The Best American Sports Writing 2017 Read online

  Fridge is in his office—that is, he’s in his white Hummer H2, parked in the driveway of a ramshackle house on Ridgewood Lane in Aiken. It’s 6:00 p.m., early April, 72 degrees outside, and 10 or more people hang around the SUV as if it’s a tiki hut on a beach. Fridge is tipping back a beer and appears to be a tad inebriated, louder than usual, more demonstrative.

  Hanging by the driver’s window is a hefty guy in a white T-shirt, smoking a menthol, drinking vodka from a plastic cup. His name is Darrell Epps. Both Willie’s and Fridge’s sometimes manager—a mysterious woman from Aiken who goes by Jaye, whose email begins Perrymediamgt and who occasionally finds Fridge paying gigs—feels that Epps is the worst enabler around. What she wants to tell all these friends is, “You’re sitting there watching him die!” Willie says simply of Darrell, “He’s William’s leech.” Again, fingers point across the divide like daggers. Epps says that Jaye is the real fraud in all of this; “a b ​—!” Michael Dean, meanwhile, paints Jaye and Willie as trying to make money off it all, “trying to drain [Fridge].”

  Despite all the tumult, this is pretty much what Fridge does every day now: hang out with people who lack apparent jobs or places to be, shoot the breeze, and drink. He’s got his own vodka cup. Maybe it’s not that much different from what high-class retirees do at the 19th hole of country clubs, calling it socializing rather than wasting away. The thing is, Fridge can’t move from his driver’s seat. His car reeks of urine because he sometimes can’t control his bladder, sometimes doesn’t care. And there’s not a medical journal on diabetes or the central nervous system anywhere that recommends alcohol consumption of this frequency for good health.

  “I’m his best friend,” says Epps, cordially pouring a little vodka for a visitor. “Listen to me. I’m his best friend!”

  I remember the good old days back in Lake Forest, Illinois, when the Bears practiced at the original Halas Hall on the east side of town and the Ditka-led circus was the wildest, craziest thing ever to hit the NFL. Before the 1985 Bears went on to outscore their foes 91–10 in the playoffs, before the regular season was even over, half the team filmed an arrogant rap video called The Super Bowl Shuffle. Their coach got a DUI on the way home from one game. Their star QB mooned a New Orleans news helicopter on the eve of the Big Game.

  And that’s not even mentioning the amazing Fridge, who was once penalized for attempting to throw Payton over the goal line. Fridge would sometimes walk over to my house, a block from the training facility, just to see if I wanted to play basketball. Once he sat in my kitchen and watched, mesmerized, as Manute Bol, his physical opposite, played hoops on TV. Who would have guessed that a decade and a half later Perry would box the 7'7" Dinka Dunker in as absurd a Las Vegas fight as has ever been seen? “What a great visual image!” announcer Chris Rose said that night, not long before Fridge—looking like a truck tire inflated 10 times past its limit—almost collapsed from exhaustion and lost a unanimous decision to the human pencil.

  Back in the mid-1980s, Perry was a naïf. Maybe he still is, though the world has taken its toll on his innocence. He has lost several Aiken houses, one of which went into receivership and is starting to rot, another of which is occupied by his first wife, Sherry. Perry has been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, perhaps from the Guillain-Barré, perhaps from headbanging. “Nah,” he says when I ask him about football-related brain trauma. “I didn’t get concussions. I gave ’em.” Funny line. Maybe only half-true.

  The thing about Fridge is that early on he was a rare physical talent, not simply lard. He was a very good swimmer, a former lifeguard at the park pool just a couple hundred yards from his childhood home. His short-burst running speed was shocking, his basketball jumper deadly, his raw strength unworldly. “On the D-line, all of us—me, Richard Dent, Mike Hartenstine, Steve McMichael—could power clean 370 pounds,” says Hampton. “But Fridge just did it like he was picking up a cat. We called it goofy strength.”

  “He was a different individual when I had him, at 308 pounds,” says Ditka. “He was a hell of an athlete, with a great attitude. Most of it now has to do with alcohol. You think you’re invincible, nothing can hurt you . . . I know. I’ve been through it.”

  The William Perry that I see here in the spring dusk, in his car, doesn’t look invincible in the least. He simply looks like a man trying very hard not to think about anything at all.

