The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  He was carrying a hammer from his toolbox—he was going to use it to break into the cases holding the guns. But now, the hammer would take on a starring role.

  He pushed open the door and swung the hammer at Robinette’s head, knocking him from his stool. Rowan later said he had been aiming for Robinette’s shoulder and missed.

  The blow opened up the side of Robinette’s head, spilling a pool of blood. The sheriff’s report called the wound a “jagged hole approximately the size of a quarter, which appeared to go through his skull.” The bloodstain soaking the carpet was, a county detective wrote, the “size of a dinner plate.”

  Even Rowan was shaken. “There was a lot of blood,” he said. “Enough to scare me. I’m a man used to seeing a lot of blood, but that was a lot of blood.”

  Rowan kicked his girlfriend in the arm, hoping to make her seem like a second victim. He shoved eight handguns into his red- and-black duffel bag and then, on his way out, noticed Robinette’s wallet sticking out of his pocket. He grabbed that too, and tore off through the woods, toward a church parking lot where Bowman was waiting.

  In the car, the two hardly spoke.

  “I was in shock with what had just happened,” Rowan said. “I thought I had just killed somebody.”

  Martinez kept to her part of the plan and called 911 from Guns and Stuff. Within minutes, Detective Sergeant James Cuddie and Officer Eric Killian were en route. They stopped 100 yards from the store, on the shoulder of the road, to put on bulletproof vests.

  They approached on foot, and inside found Rowan’s girlfriend cowered in the back. Robinette sat on a stool, holding the left side of his head. Cuddie asked him what happened, and he replied slowly, “I don’t know, Jim.”

  Cuddie then turned to interview Martinez. She hadn’t herself been in trouble before, but her social circle sometimes overlapped with Cuddie’s investigations. Martinez told him she had been there to sell some of her family’s guns when a masked robber burst through the door.

  Meanwhile, Bowman later told the police, he and Rowan drove toward a vacant home where the mother of Rowan’s girlfriend had recently lived.

  Rowan stashed the robbery evidence around the house—two pistols in the dining room vent, the duffel bag behind the refrigerator, the sneakers in the garage attic. He stuffed the Batman mask above the kitchen sink, still filled with dirty dishes and an empty bottle of Diet Pepsi Wild Cherry.

  Rowan paced the house, waiting for news, waiting for his girlfriend. He smoked an entire pack of Newports.

  Finally, Rowan called the phone his girlfriend had carried during the robbery. Cuddie answered and identified himself as Jim. He asked who was calling. Rowan, flustered, gave his cousin’s name.

  He could tell that Cuddie was suspicious. The life preserver had begun to feel like a noose.

  Connecting the Pieces

  With a thick mustache, his hair cut short, and a no-nonsense demeanor, James Cuddie would have a hard time passing as anything other than a cop. Not that he would try—everyone in Gladwin County knew him as Jim, the county detective, including many of the people he arrested. Sometimes, as Cuddie eased suspects into the back of his police car, they apologized to him by name.

  It didn’t take long for Cuddie and his colleagues to connect Rowan with the Guns and Stuff robbery. When officers dropped off Martinez, they saw his ID in her home.

  Then Bowman visited the sheriff’s office and said that Rowan might have been involved in the robbery. That was also a roundabout way of saying that Rowan might not be quite as dead as people had thought.

  For weeks, Cuddie had heard rumors about Rowan’s death, but he didn’t think much about them one way or the other. “I didn’t know it to be true or untrue,” he said. “At that point it wasn’t an issue. I’m working on other cases.”

  But now, with Richard Robinette in intensive care, Cuddie’s interest was piqued.

  It should have been the most straightforward of questions: is Charlie Rowan dead or alive? But it had become bizarrely muddled.

  The day after the robbery, Cuddie called the Saginaw County medical examiner’s office, which housed records for the county’s deceased. Officials there confirmed that there was no death certificate for Charles Howard Rowan. The medical examiner declared it “unlikely” that Rowan had died.

