The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (28 page)

"The last two, COME and WHOA," writes Wolters, "are so important that if a dog had good hunting instincts and knew only these two commands he would make a gun dog." It's the same for accomplishment in every other field, among people and pooches alike. If you had to give just two rules for success in business, politics, family, friendship, or even church, you could do a lot worse than SHOW UP and SHUT UP.

Wolters begins, however, with SIT and STAY. And these are important too. Kids today are given frequent encouragement to STAND UP FOR THIS AND THAT. But SIT TIGHT 'TIL IT BLOWS OVER is wiser counsel. Wolters employs a leash to pull the head up as he pushes the rump down. I've found that the collar of a T-shirt works just as well. Wolters uses praise in the place of dog biscuits; he writes, "I do not believe in paying off a dog by shoving food into his mouth." I, on the other hand, try to make sure the kids eat their green leafy vegetables once I've got them seated.

Wolters teaches STAY by slowly moving away from the dog while repeating the command and making a hand signal with an upright palm. But I've found that if your kids get Nickelodeon on cable TV, you don't have to say or do anything. They'll stay right there in front of it for hours.

Once SIT and STAY have been mastered, you can go on to COME. Wolters lowers his palm as a signal to go with the command, but a cell-phone signal will also work if your kids are properly trained. Mine aren't. Getting a kid to come when he's called is a lot harder than getting a dog to, probably because the dog is almost certain that you don't have green leafy vegetables in the pocket of your shooting jacket. Wolters suggests that if you're having trouble teaching COME, you should run away, thereby enticing the dog to run after you. This has been tried with kids in divorce after divorce all across America, with mixed results.

The command that's the most fun to teach using Wolters's method is WHOA:

"The dog," writes Wolters, "is ready to learn WHOA as soon as he will STAY on hand signal alone and COME on command. When he has this down pat, my system is—
scare the hell out of the dog.
Put the pup in the SIT STAY position. Walk a good distance away from him. Command COME. Run like hell away from him. Make him get up steam. Then reverse your field. Turn, run at the dog. Shout WHOA. Thrust the hand up in the STAY hand signal like a traffic cop. Jump in the air at him.
Do it with gusto.
You'll look so foolish doing it that he'll stop."

Personally, I don't have to go to this much trouble. Just my morning appearance—hungover, unshaven, wearing my ratty bathrobe and slippers Millie chewed—is enough to stop my children cold. I reserve the antics that Wolters describes for commands to this idiot computer I'm writing on.
Gun Dog
was authored in the days of the simple, reliable Royal Portable. Thus Wolters has nothing to say about computers. Besides, dogs don't use computers. (Although, on my Visa bills, I've noticed some charges to
rottenmeat.com
.)

Children don't need computer training either. Muffin, Poppet, and Buster—who can't even read—have "good computing instincts." When the Internet says COME, they come. Mom and Dad try WHOA on certain websites, but whether that works we can't tell. I'm the one who should be taught some basic commands, to make this darned PC...

"What's the matter, Daddy?" Muffin asks. With one deft flick of the mouse thing, she persuades the balky printer to disgorge all that I have composed. I see her frown. "Daddy, Millie chews everybody's shoes. She bit the teenager that mows the lawn. She killed Mom's chickens. And every time you come home from hunting, you're all red in the face and yelling that you're going to sell her to a Korean restaurant. And..."

And here is where my Richard A. Wolters theory of parenting goes to pieces. There is one crucial difference between children and dogs. You can teach a dog to lie. DOWN.

FROM THE NEW YORKER

The quarterback receives the snap from the center and fakes a handoff to the running back. Then he pivots right and fakes another handoff to the fullback. Then he fakes two more handoffs in quick succession: to a wide receiver, and then, once again, to the running back, who looped back behind the line of scrimmage during all the faking. Pretty soon, the defense catches on and goes after the quarterback, at which point the actual trick is revealed: the first fake handoff was real.

