The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (9 page)

“Xavier!” she called when she heard Wes's car in the driveway late that summer. “Your
girl
friend's here.”

All three of them got in the little coupe. Wes had a new driver's license and an old burgundy two-door Mitsubishi Eclipse he'd bought with earnings from mowing lawns and digging ditches. And this is who the varsity quarterback invited to ride shotgun: a 33-year-old woman in a neck brace who called his Eclipse a “girl car.” He was taking her on a date to the grocery store, with his favorite receiver in the backseat.

 

2. The One-Armed Quarterback

 

One hundred seventy-four days before he died, Wes led the Fennville Blackhawks to Decatur, a neighboring town where the field was packed hard from 55 consecutive years of football. The Decatur Raiders' game plan boiled down to one imperative: stop Wes Leonard. They did, eventually. On the first play he took the snap and sprinted left for nearly 20 yards, somersaulting in the air as he was tackled, bouncing right back up. He ran well and threw even better, and on any given play it was almost impossible to stop both. Fennville scored twice in the first quarter for a 12–8 lead and lined up for a two-point conversion. The setting sun cast thin blades of shadow. Wes ran around right tackle, one defender to beat, but the guy got him around the ankles and then a 270-pound defensive tackle came from the backside and crushed Wes to the stony ground. When he got up his left arm was hanging limp.

On the sideline, Xavier saw tears in Wes's eyes. Wes asked for something to relieve the pain. Jocelyn went searching for ibuprofen and politely declined when Maria offered her Vicodin. She heard the coach tell Xavier to go in at quarterback, and then she saw Wes push Xavier back.

“You're my receiver,” Wes said.

No one knew the extent of the injury because Wes waved the trainer away and refused to take off his shoulder pads. Gary Leonard, an assistant coach, knew his stubborn son well enough to know he might have to tackle Wes to keep him out of the game. The coaches found a compromise: Wes would stay out of the game on defense, where he usually played linebacker, and as quarterback he would try to stay in the pocket.

Jocelyn was crying.
This is gonna be a freakin' disaster
, she thought. Fennville's one-armed quarterback marched onto the field and fumbled his first snap. Decatur recovered.

Even then, Wes would not step aside for Xavier. Near the end of the second quarter, with Fennville trailing 24–18 and the sky that pale fire between day and night, Wes led his team to the line at the Decatur 43 in a four-receiver shotgun formation. Xavier stood in the slot to the right. The snap came in high, but Wes snared it with both hands, and the pain in his bad arm must have been excruciating as he rolled right and looked downfield. He was 10 yards deep when he hurled the ball, and it whistled nearly 60 yards through the air, arcing down near the goal line. Two defenders strained for it, but Xavier had beaten them both. He squeezed the ball to his chest and fell to the ground in the end zone.

After every possession Gary asked Wes, “Think you'd better get out of there?”

Wes always said, “No way.”

Fennville lost 32–26, partly because Wes couldn't play defense or run the ball, but he threw for two touchdowns with one good arm. When he took off his pads the end of his clavicle was sticking up under the skin of his left shoulder.

At the hospital, doctors found severe damage to Wes's left acromioclavicular joint, the part of the shoulder that helps raise the arm. The shoulder hung three or four inches below his right one. Full repair would require surgery, a cadaver ligament, and a recovery of six to eight weeks. But a doctor told the Leonards that Wes could put it off until after basketball season if he strengthened the shoulder with physical therapy. He might even return to football before then.

Now, against Hartford, Xavier had his chance to start at quarterback. Wes cheered from the sideline as Xavier completed passes of 37 and 43 yards and kept the game close into the fourth quarter. Hartford led 21–13 when Xavier took the Blackhawks down the field with less than a minute left. Fennville was in Hartford territory when he threw over the middle, across his body, without looking off the defender. The interception sealed the game. Xavier was inconsolable. He hurried to the bus to be alone with his failure.

Xavier gladly stepped aside when Wes came back after the next game. Even with a separated left shoulder, Wes seemed better than ever. He threw five touchdown passes against Bangor. Five more against Gobles. Seven touchdowns and 448 yards against Bloomingdale. In the big rematch with Hartford in the playoffs, after the Hartford fans displayed a Blackhawks effigy in a coffin, Wes completed 17 of 23 passes for 328 yards and four touchdowns—half of the yards and two of the touchdowns were to Xavier—and the Blackhawks quieted the Hartford fans with a 52–34 victory.

