The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  Few people who watched knew that Bailey had helped Santo Trafficante Jr. in the late 1970s avoid a congressional subpoena to testify in the House’s JFK assassination inquiry. Trafficante had faced jail time, but he thwarted the subpoena with Bailey’s help. Now 79 and living in Maine, Bailey says he helped Trafficante as a favor to his lawyer, Henry Gonzalez, whom Bailey called a close friend. “I knew Santo and Henry, but I didn’t represent either one of them,” Bailey says. Waldron, the Mafia expert, says Frank Sturges, one of the Watergate burglars, also appeared on the show and passed his lie detector test. Waldron says Sturges was a bagman for Trafficante.

  For years, Riggs’s gambling buddies often asked him about a fix. “Of course it wasn’t on the level,” says Jim Agate of Las Vegas, a golf gambling pal of Riggs’s. He said when he asked Riggs what had happened against Billie Jean King, “he’d laugh and giggle, and roll his eyes and say, ‘Oh, well, you know, it wasn’t my day.’”

  Over the years, King has repeatedly denied there was a fix, saying the suggestion was preposterous because, if Riggs had beaten her, he could have parlayed the victory into additional big money exhibitions against other top women players. He had plenty of incentive to win, she says. When told about Hal Shaw’s story, King laughs. “I would bet my life that Bobby never had that discussion with them,” she says of Marcello, Trafficante, and Ragano. “Maybe they had that discussion with themselves because they’re mobsters, but that’s not Bobby. Bobby doesn’t get involved with mobsters . . . If I really thought there was even a glimmer of possibility of that, I would think about it, but I know it’s not.”

  In 1995, during the last year of his life, Riggs was 77 years old and suffering from prostate cancer. And reporters were still asking him about a fix. “I know there was a rumor about that match,” he told tennis writer Steve Flink. “People said I was tanking, but Billie Jean beat me fair and square. I tried as hard as I could, but I made the classic mistake of overestimating myself and underestimating Billie Jean King. I didn’t really think she had a chance . . . Even though we had put up a million dollars in escrow for her to play the rematch, she just wouldn’t do it.”

  The day before Riggs died in October 1995, King called him at home. Over the years, the two adversaries had become good friends.

  “I love you,” King told him.

  “I love you,” Riggs said.

  Then Billie Jean King told the happy hustler how important their match’s result will always be to all women.

  “Well, we did it,” Bobby Riggs finally told her. “We really made a difference, didn’t we?”

  MARY PILON

  Tomato Can Blues

  FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

  GLADWIN, MICHIGAN—Scott DiPonio raced to make sure everything was in order—the fighters were ready, the ring girls were on time, and the Bud Light was cold.

  DiPonio was a local promoter who organized amateur cage fights that looked more like barroom brawls than glitzy Las Vegas bouts. With a mix of grit, sweat, and blood, the fights had caught on in rural Michigan, and DiPonio’s February 2 event, called Caged Aggression, drew hundreds of fans, even with cage-side seats going for $35.

  Charlie Rowan, an undistinguished heavyweight, was scheduled to fight that night at Streeters, a dank nightclub that hosted cage fights in Traverse City.

  Rowan’s cage name was Freight Train, but he was more like a caboose—plodding and slow, a bruiser whose job was to fill out the ring and get knocked down.

  He was what the boxing world used to call a tomato can. The term’s origins are unclear, but perhaps it’s as simple as this: knock a tomato can over, and red stuff spills out.

  Rowan certainly wasn’t in it for the money. He was an amateur who loved fighting so much he did it for free.

  An hour before the Caged Aggression fights began, DiPonio’s cell phone rang. It was Rowan’s girlfriend, so frantic she could hardly get the words out, DiPonio said. He asked her to take a deep breath, and, on the verge of tears, she told him that Rowan had crashed his car. He was being airlifted to a hospital. It didn’t look good.

  Two days later, DiPonio said, she called back. Rowan, only 25 years old, was dead.