  That was enough for Cuddie to surmise that Rowan was out there on the run. “Rowan and Martinez were people of interest that needed to be located,” he wrote in his report.

  On March 19, the sheriff’s office released Rowan’s mug shot to the local news media.

  “I Know That Guy!”

  Big John Yeubanks, a fight promoter, was smoking a cigarette in his home office, half-listening to the TV news. The story of the day was a robbery of Guns and Stuff.

  The suspect’s mug shot flashed across the screen, and Yeubanks snapped to attention.

  There was no mistaking it, yet it could not be.

  “I know that guy!” he shouted. “He’s not supposed to be alive!”

  Yeubanks called the sheriff to say there must have been a mistake—they were looking for a dead man.

  Word quickly spread through the cage fighting world. DiPonio’s girlfriend pulled up the mug shot on her phone. Goatee, square jaw, pursed lips—it was Charlie Rowan.

  “She showed it to me,” DiPonio said, “and I nearly threw up right there.”

  At the Gladwin County Sheriff’s Office, the phone had been ringing steadily since the mug shots were released. The officers kept hearing the same strange thing: the suspect, Charlie Rowan, was already dead.

  Weeks later, sitting in his cluttered basement office, Cuddie laughed at the deluge of calls. He described the one he received from DiPonio, so sure that Rowan was dead.

  “I told him that I had reason to believe,” Cuddie said, “that Mr. Rowan was very much alive.”

  Voice from the Beyond

  Rowan’s vision of starting a new life, in New Mexico or anywhere else, was turning to dust.

  He and his girlfriend were hiding out from the local police, from federal agents working the case, from the people Rowan owed money, and from the fight promoters he tricked.

  The Guns and Stuff robbery and the manhunt had put the town on edge. Rowan’s mother, still grieving for her son, was at the Chappel Dam Grocery when she heard about the attack. “I thought, At least I know my son didn’t do it,” she said.

  Her relief wouldn’t last long. Soon, her phone rang. It was her son, Charlie, no longer dead.

  For six weeks, she thought she’d lost him, at age 25. She never said good-bye. Now, here he was, on the phone. He had one question for her: could she give him a ride?

  His mother drove in a fog, past the familiar barns, churches, and homes that lined the road. Finally, on the right, she saw her son, waving his arms to flag her down.

  Still confused, she asked where he’d been for so long. This was all a lie? They both started crying. Rowan mumbled something about being “out of state.” He got out of the car at his girlfriend’s home, the same place his mother had cried during his memorial the month before.

  His mother went to the sheriff’s office in tears the next day to tell Cuddie that her son was indeed alive. She said she was afraid he’d robbed Guns and Stuff and hit old man Robinette.

  That night, Rowan said, he went to Saginaw, where he gave Gomez six of the stolen guns to pay down his debt, worth $1,000 per handgun. Gomez later told the authorities that he bought only one pistol from Rowan, according to a police report. Gomez was arrested soon after on charges of possessing weapons as a felon.

  Rowan and his girlfriend were still hiding out. They booked a room at the Knights Inn in Saginaw, where a bed cost $50. “I was on edge all night, me and Rosa,” Rowan said. “I knew I was fighting a losing battle.”

  Betrayal and Regret

  They stayed on the run for about 48 hours, moving from one spot to another. The scrambling didn’t throw off Cuddie and his colleagues.

  On March 20,
two days after the robbery, they tracked Rowan and his girlfriend to a friend’s apartment in Unionville. The couple were arrested about 7:15 A.M.

  It was all over—and Cuddie had a definitive answer. Charlie Rowan was not dead. But he would be going away for a long, long time.

  He told Cuddie that he didn’t mean for it to happen this way. He walked the officers through the robbery and told them where they could find the guns, the Batman mask, the stolen wallet.

  The news was out. A front-page headline in the Traverse City Record-Eagle read, “Fighter Accused of Faking Death.”

  The cage fighters felt betrayed, furious that Rowan had sullied their sport’s name.

  “He’s lucky the cops got him before the fighters did,” Big John Yeubanks, the promoter, said. Organizers of the Fight for Charlie recently filed a police report in Traverse City accusing Rowan of fraud.

