The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (55 page)

Yes, that's hard to imagine. The whole edifice is likelier to collapse first, from forces outside of sports: excesses of all kinds have a way, eventually, of being leveled.

There's no whiff of that this morning in the world of sports. Joseph's blinking the sleep out of his eyes, wolfing down a bowl of cereal, heading to a rehab workout. Everything's back to normal, nothing unusual to report. We return you to your regularly scheduled programming. There's still a college game on Thursday night.

PATRICK HRUBY

FROM WASHINGTONIAN

 

O
N THE DAY
he took his own life, Austin Trenum ate cheesecake. He was 17. He loved cheesecake. He loved the Beastie Boys too, and SpongeBob Squarepants and the silly faux-hawk haircut he spent months cultivating and two minutes shaving off because, well, that's what teenagers do. He loved his little Geo Metro convertible, neon yellow and as macho as a golf cart, a gift from his grandfather, the two driving all the way from Texas to Austin's home in Nokesville, Virginia, a close-knit community of 1,354 in Prince William County.

Austin loved his parents, Gil and Michelle, and his younger brothers, Cody and Walker. He loved his girlfriend, Lauren. He loved cheering for the girls' volleyball team at Brentsville District High School, smearing his chest with paint and screaming his lungs out alongside his lacrosse teammates; loved sneaking out of his chemistry class to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” with his friend Carmen in the band room; loved fishing and paintball, roller coasters and blasting “Sweet Caroline” with the top down.

He especially loved football. Loved watching the Dallas Cowboys. Loved playing for the Brentsville varsity team—fullback and linebacker—taking hits and delivering them, seldom leaving the field, eating two Hostess cherry pies before every game. He was a handsome kid, green-eyed like his mother, six feet tall and 190 pounds, growing stronger and more confident all the time. Under the Friday-night lights, in his beat-up helmet and shoulder pads, you could see the man Gilbert Allen Austin Trenum III was becoming.

 

It was Sunday, September 26, 2010. Michelle Trenum woke up around 8:00
A.M
. Gil was out of town, returning that afternoon from a weekend drill with his Navy Reserve unit in New Jersey. Walker, 10, their youngest, was on the living room couch, hiding under a blanket. He jumped up when Michelle walked in. Boo!

“Austin's awake,” Walker said. “He's in the basement playing a video game.”

That's odd
, Michelle thought. Austin never got up early on Sundays. Not voluntarily.

Michelle made her sons breakfast. Austin drove his other brother, Cody, 15, to a lacrosse game and cheered from the sidelines. He took more pride in his siblings than himself; he was that kind of brother. On the way home, he teased Cody. “You did good,” Austin said, before delivering the punch line. “You surprised me!”

Back at the house, Austin ate lunch. And cheesecake. While Austin surfed the Internet, he and Michelle talked about Adam James, a Texas Tech football player who had allegedly been locked in a dark electrical closet by the school's head coach, Mike Leach, after suffering a concussion. The story, which ultimately ignited a media firestorm and led to Leach's firing, began when the injured James showed up to practice in sunglasses and street clothes; Austin joked with his mother that he should do the same, just to see how his high school coach, Dean Reedy, would react.

Austin then turned serious, balancing on one foot to mimic a neurological test.

“Am I going to be out all week?” he said. “I don't want to be out all week. Do you think I'll be out two weeks?”

“You'll just have to see,” Michelle said.

During a football game the previous Friday night, Austin had sustained a concussion. Brain trauma had been in the news. There were reports of retired NFL players suffering from depression and dementia linked to their hard-hitting careers. There were congressional hearings, some of them dealing with high school football. In the coming months, the sport would be engulfed in a full-blown health crisis. Austin's parents were mostly unaware of the controversy. They had both grown up in Texas, where football was king, where getting your bell rung was just a part of the game. Almost a badge of honor.

 

Gil and Michelle had been in the Brentsville High bleachers on Friday night, chatting with friends, a full moon overhead. Neither of them saw the hit, but Gil spotted their son standing with his helmet off, touching his index finger to his nose at the direction of team trainer Richard Scavongelli. Just like last season. Good grief.

