The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  “I thought I had my mind made up,” he says. “Now I’m not so sure.”

  On Monday afternoon, the boys of Saibi, now back home in Matsuyama, are informed that today’s practice will be eight hours long. The first order of business is to tend to their field, on which heavy weekend rains have left a small lake where third base should be. Joko supervises the digging of a network of trenches that would impress a corps of engineers. Then most of the team sets upon the lake with wooden rakes and buckets and sponges. It takes them close to an hour of quiet, tireless work, but slowly the lake recedes. At last the bag is put into place.

  All the while, Anraku has been nearby, working on his mound with his own rake, shaping its gentle curves. It is necessary, Joko says, that the boys maintain their own field. They need to learn a place in order to learn their places in it. Joko is not teaching them to be baseball players, he says, because most of them will not be baseball players. But one day all of them will be men. After they finish tending their field, they bow to it, because there is honor even in dust.

  Next, they assemble in tight rows on the dirt, the starters sitting in the first row, the backups and the hopefuls sitting in two neat rows behind them. Joko gives them a talk, gentle, reassuring. “I have taught you the only way I know,” he says. Then his voice grows stern. Between their weekend games, the boys had tucked into lunches behind one of the dugouts, and one of them had left his empty bento box on the ground. “We were their guests,” Joko says. “We must leave these places cleaner than we found them.” He turns to Anraku. “This is your responsibility,” he says. “This is up to you.”

  At the end of his speech, Joko asks the boys to stand and turn to face toward home—not home plate but the place they were born. They turn in every possible direction, north and south, east and west, toward the cities and the mountains and the sea. They take off their caps and hold them to their chests. “I want you to think of where you come from,” Joko says. “I want you to think of your mothers and fathers, of the people whose love brought you here. I want you to think of what you mean to them, how precious your gifts are. I want you to think of them and decide what it is you want to do today. Will you do your best? Will you make them proud?” And then he has the boys stand in quiet contemplation for a minute, for two minutes. Their faces crease; paths form in the dust under their eyes.

  It’s hard to imagine an American coach making the same speech. It’s hard to imagine American boys taking off their caps and turning to face Philadelphia and Yonkers, San Antonio and St. Louis, and making up their minds about what it is they want to do today, and how well, and to honor whom. It’s hard to imagine our physical pursuits also being spiritual ones. It’s hard to imagine an America in which something as rare and special as a fastball is seen as less a possession than a sacrifice, more a communal property than a personal one.

  It is just as hard to imagine an American manager asking his 16-year-old star to throw 772 pitches in a single tournament.

  The boys begin their practice. It too doesn’t look like something we would ask our children to do. It is two hours before any of them touch a baseball. At one point, heavy logs are lifted and swung. Anraku, wearing a leather jacket to prepare his body for summer’s heat, watches the sweat drip off the end of his nose. Soon he will leave for a six-mile run on a hilly golf course. He runs every day. He must get stronger. He must reach the next level.

  “Let me ask you,” Joko says to an astonished guest. “Why do Japanese arms break in America?”

  He has heard many theories. He has heard that the Americans don’t let the Japanese throw enough and they get weak. He has heard they get too muscle-bound, or too fat on American food, and it alters their formerly perfect mechanics. He has heard that the ball itself is different—the American ball is bigger—and so their grip must change, which changes everything else.

  He has never heard that it’s because Japanese children field too much, or hit too much, or throw too much. Nobody, he says, has blamed Koshien or nagekomi, or if someone has, he’s been deaf to such complaints. American pitchers get hurt too, don’t they? If anything, Joko says, the Japanese aren’t working hard enough anymore. It’s not that they risk losing something important to us, to our softer way of thinking. “We’ve already lost it,” he says.

  He is not alone in his fears. “If Koshien changes,” the former Met Masato Yoshii says, “I think we would lose what is beautiful about baseball.”

  “What a game that was,” Gondo says, remembering Saito’s 948 pitches once again.