Fennville's loss on a bitter night to Montague in the round of 16 only hardened Wes's resolve to win a state basketball championship. At the start of the season he and Xavier agreed: they would finish that spring at the Breslin Center in East Lansing, playing together for the Class C state title.

In retrospect it seems absurd. The Blackhawks had no one resembling a center. They had only one consistent long-range shooter, Pete Alfaro, an unimposing sophomore who might have blown away in a strong wind. Their sixth man, Xavier, was playing his third-best sport in between doing the dishes and loads of laundry for a mother who could hardly get out of bed. They had just one starter over six-one: their point guard, Wes, who carried them with a busted shoulder and a swollen heart.

They were a blue-collar team for a blue-collar town, and with every win they lured more factory workers and fruit pickers into the gym. On March 3, as they prepared to face the formidable Bridgman Bees, who were 17-2, the Blackhawks stood at 19-0, one win from a perfect regular season.

If anyone on the court could outmuscle Wes that night it was Bridgman's Michael Kamp, a buzz-cut sharpshooter who looked like a member of Delta Force. The game boiled down to a one-on-one contest between them. Kamp won the first half. He hit a three from the right corner and another from the left to give Bridgman a 6–2 lead. Wes came back with a spinning pull-up jumper in the lane to make it 6–4. Kamp hit another long jumper in the second quarter, making it 26–15, and then faked Wes into the air and slipped past him on the baseline for a layup that made it 30–18. He had outscored Wes 12–7, and Bridgman led 35–24 at the break.

Jerry Lemmons, sitting with Gary Leonard, heard Gary say something like, “Wes keeps screwing around, we're gonna lose this game.”

Still, Wes looked cool as he walked toward the locker room. He had two quarters left to preserve the winning streak.

 

3. Three Glorious Minutes

 

Later, when Gary and Jocelyn searched their memories for some outward sign of their son's declining health, they could find none. He never missed a game or complained about shortness of breath. In at least two games that winter, he had flulike symptoms but still played well. Even toward the end of the season he came home after every game to lift weights and jump rope. If there was pain in his heart, he kept it to himself. He had a cough and a sore throat the first week of March. But on the day of the Bridgman game he felt well enough to take on his friend and teammate DeMarcus McGee in a dunk contest, during which he bounced the ball off the backboard and jammed it home.

If Wes's normal appearance was an illusion made possible by his supreme tolerance for pain, one might conclude he was too tough for his own good. Pain, after all, is the body's alarm system.

But it's also possible that he felt just fine. His illness could have remained asymptomatic until the moment it became catastrophic.

Here's how Jeffrey Towbin, chief of pediatric cardiology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, explains it. Although the doctor who performed the autopsy thought a previous viral infection might have caused the scar tissue, Towbin and other prominent cardiologists reviewed the report and reached a different conclusion: Wes Leonard was probably born with a rare genetic mutation that slowly weakened the bonds among the muscle cells in his heart. The technical term is arrythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy. It's unusual enough—affecting perhaps one person in every 5,000—that the average doctor probably wouldn't recognize it. Over the years this defective gene caused the thin walls of his right ventricle to get even thinner. It thinned the left ventricle too. In the final months fat and scar tissue replaced so much muscle that the heart's electrical forces were disrupted. It couldn't maintain a regular beat.

Under this theory, Wes Leonard's heart went from all to nothing like a collapsing bridge. The bridge holds up for years, slowly worn down by the weight of cars and the ravages of weather. Bolts quietly work loose. A billion vehicles cross without incident. And then, one rush hour, it all falls into the river.

Hearts, like bridges, can be inspected to prevent failure. But the issue is less simple than it sounds. Heart examinations come in several forms. The cheapest and most common, the electrocardiogram, can detect one set of problems and miss a second set and even falsely diagnose a third. If Wes Leonard had taken an electrocardiogram on the day of his last game, it might have found nothing wrong. Other tests exist—the echocardiogram, the cardiac MRI—but they're expensive and less practical to administer on a massive scale.

