The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Peggy asked her husband.

  “I’m going to be fine,” he replied. “I’m going to take it slow.”

  “Honey, you come back to me.”

  He kissed her.

  “I will. Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”

  When the gun sounded for the second wave of the men’s race at 3:10 P.M., LeMaitre and about 175 others charged through a tunnel of noise up Fourth Avenue. They ran past the fire hall, past the Chinese restaurant, past the other Chinese restaurant, past the United Methodist Church that advertised WORSHIP AT MOOSE PASS, 9 A.M. After two blocks the runners took a hard left on Jefferson Street and ran beneath the large mural of the Mount Marathon Race, painted on the side of the senior center and bearing a list of past winners in the way another small town might celebrate its prized graduates or war dead. They passed a low-slung building with a large red cross—the hospital. The road kept rising. In another block the asphalt turned to gravel. LeMaitre and the others ran past a warning sign at the foot of the mountain that read, GOING DOWN IS EVEN MORE DANGEROUS THAN GOING UP. Then the runners ran out of road entirely and faced the great green bulk of the mountain. They started to climb.

  In Peggy’s dining room stood a large photograph, the last ever taken of her husband, shot by a photographer on the course at about 4:30 that day. In it, Michael is just emerging from the thick brush midway up the mountain. Seward lies below, a toy landscape of streets and yards as neat as an ice tray. There is no one behind him. His knees are dirty, his gloves are soiled. He is completely soaked through by rain and sweat—shorts, shirt, headband. What you keep returning to, though, is his face. It isn’t a face of misery, or complaint. The blue eyes are wide. The grin is gritted but large, even a little wild. Last place doesn’t faze this face at all; it has been there before. You realize then that you know this grin: it is the grin of the Crazy Frenchman.

  Fuck it, the grin says. Drive on.

  Peggy shivered alone in the rain, honking her car’s horn and screaming her husband’s name at the base of the mountain to guide him home.

  By eight o’clock when he had not appeared through the spruce—two hours after Tom Walsh had radioed to race officials that LeMaitre would soon be on his way down—the family notified authorities. Hasty searches turned up nothing. The temperature was dropping, the rain increasing. By two in the morning, an Alaska State Troopers helicopter equipped with infrared radar sensitive enough to see footprints left in snow arrived and scanned the mountain through the dusky night. Searchers landed and blew whistles—still nothing. Had anyone looked up from town in the late afternoon, he might have watched LeMaitre, seen exactly where he’d gone—he was that close. But the race was long over; everyone had turned his back on the mountain, toward cold beers, hot showers. The evening ahead. Now it was sleeting at Race Point. LeMaitre had been on the mountain for 12 hours dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts. Searchers feared that if he wasn’t already injured, he was almost surely suffering from hypothermia.

  The next morning the 210th Rescue Squadron of the Alaska Air National Guard, which specializes in searching for downed pilots and missing hikers, arrived with its HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter for another infrared scan. The two choppers stalked the mountain all day. On the ground a team of 40 searchers, which soon ballooned to 60 or more, canvassed the mountain. They tried to think like the lost man: Did LeMaitre hike right past Race Point and continue up a goat path toward the true summit—only to slip down treacherous cliffs beside the path? Did he fall through a melting snow bridge created by the streams that run beneath the lingering snowfields on the racecourse and now lie, injured, out of sight? Desperate, did he beeline straight for Seward through the impossible jungle of alders and devil’s club? In the following days they checked everything, to no avail—even tying strips of pink and orange surveyor’s tape to branches to mark the places searched. Weeks later when I climbed it, the mountain remained tinseled with hundreds of poignant Day-Glo ribbons, each one a hope unfulfilled.

  Days passed. Rescue quietly became recovery. The bar-stool sages jawed that LeMaitre had pulled a fast one on everybody. “He’s in Cabo,” they said, “nursing a frosty margarita.” But for many Sewardites the hurt was personal. “This is our mountain,” Sam Young told me. “We can’t have someone up there suffering.” He and others took days off to search the mountain—some with teams, some on their own.