  Joko concludes his chat about American misdeeds by walking onto the field with buckets of balls. The boys surround him in a tight circle. Joko picks one. The boy stands maybe 30 feet in front of him, and Joko starts rifling balls, left and right, left and right. The boy dives, gets up, dives again, again and again and again, the balls mostly just out of reach. A dozen, then two dozen, then three dozen, now four, until at last the spectacle is over. The boy retreats out of the circle, and he is dirt-caked and heaving. Sweat and snot and tears cover his face. Several minutes later, his hands are still on his knees, and he still struggles to catch his breath.

  Meanwhile, another boy has been chosen. It’s the catcher, the whippet. Now he too begins diving, left and right, left and right, left and right. The boys are screaming encouragement, and he continues, stretched out and back to his feet, again and again. He is covered in earth from head to toe, but Joko continues to throw, and the whippet continues to dive, until suddenly, out of the dust: he smiles. Somehow he is smiling, and Joko is smiling back at him, until finally the whippet catches one last ball, exhausted, facedown in the dirt. The boys roar in unison. They have just witnessed the difference between victory and defeat.

  “That’s how we communicate,” Joko says, the smile still on his face. “We speak without talking.”

  The afternoon passes into evening, with so much speaking and so little talking, until the sun starts to set beyond right field and the brown earth goes golden. Anraku has returned from his run at the golf course. He is still wearing his leather jacket; his giant teenage body continues to cook. Joko has told him to be ready, that if they make Koshien again, he will throw every pitch. “I want to prove this is the right way,” Anraku says. “I want to prove the Japanese way is the right way.”

  He knows that if he gets hurt, then the Japanese way might be finished along with him, his arm the final straw. It is his greatest fear. Unlike Hideo Nomo, he won’t be the start of something. Anraku will be the end, the monster that leaves his city in ruins. “It will be my fault,” he says. His manager was talking about a discarded bento box, but he wasn’t really talking about a bento box: this is up to him.

  If he were an American kid, if he really were Stephen Strasburg, he would be that almost mythical brand of prospect whose gifts are appraised by baseball jewelers looking at him through loupes and locked away in a vault. Instead, Anraku was born Japanese, which means he is a different commodity, measured by different values. Anraku is not from this place; he is of this place. He is this place. He is his high school and prefecture and Japan. He is his mother and father. He is his manager. Most of all he is the rest of these beautiful boys, everything they are and everything they hope they will be remembered for having been. He knows that his fate will also be theirs. He knows by heart which way is home. And so off Anraku goes unafraid into the night, swinging his arm at his shoulder, as though he’s only just begun to warm up.

  FLINDER BOYD

  20 Minutes at Rucker Park

  FROM SBNATION.COM

  THOMAS “TJ” WEBSTER JR. waits impatiently for the ball to be tossed in the air. The only white player on the court, he can sense the eyes of the few dozen spectators lounging around the steel and plastic bleachers.

  At half-court, the sole referee delicately balances the ball on his fingertips while simultaneously judging the slight breeze coming off the Harlem River.

  Across the street, rising out of the ground where the once-famed Polo Groun
ds stood and Willie Mays tracked down fly balls, four 30-story housing projects known as the Polo Grounds Towers loom ominously over Holcombe Rucker Park.

  TJ anxiously tugs at his long black shorts once, then again. The tattoos that start at his wrist and crawl toward his slender biceps glisten under the sun. At five-eleven, with a lithe upper body that more resembles that of a tennis player, he doesn’t seem built for this game, or, perhaps, this place.

  As the players wait for the scorer’s table to set up, TJ bends his knees, then jumps straight into the air, landing with controlled force. It’s as if he’s testing the durability of the newly installed NBA-grade wood floor placed over the blacktop.

  Despite his small size and light frame, he carries, like a weapon stashed under a vest, a 38-inch vertical jump. Along with his self-proclaimed “great” outside jump shot, he knows that during this 20-minute open tryout he’ll have to do enough to impress one of the handful of coaches glaring at him from the stands. They represent teams in the upcoming Entertainer’s Basketball Classic, an eight-week-long tournament and the jewel of New York’s basketball summer circuit.

