The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  The frustrating part is that SEMs don’t have to be this bad. Educators have long debated the value of using sports to teach complex subjects. In 2010, the National Science Foundation, NBC Learn, and the NFL partnered to produce a series of video lessons on math and science. They used football to explain Newton’s Second Law of Motion (using field goal kicks) and projectile motion (using a punted ball).

  Compare that to a School Smarts assignment, which urged parents to become more engaged in their child’s educational experience by hosting a “kitchen table tailgate party.” Before kickoff, parents were encouraged to ask their child the following questions:

  How many teams are there in the NFL?

  Which two states have the most NFL teams?

  Which NFL team’s home stadium is farthest West? farthest East? farthest North? farthest South?

  There are 16 NFL teams with animal mascots—how many can you name?

  A few years ago, Josh Golin, the executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, was sitting in his office near South Station in Boston when he got a call from a friend of his, a public health attorney. “Have you seen what is going on with the NFL?” she asked him. He didn’t know what she was talking about, so he started to poke around and came across the league’s use of SEMs. “You hope teachers would see these for what they are and toss them in the recycling bin,” he told me. As Golin and his team of four dug deeper into what the league was doing, “the more we were like, ‘Oh my God, the NFL is using every trick in the book to market to kids.’ Junk food promotion, fantasy football, promoting sedentary screen time. They were using mobile, a TV property, live events, online, getting into schools. It was a 360-degree marketing approach to children.”

  NFL Rush Zone, the league’s animated television show that aired on NickToons from 2011 to 2014, was an especially cynical ploy. The show revolved around a heroic young boy and his friends as they try to guard the NFL from various aliens and robots bent on its destruction. The kids take orders from a blue-skinned general who works out of the NFL’s Hall of Fame and says things like: “Without one of their star running backs* and their mega-core, the Bills are particularly vulnerable!” Then, every so often, and with only the slightest nod toward plot, real-life NFL footage is spliced in while a monotonal narrator offers league history. (“The Bills have 17 playoff appearances and are 10-time divisional champions.”) There are also random appearances by “Rusherz,” Oompa Loompa–like creatures that wear NFL apparel and have giant heads, presumably for maximum exposure of the team logo on their helmets.

  Kids’ television is littered with shows that are camouflaged commercials for a product. How “toyetic” a program is—how easily its characters can be turned into merchandise—is a major factor in whether it gets made. But even in a world where the line between art and marketing has faded, NFL Rush Zone stood out. One person who worked on the show surmised that the reason it didn’t air on Nickelodeon (sort of the HBO of kids’ programming) and instead ran on NickToons (more of a Cinemax) might have been because “the inception of the idea was a little dirty . . . It was pretty NFL in your face. I’m sure some parents saw it and thought, ‘God, this is a just a big commercial for the league.’ ”

  One of those parents was Kyle Turley, the former player who now advocates for NFL alumni. Several years back, he sat down with his son, Dean, who is now seven, to watch the show. “I was gritting my teeth,” Turley says. “Not only was it about trying to get kids connected to football, but it also created this perception that there were people out there trying to hurt football and little kids were enlisted to put their lives at risk to protect the game. I couldn’t believe they were spreading that propaganda.”

  The TV show spawned a trading card game, a comic book series, toys, T-shirts, and hats. In 2013, the NFL partnered with McDonald’s and produced NFL Rush Zone Happy Meals that featured 32 collectible toys and NFL Rush Zone trading cards. “Think about what kind of statement that makes,” Golin says. “We want to reach kids so badly we are not going to worry about luring them in to eat the worst crap there is.”

  Until it unexpectedly pulled the plug this summer, the NFL also hosted “RushZone,” an online role-playing game that Brandissimo modeled after Club Penguin, one of Disney’s online worlds. Within Rush Zone, kids were able to visit various “lands” of NFL teams to collect virtual gear, chat with friends, interact with the same big-headed “Rusherz” from the TV show, or track the real-life happenings of football players and teams. Occasionally, NFL players would visit the RushZone for chats, which Guiliotis moderated. “We were told not to forward any questions about injuries or concussions,” she said.

