The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  TJ’s pass didn’t go as planned. Perhaps nothing ever does. It was half a second too late, knocked down inside the key, batted around, then picked up by the other team and tossed ahead for an easy layup.

  Duke Tango, a childish grin on his face, squeezed his microphone tight. “That man’s name isn’t ‘Uptown Finest.’ His name from now on is ‘Plastic Cup.’ Because he can’t hold nothing. That’s ‘Plastic Cup’ right there,” he said pointing at TJ. The entire crowd chuckled.

  Every time TJ touched the ball, a chorus of “Plastic Cup” echoed from the bleachers to the project buildings across the street.

  TJ heard the snickers and seemed to shrink, his shoulders hung low and his frail body slumped downward.

  The shield that had protected him for so long was gone, disintegrated in his hand. He was completely naked, staring at the Minotaur, his deepest fears, flush in the eyes.

  If I was his coach, I would have subbed him right there, spared him the humiliation, let him watch from the bench and just soak up the same Uptown air the legends once experienced.

  Instead, I watched from four rows back, my hands at my side, and wished, like he wished, that life had been kinder; that he wasn’t born a touch under six feet; that poverty isn’t what it is; that he didn’t have to clean up shit for a living; and that he didn’t wrap so much of himself into a bouncing ball that was both his source of happiness and slowly strangling any hope of a future.

  Still, as the minutes passed, there was a chance the basketball gods would smile down on him and the ball would bounce his way and this time he would dunk and the crowd could go crazy, and for a moment, or two, it would be different.

  He shot another air ball, then another. The chuckles became laughs. “Plastic Cup! Plastic Cup!”

  As the last few seconds ticked off the clock, TJ stood in the corner, away from the ball. The buzzer sounded, mercifully, and he shuffled back toward the bleachers. He sat down, alone, leaned forward, and dropped his head between his hands.

  A couple weeks later TJ asked me to meet him at Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, but he didn’t tell me where exactly, so I wandered around the web of concrete, past the dull orange walls and narrow sloping walkways. The terminal is designed in such a cold, impersonal way that it’s impossible to tell if you’re standing two stories aboveground or two stories below it.

  I finally found him standing by himself under a flight of stairs. He had lost some weight, and his eyes looked worn and tired.

  “I checked my card today,” he said, to explain why he’s leaving. “I got $8 on my card. And cash, I got like $7 and some change.” He gnawed his teeth together and looked down.

  After Rucker, TJ had floated around New York for as long as he could, trying desperately to put off the inevitable. He’d wake up in the morning, pick up his basketball, and head to one of the thousands of courts across the city. Goat Park, Tillary Park, West Fourth Street, Wilkins Park—but usually by the end of the afternoon he’d always travel toward Marcy Playgrounds in Brooklyn, underneath the building where Jay-Z grew up.

  He’d come back day after day, often shooting around by himself. Those walking past would pause by the fence surrounding the courts and curiously peer in. It was as if he was hoping he would somehow stumble across the ghost of a younger Jay-Z or someone who knew him, that he would finally be seen. And that they would then take him by the hand and offer him something, some morsel of guidance or wisdom, something he so desperately sought; a thread back out of his own personal labyrinth.

  One afternoon while shooting around, he told me, someone spotted his Roc-A-Fella Records tattoo with the Jay-Z quote on his arm. They told him there was someone he needed to meet and asked him to follow. He was nervous, but went anyway. And there, waiting in front of a corner store, was Damon “Dame” Dash, verified hip-hop royalty, former best friend and Roc-A-Fella business partner of Jay-Z.

  They sat down, Dash and TJ, just the two of them, inside a small café nearby and talked. TJ told him his story. Then he asked about Jay-Z. He asked about how it all started—he wanted to know everything. Dash humored him and talked and listened. They exchanged numbers. After more than an hour, Dash got up, reached into his pocket, and took out a wad of hundreds.

  TJ looked at the outstretched hand, the edges of the bills poking out. But TJ shook his head and turned down the offer. Dash put the money back in his pocket; they embraced and went their separate ways.

  “So why didn’t you take it?” I asked.

  “I don’t take nothin’ from nobody,” he said, hoping for it to come across as a statement of pride. “But you know, I think he respected that, I do.” He shook his head, still in disbelief he had met Dame Dash.

  He couldn’t buy food with respect, he knew that, but that didn’t scare him. He knew the taste of poverty. Respect, on the other hand, was something he was willing to starve for. Maybe this wasn’t why he came to New York, but then again, maybe it was.