  DiPonio drove for two hours from Traverse City to Gladwin for a makeshift memorial at the home of Rowan’s girlfriend. Rowan’s mother sat in the living room, quietly weeping.

  DiPonio and other promoters planned a string of benefits for the Rowan family, including one called the Fight for Charlie. The fighters were enemies in the cage, but they pulled together to help one of their own. A heavyweight who had once knocked out Rowan in less than 90 seconds agreed to work as a judge at the largest benefit.

  The Fight for Charlie took place March 9. Ring girls sold raffle tickets to a crowd of about 1,000. A young fighter declared from the cage that he was dedicating his bout to Rowan’s memory.

  “Thank you for helping us raise money for Charlie Rowan’s family,” a promoter wrote on Facebook after one of the benefits. “Thank you for letting it all out in the cage for us.” He added that Rowan was “there with us in spirit and would have been very proud of all of you!”

  Less than two weeks later, a Gladwin gun store was robbed.

  When Scott DiPonio, the fight promoter, saw the suspect’s mug shot on the next day’s news, his stomach dropped. It was the late Charlie Rowan, back from the dead.

  A Blood-Soaked Allure

  Mixed martial arts was born as a seedy sport on the fringes of society. The matches were short, loud, and brutal, fights for those who found boxing too tame. Over the years, it’s grown into a mainstream spectacle that now draws millions of viewers on television.

  The sport blends techniques from jujitsu, kickboxing, karate, tae kwon do, judo, and wrestling. Certain moves, like eye gouging and shots to the crotch, are generally not allowed. Across America, kids squabbling in their backyards now dream of making it to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, just as playground basketball players picture themselves in the NBA.

  But far from the bright lights of professional matches, shadow fighting circuits have sprung up around the country, in small towns like Kingston, Washington, and big cities like New York. It’s like the early days of boxing, but with more kicks to the face.

  “It’s amazing that guys will get beat up for free,” Christos Piliafas, a top fighter in Michigan, said. “They just love to fight.”

  In Michigan, the bouts take place in nightclubs, community centers, and casinos. Most are unregulated, with few safety requirements to speak of. In April, a 35-year-old died after losing a fight in Port Huron.

  The crude violence and underground feel of cage fighting draw lusty cheers across the state. These are not carefully negotiated bouts between millionaires trailing personal nutritionists and publicists. Inside the cage at Streeters, unknown Michigan men—factory workers, fathers, soldiers, and convicts—become the Wolverine, the Bloodbath, the Spider Monkey, and the Nightmare.

  “You build a brotherhood,” said Justin Martinson, a fighter and former Marine. “It’s the closest thing to combat.”

  Finding a Family

  When Rowan entered the cage for the first time, he felt electric. Part of it was the cocaine—he was high, as he was for most of his fights. But he also loved the atmosphere: the chain-link walls, the heavy metal music, the screaming fans.

  Rowan could take a punch, but he was out of shape and showed little promise. “He was a horrible fighter,” said Piliafas, who competes professionally. “He just showed up and would fight. He was a great first fight for someone.”

  Rowan kept his brown hair cut close and wore a thin mustache. He had a tattoo of a Viking on his left shoulder, the Grim Reaper on his right; Jesus’s face on his right leg; and MOM on his left wrist. His newest tattoo was a gothic D inside a diamond, the logo for DiPonio’s mixed martial arts team. To Rowan, the Diamond D fighters were family, even if they didn’t know what to make of him.

  Rowan had struggled to find meaningful work since dropping out of school b
efore 10th grade. He spent time in telemarketing and pipeline installation. He even worked on the carnival circuit assembling rides. He fathered three children with three women, but he drifted from all of them.

  Rowan’s real family admired his passion for the cage. “I thought maybe it would be good for him,” his mother, Lynn Gardner, said. “He seemed to like it, and I thought finally he found something and can take out his aggression. Maybe it could help him turn his life around.”

  Troubled Beginnings

  Rowan was from Gladwin, a city of 3,000 that’s barely a blip amid Central Michigan’s endless wheat, corn, and soybean farms. His story was pieced together from more than 50 interviews with relatives, local fighters, and Michigan law enforcement officials, as well as police reports, court records, and family letters.