  Just two days ago, TJ stepped off a cross-country bus with every penny to his name wedged into the bottom of his bag for a chance to change his life. It’s a long shot; he understands that, and so do the other nine players on the court. There are only two ways to make an EBC team, either by reputation or by being selected after your performance in the open run.

  Each year, one, maybe two players, at most, will be good enough to be granted a jersey and, in essence, a pass inside the halls of the cathedral of street basketball; a chance to feel the nearly religious power of Rucker Park—the same court that has hosted some of the greatest players to ever play the game.

  In 1947, Holcombe Rucker, a Harlem teacher, started the predecessor to the EBC tournament on 128th Street, a mile south of its current location on West 155th Street, in the park now named in his honor. He viewed the tourney as a way to keep local youth busy during the summer months.

  Over the next few decades, the tournament expanded and became vital to the community. Every local player with any game had to go through the crucible of Rucker’s tournaments to prove he could play. Not only to himself and to other players, but also to the fans on the street who would sometimes wait for hours to squeeze inside the small park and watch basketball in its rawest form.

  Although the tournament games are generally governed by the same rules as the indoor game, streetball has its own unique subculture. At its core, the attraction to the playground is the spontaneity and the depth of human expression. Without many, if any, set plays, extreme displays of individual skill and athleticism can flare at any moment. Early on, NBA players seeking a break from the stodgy confines of their winter league, and to solidify their street credentials, began flocking to the tournaments uptown. A young Lew Alcindor perfected his footwork there. Dr. J was a regular, and locals like Earl “The Goat” Manigault, Herman “The Helicopter” Knowings, and “Pee-Wee” Kirkland became legends almost equal in stature to their NBA counterparts.

  On the court, other players with ability, but who lacked a name, had the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with the game’s best. Overnight heroes and streetball legends appeared from seemingly nothing and nowhere in a way that could never happen in the inaccessible castle of the NBA. Reputations could be made, but dreams could be destroyed, at Rucker Park.

  The success stories have become a part of the folklore of the game and are passed down from one era to the next. Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond was offered a contract by the Lakers after he scored 50 on Dr. J in the park. Harlem’s Adrian “A Butta” Walton once dropped 33 on Vince Carter. Larry “The Bone Collector” Williams was an unknown Pasadena kid who earned himself an AND1 tour contract off the strength of his Rucker Park performances. The tales are endless. So too is the allure.

  TJ knows all these stories by heart. He knows every last page of the history and anecdotes of New York street basketball and often spends his free time researching well-known streetball players, memorizing their achievements, but imagining their stories are about him and his life. This is his sustenance. It allows him to believe that a 24-year-old white kid, born and raised in stark poverty—who never played an organized indoor game in his life, never graduated high school—somehow not just belongs here in the open run standing on this court, but that one day his own story will also become part of the mythology of Rucker Park. A chance to not just earn himself a nickname, a reputation, and respect, but maybe if all the stars align the way he thinks they will, the way he believes they will, perhaps he’ll get noticed by the right people and earn himself a basketball contract, maybe somewhere overseas, the AND1 Mixtape Tour, or the Ball Up Streetball Tour—anywhere, just to do what he loves, just to change things.

  Really, he’s given himself no other choice. He quit his job as janitor at the Greyhound bus station in his hometown of Sacramento, gave up his room in his grandfather’s house, and cashed in every last penny he saved to take a three-day bus trip across the country to try out for these 20 minutes.

  Twenty minutes. Running clock. That’s all he has to make a team and continue his journey toward the gates of basketball heaven, or crumble and perish into the basketball hellfire below.

  The referee bends his legs slightly as the longtime EBC announcer, Duke Tango, picks up the microphone.

  “Welcome to Rucker Park, the start of the greatest outdoor tournament in the world.” His husky voice shreds through the summer air, jolting the listless crowd.

  The ball is tossed up—a knuckleball—and climbs toward its apex before a pair of large hands meet it on the way down. It’s tipped backwards in a slow, soft arc. TJ grabs it out of the air, then pauses and looks over at the scoreboard, at the clock that has already begun its slow descent toward judgment.

