by Glenn Stout
Other pressures saddled Thomas, though her family isn’t sure she noticed. Taylor said he sees his sister whenever commentators remark on professional tennis player Serena Williams’s muscles. Figure skating was—and remains—an intensely white and affluent sport, he said, and judges recommended that Thomas “play down certain aspects of her looks,” he said. “It was couched in language that the person making the comments wouldn’t interpret it racially, but I did.”
Thomas ultimately got three nose jobs, brought in a ballet instructor to feminize her aesthetic, and, between the ages of 18 and 21, was considered the only one capable of taking down the worldwide juggernaut of women’s figure skating, East Germany’s Katarina Witt.
“She was the only one who could really beat me,” Witt recalls.
And though she once did—batting Witt down to second place in the 1986 World Figure Skating Championships—it often appeared to be a joyless pursuit. She fretted about the Olympics. “I really want it over with,” Thomas told Rolling Stone magazine before the 1988 Winter Games. “Last week,” she added, “I thought I was going to throw myself through the glass windows at the rink.”
Then came the moment. Thomas had skated with precision and confidence in the first Olympic event and would take gold if she stuck the longer performance.
She and her coach had planned two triple-revolution jumps in quick succession at the segment’s beginning—something no other top female skater had done—worrying ballet instructor George de la Peña, who had helped Thomas with her routine. “Why not give her some space before the big risky stuff?” he recalled saying. But Thomas thought she could land it.
The first, she did. The second, she flubbed.
Thomas knew it was over seconds into the routine. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed to her coach after she finished, eventually taking the bronze medal. She looked disappointed. But her expression conveyed something else: relief.
“Well,” she told her coach. “Back to school.”
Thomas talks a lot about what she calls the “Olympian mentality.” It’s a frame of mind among elite athletes that they can will themselves to excellence. Self-doubt and vulnerability are banished. Confidence is everything. Triumph is within reach.
William T. Long, once an academic at the Los Angeles university where Thomas did her residency, saw this psychology at work. Everyone knew Thomas could do the procedures. Patients loved her. But her grades weren’t outstanding. There was concern that she wouldn’t pass the boards. “And she did it,” he said, “against the critics and against many odds.”
But that victory also betrayed what would become her signature weakness. Long never saw her appear to be insecure and came to recognize her confidence as a “two-edged sword.” It drove her to take greater risks than others would. It made her difficult to coach. Some disliked her because of it.
“She wanted and expected to be treated like a star,” said Lawrence Dorr, who offered her a prestigious orthopedic fellowship at the Dorr Arthritis Institute in Los Angeles, but quickly realized he couldn’t work with her. “But in orthopedics, she knew she wasn’t a star,” Dorr said. He added: “She would argue back. It was almost like she was contrarian, like she was trying to argue with everything I do.”
Difficulties with other medical professionals would come to define Thomas’s career as she left one institution after another after short periods of time. Her first stop was in Champaign, Illinois. Then another in Terre Haute, Indiana. “I’ve never lasted anywhere more than a year,” she said. What she viewed as commitment to perfection, others perceived as recalcitrance. “Olympian mentality is rough because you just get frustrated with how everybody does everything,” Thomas explained in a YouTube video. “Everything needs to be done with excellence. I’m a fixer.”
If she could be her own boss, she thought things would improve. So in 2010, she left her husband and 13-year-old son—whose school year she said she didn’t want to disrupt—and moved to Richlands, where she opened a private orthopedic practice at the Clinch Valley Medical Center. But Thomas—a specialist in a sparsely populated area, with no business experience—was soon falling behind on bills, burning through savings, and clashing with other doctors.
Around this time, she treated a boy’s broken wrist, and his dad asked her out. The charming man lived in a gray trailer by the river. She and Looney began an affectionate, but combustible, relationship. She realized that Looney, who had spent years in the coal mines, had an addiction to prescription narcotics. And though she was dating him, according to Virginia Board of Medicine records, she said she prescribed him drugs to “wean him off the narcotics.”