  But where did LeMaitre go? The high tundra and rock slopes were easily enough searched. Soon the snow tunnels also had melted out, revealing nothing. Only one general scenario seemed to fit: Something sudden and drastic happened to LeMaitre—a fall? A broken ankle in the scree? A heart attack? He managed to reach the worst of the brush, or else wandered into some of Mount Marathon’s frightening, unseeable cliffs—dense and difficult areas where searchers might have missed him. Shock and hypothermia took hold. And he died there.

  But the mountain, so much larger than it looks from town, was loath to return what it had taken. Its rocky slopes ripped spiked crampons from searchers’ feet. Its muddy slopes twisted their ankles. And it kept raining. Four days after LeMaitre disappeared, the state troopers, who’d spearheaded the search, ended their effort. The Seward Volunteer Fire Department kept looking. A cadaver dog arrived from Oregon. Friends pored over high-resolution photographs. The LeMaitres’ son, Jon, came to Seward from Anchorage to comfort Peggy during the search. Daughter MaryAnne flew up from Utah and stayed for six weeks, climbing the mountain’s gullies with volunteers. Once, she steeled herself to poke through fresh bear scat on the trail, looking for a bone, a scrap of clothing, any grisly hint of her father’s whereabouts. “If it would’ve been me on that mountain—I know my dad. He’d be doing the same thing,” she told me later as she fought back tears. “I know he wouldn’t give up on me.”

  Finally even Chief Squires reluctantly called off the fire department’s effort, hoping that when autumn stripped the jungle, a clue would appear. But soon the autumn too would pass, and then the snow would fall, and still, nothing.

  In mid-August, before MaryAnne returned home, she headed up the mountain one last time. She left at three o’clock, arriving at Race Point nearly exactly when her father did. She sat by the turnaround rock and wept. Then she pulled a Dremel tool from her knapsack and carved I LOVE YOU DAD into the rock. Having experienced the mountain and Seward for these weeks, she wrote friends afterward, “If this ends up being my dad’s final resting place, he is happy here.”

  Volunteers were still on the mountain when the soul-searching, and the questions, and the finger-pointing started. Should the race timekeepers have left LeMaitre? Shouldn’t he have been stopped? Why didn’t officials know who remained on the mountain? Who is responsible?

  Two months before the race, former race director Chuck Echard had warned in the Seward Phoenix Log that race directors were asking for trouble by boosting the cap on adult racers by another five entrants last year. More bodies on the mountain meant more flying rocks, more unprepared racers. “Take care of the runners and the mountain,” Echard cautioned. “Not everyone can run the race.” Women’s champ Holly Brooks caught the thoughts of several people I spoke with when she said, “I’m kind of surprised that something like this didn’t happen sooner.”

  “Do we need to change some things? Of course we do,” said Flip Foldager. Foldager is the 55-year-old member of the race committee with a push-broom mustache who is patriarch of one of the first families of the Mount Marathon Race. Officials, for instance, recently put a new rule in place to turn back slowpokes if they don’t reach the mountain’s midpoint within an hour.

  But many Alaskans—organizers, runners, even the editorial writers at the Anchorage Daily News—reacted to LeMaitre’s death with a lionlike protectiveness toward the race. They sniffed talk of any big changes suspiciously. When I was in Alaska, the adjective that modified the Mount Marathon Race the most—it dangled from the name proudly, a little provokingly—was “dangerous.” It was this event
’s red badge of honor. Without danger, there was no race.

  “It’s not a safe race,” Foldager told me flatly over beers one evening. “We have to manage that as well as we can.”

  But don’t misunderstand: you can’t put bumpers on a race like this, he said. The mountain won’t allow it. Helmets? Ropes? Cover up one danger, another still lurks. Just as important, Alaskans won’t abide it. Danger is in the very marrow of this contest. You cannot separate the two. It is part of its deep mystique. Cancel the race? Ha. People will run it anyway, guerrilla-style.

  “The only way you’ll ever make the Mount Marathon Race safe,” Foldager told me, before finishing his beer, “is by not doing it.”

  And time and again during my visit, people inevitably turned the blame back on the missing man. “We were unprepared for someone being that unprepared,” Draper, the race committee member, told me. Many locals see Alaska as the ultimate non-nanny state. Yes, there is community, the kind that emerges when people must rally against outside forces. But at the same time, there’s still a frontier attitude, and the elbow room to go with it; you can have all the rope you want to lasso your big dreams and adventures—or all you need to hang yourself. The lesson: don’t look to anyone else for help when the grizzly charges and the rifle jams. You made your bet against this country. It’s your fault if you come up short.

