The Best American Sports Writing 2017 Read online

  In 1954, when Barry was 16, Frank Switzer was sentenced to five years in the Arkansas State Penitentiary for selling untaxed liquor. He was released five months later on a legal technicality, just in time to watch his son pack his jeans and T-shirts into an empty Early Times box and head to the University of Arkansas on a football scholarship.

  In August 1959, the summer before his senior year at Arkansas, Switzer came home for a visit. As usual, Frank was gone, who knows where, and his mother was sitting in her favorite chair, blissed out on booze and pills, reading a book.

  “My mother had no life,” he tells me. “She was deep in the country, alone, no phone, no car. It was a terrible existence for a woman who had been the valedictorian of her high school class.” Then one night Barry was asleep and Mary Louise woke him. Her eyes were glazed over and she was smiling her blissed-out smile. He said, “Mother, I would rather not ever see you again than see you like this.” When she leaned over to kiss him, he turned away. Moments later he heard a shot.

  “For 30 years I felt her suicide was my fault,” Switzer says now. “I should never have said what I said. Then years later my brother showed me a suicide note she had written. I asked him why he never showed that to me before. He said Daddy wouldn’t let him.” His mother, it turned out, had come to say good-bye to her oldest son. “I realized she’d had a plan that night that had nothing to do with what I’d said to her,” he says. “It finally removed my guilt.”

  Thirteen years later Frank Switzer died at 64. “He was shot and killed by his 28-year-old girlfriend,” Switzer tells me, “when she caught him with another girlfriend.”

  After his playing career, at Arkansas, Switzer became an assistant coach at his alma mater. Then, in 1966, his former defensive coordinator at Arkansas, Jim Mackenzie, was named the head coach at OU. The first assistant he hired was Switzer. In 1973, he took over the top spot.

  Unlike many college coaches, Switzer got close with his players. When one got married only to have all his wedding gifts stolen from his apartment, Switzer personally replaced the items. It was in violation of NCAA rules—“but that’s the way Barry was,” says former coach Merv Johnson. When a running back’s mother died, Switzer bought the kid an airplane ticket home—another NCAA rules infraction, but to Switzer it was the right thing to do. His players never forgot his kindness, and years later, when their parents died or they died, Switzer did not forget them either. “He doesn’t just remember me,” says Jon Phillips, a former offensive lineman. “He knows my telephone number, my parents’ names.” Adds Merv Johnson, “Not a soul in Oklahoma has given more eulogies than Barry Switzer.”

  Switzer was an outstanding recruiter of talent, especially when it came to young African American players, with whom he had no problem connecting. In the South of the 1970s, this was a rare quality. Switzer would walk through the hallways of black high schools, “flashing his big, long fur coat and all his championship rings on his fingers,” said Charles Thompson, a former quarterback from Lawton, Oklahoma, who was recruited by Switzer in 1987. “Texas and Oklahoma were full of great black players, but the Longhorns didn’t recruit them,” Switzer says. “So I did.” No wonder he was known by his players as “the Sooners’ first black coach.”

  I ask Brian Bosworth if Switzer was as close to his white players as he was to his black ones. “Barry put a lot more effort into the problems of his black players,” Bosworth says. Still, athletes of all races loved playing for Switzer because he played it loose, with few rules. “I never muzzled them,” Switzer says. “I let them have their own personalities.” Thomas Lott, a quarterback who went on to play for the Atlanta Falcons, wore a goatee and a do-rag; running back Little Joe Washington wore silver cleats; Bosworth cut his hair into a Mohawk and painted his uniform number on his scalp. Other players wore earrings, Afros, had gold teeth and tattoos. Some were black militants; some, like The Boz, were just white-boy egomaniacs. Says former offensive lineman Terry Webb: “People didn’t come here to play for the University of Oklahoma. They came to play for Barry.”

  Not all players responded to Switzer’s flamboyant style. When Troy Aikman came to Oklahoma in 1984, he was a serious, disciplined quarterback who was discomfited by Switzer’s style. A drop-back passer, he left the Sooners for UCLA after only a year. He was replaced by Jamelle Holieway, who took the Sooners to the NCAA championship, something Aikman never did. Curiously, 10 years later Aikman would be Switzer’s quarterback with the Cowboys, leading the team to the 1996 Super Bowl victory. Holieway, meanwhile, was cut after just one year with the Oakland Raiders.