As Thomas’s troubles mounted, Long said he received lengthy, 10-page emails from his former student. They were “rambling,” he said, laced with suspicion that the medical system was conspiring against her. Whatever was troubling Thomas, he said, was “progressive” and worse every time he heard from her.
On April 22, 2012, Thomas and Looney had a disagreement at the trailer, says a psychological evaluation Thomas shared with the Washington Post. Thomas got hold of his gun. “She thought, ‘If I act crazier than him, he will straighten up,’ ” the report says. “She then went outside and shot the gun into the ground to scare him,” it also states.
Later that day, according to Virginia Department of Health Professionals records, she approached a police officer and told him she had a gun and wanted to hurt herself. He detained her and, on a temporary detention order, brought her to a hospital for treatment. Medical board records show she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Clinch Valley officials told Thomas to enter a distressed-physician program. But she couldn’t afford it. And a year later, Thomas’s staff membership and clinical privileges were revoked. Medical board records say there were “concerns of an ongoing pattern of disciplinary and behavior issues and poor judgement.”
Unable to practice—or afford $800 in monthly rent—Thomas moved into Looney’s trailer, declared bankruptcy, and let her medical license expire. Last July, the Virginia Board of Medicine ordered a hearing to investigate whether she might have broken any medical laws when she prescribed narcotics to Looney and declined help for a diagnosed mental illness.
In September, Thomas contested the bipolar diagnosis at a board hearing, records show. The diagnosis was made too quickly, she said, proffering a separate evaluation conducted by a psychologist whom she had paid. The doctor, who diagnosed Thomas with depression in “complete remission,” said in the evaluation that the Olympian’s erratic behavior was not a symptom of bipolar disorder, but “naivete, overconfidence, and her expectation that if she works hard enough, she can overcome any obstacle . . . Her experience as a world-class figure skater reinforced this expectation and confidence.”
In October, the board, citing her expired license, took no action.
It’s 9:00 a.m. inside the trailer, but Looney has been up for hours, worrying. The only money they have coming in is from some Social Security checks on account of the death of his children’s mother. He looks around the mobile home. He says he wants to get out of here, but doesn’t know how.
Just then, Thomas arrives from the bedroom and nestles next to him on the couch. He hands her a cup of coffee. She has just finished talking to a prospective Karatbars recruit. “I just had a really interesting conversation with a lady,” she says. “This lady completely gets me.”
“She sounded to me like she was jacked up,” Looney says of the woman, whom he had overheard speaking with Thomas.
The pair so rarely agree that spending time with them can feel like sitting in on a couple’s therapy session. He wanted to get a job in the mines; she said he shouldn’t. She wanted him to do the Fix My Life show; he thought he would be embarrassed on national television. He hates their mobile home; she loves it, expressing disdain for “superficial” things.
In fact, Thomas says she loves almost everything about their life in Richlands. And there’s reason to believe her. “I didn’t know we even had this b
eauty in this country,” she said. “No one ever treated me badly” in Richlands, she added. “And I was like, ‘I like it here.’ ”
These days, she doesn’t have to shoulder the pressure of being the first black anything. She doesn’t have to worry about medical exams, whether a patient will recover, or if her practice will succeed—because it already failed. And she and Looney, who has been clean since 2012, say they’ve calmed their relationship with a 12-step recovery program.
“I expected to be one of the leaders in joint-replacement therapy,” said Thomas, now writing a book about her life. “That was what my image was. Then I had an experience that totally changed my mind.”
On a recent afternoon, a light snow sprinkled the trailer with white. Looney and his two boys barreled outside to play. Thomas pulled on her red, poofy coat. She walked off by herself, toward the river. She tilted her head back and, with arms held out wide, was quiet as the snow pattered on her face.
Looney asked what she was doing. She said she was re-creating the iconic scene from The Shawshank Redemption, when character Andy Dufresne escaped prison following decades of false imprisonment and assumed the same posture in the rain.