  There’s a brutal fairness to this sentiment, but I left these conversations feeling that it’s too easy to write off Michael LeMaitre as careless, reckless. How many of us have had near misses—the somersault over the handlebars 10 miles from the trailhead, or the mini-avalanche deep in the backcountry—and then laughed about those epics around the campfire later on when all was well? Have you ever thought how close you’ve come to disaster? We all have a strange friendship with risk. We crave its thrill—who doesn’t want to edge a little closer to the redline where the adrenal gland squeezes and the colors grow brighter? Yet we rarely understand how close we’ve skirted that line, or what’s on the other side. Accidents? Those happen to the other guy. Nobody ever laces up his shoes thinking he’ll lead off the 10 o’clock news.

  Does that make us all irresponsible?

  So now you’re Michael LeMaitre, toeing the starting line last July 4. You haven’t been up the mountain, and you’re a little nervous. Then you look up and you see the peak, so close you can almost reach and tap its summit. It’s just three measly miles, round-trip! Straight up and down again, with hundreds of new best friends! You’ve been through so much more than this. Take it slow, you think, and you’ll be fine.

  Honestly—if you were Michael LeMaitre at the starting line, what would you do?

  The morning I left Seward, I dragged my luggage into the hotel parking lot. The previous day’s bright, smiling sun was gone. The rain had returned, and with it a shivery dishrag bleakness. In the harbor the season’s last tourists milled about wearing crabbing gear, waiting for their tour boat to depart.

  As I opened the trunk, the skies across Resurrection Bay split open. Bars of Annunciation light burst across glaciers and water and shabby hotel parking lot—the kind of unrestrained, overspilling Alaskan beauty that swells your heart and also breaks it a little bit for its fleetingness, and that makes every other soggy, frigid moment here in the far north worth it.

  I turned with the light and faced Mount Marathon. The mountain stood as it always did, its Egyptian bulk leaning over town—not glowering, not protective, just . . . indifferent. With the sunlight a clear rainbow had appeared, arcing out of dark skies and landing clearly in the thick brush a few hundred feet up its face. It was silly and maudlin to think anything of it and I knew it, and I turned away. Then I turned back and spent a long time memorizing the location, though unsure who I would tell, or what I would say.

  Eventually my eyes drifted down the long, meandering ridgeline. A second rainbow had appeared, falling to earth in the undergrowth some distance away from the first. And now an unlikely third rainbow tumbled from the sky and rooted itself, bright and promising, in still another place. Then, one by one, they disappeared.

  CHARLES P. PIERCE

  The Marathon

  FROM GRANTLAND.COM

  IT WAS WHAT was left behind that wrung the heart as you walked through Copley Square in Boston while the sun fell at the end of a very bad day. Tables full of unopened bottled water. Piles of those strange silver thermal blankets that have become as much a part of the annual event as spaghetti suppers and lost Scandinavians trying to find their way to Fenways Park. Bags of street clothes, waiting in great lines along Berkeley Street for owners who were god knows where. The Common. The Public Garden. Locked down in a restaurant into which they might have wandered to use the facilities. One solitary fireman, slumped on the bumper of a truck, eyes to the sky, without the energy to reach down and pick up a bottle of water at his feet, and then the shadows lengthening down Boylston Street again, and sirens and sirens, and then silence, and sirens some more. This is the tableau that’s left when you take out the joy.

  Nobody loves the Boston Marathon as much as the people who make fun of it year after year. This was the race that previously offered as a prize a not particularly expensive medal, a laurel wreath, and a bowl of beef stew. This was the race that, on one memorable occasion, nobody knew who actually won. I don’t know anyone who loved the race that didn’t mock it for its monumental inconvenience, its occasionally towering self-regard, and the annual attempts by Boston-area television stations to use it to win another shelf full of local Emmys. This includes me, and I’ve been around 25 or 30 of them, more or less, in one way or another, watching from the press truck, from the firehouse in Newton, from somebody’s roof, and very often from just barely inside the front door of the late, lamented Eliot Lounge. The Marathon was the old, drunk uncle of Boston sports, the last of the true festival events. Every other one of our major sporting rodeos is locked down, and tightened up, and Fail-Safed until the Super Bowl now is little more than NORAD with bad rock music and offensive tackles. You can’t do that to the Marathon. There was no way to do it. There was no way to lock down, or tighten up, or Fail-Safe into Security Theater a race that covers 26.2 miles, a race that travels from town to town, a race that travels past people’s houses. There was no way to garrison the Boston Marathon. Now there will be. Someone will find a way to do it. And I do not know what the race will be now. I literally haven’t the vaguest clue.

