The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  So she told the UN refugee workers that Biel was part of her family. And he went with her to Kakuma and lived with her like a third son. “I call her Mom because she’s caring for me and treats me the same as she did her own children,” Biel says. “They saved my life.”

  He didn’t grow up running. He loved soccer; a lanky defender ranging across the grassless pitches of Kakuma, he could go all day if asked. He ran the occasional school relay, to help out, but never more than a lap or two. Then, a year ago, a posting went up in the camp: Tegla Loroupe was coming in August to stage a 10-kilometer race, and the best would earn spots at her training center and a chance at the Olympics. Biel liked that runners controlled their own fate. He thought, Why not me?

  He had one pair of sneakers, barely; holes gaped under the balls of both feet. “There was no sole,” he says. “I was tying them, and I say, ‘God help me now.’ ”

  Biel, running the whole way on his toes, finished third. The flight from Kakuma to Nairobi was his second, the first having come when the UN flew Chuol’s family into Kakuma a decade before. After news got around that Biel was one of the 30 chosen, he received a phone call from an uncle in Juba. “Your family is alive,” the man said. “Your mother, your brother, even your father. They are all back in Nasir.”

  Biel has no idea if this is true. He still hasn’t spoken to anyone in his family, can’t go back himself, and says that in his culture, people lie rather than confirm bad news long-distance. “I cannot believe it,” he says, “because when you are far away, they cannot tell you the truth: they don’t want you to be hurt. But sometimes I think about it and say, okay, maybe they are alive, and it makes me happy. I say . . . maybe. Imagine: for 12 years I never see my father, and then this guy tells me that he’s alive. It’s hard.”

  Still, all the while Biel kept working, improving, surviving cuts: when 16 of the originals at Loroupe’s training center were replaced in February, when the IOC named the 43 final candidates worldwide in March, when the list of candidates at the training center was sliced down to 14 later that spring. And with each step an idea took firmer shape: if he makes something of this chance, makes any money, he will get Chuol and her sons out of Kakuma. “That is the way I can thank them,” Biel says.

  On June 3 the runners gathered inside the social hall at Loroupe’s training center for the IOC’s announcement. No hints had been given. The coaches kept warning them: only one of you might go to Rio. It’s okay. Don’t despair if you’re not chosen.

  A video screen popped to life, relaying the image of Thomas Bach sitting at a table in Lausanne, Switzerland. Some runners prayed. Some felt their hands shaking. Then they heard their names being read from far away, one by one, five of them inside that room in Kenya. “It felt like a dream,” Lokoro says.

  The first was Biel’s. At the unreal sound of it—him, his name!—coming out of a TV on a wall, his eyes filled. He thought about his mother and the last time, 11 years ago, he had cried. Now he wept again, happily. When the cameras and reporters and his teammates crowded around him, he could barely speak.

  “It was too big,” Biel says, but if you’ve never lost everything, you might not understand. That was the bell signaling the last leg of a long, desperate run. A refugee is on the move. Cheer hard. Look at him—look at all of them—go.

  JOHN BRANCH

  Why Steve Kerr Sees Life Beyond the Court

  from the New York Times

  The last time Steve Kerr was in Beirut, his birthplace, with the bombs pounding the runway and the assassination of his father six months away, he left by car.

  The airport was closed. There was talk of taking a cruise ship to Cyprus, or accompanying an ambassador on a helicopter to Tel Aviv, or even crossing into Israel on a bus. A military plane headed to Cairo had an empty seat, but it went to someone else. Finally, a hired driver took Kerr over the Lebanon Mountains and across the Syrian border to Damascus, then on to Amman, Jordan. It felt like an escape.

  “I’m fearful that all this uncertainty and inconvenience, not to mention even a sense of physical danger, has not done Steve’s image of Beirut much good, and in his present mood he wonders what any of us are doing here,” his father, Malcolm H. Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut, wrote to other family members that day in August 1983.

  A few months later, Malcolm Kerr was shot twice in the back of the head outside his university office.

  Steve Kerr was 18 then, quiet and sports-obsessed. He was a lightly recruited freshman at the University of Arizona, before it was a basketball power. It took a vivid imagination to see him becoming an NBA champion as a player and a coach, now leading the Golden State Warriors.

  But perhaps it should be no surprise that, at 51, Kerr has found his voice in public discourse, talking about much more than basketball: heavy topics like gun control, National Anthem protests, presidential politics, and Middle East policy. With an educated and evenhanded approach, he steps into discussions that most others in his position purposely avoid or know little about, chewing through the gray areas in a world that increasingly paints itself in bold contrasts.

  In many ways, he has grown into an echo of his father.

  “The truly civilized man is marked by empathy,” Malcolm Kerr wrote in a foreword to a collection of essays called The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective. “By his recognition that the thought and understanding of men of other cultures may differ sharply from his own, that what seems natural to him may appear grotesque to others.”

  In a rare and sometimes emotional interview this fall, Kerr spoke about the death of his father and his family’s deep roots in Lebanon and the Middle East. Some of the words sounded familiar.

  “Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and look at it from a bigger perspective,” he said. “We live in this complex world of gray areas. Life is so much easier if it could be black and white, good and evil.”

