The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  Darrell’s fragile mental state shattered when his girlfriend left him. Just after midnight on a Monday in September, a Palm Beach Gardens police officer found Darrell lingering in the shadows behind a gym. When the cop stopped him, the boxer took a “defensive stance” and refused to answer. The officer had to point a Taser and call for backup before Darrell handed over his driver’s license; he was charged with loitering and resisting arrest, though the case was soon dropped.

  About a month later, Stan finally realized how unstable his rival had become. “Darrell was stepping to Stan again at some bar, saying, ‘I’m better than you; I’m better than you.’ But Stan would not fight him,” Lewter says.

  Soon after, Stan called Desrosier with a startling request: he wanted to borrow his gun. “He said, ‘Darrell threatened to kill me,’ ” Desrosier says. “I told him: ‘Stan, you are not a street man. We need to settle this in the boxing ring.’ Eventually, everyone was laughing about it. We thought it was settled.”

  Then, the night before Thanksgiving, Stan agreed to head out to Clematis Street with Darrell and several other friends. Desrosier was invited but decided to stay home. He’d had his own falling-out with Darrell and wanted to steer clear of the temperamental boxer.

  There’s still disagreement about exactly what happened that evening. Here’s what Darrell later told police: The group hopped into Stan’s red Saturn and headed to a pizza place, where he claimed Stan began relentlessly boasting. “I’m a championship fighter,” Darrell claimed Stan yelled. “I will kick your ass!”

  When Darrell didn’t back down, he told cops, Stan beat him up. He even provided an excuse for why he’d lost: “[Stan] had training in mixed martial arts and wrestling in addition to traditional boxing,” an officer wrote.

  Stan’s friends say that tale is nonsense. Stan was notoriously humble and had no interest in fighting Darrell, they say. “Darrell wanted to go bare-knuckle right there on Clematis. Stan said no,” Gedeon says. “But he was throwing jabs. So Stan body-slammed him. He just picked him up and dropped him, because he didn’t want to hit him.”

  But the party didn’t dissolve after that first confrontation. Instead, the group moved on to a rooftop lounge. Darrell told police that Stan “continued to make off-hand remarks . . . about who was the better fighter.”

  Desrosier doubts that claim. But he says Stan did fan the flames, perhaps by accident. Darrell was already steaming over his split from his girlfriend, and that night, Stan—the better fighter, the better-loved friend, the local boxing hero—also bested him on the dance floor.

  “Darrell can’t get shit, but Stan got a girl,” Desrosier says. “Darrell comes in, interfering with the girl, and now it’s an ego thing. A couple words got said, Darrell had a foul mouth, and it got to the best of them. Then hands got thrown.”

  When the dust cleared, Darrell limped away, beaten and in pain.

  Hours after returning home, Stan heard a knock. He peered out and saw Darrell—and wanted nothing to do with him. “Stan wouldn’t come out,” Lewter says. “He’s yelling out the door: ‘It’s squashed, it’s over, it’s done.’ ”

  But Darrell insisted he simply wanted to talk it over. “Stan said, ‘Let me see your waist.’ Darrell showed him his waist—no gun,” Desrosier says.

  What Stan couldn’t see was the silver Colt .45 Darrell was holding in his other hand, just out of view. As soon as Stan opened the door and stuck his head out, Darrell fired a single shot through his temple.

  Barely 20 minutes later, a stunned Desrosier stood staring at his friend’s bloody corpse. He pulled out his cell phone and texted Darrell.

  “Damn u killed Stan,” he wrote.

  Darrell later texted back: “Call me.”

  When Desrosier dialed his number, a raspy-voiced, weeping Darrell picked up. Desrosier says, “He was saying over and over, ‘I’m sorry, dog. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ ”

  Desrosier pressed him: Why did he do it? Why did he have to shoot Stan? But Darrell wouldn’t answer. “He just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

  The elder Stan Stanisclasse carefully maintains a shrine to his son on a table next to the front door. The wooden surface is covered with polished trophies, gaudy championship belts, and framed photos of the sweaty young fighter. But Stan Sr.’s most prized relic is in a dark corner of the garage.