  This was not uncommon for the Sooners, largely thanks to Switzer’s wishbone offense. In four years with the team, for example, Holieway completed only 117 passes but ran for 2,713 yards and 32 touchdowns. Unfortunately, NFL coaches weren’t looking for running quarterbacks. They wanted drop-back passers like Aikman. Switzer’s players did not make the transition easily. “Even our offensive linemen were at a disadvantage,” Bosworth says. “They weren’t prepared to be pass blockers, because all they’d ever done in Oklahoma was run block.”

  Bosworth, for example, was considered one of the greatest linebackers ever in college football, a two-time All-American. In 1987, he was drafted by the Seattle Seahawks, who awarded him the largest rookie bonus ever—$11 million over 10 years. But in the pros, The Boz was unable to back up his outrageous persona with accomplishments on the field. Before one game against the Raiders, Bosworth told reporters that he was going to shut down star running back Bo Jackson. The first time he hit Jackson, Bo carried The Boz over the goal line. Bosworth was cut after just two years. ESPN called him the sixth worst NFL flop ever.

  Bring up the spotty NFL performance of former Sooners, and Switzer gets defensive. Bosworth’s career, he says, was cut short by a shoulder injury, not by any coaching deficit. He turns the conversation toward players who excelled in the NFL—and later in life. “Lee Roy Selmon was an NFL Hall of Famer,” Switzer says. “Billy Sims was a Heisman Trophy winner, a college Hall of Famer, and an NFL Rookie of the Year. Little Joe Washington was his team’s MVP. He’s now a financial adviser for Wells Fargo, for chrissakes.”

  Still, by the late ’80s, Switzer was becoming an anachronism. The college game was changing, from a plodding, four yards off-tackle running game to a wide-open passing game more like the pros. The University of Miami’s Hurricanes became the NCAA’s alpha dog, winning championships under coaches Howard Schnellenberger and Jimmy Johnson. Miami players like Michael Irvin and Vinny Testaverde, rather than Sooners, went on to dominate the NFL. “The program began unraveling,” Bosworth says. “The new players were less disciplined. It all happened so fast. Coach didn’t see the disease spreading.”

  In 1988, the NCAA began investigating the Sooners program for 16 NCAA violations. Most were typical, picayune charges. Somebody had bought a player dinner, loaned a player a car, given him a few bills to buy clothes. Others were more substantial, including recruits being offered cash to come to Oklahoma and no-show jobs once they arrived. The Sooners program was accused of lacking institutional control. In 1989, quarterback Charles Thompson was arrested for selling cocaine, set up by a friend. That same year a player shot a teammate, and two Sooners raped a woman from Oklahoma City. Then the coke-dealing quarterback convinced his friend the snitch to rob Switzer’s house of his championship rings—and then ratted him out.

  Switzer says this kind of behavior snuck up on him. “You have to understand, the early eighties is when the drug culture hit,” he says. “When I played it was beer. Then, in the seventies, you had marijuana. But in the eighties it was street drugs, cocaine. When that hit everything changed. I had four kids who committed felonies in a very short time. Hell, I didn’t think I had to tell my players, ‘Don’t rape anyone, don’t shoot each other, don’t sell drugs.’ ”

  Thompson spent 17 months in a federal prison on the cocaine charge, where he wrote a book, Down and Dirty: The Life and Crimes of Oklahoma Football. In it he celebra
ted Switzer as a coach who “identified with his black players,” and “had a good heart,” and couldn’t “say no to kids from a broken home.” But at the same time, he wrote, Switzer was “a supreme bullshit artist who let his coaches be the bad guys.” The coach, Thompson wrote, supplied his players with “beer and booze. He [Switzer] was always high on booze and primo [cigarettes sprinkled with cocaine]. He drank us all under the table.” When I asked Switzer about this, he denied it.

  By the spring of 1989, everyone with an interest in Sooners football—players, fans, alumni, administrators, the media—had had enough. On June 19, 1989, Barry Switzer resigned from the “only job I ever loved,” he told me. He’d never coach college football again.