  Rucker was over, his fantasies were dead. He had no job to go back to, he had almost nothing, nothing at all but the possible respect of Dame Dash. But this, this was a lot.

  “Now boarding bus 4083 to Pittsburgh and all points further west,” the bus driver announced. Everyone nearby got up and staggered into line.

  “Maybe I should have taken it,” he said reaching for his stomach. “I could use it, I could really use it.” He zipped up his backpack and looked around as the passengers in front of him slowly shuffled forward.

  As he neared the front of the line, the realization that maybe he would never be a Rucker Park legend was starting to sink in. “Three days on a fuckin’ bus, to go back to . . .” His voice started to crack. “You know where I live. What if you were in my shoes?” He glanced down at his worn Nike sandals. “In these fuckin’ flip-flops?”

  He looked up at me. I reached in my pocket and handed him a granola bar.

  TJ gave the driver his ticket outside of the gate, then turned and hugged me quickly, looking away.

  I stood and watched him walk up the stairs of the bus and disappear back into the darkness.

  I wanted to tell him that this would make him stronger. That he did something most people would never dream of, that he scored, that he earned Dame Dash’s respect, that the trip to Rucker Park was just a start.

  I wanted more than anything to tell him that in the end it would all work out.

  But the truth was, I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

  AMANDA RIPLEY

  The Case Against High School Sports

  FROM THE ATLANTIC

  EVERY YEAR, THOUSANDS of teenagers move to the United States from all over the world, for all kinds of reasons. They observe everything in their new country with fresh eyes, including basic features of American life that most of us never stop to consider.

  One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling. Its campus has lush grass fields, six tennis courts, and an athletic Hall of Fame. “They have days when teams dress up in Hawaiian clothes or pajamas just because—‘We’re the soccer team!’” Jenny says. (To protect the privacy of Jenny and other students in this story, only their first names are used.)

  By contrast, in South Korea, whose 15-year-olds rank fourth in the world (behind Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong) on a test of critical thinking in math, Jenny’s classmates played pickup soccer on a dirt field at lunchtime. They brought badminton rackets from home and pretended there was a net. If they made it into the newspaper, it was usually for their academic accomplishments.

  Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education. (The U.S. ranks 31st on the same internat
ional math test.) The challenges we do talk about are real ones, from undertrained teachers to entrenched poverty. But what to make of this other glaring reality, and the signal it sends to children, parents, and teachers about the very purpose of school?

  When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of ten foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.

  Even in eighth grade, American kids spend more than twice the time Korean kids spend playing sports, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced Academics. In countries with more holistic, less hard-driving education systems than Korea’s, like Finland and Germany, many kids play club sports in their local towns—outside of school. Most schools do not staff, manage, transport, insure, or glorify sports teams, because, well, why would they?

  When I was growing up in New Jersey, not far from where Jenny now lives, I played soccer from age seven to seventeen. I was relieved to find a place where girls were not expected to sit quietly or look pretty, and I still love the game. Like most other Americans, I can rattle off the many benefits of high school sports: exercise, lessons in sportsmanship and perseverance, school spirit, and just plain fun. All of those things matter, and Jenny finds it refreshing to attend a school that is about so much more than academics. But as I’ve traveled around the world visiting places that do things differently—and get better results—I’ve started to wonder about the trade-offs we make.

  Nearly all of Jenny’s classmates at Shawnee are white, and 95 percent come from middle- or upper-income homes. But in 2012, only 17 percent of the school’s juniors and seniors took at least one Advanced Placement test—compared with the 50 percent of students who played school sports.

  As states and districts continue to slash education budgets, as more kids play on traveling teams outside of school, and as the globalized economy demands that children learn higher-order skills so they can compete down the line, it’s worth reevaluating the American sporting tradition. If sports were not central to the mission of American high schools, then what would be?

  On October 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove played St. Matthew’s Grammar School of Dallas in football, winning 5–0. The event was a milestone in Texas history: the first recorded football game between two high school teams. Until then, most American boys had played sports in the haphazard way of boys the world over: ambling onto fields and into alleys for pickup games or challenging other loosely affiliated groups of students to a match. Cheating was rampant, and games looked more like brawls than organized contests.

  Schools got involved to contain the madness. The trend started in elite private schools and then spread to the masses. New York City inaugurated its Public Schools Athletic League in 1903, holding a track-and-field spectacular for 1,000 boys at Madison Square Garden the day after Christmas.

  At the time, the United States was starting to educate its children for more years than most other countries, even while admitting a surge of immigrants. The ruling elite feared that all this schooling would make Anglo-Saxon boys soft and weak, in contrast to their brawny, newly immigrated peers. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. warned that cities were being overrun with “stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth.”

