The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (21 page)

"How'd you get into that deal?"

"You've got to be willing to ride a wild mustang," Teryn Lee said.

Kevin Hanratty, a working cow horse competitor from Lincoln, New Mexico, stood off to one side and watched too. Little Cheatgrass, with the BLM freeze mark on his neck, looked out of place next to the bulldoggy quarter horses around him. Despite the clanking, hollering clamor of the showgrounds, the mustang blinked happily as Teryn Lee chatted. Hanratty, with his jeans tucked into his stovepipe boots, was riveted. "That horse, his blood goes back to the old Spanish vaqueros," he said. "Right there is the little bit of us that's still wild, a remnant of the Old West. There's not much of it left, but it's still alive with Teryn Lee and that horse."

 

Three weeks later the warm-up ring at the Will Rogers Memorial Center, in Fort Worth, swarmed with shiny-hided mustangs: red, yellow, brown, black, and gray. The challenge of training them had taken a toll. Of the 130 trainers who had signed up for the Makeover, only 83 had made it to the contest. Trainers came from 23 states. One of the top contenders was Mark Lyon, a Nebraska trainer who won the contest in 2008. He wore his red mustache waxed, like a friendly Snidely Whiplash, and a flat-crowned black hat. "They were once wild, and they've decided to become willing partners," he said. "They're the forgotten horse."

Many of the animals showed little evidence of their wild days. Day campers visiting the horse barns lined up to meet a black mare. Three months earlier, she had never felt human touch. Now she lowered her head and half-dozed as little hands patted her all over. Nearby, Victor Villarreal waited for his next class with his blaze-faced mustang, Cochise. Villarreal lives in Fairfield and works at a power plant. Unlike Teryn Lee, he's not a professional trainer. "I'm just a regular joe who has a passion for it," he said. "How many people can say they've trained a wild mustang?"

In the two-day contest, the horse and rider teams qualified for the finals by competing in four preliminary classes, where the difficulty of what they'd attempted became clear. Some horses trotted through cones but refused to go through the gate obstacle in trail class. Some docilely lifted their feet on their trainer's cue but freaked at the sight of a flag. Others didn't stop too well. There were horses that jerked, stamped, and said no. Several riders very nearly got dumped.

There were also successes, teams like Cheatgrass and Teryn Lee that demonstrated an abiding understanding of each other and traveled the classes on a loose rein, relaxed. Cheatgrass did everything he was asked, stopping and turning and accepting commands despite the indoor spaces he'd never seen before, the crowds, the noise. Teryn Lee's strategy was simple. "I don't have to win every class," he said. "I just have to make the top 20."

Amid the thrill of competition, the BLM made sure to get its message out. Not far from the vendors selling halters and miracle supplements, Don Glenn, the director of the wild horse and burro program, sat behind a table laden with mustang trinkets and promotional materials.

"We can't allow the wild horse to expand and let nature take its course," he said. "They'll destroy their own habitat and die from lack of food and water. Congress has passed laws to allow for livestock grazing and mandated for multiple-use management not just for horses, not just for cows, not just for wildlife or oil and gas but for all those things."

It was late in the afternoon of the contest's second day. In a few minutes, judges would announce the 20 finalists, who would compete that evening, including Teryn Lee and Cheatgrass.

"This has been the highlight of the wild horse and burro program," Glenn said. "This effort gets more horses adopted. The last thing we want is for the mustang to disappear."

There is something that happens when horses travel loose together. The finals began with the national anthem in four-part harmony. The gates of the coliseum opened and eight mustangs of eight colors flowed out, followed by a cowboy snapping a bullwhip. They moved in unison as seamlessly as birds in flight, necks arched, manes floating, shifting speed and direction by some unseen communication known only to them. It was hokey, it was sentimental, and, reader, it was beautiful.

