The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  “What the hell are you doing?” his coach asked, pulling Rice off the floor.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Rice replied.

  “That’s it,” the coach said. “You’re done.”

  “It was the most embarrassing moment of my life,” Rice said. “Until this happened.”

  Later, Betz requested two volunteers for some role-playing: what do you do when a colleague says something intolerant and offensive? “Who wants to be the PE teacher?” she asked.

  Rice gamely raised his hand and went up to the front of the room with his female partner, a coach from a middle school in DeKalb, Illinois, who was supposed to ad-lib a response to his scripted lines.

  “That kid has such a mouth on him,” Rice read awkwardly. “He thinks he is so funny. Well, I shut him up today. I called him a little homo, and that cracked everyone up and shut him up. It’s the first day we’ve had some peace in that class since the unit started.”

  His pretend colleague responded instantly: “How is that in any way appropriate?”

  “What I want at Rutgers is a coach who is going to be intense, hardworking, and emotional and who is going to care every single second,” the Rutgers athletic director, Tim Pernetti, said at Rice’s introductory news conference in May 2010. “At the same time,” Pernetti added, “I think we have a guy who understands . . . where the line is.”

  It would be too much to suggest that anyone could have known at that point that Rice didn’t really understand where the line was. But it’s easy to see that Rice and Rutgers were a bad fit from the start. This was one of the worst teams in one of the toughest basketball conferences in the country. Rebuilding the program was going to take time. Even if Rutgers improved significantly, it was not going to win a lot of games. What the team needed was not a coach single-mindedly obsessed with winning but one who knew how to lose.

  The season before Rice arrived, Rutgers finished 14th out of 16 in the Big East, and then three players left the team, including the top scorer. He tried to make a virtue of their underdog status, hanging a punching bag in the locker room covered with laminated newspaper clippings about how bad Rutgers was going to be.

  Rice also came up with a motto—a philosophy, really—to help guide practices: “Comfortable in Chaos.” The concept was borrowed from the Navy SEALs, whose training assumes that the game plan has been scrapped and that they are in trouble. As Rice saw it, going up against teams like Georgetown and Syracuse was the basketball equivalent of a combat mission gone awry. He wanted practices to be more demanding—more hellish—than the games themselves. “Get ready for the chaos,” he’d say as his players stretched out and warmed up.

  Rice says he can now see that he took the idea way too far. “A good coach leads his team to water,” he told me, borrowing a metaphor he picked up in anger management counseling. “A great coach leads them to water and makes them thirsty. I led them to water, put their heads in until I was satisfied with how much they drank.”

  It’s a reality of coaching that no matter what you do, your team is not going to get better every day. During our conversations, Rice talked a lot about the ticking clock, how he felt as if he had only so much time to turn Rutgers around if he wanted to keep his job. I don’t doubt that Rice felt a powerful urgency to win at Rutgers. But the pressure was only a catalyst. It was also who he was and what he did for a living that made his behavior at Rutgers seem inevitable.

  “It’s easy to say now, but when I was in it every day, I wanted to grab someone and just go, ‘We can do this, we’re going to show everybody,’” Rice told me. “Because that’s who I am, and that’s what I do.”

  By some measures, Rice’s first season at Rutgers was a success. The team was projected to finish dead last in the Big East. Instead, Rutgers finished 12th, with an overall record of 15-17. As proud as he is of his Robert Morris teams, Rice considers this his greatest achievement as a coach.

  His second season promised to be even better. He landed five highly rated prospects, a remarkable feat for such a weak program. Of course, five highly rated prospects also meant a lot of freshmen, all of whom had to get used to playing against bigger, stronger competition, not to mention college life. The team proved inconsistent. It showed flashes of potential, upsetting some top schools, but would then turn around and lose to schools it was expected to beat. It finished the season 14-18.