On the sideline, Austin was dazed, slurring his words. During the drive to the emergency room, he was alert enough to call Lauren, his girlfriend. By the time he was standing in line at Prince William Hospital, shirtless and sweaty, he seemed fine. He cracked jokes, flirted with the nurses who brought him a sandwich and a soda. He begged a doctor to let him leave, asked if Lauren could come back to the examination room.

A nurse asked if he wanted Tylenol.

“The last time you got a concussion, you got a headache,” Michelle said. “Are you sure you don't want it?”

“Mom, I'm fine,” Austin said. “I don't have a headache. Except for my normal football headache. I get them after every game.”

The medical staff gave Gil and Michelle a sheet of instructions: Watch for vomiting and clear fluid coming out of Austin's nose, signs of a more severe brain injury. Limit their son to “quiet activities” for the next 24 hours. Wake him from sleep every few hours to check for evidence of intracranial bleeding, such as confusion and extreme drowsiness.

Heading home, the Trenums stopped at the Chuck Wagon, a restaurant around the corner from their house, where the Brentsville High players gathered after games. Austin's teammates recounted his sideline exchange with Scavongelli.

 

SCAVONGELLI
: Do you know where you are?

AUSTIN
: Yeah. This is my field!

SCAVONGELLI
: No. Do you know what school you are at?

AUSTIN
: Yeah. My school!

SCAVONGELLI
: Do you know who you're playing against?

AUSTIN
: No.

 

This is my field! Everyone laughed. They laughed at the way Austin had gotten emotional on the field too, cussing out one of his buddies, something he never, ever did.

On Saturday morning, Austin attended football film study; that afternoon, he went fishing; in the evening, he took Lauren to a Sugarland concert, a belated celebration of her birthday. They sat on the Jiffy Lube Live lawn, taking pictures under the stars. When Austin got home, he texted Lauren good-night. The next day, he was sitting in his family's dining room doing homework, texting her again about meeting up two hours later to watch a Redskins game.

Austin was a good student, ranking in the top 6 percent of his class. He planned to study chemical engineering in college and was deciding between Virginia Tech and James Madison. The former had a better football team; the latter, he deduced during a campus visit, had better-looking girls. As Austin studied for his Cold War history class, Michelle went online to check his academic progress. There was a problem. He hadn't turned in two papers. Michelle was upset and lectured him about slacking off.

Gil came home around 2:30
P.M
. Michelle gave her husband a kiss and cut him a slice of cheesecake. She told him about Austin's schoolwork. Austin looked irritated—almost angry. That was out of character. Michelle saw his jaw clench. His mouth moved. She was stunned.
Did he just call me a name?
Austin stared straight ahead.

“If you don't finish your work,” she said, “you can't see Lauren tonight.”

Gil and Michelle went outside. Cody and Walker were on the living room couch, watching a football game. At some point, Austin went upstairs.

“I don't know what's wrong with Austin,” Michelle said. “He shouldn't disrespect me like that.”

“He's a teenager,” Gil said. “I'll go talk to him.”

Gil went inside. He passed the kitchen table, where his cheesecake sat untouched. He walked up the stairs, the same stairs where Austin would ambush Walker when he came home from school, peppering him with foam darts from a toy gun. The door to Austin's room was open.

Michelle Trenum heard her husband scream.

 

On her way to the hospital, Patti McKay made a deal with God.
Not Austin. Please. Take me instead
. The boy was like a second son. Every summer, the McKay and Trenum families vacationed together at a lake in Maine, where the kids would play King of the Dock—wrestling for control of a wooden swimming platform, tossing one another in the water, Austin always making sure the younger children won their share.

When her cell phone rang, Patti was in her sister's garden, kneeling in the dirt. It was Cody, panicked. Austin wasn't breathing. Gil was trying to resuscitate him. An ambulance was on the way. What should they do?

Keep performing CPR, Patti said.

