The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (3 page)

Here ends the lamentation, on this faintly upbeat note. All the uncertainty and gloom in the atmosphere added a dash of bravery, even gallantry, to every piece of sports writing I read, and gave an extra zing to the very best. I remember, while I was working with Andre Agassi on his memoir, the deadline was drawing near, the stress was running high, and I said something Andre liked, made a suggestion with which he wholly agreed. Suddenly he shouted:
I don't know whether to kiss you or knock you out!
I never understood exactly what he meant, but I think it had to do with that visceral reaction, that reflex of tenderness and vehemence we all experience when, just in time, the right words hit our inner target. At some point, while reading every piece in this book, that's what I felt. Bull's-eye.

For example, Jonathan Segura. As I read the first few lines of his piece it was late, I was dead tired, and then all at once I wasn't. I was out of my chair, pacing, laughing, clenching and unclenching my fists. In particular I want to single out Segura's lush and wanton profanity. I hope it shocks and mortifies every scold out there who's forever bitching about bad language. My philosophy: if you don't like bad language, don't use it. And if you can't rejoice in the life force pulsing through every lovely four-letter word in Segura's paean to his soccer-loving mate (“Whatever he did, he did the shit out of”), then you and I are probably not going to be able to hang out.

I'll admit, I dropped a few f-bombs while reading Wright Thompson's piece. Thompson is quietly becoming a one-man dynasty in the world of sports writing. He made last year's
BASW
, he's already reserved a spot in next year's, and he wrote several pieces that could have been selected for this year's. Faced with too many choices, I picked his epic portrait of Urban Meyer, a football coach driven, and nearly destroyed, by perfectionism. (Savor that incredible opening passage, in which the coach's daughter, and Thompson, bravely call out the coach.) Two other perennial All-Stars, Thomas Lake and Chris Ballard, weigh in with pieces that feel linked. Lake, employing just the right pathos-to-restraint ratio, tells the story of a high school basketball player who died shortly after making a game-winning shot. Ballard, with a novelist's sense of scene and pace, describes a high school baseball team that went on an impossible run after one of its players died in a car wreck. I will not soon forget the team bus wending its way home from the tournament, stopping at the cemetery, where the boys, hats off, observe a moment of silence.

I chose a few pieces more for their solid reporting, like Kent Babb's cold-blooded exposé of the gulag that was the 2012 Kansas City Chiefs. More than one NFL team is ruled by control freaks obsessed with secrecy, drunk with power, but my mouth hung open as I read about general manager Scott Pioli's brief reign of terror on Arrowhead Drive. The head coach running around thinking his office is bugged? The team president using a discarded candy wrapper as a “coaching moment”? Come on, guys. Get a grip.

In a year filled with downers, several pieces provided some badly needed levity, like Erik Malinowski's kooky analysis of one seminal sitcom episode, which cast real baseball players as themselves and thereby changed the way we think about both national pastimes—baseball and TV. Bill Littlefield might have scored the year's funniest line in his piece about a wayside boxing gym in Pittsburgh. (What the ring card girl asks the gym owner—I guffawed aloud.) And Jeff MacGregor slayed me with his
Godot
-esque goof on Roger Goodell. If some readers don't get it, wonderful. Here's hoping they'll be motivated to read some Beckett.

Pound for pound, the funniest piece to cross my desk might have been David Simon's tribute to last summer's valiant Orioles. The humor is wry, as one would expect from the creator of
The Wire
, and yet there's one joyfully silly exchange between Simon and his cousin, a Yankees fan, which ends with Simon texting: “Bite me, O pinstriped whore.” Maybe it's the Mets fan in me, but I let out a soft, involuntary
yeeeah
.

Whenever possible, you want a love story in the mix, and I'm indebted to the incomparable Allison Glock for producing a fine one. Her anatomy of the doomed relationship between two basketball stars, Rosalind Ross and Malika Willoughby, was still on my mind days after I read it. Glock tells a difficult tale with compassion, insight, and her typical unblinking eye for detail. (What the father learns from the mortician—chilling.) A far less complicated love story is Rick Reilly's piece out of Queen Creek, Arizona. Bullies at the local high school were tormenting Chy Johnson, a mentally handicapped girl, until the football team stepped in. Reilly's reporting gives some richly deserved dap to Carson Jones, the quarterback, who first invited Chy to sit at his roundtable during lunch. If you've read anything in recent months that so sweetly and compactly restored your faith in people, please forward it to me.

