The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  The next pool we fished happened to be on the left side. I had not practiced the left-side cast during my insomniac night. Now when I tried it I could not do it at all. The pool after that was on the right, but my flailing on the left had caused me to forget how to cast from the right. Again the circus-tent collapse, again chaos and disgrace. My euphoria wore off, to be replaced by symptoms of withdrawal.

  I liked that Joe always called me “Bud.” It must have been his standard form of address for guys he was guiding. The word carried overtones of affection, familiarity, respect. He got a chance to use it a lot while trying to help me regain my cast, because I soon fell into a dire slump, flop sweat bursting on my forehead, all physical coordination gone. “Bud, you want to turn your entire upper body toward the opposite bank as you sweep that line . . . You’re trying to do it all with your arms, Bud . . . Watch that line, Bud, you’re coming forward with it just a half-second too late.” I was ready to flip out, lose my temper, hurl the rod into the trees. Joe was all calmness, gesturing with the cigarette between two fingers of his right hand. “Try it again, Bud, you almost had it that time.”

  By midafternoon Joe started in on the 30-pack of Keystone, but he took his time with it and showed no effects. Our camp that night was at a wide, flat place that had been an airfield. J.T. served shrimp appetizers and steak. Joe and I sat in camp chairs while he drank Keystone and told more stories—about his Cajun grandfather who used to drink and pass out on fishing excursions, and Joe had to rouse him so he wouldn’t trail his leg in the gator-infested waters; about a stripper he had a wild affair with, and how they happened to break up: about playing basketball at night on inner-city courts in Fresno where you put quarters in a meter to keep the playground lights on. At full dark, I went into my tent and looked through the mesh at the satellites going by. Joe stayed up and drank Keystone and watched sports on his iPhone.

  I was back in the river and mangling my cast again the next morning while Joe and J.T. loaded the raft. Out of my hearing (as I learned afterward from J.T.), their conversation turned to J.T.’s father, who died when J.T. was 15. Joe asked J.T. a lot of questions about how the death had affected him.

  J.T. misunderstood Joe’s instructions and set up our next camp at the wrong place, a narrow ledge at the foot of a sagebrush-covered slope. Joe was angry but didn’t yell at him. During dinner that evening, J.T. told us the story of his recent skateboarding injury, when he dislocated his right elbow and snapped all the tendons so the bones of his forearm and hand were hanging only by the skin. Joe watched a football game and talked about Robert Griffin III, who was destined to be one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, in Joe’s opinion. As I went to bed I could still hear his iPhone’s signifying noises.

  At a very late hour, I awoke to total quiet and the sound of the river. The moon was pressing black shadows against the side of my tent. I got out of my sleeping bag and unzipped the tent flap and walked a distance away, for the usual middle-of-the-night purpose. When I turned to go back, I saw a figure standing in the moonlight by the camp. It was just standing there in the sagebrush and looking at me. At first I could not distinguish the face, but as I got closer I saw that it was Joe. At least it ought to be, because he was the most likely possibility; but the figure just stood in silence, half-shadowed by sagebrush bushes up to the waist. I blinked to get the sleep out of my eyes. As I got closer, I saw it had to be Joe, unquestionably. Still no sound, no sign of recognition. I came closer still. Then Joe smiled and said, “You too, Bud?” in a companionable tone. I felt a certain relief, even gratitude, at his ability to be wry about this odd moonlight encounter between two older guys getting up in the night. Now, looking back, I believe that more was going on. I believe that what I saw was a ghost—an actual person who also happened to be a ghost, or who was contemplating being one.

  The poor guy. Here I was locked in petty torment over my cast, struggling inwardly with every coach I’d ever disappointed, and Joe was . . . who knows where? No place good. In fact, I knew very little about him. I didn’t know that he had started guiding for the Fly Fisher’s Place in 2009, that he’d done splendidly that year (the best in modern history for steelhead in the Deschutes), that he had suffered a depression in the fall after the season ended, that he’d been broke, that friends had found him work and loaned him money. I didn’t know that after his next guiding season, in 2010, he had gone into an even worse depression; that on December 26, 2010, he had written a suicide note and swallowed pills and taped a plastic bag over his head in the back offices of the Fly Fisher’s Place; that he’d been interrupted in this attempt and rushed to a hospital in Bend; that afterward he had spent time in the psychiatric ward of the hospital; that his friends in Sisters and his boss, Jeff Perin, owner of the fly shop, had met with him regularly in the months following to help him recover.