“I’m free,” Thomas called out to him. “Don’t you get it?”
SEAN FLYNN
The Shooter and the Saint
from gq
There’s a dead man spilling out of a Mercedes on Sophie Wright Place, his feet limp on the pavement, the rest of him slumped over the seat. His name is Will Smith and he is a Saint, or used to be a Saint, which is as much an appellation as a job description in New Orleans. Smith played nine seasons in the NFL, had a Super Bowl ring, retired to the city where he was rich and famous because he was a big man with an extraordinary gift. He was an adopted son and a favorite son, out on a springtime Saturday night with his wife and a few friends.
Then he got shot to death in the street.
There’s another football player on the street, a native son, New Orleans born and raised. Bigger than Smith and nearly as gifted, but he never got famous and he never got rich. Almost 30 years old and he’s humping it in a development league even the local press doesn’t bother covering. He’s a workingman, drives a tow truck, and breeds puppies and pours concrete to pay the bills and raise his boy.
His name is Cardell Hayes, but his friends call him Bear because that is his approximate size, 6'6", 305. He shot Smith, shot him eight times, one in the side and seven in the back. He might’ve shot Smith’s wife too, once in each leg. Didn’t mean to, though, if that matters at all.
Cardell is scared. He’s not running away. He’s waiting for the police to come. His gun, a .45 semiautomatic pistol, is on the hood of his Hummer, which is pushed up against the back of Smith’s Mercedes SUV. Cardell’s already taken out the magazine, set it next to the gun.
He’s on his phone, calling his ex-girlfriend, an English teacher he’d been with from the eighth grade until a few months ago. They’re still close, raise their son together. His voice is panicky, cracking, like he’s gulping for air. He’s talking in fragments, not making sense, not to Tiffany, anyway.
I shot someone, he tells her.
I don’t know what happened, he says.
And both of those things, right then in the echoing wail of the approaching sirens, are absolutely true.
A lot of people get shot in New Orleans. The city consistently has one of the ten highest murder rates in the country, and most victims die as anonymous statistics, significant only in the aggregate.
Except when they are famous. Unlike Will Smith, none of the 30 people murdered in New Orleans before April 9 this year were retired NFL defensive ends with Super Bowl rings. Famous people die famous deaths, and those need to be publicly explained. If Cardell Hayes didn’t know what happened, it was appallingly obvious to everyone else.
Shortly before 11:30 that night, Cardell’s Hummer ran into the back of Smith’s Mercedes. There was an argument, loud and incoherent, and then pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop. Road rage, apparently. Someone had to be the bad guy, and common sense suggested it was more likely to be the guy with the gun who wasn’t dead than the football star with the charitable foundation whose name was going into the Saints Hall of Fame. Cardell certainly looked like he could shoot a man over a dented fender: In his mug shot, which went up on the news sites and sports sites and gossip sites within hours, dreadlocks tumble off his head and his neck beard is like a sling holding up his head, hard and round as a cannonball. There was another photo too: Cardell strobed in police light and standing next to a normal-size officer, his arms safely cuffed behind his back, like a giant subdued.
By sunrise, the basic narrative had already been written, perhaps indelibly, and spread globally. “Cardell Hayes,” his attorney groused to reporters a few days later, “was tried and convicted before I got out of church Sunday morning.”
It only got worse as the day wore on. Reporters—and there were many, because a dead Super Bowl winner, especially one who can be called a Saint without irony, draws a lot of press—quickly pulled up Cardell’s criminal record. It was not extensive, but it could be shorthanded, unfairly though not inaccurately, to a drug-and-gun conviction. In 2010 he was pulled over for not signaling a turn. He told the officers about the legal handgun in the car. The police also found six Tylenol 3 caplets, the kind with codeine. Those are not recreational drugs, but they do require a prescription, which Cardell did not have because they were prescribed to his aunt. Thus, he was carrying a weapon while in possession of illegal narcotics. He eventually pleaded to misdemeanors.
