The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  He never did get his degree, but Tiffany graduated and got a job teaching high school English, and between them, they made a good middle-class life. They bought a house in the city, and Cardell worked for himself so he could take their son to preschool in the mornings and pick him up in the afternoons and be at all the teacher conferences and assemblies. He bought and sold cars and he ran a couple of tow trucks, and, as much for passion as profit, he bred dogs. Cardell was diligent and deliberate with the bullies: mothers artificially inseminated, litters delivered by C-section, a misting system to keep the kennels cool in the summer.

  They drove uptown, Cardell and Kevin, both in a good mood. They were playing ball again, defense for the Crescent City Kings, thinking maybe they could get sharp enough for the paying leagues. They’d had practice that afternoon, which always put Kevin in a good mood. Got the blood going, washed out the stress. Kevin was a welder and a boilermaker, had a union card and a college education, but even at 30 years old it felt good to get out on the field.

  April 9 had been a near-perfect day, glorious in the Louisiana spring, before the humidity settles in like a compress. After practice, Kevin had gone down to the French Quarter Festival, then watched the sun set over the Mississippi. The house party was a bust, though. Cardell and Kevin left after a half-hour or so, didn’t even have a drink, and started driving downtown. They were going to Tipitina’s, the famous music club in an old warehouse on the river.

  Cardell drove east on Magazine Street. He braked for a red light at St. Andrew. He felt a vibration shudder through the Hummer.

  He looked in the mirror at a Mercedes SUV on his bumper, then at Kevin.

  “We get hit, big brother?”

  “Yeah, soul,” Kevin said, low and slow, the way he always talks. “We got bumped.”

  At the end of every day at Warren Easton High, the principal, Philmon Edwards, would get on the PA and read whatever news or events had to be announced to the student body. Then he finished with the same simple directive: “Govern yourselves accordingly.”

  Kevin hadn’t been sure exactly what that meant back then, before he and Cardell graduated in 2005. But it stuck with him, as any phrase repeated so many times will, and eventually he figured out it was a reasonable guide worth following at any given time.

  Cardell remembered it too. So when his Hummer got tapped on Magazine Street, he did the proper thing, which was to pull to the curb. It was probably nothing—“Bear’s so big,” Kevin told me, “and the car’s so big, he wasn’t even sure we got hit”—but a person governing himself accordingly will stop when he’s been involved in a minor traffic mishap. “I thought we’d get out and look at it and there wouldn’t be any damage, and we’d just say, ‘All right, forget it, go have a good night,’ ” Kevin told me a few weeks after the fact. There was no need to get the authorities involved. “Black people,” he said, “don’t want any encounters with the police.”

  But the Mercedes didn’t stop. It maneuvered around the Hummer, then accelerated across St. Andrew and onto a short street called Sophie Wright Place.

  Cardell had been dinged once already in a hit-and-run. His Hummer had been broken into, too, and his insurance kept ticking up.

  He wheeled away from the curb and followed the Mercedes. He figured he’d at least get the plate number. Kevin pulled out his phone to call 911.

  There are a few reasons Will Smith might not have wanted to pull in behind Cardell’s Hummer, the main one being he didn’t think he’d hit him, thought he’d braked soon enough and hard enough to stop short. Another was that he was driving a $140,000 vehicle and if some asshole wanted to carjack him, coaxing him to the curb would be a fairly common way to start. A third might be that he’d drunk himself three times over the limit and didn’t need to make any unnecessary stops. Or, finally, it may just have been that he was Will Smith: Queens born, Utica raised, first-round pick out of Ohio State in 2004, at one point among the highest-paid defensive players in the NFL, a reported $70 million with all the options.

  He’d spent the day at the French Quarter Festival with his wife, Racquel, and a couple they knew from Kenner, where they lived. Pierre Thomas, another former Saint, and Billy Ceravolo, the retired cop, joined them later at Sake Cafe. At some point, their friend from Kenner called her brother, and he drove over in his Chevy Impala.

  Thomas and Ceravolo left first, for the bar at the Windsor Court Hotel, a boutique place downtown. The other five left together at about 11:20: Smith, Racquel, and the couple from Kenner in the Mercedes, the brother alone in his Chevy, a car or two ahead.