  I didn’t know that after the next season, in late 2011, he had disappeared; that Perin, fearing a repetition, had called the state police; and that they had searched for him along the Deschutes Valley with a small plane and a boat and eventually found him unharmed and returning home. Joe later told Perin he had indeed thought about killing himself during this episode but had decided not to.

  I didn’t know that Perin had refrained from firing Joe on several occasions—for example, when Joe was guiding an older angler who happened to be a psychiatrist with the apt name of Dr. George Mecouch, along with one of Dr. Mecouch’s friends, and a repo man showed up with police officers and a flatbed, and they repossessed Joe’s truck (a previous one), leaving Joe and his elderly clients stranded by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere at 11 o’clock at night. Dr. Mecouch, evidently an equable and humorous fellow, had laughed about the experience, thereby perhaps saving Joe’s job. I did not know that Perin had permanently ended his professional relationship with Joe when Joe refused to guide on a busy Saturday in July of 2012 because he had received no tip from his clients of the day before.

  The spot where Joe killed himself is out in the woods about six miles from Sisters. You drive on a rutted Forest Service road for the last mile or two until you get to a clearing with a large gravel pit and a smaller one beside it. Local people come here for target practice. Splintery, shot-up pieces of plywood lie on the ground, and at the nearer end the spent shotgun-shell casings resemble strewn confetti. Their colors are light blue, dark blue, pink, yellow, forest green, red, black, and purple. Small pools of muddy water occupy the centers of the gravel pits, and the gray, rutted earth holds a litter of broken clay-pigeon targets, some in high-visibility orange. At the clearing’s border, dark pine trees rise all around.

  Probably to forestall the chance that he would be interrupted this time, Joe had told some friends that he was going to Spokane to look for work, others that he would be visiting his children in California. On November 4, 2012, he spent the afternoon at Bronco Billy’s, a restaurant-bar in Sisters, watching a football game and drinking Maker’s Mark with beer chasers. At about six in the evening he left, walking out on a bar tab of about $18. The bartender thought he had gone outside to take a phone call. At some time after that, he drove to the gravel pit, parked at its northwest edge, and ran a garden hose from the exhaust pipe to the right rear passenger-side window, sealing the gaps around the pipe and in the window with towels and clothes. A man who went to the gravel pit to shoot discovered the body on November 14. In two weeks, Joe would have been 49 years old.

  He left no suicide note, but he did provide a couple of visual commentaries at the scene for those who could decode them. The garden hose he used came from the Fly Fisher’s Place. Joe stole it for this purpose, one can surmise, as a cry for help or gesture of anger directed at his former boss, Jeff Perin. Over the summer, Joe’s weeks of illegal guiding had caught up with him when the state police presented him with a ticket for the violation. He would be required to go to court, and in all likelihood his local guiding career would be through, at least for a good while. Joe thought Perin had turned him in to
the authorities; and, in fact, Perin and other guides had done exactly that. Joe was often aggressive and contentious on the river, he competed for clients, and his illegal status made people even more irate. But, in the end, to say that Joe’s legal difficulties were what undid him would be a stretch, given his history.

  Joe’s friend Diane Daviscourt, when she visited the scene, found an empty Marlboro pack stuck in a brittlebrush bush next to where Joe had parked. The pack rested upright among the branches, where it could only have been put deliberately. She took it as a sign of his having given up on everything, and as his way of saying, “Don’t forget me.”

