The Best American Sports Writing 2017 Read online

  Equally chilling is another consequence of a contracting business: writing with the understanding that your subject may soon be your employer. As the number of news outlets shrinks, the biggest employers of reporters may soon be the leagues themselves. MLB.com, NBA.com, NHL.com, and NFL.com are inundated with beat writers and columnists and national take-out writers who once vowed to never work for these league sites but who also made another vow: to feed their families and make sure their children had clean clothes and money for college. In the case of baseball, MLB.com has become a viable, mainstream destination. Its writers are now part of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, which makes them eligible to vote for the Hall of Fame, even though they are drawing a paycheck from Major League Baseball, and it is well known that MLB tightly controls tone and the subjects that writers are allowed to explore. Knowing that MLB.com could very well be their next employer undermines the willingness of writers to be tough in their coverage, whether the subject is labor or PEDs, the ongoing demand that public money be spent for private stadiums, or MLB leadership taking the game in the wrong direction. Certainly you might think twice before writing a hard profile of Roger Goodell or Rob Manfred, knowing you may one day need to work for the NFL or MLB. Through the simple act of self-protection, writers might resist taking on stories critical of sports executives. Leagues could reward the best writers for their courage by forever refusing to hire them. A 30-year-old with a family, doing the math of wanting to write for the next 35 years, might not be so willing to be unpopular with the powers that journalism is supposed to hold accountable. The power wins, and it receives a free pass.

  The leagues certainly are aware of their growing position, which is why it is gratifying to see ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. consistently being unafraid to do the work. Because of the television-induced shrinkage between journalism and celebrity, investigative writing has been under threat, but “Welcome to the Big Time,” his story of the latest bubble in sports—daily fantasy sports—represents the kind of month-to-month, minute-to-minute storytelling mastered by some of the best newspaper and magazine writers whose writing reads like espionage thrillers (the late, two-time Pulitzer winner J. Anthony Lukas being one of the best examples). Beyond the game on the field, certain architects and elements of a sports world worth tens of billions of dollars may try to live in the shadows. Thankfully, because of writers like Don, they do not.

  There are so many ways to write well, and the joy of selecting the pieces for this collection was in being reminded that, as much as writing cedes ground to left- and right-swiping and the small and big screen (the apocalypse keeps announcing the arrival of The Emoji Movie, which need not be presented with extended comment for anyone who cares about words), and the seeming impatience with thoughts beyond 140 characters, there are wonderful writers whose gifts on full display remain compelling. The submissions, just over 100 in total, also served as a reminder that taste is highly personal and writing is not math: coming up with a different solution doesn’t make us wrong, and we like what we like. I found myself gravitating toward stories that I began to categorize as “sideways”—stories of how it all went wrong, of how pathways that had once seemed clear were anything but. I loved the moments before sunset, the stories and profiles that stare at a life that sits in the rearview mirror as the years pile up and the road ahead is no longer limitless. Time is shortening, and the deadline for reconciliation is no longer infinite. Kurt Streeter’s excellent “The Spirit of a Legend,” on the controversial burial place of the great Jim Thorpe, might best exemplify this theme.

  For all of the complaining that writers and journalists love to do, this experience was for me restorative. I also am aware of my limitations, and next year’s editor will discover his or her own preferences as a reader. I found myself falling not only for stories but also for styles. I love kinetic writers, and there is none better than Roger Angell, whose piece “Almost There” reminded me of what the great saxophonist John Coltrane once said of Stan Getz: “We’d all like to sound like that—if we could.” Angell was born in 1920. He saw Ruth and Williams, Robinson and Koufax, Reggie and Cal, Bonds and Trout. He saw them all live, firsthand. The one thing even he did not see, until now, was a Chicago Cubs World Series victory. Angell is able to accomplish perhaps the most difficult writing task: to describe not only the high drama on the field but the actual movements of the players, and their importance, while sounding like a poet instead of a kinesiologist. His powers of description create an indelible image of the game, while also conveying his own joy in being there. He is a marvel.

