The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (63 page)

Cecy huffs a sigh and eyes her nails, content to let him tell the story. She cuts in only to correct his memory, which after a dozen or more concussions, can stand the help. “You took more pills than that,” she says when he talks about the period after his first back surgery, post-retirement. In 2005, he had a lumbar laminectomy to fix three vertebrae in his back, and got healthy enough to hold an executive position with an office-cleaning outfit in New York. He also cut back on his pill consumption—though not quite as much as he recalls. “It wasn't just a couple a day,” she says. “The co-pays for your pills—the sleep stuff, the Vicodins, plus the muscle relaxers—that was in the thousands, babe.”

Lucas seems stunned. “You sure that wasn't later, when my neck got bad?”

“Baby, we were broke, even with your TV gig. Every last dollar went to drugs.”

By 2008, Lucas's NFL coverage had ended, and his cervical nightmare began: short, sharp spasms that had Cecy fearing he'd developed Tourette's. Dropped by his doctors because he had no insurance and couldn't pay cash for visits, he hit the street and found dealers happy to help a TV star. “I'm talking professionals in Manhattan, not some kid on a corner; for a while, they wouldn't take my money. They'd just say, ‘Bring me to the club when you go out.' I'd get them past the ropes, introduce them around, and be on my way to the tunnel with my stash.”

But addiction is a beast whose belly can't be filled. Lucas's intake doubled, then quadrupled. In a year, he'd lost his start-up business because he was so doped he couldn't make meetings; lost the big, suburban house downstate that Cecy spent years remodeling; pulled his daughters off dance teams and cheerleading squads because he needed their travel money for his jones; and moved the family, Christmas week, to a saltbox in Harrison, where they were awakened by drunks banging on their door. “All I did then was break their hearts; why they didn't leave me, I'll never know.”

“Because you wanted to die, and we wouldn't let you. Tell about the time Rayven stopped you.”

Rayven, his oldest, walked into Lucas's bedroom on a morning he'd set aside to shoot himself. “I was at my worst, just filled with fuckin' poison,” he says. “She's standing two feet from where I'm hiding the gun and says, ‘Daddy, I know you're sick and having a bad time, but I just really, really love you and want you better.' I mean, what do you say to that but I love you too, baby, and I promise I'll keep trying?”

He made a series of calls to the league and players' union, seeking cash and medical help. What came back, says Cecy, was a disability application “the size of a frickin' phone book. We filled it out the best we could, and six months later: denied.” Ultimately, they managed to get him partial disability, borrowed against his NFL pension; meanwhile, his checks from SNY went “directly to drugs—I never saw them,” she says. Then came the break that saved his life: a back-channels call from a former league physician, passing on Smith's private number. “He said, ‘You can't use my name, but she'll take care of you. Please call her before you do something crazy.'”

Three days later, Lucas was on an examining table at PAST's surgical center in Clifton. “The nurse who took my pressure ran out to get the doc. I'm thinking, Hmm, this probably ain't good,” he says. After 12 years of pilling, his heart had doubled in size, and his blood pressure readings ran so high that any strain could have triggered a stroke. He was rushed to see Dr. Bart De Gregorio, PAST's pulmonary director, and put on a crash course of diuretics and beta blockers. Through diet and medicine, doctors reduced his triglycerides while weaning him from a dozen toxic drugs. That October, PAST's Emami performed a spinal fusion, resolving at least some of the pain in his neck and allowing him to enter rehab.

For three full days, Lucas writhed on the floor, shitting and barfing and hearing voices. When he managed to get upright, the joint pain was savage: “He walked,” says Smith, who flew him to Florida and stayed through the worst of it, “like an 80-year-old guy with gout.” As the Suboxone built up, though, the pain receded; in a fortnight, he was stretching and taking long walks, things he hadn't done in nearly a decade. After 42 days, he went home to his family, who'd moved to their current house across town. “I came through the door, and it was just tears, hugs, and more tears: the real me was back, not the zombie,” says Lucas. He looks over at Cecy, who stands to clear the dishes in order to keep from crying. “All the wrong I did her, the times I broke her heart: for her to still love me . . . man, you don't know.”

It's about to get seriously moist in that kitchen when Lucas's daughters burst in: two tall, lissome teens and a 10-year-old colt with their mother's heartfulness. They kiss Mom hello, then hover over Dad, sensing something amiss. “You okay?” they ask him. “Does your neck hurt? Your knee?” “I'm fine,” he says. “Stop mothering me.” “Then, good,” says Rayven, grabbing his hand. “You can drive us to Wendy's: we're starved!”

JEFF M
AC
GREGOR

FROM
ESPN.COM

 

I
N WHICH WE RETURN
yet again to the work of Samuel Beckett in the interest of clarifying American football.

 

A country road. A tree
.

Evening
.

ESTRAGON
: Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR
: I'm beginning to come around to that. All my life I've believed, but not now.

They sit a long time in silence
.

ESTRAGON
: Believed in what?

VLADIMIR
: Which what?