Although Wes's genetic disease was very rare, it culminated in a terribly common event called sudden cardiac arrest. About 900 Americans die from it every day. And many of those deaths could be prevented with a machine called an automatic external defibrillator. The defibrillator is a portable box of electricity that can shock a quivering heart back into rhythmic pumping. It costs about $1,200. In theory anyone can use it—even a person with no medical training—because it analyzes the patient's heartbeat, gives step-by-step instructions in a computerized voice, and refuses to deliver a shock unless it determines a shock is actually needed.

Victims of sudden cardiac arrest almost always stand a better chance of survival if they're defibrillated within 10 minutes.

When Wes Leonard collapsed at Fennville High School on the night of March 3, 2011, there was a defibrillator in the building, perhaps 50 feet from the gym.

 

Xavier watched the start of the second half from his usual place on the bench. The coach liked Xavier's frantic energy and his three-point stroke, but his shot was off that night. Other Blackhawks were cold too, which meant Wes had to lead the comeback. He cut the lead to seven with a lovely midrange jumper in Michael Kamp's face. Wes pumped his fist and looked at his coach, who was yelling something, and that momentary distraction gave Kamp a chance to blaze down the right sideline and beat Wes for a layup. Bridgman led 37–28. Game on.

The two rivals carried on a respectful conversation during their battle. “Nice box-out,” Wes said. Kamp hit a three in Wes's face to make it 43–37. Wes rattled in a fadeaway: 43–39. Wes drilled one from the top of the key. At the end of the third quarter, Bridgman's 11-point lead had dwindled to three.

Kamp tightened up his defense in the fourth, putting a left hand on Wes's rib cage, swiping at the ball with his right. Other Fennville players stepped up, giving the Blackhawks a brief lead before Kamp's twisting runner off the glass put Bridgman ahead 53–52 with about 2:30 left. Fennville hit a free throw to tie it, and then Bridgman burned nearly two minutes on its final possession. Bellowing sounds came from the Fennville crowd. A Bridgman player missed a three at the buzzer. The game spilled into overtime.

Wes Leonard scored 19 points in regulation. Michael Kamp scored 20.

In overtime both teams played with an air of exhaustion. They'd put up just two points each by the time Fennville came down for its final possession. Kamp followed Wes in lockstep. Fennville coach Ryan Klingler called time-out with 56 seconds on the clock. The fans raised a deafening chant.

“BLACK-hawk POW-er!”
Clap-clap, clap-clap-clap
.

“BLACK-hawk POW-er!”
Clap-clap, clap-clap-clap
.

There was little mystery in the play Coach Klingler would be calling. Some variation on getting the ball to Wes and getting out of the way.

In the other huddle Bridgman coach Mike Miller switched from a man defense to a trapping 1-3-1 zone. He hoped it would disrupt Fennville's rhythm, and maybe it did, but it had this side effect: Michael Kamp would no longer be Wes Leonard's shadow.

Fennville ran 25 seconds off the clock before Wes caught a pass on the left wing, well behind the three-point line, with about 30 seconds remaining. Then the Bridgman defenders made two crucial mistakes. One, they seemed to relax, believing that Fennville would hold for a shot in the final five seconds. Two, they missed a rotation on the back side of the zone, leaving an open lane to the basket.

Wes leaned in and charged. By the time he executed a flawless crossover from left to right, he was approaching the foul line. The defenders swarmed in, too late. He already had the angle to the front of the rim. On the bench Xavier saw Wes take off and thought he would throw down a dunk. No need. Wes dropped in a finger roll, net cords rippling, and Maria shrieked her approval with the other Fennville women. The Blackhawks led 57–55 with 25 seconds left.

Kamp had one more chance to surpass his rival: a clean look at a three from the right wing. It felt right leaving his hand, and it looked good sailing past the clock, 1.5, 1.4, 1.3.

Later, looking back, he was glad he missed it.

The ball hit the front rim, bounced high above the white square on the backboard and then fell away, nicking the distant edge of the rim as the buzzer sounded. The regular season was over, and the Blackhawks stood at 20-0. Wes Leonard's moment had begun.