  Switzer always said he had no interest in coaching in the NFL. But in 1994, a bitter and longtime feud between Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and head coach Jimmy Johnson came to a head, despite two Super Bowl wins. Switzer had been out of the game for five years, but Jones, who played for the Razorbacks while Switzer had been an assistant coach, gave him a call. “So just before Jerry and Jimmy got divorced, Jerry calls me and asks if I want to coach the Cowboys. I said, ‘I didn’t know the job was open.’ He said, ‘It’s fixin’ to be.’ The next day he fired Jimmy. Why me? He wanted to have people around him who were loyal, who he knew. I’m the guy he turned to.”

  His mandate was not to overcoach, not to fuck up a sure thing. Switzer ditched his vaunted college wishbone offense and ran Johnson’s passing offense behind quarterback Troy Aikman. In his second season, the Cowboys won the Super Bowl.

  But Switzer resigned after only four seasons in the pros. His heart, he says, just wasn’t in the pro game. “I liked the kids, you know?” he says. He could never get close to the pros like he could his college players. What’s more, at OU Switzer was the star of Sooners football. In Dallas the players were the stars. “I quit,” he says. “It wasn’t fun anymore.” Two years later Switzer came back to Oklahoma and assumed his new role there: elder statesman, lovable anachronism, the Grand Old Man on campus.

  Switzer pulls the Benz into the circular drive in front of a big, faux-stone Tudor house that is a shade short of a mansion. We go into the garage, where he keeps three German shepherds in wire kennels. One of them snarls at me and bares his teeth. “Don’t go near him,” Switzer says. “He’ll tear your ass up. He was abused. They kept him in a kennel for his first eight months. So I adopted him. He didn’t know how to socialize, but I turned him around. Now he loves me and my wife.”

  We go to the backyard. Unreal green grass, swimming pool, a big cabana open on one side. “Watch out for dog shit,” Switzer says. “He’ll only shit on concrete ’cause that’s all he knows.” Switzer gets a pooper scooper and picks up dog shit on the tile around the pool. I tell him he has a beautiful lawn. “AstroTurf,” he says. “When it snows I just sweep it off.”

  Inside the cabana are sofas, easy chairs, and a circular bar with stools. This is where Switzer does his weekly webcast, Coaches’ Cabana, streaming live every Saturday during the games. His guests are usually retired players and coaches, Sooners from the glory years of the ’70s and ’80s. They watch the game on television and chitchat in that way of ex-jocks in a bar.

  We go inside to the kitchen, where Switzer introduces me to his wife, Becky, a petite blonde of 60 who looks younger than her age. She is Switzer’s second wife, a former gymnast, trained by Béla Károlyi, who went on to coach the Sooners. His first wife, Kay, the mother of his three children, divorced him in 1981, after 18 years of marriage. When I ask Switzer about the divorce, he just says, “Kay left me for the right reasons. I was an asshole.” When I press, he explains what he means. “I made mistakes,” he says. “I was undisciplined, immature. My daughter says I was a great father but a terrible husband.”

  On game day I drive to Switzer’s house at noon. Becky is carrying in groceries from her car. I help her in an awkward silence. Finally I ask her how she deals with all the people who want her husband’s time. “We have eight beds upstairs,” she says. “On game days most of them are occupied. Barry loves it.”

  I go outside to smoke a cigar at a small table overlooking the front yard and the street that leads to the campus. Cars pull into the driveway and people come over to me to ask if “Coach is home.” I say no. They are sure to tell me their names—a fan, an alumnus, a player from 35 years ago—and add, “Tell Coach I stopped by to say hello.”

  When Switzer gets home, he sits with me outside in the cool afternoon sunlight. Soon we are talking again about our fathers. I tell him of the time my dad took me on a fishing trip: two blocks down the street to a golf course with a water hazard, a stagnant pond. I sat there for hours with a stick and string and a safety pin for a hook, hoping to catch—what, a Titleist?—while the old man was booking bets in the bar across the street. “At least your father took you hunting,” I say. I had seen an old photo of a four-year-old Switzer with a dead squirrel in one hand and a rifle over his shoulder. His father kneels beside him, smiling.

  Another car pulls into the driveway. A handsome young man wearing sunglasses comes over and sits down. Switzer introduces him as “Ryan, my computer guru.”

  Ryan is holding an envelope stuffed with $100 bills. He counts out 45 C-notes and hands them to Switzer. “Not in front of the old fiction writer,” Switzer says. “He’ll think I’m a bookie.” Then he grows serious. “Are you sure you don’t need it?”