  When you cut through all the mythology of the college coach as molder of young athletes, what you will find is basically a group of extremely competitive people whose livelihoods—not to mention self-images—are tied to the performance of a group of adolescent kids. This doesn’t mean that coaches don’t care about their players; it’s just the reality of the job. “What did you think about when you were 17 to 22 years old?” Rice says, referring to some of the challenges of coaching college players. “You were out of your mind. The last thing you’d think about was jumping to the ball and making a play for your teammate and boxing out every time. You’re thinking: Where’s the party going on? Who’s hanging out with who that night?”

  In this sense, anyway, coaching really isn’t so different from parenting. You want your kids to do better, to be better, and it can drive you crazy to watch them repeat mistakes or even just underachieve. The trick is to be able to drive down your own demons, to contain your frustration, and, more generally, to balance anger and disappointment with love and encouragement. This is what good parents and great coaches do. And it’s what Rice couldn’t do at Rutgers. Here’s another way to look at it: college coaches often talk about saving kids from themselves; Mike Rice’s problem was that he couldn’t save himself—or his kids—from Mike Rice.

  I’ve heard Rice call his behavior any number of things—“idiotic,” “thoughtless,” “stupid.” As Rice puts it: “There’s not a lot of thought that went into why you would throw a ball at somebody’s feet as hard as you could. Is that going to make him rebound better? Probably not. I don’t know what will, but that won’t.” Even as Rice acknowledges that he was wrong, he says his players understood he was just trying to motivate them. “Did any of them blink?” he asked me once. “If they were mad at me, they would have knocked the hell out of me. They’re six-nine, 270 pounds.”

  After the video went viral, a number of Rice’s players at Rutgers came to his defense on TV and in newspapers. “We always said we want to be pushed to that point where we get better,” Tyree Graham, who was on the Rutgers team for Rice’s first two seasons there, told me. “That’s what he did.”

  It’s not surprising that players would rally around their coach when they saw him being publicly pilloried. But not all of them agreed with what Rice was doing. The fact that Rice’s players didn’t fight back doesn’t mean that his conduct wasn’t abusive. What college athlete is going to knock the hell out of his coach? And to whom could Rice’s players complain? The athletic director who hired him? The assistant coaches who were loyal to him and stood silently by while he bullied the players, or even participated in similar behavior themselves?

  Rice says he wanted his players to fight back, to match his intensity. You can see how this might work as a form of motivation, but you can also see how it could easily backfire. Not all players are going to feel comfortable yelling at their coaches. And isn’t it the coach’s job to hold himself above and apart from his team, to be the educator, the grown-up?

  One mystery of Rice’s story is how his behavior went unreported in the media for so long. His practices were open to the public and regularly attended by local journalists. During Rice’s first year, Jay Bilas, a college basketball analyst on ESPN and a former Duke player, watched a Rutgers practice and was so taken aback by “the volume level, the profanity, the challenging of the players,” he told me, that he pulled one of Rice’s assistants aside to say that someone needed to talk to him. Rutgers’s new basketball coach, Eddie Jordan, said over the summer that the school has been working with players who had some “psychological damage” from their time w
ith Rice.

  Rice’s style might have worked at Robert Morris and with his first team at Rutgers—which he affectionately calls “the leftovers”—but it stopped working during his second season there. Part of the problem was that some of Rice’s returning players felt that he was treating the freshmen differently, that they were being spared the worst of Coach Rice’s Comfortable-in-Chaos boot camp.

  Rice said one of his assistant coaches told him privately that his relentless intensity and negativity were hurting the team, and suggested he lighten up on some players. Another gave him a copy of a book called The Positive Dog to underscore the importance of positive feedback.

  But Rice didn’t listen, at least not until his second season at Rutgers was nearly over. “You’re successful and now you keep building and it gets a little more out of control until it becomes a problem,” he says. “And my problem became a huge problem, and I never took time out to analyze how I was going about things. Even though people would say things, I’m not hearing it. Because the intensity is what I was, the intensity is what I knew.”

