The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (52 page)

As we motor out of the harbor, the wake created by the boats ahead of us—
Rip Tide, New Seeker, Pale Horse, Lovely Martha
—is enough to pitch us substantially and often. Jellyfish float by, and some forlorn strands of kelp. When the water splashes against the bow, a feathery spray shoots up and produces a very brief rainbow. We pass some outcropping rocks: huge, dark brown, like half-submerged dinosaurs. They're the kind of rocks that surfers always describe as “spooky.”

The white, fuzzy patch of sea that the surfers take off from is coming into focus. For now, they just sit there, saddling their boards, maybe even talking to one another. They're eyeing the horizon, looking for the next surf-worthy waves. When a set comes, the surfers will make their way to a location that to a viewer will seem mysteriously precise but to them intuitively obvious. Then they will paddle with all their might.

The San Mateo County sheriff has a boat out here, and so do the Coast Guard and the local harbor patrol. There are guys on paddleboards and motorized rubber rafts and guys zooming around on Jet Skis, here in case probability strikes and someone goes under. They occasionally stop, idle their engines, and pound a bag of trail mix. The water we're floating in is a sort of blue-green that's so pigmented it's actually tacky, like the color of a cartoon girlfriend's eyes. But just yards away it's frothy and white—what surfers call “soup.”

Zach Wormhoudt, in green, is confidently zooming left on a wave when a mantle of foam suddenly obscures him. The wave he's taken off on has collapsed, going from a dark, coherent form to chaos—messier and whiter and maybe even bigger than a cloud. We all gasp. About 20 seconds later, he bobs up like a rubber ball. I can't make out his features from here, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was grinning.

Peter Mel, known as “the Condor,” takes off behind two other competitors. Within moments, it's obvious that the wave is his. He is the one who has chosen the perfect starting spot, the place from which he'll acquire maximum stability and speed. He drops in at what must be an 87-degree angle. A slight frizz of white appears at the top of the wave and he cuts down—plummeting tens of feet in a matter of milliseconds. By the time he's at the midway point of the wave, the white frizz has grown to an anarchic mess of bright foam. It looks like a horizontal avalanche, and Mel, a man escaping it.

Mel remains a few feet in front of the white for an improbably long time. He traverses the wave vertically, maneuvering up the face and back down again, over and over again, crouching down, holding the rail of his board, sometimes grazing the wave lightly with his right hand—it's affectionate, almost romantic, but also possibly a little hostile. Surfers have complicated relations with the waves they ride, somehow both adversarial and amorous.

Finally, when the force of the wave has receded, Mel shoots his board over its face and down its back. The ride is over.

Sitting here on a plastic bucket that's probably a motion sickness receptacle, I'm struggling to remember the last time I had fun. People who do karaoke probably have fun in the way I'm imagining. As do, maybe, skeet shooters. Surfers definitely have fun in that way, the way going down a slide is fun when you're a kid: anticipatory, goal-oriented, breath-altering. Some crude calculations reveal that I haven't felt anything like that in at least six years, not since the last time I went surfing.

 

For a sporting event whose dramatic stakes easily outweigh those of any other—the Super Bowl may feel like life-or-death, but it's not—Mavericks is anticlimactic. While we wait for the closing ceremony to begin, the stage is occupied by a band that mostly plays Sublime songs for close to an hour. Much of the crowd clears out before the ceremony even starts. The parking lot looks and feels like Sunday afternoon on a college campus after a Spring Fling weekend: the sun is low, boyfriends are offering up their jackets, everyone has mild heat stroke. I smell terrible and feel like I've been slowly drinking vodka out of a water bottle for hours. It's nice. The beer garden is shutting down, and the surfers are nowhere to be seen. They're probably eating between four and five thousand calories and hopefully taking a hot shower.

Finally Jeff Clark, who runs the local surf shop and began the contest in 1999, takes the mic, smiles, and recounts some of the day's highlights. “We saw these guys do things like pulling into the barrel, just getting blown up, milking it to the inside, trying to do floaters on 15-foot elevator drops,” he says. “It was fun.” Clark calls the finalists up to the stage one by one: Peter Mel, Alex Martins, Greg Long, Zach Wormhoudt, Mark Healy, Shawn Dollar. Their faces, which nobody's seen all day, have a blue cast to them. It's hard to imagine them truly warming up for at least another 24 hours.