  The following night we meet at an Applebee’s. That the actual intersection of Whiskey Road and Easy Street is nearby tells you something about this town that is by parts pretty and decrepit, with Civil War memorials, gas costing $1.37 9/10 a gallon, and a place that’s still referred to as the Aiken Colored Cemetery. Nearby, off Willow Run Road, there’s a weedy field where a black fellow named Harry McFadden, an acquaintance of Willie Perry’s, was reportedly lynched in 1978.

  Fridge comes in with Epps, placing his walker next to the table. He doesn’t eat much, just nine wings. “Not like the old days,” he says. But he has four double Jack Daniels and Cokes, and once he has hobbled back to his car, he asks Epps to go back and get him some pecan pie and a brownie to go.

  A couple of months before this I had visited Fridge at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago. He had come to town for a 30-year reunion event celebrating Super Bowl XX, with his brother Willie and Jaye escorting him. But after being roundly cheered at halftime of a Bears-Lions game at Soldier Field, he’d become ill with a leg infection related to his diabetes. He told me he could no longer feel from the shin down and that his hands were numb too.

  That night there was talk that he might need to have a foot amputated if things didn’t improve. Lying in his bed with a hospital gown on, catheter in place, Fridge didn’t frown or complain. He’ll never say he’s hurting. Former Bears trainer Brian McCaskey remembers when Perry came to the sideline during a game, held his forearm out, and said, “What do you think?” “It was bent down and up,” recalls McCaskey, amazed, “broken all the way through.”

  The doctor comes in. He says that for some reason Perry has been taking pills he wasn’t prescribed; meanwhile, he’s not taking the ones he should be. Willie and Jaye think this shows, again, how little Michael Dean is caring for his brother. They think it might be damn close to poisoning him. Which Michael Dean finds bewildering; guardian though he is, he points out that Patsy is the one who now oversees William’s medicine intake.

  But when it comes down to it, shouldn’t a grown man take care of himself? Especially one who in 2014 was declared by a doctor, cognitive issues and all, to be capable of managing his own affairs and no longer in need of a guardian?

  “When I’m ready, I’ll take [Michael Dean] back to court and I’ll get my guardianship back,” Fridge says. But he’s done nothing. And it’s likely he never will. He’s slip-sliding away. He seems tired of any struggle whatsoever.

  “Talent can be a curse,” says Hampton. “At 14, Fridge was the biggest thing in Carolina. Everybody expected him to play football. It’s almost like he was a reluctant participant. He didn’t have to sell out to be the best, and now he doesn’t have to care.”

  Ditka, whose Gridiron Greats charity has helped pay for some of Perry’s debts, finds it all heart-wrenching. “It’s a great life wasted,” he says. “There’s no reason it has to happen. A bad deal? No, he got a great deal! In life you gotta help yourself. It’s tragic. I think he’s given up. And the question in my mind is, Why?”

  The air is clear and fresh at 1:00 p.m. on a Wednesday in Aiken; it’s 78 degrees, bright sun. The Masters will start soon in nearby Augusta, Georgia, and flowers will start opening from south to north, like popcorn seeds cooking in a pan.

  Fridge is in his car, parked under a shade tree near some men playing checkers. Two months from now he’ll be hospitalized briefly for what Willie describes as a ministroke, his second in a short period. Michael Dean will deny that either ever occurred. But for now the big man is at ease, drinking beer from his cooler, his buddy Epps nearby, smoking and d
rinking, wiping away sweat with a white towel draped over his shoulder. We’re barely two blocks from where Fridge was raised, and that seems relevant.

  “I’m home,” he says. “And I’m happy. I can’t say everything is peachy keen, but I’m still enjoying life. I love Chicago, but there’s no place like home.”

  The acrid stench from his car interplays with the fragrance of apple blossoms drifting in the breeze. He’s making a stand right here. A declaration.

  “I’m my own man,” he says, seemingly tired of people trying to improve him. “It’s simple. I ain’t never trying to be famous. I never, ever try to be extravaganza. I’m just a plain old country boy!”

  As if that explains it all. Or anything, really.