  “You’re lucky I have no more anger, buddy!” Rice joked one afternoon in June, swerving his Audi SUV to avoid a car that had just cut in front of him. We were on our way to lunch at a Ruby Tuesday near the Newark Airport. Sitting in the backseat was the man in charge of Rice’s emotional and professional rehabilitation, John Lucas.

  The John Lucas Athlete’s Aftercare Program in Houston, where Rice has spent quite a bit of time since last spring, has become a mandatory stop on the disgraced sports figure’s road to redemption. Whether you’ve been arrested for drunken driving (Rod Strickland) or kicked off your college football team for smoking pot (Tyrann Mathieu), John Lucas is the man to call.

  “First thing I did was say you’re going to have to pay for your treatment,” Lucas said, recalling his initial conversation with Rice last spring. “Nobody is going to believe you’re serious if you don’t pay for it. And I’m not going to do insurance. When he heard the numbers—”

  “Luc don’t do anything cheap,” Rice said.

  It’s hard to say what, exactly, Lucas does. He has no professional degree in psychology or social work. With his familiar recovery rhetoric, he’s more AA sponsor than therapist. (Rice, he says, has to learn that he’s just another “bozo on the bus.”)

  Lucas does, however, have the credibility of a survivor: about 30 years ago, his promising NBA career was derailed by cocaine and alcohol addiction. He also runs a lot of basketball clinics that can serve as halfway houses for a recovering Big East coach who’s trying to get back into the game any way he can, even if that means spending a holiday weekend running layup drills for fifth-graders on a volunteer basis.

  Between bites of his burger and fries, Lucas prodded Rice toward self-reflection. “When I was at Robert Morris having the time of my life, I wasn’t having the time of my life, because I wanted more,” Rice said. “When I was at Pitt, we went to the Sweet 16—but I just wanted to get a head coaching job. I always wanted more—more, more, more. I wanted to win every day. If you didn’t do it, I was going to make you do it. I was going to overwhelm you with intensity, with passion, with motivation.”

  At the same time, Lucas also worked on the narrative of Rice’s redemption. “He’s going to have the gift of sensitivity now,” Lucas said.

  The whole conversation felt more than a little contrived, a lunchtime therapy session conducted for my benefit. Rice obviously sought out Lucas because he needed help trying to reclaim his reputation. But it would be unfair, and inaccurate, really, to say that Rice isn’t going through something genuine. And if Lucas wasn’t exactly offering searing psychological insights—his basic take was that Rice is no different from any other addict, only his vice is perfection—it was clear why Rice finds it comforting to be around him. Since the video, Rice has been defined, above all, by shame. (The same emotion he was often trying to get his own players to feel.) But Lucas, who during his playing days famously awoke from a bender soaked in his own urine, doesn’t judge.

  There’s another thing too. Part of the allure of the world of competitive sports is that it doesn’t require self-awareness. Your only job is to win. So when athletes and coaches find themselves in Rice’s position, they often don’t know how to talk about what they’re going through. Lucas’s vocabulary may be borrowed from a different recovery movement, but it’s better than nothing.

  “I make him talk to me about the fears,” Lucas said.

  “What are those fears?” I asked.

  “I’m not good enough,” Rice said.

  “The fear that he won’t get another job,” Lucas said. “How long is everything going to be, ‘Mike Rice, disgraced ex-Rutgers coach’?”

  Lucas gestured at Rice, whose eyes were red and swollen with tears. “Look at the pain he’s in right now. He can’t forgive himself . . . If you can’t see he’s human and genuine, you’re missing it. Here’s somebody that’s truly remorseful, that’s trying to get everything back in a day, and I’m trying to tell him that that’s gone forever. No one is ever going to forgive him. That’s the good thing for Mike Rice. His self-worth will come by who he is now, not by his title.”