  Angell’s New Yorker colleague Louisa Thomas writes about tennis in a similarly kinetic way, watching the body work, capturing the detail and personality of physical movement, what emotional wrestling with the pressurized circumstances at hand creates the movement, and how each looping backhand and tremoring forehand builds the points and the score, simultaneously creating the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle she constructs with a signature beauty that is not aloof. Thomas is a master at being present as a writer, yet she is so gifted that her characters and the action—on the grass in “Serena Williams, Andy Murray, and a Political Wimbledon”—are always presented ahead of her. Like the spectators at Centre Court, Thomas watches, feels, and thrills for the participants and the drama, yet for all the shuddering excitement, she somehow makes no distracting noises. We’d all like to sound like that—if we could.

  Sometimes the best writing resembles a gangster film—direct and Spartan scenes where one tough picks up another by the lapels and hurls him through a storefront window—while other times the best writing reads like a family history, a heavy dynastic arc of legends as sweeping as a fictional saga. Dave Zirin of The Nation gives us the former kind of writing and The New Yorker’s David Remnick the latter in their dual postscripts on Muhammad Ali, the most towering American athlete of his time and, many would say, of any time. Zirin’s pugnacity is especially vibrant and essential in today’s world, where we use terms like “postfactual” so casually (as if its long-term dangers are akin to simply surviving a bad winter), and his insistence that Ali not be co-opted in death sends a larger message: truth is not something the powerful can blithely massage into something less sturdy, into opinion, to be believed—or not. Try it and, as happens to New York governor Andrew Cuomo in “Andrew Cuomo Would Have Blacklisted Muhammad Ali,” expect Zirin to toss you through the glass.

  Remnick’s words in “The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali” are as much about us, the road under America’s feet, as about Ali. He tells us our story as we shifted and grew and matured as a country around our famous son—sometimes authentically, sometimes cynically, and not nearly so heroically, Remnick concludes, as to merit any virtuous claim on an American original who became so (and here Remnick deftly uses a well-known detail) because someone stole his bicycle when he was 12.

  Back in 1980, Angell wrote “Distance,” a wonderful piece of writing on the pitcher Bob Gibson for The New Yorker. As the money increases, distance is what the sports world seems intent on creating between itself and the rest of the world. Yet what ties together the 27 stories in this edition of The Best American Sports Writing is how the writers navigate the gulf between themselves and their subjects and show us, the readers, the beating heart that does not always want to be found. Sometimes the result tests the reader’s ability to keep reading without flinching, especially as some of those subjects make choices that hasten their demise, such as in “Sucker Punch,” Tim Elfrink’s haunting piece from the Miami New Times on the avoidable turning fatal, or Jeff Maysh’s heartbreakingly sad “Why One Woman Pretended to Be a High-School Cheerleader” from The Atlantic. Sometimes the writers are looking for people uninterested in advertising their personal quest for discovery, like Wright Thompson stalking the steps of Tiger Woods, without Tiger’s permission or cooperation, in “The Secret History of Tiger Woods.”

  The common theme here is clear: all of these pieces find a way to close the space between wri
ter and subject by turning obstacles into allies and by remembering, even as so much journalism morphs into punditry, that listening is always better than talking. Whether encountered at a podium or a picnic table, the beating heart is always there. We just have to work harder these days to find it, and that is what the writers in this collection do. The result is a cross-section of pieces, spanning several sports, disciplines, and styles, that move me, each in its own way, closer still to my lifelong joy in words, in reading them—and in writing more of my own. I hope this collection moves you too. Enjoy.

  Howard Bryant

  RICK TELANDER

  William Perry

  from sports illustrated

  We can start with this: everybody loves the Fridge. William Perry could have been called the Car or the Shed or the Washing Machine or even the Water Heater. But he wasn’t. The Refrigerator it was—Fridge, for short—ever since his days as a 300-plus-pound nosetackle at Clemson. Because it fit. Nicknamed for that most wonderful of American kitchen appliances—the one with the good stuff inside that keeps us alive and happy and sometimes fat—Fridge in his heyday was as well liked as that leftover piece of apple pie, wrapped in cellophane, just behind the mayonnaise and cold chicken.