  Gladwin families hunt on weekends, and the town’s quiet roads include Deer, Elk, and Antler Streets. It takes five minutes to drive across town, from McDonald’s to the west to Shopko to the east. Jobs are hard to come by. Slouching houses with plywood-covered windows are as common as stop signs.

  In some ways, Rowan had been preparing for the cage his whole life. His father, also named Charles, had beaten him and his brother ever since they were little.

  “His dad would put him on the floor and stomp him in the head,” his mother said. “When he couldn’t take it out on Chuckie, he would take it out on me.”

  Home was cigarettes, beer, and the blare of a television over his parents’ constant arguments. The family moved around Michigan as Rowan’s father picked up and lost factory jobs. For a while, the family gathered soda bottles for spare change.

  “I thought about leaving a lot,” his mother said. “But I was never confident enough in myself and my abilities.”

  Rowan’s father died of cancer in 2001. “He told Chuck that he would rather it was him”—his son—“that was dying,” she said.

  Even as a kid, Rowan was always in trouble. He stole from neighbors and relatives—“guns, dumb things, work tools, money,” Scott Gardner, his stepfather, said.

  In the years after his father’s death, Rowan was arrested on charges of marijuana distribution and failure to pay child support. He was charged with criminal sexual misconduct as a teenager and failure to register as a sex offender in 2007. Those records are sealed under state law. Rowan spent most of 2012 in jail on check fraud charges.

  During those years, he used cocaine and did some work for drug dealers, but he kept that a secret from his family.

  Through mutual acquaintances, he met Michael A. Gomez, a convict with drug and weapons charges dating back at least 20 years. The sheriff’s office knew Gomez had ties to the Latin Kings and the Mexican Mafia Gang.

  While Rowan was ferrying drugs in Three Rivers in 2010, before he began cage fighting, he claimed to have lost Gomez’s shipment, maybe worth as much as $80,000. As Rowan told it, a group of thieves jumped him, cracked his ribs, and stole the drugs.

  Now, Rowan owed money to impatient people. He tried to lie low, but in January, a group of men beat him up behind Shopko, leaving him with two black eyes, broken ribs, and blood on his baseball cap, he told friends at the time.

  Rowan was desperate. Then, while he was watching TV at his girlfriend’s house, a show caught his attention. It was on the Investigation Discovery channel, something about a guy who staged his own death so he could start his life anew.

  A Way Out

  Rowan had felt as if he were drowning for a while now. He owed money to drug dealers. He couldn’t keep a job. His hobby was getting beaten up in public. Now this fake-death scheme landed like a life preserver.

  If people thought he was dead, he and his girlfriend, Rosa Martinez, could move far from Michigan. Maybe New Mexico. They could begin again.

  “I wanted a fresh start,” he said in one of a series of interviews conducted both in person and over the phone. “To pick up and start someplace new where no one knew us.”

  The phone calls were the first step—Rowan said he was there when Martinez called DiPonio, the fight promoter, to announce the car crash. She later called his mother. Rowan said it broke his heart to think of his mother picturing him dead, but he saw no other way. He could hear Martinez as she made the calls, and he said that first step of the hoax “almost killed me.”

  When Martinez called back two days later to say Rowan was dead, he said, he choked up and had to leave the room.

  In Memory of Charlie

  The mourners gathered at Martinez’s home to remember Charles H. Rowan, father, son, friend, and cage fighter. The guests walked up a wooden ramp leading to the front door, past a sprinkling of cigarette butts that dotted the yard’s patchy snow.

  Inside the small living room, lined with brown carpet and wood-paneled walls, sat two young children, along with Rowan’s mother, who was sobbing.

  Martinez looked grief-stricken. She brushed off questions about funeral arrangements and other practical matters, making clear she was not yet ready.

  As the group sat quietly in the living room, she stepped away to collect a bag that she said had been retrieved from the accident.

  She pulled out a white baseball cap that was stained with blood. A young boy began to cry.