  At around three on Monday afternoon, Back Bay gradually grew grimmer as you walked east toward Copley Square. At Kenmore, it was actually still something of a party. People were streaming up Commonwealth Avenue in the general direction of Boston University and, while there were still a few tearful hugs here and there, most people seemed to feel themselves entering something of a zone of safety as they walked by Fenway and off toward BU. Kathy Hynes and Harry Smith, who ran together for almost the entire race, were standing in front of the BU School of Management, wrapped in their silver blankets. They’d made it as far as Kenmore Square. Then, all around them, the iPhones of their fellow runners began to ring furiously, and a police officer told them to execute an immediate right-face and stop. “You could hear people talking about ‘something happening’ at the finish line,” Hynes said. “And then they told us that the race had been canceled because of ‘an incident.’” And that is how the news spreads today, when two bombs go off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and at least three people die and north of 100 are injured, some brutally. The shock is sudden but its ripples fade quickly as the knowledge of what happened goes out into the ether and then back through thousands of personal mobile devices. Horror has no shelf life anymore. Everybody knows already. Everybody’s a newsman. Everybody’s in showbiz.

  The longer you walked down toward the Public Garden, east on Commonwealth, past all the stern iron and stone monuments to great departed Bostonians, the more you saw the faces change. People were staring now, past their friends and their families, off toward some spot in the far distance t
hat only they could see. There were more people crying. There were even more simply wandering, dazed but unhurt, and then you realized these people were traveling through shock after they’d already traumatized their bodies over 26 miles. They were husks, some of them. They had very little left at all. Not far from Public Alley 436, just off Clarendon Street, about three blocks from what some people already were calling ground zero, Joe Nuccio hung out of the window of his apartment, recording video on his iPhone of the slowly untangling crowd on the sidewalk. Joe had heard the first explosion, then he’d heard the second, which he described as more of a blast than a bang. He felt his building shake a little. Then he threw open his window, and he saw people running past.

  “The first thing you thought of was 9/11,” Nuccio said. “You know, all those people running up the middle of the street. People were running, just running. They only stopped for a minute to cry and then they’d run again, and I looked out the window and I saw this white smoke rising up past the [Hotel] Lenox sign.”

  Ultimately, many of the lost and the confused and the separated found themselves and their loved ones at the Boylston Street end of the Public Garden. There was a general milling about and, for a moment, it almost seemed as though the spirit of the day had been recaptured, until you realized that a lot of this joy was about finding out your wife or your son wasn’t maimed, and until you saw the people sitting alone, their backs against the trees, staring up through the branches as if they were hanging prayers on every one of them.

  The Kings were gathered at one corner of the Garden, next to an old stone fountain. Vicky King had been running the race, and her husband and son had been waiting along Boylston Street not far from the Marathon Sports store, which had been a great place to watch the race until, in a flash of an instant, it had become the worst place to be in the world. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a reenactment,” said Ben King, Vicky’s son. “But what the first bomb sounded like was a cannon going off, like, Boom. I wasn’t really sure what it was. Then came the second one from up the street, and I saw the police and the EMTs just ripping the barricades away.” Out on the course, Vicky was running with her friend Nancy Breeden from Seattle. They’d just turned onto Boylston Street when they saw the commotion erupt in front of them. “A policeman came up to us,” Breeden said, “and he said, ‘Now, you have to run that way,’ and pointed back the way we came, so we did.” And that was how their Boston Marathon ended. In reverse. And, all around them in the Public Garden, what seemed to be forming itself was something that was not quite a party, but not quite a wake either. It was something solemn and celebratory all at once, like Easter morning, like a late-coming early spring.