ESTRAGON
: In what did you once believe?

VLADIMIR
: The NFL.

ESTRAGON
: In football?

VLADIMIR
: Not just football.
NFL
football. The Shield. It was a symbol.

ESTRAGON
: A cymbal?

VLADIMIR
: A symbol of quality. It was unquestionable.

ESTRAGON
: Incontrovertible.

VLADIMIR
: Ineluctable.

ESTRAGON
: Indisputable.

VLADIMIR
: Undeniable.

ESTRAGON
: And now?

VLADIMIR
: I question. I dispute. I eluct.

ESTRAGON
: What was once indubitable is now dubitable.

VLADIMIR
: The whole apparatus is in doubt.

ESTRAGON
: Replacement officials?

VLADIMIR
: Scabs.

ESTRAGON
: The very same! Like a skinned knee!

VLADIMIR
: It's tragedy masquerading as comedy.

ESTRAGON
: Comedy rebranded as tragedy.

VLADIMIR
: It's a leaguewide lockout.

ESTRAGON
: Union-busting cahoots! The league is in league with The League.

VLADIMIR
: The league isn't the players. The league is the owners.

ESTRAGON
: Maybe the league left its wallet in its other pants, because the league needs to scrounge a few dollars.

VLADIMIR
: Very few.

ESTRAGON
: So the league is using bargain officials from other leagues.

VLADIMIR
: From the Lingerie League.

ESTRAGON
: Safety first! Who would know better the risks and rules governing high-speed helmet-to-helmet contact and potential brain injury than a back judge from the Lingerie Football League?

VLADIMIR
: And at an attractive discount.

ESTRAGON
: So except for the absurd incompetence, it's been a win-win-win right down the line.

VLADIMIR
: He'll have to explain it all to us when he gets here.

ESTRAGON
: Who will?

VLADIMIR
: Goodell.

ESTRAGON
: We're waiting for Goodell?

VLADIMIR
: Yes. He can explain it.

ESTRAGON
: Of course he can. Maybe. But can he make good on it?

They wait
.

VLADIMIR
: In his defense, you can't be half a gangster.

ESTRAGON
: Or even half a Gangnam.

VLADIMIR
: Those nickels and dimes add up.

ESTRAGON
: Too true.

VLADIMIR
: Especially in Las Vegas.

ESTRAGON
: Where they gamble on football?

VLADIMIR
: Professional American football is the most beloved and lucrative random numbers generator in human history.

Both rise, look up into the lights, and hold their hats over their hearts for a very long time. Their eyes well with tears. They sit again, exhausted
.

ESTRAGON
: But it has to be on the up-and-up.

VLADIMIR
: On the level.

ESTRAGON
: On the square.

VLADIMIR
: Or it might as well not be football at all.

ESTRAGON
: Like operetta, or the New York Jets.

VLADIMIR
: Or anything else you can't reliably bet upon.

ESTRAGON
: Because the league sells physical marvels and unbelievable feats of nonfiction.

VLADIMIR
: And if people can't believe them . . .

ESTRAGON
: Real trouble.

VLADIMIR
: It's a question of epistemology . . .

ESTRAGON
: And the betting lines.

VLADIMIR
: Exactly. Goodell has to fix it because all of a sudden it looks fixed.

The sky darkens
.

ESTRAGON
: Will he never get here?

VLADIMIR
: I'm not entirely convinced he ever left.

ESTRAGON
: True. He's everywhere.

VLADIMIR
: And nowhere.

ESTRAGON
: He'd want us to remember.

VLADIMIR
: Remember that it's slow-motion violence set to music?

ESTRAGON
: The very thing. Sentimentalized carnage. The Shield is a cymbal of integrity, after all. And your assurance of highest-quality action.

They sit a long time in silence
.

VLADIMIR
: Still. It's not a strike.

ESTRAGON
: It's a lockout.

VLADIMIR
: Time to shake off the dust. Shall we go?

ESTRAGON
: Yes, let's go.

They do not move
.

Curtain

K
ENT
B
ABB
is a sports enterprise writer for the
Washington Post
, which he joined in October 2012 after spending the previous five years covering the NFL and writing columns and longform pieces for the
Kansas City Star
. He also has worked for
The
(Columbia, South Carolina)
State
. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, he lives in northern Virginia with his wife, Whitney.

 

C
HRIS
B
ALLARD
is a senior writer at
Sports Illustrated
. He is the author of three books, including
The Art of a Beautiful Game
and
One Shot at Forever
, about the 1971 Macon Ironmen baseball team. A graduate of Pomona College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two daughters. This is his third appearance in
The Best American Sports Writing
.

 

B
ARRY
B
EARAK
joined the
New York Times
sports staff in late 2011 after many years as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2002 for stories from Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has twice received the George Polk Award, once for his coverage from Afghanistan and then, along with his wife Celia Dugger, for work from Zimbabwe. Bearak, a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing, has also been a staff writer for the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
and a visiting professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was raised in the Chicago area and attended Knox College and the University of Illinois.