life and two worlds I knew nothing about. I’d never imagined what it would be like to kneel on a mat with one leg and hope I could somehow burst up and around and take down someone with all limbs attached. Deep-diving into that experience through Merrill’s reporting made me think that maybe, you know, scuffing myself up on a brick wall to learn parkour wasn’t much to whine about after all. And wow! To reach the peak of collegiate wrestling despite that handicap and then suddenly walk away because . . . well, dig in for yourself and find out.

  Likewise with breasts. I didn’t know Amanda Hess’s writing before coming across this piece, but I’m on high alert from now on. What remains with you after you’ve read it isn’t even her light-touch storytelling and ability to pull up just the right tales to bring her point to life, but the gratitude you feel whenever someone opens your eyes so that you see things differently from then on. When I finished reading the stories nominated for this year’s collection, I was so blown away I went online to announce, “I’ll stack Best American Sports Writing 2014 against any Best American anything of any year.” I’d never known I could feel sympathy for such devils as Don King, a criminal cage fighter, and bull sharks. Until Don Van Natta Jr. unearthed secrets from a generation ago, I had
no idea that Bobby Riggs loved Billie Jean King. Truly loved her.

  Did you? Well, strap in. You have no idea what you’re about to discover.

  CHRISTOPHER MCDOUGALL

  PAUL SOLOTAROFF WITH RON BORGES

  The Gangster in the Huddle

  FROM ROLLING STONE

  THE FIRST TEXT pinged him around nine that Sunday night: I’m coming to grab that tonight, you gon b around? I need dat and we could step for a little again. For Odin Lloyd, this was bang-up news, proof that his luck had turned around. Aaron Hernandez, the Pro Bowl tight end of the New England Patriots, was coming by later to scoop him up for another five-star debauch, just 36 hours after he’d taken Lloyd out for the wildest ride of his life. All night Friday, they’d kicked it at Rumor, popping bottles and pulling models up the steps of the VIP section of the Boston theater district’s hottest club. “Shit was crazy,” Lloyd told friends the next day at his niece’s dance recital. “The girls were off the chain. We smoked that super-duper and Aaron dropped 10 G’s like it was nothing. We kept rolling past dawn at his big-ass mansion, then he tossed me the keys to his Suburban.”

  Big doings for a semipro football player and underemployed landscape helper, though there too fortune smiled on Lloyd, 27. He’d just gotten word that he’d have shifts all week, his first steady hours in some time. And now he was about to burn it down again with Hernandez, the $40 million man with the restless streak and a bottomless taste for chronic. The problem, Lloyd said, was it didn’t end there with Hernandez and his how-high crew: “Them boys is into way worse shit than herb.”

  How much worse? About as bad as it gets, say longtime family friends. In exclusive conversations with Rolling Stone, those friends, who insisted they not be named, say Hernandez was using the maniacal drug angel dust, had fallen in with a crew of gangsters and convinced himself that his life was in danger, carrying a gun wherever he went. Sources close to the tight end add that throughout the spring, when players are expected to be preparing themselves for the marathon NFL season, Hernandez had missed workouts and sessions with a rehab trainer and had been told by his head coach, Bill Belichick, that he was one misstep from being cut.

  But training camp was six weeks away, and Hernandez wasn’t one to heed a warning. He went on hitting the clubs with his boys, including Lloyd, who was dating his fiancée’s sister. That Sunday, Lloyd’s best friend urged him to stay home, saying he needed his sleep for the week ahead. Lloyd had already been up all weekend—he’d taken his friends clubbing Saturday night in Hernandez’s black Suburban. Hernandez wouldn’t hear it, though; he kept texting Lloyd. Aite, where? Lloyd relented, ignoring his friend. It don’t matter but imma hit you, said Hernandez at 9:39. If my phone dies imma hit u when I charge it.

  Tonight, though, wouldn’t be anything like Friday. All weekend, Hernandez had been stewing in his 7,000-square-foot mansion 45 minutes outside Boston in North Attleborough, not far from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play, fixated on something that happened in the club two nights earlier. Per a close friend of Lloyd’s, they’d been getting buzzed in VIP when Lloyd saw two of his cousins downstairs. He went to hug them up and buy them drinks when one of them, a West Indian with dreads, started pointing and mean-mugging Hernandez. “I don’t like that nigger, he’s one of them funny people,” said the cousin. “Stop pointing, that’s my boy,” said Lloyd of Hernandez. “You’re gonna start some shit ’tween me and him.” “Well, I don’t want you with him, he’s a punk,” said Lloyd’s cousin, jabbing his finger again in Hernandez’s direction.

  When Lloyd went back upstairs, Hernandez was enraged. Club security cameras allegedly captured the two men squabbling, showing Hernandez, six-two and a rippled 250, facing off with the five-eleven Lloyd. The friends stopped short of throwing punches, though cameras mounted outside the club show the argument resuming in the street.

