The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (46 page)

That changed the Fourth of July when I was sent down to Seward to cover a news story on the Mount Marathon Race, a brutal 3,022-foot climb with sketchy handholds, slippery footing, and ankle-deep scree. The night before the race it rained and I slept in a leaky tent, and I huddled in a ball, wet and cold and depressed because a few years earlier, my sister had died of an eating disorder on the Fourth of July, and all I wanted to do was rock back and forth and weep.

Maybe it was lack of sleep or maybe I had a hint of a fever, but as I climbed those steep cliffs to the halfway point on the mountain the next morning, I felt renewed. The rain cleared and the air was fresh, and up so high I could see out over the bay and the harbor, the boats tiny and snug. Later, as I shot photograph after photograph of women running down the mountain, muddy and bloodied and punching their fists triumphantly in the air, something opened inside to me. My head swirled and the bright light flashed behind my eyes and I heard my sister's voice, low and sardonic and husky from too many cigarettes; it was as if she were right there beside me. “What happened to you, Cin?” she asked. “You used to be so brave and fearless.” And it all came back, those summer days of running through the fields with my bare and tough feet, and how when I fell down I got right back up and ran again. I felt a stab of grief so deep and pure that I cried out, not only for my sister but also for that fierce and wild girl I had once been. Why had I given her up so easily, so carelessly? Why had I left her so far behind?

After that, it was as if there were a hum inside of my chest. All winter I worked out at the gym and when spring came, I began running again, a few miles at first, each step awkward and clunky so that my knees shook and ankles ached with effort. Soon I was up to five and then eight and finally 10 miles, and the next Fourth of July I stood at the starting line of the Mount Marathon Race with 300 other fierce and gritty women, and when the gun went off I was running again, running up Fourth Avenue and Jefferson Street to the base of the mountain, where I pulled myself up over roots and fell and cried and sweated, leaving a trail of blood over those cliffs like something holy, an initiation or a communion.

I collapsed at the finish line and the woman ahead of me threw up on my shoes. I sat there, and the sky was blue and the air shimmered with heat and the blood from my knee dripped down on the pavement, and I was so happy that I couldn't stop smiling.

 

During a mountain race out on Knoya Ridge a few years ago, a young man collapsed and died. It was an overcast day in late spring, the air damp and moody. About 30 of us lined up at the start and ran through curved and wooded trails that slowly evened out the higher we climbed. Our pace slowed and sweat ran down our backs, and during one fierce ridge I leaned down and rubbed my fingers in the dirt and stuck them into my mouth, just to have something to taste. Up above the tree line the world opened and the breeze picked up and there was nothing but silence and mountains and a stuttered line of runners.

A small group huddled near the finish, and a woman yelled that someone was hurt, to please go around. I thought of broken bones, bruised legs, the usual running injuries, until I saw the fallen man's face, slack and blue and unmoving as a woman leaned across his chest and uselessly administered CPR.

We gathered around him, all of us. We took off our shirts and windbreakers and covered his body, and then we stood sentinel, we stood near the top of that mountain, surrounded by valleys and sky and clouds, in that place of unimaginable beauty, and nothing moved but our breaths and the flutter of windbreakers across the young man's stilled legs.

After the rescue crew arrived, after the hellish arranging of the body over the stretcher, after the liftoff and the final silence, after the run back down the mountain and the days and weeks that followed, I read in the newspaper that the man had been just 22 years old and had had a preexisting heart condition. I knew even then that I would never forget that day, not only the young man's death but everything else too: the clouds pressing close, the silence, the mist of cold air rising around us.

Often when I run I think of how it would feel to die in the mountains. Part of me rejoices, not because I want to die but because I'm running over rocks and my arms are outstretched and my breath comes hard and I am totally and completely in my body. Yet each time I run I can feel the persistent and inevitable possibility of my own death, and behind it and before it and probably even because of it, so much fucking life.

CHARLES SIEBERT

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

 

L
AST APRIL
28
, a splendid spring Saturday that fairly begged you to be outdoors, I spent all afternoon in front of my living room TV, anxiously watching the last day of the annual NFL draft, live from Radio City Music Hall. As big a football fan as I am, I had never seen any part of a draft, to say nothing of its final four rounds, which are a roughly seven-hour marathon that lasts until sundown. And yet, on that day, I sat riveted.