  A black punching bag riddled with shallow dents—a permanent reminder of his son’s daily practice—silently hangs from a chain, gently swaying in the cool winter breeze.

  “This was the third one, actually,” Stan’s father says, caressing the leather. “He wore through two more of them in this garage.”

  Stan’s parents have spent the past three months asking the same question Desrosier repeated into the phone that horrible night before Thanksgiving: would another boxer really kill their son just because he couldn’t beat him in the ring?

  “Even the guy’s family, some of them have come up to ask me why. They don’t know either,” Canita Stanisclasse says of Darrell.

  Still, the question lingers, debated ad nauseam in boxing gyms from Palm Beach to Miami. In Stan’s circle, there’s little dispute about what drove Darrell to the crime.

  “The entire problem here was Darrell’s ego. He wanted to be better than Stan so badly,” Lewter says. “That’s why he was stepping up to Stan over and over, always saying, ‘I’m better than you.’ The only person on earth who thought he was better than Stan was Darrell.”

  There’s a strange balance in sports. Athletes have to believe they’re the best—often irrationally and against all evidence—to find the mental strength to win. It’s a feat of delusion we all celebrate in our heroes. Rocky Balboa was insane to think he could beat the best fighters in the world, but that’s what made his story so compelling.

  Darrell was the deranged side of that coin, Stan’s friends say. His self-belief was so strong that squaring it with his mediocre skills and Stan’s dominance became impossible. He had to find a way to top his rival.

  “I think it started as more of a friendly rivalry, but Darrell took it to another level,” says Willard, the fight promoter. “Stan would win and win, and it’s no big deal to him. But Darrell took it more personally because he couldn’t beat Stan. It gnawed at him for years.”

  Police made the same case in charging documents. The morning after the shooting, they found Darrell in his apartment. He soon confessed to killing Stan, they say, and pointed them toward a box under his bed, where they found a Colt .45 and the clothes he wore during the shooting. The motive?

  “Mr. Stanisclasse held several championship titles but refused to accept a challenge from Mr. Telisme,” police wrote. “Mr. Telisme felt he was missing his opportunity to advance in the boxing community.”

  The killing was premeditated, prosecutors say. They’ve charged Darrell with first-degree murder and carrying a concealed firearm without a license.

  Despite confessing to police, Darrell pleaded not guilty December 21. His attorney, Scott Skier, says prosecutors have taken the death penalty off the table and he plans to “aggressively defend” Telisme. And both Darrell’s father and Desrosier say they doubt he planned to kill Stan that night. “I can’t believe that,” Daniel Telisme says. “I think it must have been some kind of accident.”

  Adds Desrosier: “He didn’t mean to do this shit. You could tell he didn’t. It all just got the best of him. He ain’t no evil guy. And I think he has fucking suffered every day since then.”

  But Stan’s family says there’s too much evidence Darrell had plotted violence for years.

  “It was his jealousy of Stan,” Canita says. “He didn’t realize that this is something Stan worked for . . . He deserved to be where he is. [Darrell] didn’t see how much time Stan spent and how hard he trained. He thinks Stan just walked into it, and [Darrell] wasn’t willing to do all that work.”

  Darrell is scheduled for trial August 22. Beyond the motive, there’s one other unanswered question. Witnesses spo
tted a black SUV driving Darrell to and from the murder scene. Someone enabled him to kill Stan, his family believes, but no other arrests have been made.

  Stan’s family and friends try to remember the rising star they loved. More than 400 showed up to a wake in December at Iglesia Familiar Family Church to share memories: how a sweat-drenched Stan, with a shit-eating grin on his face, would run up to hug people in the gym; the way he’d teach young boxers to duck a punch; all the times he outfought more seasoned boxers; how he worked the crowd with that little shuffling dance move.

  “This kid was going to be Floyd Mayweather in five years,” says Charlie Remy, a friend from Elite Boxing. “I really believe that.”

  Stan’s parents have left his memorabilia and punching bag untouched. They’re working to start a scholarship in Stan’s name to fund schools back in Haiti. “Nobody can answer why Darrell did this,” Canita says. “All I can say is Stan is gone. Nothing you can tell me is gonna replace him.”