  They mourned Rowan as a lost soul gone too soon. But he had not gone anywhere. Rowan was upstairs throughout the memorial, he said, hiding in a child’s bedroom until the guests left. While his mother cried and his girlfriend accepted condolences, Rowan worked hard not to make a sound.

  He said he thought about walking downstairs to interrupt the grieving, ending the ruse right there. But he decided not to.

  From upstairs, he said, he could hear the sobs coming from the living room, sounds that took him by surprise. “For people to care about me,” he said, “it meant something.”

  But now, he needed to play dead, which meant he needed to block all that out. He looked out the bedroom’s small window, past the lawn and out toward the Rite Aid. He tried not to break his gaze.

  Trapped

  If this was the afterlife, Rowan didn’t much care for it.

  He spent most of the next six weeks hiding out in his girlfriend’s home, watching TV and working out in a small makeshift gym. He said he closed his bank account and disabled his Facebook page. He made late-night trips to Rite Aid and even kept Martinez company for a meeting at her children’s school. The couple said they were possibly moving to New Mexico, a school official later told the police.

  “I went stir-crazy,” Rowan said. “I couldn’t call any of my friends; I couldn’t go anywhere. I love Rosa more than life itself, but it’s just too much to be around the same person all of the time.”

  Despite his efforts, the hoax began to fray. Skeptics took to Facebook, where they peppered the fight promoters with questions about death certificates and obituaries.

  The promoters took offense. “I said: ‘How dare you question this? The dude is dead! Have some respect,’” the promoter Joe Shaw said.

  Rowan’s family wanted to know what happened to his body. Scott Gardner, his stepfather, called local hospitals but didn’t find anyone who could help. “We felt like we didn’t have any facts,” Gardner said. Sympathy cards began to arrive, some of them with checks included, but the family set them aside.

  Rumors about Rowan were bound to reach the people he owed money, and by mid-March, they apparently had. While his loved ones still thought he was dead, he sneaked away to meet with Michael Gomez in Gladwin—the circumstances remain murky. Gomez and his lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

  At the meeting, Gomez threatened to hurt Martinez and her kids, Rowan said.

  The walls were closing in. But Charlie Rowan, still presumed dead, had one last idea.

  An Opportunity to Strike

  On a cold March afternoon, Roxie Robinette served lunch to her husband, Richard. The bell rang next door in their store, Guns and Stuff: a new customer.

  Richard got up, leaving Roxie behind to fold laundry in fron
t of the TV.

  Guns and Stuff was a mom-and-pop shop that sold revolvers, pistols, and shotguns, along with hunting jackets and Skittles. Mounted buck heads eyed customers from the wall. A sign read, NO PISSY ATTITUDES.

  The gun store played the role a diner might in another town—the place where neighbors gossip about the weather and one another. All of Gladwin knew Richard Robinette, a retired plumber and banjo player who’d been in poor health. Even Rowan knew Robinette: he had recently sold Robinette a rifle he stole from a relative, Rowan said.

  On the afternoon of March 18, the sheriff said, Michael Bowman drove Rowan and his girlfriend to the store in a maroon Chevrolet Blazer. Bowman was among Rowan’s closest friends, a lanky, baby-faced man in his early twenties with a criminal history of his own. A lawyer for Martinez did not respond to multiple requests for interviews. Bowman’s lawyer declined to comment.

  Rowan sat in the backseat, wearing a trench coat and sneakers. He smeared black dollar-store makeup around his eyes and tied a red bandanna around his mouth. The finishing touch was a Batman mask he said he took from his girlfriend’s son.

  Rowan was going to rob Guns and Stuff—“hit a lick” was his term. His girlfriend would be the decoy.

  The police said she walked into the store first, carrying an iPhone in her pocket that was on an open call to Rowan, waiting down the road. That way, he could listen in and find the right moment to strike.

  After a few minutes, Rowan got out of the car and headed toward the neon OPEN sign. But on the way, he realized he had made a mistake: he forgot the weapon, a pink canister of pepper spray. He had left it in the car.