The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  It took four hours in jail before Hoffner was told that the charges against him related to videos of his children on his cell phone. It took a night behind bars and then another day for police to allow him to watch those videos with his lawyer. A police officer sat in the room with them to provide supervision. The lawyer took notes. Hoffner tried to pretend the children on the screen were strangers, hoping it would help him critique the videos more harshly.

  They watched in silence. The police officer fidgeted in his seat.

  “That was it?” Hoffner said when the second video ended. “The only thing I saw was a bunch of happy kids.”

  He explained to the lawyer that his children had been nearing their bedtime on a weeknight. They had just gotten out of a bubble bath, which the three kids often took together in a big banana-shaped tub upstairs because the Hoffners believed in teaching their children to be comfortable with their bodies. “There’s no parenting book that says kids shouldn’t be naked together,” Hoffner said. He had been downstairs working while his kids took a bath. They suddenly appeared before him with their hair wet and towels wrapped around their waists. They said they had made up a skit and wanted Hoffner to film it. He had no idea what they were going to do; he didn’t particularly care. He had a team to coach and a season to prepare for. Football was his obsession, and at times during the season he was home before his children’s bedtime only once or twice in a week. He was a loving but distracted father, he said. And his goal in this moment was to appease them—to speed up the sometimes-interminable bedtime routine, get them to bed, and return to the TV—so he grabbed his BlackBerry and hit Record.

  The kids dropped their towels. They sang and danced and shouted. His son played air guitar, and his daughters bobbed their heads to an imaginary beat. Hoffner held his phone to his chest and continued to film.

  “Wow, are you guys done yet?” he said about 20 seconds into the first video.

  “No,” the four-year-old said.

  “Let’s start over, guys,” the nine-year-old said.

  “Guys, do the right thing!” the four-year-old said.

  “Is the show over?” Hoffner asked again. And a few seconds later, just before he stopped recording, he said, “The show is over.”

  He had never thought about or watched the video again—until now, sitting in jail with his lawyer. Maybe here, in this space, any video of naked children automatically looked like child porn, Hoffner thought. But to him, it depicted a regular night at the Hoffner house: three goofy kids, comfortable in their own skin, trying hard to delay bedtime.

  “Anybody who thinks this is porn or abuse doesn’t know my family,” Hoffner told his lawyer.

  He hired a publicist, who arranged a news conference. Mel agreed to give a speech there. She never watched the videos herself, but she had seen plenty of her children’s naked dance routines. “The charges against my husband are ridiculous and baseless,” she said during the August 27 news conference. “My family does what every family does—we take videos and pictures of our kids in all their craziness.”

  As a guidance counselor at Mankato West High, Mel knew enough about psychology to analyze her own emotions. “Profound sadness that manifests as anger,” she said. She was angry at the university for being “irresponsible,” she said; and at the assistant football coaches for never having the courage to support or defend her husband publicly; and at the coaches’ wives, once her closest friends, who now wouldn’t even answer her calls; and at the community as a whole for believing that her husband could be anything other than a loving parent, a loyal employee, an unsentimental farm boy, a good football coach. “I feel almost unsafe living here, the way so many people get awkward around us and freeze us out,” she said.

  She started on medication. She read books about criminology and posted on college football message boards in support of her husband, who had never before been arrested or suspended.

  She consulted a child psychologist, who said the children would do best in a “normal environment,” so Hoffner told them he was only on a “sabbatical” from work. Mel and the kids still went to home football games on Saturdays because that’s what they had always done, though the games and the crowd made Mel feel even more isolated, with no one talking to them. Hoffner was barred from campus, so he watched on his computer at home as his former assistant coach won game after game by running Hoffner’s plays with Hoffner’s players. The university forbade him from contacting players. The team’s new head coach, Aaron Keen, whom Hoffner had saved in 2011 from a Division II school shuttering its football program, now preached loyalty and attentiveness. Keen had his players meet each week with a sports psychologist, who encouraged them to focus only on what they could control. Hoffner and his “situation,” Keen said, were a “distraction” capable of derailing their season. The players referred to that distraction with a motto—“Flush it”—and they sometimes kept a toy toilet on the sideline to remind them to leave the past behind.

  “Day by day, that team became mine a little less,” Hoffner said.

  Meanwhile, day by day, the prosecution’s case against him was falling apart. Police seized and searched his laptop, cell phone, and a home computer and found nothing—no other images or videos that could be considered pornographic. A day care provider testified that the Hoffner children “have always exhibited appropriate social development” and “emotional competence.” A certified sex therapist viewed the videos and said they consisted of “normal child’s play.” Blue Earth County Human Services conducted its own investigation and interviewed the Hoffner children, none of whom even remembered being videotaped naked.

  “Where on your body do you not want to be touched?” an investigator asked.

  “My eye,” the now five-year-old responded.

  “And who protects you?”

  “My mom and my dad.”

  On November 30, a judge reviewed the evidence and ruled to dismiss Hoffner’s case, concluding that the charges against him should never have been filed. “The videos under consideration here contain nude images of the defendant’s minor children dancing and acting playful after a bath,” the judge, Krista J. Jass, wrote in her decision. “That is all they contain.”