  One important distinction between Mike Rice and your average public figure looking for redemption is that Rice isn’t guilty of some discreet transgression that arguably had little or nothing to do with how he did his job. His transgression was how he did his job. This is going to make it more challenging for Rice to get back into basketball. But he is determined to coach again.

  After his son’s game against Brick Township, as Rice and I drove to a pizzeria in a nearby strip mall, I asked him if he had any leads on basketball jobs. He was vague but sounded encouraged. He said that he would have to work his way back up, probably starting as a scout for an NBA team, but that he thought he would eventually get another shot.

  Over the past several months, Rice told me repeatedly that he was going to emerge from this experience a better man, a better father, and a better coach. It was the sort of thing that anyone in his position would say, and I always glossed over it in our conversations. But it’s actually an interesting issue. It’s not, as it might seem on the surface, simply a matter of whether Mike Rice has “learned from his mistakes.” It’s a more universal, even philosophical question: can we really change who we are?

  I was impressed by Rice’s coaching during his son’s game that evening, in particular how focused he was on every little thing his players were doing. This is exactly what most serious athletes want: a passionate coach who’s doing everything he can to make you a better player. But I also wondered how difficult that intensity must be to corral, especially for someone with Rice’s background and makeup. It’s possible that Rice might be a better man and father if he could learn to harness his intensity and get past the need to always have to prove something. But that might not make him a better coach.

  A lot of coaches do start their careers unable to calibrate their intensity. They gradually figure out that it doesn’t much matter if this approach is successful, to say nothing of appropriate. It’s not sustainable. An important part of this process is becoming self-aware, learning how to truly stand outside yourself. Another is absorbing something we were all told as kids: winning isn’t everything. Or maybe it would be more precise in the context of Mike Rice to say that if winning is everything, you’re probably going to wind up damaging a lot of people, yourself among them.

  “I wish I would have been more thoughtful in how I went about making them forged as a team, making them tougher as a unit,” Rice told me. By now, the restaurant had emptied, and our waitress was resetting the tables around us for the next day, making sure we knew that it was time to leave. Rice paused for a moment, before either saying what he knew he was supposed to say or trying on a new identity. “Or maybe just accepting that sometimes you have to accept that you are who you are. Look, we’re not very good, but we’re going to try every day, and we’re going to do the right
things.”

  BEN MCGRATH

  The Art of Speed

  FROM THE NEW YORKER

  THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED MAN in the world’s most glamorous sport stands at a drafting table all day. Using a number 2B pencil and a right-angle ruler, he produces as many as 300 drawings a week. The energy-drink company employing him dedicates another five staffers to scanning and converting his images into digital form, for analysis and manipulation on a computer-aided design (CAD) system. His name is Adrian Newey, and he is often said to perceive solid objects not by their outlines but by the flow of air currents around them. The drawings reflect this aerodynamic perversion: dense concentrations of swooping lines that flatter a rear suspension, say, and suggest something more on the order of a space shuttle. In a sense, he sketches speed itself.

  Newey’s sport is Formula One racing, the caviar to NASCAR’s Cheetos. He is the chief technical officer for Red Bull Racing, Formula One’s premier outfit, and spends most weekdays at a factory in the planned city of Milton Keynes, an hour northwest of London. “It’s a bit NASA,” my tour guide, Anthony Ward, said when I was granted the rare privilege of admission, last fall. We passed stereolithography machines and giant autoclaves operated by men in white lab coats, and a supercomputer with processing power equivalent to 100,000 iPads, according to Ward, who recited that last detail with a mixture of pride and chagrin. “We would be bigger if we could,” he said, and began explaining the complex rules governing the ratio of resources that teams may allocate to their computational-fluid-dynamics departments and their wind tunnels, if they choose to have them. Red Bull’s wind tunnel, in nearby Bedford, was originally built by England’s Ministry of Defense, to test the Concorde. The rules and regulations extend for hundreds of pages, for reasons having to do with safety, politics, and whim; they amount to the “formula” that gives this billion-dollar pinewood derby its name.