  After Smith got around the Hummer, he caught up to the Chevy at the corner of Sophie Wright and Felicity Street.

  Cardell was right behind him. Taillights flashed, Cardell stomped heavy on the brakes. The Hummer’s front end dipped, slid into the back of Smith’s SUV, not hard enough to pop the air bags but with enough force to shatter the Mercedes’s rear window, spiderwebbed glass held together by the tinting film. The Mercedes, in turn, bumped into the rear of the Impala.

  Kevin caught his balance. Already, two white guys were charging toward the Hummer.

  Govern yourself accordingly.

  Kevin left his revolver when he got out.

  Cardell opened the driver’s door, stepped onto the pavement. He had his .45 in his right hand, held at his side, pointed at the ground.

  In New Orleans, that is a perfectly legal thing to do.

  “What kind of person,” Kevin asks one day, “sees a guy like Bear, someone that big, standing there with a gun, and keeps coming at him?”

  He was at a sidewalk coffee shop in Treme, Kevin and three of Cardell’s other friends, about a month after the shooting. The question was rhetorical. It is agreed by acclamation that the proper response in such a situation is to abruptly stop, back up, and speak as calmly as possible.

  The other question, though, is why Cardell was standing in the street with a .45 in the first place. The reflexive answer to that too is agreed by acclamation: Would you ask a white man that question? “He was a legal gun owner in an open-carry state,” Kevin says. He lets that hang there for a moment. “Where the fuck is the NRA?”

  An armed society, it has been said, is a polite society.

  In any case, it also is agreed that Cardell did not intend to threaten anyone—only to indicate he was capable of protecting himself. He was not a violent man but rather, at that moment, the proverbial good guy with a gun. If anything, Cardell was aware of how much damage a man his size could inflict, how much conflict he could attract from any meathead with something to prove. He was gentle by nature, but even gentler to compensate for his size. “He was the only person I knew who was logical about everything,” Tiffany told me. “He always thought everything through.” Dwight Harris knew Bear wasn’t a tough guy. He was at Lance’s before it all happened, and he had his Can-Am, one of those three-wheeled motorcycles, parked behind the chain link around the lot next door. Cardell always wanted to ride it, but he never would. He’d climb on and Harris would start it and Cardell would sit there, pondering. Then he’d shake his head, switch it off. “I ain’t about to kill myself today,” he’d always say. “I’m gonna run into something.”

  Harris is at the coffee shop, listening to the gun debate, which keeps coming back to the same question because everything that happened after seems to depend on the answer: why did Cardell have a gun, and why was he holding it? Harris finally lets out a heavy, definitive sigh. “Man, the same reason nuns walk around with guns,” he says. “It’s New Orleans.”

  Four days after it happened, at the hospital where Racquel Smith was still being treated, a lawyer for her and the rest of the Smith family, Peter Thomson, explained their version of how it came to be that Racquel’s femur was fractured and her husband was dead.

  Will Smith did not believe he’d bumped Cardell’s Hummer, Thomson said, and therefore didn’t see any reason to stop. Everything after, in Thomson’s accounting, happened because Cardell is a ragef
ul lunatic. He chased Smith, rammed his Mercedes, leapt out “enraged, yelling and cursing,” he said. Racquel, who’d been in the backseat, got out and pleaded with him. “Leave us alone,” she said, according to Thomson. “Go back to your car. We have children. This is not worth this.”

  Right about then, in this version, Cardell kneecapped her, put one round in each thigh. “We have evidence,” Thomson continued, “that the killer showed no remorse whatsoever, that he actually stood over Will Smith’s dead body, as his wife had crawled away because she couldn’t walk and is cowering.” And then some especially gangsta shit: “The killer is yelling over the body of Will Smith after he killed him.”

  (A few hours later, Cardell’s attorney held a press conference in front of his office. “The rules of professional conduct prohibit lawyers from speaking ill about other lawyers,” John Fuller said, with an edge that made it clear he was, in fact, speaking ill of another lawyer. “But I’ll say this: There are some things that I heard that I question.” He did not go into great detail, though broadly speaking, it could fairly be summarized as: all of it, except the fact that Will Smith got shot.)