The offense arrives on the field with a two-receiver, two-end package. The receivers bunch to the left and the first tight end splits out wide to the right. Then the quarterback starts patting his pockets and looking around anxiously, as if he can't find his keys. Meanwhile, the second tight end—who has a beautiful singing voice—drifts into the backfield and croons selections from
A Little Night Music.
This continues until the referee blows the whistle for delay of game.

This play will not yield any yards, but it will get the defense thinking.

Essentially, a well-disguised variation on the strong-side blitz. For the first trick, the strong-side linebacker "stunts" inside the defensive tackle to confuse the blockers. The other trick is that they're all on steroids.

A week before the big game, team officials engineer a "chance encounter" between the opposing quarterback and the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. The pair become fast friends, attending a number of folk concerts and rummage sales together. As their relationship blossoms, Gyllenhaal inculcates the quarterback with progressive ideas about transparency and freedom of information, and by the end of the week he convinces the quarterback to post his team's playbook on WikiLeaks. The team loses five of its next six games, and the quarterback is benched. As for Jake Gyllenhaal, he is eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, and is hired by Fox Sports to join Howie Long and Michael Strahan on the Sunday NFL pregame show.

In a single-back, four-wideout formation, the quarterback accidentally sends the receivers on identical crossing routes, causing a spectacular collision at midfield. The defense seizes the advantage: they overpower the offensive line and pancake the quarterback for a substantial loss, leaving only the running back to tell their stories and sing their songs and pass on their proud traditions of hunting and leatherwork.

The quarterback lines up behind the center and takes the snap. But as he drops back we see that he's holding not a football but a basketball. This causes the defense to hesitate, and the quarterback lobs the basketball deep to the wide receiver. The receiver catches it in stride for a touchdown—at which point the ball turns into a bouquet of roses. If, however, the ball is intercepted, it turns into bees.

After sacking the quarterback, a defensive lineman "accidentally" leaves behind a tattered parchment scroll that turns out to be a sixteenth-century treasure map. In the second half, the quarterback is consumed with visions of rubies, silver coins, and gold bullion. He recruits a party of his most trusted offensive linemen and together they embark on a two-week journey to a forgotten island off the coast of Guadeloupe. They return, bedraggled but successful, bearing a treasure worth nearly $80,000—only to discover that the combined lost salary for the weeks they missed added up to $4.3 million. The season ends badly, with the team slipping into last place and the starting left guard succumbing to wounds sustained in a cutlass fight.

During the offseason, the opposing quarterback is again approached by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. The quarterback warns Gyllenhaal to keep his distance, but Gyllenhaal tells him that it isn't like that—he wants to offer the quarterback a part in an independent film he is producing, called
The (Quarterback and the Dame,
about an unlikely romance between a gridiron hero and the English stage legend Judi Dench. The quarterback reads the script, and he has to admit it's pretty good, so he signs on. The quarterback arrives on the set for the first day of shooting, only to find Gyllenhaal costumed in shoulder pads and eye black. The quarterback goes berserk, believing that he'd been promised the part.

"No, no," Gyllenhaal coos, "you're playing Judi Dench."

In the waning seconds of the first half of the NFC championship game, the pious visiting quarterback leads a masterly 80-yard drive, culminating in a 15-yard touchdown strike. As his teammates celebrate, the quarterback drops to one knee to thank Jesus. Just then, the Rapture comes, and the quarterback is instantly beamed up to Heaven, leaving only his cleats behind. The visiting team is forced to play the second half with the inconsistent journeyman Billy Joe Hobert, who throws three interceptions, and they end up losing the game, 42–10. The home team advances to the Super Bowl—only to lose in heartbreaking fashion, when what would have been the winning field goal caroms off an apocalyptic horseman and falls wide right.

FROM SPORT LITERATE

T
HE KNEE HIT HARD,
crumpled the vinyl halo, not much in the way of ear protection, but enough to pass the safety standard. The full force of the knee brought to bear upon the ear inside the halo. The bruised ear echoed with pain, skin separated from cartilage, and blood filled the space between. Within moments, the ear transformed itself into an overripe plum, split and dripping thick red nectar.

