The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (54 page)

Developmental compression:
that's what the caretakers of psyche and spirit call a phenomenon that became normalized over the last few decades. Truth is, Agassi, perhaps the most developmentally compressed athlete of modern times, could never have wrought his groundbreaking educational initiative—which includes plans for more than 75 charter schools serving up to 50,000 students nationwide—if he hadn't leaped off the compression track in his twenties for long stretches that outraged and bewildered sports fans. Truth is, any athlete of this era, unless he attended a tiny high school that had to scrounge up enough kids to field a team, probably
had
to be developmentally compressed for at least a few years if only to experience the simple joy of starting on the varsity.

Joseph's speech is slowing down, it's growing difficult for him to form sentences. And still the story he tells on the steps of UVA's Rotunda brings tears to the eyes of an English professor at the rally. He never even mentions to his listeners that he plays for UVA. He doesn't want them to stereotype him as a football player.

 

Hope surges through Joseph and the hunger strikers: UVA president Teresa Sullivan has agreed to meet with them. At an odd hour, 7:00
A.M
., and two more days of hunger hence, but they're desperate now, fearful that their sacrifice will evaporate in the dry air of apathy, praying that the national attention Joseph has attracted has finally begun to make the administration flinch.

On his sixth foodless day he and a roommate who has joined the hunger strike, Peter Finn, can't stop obsessing about food: sushi . . . pizza . . . chicken . . . steak, sushi, pizza, chicken, steak,
sushipizzachickensteak
. They go out to dinner just to watch their girlfriends eat. “Can we sniff your food?” Joseph begs his girlfriend, Kathy Storm. She hands him a french fry and he holds it beneath his nose, closing his eyes, swooning. “Can you eat one with your mouth open?” he begs. She complies. He's getting lightheaded, goofy. He leans in to inhale another french fry and knocks over a glass, splashing water all over the table.

 

He falls silent on his seventh day. Opening his mouth only now and then to say to Peter, “God, I'm hungry.”

“Please,” their other roommate, Toye Falaiye, keeps pleading with them, “just eat.”

LoVanté Battle, Virginia's junior safety, comes by to check on Joseph. “You look pathetic,” he tells him.

Joseph feels the pressure growing. He's entering the final week before spring break, has papers due and exams to take for which he can't possibly focus, and he has a flight to Belize in five days to co-lead a group of a dozen UVA students in renovating an orphanage, a commitment made weeks ago.

He feels doubt arising. He knows that doubt always arises in movements like this one, and that here is where his heroes dug in . . . but their battles were so much more personal than his. Ali was getting drafted into an army during wartime. Walton's friends were getting shot at in Vietnam. Jim Brown, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos had to go to the other side of town to eat and sleep. Billie Jean King was playing for prize money that was sometimes one-sixth of what men received and breaking the law to get an abortion in 1971. Their success as activists four decades ago is one more reason that today's athlete doesn't feel he
must
stand up. If he's black, he can eat or sleep anywhere his wallet allows, make just as much money as any white icon, and, like everyone else, leave wars to men and women who choose to fight them. It doesn't seem necessary to risk his playing time, reputation, or commercial popularity . . . unless . . . unless he fully understands the hero's quest and wishes to fulfill it.

It's not enough, in that quest, to overcome all the obstacles and enemies in the forest and seize the Holy Grail. “The mystique of the hero is that he goes into a realm that the rest of us can't go to, but he's got to come back with something that's important for everyone,” says Edwards. “If he comes back with the Grail and doesn't use it to support the people and place he came from, there's a huge chunk missing from his halo. Jackie Robinson isn't a hero because he was a great baseball player or Ali because he was a great boxer. Joe Frazier and Larry Holmes were great boxers too. It takes something more than that. Heroism has been downgraded into a pursuit of celebrity, and celebrity doesn't carry any obligation to anything except to fame and money.”