  Cardell was in jail, charged with second-degree murder and attempted murder—he’s pleaded not guilty—and would remain there for the foreseeable future, a $1.75 million bond being priced beyond his means. As he should be, Thomson seemed to suggest. The attack was completely unprovoked, a man is dead, a woman is maimed, and three children lost their father. “I’m aware of nothing,” Thomson said, “that Will Smith did that would cause this killer to be afraid for his life.”

  That is very carefully worded. He wasn’t there. And, in any case, fear is almost wholly a matter of perspective.

  Kevin didn’t have the door open yet, and already two white men were stomping toward the Hummer. They were not big men, but they were in a fury. One was stripping off his shirt. I feel played, Kevin heard one of them say. I want to fight.

  Kevin found that mildly amusing. Who says that?

  The white guys apparently saw the gun in Cardell’s hand, because they converged on Kevin. They were throwing punches but not connecting because Kevin is tall and rangy and has a brown belt in Kenpo and squats 350 just to warm up. Mostly, he was worried about avoiding an assault charge. He had his eye on Cardell, though.

  Racquel was between Smith and Cardell, keeping distance between two big men. Cardell, Kevin swears, was being careful to keep his right hand at his side. Smith swung once, twice, a third time, three sloppy rights that made glancing contact.

  Please don’t do that, Cardell said.

  He was scared.

  Racquel appeared to persuade Smith to let it go, to get back in the car and sort it out later. Smith turned, took a step away. Then, Kevin says, Smith pushed his wife aside. That would not be the first time, allegedly. Smith was known to have a temper and had a history of allegedly striking his wife, having been charged with domestic-abuse battery in Lafayette in 2010 after reportedly dragging her down a sidewalk by the hair. (Racquel later tweeted that the episode was “all bs,” adding, “I feel bad for my husband who is innocent in all of this.” The charge was ultimately dismissed.)

  Smith came back toward Cardell: You got a gun, motherfucker? I got a gun too.

  Kevin, still holding off the two white guys, reached for Smith’s left arm. Homie, chill the fuck out, he said. You’re trippin’.

  Smith spun away, then leaned in through the open door of the Mercedes. He kept a licensed 9-millimeter handgun in the center console.

  The white guys were still messing with Kevin. Kevin slipped.

  He heard pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop.

  When Chase Dixon heard that Will Smith had been killed, he shook his head in disgust and thought the obvious thought: more New Orleans bullshit.

  Why wouldn’t he? There were 164 murders in New Orleans in 2015, an average of more than three every week; 2016 wasn’t quite as bad, but Will Smith was the 31st person murdered in 100 days. Old shell casings can at times be a nuisance at fresh crime scenes, and it’s not always simple to sort out whether a bullet hole in a clapboard is from a recent stray or has weathered for a while. Eventually, a celebrity was going to be among the statistics.

  But then he found out who pulled the trigger.

  Dixon knows Cardell and Kevin. They work out at his gym a couple of times a week. Kevin started going there with his martial-arts coach, Steven “Spyder” Hemphill, and Cardell started going with Kevin. Spyder lost his elder brother and his eldest son to the streets, and he’s got one boy now, Sean, a light-heavyweight amateur boxer and a damn good one, nationally ranked.

  “It was always Kevin, Cardell, and Sean, and Sean doesn’t surround himself with bad people,” Dixon said one afternoon.

  “I don’t allow riffraff around my son I have left,” Spyder said.

  “These dudes,” Dixon said, “they’re not monsters. They’re young black kids growing up in a tough-ass city to grow up in.”

  There was a preliminary hearing for Cardell scheduled for April 28, not quite three weeks after he shot Will Smith to death. Generally speaking, a preliminary hearing would be good for Cardell: the prosecution would be required to convince a judge they had enough evidence to continue holding him, which meant they would have to present witnesses, whom Cardell’s attorney, John Fuller, could cross-examine. Fuller, in turn, would get to present his own witnesses.

  As a practical matter, Cardell would have remained in jail—probable cause is not a stringent standard to meet, especially when the evidence includes a celebrity shot eight times—but it would have been a narrative coup, a chance for Fuller to get on the public record a more sympathetic accounting of April 9.