  According to Guiliotis, the league was particularly focused on getting kids to buy virtual apparel—whether it was an Inuit suit to stay warm in the chillier parts of the online world, wingtip shoes in NFL colors, Halloween costumes, or NFL team “masks” like a Mexican wrestler might wear. The hope was that children would see an avatar with the premium stuff and then buy it for themselves by plugging in their parents’ credit card. “There were internal discussions about how to get the kids to want what other kids have,” says Guiliotis, who also said that the NFL used software to track the time kids spent in each world and tweaked its strategy to keep them engaged longer.

  NFLRush.com, the league’s main website for kids, features a bunch of other tools meant to keep them captivated. The site houses more than 80 mini-games, almost all of them football-related, along with polls and trivia challenges. Children can also participate in a “pick ’em” game, where they guess the winners of NFL contests and pit their prognosticating skills against others.

  The league’s efforts to engage children online have worked. In 2009, the Rush Zone had 1.5 million registered users. In 2010 it was 2 million, and by 2013 the NFL had signed up 3 million kids. The NFL now knows the names, emails, genders, birthdays, and favorite teams for all these kids—a marketer’s treasure trove. Golin is afraid of all the power that this new information gives the league as it figures out its next moves. “It’s hard to find anything equivalent to what the NFL has been doing,” he said.

  And then there is this: after several years of decline, the number of American children playing tackle football rose 2 percent in 2015, according to an analysis by USA Football. It’s hard to say how much of that can be attributed to the league’s marketing initiatives, but that’s more than 40,000 kids between the ages of six and 14 who have been persuaded to strap on a helmet in the middle of a health crisis we still don’t fully understand.

  In all my research of all the tactics the league has used to secure a long, prosperous future for itself, I found only one that was easy to get behind. Over the last few years, the NFL and USA Football have emphasized a youth program called NFL Flag. NFL Flag is similar to normal football, except safer: there’s no tackling. It also gives local leagues replica NFL jerseys at a heavy discount and provides them with a football for every five children they register, a boon for the underfunded. “We’ve got footballs coming out of our ears,” Richard Rosenthal, the assistant director of recreation for the Medford Parks Department in Oregon, told me.

  Thanks in part to those moves, the number of kids playing flag jumped to 1.7 million in 2015, an increase of nearly 10 percent over the previous year. Chris Nowinski, CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, loves this trend. He told me that it would be “so much safer” if more of the roughly 2.1 million kids between six and 14 years old who play tackle only participated in flag football before high school. And while that wouldn’t be ideal from the NFL’s perspective, it’s far from catastrophic. “It’s still getting football as a brand into a kid’s psyche,” says Michael Cihon, the founder of the United States Flag & Touch Football League in Ohio. “I have kids in my leagues so young that when they run, their flags are dragging on the ground. Where do you think those kids are going to be at 33? They are going to be in the Dawg Pound cheering on the [Cleveland] Browns.”

  On the fac
e of it, another tactic the NFL relies upon also seems noble. For the past few years, Goodell, Mike Golic, and others have railed against the dangers of specialization, the practice of kids playing a single sport year-round. They talk about how it can lead to overuse injuries and psychological stress. Goodell has mentioned it in speeches and pivoted to it under questioning about concussions and CTE. Dr. Neeru Jayanthi of Emory University, recognized as a leading expert in specialization, told me he appreciates that the NFL is drawing attention to the issue. But he hopes that it isn’t being used to draw attention away from football’s own health concerns.

  In the crisis management business, there is a term for what the NFL seems to be doing with specialization, says Gene Grabowski, a partner at kglobal. It is called “switching the witch.” If people have a negative opinion of you or your company that can’t be dismissed, give them something they can label as a bigger concern.