I had in front of me what's known as a Draft Scout Player Profile: a starkly efficient, computerized summation of every draftable player's past prowess and future prospects. I, however, was interested in only one, my nephew, my younger sister's son. His specs were, of course, familiar to me. But somehow the officious, bare-bones alignment on my computer screen—in categories befitting a prize steer at auction—rendered him a complete stranger. And a rather impressive one at that.

Name: Pat Schiller. Number: 53. Position: Outside linebacker. Height: Six-foot-one. Weight: 234. College: Northern Illinois. Under “Pro Day Results”—his audition, essentially, before several NFL scouts at the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University earlier in March—were 22 bench presses of 225 pounds, a 35-inch vertical leap, and, for a linebacker, a head-turning 4.65 seconds in the 40-yard dash. Under his “Draft Scout Snapshot” was a link to game-highlight footage: a rapid-fire sequence of heat-seeking-missile launches into ball carriers; the all-out, “high-motor” mode of play that garnered number 53 a team-leading 115 tackles in his senior year, along with second-team All Mid-American Conference and Northern Illinois's Linebacker of the Year honors. As for Pat's “Projected Round,” there was, after the word “stock,” a bright red, upward-pointing arrow, followed by the words “shot late.”

Some 800 miles west, meanwhile, in a two-story modern colonial on a neatly etched cul-de-sac in the western Chicago suburb Geneva, Pat lay on the living room carpet, holding his golden retriever, Champ. Around the TV with him was his immediate family: his father, also named Pat, a longtime excavation contractor as well as an accomplished pianist and songwriter in the Billy Joel mode, with a couple CDs to his credit and a number 6 single on a 2004 adult-contemporary-music radio chart; Pat's mother, my younger sister, Cathy, a doctor's medical assistant; my niece, Stephanie, a classically trained vocalist who now works in the admissions office at Northern Illinois University, her alma mater as well; and her fiancé, Michael. My nephew, my sister had told me, wanted to keep things low-key, wanted to avoid the roomful of slack faces and well-meaning condolences should things not go as hoped.

He was, in a sense, already chosen. Of the 80,000 or so who play college football every year, no more than 1,500 are even scouted by pro teams. On average about 300 of those players will be invited to show their stuff at the weeklong NFL scouting combine held every February at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Hundreds more will perform at regional combines or at their college team's pro days. Among the heads Pat turned was that of Ran Carthon, son of the New York Giants fullback Maurice Carthon. Ran Carthon was also a former NFL running back before becoming a scout for the Atlanta Falcons. The Falcons called Pat four times in the previous week alone, the final call coming that Saturday morning.

“Stay by your phone for Rounds 6 and 7,” he was told.

What followed was a slow-motion combo to the gut. The Falcons' sixth-round pick went to Charles Mitchell, a safety out of Mississippi State. In Round 7, they took Travian Robertson, a defensive tackle from the University of South Carolina. Four picks later, the Indianapolis Colts took as the draft's last selection Chandler Harnish, the quarterback at Northern Illinois and my nephew's close friend and college housemate.

“The room went kind of quiet,” Pat told me. “There was like this skipped heartbeat. And then the waiting started all over again.”

Seconds after the official NFL draft ends, a whole other nether-draft begins, one far more frenzied and dramatic than the one at Radio City. From 1967, the year the NFL instituted a joint draft with the more recently established American Football League, until 1976, the draft went 17 rounds, with about 450 players being selected. The current seven-round format totals about 250, leaving a vast countrywide bin of talented discards that general managers, coaches, and scouts start madly ferreting through, like a group of shoppers who have been granted a limited after-hours spree for bargain-basement gems.

Not two minutes after Harnish's selection that day, Pat's phone rang. Ran Carthon was on the line. The Falcons wanted him.