  PAT JORDAN

  Barry Switzer Laughs Last

  from men’s journal

  Barry Switzer and I are driving through the Oklahoma University campus in his black Mercedes on a sunny day in September. He slows the Benz, lowers his window, and calls out to a coed in a miniskirt and high heels: “You wearin’ some beautiful shoes, girl.” She smiles and says, “Thank you, Coach.” I ask if he knows her. He says, “Hell, no!”

  Traffic is backed up downtown because of tonight’s game against Tennessee. A skateboarder darts out from behind a parked car. Switzer yells at him, “Get outta the fuckin’ way!”

  We finally park and step into Louie’s Too, an OU dive bar. It’s deserted at noon, except for a young woman wearing an impressively tight-fitting black T-shirt with LOUIE’S TOO written across her chest. She’s sitting at the bar, her legs thrown over the legs of some guy, her arms around his neck. Switzer says, “You workin’ here, girl, or you just workin’ on him?” The woman blushes and hustles behind the bar.

  We sit at the bar, chatting up the barmaid, whose name is Lisa. She says she works nights in a hospital giving ultrasound tests. Switzer grins and asks her how old she is. “Thirty-two!” he says. “You damned near too old for me, girl.” Switzer is 78.

  Lisa laughs, then notices the Super Bowl ring on Switzer’s left hand. He takes it off and hands it to her, saying, “We goin’ steady now.” Lisa puts the ring on her finger and strikes a pose, placing the flat of her hand against her cheek, flashing the ring with a coquettish smile and a flutter of eyelashes. Then she gets us two more drinks.

  “I dunno, girl,” Switzer says. “One more drink and I’ll need a nurse.”

  “I’m not a nurse,” Lisa counters.

  “You’re close enough,” Switzer says.

  Lisa goes down the bar to show the guy the ring, leaving us to talk. When I ask Switzer about his coaching career, he suddenly grows serious. “I had a great run,” he says. “College was my game. I liked my pro players, but I didn’t have relationships with them. You don’t recruit pros, get to know them, their parents, their personal problems. If they can’t play, you get rid of their ass. You recruit a kid in college, he’s yours for life.”

  Switzer pauses. When he continues, it’s with uncharacteristic modesty. “Hell,” he says, “I was just as good a college coach as the other guys. The magic is always in the players.”

  Switzer is one of only three football coaches to win both an NCAA championship and a Super Bowl. Between 1973 and 1988, his Oklahoma Sooners won 157 games, lost 29, and tied four. Until this year Switzer held the highest winning percentage, .837, of any major college coach of 150 games or more. He won three championships, and he would have won more if his teams hadn’t been constantly flirting with NCAA probations. Then, in his four years coaching in the pros, he led the Dallas Cowboys to a Super Bowl victory over Pittsburgh in 1996. And he did it all on his terms. Switzer spoke his mind and played by his own rules. He was described as the coach in the black cowboy hat, the outlaw coach who played it fast and loose. NCAA rules were for the other guys, stiffs like Penn State’s Joe Paterno, Texas’s Darrell Royal, Nebraska’s Tom Osborne. Switzer didn’t have many rules for his players. He treated them, he says, like “grown men” who could “carry their own water.”

  Stories about Switzer’s drinking and womanizing were legendary, maybe apocryphal. The $100,000 bar tab during Super Bowl week of 1996. The stewardesses he banged two at a time. The Sooner coeds whose cars were parked outside his house in the morning. The very public affair he carried on with the wife of one of his assistant coaches. These stories endeared Switzer to Sooners fans. Even the school president told him he could smoke dope as long as he won national championships.

  Switzer never shies away from the peccadilloes of his past. “You bet that damned bar tab was the truth,” he says. “I kept getting the damned bill for three months. Hell, there was a $3,500 bottle of Louis XIII cognac on it. I was worried gangsters would come after me.” Jimmy Johnson, the Cowboys coach whom Switzer replaced, told him to give it to the team’s owner, Jerry Jones. “But wait until he’s in a good mood,” Johnson said. Finally Switzer handed the bill to Jones, who was less than happy—but, says Switzer, “I never got another bill.”