  Hanson, who had been asked by Hoffner’s family and lawyer to drop the charges numerous times and always refused, said he disagreed with the judge’s decision but would not appeal. Then he quickly defended his handling of the case. “No matter what the prosecutor does in a controversial case with a high-profile suspect, they will be criticized,” he said before declining further comment about the case.

  Hoffner and his lawyer held a news conference to address the judge’s decision. He wore a purple tie, the university color, and read a prepared statement about waking from a nightmare. But as he looked around the room, he was thinking more about all the things he might never get back:

  His team, which had gone 13-1 without him, earning Keen an award as regional coach of the year.

  His reputation, because a Google search for his name brought up images of him in an orange jumpsuit.

  His job, because the university said he was still under internal investigation and showed no signs of returning him to coaching.

  After the dismissal, the Hoffner defenders came out in full force. There had been an online petition for Hoffner’s reinstatement, a Facebook page, and a candlelight vigil at his house. But now donors threatened to rescind their pledges to the university. The president of the Touchdown Club, Dennis Hood, resigned. “This whole thing is nuts,” Hood said. “The university made a mess of everything. They overreacted and ruined a man’s life. Frankly, I’m embarrassed.”

  Hoffner said of the university: “They wanted to cast me as the next Jerry Sandusky. You hear my name, you see my picture, and you think, Sick f——. That’s what I would think too. There’s no coming back from that. I would have been better off if I’d shot somebody.”

  Hundreds of Hoffner supporters shared their outrage by forwarding a chain email that
included another home video, this one shot by a Mississippi couple and submitted to America’s Funniest Home Videos in 2008. It showed two naked boys dancing and gyrating behind their older sister—and it had aired on national TV and won the $10,000 first-place prize.

  The university remained unmoved, citing the mysterious second investigation into Hoffner’s conduct. It was unrelated to the initial charge of child pornography, officials said, but involved two “internal complaints” against Hoffner that the university refused to provide details about. (Despite these complaints, the school still employed Hoffner.)

  Shocked by the initial charges, then by the judge’s exoneration, the university community did what communities do: it ignored the awkward wreckage. Most players continued to avoid Hoffner because they had wanted to “flush it,” and being around him still felt strange. The coaches’ wives still left Mel’s calls unreturned. The new president of the Touchdown Club said the university should move on and support a new coach. Keen and his assistants began preparations for another season, with a team that now felt wholly theirs. Hoffner was seen as both vaguely guilty and completely innocent, as an object of suspicion and a martyr, as lucky to be free and the unluckiest man in town.

  About four months after his case had been dismissed, Hoffner awoke one morning in late spring to yet another day defined by his arrest. He microwaved pancakes for his daughters, then loaded the kids into a Kia minivan—“the grocery getter,” he called it—and pulled out of the chalk-covered driveway. The neighborhood kids had slowly started coming back to the house to draw and play basketball, although a few parents still seemed “weird,” Hoffner said.

  Now he pulled up to the elementary school and watched his five-year-old walk toward the entrance. “Bye, Peanut,” he shouted to her. He drove beyond the Mankato water tower, passing by his old practice field and the center of campus. He continued through a neighborhood and parked the minivan in front of a partially abandoned school building, quiet except for the hum of an industrial lawn mower.

  “Welcome to my new office,” he said.

  The university had reassigned Hoffner during its investigation, and now he was making $101,000 for a shadow job as assistant director for facilities development. His workspace was a former storage closet, a windowless box of a room with poor cell-phone service. He had no training in facility management and no desire to learn. “I’m a football coach,” he said. “That’s all.”

  Hoffner sat in the windowless office and twirled a pen in his hand. He suspected the university would never give him his job back, but he felt trapped in a daily limbo, forced into a new kind of prison. The university refused to comment about its investigation—to anybody, about anything related to personnel. Hoffner, his lawyers, and the public could only guess as to its motives: Maybe administrators liked Keen better as head coach and wanted to “flush it.” Maybe they hoped to guard against a lawsuit by finding just cause to validate Hoffner’s dismissal. Maybe they were embarrassed that he’d violated policy and taken personal videos with his university-owned cell phone, whether or not those videos were illegal. Maybe they had found something unusual while analyzing years of search history on Hoffner’s university-owned computers.

  He had considered filing a lawsuit, but his lawyers advised him to wait until the university finished investigating and likely fired him. Then he’d appeal with help from his union and finally have grounds to sue.

  He had not applied for other jobs because what other Division II school would take a risk on someone like him? Why not hire one of the 200 qualified applicants who didn’t show up in an orange jumpsuit on Google?

  So he sat in the windowless office and watched the clock on the wall inch toward 4:00 P.M., time for practice, the fixture of his schedule for 25 years. It happened to be the first day when coaches allowed players to put on pads and hit each other. The tradition had always been one of Hoffner’s favorites—a day for the natural sorting of victims and aggressors.

  He hadn’t been to the football field in eight months. He wasn’t sure whether he was even allowed there.