  In a better, alternate universe, the NFL might realize that these sorts of deflections are dangerous. But we don’t live in that universe. Where we live the leverage the league has over the advertising and media industries almost perfectly ensures that nobody will call the NFL out. “If you pay attention, you’ll notice everyone sticking to the same script,” Nate Jackson told me. That’s why plenty of people were outraged but few were surprised when ESPN pulled out of a concussion-related documentary with Frontline in 2013—a decision made after league officials reportedly expressed their displeasure to network executives during a tense lunch in midtown Manhattan.

  Consider the league’s rap sheet over just the last half-decade. There’s been a major concussion crisis (accompanied by congressional hearings); the mishandling of several domestic assault cases (accompanied by congressional hearings); as well as a gruesome assortment of other alleged offenses, including child abuse, sexual assault, and murder. Yet none of the league’s major corporate partners has pulled its support. NFL sponsorship revenue actually grew in 2015, up 4.4 percent to $1.5 billion.

  And the possibility that anyone from within the NFL would blab about the league’s moral failings seems unlikely. There’s a cultlike creed around headquarters: “Protect the Shield.” It means that an employee’s first priority is, and must always be, the survival of the league. The concept breeds loyalty. People who work for the NFL rarely leave, and those who do often end up at a corporate partner, like Nike or ESPN. Which means that everybody loses money if somebody talks. It’s a closed loop.

  Earlier this year, the league made big news by hiring Joe Lockhart—who founded the Glover Park Group, one of Washington, D.C.’s most effective crisis shops—to be its executive vice president of communications. (Before that, Lockhart served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.) The move made sense: the NFL has benefited from its long relationship with the Glover Park Group, seeking its advice after the Ray Rice domestic battery video came out and using it to lobby Congress over broadcasting rights. Lockhart’s arrival was interpreted as a high-profile, chest-thumping signal that the league was going to pursue its detractors more aggressively than ever. But less attention was focused on Paul Hicks, the man Lockhart replaced at the NFL. He went straight to work at the Glover Park Group. (He’s also the father of Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s spokesperson.)

  Josh Golin has spent a lot of time over the last two years fighting against this monolith. In February 2015, he helped release a scathing report on the league’s “intense campaign to target children” in the hopes that it would spark outrage. It didn’t. So he narrowed his focus just to NFL Rush Fantasy and teamed with the National Coalition on Problem Gambling. After a series of meetings, the league tacitly admitted this summer that it had gone too far by changing the rules of the game. Prizes are now awarded via a drawing involving all participants rather than to the highest scorer. “No longer will a child make money off Eli Manning throwing for 300 yards,” Golin says. The NFL also agreed to stop distributing SEMs that promoted the fantasy game.

  But none of this signaled a shift in policy. The kids’ fantasy football game is still easy to find on the NFL’s digital properties. Moms are still being told that the game is safe for their children. And there are still plenty of boneheaded NFL SEMs swimming around American classrooms. When I asked Golin if he was disappointed, or if he felt there was more he could’ve done to save kids from the NFL’s marketing tactics, he just shrugged. “Sometimes you have to try and get a win where you can,” he said.

  GRAYSON SCHAFFER

  The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut

  from outside

  Lhakpa Sherpa awoke before dawn on a cold Connecticut morning in January 2015 and shuffled into the kitchen of her two-bedroom apartment in West Hartford. The walls were covered in drawings and coloring-book pages of Disney princesses shaded in crayon and pencil by her two daughters, ages 8 and 13. She brewed up a small pot of coffee rather than the milk tea she grew up on in Balakharka, a village in the Makalu region of the Nepalese Himalayas. The apartment was clean, the girls’ toys packed away against the walls, and the building, though older, was more or less in good repair. It seemed secure.

  “I’m very sad inside, but I never show people sad,” she said. “I’m all the time happy.” I asked whether she was sure she wanted her story told. She was.