Psssst
. Here's the secret that Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali discovered, the one that no agent or handler whispers into the modern athlete's ear: when you play your sport for something much larger than yourself, than your wallet, than your ego or even your team, when you tap into
that
power, son . . . look out.

 

Crunch time. Summit meeting with the university president. Eighth day of Joseph's hunger strike. He crawls out of bed at 6:30, slogs across campus to stand vigil with 30 others outside Sullivan's office. In the rain. For nearly two hours. Does she know that ESPN's next, that Joseph and the hunger strike are about to be featured on
Outside the Lines
and
ESPN.com
?

The meeting finally ends. Six Living Wage supporters walk outside, nearly empty-handed. The administration agrees to little more than to meet again. At the second meeting, two days later, it agrees to form a student advisory committee to look further at the issue.

Joseph walks his hollow gut through the drizzle, feeling a little bit of everything. Hollowness spreading into his chest because the clock's running out on him. Disappointment that there'll be no fourth-quarter game-winning drive. Excitement about ESPN. Worried that “success,” even if it comes, might amount to little more than what previous Living Wage Campaigns have achieved: a small raise for the workers that's not tied to the living wage, that doesn't cover the growing legions of contract workers, and that can get swallowed in no time by inflation . . . which is, in fact, exactly what will happen two months later.

He has lost 12 pounds. He has to start eating, the campaign's doctor has told him, to give his body a chance against the new bacteria he'll be encountering in Belize in just four days. He twitches back and forth for hours over his decision, and finally, at 9:30
P.M
., he gives in. He and his roommate order takeout.

A half hour later, in silence, Peter tears into a slice of pizza and Joseph lifts a spoonful of miso soup and a sushi roll to his mouth. Sushi tastes great. Sushi feels lousy. He tells his fellow strikers the next morning that eating just doesn't feel right, and how much he appreciates their carrying on, then wonders what the consequences of his act will be.

Carlos and Smith, acting on a far larger stage, were immediately suspended from the U.S. team and banished from the Olympic Village, then received death threats at home and watched one door after another close when they applied for jobs. Carlos took a claw hammer to his furniture in the middle of the night to use as fuel to keep his family warm. “It was like I had cancer,” he says. The FBI worked up a 3,500-page dossier on Edwards, some of it coming from informants placed in his sociology classes. Joseph? He just takes a cyber-beating.

 

SCBIGTIME
: What an idiot. If this cause is so important to him, he should organize charity events to contribute to those he feels are in need rather than attack job creators.

TOBY
21155: Excuse me while [I] throw up . . . another brainwashed progressive.

MATTHEW
055062: Sounds like he needs to fast for playing time, this fool sucks b— and he knows it!

CVILLEPSUFAN
: Who cares? There will still be a college game on Thursday.

BRONCO-FORCE:
doesn't take this lying down: Honestly . . . how can some of you people sleep at night. He's a young, obviously socially conscious athlete, who is doing something to stand up for what he believes in. Why do so many wish to see the me-me-me athletes of today, while scorning young men of purpose like this one . . .

 

Plenty of other fans and media members jump to Joseph's defense. His roommate shakes his head. “If a walk-on player gets this coverage,” concludes Peter, “just imagine what a star could do!”

Joseph's girlfriend, Kathy—half Norwegian, half German—can't explain this to her countrymen. “It's
amazing
in this country how much power sports gives you,” she says. “
A football player!
I didn't think that would be of any importance.
A football player!
”

And Joseph? He's still a little dazed by it all, astonished by the media storm and the admiring emails that came in, one from NFL Players Association president DeMaurice Smith, another from the leader of the Service Employees International Union expressing interest in helping the UVA workers form a union, and yes, even a response from Coach Reid saying that he hoped this wouldn't drive a wedge between them and that he still had great respect for Joseph. “I feel more empowered,” Joseph says. “It inspired me. I want to commit deeper. This is how it goes with every major change in society. It requires activism. People don't change without pressure. Athletes are so magnified and have such an opportunity to use that, but they don't, and so the focus on them often gets put on the negative. It really works against them in the end. Sports are the main arena that black males are seen in, and there are so many intelligent ones, but they're not heard from on these issues, so all you hear is
dumb jocks
or
violent black men
.