Peter Mel is the winner. When his name is announced, the audience goes benevolently wild. Clark puts a kelp lei over Mel's head and gestures generously to the award board. The prize is $50,000. Mel, who sports a full mustache, looks like the man on the Brawny paper towels logo, but swarthier and even more handsome. He takes the mic from Clark, grins, and looks at his fellow competitors. “We do the mutual thing, you know, as a brotherhood,” Mel explains. “We decided to split the cash.” At this, all six guys embrace in a rowdy group hug.

 

I come back the next day for another look. It's achingly perfect out, even more so now that the Jumbotron has been dismantled and the road is clear. The surfers are already gone; most just drove home after dinner and went to bed. It might be one of the only mornings that these guys have slept in.

There is no place more beautiful than where I am right now, and nobody cooler than the people who surf here. I am made aware of these kinds of superlatives every time I come back to California, and I luxuriate for a few minutes in the experience of knowing something for sure without having to think about it at all. And then I drive away.

FROM THE NEW YORKER

 

I
N ORDER TO MEET FALAFEL
, the highest-ranked backgammon player in the world, I took a Greyhound bus to Atlantic City, and then hopped a jitney to the Borgata Hotel. Falafel's real name is Matvey Natanzon, but no one calls him that, not even his mother, who calls him Mike, the name that he adopted when they emigrated from Israel to Buffalo—one leg in a long journey that began in Soviet Russia. Now even Falafel calls himself Falafel.

Falafel was in Atlantic City to support a friend he calls The Bone, a professional poker player who was registered in a tournament at the Borgata. The Bone, who is from Ukraine by way of Brooklyn, used to play backgammon, but he switched to poker because there is more money in it. Falafel is either a purist, or unable to master poker, or too lazy to really try, or all of the above. He is committed to backgammon, which is his main source of income—to the extent that he can find wealthy people who want to lose to him in cash-only private games. There are more of these than one might expect, but not a lot. Finding them and hanging on to them is a skill.

The jitney that travels between the Atlantic City hotels is run-down and slow, a horrible way to travel. Falafel would never take it. He can make $10,000 in half an hour playing backgammon; he can make many times that in an evening—and he can lose it all just as easily. The money comes and goes. Currently, he has no home. He has no driver's license. Until just a few months ago, he had no cell phone, no bank account, and no credit card. Pretty much everything that he owns can fit into a large black suitcase. Still, he allows himself certain luxuries, and one of them is to hire a car rather than sit in a jitney.

Falafel had promised that he would be in the Borgata's poker ballroom, and when I arrived, at four-thirty on a gray January afternoon, the ballroom was half empty. To the nongambler, the interior of an Atlantic City casino is in no way a place of obvious joy. For Falafel, who wanted to dabble in a few quick hands while he waited for The Bone, the atmosphere was energizing. He is a big man, both in the tall way and in the overweight way, and he was dressed to relax: a soccer jersey with the logo of a Turkish cell-phone company on the front, and on the back the number 7 and
FALAFEL
. Propped up on his head was a yellow knitted cap, giving him the appearance of an oversized garden gnome. Nylon shorts extended below his knees. Fiddling with a dumpy black cell phone, he looked up, smiling, and asked, “How did you recognize me?”

Falafel is typically unshaven, but the stubble is not forbidding, and his face easily fills with warmth. In 2005, an Israeli filmmaker made a documentary about him, called
Falafel's Game.
In a scene filmed late one night in his hotel, Falafel says, “I'm like a kid inside. I feel like a kid—in my principles, the way I think about things.” He is 44. He has known hardship: he once lived on a park bench. Pickpockets have stolen from him. Lowlifes have taken advantage of him. He has learned to be streetwise, but something kidlike remains. He lives life as if it were a game.

Falafel bought $300 in chips and sat at a table. Soon the piles before him were getting taller. He attributed this not to his skill at poker but to his gambling instincts, which are formidable in some circumstances (backgammon, mainly) and horrendous in others (sports betting, mainly). As he played, he glanced at the cards occasionally, but mostly he jabbered. When an elderly man in a leather jacket sat down and, by coincidence, began to talk about backgammon, Falafel could not contain himself. “Oh, you play?” he said. “I like to play too.” The man nodded. A round of cards was dealt. “You know,” Falafel said, “I'm the number-one backgammon player in the world.” He glanced at a card. “None of you could beat me.”