A cardiology nurse, Patti suspected a subdural hematoma. A brain bleed. Which was odd. She had just seen Austin, about 90 minutes earlier, pulling up in her driveway—the top down on his little yellow convertible, Cody in the passenger seat.

Austin had been grinning. He had a gift with him, a Snickers cheesecake.

“Here, Ms. McKay,” he said. “Look what we brought for you.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay.”

“No, really—how are you feeling?”

“I'm
fine
. My headache is almost gone.”

Patti had been at the game on Friday night, standing with Austin in the Brentsville High parking lot, holding his arm to help him balance. But today his gait was normal, his hands weren't shaking. She called the emergency room, professional instincts taking over.
You're getting a boy who had a concussion two days ago. You need a neurosurgeon. If you don't have one, have a helicopter ready to evacuate
. Arriving at Prince William Hospital, she didn't see a helicopter. She saw Rob Place, the Trenums' next-door neighbor.

Austin hanged himself, Place said.

 

Nothing made sense. Not suicide. Not Austin. Not the boy who went deer hunting in West Virginia with his father and crafted elaborate zombie-apocalypse defense plans with Walker. Not the young man who always said “Yes, sir” and “No, ma'am” and was adored by his friends' parents. Not the charmed kid who never got mad on the lacrosse field, who'd scored a goal six seconds into his first high school game.

“If someone came to me and asked me to rank, one to 25, the kids on the team most likely to have problems and the kids who were the most stable, Austin was number one on the stable end of the list,” says Carl Kielbasa, Austin and Cody's former high school lacrosse coach. “His maturity level was extremely high. Never experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Almost fatherly to his brothers. Had a wonderful sense of humor. He was a great teammate, very attentive and aware, very patient and kind. A big-time leader on the team and in school—he could hang out with the kids who were partyers and be in an honor society meeting the next day. Everyone loved him.”

Austin was taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital, where he died at 2:00
A.M
. on Monday. The entire community was stunned. The boy was beloved. Football was beloved. In the Nokesville area, plans were under way to build a new $850,000 youth football complex; elementary school students were let out early on Friday afternoons, the better to high-five Brentsville High players as they made their march down the town's main road.

How could this have happened?

The Trenums went home. Later that day, their phone rang. Laura O'Neal answered. She was Austin's godmother, one of Michelle's best friends. She'd been there for Austin's first birthday, eating cowboy-themed cake; there when he got his first lacrosse stick, which he carried everywhere, like a scepter. Now she would plan his funeral.

There was a man on the line, Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football player, calling on behalf of scientists at Boston University.

They wanted Austin's brain.

 

The human brain is a wondrous thing. It enables us to throw a football, allows us to breathe, think, and love. In its neurons and glial cells, synapses and neurotransmitters, it is essentially who we are.

And who we are is fragile.

Gerard Gioia opens his laptop. On the screen is a video depicting a brain inside a skull. The brain, he explains, is a spongy mass of tissue. Surrounded by fluid, it moves independent of the skull, just slightly, the arrangement providing a protective measure of shock absorption.

“And this,” he says, “is why the helmet will never be the simple answer to this injury.”

Helmets prevent skull fractures but not concussions. Gioia clicks a button. The head rocks back and forth. The brain smashes against the inside of the skull. The screen flashes like a strobe light, a comic-book
pow!
Such is the basic dynamic of a concussion, an injury that occurs in football with alarming regularity: according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, 4 percent to 20 percent of high school and college players will suffer one during a single season. That's likely a low estimate—some experts believe as many as eight of 10 concussions go undiagnosed.

“When the head or the body takes force, the brain moves,” explains Gioia, head of Pediatric Neuropsychology at Children's National Medical Center and an expert on youth and adolescent sports concussions. “It has a certain threshold, beyond which it stretches and strains.”

Gioia loves football—played it himself in high school and college. He wants to make the sport safer. Three weeks after Austin's death, he met with Gil and Michelle in his Rockville office, where a New York Giants–themed street sign hangs on the wall. Michelle brought a picture frame containing three photos of Austin, including one of him joyfully painting his face before a volleyball game the week before his death.