“The truth is,” said Dave Lee, Pat's agent, a partner of PlayersRep based in Cleveland, “when you get toward the bottom of the draft, basically from the fifth to the seventh round, the talent level isn't all that different from that of the undrafted free agents. Teams at that point are just looking for guys that fit their system, and it's anybody's guess whether you'll get drafted or not. The Falcons wanted speedy linebackers. Pat shows a lot of speed. They said, ‘We think it's a great opportunity.' They went through the reasons. Obviously we said, ‘We're getting other calls,' so we could play a bit with the signing bonus, but it was pretty easy to jump on their offer.”

A contract was soon faxed to the Schillers' home, its terms at once bleak and beguiling. Up front, Pat would receive just a $1,000 signing bonus, along with per diem expenses of $155 during spring camp. Should he make it as far as preseason training camp beginning in late July, the payment would be the NFL Players Association's stipulated $850 a week. The big money, big for a rookie at least, was all in the offing: the standard first-year salary of $390,000 he receives only if he makes and remains on the 53-man roster for the entire season. Should he be picked for the team's eight-man practice squad instead, he would receive a salary of $5,700 a week, amounting to $96,900 over a 17-week season and more if the Falcons made the playoffs.

Pat and Dave Lee were encouraged by the fact that the Falcons hadn't picked any linebackers in the official draft. The team did, however, sign three other undrafted linebackers and a total of 23 undrafted free agents in all, the most of any team in the NFL. In the end, 623 undrafted free agents were signed in 2012 to the same basic contract that arrived at the Schillers' home that evening. It all seems wildly prodigal. But not in terms of breaking owners' bank accounts so much as players' hearts. Two, maybe three, of the undrafted free agents annually signed by each NFL team will make the 53-man roster. Of the 23 undrafted players on the Falcons roster at the start of last season's minicamp, one player made the roster.

With a signed contract in hand that Saturday evening, my nephew descended the stairs to the family's finished basement to use the fax machine in his father's music studio. The Falcons ask that their players send such contracts back before midnight. It's the undrafted free agent's peculiar inversion of the Cinderella tale: having to rush to ensure the right to arrive at the NFL's ball in a pumpkin.

 

Six weeks later, his sculptured frame blurring in the gridiron- warble of a Georgia June sun, Pat was standing on the Atlanta Falcons' practice field in Flowery Branch, learning the consequences of living his dream. Midway through the Falcons' six weeks of spring-training sessions—each NFL team's yearly padless orientation ritual—Pat had just got what all first-year players in the NFL most crave: a play, a “rep.” Reps for a rookie are but a few precious crumbs left after the daily scrums of the first and second teams—the “Ones” and “Twos.” It's one of the crueler realities of the NFL's strictly enforced hierarchy, a classic Catch-22: what you most need in order to make a team as a rookie, especially an undrafted one, are opportunities to show what you can do. You have little chance of getting those, however, precisely because you're a rookie. There are so few chances, in fact, that when a rep does come your way, the tendency is to get a bit greedy, to overplay.

Mike Nolan, a former defensive coordinator for the New York Giants, Jets, and five other NFL teams before being hired by Atlanta last winter, had just signaled for the “Threes,” with Pat at middle linebacker or “Mike,” to execute a “Dallas freeze,” a package featuring two blitzing linebackers. As one of the scheme's designated blitzers, Pat shot toward the quarterback, then deftly swerved inside a blocking fullback to get at his target. Another head-turning display, although in this instance for entirely the wrong reasons. Coaches love speed. They love schemes even more, and in that one Pat was designated to be the “contain man.” His responsibility was to go outside the blocking back to prevent the play from developing wide.

“Give me two good reasons,” Nolan's voice boomed, “why you went inside.”

Pat went slack beneath a bowed helmet, then shrugged.

“That's right!” Nolan replied. “Because there aren't any!”

Over dinner that evening at the nearby Legacy Lodge on Lake Lanier, where the Falcons were staying throughout spring camp, that play came up, just as it would, Pat assured me, at team meetings the following morning.

“I heard ‘freeze,'” Pat said, “so I knew I was going to be one of the blitzers. I got that. But I treated it like a normal blitz, where you find any way you can to the quarterback. I didn't realize I was the contain player. Unfortunately, in this league, you don't get many chances, and that's a blitz I'd only run maybe twice in the three weeks that I've been here. So you do all these things right and then you mess up the last one, and you're getting yelled at. NFL coaches will tolerate physical mistakes but not mental ones.”