A skeptical player wearing a Miami Dolphins cap picked up his smartphone to verify. To his left, another old man asked, “Is it in the Google?”

“I'm checking,” the skeptic said. “I'm just getting a lot of restaurants.”

The dealer slowed play, so that the matter could be resolved—which it quickly was, generating a wave of smiles. Suddenly, a celebrity was among them. “Okay, Mr. Falafel,” the dealer said. “What will it be?”

In two hours, Falafel was sitting behind $500. Things were looking up. “A year ago, if you found me then, my life would have been so much different,” he said. For a time, Falafel was living in Las Vegas, with a roommate—a young backgammon whiz whom he calls Genius or Lobster, depending on his mood—but he rarely left the couch, where he watched sports, and watched the money that he bet on sports disappear. Now he saw opportunity. “This year, I am traveling a lot, playing more backgammon,” he said. From Atlantic City, Falafel was planning to go to a tournament in San Antonio, and then there were trips to Los Angeles, Israel, Denmark, and, in August, Monte Carlo, for the world championships. In each place, the prospect of cash side games lay in wait. An Internet gaming site was interested in cooperating with him. He had taken on a student. Falafel was filled with a sense of purpose. He was ready, he told his friends, to turn his fortunes around.

 

“We should go now,” Falafel said, as he cashed out; he needed to find The Bone, who was finishing a round in his tournament. The two men met in the mid-1990s, when Falafel was in New York, living in Washington Square Park, and playing chess. The Bone, whose real name is Arkadiy Tsinis, is tall and thin. He is a disciplined gambler; recruiters from Wall Street have tried to bring him into their game. “That's him,” Falafel said, pointing to a man wearing a floppy leather hat and sunglasses perched on an aquiline nose. The Bone was locked in a stare-down with another player. The visible portions of his face were impassive. Eventually, with only a few chips left, he folded. Falafel tried to cheer him up as they walked over to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Falafel's homelessness was of his own making. In 1972, when he was four, his mother, Larissa, fled Soviet Russia (and Falafel's father), moving to the Israeli town of Azor, near Tel Aviv. In Falafel's memory, Azor is ever warm and sunlit, filled with soccer matches and schoolyard friends. Larissa worked long hours at the airport, and so Falafel was often free to do as he liked—until he was 14, when she told him that she was marrying an Israeli American biophysicist, and that they were moving to Buffalo, to live with him. Falafel resented the move. Buffalo was cold and foreign. He didn't know the language. His stepfather, a Holocaust survivor, was caring but stern, and pushed him to think of life in pragmatic terms. Falafel rebelled. He did little but play chess; he drank, and even went to school a little tipsy. He went to college halfheartedly, and after graduating he lost his savings by betting on sports. Larissa refused to help him unless he found a job, and so, instead, in the winter of 1994, he hitched a ride with a friend to Manhattan, to hustle chess. “I just went through the motions,” Falafel says. “My only thing was to make a bit of money so that I could survive.”

Falafel knew little about Washington Square Park—a Hobbesian gaming arena in the center of Greenwich Village. “I called it Jurassic Park,” The Bone said. Some of the chess players were fast-talking charmers; some had learned the game in prison. There was Sweet Pea, Elementary, the Terminator. When well-known fish—players of middling skill with money to lose—would turn up, a frenzy would erupt to vie for their action. Falafel became friendly with a wizard at blitz chess named Russian Paul, who adopted a half-mentoring attitude, involving avuncular insults about Falafel's game or his laziness or his self-destructive habits.

“I can tell you how I discovered him,” Russian Paul says. “I used to play at my favorite table, and one weekend morning I came, and there was somebody snoring, sleeping under it.” He hired Falafel—two dollars every morning—to hold his table for him. Before long, Falafel was playing too. By the standards of the park, where grandmasters sometimes stopped by, Falafel was in no way exceptional—“Stupid, stupid, that's stupid,” Paul would mutter as he played him—but he enjoyed the camaraderie of the hustlers. Two dollars was enough to get him a falafel, which he ate every day, often for every meal. One night, Russian Paul found him passed out with patches of deep-fried chickpeas stuck to his face, and the park's newest hustler earned his street name.