The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (3 page)

Last year one author, in pursuit of a story, "unintentionally pitchforked a load of manure" into his mouth. Jake Bogoch, who grew up playing hockey in western Canada—where, as he writes, "you play until your trajectory stalls or your father allows you to quit"—enrolled in kiddie goon camp and ended up with blood in his urine and "a deep bruise that was larger than a slice of processed cheese."

This is not what Red meant by legwork. But the 29 stories in this collection prove that there are still places only words can take us. The authors in this anthology followed Red's lead down sometimes dark and unlikely corridors, chasing stories about sexual reassignment surgery, intersex athletes, sexual assault, drug addiction, and neurological disorders, including Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism.

Techno-gimmicky wizardry can fast-forward, slo-mo, rewind, and record experience. But the right word, still as hard to find as the hole in a slugger's swing, and a perfectly turned phrase as exquisite as any triple lutz can summon a feeling, a place, a moment in time, with irrefutable specificity.

Words can slow the synapses and let us savor those moments, as in "Eight Seconds," Michael Farber's piece about the time it took to score the gold medal-winning goal in hockey in Vancouver. The story is as exceptional as it is an exception. "Consider a moment," he begins. "Now take that moment—maybe the most significant in sports in 2010—and break it down frame by frame into 100 or so smaller moments."

That's what words can do.

Words have the power to change the status quo—as Megan Chuchmach and Avni Patel did by exposing 36 swimming coaches and compelling USA Swimming to change the rules governing the men who coach young women.

Words let us feel what a luger feels after a crash, when ice turns to fire. Words let us hear what people say and let us decide what their words say about them. Red told me years ago, "I crow with pleasure at this kind of usage: 'I know the man that that's the house of's daughter.'" He would have delighted at this from a member of the U.S. National Homeless Soccer Team profiled by Wells Tower, one Jason Moore, who introduces himself at the New York City shelter he calls home as Reverend Pimpin': "Being a reverend, you kind of learn to be pimpalicious."

Courtly as he was, Red would have recoiled at Ben Roethlisberger's crude barroom command cited by Sally Jenkins: "All my bitches, take some shots!" But he would have recognized the ugly truth of entitlement in the language of a quarterback accustomed to barking orders at the line of scrimmage and having them obeyed.

Words give us access to unknown territory—a crash site revisited 40 years later, the habitat of America's dwindling population of wild mustangs, the workshop of a master carver of Native American lacrosse sticks. And words fill the interior places in the heart and soul. Here is the ineffable John McPhee describing a last visit to the hospital to see his dying father. "I looked out the window for a time, at Baltimore, spilling over its beltway. I looked back at him. Spontaneously, I began to talk. In my unplanned, unprepared way, I wanted to fill the air around us with words, and keep on filling it, to no apparent purpose but, I suppose, a form of self-protection."

Sometimes words just plain take your breath away.

These 29 stories represent a panoply of excellence, reporting, and tone. They are by turns melodic, comedic, elegiac, and always idiosyncratic. I resolved to have as many voices heard as possible, eliminating some otherwise worthy picks because I had already chosen another piece by the author. Glenn dutifully removed the author's name and publication from the weighty batches that thudded at my front door. But some of the voices were so distinct, I recognized them anyway.

Voices of conscience: Sally Jenkins of the
Washington Post,
my pick for the best sports columnist writing today, and Selena Roberts of
Sports Illustrated.
It's no coincidence, I think, that two of the strongest voices in these pages belong to women writing about issues affecting women that wouldn't have made the agate page in Red's day.

Voices of whimsy: P. J. O'Rourke's lessons on child-rearing as gleaned from a 1961 field dog manual; Yoni Brenner's hilarious send-up of the verbal grandiosity of Any Given Sunday in the NFL. The last of his "Trick Plays" gives a whole new meaning to a Hail Mary pass: "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."