  Lhakpa made breakfast sandwiches for the girls as her 18-year-old son, Nima Sherpa, left for community college in nearby Hartford. Each time she stepped out into the hallway of her building, one of her daughters would jump up and dead-bolt the door behind her. When she walked them to their respective schools—she doesn’t drive or read or write, though she’s learning—Lhakpa kept her cell phone charged and remembered to stay alert, just as the women who took her in at Interval House, a local shelter for victims of domestic violence, had told her to do.

  All of this—her whereabouts, her basic routine—was known to her husband. “Ex-husband,” she caught herself, saying it twice, trying out the prefix for the first time. She had just finalized her divorce, after 12 years of marriage, from a Romanian American named George Dijmarescu, 55, a nine-time Everest summiter and home renovation contractor. Following a civil trial in Connecticut Superior Court during which, according to Judge Jorge Simon’s memo of decision, Dijmarescu had to be “verbally restrained by the court repeatedly to cease his continued personal assault,” Lhakpa—a permanent resident of the United States on the path to citizenship—was awarded sole legal custody of the girls, both of whom are U.S. citizens. At the time, Connecticut still had a criminal trial pending against Dijmarescu for breach of peace and second-degree assault against Lhakpa. He’s since been convicted of the first charge, found not guilty of the second, and given a six-month suspended sentence and a year of probation.

  On the witness stand at their divorce hearing, Lhakpa said through an interpreter that Dijmarescu had told her the same thing on multiple occasions—that if she took his girls away, “First I will kill you, and then the girls, and then myself.”

  All along, Dijmarescu has maintained, as he testified in his deposition, that Lhakpa “clearly cannot distinguish her lies from the truth,” that she orchestrated the abuse narrative as a way to rob him of his daughters, though he was the plaintiff in their divorce case. Now she’d won the girls in court. And so she was watching her back. Once they were at school, she’d go to one of her two jobs—housekeeping for an in-home health care service and working as a cashier at a 7-Eleven. Combined they earned her $400 per week. She was embarrassed by both of these occupations.

  Lhakpa, whose Nepalese passport says she’s 43, but who’s probably closer to 40, is also a climber. A good one. She has summited Everest six times, more than any other woman in the world. Five of those trips were organized by Dijmarescu. In 2000, she became the first Nepalese woman to summit Everest and make it back down alive. In 2010, she made it to Camp 3 on K2 and spent two days there before the weather forced her to descend.

  Yet few peo
ple are aware of her mountaineering exploits. The Wikipedia page that catalogs Everest records contains listings as specific as “first twins to climb Mount Everest together,” but there’s no mention of Lhakpa. A 2013 ESPN.com article on five-time Everest summiter Melissa Arnot mentioned Lhakpa as an aside, calling Arnot “either the most accomplished female Everest climber ever, or the most accomplished non-Sherpa woman. (A Nepali named Lhakpa Sherpa is said to have from four to six Everest summits.)”

  “I’m not sure why no one knows about her,” Arnot, who is climbing Everest again this year, recently wrote in an email. “When I ask around to Nepalis, not many have heard of her. The first time I heard about her was in 2011, when I met her father when I was going to climb Makalu.”

  Lhakpa’s obscurity owes partly to the fact that Sherpa climbers are still perceived as a homogenous workforce so gifted at getting to the summit that their accomplishments are often referred to in the collective. But in Lhakpa’s case there’s something more. Since 2004, she has been too frightened to speak to reporters. That’s the year she says she was punched in the head by Dijmarescu in Everest’s north-side base camp, in Chinese-controlled Tibet, in full view of expedition teammates from Connecticut—a charge that Dijmarescu insists was self-defense. Photographs published in the Hartford Courant (which Dijmarescu claimed in court were doctored) showed her being carried limp and bloody to the kitchen tent for treatment. After that incident, Lhakpa became very quiet about her achievements. Her six diploma-like summit certificates—five from the Chinese government and one from Nepal—are stored in a closet.