Cardell’s athletic history was also a matter of relevant curiosity. In 2004, a scouting outfit ranked him as one of the top 50 high school prospects in Louisiana, which sends more men per capita to the NFL than any state except Alabama. But Cardell never even played college ball. Furthest he got was being an extra on a fake team in 22 Jump Street and a defensive lineman for the Crescent City Kings in the Gridiron Developmental Football League.
There was one more thing, about Cardell’s father. The day after Christmas 2005, Anthony Hayes had a card declined at Walgreens. He argued, punched a clerk, and left. The police found Anthony walking down St. Charles Avenue, holding a four-inch knife. He did not want to stop, and he did not want to be arrested. Anthony also had a history of mental illness. More police came. They pepper-sprayed him. Anthony lunged—it’s always a lunge—at Lieutenant William Ceravolo. Three other officers fired. Anthony was hit nine times, crumpled awkwardly to the pavement, and died.
As of April, Ceravolo was retired from regular duty, a captain in the New Orleans Police reserve. He also happened to be a friend of Will Smith’s. Had, in fact, been out with Smith at a place called Sake Cafe not 20 minutes earlier and ten blocks west.
Stray details about Cardell were feathered into the coverage, almost as if to make him bigger and thuggier: how he sometimes did security for the Saints—which isn’t true—or how he bred expensive and funny little dogs called bullies, a cross between French bulldogs and pit bulls. (Those dogs, USA Today ominously added, “are considered loyal, protective and potentially dangerous—characteristics that apparently Hayes shares.”)
But those were just texture. What were the odds that an aspiring professional football player with a criminal record would run into a superstar who just happened to have had dinner with one of the cops who’d been involved in the killing of his father?
In New Orleans, actually, those odds aren’t too bad.
An hour before it happened, at about 10:30, Cardell was in Treme, in a storefront barbershop called Lance’s. There are bars on the door and a mirror along the back wall, in front of the barber chairs, two worn couches, and a rack of snacks. The only real decorations are Saints posters and Saints pennants and a list of rules—“Number One: No Disrespecting the New Orleans Saints”—taped and tacked to the walls.
Cardell was a regular at Lance’s, had been ever since Anthony Williams started cutting his lines, keeping his hair kn
ife-sharp at the edges. He would come just to hang out too, and usually call ahead to have someone order him a large pizza, make sure he had a snack waiting. Late on a Saturday night, people are still working at Lance’s, and a few guys are hanging out, looking for something to do.
A little past 10:30, Cardell’s phone pinged. He smiled. “House party Uptown,” he said.
Everyone wanted Cardell to check it out first, see if it was worth dragging across town. The only one who’d go was Kevin O’Neal. He’d ride shotgun in the Hummer.
Kevin was one of Cardell’s best friends, played football with him at Warren Easton High School. “The nerd school,” Kevin calls it, because you had to test in. But it had a good football team, and Kevin and Cardell were two of its best players. In 2004, a scouting website called Tiger Blitz ranked Cardell, a six-foot-three, 260-pound defensive tackle who could run the 40 in 4.8 seconds, number 48 on its list of Louisiana high school prospects. Kevin, six-four and 200 pounds, was an outside linebacker who benched 250 and squatted 450. “Very rarely,” a site called Rivals wrote about him, “does it happen that a player plays one year of football and is instantly on the minds of over a dozen college programs.”
They graduated in May 2005. “But man, you gotta keep in account everything that happened in 2005,” Kevin told me. “We had some real serious talent coming out—and then Katrina hit. Football and trying to pursue the NFL? It’s like, My home is gone. College? My fucking home is gone. A lot of people never rebounded from that.”
Football would wait. Cardell looked after his mother and his sister and enrolled in Southeastern Louisiana University, an hour’s drive north, on the far side of Lake Pontchartrain. Kevin was at Southern University and A&M College, then went to play ball at Compton Community College. Cardell’s girlfriend, Tiffany, was at Southeastern too. When she got pregnant in her last year, Cardell left school to pour cement, earn a living.