  JEFF MAYSH

  Why One Woman Pretended to Be a High-School Cheerleader

  from the atlantic

  On September 2, 2008, a shy, blond transfer student strolled into Ashwaubenon High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The petite sophomore wore a pink hoodie and carried a new school bag decorated with hearts, eager to start the new term. But just 16 days later, she was standing in court wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and shackles, charged with identity theft. There, prosecutors revealed that Wendy Brown was not really 15, but a 33-year-old mother of two—who had stolen her teenage daughter’s identity in an attempt to relive her own high school days. In her weeks as a student, Brown had taken classes with students half her age. She had tried out for the Ashwaubenon High School cheerleading squad and even attended a pool party thrown by the cheer coach.

  Television crews surrounded the courthouse and besieged Brown’s family at their home in Nevada. “It was bad,” recalls her father, Joe. “Every show that’s on in the morning called . . . Oprah didn’t call. She was the only one that didn’t call.”

  A bespectacled Brown spoke like a teenager as she addressed the court: “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for what I’ve done,” she said softly. “I feel bad about it. And I regret it. Um, I always have . . . I am not a bad person. I just made a mistake.”

  Brown’s antics baffled the court. Searching for guidance, the judge rifled through his law books, as prosecutors unpacked her troubled past. Brown had served prison time in 2002 for burglary and again in 2004 for obstructing justice; she was also accused of writing a Dairy Queen a bad check for $13. “I can only guess if history repeats itself her motive has something to do with money,” Lieutenant Jody Crocker, Ashwaubenon’s captain of investigations, told reporters. If the allegations of identity theft were true, Brown would face up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Yet her only crime while posing as a teenager was to bounce a $134.10 check for her cheerleader uniform.

  Back in her home state of Illinois, Cass County state’s attorney John Dahlem recognized Brown on television and asked the question on everyone’s minds: “My first thought was, ‘Why would you want to go through high school again?’ ” he told a local newspaper.

  Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist, says: “Many people focus on choices they made—or chances they didn’t take—as a way of grappling with understanding their current circumstances.” For example, in 1986, a failed athlete named James Arthur Hogue, 26, posed as a 16-year-old boy and enrolled at Palo Alto High School, where he won one of the most prestigious high school cross-country races in the country. In 2009, Anthony Avalos, 22, faked a birth certificate on his computer so he could play basketball for Yuma Union High School, and aim for a college scholarship.

  In January, Brown agreed to meet me in a noisy coffee shop just five miles from the school, in East Green Bay. In a quiet corner, she removed her chewing gum and rolled it in the plastic wrapping from her banana muffin. She is 41 now, though she looks much younger. She is mouselike, her eyes magnified by thick lenses, her face hidden behind an unruly mop of blond hair. When she speaks, it is from behind a hand that muffles her tiny voice.

  This is the first time she has spoken publicly about her motivations. Brown says it wasn’t money that drove her to step back in time: “What was I gonna steal?” she asks. “Kids’ lunch boxes?” Instead, she says, it was to fulfill a dream that was crushed many years ago.

  The only part of high school that Wendy Brown enjoyed, except for the final bell, was long-distance running. It was the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall was being demolished, and New Kids on the Block topped the Hot 100. In southwest Chicago, Brown would dash through the leafy suburbia of Oak Lawn. For the 16-year-old track star, running was a means of escape.

  Wendy had a speech impediment—she pronounced rabbit like “wabbit”—which led to bullying, and fights. Speech therapists uncovered deeper issues at home. “Brown has a long-standing history of significant emotional problems,” a judge later concluded, after reviewing evidence. “They stem primarily from her relationship with her mother, which is very abusive.” Brown explains: “We fought all the time . . . She put me down, said things about me, I got hit a lot.”

  She says running helped to put valuable miles between her and home, and the bullies at Harold L. Richards High School. But one day as she was darting across the village, a wave of nausea washed over her. She stopped and threw up. That had been happening a lot recently.