Each finalist had four and a half minutes to show off his or her horse to music. Judges looked for horses with the basics of walk, trot, and lope, along with several other maneuvers. They also judged the riders' horsemanship and the overall presentation of the performance. Props were encouraged. Several contestants dressed as Indians, complete with braided wigs, one of whom leaned over at a lope and snatched up what appeared to be a blowup doll dressed as an Indian maiden. He set the stolen maid on the back of the horse, where she flapped gracelessly against the horse's rump at every stride. One rider, dressed as a firefighter, did a tribute to U.S. service members and first responders. This got big applause. Another finalist eschewed music and rode to an original spoken-word piece from the point of view of her buckskin horse, Tucker. At one point in her routine, she laid the horse down on the arena floor in front of all those thousands of people. She got on her knees, leaned against him, and prayed.

"I am the creator's gift to you," the voice-over said earnestly. "I am mustang. I am Tucker the mustang."

Shooting was popular in the finals, the extremely loud
ka-pows
apparently demonstrating the animals' tolerance for the unpredictable array of human antics. But a few routines were less scripted, and these unadorned performances best highlighted the achievements the teams had made. Horses chased calves with all the speed they had. There were riders who stood on their horses' backs or rode without bridles. One mustang docilely carried the young daughter of the trainer at the end of her performance.

Under the blaze of Will Rogers's lights, very far from the deserts of Utah, where he was born, Cheatgrass the wild horse loped out and stopped neatly at the end of the arena. He turned in a careful spin, collected himself, and loped large, even circles. Teryn Lee gunned him a bit, then Cheatgrass made a long, sliding stop. When a calf was sent into the arena, the mustang's ears stood at pert attention. He dodged when it dodged and skittered when it skittered. He tracked the calf as Teryn Lee built a loop and caught it with a minute to go. Other finalists had done this much, but Teryn Lee dropped off the side of the horse and ran down the rope to the calf, flipping it onto its side and tying its feet as it flopped and struggled. Cheatgrass backed up and kept the rope taut, as a little calf-roping horse should. His eyes never left Teryn Lee and his feet did not move. People in the stands thundered applause and rose to cheer until the music was hard to hear; the mustang stayed at his job until Teryn Lee mounted, slacked his rope, and tipped his hat to the stands as they walked away. It's not what horses with a hundred days of handling are supposed to be able to do.

When Teryn Lee's name was called, he dropped his head and rubbed his mustang's neck. A colored sash was thrown over Cheatgrass. Teryn Lee, looking a little stunned, gripped the $50,000 cardboard check as he was mobbed by well-wishers. Photographers posed him with judges and rodeo queens in spangled suits.

"He has a home with us forever," he told anyone who asked.

They had won the highest purse ever awarded in a wild horse competition. Cheatgrass stood quiet amid the flash and hubbub, his eyes dark and soft. He's a mustang. He does not know what is to come.

FROM SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

T
HE WOOD IS ALIVE,
they say. Yes, a good stick talks to you when it's finished and agleam: begging to be picked up and cradled, demanding that you rake the nearest ball into the cow-gut webbing that with time becomes so sensitive, so responsive, that it can feel as if you're carrying an egg in the palm of your hand. But Alf E. Jacques can hear the wood long before that, when what will become a lacrosse stick still resembles a shepherd's crook, and the drilling and sanding and shellacking are yet to be done. This one? He can all but feel it breathe beneath his blade.

But then, Jacques expected as much. A master stick-maker whose workshop squats behind his mother's house on the Onondaga reservation, just outside Syracuse, New York, he selected, steamed, bent, and began air-drying a prime batch of hickory poles 28 months ago. Usually a year is long enough to make a good lacrosse stick, but Jacques was taking no chances; he wanted these poles cured to perfection for this mid-June afternoon, when he would sit at his cooper's bench, take a draw-shave in hand, and begin shaping the six-foot defensive sticks for the competition to come.

"This is for the Iroquois Nationals," the 61-year-old Jacques says. "Nobody else gets one. Every four years I make at least six D-sticks for them." He laughs. "And they usually save them for when they play the Americans."