  “If you didn’t like Fridge,” says Mike Ditka, his coach in Chicago, “you didn’t like anybody.”

  When the world champion Bears started to pull in endorsements and celebrity gigs following Super Bowl XX, in 1986, and Perry, just a rookie, hauled in more than anyone—more even than Walter Payton or Jim McMahon or even Da Capitalistic Coach himself—“it would have been easy for us to resent him,” says Dan Hampton, Perry’s defensive linemate. “But we loved Fridge.”

  There was a role—convivial Southern goofball—that the swollen, gap-toothed Perry played in that magical season, and he played it well. Some of it was artifice, from mythology and expectation and the media’s need for simplicity. Fat equals jolly, you know. But much of it was Perry, for real. He was as easygoing as you would expect given his Deep South roots, in Aiken, South Carolina. He did have 11 siblings; seven brothers and four sisters. He, indeed, had his front tooth shot out by a BB gun as a lad. He had drunk a couple cases of beer after one college game. He could eat like a shark, guzzle like a horse, take off like a rabbit, jump like a lion. Yes, at 6'2"-and-change he could dunk a basketball. I saw him do it. My guess is that he weighed 330 at the time. We were at the Multiplex Fitness Club in suburban Deerfield, Illinois, a couple of years after his rookie season, playing pickup ball. The rim survived.

  His fame started when Ditka put him in to block for Payton and then to tote the rock himself against the defending champion 49ers in week six of that rookie year. San Francisco’s coach, Bill Walsh, had used 275-pound guard Guy McIntyre in the backfield the previous season, in an NFC championship game victory over Chicago, and Ditka had remembered.

  But Fridge’s notoriety really exploded, like a grenade in a tomato patch, when he lined up and ran for a touchdown on October 21, 1985, in a Monday night game against the Packers. Much of America was watching as he became the heaviest man in NFL history to score off a set play. All the overweight, Barcaloungered, chip-dipping, vicariously living fans across the country were mesmerized and thrilled. Hot damn! This was entertainment.

  Back then, you have to remember, 308 pounds was a crazy-big deal, like something from a tent show. Fridge was the “best use of fat since the invention of bacon,” one sportswriter wrote. But now there are hundreds of players in the NFL Fridge’s size or larger. Many high school teams have one or two. Looking back at the video from when Fridge went on Late Night with David Letterman in 1985, it is stunning how slim he appears compared with what we’re used to seeing on the field these days.

  Humor was maintained that night on Letterman with some gags about eating, and when Fridge saw 43-inch, 36-pound teenage actor Emmanuel Lewis in the green room, he told a reporter, “Man, last time I was that small was when I was born.”

  So who could dislike this fellow? As long as he wasn’t played for a complete yokel or freak, he could get along with anybody. And as long as you weren’t lined up opposite him, then he posed no danger to anyone or anything. As Fridge, 53, says now, “I’m not doing anything bad. That’s not in me, not in my family—we weren’t raised that way. I do things in a correct way, a respectful way.”

  But not, alas, in a healthy way. And not—if we’re thinking of life as a brief moment to be tended to with diligence and care—in a proper way. Fridge drinks. Too much. That he drinks at all, really, is a problem. He has physical and mental issues that demand sobriety. (“I’m sure he’s got traces of CTE,” says younger brother Michael Dean, himself a former NFL defensive lineman.) In 2011, just 11 years after he flashed his famously imperfect smile for the cheery cover of Sports Illustrated’s first “Where Are They Now?” issue, Fridge declared publicly that he is an alcoholic. He has been to rehab. He’s been told by doctors to stop drinking. He’s been told by family members.