  She guessed it might have been the stress of being so unpopular. Though her brother was on the school’s football team, the Bulldogs, an invisible barrier seemed to separate her from the cool girls, the cheerleaders who waved black and gold pom-poms on game days. “I was always jealous of them,” Brown says. “It just seemed that they had a great life.” When Brown’s mother found out about her vomiting, she asked her straight up: “Are you pregnant?”

  It was impossible, Brown thought. She was whippet-thin. And anyway, she thought the way she and her boyfriend did it was safe. “I didn’t know what made you pregnant,” she told me. “My mother never talked to me about things like that.” A home pregnancy test registered negative, but her mom and a doctor insisted on an ultrasound. “You’re pregnant,” he confirmed. “Four months.”

  Brown’s boyfriend abandoned her instantly, but not before telling everyone at school. The kids threw paper at her, pushed her around. She could take the bullying no longer. “I wanted to get my high school diploma,” Brown says, “but there was just too much going on.” She quit, and on her 17th birthday, she gave birth to baby Joey, named after her father. Three months later she became pregnant again with a baby girl, Jaimi, this time by another boy.

  In the meantime, she watched her younger sister, Jennifer, effortlessly rise through the school’s social ecosystem. “I hated her,” Brown says. “She got everything that I wanted. I was extremely jealous of her.” Seeing Jennifer wear the Bulldogs black-and-gold cheerleader’s uniform, she says, was enough to break her heart.

  Drifting into her twenties, Brown held a series of short-term jobs at Kmart and Wal-Mart; she poured bad coffee at fast-food restaurants. Her longest period of employment, the court later heard, “was as a stripper.” It was a life spent on the move, transporting the kids from Texas, to Michigan, to Nevada, and back to Illinois, where she married a man in June of 2006.

  Six months after their wedding day, she says, the violence started. They moved to Cass County, Illinois, where the police chief, Tom Osmer, told the local paper that the police were frequently called to the couple’s home. A neighbor told the Galesburg Register-Mail in 2008, “[He] knocked all the windows out when he got mad at her.”

  The couple moved to Green Bay in August of 2008 looking for a fresh start. Brown had an old friend there, and it was far enough from Illinois to leave their pasts behind. They rented a small apartment on Willard Drive, so close to the football fields of Ashwaubenon High School that you can hear the coach’s whistle at practice. Due to the violence and instability at ho
me, Wendy says her two kids, by then teenagers, moved to Nevada to live with her parents, Joe and Judith. “I had a breakdown,” she admits. It was the lowest moment of her life.

  And when she looked out her window she saw a high school, the place where it all went wrong.

  When Brown posted photographs on Facebook, she says, friends would comment on her youthful looks, writing, “You look like a junior in high school!” Alone in her apartment one evening, Brown pulled off her baseball cap, and carefully snipped bangs into her hair. She flicked a little curl at the ends, the way the local girls did. And when she looked in the mirror, she thought, it was like looking at her daughter, Jaimi, then a sophomore in high school. (Jaimi was not available to comment on this story before publication.)

  Brown says her husband took her to the mall to buy school clothes. (She says he was in on it, even encouraging her plan, but the judge later said that her husband had “no idea.”) She selected a fashionable Esprit shoulder bag. Then she flicked through racks of jeans and Levi’s clothing in the junior section. She weighed 103 pounds and wore a petite size. Brown tried on a pair of Nike shoes, the brand she always bought her own children. But the real trick was the voice. “I just did that little valley girl thing, the California thing,” Wendy says. In the coffee shop, she transforms her voice into an up-speaking teen’s. It is disquieting.

  With that voice, she simply strolled into the school that August, and introduced herself to the school counselor, Kim Demeny, using her daughter’s first name and her own maiden name. She said she was a transfer student from Pahrump High School, Nevada—the same high school that her daughter was currently attending. Demeny declined to comment for this story, but told police that on Brown’s registration document, the student wrote that her mother was “difficult to reach at work,” and the school should “let her go home on her own if she felt sick.” Demeny said Brown “appeared older,” but that her demeanor was “consistent with that of a high-school girl.” Before their meeting ended, Brown asked Demeny when cheerleading tryouts were happening.