  After his pro career ended, Switzer moved back to Norman, Oklahoma, where he is treated as a kind of coach emeritus, an éminence grise. Parents bring their kids to his house to meet the legendary coach, sometimes by appointment, sometimes unannounced. Switzer will tousle some youngster’s hair while regaling them with stories of some legendary Texas-Sooners game. Before home games he stands on a stage on campus to have his picture taken with an endless line of fans. In restaurants women take selfies with him, and men sit down and propose business deals.

  He doesn’t really drink anymore, not heavily, anyway. As for the women, he plays his flirtations for laughs now, the harmless old lech. One night at dinner, he says to our young blond waitress, “You look familiar.”

  “I use-ta be a Sooners pom-pom girl, Coach.”

  “Use-ta?” Switzer replies. “How old are you?” Twenty-two, she tells him.

  He smiles and says, “That’s about right.”

  “When Barry was coaching the Sooners, his moral lines were broader than most other coaches’,” says Brian Bosworth, or “The Boz,” who played linebacker for Switzer in the mid-1980s. “To his players he was the lord of lords. We idolized him because he loved to have fun. Even now his fuel is meeting people. He needs that. It’s his life’s purpose. Coach was always the prettiest girl in the room.”

  Switzer drove moralistic, straight-arrow coaches to distraction. He broke all the rules and still beat Darrell Royal’s Longhorns like a drum. Royal accused Switzer of paying his players and demanded he take a lie-detector test. Switzer told him, in essence, to go fuck himself. College coaches liked to say that Switzer’s players had to take a pay cut when they went to the NFL. Joe Paterno, who treated his players like his children, considered himself the moral conscience of college sports until, of course, the world learned differently. When asked in the 1980s if he’d ever retire, Paterno said, “I can’t leave the college game to the . . . Barry Switzers of the world.”

  Before I headed to Norman, Switzer and I spent an hour on the phone. It wasn’t long before we began strutting our bona fides. He works out every day. So do I. His sport is football, mine baseball. He drinks scotch. I drink bourbon. We both smoke cigars, carry guns, love dogs, and women too. We both have been arrested in airports with guns in our bags. He was fined $75,000 and shortly afterward lost his job with the Cowboys. I spent eight hours sleeping on a concrete floor in the Broward County, Florida, felony holding tank.

  It gets deeper. Both of our mothers died of their own free will: his shot herself, mine pulled the feeding tubes from her arm in a hospital. My father was a gambler, con man, and grifter. His father, he tells me, was a “rounder, womanizer, drinker, bootlegger, and atheist.” And Switzer carried on the tradition—“a rogue who lives on the edge,” he says. “Just like my daddy.”

  Louie’s Too is crowded now. We’re constantly interrupted by students and alums who want their pictures taken with Coach. He obliges them all. It becomes impossible to talk, so we hop into the car and drive to Switzer�
��s house.

  Along the way, Switzer makes a business call. He has his fingers in a lot of pies: oil, banks, real estate, a Napa vineyard, and storage units called Switzer’s Locker Room. He says into the phone, “You gotta get the governor to get that guy off that commission so he can appoint our guy and the deal will go through.” He hangs up as we pass the liquor store he owns, Switzer Wine and Spirits, the only one close to campus. The parking lot is filled with cars whose owners are stocking up for tonight’s game. Switzer grins and says, “I always thought that if I ever needed a job, I could become a bootlegger like Daddy.”

  Frank Switzer sold his liquor mostly to African Americans in the tiny town of Crossett, Arkansas, where Switzer grew up in a ramshackle house that lacked, until the 1950s, glass windows, running water, a telephone, and electricity. As a young boy, Barry led his mother through the backyard at night to the outhouse. He carried a flashlight to light the way and a pistol to shoot copperheads.

  In high school Switzer was a handsome, rawboned football hero, 6'1", 180 pounds, yet no respectable white girl in town would date him, a bootlegger’s son. “So I hung with blacks,” he said. “I identified with them. I’d get on my school bus and wave to them waiting for their bus. When their bus broke down one day, I told them to get on our bus. Our driver said, ‘Sit your ass down, boy, and shut up.’ ” Switzer was raised by the same black nanny who had raised his father, because his mother, Mary Louise, lacked the will or the energy to raise Barry and his younger brother, Donnie. She preferred to escape from her loneliness and despair into a fantasy world of novels, liquor, and barbiturates.