Gary Smith's delicious piece about a hunger-striking football player hasn't yet gotten all the huzzahs it deserves, maybe because it's fearlessly, brazenly political, a no-no in sportswriting, as in sports, which is sort of Smith's point. A Hall of Famer several times over, Smith shows that he's not about to stop taking chances. This piece is a high-wire act, filled with risks that would trip up lesser writers, and though I held my breath in several places, Smith makes it safely to the other side.

Finally, two pieces stand apart for me. The first is Barry Bearak's. In the copies and printouts sent to me by
BASW'
s legendary curator, Glenn Stout, the name of every writer was redacted. But I was three pages into the story of Micah True, the mythic runner who vanished in the New Mexico wilderness, when I looked up and thought: Bearak? His style is that Zorro-like, his voice that etched into my memory.

I had the good fortune of meeting Bearak once. We were both working at the
Los Angeles Times
, where he was a god, revered for his bravery and linguistic virtuosity. (Pull up his 1992 series on New York City crack addicts. Prepare to be stunned.) The boss invited Bearak to give a lunchtime talk to younger reporters, and I remember us all eagerly squeezing into the conference room, like batboys getting to meet Babe Ruth. I still find myself drawing on things Bearak said that day.

Many writers could have done something special with the story of True. Only Bearak could have written such a clean, tight yarn, while also finding room for such sparkling imagery. Marijuana “fluted” through True's head; cold air “scythed” through the forest. I read the piece while drinking coffee, sitting in the sun, but I was high, I was chilled—I was True.

Lastly, Karen Russell. I want to say it as plainly as I can: her piece about the one-eyed matador ranks with the finest sports writing I've ever read. Some will be surprised to discover that Russell isn't a sportswriter, nor even an occasional writer of sports. She's a novelist, a short story writer, a rising literary superstar. What I find hard to figure isn't
how
Russell writes so masterfully about sports, but
when
. This piece appeared just months before her acclaimed short story collection dropped, just months after her novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Does the woman sleep?

The one-eyed matador is Juan Jose Padilla, whose eye was pronged out by an 1,100-pound bull. Russell makes you feel the hideous wound, makes you want to reach up and touch your own eye to be sure it's still there, then follows Padilla through his healing and improbable comeback. Don't read the piece once. Read it twice, read it three times, and slow down each time you come to the scene where Padilla stands before a young cow, ready to
torear
an animal for the first time since his injury. The cow moves forward, Padilla steps aside, and there it is, one man's quiet triumph over—everything. But especially loss. The moment takes place at the end of December, Russell tells us, because Padilla is determined that the year will not end without him dressing again as a bullfighter. His need for the cape, she says, is like “the longing of a ghost recalling its body.”

Oh, Russell. When I read that line I didn't know whether to kiss you or knock you out, so I just shook my head and gently placed your piece on top of the yes pile. You were born to be atop the yes pile.

But that's the problem. With so much talent, you'll always be in great demand, pulled in many directions at once. Please, continue to make time now and then for sports. This business needs writers like you, voices like yours, if we're going to avoid the next sinkhole. And each of us, individually, when we fall in? Masterpieces like the tale of the one-eyed matador can help us cope, and might even inspire us to climb our way out.

J. R. M
OEHRINGER

KAREN RUSSELL

FROM GQ

 

I. Zaragoza, Spain—October 7, 2011

 

W
HAT DOES THE
bull see as it charges the matador? What does the bull feel? This is an ancient mystery, but it seems like a safe bet that to
this
bull, Marques—ashy black, five years old, 1,100 pounds—the bullfighter is just a moving target, a shadow to catch and penetrate and rip apart. Not a man with a history, not Juan Jose Padilla, the Cyclone of Jerez, 38 years old, father of two, one of Spain's top matadors, taking on his last bull of the afternoon here at the Feria del Pilar, a hugely anticipated date on the bullfighting calendar.