  Providing commentary on the state of today’s politics and culture is not a prerequisite for Kerr’s job. There are sports fans, maybe the majority of them, who wish athletes and coaches would keep their non-sports opinions to themselves—stand for the anthem, be thankful for your good fortune, express only humility, and provide little but smiles and autographs.

  Kerr understands that. Sports are a diversion for most who follow them, “only meaningful to us and our fans,” he said. In a sports world that takes itself too seriously, that perspective is part of the appeal of Kerr and the Warriors. They won the 2015 NBA championship, were runners-up last season, and remain a top team this season. They seem to be having more fun than anyone else.

  But Kerr also knows that sports are an active ingredient of American culture. He knows, as well as anyone, that players are complicated, molded by background, race, religion, and circumstance.

  And Kerr is too: a man whose grandparents left the United States to work in the Middle East, whose father was raised there, whose mother adopted it, whose family has a different and broader perspective than most. The Kerrs are a family touched by terrorism in the most personal way. Malcolm Kerr was not a random victim. He was a target.

  That gives Steve Kerr a voice. His job gives him a platform. You will excuse him if he has a few things to say.

  “It’s really simple to demonize Muslims because of our anger over 9/11, but it’s obviously so much more complex than that,” he said. “The vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people, just like the vast majority of Christians and Buddhists and Jews and any other religion. People are people.”

  He delved into modern Middle East history, about World War II and the Holocaust and the 1948 creation of Israel, about the Six-Day War in 1967, about peace accords and the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Iraq War and the United States’ scattered chase for whatever shifting self-interest it has at any particular time.

  “My dad would have been able to explain it all to me,” Kerr said. Instead, he absorbed it as a boy and applies it as an adult. “He at least g
ave me the understanding that it’s complex. And as easy as it is to demonize people, there’s a lot of different factors involved in creating this culture that we’re in now.”

  Malcolm Kerr was a professor at UCLA for 20 years, and the sprawling ranch house where the family lived in Pacific Palisades, California, has a flat driveway and a basketball hoop bolted to the roof above the garage. Steve Kerr spent countless hours in the driveway practicing the shot that would give him the NBA record for career three-point percentage that still stands. But not all memories in the driveway are about basketball.

  “I remember when the Camp David accords happened,” Kerr said, recalling the 1978 peace talks between Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, shepherded by President Jimmy Carter. Kerr had just entered his teens.

  “One of my best friends was a guy named David Zuckerman, a Jewish guy, and his father was an English professor,” Kerr said. “Mr. Zuckerman and David drove me home from baseball practice or something, and we pull up in the driveway and my dad sees us and comes running out. Mr. Zuckerman’s name was Marvin, and my dad said: ‘Marvin, Marvin! Did you see the picture today of Begin and Sadat?’ It was the biggest thing. It would have been the equivalent of the Dodgers winning the World Series. He was so excited for that moment because that is what he really hoped for: Middle East peace. That was his dream. That day, I’ll never forget it.”

  Kerr paused.

  “And then it was only a short time later that Sadat was killed,” he said.

  The Sadat assassination was in October 1981, just 27 months before Malcolm Kerr was killed.

  “We Were the Good Guys”

  Malcolm Kerr’s parents, Stanley and Elsa Kerr, were American missionaries who met in the Middle East after World War I. He worked for American Near East Relief in Turkey during the slaughter of countless Armenians (detailed later in his memoir The Lions of Marash). She had traveled to Istanbul to study Turkish and to teach. They married in 1921 and moved to Lebanon to run orphanages. They went on to teach at the American University of Beirut for 40 years.

  Malcolm was one of their four children. He went to the United States for prep school and graduated from Princeton before he returned to AUB for graduate school. It was there that he met Ann Zwicker, an Occidental College student from California spending a year studying abroad.

  Beirut was a cosmopolitan, sun-kissed city on the Mediterranean, a mix of Christians and Muslims seemingly in balance, if not harmony. AUB was founded in 1866 (it celebrated its 150th anniversary on December 3) as a bastion of free thought and diversity, welcoming all races and religions. As wars and crises suffocated the Middle East in recent decades, it has often felt like an island, protected by prestige and open-mindedness.

  Malcolm and Ann married and raised four children: Susan, John, Steve, and Andrew. The first three were born in Beirut. Malcolm Kerr took a teaching job at AUB, but the Kerrs settled in California when Steve was a toddler. Malcolm Kerr’s tenure at UCLA was sprinkled with sojourns and sabbaticals that persistently pulled the family back to the Middle East.

  Steve Kerr spent two separate school years in Cairo. There were summers in Beirut and Tunisia, another year in France, and road trips circling the Mediterranean in a Volkswagen van. Steve “was not always thrilled,” he admitted, to leave friends and the comfort of California. He hated to miss sports camps and football and basketball games at UCLA, where the Kerrs had season tickets.

  In hindsight, though, his family’s long history in the Middle East, beginning nearly 100 years ago, shaped him in ways that he only now realizes.