  He has argued that Cardell “was not the aggressor” and that he “is legally not guilty,” which seems to depend on a debatable reading of Louisiana’s stand-your-ground law. He has also hinted, unsubtly, at a cover-up, suggesting there was “possible untoward activity by a former NOPD officer.” The implication, for which there is no evidence, is that Ceravolo ditched a gun that Smith might have grabbed and replaced it with a clean one. Ceravolo, through his attorney, denies doing anything improper.

  The other way for the prosecution to keep Cardell in jail before trial was to have a grand jury indict him. A secret proceeding, no cross-examining witnesses, no public record of the proceedings except for the end result.

  The Orleans Parish grand jury, as it happened, met on Thursday, April 28. Fuller managed to get one witness on the stand before a clerk rushed in with the indictment and canceled the preliminary hearing.

  Cardell Hayes may not have reached the level some expected he might, but he still believed he had a chance. Which is why he worked his ass off playing starting noseguard for the Crescent City Kings. A huge man, but fast. “He could run like a deer,” head coach Frederick Washington told me one sweltering evening on the sideline. Probably not quick enough to play defense in the money leagues, but offensive guard in the NFL? “For sure,” Washington said. He considered that for a moment. “No less than the CFL.”

  The Kings are a good team too, went 9-2 last season, hosted the championship at Joe W. Brown Memorial Park. You know what the difference is, though? More than 153 million people watched Will Smith win a Super Bowl. How many saw the Kings lose the title game to the Nashville Storm? Anyone?

  But Cardell went to practice and he worked out and he paid his bills and he raised his boy. He governed himself accordingly. That night, when he shot that man, he did not run away. He asked other people, witnesses, not to leave. He removed the magazine from his gun and put them both on the hood of his Hummer. He waited for the police, and he called Tiffany. “These white guys kept coming at us,” he told her in a raspy panic. “He was going to get a gun . . . I don’t know what happened.”

  And he didn’t, not all of it, not the most important part, which would make him famous for all the wrong reasons. Cardell did not know whom he had shot. No one told him until he was taken to jail. He already was cry
ing, just for having killed another human being. But Will Smith? Cardell heard that and sobbed, his big body heaving, tears dripping into his lap because his wrists were still cuffed and he couldn’t wipe them away. Will Smith was the kind of player Cardell always wanted to be.

  TIM ELFRINK

  Sucker Punch

  from the miami new times

  Some boxers enter the ring scowling dead-eyed at their opponents. But Stan Stanisclasse could never pull it off. His smile came too easily—it’d just creep unbidden across his face. So he began most bouts with a little dance instead, stomping and sliding his feet back and forth in a half-moonwalk, half–Muhammad Ali shuffle, with one glove held high above his head.

  For Stan, boxing was joy.

  For Darrell Telisme, the sport was vicious, personal, and violent. From the moment Telisme had walked into Elite Boxing, Stan’s home gym in a blue-collar corner of West Palm Beach, he hadn’t stopped jawing. Never mind that Stan was the best fighter in the city or that he was on his way to a 40-6-3 amateur record, a Golden Gloves belt, and a legitimate shot at the Olympics.

  As they circled inside the bright-yellow ring behind a sliding garage door that leaked humid air, the two looked like mirror images: a couple of Haitian American teenagers with diamond-cut biceps. But closer investigation showed Darrell’s features were stony and Stan’s were open. Stan’s face was baby smooth, while Darrell’s was marred by a black star inked across his right cheekbone.

  Once the punches began flying, the difference was even starker. Stan was a blur. Jab left, duck right. Shoulder roll. Thunderous hook to the head. Jab step. Another full-bodied blow to the gut. Darrell was a tree trunk, a slab of meat hanging from a hook. He was underwater.

  Dave Lewter, the crewcut ex-pro who owned the gym, watched his star fighter pummel the shit-talking newcomer. That day in early 2010, he let the pair spar for two rounds—at least one too many, in hindsight. “I can’t even call it a fight,” Lewter says today. “It was head shots, body shots . . . Stan just took it to him.”