  After the hoax was exposed, the cage fighting promoters decided to hold another benefit, this time to raise money for the Robinettes, the owners of Guns and Stuff. They have collected more than $15,000.

  “We got sick of hearing about Charles Rowan and we thought, What about the Robinettes?” Yeubanks said. “Everybody was looking at this guy like he was an MMA fighter from Michigan, but in fact he was a small-time tough guy who got in a cage a couple of times.”

  Today, Richard Robinette is back home after a recovery that’s surprised even his family and his doctors. He started playing his banjo again. He recently fixed the bathroom sink.

  He doesn’t remember much of the robbery, but he showed off a horseshoe of stitches on the left side of his head.

  “You can’t sit and cry about it,” he said. “They thought I was going to die.”

  A few miles away, Rowan sits inside another cage, in the Gladwin County Jail. He pleaded guilty last month to armed robbery. He’ll be sentenced in October.

  In jail, Rowan wrote letters to his mother, trying to atone. “I did not mean to hurt that man and his family,” one letter read. “I hope to see you at my visit.”

  Rowan’s mother usually goes to see him once a week. On a recent afternoon, the two put their hands against the clear divider that separated them.

  “I’m sorry you did this too,” his mother said. Rowan, wearing an orange jumpsuit, told her he figured he’d be locked up for the rest of her life.

  He reads mysteries in jail. During his first few weeks behind bars, he tried to catch glimpses of his girlfriend, who was being held nearby. She recently pleaded guilty to armed robbery charges.

  He goes over the whole strange story, step by step. He finds himself returning to the fake memorial, and the sounds of people sobbing for him.

  “I didn’t realize how I impacted other people’s lives,” he said. “I don’t hold myself in high regard. I’m not a good person, I’m not a good dad, and most of the time I’m not a good son.”

  He thinks about his girlfriend, Rosa, and wonders whether they’ll ever be together again.

  “It’s like . . .” He struggled to get the words out. “It’s like we just died.”

  JAY CASPIAN KANG

  The End and Don King

  FROM GRANTLAND.COM

  IN THE BACK ROOM of Manhattan’s Carnegie Deli, Don King picked at a pastrami sandwich with his fingers. He had just been asked a question about his electric hair and, for the first time in a day filled with radio and television interviews, King paused before he spoke. A cautious look crept over his graying eyes. As he silently deliberated between several well-worn origin myths about the height of that hair, King tweezed a scrap of pastrami between two well-manicured fingernails and dragged the meat through a puddle of deli mustard. “My hair is God’s aura,” King explained while chewing. “Everything went up when I got home from the penitentiary. One night I went to lie down next to my wife and my hair started popping and uncurling all on its own—ping, ping, ping, ping! I knew that it was God telling me to stay on the righteous path so he could one day pull me up to be there with him.”

  King smiled, but not the smile you remember. That smile—the screwed-on mask of boundless optimism—had been on full display throughout this week of promotions, but at the Carnegie, King had finally succumbed to exhaustion. “When I’m doing good, the hair goes straight up,” King said, a bit wearily. “Now that things are difficult, the hair has gotten a little flatter.”

  I had been trailing Don King for two weeks between Boca Raton, Florida, and now New York City. This was the closest he had come to admitting that things just weren’t what they used to be. In three days’ time, Tavoris “Thunder” Cloud, King’s last fighter of any consequence, would step into the ring against Bernard Hopkins at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The story of the fight should have been about the 48-year-old Hopkins and his quest to become the oldest champion in boxing history. But because Don King was involved, the focus during fight week had been on Don King and his uncertain future. If Cloud lost to Hopkins—especially in a boring way—his short career as an opponent in televised events would be put in serious jeopardy and King would have very little left to promote. In a prefight interview, Hopkins, who, like so many other fighters, had worked with King before an inevitable falling-out, had this to say about his old promoter: “What a way to put the last nail in the coffin. Who thought it would be me that would shut him down?”