  John Hazel, the Deschutes River’s senior guide, said Joe was a charismatic fellow who took fishing too seriously. “I used to tell him, ‘It’s only fishing, Joe.’ He got really down on himself when he didn’t catch fish. Most guides are arrogant—Joe possessed the opposite of that. Whoever he was guiding, he looked at the person and tried to figure out what that person wanted.” Daviscourt, who had briefly been Joe’s girlfriend, said he was her best friend, and made a much better friend than a boyfriend. “He fooled us all,” she said. “I haven’t picked up a fly-fishing rod since he died.” She made a wooden cross for him and put it up next to where she found the Marlboro pack. The cross says JOE R. on it in black marker, and attached to it with pushpins is a laminated photo of Joe, completely happy, standing in the river with a steelhead in his hands and a spey rod by his feet. On the pine needles beside the cross is a bottle of Trumer Pils, the brand Joe drank when she was buying.

  Just before Joe died, J.T. Barnes was calling him a lot, partly to say hi, and partly because Joe had never paid him for helping on the trip with me. (He did split the tip, however.) For someone now out $600, J.T. had only kind words for Joe. “He was like the ideal older brother. And he could be so up, so crazy enthusiastic, about ordinary stuff. One day we were packing his drift boat before a trip, drinking beer, and I told him that I play the banjo. Joe got this astonished, happy look on his face, and he said, ‘You play the banjo? No way! That is so great—I sing!’ That made me laugh, but he was totally being serious. I play the banjo, Joe sings!”

  Joe had six dollars in his wallet when he died. Kay, his sister, who lives in Napa, thought Joe’s chronic lack of money was why he lost touch with his family. “Joe was always making bad decisions financially. Maybe, because he had a lot of pride, that made him never want to see us. But he was doing what he loved, supporting himself as a famous fishing guide. He had no idea how proud his family was of him.”

  Alex Gonsiewski, a highly regarded young guide on the river, who works for John Hazel, said that Joe taught him most of what he knows. When Gonsiewski took his first try at running rapids that have drowned people, Joe was in the bow of the drift boat helping him through. “It’s tough to be the kind of person who lives for extreme things, like Joe was,” Gonsiewski said. “His eyes always looked sad. He loved this river more than anywhere. And better than anybody, he could dial you in on how to fish it. He showed me the river, and now every place on the river makes me think of him. He was an ordinary, everyday guy who was also amazing. I miss him every day.”

  The paths along the river that have been made by anglers’ feet are well worn and wide. Many who come to fish the Deschutes are driven by a deep, almost desperate need. So much of the world is bullshit. This river is not. Among the many natural glories of the Northwest that have been lost, this valley—still mostly undeveloped, except for the train tracks—and its beautiful, tough fish have survived.

  Joe was the nakedest angler I’ve ever known. He came to the river from a world of bullshit, interior and otherwise, and found here a place and a sport to which his own particular sensors were perfectly attuned. Everything was okay when he was on the river . . . except that then everything had to stay that way continuously, or else horrible feelings of withdrawal would creep in. For me the starkest sadness about Joe’s death was that the river and the steelhead weren’t enough.

  At the end of my float trip with Joe, just before we reached the river’s mouth, he stopped at a nondescript, wide, shallow stretch with a turquoise-flowing groove. He said he called this spot Mariano, after Mariano Rivera, the Yankees’ great relief pitcher, because of all the trips it had saved. I stood and cast to the groove just as told to, and a sudden river quake bent the spey rod double. The 10-pound steelhead I landed after a long fight writhed like a constrictor when I tried to hold it for a photograph.

  The next evening, not long before I left for the airport, Joe and I floated the river above Maupin a last time. Now he wasn’t my guide; he had me go first and fish a hundred yards or so ahead of him. Dusk deepened, and suddenly I was casting well again. I looked back at Joe, and he raised his fist in the air approvingly. At the end of his silhouetted arm, the glow of a cigarette could be seen. I rolled out one cast after the next. It’s hard to teach a longtime angler anything, but Joe had taught me. He knocked the rust off my fishing life and gave me a skill that brought back the delight of learning, like the day I first learned to ride a bicycle. I remembered that morning when we were floating downstream among the crane flies in the sunlight. Just to know it’s possible to be that happy is worth something, even if the feeling doesn’t last. Hanging out with Joe uncovered long-overgrown paths back to childhood. Peace to his soul.