  Sports, the thinking went, would both protect boys’ masculinity and distract them from vices like gambling and prostitution. “Muscular Christianity,” fashionable during the Victorian era, prescribed sports as a sort of moral vaccine against the tumult of rapid economic growth. “In life, as in a football game,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in an essay on “The American Boy” in 1900, “the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!”

  Athletics succeeded in distracting not just students but entire communities. As athletic fields became the cultural centers of towns across America, educators became coaches and parents became boosters.

  From the beginning, though, some detractors questioned whether tax money should be spent on activities that could damage the brain, and occasionally leave students dead on the field. In 1909, New York City superintendents decided to abolish football, and the New York Times predicted that soccer would become the sport of choice. But officials reversed course the next year, re-allowing football, with revised rules.

  The National Collegiate Athletic Association had emerged by this time, as a means of reforming the increasingly brutal sport of college football. But the enforcers were unable to keep pace with the industry. Once television exponentially expanded the fan base in the mid-20th century, collegiate sports gained a spiritual and economic choke hold on America. College scholarships rewarded high school athletes, and the search for the next star player trickled down even to grade school. As more and more Americans attended college, growing ranks of alumni demanded winning teams—and university presidents found their reputations shaped by the success of their football and basketball programs.

  In 1961, the sociologist James Coleman observed that a visitor entering an American high school

  would likely be confronted, first of all, with a trophy case. His examination of the trophies would reveal a curious fact: The gold and silver cups, with rare exception, symbolize victory in athletic contests, not scholastic ones . . . Altogether, the trophy case would suggest to the innocent visitor that he was entering an athletic club, not an educational institution.

  Last year in Texas, whose small towns are the spiritual home of high school football and the inspiration for Friday Night Lights, the superintendent brought in to rescue one tiny rural school district did something insanely rational. In the spring of 2012, after the state threatened to shut down Premont Independent School District for financial mismanagement and academic failure, Ernest Singleton suspended all sports—including football.

  To cut costs, the district had already laid off eight employees and closed the middle school campus, moving its classes to the high school building; the elementary school hadn’t employed an art or a music teacher in years; and the high school had sealed off the science labs, which were infested with mold. Yet the high school still turned out football, basketball, volleyball, track, tennis, cheerleading, and baseball teams each year.

  Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary school music teacher for an entire year. But, despite the fact that Premont’s football team had won just one game the previous season and hadn’t been to the playoffs in roughly a decade, this option never occurred to anyone.

  “I’ve been in hundreds of classrooms,” says Singleton, who has spent 15 years as a principal and helped turn around other struggling schools. “This was the worst I’ve seen in my career. The kids were in control. The language was filthy. The teachers were not prepared.” By suspending sports, Singleton realized, he could save $150,000 in one year. A third of this amount was being paid to teachers as coaching stipends, on top of the smaller costs: $27,000 for athletic supplies, $15,000 for insurance, $13,000 for referees, $12,000 for bus drivers. “There are so many things people don’t think about when they think of sports,” Singleton told me. Still, he steeled himself for the town’s reaction. “I knew the minute I announced it, it was going to be like the world had caved in on us.”

  First he explained his decision to Enrique Ruiz Jr., the principal of Premont’s only high school: eliminating sports would save money and refocus everyone’s attention on academics. Ruiz agreed. The school was making other changes too, such as giving teachers more time for training and planning, making students wear uniforms, and aligning the curriculum with more rigorous state standards. Suspending sports might get the attention of anyone not taking those changes seriously.

  Then Singleton told the school’s football coach, a history teacher named Richar
d Russell, who’d been coaching for two decades. Russell had played basketball and football in high school, and he loved sports. But he preferred giving up the team to shutting down the whole district. He told Singleton to do whatever he needed to do, then walked over to the gym and told the basketball players, who were waiting for practice to begin. At first, the students didn’t seem to understand. “What? Why?” asked Nathan, then a junior and a quarterback on the football team. “Would you rather have sports or school?” Russell replied.

  Out by the tennis courts, Daniel, a junior who was in line to become a captain of the football team, was waiting for tennis practice to start when a teacher came out and delivered the news. Daniel went home and texted his friends in disbelief, hoping there had been some kind of mistake.

  “We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”

  As the news trickled out, reporters from all over America came to witness the unthinkable. A photographer followed Nathan around, taking pictures of him not playing football, which the Corpus Christi Caller-Times ran in a photo essay titled “Friday Without Football in Premont.”