  None of it matters. He’s got drinking buddies. Alcohol’s his special pal. He’s back in slow, sleepy Aiken and, by God, he’s doing what he wants to do. Even if it causes pain and divisiveness in his family, as members watch him slowly implode and are at a loss to help him.

  “I’m home and I’m happy,” Fridge says. “I ain’t got no plans. I’m just gonna relax and take my time.”

  So the love and support he receives from others is dead-ended by his stubbornness. Perry can barely walk, and only then with a walker. He’s at least 150 pounds overweight—around 430, even 450, according to friends and family. He doesn’t work with physical therapists or wear the compression socks or orthopedic shoes that he should. His hearing is terrible, but he won’t wear his aids, so he ends up virtually reading lips unless you are close to him and speaking loudly. He has four children, and he doesn’t see them much, or at least not as often as one would expect. Both of his ex-wives are out of the picture. He lives alone in a retirement facility.

  What does one do? Let him be? He has diabetes and the residual effects of a nasty thing called Guillain-Barré syndrome, which hit him in 2008. Tellingly, one of the concerns with the mosquito-borne Zika virus is that researchers believe it can cause not only birth defects but also Guillain-Barré syndrome, which creates neurological problems that can leave victims paralyzed and sometimes on life support. Its effects can diminish or last forever.

  Fridge was nailed by it, possibly because of a severe dental infection, and at one point in 2009 he was near death. He couldn’t move and was wasting away in bed, dehydrated beyond recognition, without any family near. Willie, one of his older brothers, says that when he found Fridge, he looked like a gaunt war-camp victim, down to 190 pounds. Look at Perry now, and you might guess that his skeleton alone weighs 190 pounds.

  Oh, and the millions of dollars that Perry made over his 10-year NFL career are long gone too. So is his Super Bowl ring—at size 25, believed to be the largest ever made—auctioned off a year ago for $200,000, without Fridge getting anything for it.

  It’s all a mess, it seems, from health to finances. And sadly, in a sense, the people suffering the most from Fridge’s demise are his children (three girls and a boy) and family members, who all claim to want to help him, but who are too busy fighting among themselves to enact any change. Michael Dean, who lives in Charlotte, was named by a judge as guardian and conservator of Fridge’s affairs when William was first incapacitated, in 2008. But Perry’s son, William II, told a Chicago TV reporter last year that he has doubts about Michael Dean’s stewardship and legal control. “It’s a bad situation,” he said. “Hopefully we can get guardianship over [my dad] and go forward, and get him removed so he can do the right thing and be independent.”

  Willie is more desperate than that. “Jealousy,” he says, is why Michael Dean keeps Fridge under his power. “When William was messed up, it made sense, but not now.” Willie claims that Michael Dean, who lives 150 miles away from Fridge, is only giving his brother the “minim
um care” that he needs; he suggests that Fridge doesn’t see the necessary doctors or attend certain autograph and celebrity outings where he could make much-needed money. This Michael Dean finds hilarious; he says that he was the one who nursed Fridge back to health in 2009, that his sister Patsy is now in Aiken taking care of their brother, and that William’s own stubbornness explains his missing appointments. He also claims that Willie wants to pry guardianship away so he can use Fridge himself as his “cash cow.”

  If this makes no sense, so be it. The Perry family is tight but torn, with age difference, gender, and competitiveness all leading to a big, interwoven, fractious ball of domestic dysphoria. Willie claims that Michael Dean profits off Fridge’s minimal income (from Social Security and from his NFL pension; public records show Perry with total equity of $35,245 and net income of $13,921 for 2015), pointing to an annual $1,250 “caretaker/conservator” fee in his records. But Michael Dean flat out denies any improprieties; any money, he says, goes toward accounting and bookkeeping. “I’m getting rich off Fridge?!” he asks, incredulous. “I don’t want anything to do with the mess! He still owes a couple hundred thousand to the IRS. Everything you put in place, he fights. I can’t babysit him for the next 20 years. I’ve tried to get rid of the guardianship and conservatorship. I’d give it up to anybody—except Willie. Anybody but him.”