  “Screw it,” he said, standing up from his desk and grabbing his coat. “I’m going.”

  He drove the grocery getter to the practice field and parked against a fence, rolling down his window while he kept the engine running. He could sit behind the darkened windows without being noticed and listen to the familiar sound track of practice: shouting, cussing, and the shrill scream of a whistle set against the heavy bass of rap coming from a speaker.

  He sunk down in the driver’s seat and watched players he had recruited perform drills he had created with practice equipment he had ordered. There was number 93, the lineman he had recruited at a high school wrestling practice in Huxley, Iowa, driving roughly 200 miles back home in the dark. There was the star wide receiver who had been dismissed and was now back on the team. There barking orders in the center of the circus was his old assistant coach, Keen, whom Hoffner says he both saved from football oblivion and championed, arguing that Keen receive a salary of $60,000 instead of $50,000.

  He watched in silence and timed each drill on the clock in the grocery getter. He broke down passing routes. He analyzed blocking schemes. “Good. Good,” he said, talking only to himself. “Get low. Get low.”

  A former graduate assistant coach, helping Keen for the day, spotted Hoffner in the van, and Hoffner waved him over. The old assistant climbed into the backseat. “How you doing, Coach,” he said.

  “Not so good,” Hoffner said.

  They sat for a minute in awkward silence, watching practice unfold out the window. Hoffner had always thought football was a complicated game, one he had devoted his life’s work to figuring out, but now the action on the field looked beautiful for its simplicity. Players were doing one-on-one tackling drills; each person tried to run by another without being taken to the ground. It was a game that offered the promise of self-destiny; the deserving player always won. That was the great thing about football, Hoffner thought now. It was fair and transparent. All the action unfolded out in the open for everyone to see.

  In the coming weeks, the university would conclude its second investigation and dismiss Hoffner from the payroll without explanation. The union would file a grievance on his behalf. The university would again refuse to comment. Hoffner would consider signing up for unemployment insurance. More supporters would write the university in protest. A divided town would wait for the university to reveal its findings and its motives at an arbitration tentatively scheduled for late this summer, when another verdict would be rendered in the complicated, convoluted case of Todd Hoffner.

  “Do I ever get to go back to my life?” Hoffner would ask. “Or have they erased it for good?”

  But for a few moments inside his van, Hoffner was still just a football guy, talking to another football guy, watching a spring practice.

  “That’s what I miss—the idea that everything is in your control,” he said, turning to the graduate assistant coach. “I got accused of something, got exonerated, and I still lost my job, my life, and my livelihood. How does that work?”

  “I don’t know, Coach. What can I do?”

  Hoffner turned back toward the windshield. He watched a few more players go through the tackling drill.

  “You can’t do anything,” he said. “But it’s nice that you still call me Coach.”

  JONATHAN MAHLER

  The Coach Who Exploded

  FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

  MIKE RICE IS COACHING AGAIN. Or rather, he’s running after-school clinics for third- to sixth-graders at a vast, four-court indoor basketball facility in Neptune, New Jersey, where he also works out local high school players on Friday afternoons and coaches his son’s high school team in a fall recreational league.

  Considering where Rice was a year ago—preparing for his third season as head coach at Rutgers University with a guaranteed salary of $700,000—it is quite a step down. Of course, considering where Rice was seven months ago—a
figure of national disgrace who was fired for mistreating his players—it’s a little hard to believe he’s coaching at all. “It helps when your best friend owns the place,” Rice said.

  We were watching his son’s team, Red Bank Regional High School, warm up before a recent game against the inauspiciously named Brick Township High. Red Bank looked like your average suburban high school team, with the exception of one kid. When I asked Rice about him, he said: “The big man is terrible. Just watch.”

  The instant the game got under way, Rice started pacing manically up and down the floor, yelling nonstop, his raspy voice echoing across the gym. He hollered at his team after every trip down the court, invariably singling out players both for doing something right (“Are you kidding me?” he said when one of them squeezed between two defenders and laid the ball in off the glass. “You’ve got ballerina feet!”) or wrong (“Ben, you’re fighting for time! You get in the game and the first thing you do is give up an and-1?”).

  Rice wasn’t berating anyone, and he definitely wasn’t abusing anyone. Yet if you’d been watching him that night, you might very well have thought, That guy is nuts.

  He was right, though: the big man had a long way to go. After he made one halfhearted attempt to stop a much smaller opponent from driving to the basket, Rice did a sideline demonstration for him: “This is a lion,” he said, proceeding to roar loudly and menacingly raise both arms above his head. Then Rice lowered his arms limply by his side. “This is a wimpy little cat: Meow. Be a lion!”

  The big surprise of the night was Rice’s son, Mike III, a skinny sophomore guard who looked like a boy playing with men. He came off the bench midway through the first half and reeled off a couple of three-pointers, a reverse layup, and a teardrop shot off the dribble in the lane.

  Rice and I had talked about his son’s game a few times, and Rice did not always sound optimistic. “I’ve got to get him more into academics,” he told me once, after receiving a text message from his wife informing him that Mike III had just been benched after going 0-for-3 in an AAU game.