Voices of grace: Mark Pearson writes of his cauliflower ear, a legacy of his college wrestling days and the love of the sport he inherited from his father. The burdens bequeathed by fathers (present, omnipresent, jailed, dead, remembered) are the subtext of this and so many other stories. Pearson's father taught him to wrestle with pain and left him glad to be the father of daughters. "As much joy and pride as there is between a father and a son, I don't know that I could endure much more of the unspoken pain that marks the lives of fathers and sons."

Voices that expose just how far otherwise rational people will go to win: Bill Shaikin introduces us to Vladimir Shpunt, an émigré Russian physicist hired by baseball's former power couple, Frank and Jamie McCourt, to help the Dodgers win by sending positive energy over great distances. From his living room in Boston. Via cable TV. No word who got custody of him in the divorce.

Voices that speak to the enduring importance of having a voice: Bill Plaschke's autobiographical ode to an old-fashioned notebook that gave a stuttering young boy a voice he didn't know he had speaks volumes about the enduring import of words.

Together, and in unexpected harmony, these 29 voices are sports writing's Greek chorus, by turns singing the praises of risk-takers and bearing witness to risk's pathological excess. On principle, I declined to include any of the multitudinous entries, no matter how well executed, detailing the sexploitation of others by risk-takers named Brett and Tiger. I also eliminated stories about women—racecar driver Danica Patrick and a whole roster of scantily clad femme fatale football players—who allow the sexploitation of themselves.

The need to risk self and sanity was the subject of many of this year's best submissions. Craig Vetter's admirably restrained profile of BASE jumper Dean Potter in
Playboy
reveals a man unable to accept the limits of humanity. Potter isn't satisfied with having flown four miles at 120 miles per hour with a parachute strapped to his back. No, he aims to fly without his hand-tailored Italian wingsuit or a parachute and walk away—like my pal Powers—in a pair of jeans.

Vetter sets the only appropriate tone for such a story—deadpan.

Bret Anthony Johnston sees art and aspiration—Pablo Picasso and Mike Tyson—in the daredevil skateboarder Danny Way, broken in so many places and in so many ways, "pushing not merely the limits of skateboarding but the boundaries of the human spirit, the soul."

The cultivation of confected risk in extremely extreme sports—and the astonishing number of stories devoted to those pursuits—may say something about how far we've come as a species, with leisure time to kill, disposable income to spend, and complacency to defy. It says as much about how far we have to go.

As I whittled and fiddled, and read and reread, the earth opened up and swallowed Japan. Neptune reared his gnarly head and let loose an epic wave that was definitely not surfable. Those running for their lives did not have to pay an entry fee for this "Death Race."

I wondered how those images registered, if they registered, with the corporately funded, apparel-endorsing, move-busting, family-busting, serotonin-depleted thrill-seekers who push the extremes of extreme. Do these explorers of human possibility know there was a guy named Magellan who navigated uncharted waters without GPS?

I wanted to tell Danny Way to read Mark Kram's series for the
Philadelphia Daily News
about a young boxer killed in the ring who became an organ donor and saved five lives. I wanted to tell Austrian aqua man Herbert Nitsch to read Chris Ballard's ode to a dying coxswain, Jill Costello, who steered her last race less than a month before her death from lung cancer. I wanted to tell Dean Potter to read Wright Thompson's homage to the soccer-playing Chilean miners whose old teammates joined the dusty vigil aboveground because, as one said, "we are not friends just of games. We are friends of the heart."

In its own decidedly nonlethal way, writing is also a kind of risk: these guys take their lives in their hands, and we take their lives in ours when we choose what to reveal about them—and sometimes about ourselves. Nancy Hass's elegy to Mike Penner, a longtime writer for the
Los Angeles Times,
should be required reading for all the leapers, sliders, skaters, and divers who leap, slide, skate, and dive in the name of human fulfillment. Penner risked everything to become the woman he knew himself to be, revealing to his readers that the Old Mike was now the New Christine. In her debut at a press conference introducing David Beckham to L.A., Christine wore "a golden-hued top from Ross and a multi-colored paisley skirt from Ames and a pair of open-toed heels from Aerosoles." In the end, she was unable to live in her new skin. The life and death of Mike Penner/Christine Daniels bears witness to just how far human beings will go to become fully themselves and the limits that fate places on the enterprise.