On July 15 the Nationals are scheduled to open the 2010 lacrosse world championships against host England in Manchester, but that's no sure thing. For 27 years the team representing the Iroquois—the confederacy of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations—has been the sole Native American entity to compete internationally, traveling on Iroquois (or, in their language, Haudenosaunee, meaning People of the Long House) passports and balancing lacrosse's prep school vibe with an aura of history and mystery and loss. But last week, just days before their scheduled departure, the Nationals were told by officials of the U.S. State and Homeland Security Departments that they would not be allowed to exit and enter the country on those documents.

The Iroquois in turn rejected an offer to travel on U.S. passports. "We are representing a nation, and we are not going to travel on the passport of a competitor," said Tonya Gonnella Frichner, an Onondaga lawyer and a representative to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. As of Monday night neither side had budged, raising the possibility that for the first time since 1990, the world championships would be contested without the game's inventors.

This might seem like a mere bureaucratic snafu, but it represents a serious threat to both the tournament and the Iroquois nation. Despite drawing from a population of only about 125,000 people scattered across northeastern North America and despite lacking the financial clout of lacrosse's international powers, the Iroquois have finished fourth in the last three world championships, and they figured to enter the 30-nation 2010 competition as true contenders. The Nationals are also the Iroquois's most public expression of sovereignty, of their long-held belief that they are an independent people. Beating mighty Team USA or defending champion Canada in Manchester would be sweet, of course. But the mere hope that the Nationals would enter the United Kingdom on their own terms, bless the tournament with a traditional tobacco-burning ceremony, and then take the field against the world's best would make claiming the championship almost beside the point. "Winning is not the end-all," says Sid Jamieson, who coached the first Nationals team in the early 1980s. "Just being there is a victory."

 

Let 'em know you're there, they say. Having a presence, showing the world that they still exist, is a constant theme with the Iroquois, and few things express it more memorably than a jab with a wooden stick. "I remember getting checked, and my arm would go numb, just go limp," says former Syracuse player John Desko, who now coaches the Orange and who coached Team USA at the 2006 world championships. In the Nationals' match against host Canada that year, defender Mark Burnam, now a Nationals assistant coach, says he used his pole to "slash people on purpose and let them know that they were going to get slashed every time. I'd throw pokechecks, and that thing don't bend. [Opponents] would shy away from me. I don't blame them. The thing is like a friggin' weapon. It nearly kills you."

The advent of the aluminum-shaft, plastic-head, nylon-web stick in 1970 might have been the single greatest spur to lacrosse's growth, but it marginalized the wooden shaft; leagues now ban it, coaches discourage it, parents see one and complain. Native American or not, every player in NCAA lacrosse uses what Oren Lyons, a member of the Onondaga council of chiefs, calls "Tupperware." And if the Nationals play in England, most of their stickheads will be plastic too.

Yet the wooden stick remains central to the Iroquois religion and culture: males are given a miniature version at birth, sleep with their playing sticks nearby or even in bed, and take one with them into the grave. In international field lacrosse the Iroquois are the only players who still use wood, and while the sight of it might be unwelcome to their opponents, it gives even victimized apostates a thrill. During a hotly contested game between the Nationals and Team USA at the 1999 under-19 world championships in Adelaide, Australia, players from Australia, Canada, and Engl and began chanting, "Bring out the woodies!" Three Nationals defenders swapped their Tupperware for hickory to roars from the crowd.

"When those six-foot wooden sticks come out," says Iroquois at-tackman Drew Bucktooth, "they know we're there." That's why, a month before the start of the 2010 world championships, Sid Smith felt compelled to make his way to Jacques's workshop. Smith, a 23-year-old defender from the Six Nations reservation in Ontario, led two NCAA championship teams and was a onetime All-America at Syracuse; he capped his college career by stripping the ball and setting up the game-winner in overtime of the 2009 title game, against Cornell. Smith grew up playing almost exclusively with plastic and has never used a six-foot wooden stick in competition. But he wants one now.

Jacques isn't ready for Smith's request: each stick is different, and players always want a batch from which to choose. But Smith is less patient than most Nationals ("I want to win all the championships I can," he says), and this year's roster is coming in thin and disorganized. He's going to need help.

"I'm here [again] next Thursday," Smith says to Jacques. "Will you have it done by then?"