  Most people, even self-important stars blowing thousands on bottle-shaped women, might have simmered down about now. But the 23-year-old Aaron Hernandez wasn’t like most people; for ages, he hadn’t even been like himself. The sweet, goofy kid from Bristol, Connecticut, with the klieg-light smile and ex-thug dad who’d turned his life around to raise two phenom sons—that Aaron Hernandez had barely been heard from in the seven hard years since his father was snatched away, killed in his prime by a medical error that left his boys soul-sick and lost. Once in a great while, the good Aaron would surface, phoning one of his college coaches to tell him he loved him and to talk to the man’s kids for hours, or stopping Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner, to kiss him on the cheek and thank him damply. There was such hunger in that kid for a father’s hand, and such greatness itching to get out, that coach after coach had covered for him whenever the bad Aaron showed—the violent, furious kid who was dangerous to all, most particularly, it seems, to his friends.

  And so, two days after the spat with Lloyd, he was nursing his rubbed-raw grievance. “You can’t trust anyone anymore!” he’s heard screaming on the footage of his home-security system. Sometime that night, he reached out to a couple of Bristol goons, Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz—two stumblebum crooks with long sheets of priors and no job or fixed address to lay their heads—and ordered them to take the two-hour drive to Boston on the double, telling one of them, Hurry ur ass up here, nigga.

  Around 1:10 A.M., Hernandez set off with Wallace and Ortiz in a rented Nissan Altima to pick up Odin Lloyd. Hernandez’s security cams show him with what looks like a Glock .45 in hand, pacing in his living room. On the 30-mile drive to Fayston Street, a war-zone block in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, where Lloyd lived with his mother and younger sister (he’d been forced to move home after losing his job at the local utility company), the three men stopped to buy a pack of blue cotton-candy Bubblicious and a cheap cigar, the type used to roll blunts. Usually, that was Lloyd’s job—Hernandez fondly called him the Bluntmaster. Making do without him, they got to Lloyd’s house at 2:33 A.M., where a surveillance camera posted across the street showed Lloyd getting into the backseat of the Nissan. It fast became clear to Lloyd, though, that this wouldn’t be a night of hot-sheet fun. He began firing texts off to his sister, sending distress flares every few minutes. U saw who I’m with . . . Nfl . . . just so u know . . .

  The last one reached her at 3:23 A.M. Minutes later, Lloyd got out of the car in an industrial park in North Attleborough. He seemed to know what was coming, but decided to make a stand: the driver’s side mirror of the Nissan was broken off, a sign that he might have gone down swinging. On a sand-and-gravel patch, Lloyd raised his arms in defense of the first shot, and was then hit in the back twice as he turned away and fell to the ground. The gunman pumped two more rounds into his chest for good measure. The next day, cops lifted tire tracks near the body that matched the Nissan. Tracing the car back to the rental agency, police would eventually recover a .45 shell case and a wad of cotton-candy Bubblicious. And though Hernandez would monkey with his home-security system, getting rid of six hours of key recordings, and smash up the cell phone he’d turn in to cops, he’d neglect to scrub all the data they contained, handing police a honeypot of incriminating evidence.

  They’ll need every bit of it to convict Hernandez of murder and send him away for life. Both on the field and off, he’s been hell to bring down; the man has a genius for breaking loose. According to several experts, he might just do it again, make one last run to daylight around the edge.

  There have been 47 arrests of NFL players since the end of the last regular season: bar brawls, cars wrecked, spouses shoved or beaten. Violence travels; it follows these men home, where far too many learn they have no kill switch. But there’s the sociopathy of a savage game, and then there’s Aaron Hernandez. Since 2007, he’s been charged with, or linked to, the shootings of six people in four incidents. Three of the victims were gruesomely murdered. One survivor, a former friend named Alexander Bradley, has had multiple operations and lost his right eye. The other two survivors were shot in their car outside
a Gainesville, Florida, bar after an altercation involving Hernandez and two of his teammates his freshman year at the University of Florida. While in Gainesville, he sucker-punched a guy and shattered the fellow’s eardrum, and reportedly failed multiple drug tests, though he was suspended only once for those offenses. He posed for selfies in the mirror while (a) wielding a .45 and (b) swathed from head to toe in Bloods regalia, and threatened to “fuck up” Wes Welker, his Pro Bowl teammate, just days after being drafted by the Patriots. (Welker, a veteran, had refused to help the rookie operate the replay machine.) Since high school, he’s scourged his skin with a scree of tattoos. Writ large on his left arm: HATE ME NOW. On the meat of his right hand, just above the knuckles: the word BLOOD in bright-red scrawl.

  Of all the questions raised by the murder of Lloyd, two enigmas underpin the others: How did a kid so rich in gifts and honors—the most celebrated son in the history of Bristol—grow into such a murderously angry man? And why does Bristol, the town that time forgot, keep landing in the middle of this lurid story?

  This city of 60,000 was always a sweet, sleepy place to buy a house, raise children, and send them elsewhere. The locals built firearms and doorbells in the plants here, then car parts and mainsprings for clocks. The population spiked in the decades after D-Day—vets moving in to take factory jobs and rent small pillbox homes on the west side of town. No one got rich or stuck around for college, but it was heaven to be a 12-year-old here: manicured ball fields, Boys Club summers, a sky-blue pool in every park.

  Aaron’s father, Dennis, ruled those fields before his son followed in his footsteps. In the ’70s and ’80s, Dennis and his twin brother, David, became local sports heroes. Enormous for their age and fast and tough, they took to football straightaway and were happier running through, than around, you. They’d be three-sport stars in high school and draw scouts to their games, though as good as they were at football, they were better in street fights, say friends: nobody fucked with the Hernandez boys.