  At the Carnegie, nobody was talking much about Tavoris Cloud or Bernard Hopkins or the impending end of Don King Promotions. King had come to one of his favorite New York landmarks to enjoy a quiet lunch with three longtime employees. They talked, mostly, about music and old times in Manhattan, the city where King lived and worked during the majority of his reign at the top of boxing. The conversation eventually turned to James Brown. Don King, still digging his fingers into his sandwich, muttered, “James Brown died owing me $50,000. But I loved James Brown.”

  Don King no longer sits on boxing’s throne, but he has nostalgia by the balls. Fights are best enjoyed through old film, which means that if you want to watch Muhammad Ali or Larry Holmes or Mike Tyson or Julio Cesar Chavez or Evander Holyfield raise his arms in triumph at the end of a fight, you’re also going to see the big man with the bigger hair climbing in through the ropes. You see him in the Philippines in 1975, hovering over a near-death Muhammad Ali after the Thrilla in Manila. You see him in Japan, 15 years later, looking more or less like the same man, crowding in on a battered and finally defeated Mike Tyson. He has negotiated deals with Mobutu Sese Seko and counted Hugo Chavez as a personal friend. Nobody alive, save some presidents, has taken more photos with world leaders and celebrities. As a boxing fan growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s, I cannot remember a single fight that didn’t end with Don King in the ring, cigar clamped between his teeth. He is one of those big American men who distort our collective memory—I’m sure King’s rival Bob Arum promoted some of the fights I watched as a kid, but when I think of the final bell, I still see the menacing hulk of Don King smiling for the cameras.

  So it’s a little sad to sit across from Don King at the Carnegie Deli and see the tourists line up at our table to take a photo with him, and to overhear them talk about the man in the past tense as if he were already dead. Not because Don King deserves our sympathy, but because it’s always jarring to see a once-robust American institution fall into disrepair and decay. The cuffs on King’s “Only in America” denim jacket—the same coat he wore to the Thrilla in Manila—are badly frayed. He sometimes stumbles over his words. There’s a distinct sag in his once-static face. Don King never thought he would live past 50. He is 81 years old now and has been in the public’s eye since the early ’70s.

  Don King was born in Cleveland in 1931 and grew up in the city’s numbers racket, a lottery-style game that King describes as “hope for people who don’t have hope.” As a kid he wanted to be Clarence Darrow, and set himself up to study law at Kent State University. The summer before he was to matriculate, King’s older brother Connie recruited him to “take numbers,” whereby the young
er King would walk around Cleveland’s black neighborhoods and record $1 lottery-style bets. Players would submit a three-digit number to King, who was somehow able to keep track of everything in his head. At the end of the business day, if a player’s number matched up with the middle three digits in a predetermined market quote, he or she would win somewhere around $600. King’s phenomenal memory and his talent for talking made him a natural at the numbers game, and before too long he started his own production.

  Despite his involvement in the mob-controlled rackets, King managed to mostly avoid legal problems during his youth. But on December 2, 1954, King shot and killed Hillary Brown after Brown and two associates tried to rob one of King’s gambling houses in Cleveland. The judge in the case decided that King had acted in self-defense and declared the act a justifiable homicide. King was released and continued running numbers.

  Over the next 12 years, King continued to grow his empire and took over ownership of several businesses in Cleveland, including the Corner Tavern, a music joint that has since been enshrined into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The law eventually caught up to him again. On April 20, 1966, King stomped a former employee named Sam Garrett to death over a $600 debt. In a trial overrun with witness tampering and bizarre judicial motions, King was eventually convicted on a reduced first-degree manslaughter charge. “When they sentenced me,” King told me, “they said it was a probationary shock. Like I would go in and come out quickly and they hoped that the experience of the penitentiary would shock me into going straight. Turns out they kept me in there for four years.”

  King says he divides his life into two categories—Before the Penitentiary and After the Penitentiary. There is no doubt that his time in prison expanded King’s ambitions. He read voraciously, and by the time he got out he had built up the lexicon of quotations and malapropisms that would turn him into one of the great talkers of his time.