  Ryan hesitates. “I said I’d pay you back.”

  “You were gonna use it for a down payment on a house.”

  “Well, my granddaddy passed a while ago and he left no money for his funeral. I was grateful I could pay for it.”

  “Now you can’t buy the house?” Switzer asks. Ryan nods. “How much do you need?” Ryan says $3,000. Switzer counts out 35 bills. “You always need extra,” he says.

  “I can’t be in your debt again, Barry.”

  “Take the money and buy the fucking house. It’ll come back to you.”

  “I don’t know how long it’ll take me to pay you back.”

  “I don’t care! But the next time I see you, you’d better own that fucking house.”

  Ryan takes the money and gets up to leave. “Barry, you bring tears to my eyes.”

  After Ryan leaves we sit in the sun, not talking, a little embarrassed. Switzer checks his messages. “Come on,” he says. “I gotta make an appearance at this guy’s house.” We drive through campus, passing flocks of people walking toward the stadium. Switzer finds a small ranch house and we go inside. There are more than 30 people partying inside and out by the pool. The redneck crowd is drinking beer, eating nachos and wings, singing Sooner fight songs, cheering, and yelling at one another already, four hours before the game. Switzer works the room like a Vegas shill, shaking hands, slapping backs, hugging women, posing for selfies, telling stories—another ancient Longhorns-Sooners game, which, in his telling, always ends the same, with a Sooners victory.

  A short man smoking a cigar, belly protruding from his T-shirt, approaches. Switzer introduces me. The man pumps my hand and asks if he can take a picture of Barry and me with his daughter. “We’d be so proud,” he says. His daughter is a pretty blonde in a tight miniskirt. She stands between Switzer and me, with our arms over her shoulders. Her father, beaming, takes the picture.

  Back in the car, Switzer says, “He’s a good ol’ boy—a millionaire 200 times over, yet he’s not pretentious. I like him.”

  By 7:30, back at Switzer’s house, about 50 people crowd the pool area and cabana, eating from a buffet of chicken wings, drinking at the bar. Switzer tells me to enjoy the party and heads to the cabana to host his show. Tonight’s guests are former players Billy Sims and Thomas Lott. The two men look prosperous and a good distance from their playing weight. In fact, Sims’s life after football was a series of catastrophes: failed business ventures, bankruptcies, divorce, jail time, charges of domestic violence. In 2001, he was forced to sell his Heisman Trophy for $88,000. Now he
’s back on his feet with a chain of 46 Billy Sims Barbecue restaurants. Lott, meanwhile, hosts a sports radio show.

  I watch the three men from a chair by the pool, but it’s hard to hear much over the noisy crowd. They’re hunched together almost conspiratorially, oblivious to the pool party. It’s a bond often seen among veteran athletes, as well as cops and soldiers—men who have fought together and know things the rest of us do not.

  After a couple of hours, I get up to leave. I look back at Switzer, sitting with his former players on the sofa, gabbing about the game. No one, I notice, seems to be paying attention to them. Their voices go unheard, except by one another. It’s the coach and his players—all Barry Switzer ever needed.

  DAVE SHEININ

  A Wonderful Life

  from the washington post

  GRANITE BAY, CALIF.—The pale California sun makes its midday bend toward the southwest, drenching the freshly pruned vineyards of Baker Family Wines out behind the house with nurturing sunlight. It sends bright-colored beams through the stained glass windows atop the vaulted ceilings. And it radiates upon the massive solar panels at the edge of the property, filling them with the energy that courses into the house and illuminates the recessed lighting of the gourmet kitchen, where Dusty Baker is standing at the stove making collard greens.

  You can learn all you need to know about a man from his collard greens.

  Baker grew his own in his backyard garden because that’s how his daddy taught him, from heirloom seeds he got from his friend, blues legend Elvin Bishop. So already you know this about Johnnie B. “Dusty” Baker Jr.: He is his father’s son, from the ground up. But it’s the blues that nourishes him.

  He cooks his collards with low-sodium chicken broth and boils the salt out of his ham hock before dropping it into the pot. So you know this too: the new manager of the Washington Nationals is deeply aware you only get so many trips around the sun, and at age 66, after surviving both prostate cancer and a stroke, he isn’t taking any of them for granted.