Weeks later, the doctor said: "I can still get a few milliliters of blood out of there."

His hypodermic needle poised on the examining table like a massive mosquito. I had seen ears, drained again and again, only to refill and harden, moonscapes, pocked with craters, rimmed with ridges. This ear was mine, earned, and paid for; he would not deflate it with his hungry hypodermic. On purpose, I waited too long, a week, maybe two, as the sharp twinges of my heart beat in my ear. When I walked outside, the midwestern winter wind felt good, iced the skin, and numbed the pain. The ear, once soft, a pliable blood balloon, overflowed its rim then it shrank like a receding flood and hardened. Fissures formed like drying mud flats.

"That's okay," I said. "Leave it."

He looked at me. Slightly amused, he asked, "Where are you from?"

"Pennsylvania."

"A tough guy from Pennsylvania, huh?"

 

We weren't quite from coal country, but we were close enough. Twenty-five minutes away they fired the Bethlehem Steel mills with the coal that was mined a little farther north. Next town over, Allentown, they bent and shaped steel into Mack Trucks. An hour away they were ripping slate and shale from the mountains and turning the hillsides into black stick forests of dead trees and mud. I grew up wrestling against the sons of the men who worked in those places, tending the furnaces, shoveling the coal, and bending the steel.

My father worked with steel in a different kind of factory. He was a furniture designer for Knoll International. He made sculptures in his spare time, and our living room was filled with his plaster, plastic, and wood found-object sculptures. His Pearson Chair was in the Louvre in Paris in a Knoll exhibition. The Pennsylvania Dutch kids, whose fathers were farmers and factory workers, thought we were weird, but they liked to look at my father's creations, filled with branches and plastic action figures caught in plaster like some abstract re-creation of Pompeii.

To add to it, we lived in what they called a modern house. It was more than 100 years old. What was modern about it, I wasn't sure. When my parents bought it, it had no plumbing and its heating system consisted of black potbelly stoves. They bought the house from an old man who used to shoot deer from the living room window. He would come back to the house sometimes to pick wild mint to make tea. My father gutted it before we moved in. He and a friend took an electric saw to the outhouse, then kicked it over and it rolled down the hill. He knocked a hole in the three-foot-thick stonewalls to put in a kitchen window. He rounded the corners of the new window instead of squaring them. This was apparently modern to the neighborhood kids.

We lived in the middle of the woods on the side of a steep hill that ran down into a narrow valley split by a trout stream where I spent most of my springs fishing for rainbows.

One time when I was six or seven, I made a model chair like the ones I saw him make. I used scraps of leather and balsa wood. It was covered in white glue and crooked. My father looked at it and said, "It looks like a dancing chair." It hurt when he said it. Later, when I wondered if I should follow him into design, he just said, "It's too hard to make a living at it."

Growing up, we didn't have much more than dreams. Knoll shut down its design department and my father found another job. When that company closed down, he tried to freelance. It didn't work out. That winter we had a cold snap and our electricity was shut off. I'd shower in the gym each morning when I got to school. When I got home, I would carry tin buckets in the dark to the top of the hill behind the house to get water from the spring. The water line had frozen and we had no running water in the house. I'd fill 10 one-gallon buckets and leave them in the living room, so my brothers and sister could take baths the next day. The hillside was frozen over and the spring looked like a miniature glacier.

 

Years later, it was still with me. "Your ear doesn't bend," the barber said. One finger pressed the back of it, scissors snipped hair, and each cut exposed it more. There is not much hair to hide it anymore and just as well. I never wanted it hidden.

"Cauliflower ear," I said.

She nodded and said: "I don't like people playing with my ears." She held the ear gently between her thumb and forefinger, and trimmed the hair around it. The electric razor hummed in my ear as she worked. She was unfazed, not like the girl at the coffee shop, who stared, and asked: "Is it a birth defect?"