“Maybe I'm an idealist, but in a world where people are starving while others are making millions of dollars a year, it's about the
will
to change it. It's about people who don't care. At the core of all great injustice is greed. It's not an American problem. It's a human problem. If my mother hadn't gotten housing vouchers after my father left and moved us into a neighborhood with a high school that really cared about its students, it likely would have turned out very bad for me. The teachers in my previous school system were unqualified and unhappy people. How are you going to go to college attending schools like that? That's not a merit system. That's
chance
.”

 

What battles loom for the next Wonman Joseph Williams . . . and will we have to wait another 30 or 40 years for him to arise? Two issues fester right on sports' doorstep, ripe and ready to burst. The first is the emergence and acceptance of the first openly gay athlete in a mainstream team sport. The second is the systemic corruption of college athletics, from the tens of millions of dollars being made by TV networks, conferences, and the NCAA on the sweat and toil of the college athlete to the absurdity that median spending on athletics by universities in major conferences is four to 11 times higher per athlete than that spent on education-related expenses per student and growing at double to triple the rate of academic expenditures, resulting in a net
loss
for all but seven athletic programs nationwide, even with all those TV revenues, according to the Knight Commission—a deficit that must be made up by increases in tuition or increased allotments drawn from state taxes or general university funds.

Who knows?
This
Wonman Joseph Williams, after all, has two years of eligibility left at UVA and plenty of time after that to consider his next stand. “There needs to be a radical revolution of the way we view sports, especially on the amateur level, in America,” he says. “I'd love to be a part of it if it ever happens. But it's hard for an athlete to say he's going to protest for the sake of athletes at large, because most of us have just four years, and we want to win
now
and to get playing time
now
.”

But the biggest looming battlefront, the one that cries for athletes at the ramparts yet transcends sports, the one that will require the most heroic investment from athletes because they're the ones reaping the status quo's richest rewards, is the very cause, says Edwards, for which Joseph just laid his stomach on the line. “
The
problem of the 21st century is going to be the deepening economic disparity, about the have-mores and the have-nones. What this young man in Virginia did spoke
exactly
to that.”

The old, gray warriors from the 1960s and '70s, they're watching, they're waiting. “Sure,” says Walton, “there are people just retreating to their mansions on the hill and pulling the ladder up behind them, but the great thing about any group dynamic is that it always comes down to
one guy
. And we all have the chance to be that guy. The one with the willingness to stand tall for those who can't. It still comes down to: do you care, and does it really matter?
I
do, and
it
does. And I salute this young man for standing tall.”

Carlos isn't holding his breath. “The people who do these things start building the courage of others to think about taking a stand too,” he says. “What this kid did might bring a light to other athletes. But it won't start a stampede.”

 

It's the morning after the end of Full Harmony's hunger strike. He and athletes all across America are pulling on their sweats and hurrying to weight rooms, to conditioning and agility drills, to classes. Don't peer at them, these determined young men and women on college and professional teams, and ask where their social conscience and voice have gone. Look at us. We're the soil from which they grow. If we don't change, they can't, and so the first revolution that would have to occur is the one that no one's talking about.

Our next Wonman Joseph Williams, the ground-changing one, would have to be so bold and so radical even to
consider
attempting that revolt. Then he'd have to pray that enough other athletes, among the 99 percent who aren't going pro, understand deep inside. They'd stop pumping iron, refuse to run sprints, quit reporting to gymnasiums and practice fields, stop being
entertainment
, demand to be reunited with the student body, insist that the runaway developmental-compression train slow down long enough for them to find out who they are
besides
athletes. Long enough for them to expand. They'd sit down not for money—a real concern as well—but for time and for space. To be human-being-student-athletes.