  JEREMY MARKOVICH

  Elegy of a Race Car Driver

  FROM SBNATION.COM

  SOMETIME AFTER 10:30 on a Thursday morning in May, after he’d had his cup of coffee, Dick Trickle snuck out of the house. His wife didn’t see him go. He eased his 20-year-old Ford pickup out on the road and headed toward Boger City, North Carolina, 10 minutes away. He drove down Highway 150, a two-lane road that cuts through farm fields and stands of trees and humble country homes that dot the Piedmont west of Charlotte, just outside the reach of its suburban sprawl. Trickle pulled into a graveyard across the street from a Citgo station. He drove around to the back. It was sunny. The wind blew gently from the west. Just after noon, he dialed 911. The dispatcher asked for his address.

  “Uh, the Forest Lawn, uh, Cemetery on 150,” he said, his voice calm. The dispatcher asked for his name. He didn’t give it.

  “On the back side of it, on the back by a ’93 pickup, there’s gonna be a dead body,” he said.

  “Okay,” the woman said, deadpan.

  “Suicide,” he said. “Suicide.”

  “Are you there?”

  “I’m the one.”

  “Okay, listen to me, sir, listen to me.”

  “Yes, it’ll be 150, Forest Lawn Cemetery, in the back by a Ford pickup.”

  “Okay, sir, sir, let me get some help to you.”

  Click.

  The funeral was four days later. It was small. There weren’t many people. Maybe 50, mostly family. A few were old crew members from Wisconsin and Kansas City. Kenny Wallace, a driver who made Dick Trickle his mentor, was there. So was Kenny’s older brother Rusty, the former Winston Cup champ who used to call Dick every Monday. Mike Miller and Mark Martin, both drivers, came. Nobody else from NASCAR did. Dick wanted it that way.

  There was no eulogy. The pastor only said a few words. But he didn’t go on long. Soon, everybody had left the church and headed down the road to Dick and Darlene’s place in Iron Station. Kenny hugged Dick’s son Chad.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kenny said.

  “Aw, come on, man,” Chad told him. “Seventy-one years. That’s pretty good.” Kenny thought Chad sounded a lot like his father.

  The suicide. That didn’t seem like Dick at all. People who knew Dick had heard something was wrong. A lot of them weren’t sure what it was. Kenny asked Darlene if she’d seen this coming. No. She had no idea anything was wrong until a Lincoln County sheriff’s deputy pulled into her driveway on Thursday afternoon.

  After Dick shot himself, Chad called Kenny. Darlene wants you at the funeral, he said. “You know,” he said next, “we’re all big Kenny Wallace fans.” That sounded like a Dick Trickle cal
l. There weren’t many short phone conversations between Kenny and Dick. If the phone would ring and Dick’s name was on the caller ID, Kenny would think twice about answering if he didn’t have an hour to talk. But they still talked all the time. Dick was still giving him advice. Back in 2011, Kenny called to talk about his new Nationwide Series race team. He told Dick he’d lost some weight. He was ready. You’ve got a new car now, Dick told him. Do not change your driving. Let the car do the work for you. Kenny had 11 top 10s and finished seventh in points, his best showing in years.

  The calls started to slow down. Kenny wasn’t sure why. Dick really didn’t talk about it. In 2011, Kenny’s father, Russ, an old-school racer who won a lot around St. Louis, died at age 77. Your dad lived a great life, Dick said. He was in pain, but he’s fine now. Dick could justify anything, but Kenny thought it was odd how quickly he’d made sense of his father’s death.

  After Dick’s funeral, Kenny had an idea. “Darlene, maybe we should make some T-shirts,” Kenny said. New ones. With Dick Trickle’s name on the front. Just something so his fans could remember.

  “Nope,” she said. “We’re done.”

  Darlene hadn’t talked publicly about what happened to Dick. She still hasn’t. And so Dick Trickle’s closest friends were left with memories from a lifetime of friendship and a couple of clues and hindsight to make sense of his death. Darlene knew that the people who loved her husband needed to know what happened. So before Kenny and the rest of Dick’s friends left the house after his funeral, she gathered up some manila envelopes and handed them out, one by one.