When Marques comes galloping across the sand at Padilla, the bullfighter also begins to run—not away from the animal but toward its horns. Padilla is luminously scaled in fuchsia and gold, his “suit of lights.” He lifts his arms high above his head, like a viper preparing to strike. For fangs, he has two wooden sticks with harpoonlike barbs, two banderillas, old technologies for turning a bull's confusion into rage. Padilla and Marques are alone in the sandy pit, but a carousel of faces swirls around them. A thousand eyes beat down on Padilla, causing sweat to bead on his neck. Just before Marques can gore him, he jumps up and jabs the sticks into the bull's furry shoulder. He brings down both sticks at once, an outrageous risk. Then he spins around so that he is
facing
Marques, running backward on the sand, toe to heel.

A glancing blow from Marques unsteadies Padilla; his feet get tangled. At the apex of his fall, he still has time to right himself, escape the bull. His chin tilts up: there is the wheeling sky, all blue. His last-ever binocular view. This milestone whistles past him, the whole sky flooding through the bracket of the bull's horns, and now he's lost it. The sun flickers on and off.
My balance—

Padilla has the bad luck, the terrible luck, of landing on his side. And now his luck gets worse.

Marques scoops his head toward Padilla's face on the sandy floor, a move that resembles canine tenderness, as if he's leaning down to lick him, but instead the bull drives his sharp left horn through the bullfighter's jaw. When Marques tusks up, the horn crunches through Padilla's skin and bone, exiting through his left eye socket. Cameras clock the instant that a glistening orb pops loose onto the matador's cheek. A frightening silence descends on the crowd. Nobody knows the depth of the wound.

Marques gallops on, and Padilla gets towed for a few feet, pulled by his cheek. He loses a shoe. Skin stretches away from his jawbone with the fragile elasticity of taffy.

Then Padilla's prone body is left in the bull's dust. He springs up like a jack-in-the-box and hops around. His face is completely red. As the blood gushes down his cheek, he holds his dislodged eye in place with his pinkie. He thinks he must be dying.
I can't breathe. I can't see
.

Marques, meanwhile, has trotted a little ways down the sand. He stands there panting softly. His four legs are perfectly still. What unfolds is a scene that Beckett and Hemingway and Stephen King might have collaborated to produce, because this is real horror, the blackest gallows humor: the contrast between the bullfighter crying out
“Oh, my eye! I can't see! I can't see!”
and the cud-chewing obliviousness of the animal.

In the bullring, other bullfighters spill onto the sand and rush to Padilla's aid. They lift him, hustle him toward the infirmary. Meanwhile, the bullfight must go on. Miguel Abellan, another matador on the bill, steps in for Padilla. He kills Marques in a trancelike state that he later swears he can't remember. Tears run down his cheeks. He's survived 27 gorings himself, but what he sees in Zaragoza makes him consider quitting the profession.

Cornadas
—gorings—are so common that every plaza is legally required to have a surgeon on site. Bullfighters now routinely survive injuries that would have killed their fathers and grandfathers. Good luck, now, excellent luck: Carlos Val-Carreres is the Zaragoza surgeon, one of the best in Spain.

“I'm asphyxiating,” Padilla gasps as they bring him in. Many hands guide him into the shadowy infirmary. Someone scissors off his clothing. Someone inserts a breathing tube into his windpipe. Val-Carreres understands instantly that this is a potentially fatal
cornada
, one of the worst he's seen in 30 years, and one they are ill equipped to handle in the infirmary. Padilla, now tracheally intubated, is loaded into an ambulance.

Pronóstico muy grave
, Val-Carreres tells reporters.

At 7:52
P.M
., half an hour after the goring, Padilla arrives at the emergency room. He presents with multiple fractures to the left side of his face, a detached ear, a protruding eyeball, and hemorrhage at the base of his skull. A five-hour operation saves his life. The surgeons rebuild his cheekbone and eyelid and nose, with mesh and titanium plates. But they are unable to repair his split facial nerve, which has been divided by the bull's horn, because they cannot locate the base of the nerve. Padilla wakes up from the anesthesia to discover that he can no longer move the left side of his face. It is paralyzed.