Mike/Christine's last byline was a suicide note. Hass writes: "For two decades, Mike Penner had crafted subtle sentences that teased the ironies out of the self-important world of sports: Christine Daniels, the woman he became for 18 months, added self-revelation and raw emotion to the mix. But in the end, there were only terse instructions."

That was a risk worth dying for.

J
ANE
L
EAVY

FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE

R
UBEN "SPEEDY" GONZALEZ
was always the last kid picked in physical education class, but he wanted to be in the Olympics. So he settled on luge by default.

"I needed a sport with lots of broken bones because I knew there would be quitters—and I never quit," he told Reuters last week. "I'll be the last man standing."

Or at least sitting. Gonzalez, who lives in Texas and competes for Argentina, is 47 now and yesterday he was bidding to become the first man to compete in four Winter Games across four decades. The secret to his survival is that he doesn't mind busting up a hand, a foot, an elbow, a rib when he slams into iced concrete and that he's invariably the slowest man on the track.

After the first two of four runs, Gonzalez is sitting a distant last among 38 competitors, more than eight seconds behind German leader Felix Koch and more than two seconds out of 37th place in a sport that is measured to the thousandth.

Until Friday, Gonzalez, a former photocopier salesman, was one of those charming quadrennial oddities, like Eddie The Eagle and Eric The Eel, who capture the public's imagination because they're Everyman, our Plimptonian ambassador to Olympus. But once Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died after a terrifying crash during a practice run on the Whistler speedway, watching Gonzalez slip-slide his way down the world's fastest run lost its amusing allure.

Luge always has attracted more Olympic "tourists" than the rest of the winter sports because anyone can do it. Just lie on your back and let gravity handle the rest. But once the amateur's amateur finds himself hurtling along at 90 miles an hour and ping-ponging from wall to wall before flipping over and ending up in a plaster cast, he learns a painful lesson. These Games can kill you.

There are 15 sports on the winter program and half of them can be fatal if you don't know what you're doing or simply have bad luck. All of the sliding sports—bobsled, luge, skeleton—are an orthopedic surgeon's dream. Ski jumping is flying without wings. Freestyle aerials are an upside-down lottery. The downhill is heart-stopping, even for gold medalists. And the snowboard halfpipe is the plaything of the devil as Kevin Pearce, who suffered a severe head injury in the Olympic trials, can testify.

Even short-track speed skating can put you in the hospital for weeks. Allison Baver, who'll be competing here, shattered her right tibia last season after colliding with teammate Katherine Reutter in a World Cup race. At the trials, J. R. Celski ripped open his left thigh with his right skate blade after hitting the wall, nearly severing his femoral artery.

The Winter Games are dangerous enough for elite athletes who have been competing for years. They're no place for adventure seekers like the Latin American skier who'd never even been on a bunny slope but wanted to compete in the 1992 Games in Albertville. To prepare himself, he promised, he'd take a week of lessons in Val d'Isère.

By establishing qualifying standards before the 1994 Games, the International Olympic Committee tried to put a stop to absolute amateurs who'd convinced their countries to give them a parade uniform and a starting number. Even so, a sobering number of qualifiers probably have no business in the Games.

Kumaritashvili was no neophyte. He'd spent two years on the World Cup circuit, competed in five races this season, four of them on Olympic tracks, and ranked 44th in the overall standings. But he clearly was in over his head here.

The Whistler track is known as the "Elevator Shaft" because it plunges downward like the express elevator in a Manhattan skyscraper. It's fast and technical and even the best sliders in the world, like two-time champion Armin Zoeggeler of Italy, flipped during training runs last week. At high speed, even modest crashes are scary.

"When you hit that ice, it turns into fire," testified U.S. doubles slider Christian Niccum, a two-time Olympian who rolled over in training here. "I wanted to rip my suit off and yell, 'I'm on fire! I'm on fire!' It's hard when you're burning and the only thing to cool you down is ice."