  “It’s an American story, something I’m very proud of, the work that my grandparents did,” Kerr said. “It just seemed like a time when Americans were really helping around the world, and one of the reasons we were beloved was the amount of help we provided, whether it was after World War I, like my grandparents, or World War II. I’m sort of nostalgic for that sort of perception. We were the good guys. I felt it growing up, when I was living in Egypt, when I was overseas. Americans were revered in much of the Middle East. And it’s just so sad what has happened to us the last few decades.”

  Kerr was in high school when his father was named president of AUB in 1982. It was Malcolm Kerr’s dream job. But the appointment came as Lebanon was embroiled in civil war. Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, expelled from Syria, had its headquarters in Beirut. Iranian Shiites, followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had moved into Lebanon and given voice to the impoverished Shiite minority there. The Christian population was shrinking, and Lebanon was in the middle of a tug of war between Israel and Syria.

  “I bet there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll get bumped off early on,” Malcolm Kerr told his daughter, Susan, in March 1982, she recalled in her memoir, One Family’s Response to Terrorism.

  He accepted the job the next morning. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the countermove by the Iranians to send its Iranian Revolutionary Guards there through Syria, began in June 1982, weeks before Malcolm Kerr was to start the new job. In the chaos, Iran-backed militants were organizing and would eventually become Hezbollah.

  Malcolm Kerr was kept in New York until things settled, but AUB’s acting president, David Dodge, was kidnapped in July, and AUB was in need of leadership. Malcolm Kerr arrived in August, expressing hope that the destruction and death closing in on the campus could be kept outside its walls. (Dodge, who was released by his captors after a year, died in 2009.)

  Back in California, Steve began his senior year and starred on the basketball team.

  “I wanted him to be at games, but I knew that he was doing what he loved,” Kerr said. “And when you’re 16 or 17, you’re so self-absorbed. You just want to play and do your thing.”

  Malcolm Kerr wrote letters home almost daily. They detailed tense meetings with political leaders, the latest assaults on Beirut, the assassination in September 1982 of the Lebanese president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, the interviews with foreign journalists. Most were filled with optimism and good humor.

  “The thought of being in Pacific Palisades for Christmas is more appealing than I can say, and I wouldn’t miss the chance for anything,” he wrote in one. “Hopefully I’ll get there in time to catch a few of Steve’s basketball games and watch Andrew wash the cars.”

  That December, the Kerrs posed at their California house wearing matching AUB sweatshirts.

  Steve Kerr went with his mother and brother Andrew to Beirut in the summer of 1983, before he went to play at Arizona for the first-year coach Lute Olson. A few months before, militants had bombed the United States embassy in Beirut, killing 63, including 17 Americans. But the visit fell during what felt like a lull in the war.

  “We went hiking in the mountains above Beirut and swimming in the Mediterranean,” Kerr said. “The house where they lived was on campus—the presidential house, the Marquand House. It was beautiful. It was surreal. There was a butler. We didn’t have that back home. But now he was living the life of the president. We had a great time during the day, and then we played cards after dinner outside.”

  The trick was leaving. Ann Kerr went with Steve to the airport in August.

  “There was some question about whether flights would be going out because of everything that was happening,” Kerr said. “We were in the terminal, and all of a sudden there was a blast. It wasn’t in the terminal but on the runways. The whole place just froze. Everybody just froze. People started gathering, saying, ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here.’ My mom grabbed me, and I remember running out of the terminal and through the parking lot. It was really scary. I remember thinking, ‘This is real.’ ”

  The Kerrs pondered options for getting Steve out. They learned that a private plane of diplomats was going to the United States Marine base and there might be an available seat on the flight back out. Steve spent hours waiting, talking to Marines. In the end, there were no seats. The Kerrs eventually made arrangements for a university driver to take Steve over the moun
tains, through Syria to Jordan. (The driver, a longtime friend of the family, was killed by a sniper in Beirut in 1985.)

  On an early morning in October 1983, a truck bomb destroyed the four-story Marine barracks. Among the dead were 220 Marines and 21 other service members.

  “I remember looking at all the photos afterward,” Kerr said. He started to cry. “I see all these, the nicest people, who I met and they were showing us around the base and just trying to do their jobs and keep the peace. And a truck bomb?”

  Kerr said he recognized some of the faces of the dead.

  “There is a chaplain who had come over and kind of taken us under his wing,” he said. “The nicest guy. And I saw his face . . .”

  Kerr wiped his eyes and took a deep breath. “What has it been, 30 years? And it still brings me to tears.”

  In December, John visited his parents in Beirut. They had a videotape of Steve’s first game for Arizona a couple of weeks before. The picture was fuzzy, shot without sound from a camera high in the gym, and they could not always tell which player was Steve. It did not matter.

  “I think he scored three baskets, and we must have watched each of them 10 times, rewinding the tape over and over again just to relish every detail,” John wrote in an entry for a family scrapbook made on an anniversary of Malcolm Kerr’s death. He called it “Dad’s and my high point as sports fans.”

  In the middle of a night in January 1984, Kerr got a call in his dorm room from Vahe Simonian, a family friend and a vice president at AUB who was based in New York. Simonian told Kerr that his father had been killed.