  19:59 . . . 19:58 . . . 19:57 . . .

  In the early afternoon, our bus pulls into Salt Lake City. The station is crowded, but it somehow seems vacant. A room full of exhausted, hungry people gives the long, cold hallways a feeling of vast emptiness. I’ve only been on the bus with TJ a relatively short 14 hours, but it’s already begun to feel claustrophobic and restrictive, like a truck full of cattle.

  I find a couple open spaces on the floor at the far end of the station; I put my bag underneath me and sit down. Soon the stench of hours of unchecked sweat spills out across the room. TJ seems unfazed. He pulls out his basketball, nearly worn to the rubber, signed by each of his family members and closest friends like an arm cast, wishing him luck on his journey. He begins casually spinning it around his finger in a tight circle, then around his thumb, then finally transferring the spinning ball to the edge of his cell phone. It’s a party trick he’s perfected to the point of boredom. A smallish man, with thick, worn lines across his forehead, comes closer to admire the skill. TJ smiles proudly.

  This is the third time TJ has made this pilgrimage across country. The first time, in 2011, he had no expectations or even a place to stay. He was allotted a free ticket by virtue of working at Greyhound and simply wanted to take the three-day journey, place his feet on the Rucker Park playground, then get back on the bus and head home. However, a few days before he left, as if by divine intervention, he met a fellow streetballer at his favorite court on P Street and 10th in downtown Sacramento. He invited TJ to stay at his family’s place in Queens for a few days, only a subway ride from Harlem.

  “The first time I went there I took the subway to 145th Street,” he explains to me through an awkward accent—a slow Northern California drawl (he’ll say “hella” more than a few times) with touches of a Southern twang from his high school years spent in Oxford, Mississippi.

  “As I’m walking I see the Polo Grounds Towers and my heart starts racing. I was shaking and nervous because I’m so excited. I sit down during a game and at halftime they ask if anyone wants to dunk. I was nervous, but I know for a fact if I raise my hand they’ll pick me. Why? Because I’m white. Hannibal
(an EBC announcer) picked me out of everyone. I went on the court, threw myself an alley-oop, cocked it back, and dunked it. It was 10 at night, streetlights on, music is going. The place went crazy. I dreamed about that my whole life.”

  A year later, he returned to Rucker, not just to dunk, but also to enter the open run and try to make a team. However, an ankle injury a few days before derailed his attempt. He stayed in New York a week longer, returning to Rucker Park nearly every day to watch the games, before eventually taking the bus home.

  Over the last 12 months, he’s been consumed with thoughts of playing in the EBC and excelling, seeking out that euphoric rush from the crowd on a weekly basis. He wakes up every day at 5:00 A.M., runs suicides, shoots an obscene number of jumpers, then plays in any game he can find.

  But he’s also taken to Facebook to boast he’s one of the best in Sactown. He has announced that he is coming to Rucker Park this summer to score 40 to 50 points a game against the world’s best.

  People began to take notice. The director of the EBC heard about him, and so did others associated with the tournament. A film production team in Los Angeles got wind of the white kid with the unreasonable confidence and soaring leaping ability, and they got curious.

  A producer friend of mine suggested I go up to Sacramento from LA and find out more about him, then document his journey across country. I played 10 years of pro ball overseas, and although I knew very little about street basketball in New York, my friend thought, if nothing else, I’d be a good judge of talent.

  The day before we took off across country, I met TJ at his grandfather’s house in the northern Sacramento neighborhood of Del Paso Heights (DPH, or “Deepest Part of Hell,” as TJ calls it). It’s a community of mostly small, decaying California bungalow houses built for migrant farmworkers from Oklahoma and Mexico during the Great Depression and workers at the McClellan Air Force Base during World War II. His place, near the end of the block, sits across from an alley of abandoned furniture and behind a pair of RV dealerships. A couple of the houses on the block are boarded up; the rest seem to be, if not neglected, barely functional, nothing more.