The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  * * *

  Hanging Around, Scene 3: There were whitewashed walls around the house in a Miami neighborhood. Birds cawed and sang, and sang and cawed, in the merciless noonday sun. Inside the house was cool and soothing, and the elderly woman with the guitar was seated in a cane chair across the living room from me, talking about the son, and the grandson, she had raised. She was a strong-looking woman, and wiry, the way some people are born to be. Her son’s music had changed the way the world looked at an entire island and its culture. His recorded music wafted through the shady room. His son, her grandson, whom she’d raised, was a ferocious tackler on the University of Miami’s football team. His name was Rohan Marley. Her son’s name had been Bob Marley. Her name was Cedella Booker. When her son died, of melanoma, at 36, she sang his “Redemption Song” at his funeral:

  Won’t you help to sing

  These songs of freedom?

  We conducted the interview because that’s why I’d come to Miami, to write about her grandson and his late father. But afterwards we talked about life and music and the road she had traveled. I happened to mention that my wife was expecting a baby.

  “Jah blessing on your baby girl,” Cedella said.

  “We don’t know that it’s a girl,” I said.

  Cedella smiled and strummed a couple of light chords and nodded. Two months later, my daughter was born.

  * * *

  So hang around, at a merry remove, with Tom Brady, the singular quarterback of the New England Patriots. And then hang around with Caity Weaver as she goes reluctantly to the Super Bowl in Minneapolis and makes her own fun by exacting a promise for a genuine Philadelphia Eagles mini-fridge for her cubicle if she can complete a 26-item scavenger hunt that requires her to do everything from ride a private jet to find a dead bird. Oh, and she engages a book of magic to help her out.

  I bought a commemorative Super Bowl pen (also $6) at a souvenir pop-up shop that spanned two floors of the stadium, and featured ghostly white statues of football players, benched forever in heaven.

  The pop-up contained a FedEx booth where customers could pay to have their purchases shipped directly from the game. A FedEx employee allowed me to have a piece of tape for free. (THANK YOU!!!)

  I tore a piece off a jumbo paper towel roll left on a table in a women’s restroom and went into a stall to perform my dark deeds.

  “Draw a large pentagram on the paper and write their first and last name in the center,” the instructions read. “Sprinkle a little salt on the name.”

  “Then, drip some water on to the condiments.”

  “Place the special item on to the name. Lean down to the paper and chant the bad spell.”

  Good luck go, Go away. But bring all of the bad to stay. And for this spell, I must pay a price. With something dear, As well as nice. This is my will, So Mote It Be!

  “Fold the paper in half hamburger style, and then hot dog style. Repeat until paper is small enough to fit in your pocket.”

  Or hang out with Joe Branch, who is involved in the cutthroat world of Cubing, the competitive exercise of solving the Rubik’s Cube. And then hang out with his father, John, who has found himself in the role of sports parent in a very unusual, but wholly satisfying, context.

  He had found acceptance by doing nothing more than being himself. Funny that it would come in a place where he could leave all the reinvention to the familiar 3 by 3 object in his hands, the one that has 43 quintillion possible configurations but that he and all the others could solve in seconds.

  The crowd hushed. The race began. In little more than five minutes, Max Park solved all six of the puzzles, leaving the world behind.

  “A valiant effort from the dream team,” the MC said.

  I walked away with no doubt about the best view—that of a parent, watching a child find his place.

  And just like that, you discover that the entire journey is nothing more than a tour of the joy of playing games and that, given the nature of the world and its people, it’s the furthest thing in the world from playing hooky.

  * * *

  My grandmother was a shepherd. She and her six sisters worked the flocks in the hills around Listowel in north Kerry. She left Ireland in 1901 and arrived in Massachusetts via Liverpool when she was 24 years old. She worked as a domestic and then married a policeman named Patrick Pierce. They had five children and four grandchildren, one of whom was me. She had no formal education; what she knew she learned from the hedge schoolmasters in her village, and from the shanachies, the itinerant Irish storytellers who worked for food and a bit of whiskey and who functioned as both entertainment and collective memory.

  Years later, sitting in her dining room in a suburban home not far from my own, my grandmother told those stories to me. Ancient stories about Cuchulain and Deirdre of the Sorrows, and stories about her own life in the old country and the new—about how her youngest sister would duck out of work with the sheep to sit under a tree with a book—and the word “book” would have five syllables in the accent of the north Kerry hills—and then about the boxer dog they’d had who would wait by the door for The Sergeant to get home from walking his beat. And she told me about one day when her father took her into Listowel to see Charles Stewart Parnell speak, and this was after Parnell had fallen from grace, and a huge fight broke out, hurley sticks belting people in the chops. Years later I was reading Robert Kee’s excellent biography of Parnell, and he described that same riot and in detail, and it was just as my grandmother had told me over tea when I was a boy.

  I wish she were alive. I wish she could read the stories in this book and see how the simple act of telling them, the art of the shanachie, has survived the onslaught of technology and the cacophony of information and a collective attention span that is dwindling by the day. I wish she were alive so I could tell her about the polar bear in the river, and about the kids swinging cattle bones in the burning desert twilight, and about Bob Marley’s mother predicting the birth of the great-granddaughter she never saw. Because all stories have endings, and not all endings are happy ones. I would tell her that, less than a year after we all chased the whales in the cold, gray river, Terence Tootoo took his own life with a shotgun in a field in Manitoba after being arrested for driving under the influence. His suicide note to his brother Jordin read:

  “Jor, go all the way. Take care of the family. You’re the man. Terence.”

  His brother’s suicide threw Jordin into a spiral. He became the first Inuk athlete to play in the National Hockey League. He drowned the pain and memories in alcohol and promiscuous, anonymous sex. But then he got sober and has stayed that way for a decade and a half. He has married and raised a family, and in 2014 he published a memoir with the great Canadian sportswriter, Stephen Brunt. This is Jordin’s account of Terence’s last, terrible night.

  My brother must have thought his life was over. He must have been thinking, So, f—, this is it. All the work I’ve done has just gone down the drain. And everyone would know. It would be humiliating. I think he just couldn’t deal with that being in the public eye. Everyone thought that Terence was this great guy, and that’s how he wanted to be perceived. Everyone makes mistakes, but for him, with all that pressure coming at him from different angles, I just don’t think he had the will inside him to fight it anymore. Instead, it was like, F—, this is it. I’m done. I don’t want to deal with all of these people thinking I’m not this perfect, perfect guy.

  Terence died. Jordin lived and got well and somehow has managed to live with his life, all the good and bad of it, and he’s telling people about it in order to help them live with their own, all the good and bad of them. And that’s the end of the story that began in the Churchill River, the white whales like smooth veins of ivory below the surface of the water. My part of it anyway.

  I wish my grandmother was alive so I could tell her about Jordin and Terence and the whales and what came after. I wish she were alive to read this book, and I am very glad that all of you are. Lose yours
elves. Hang out with the people in the stories, and hang out with the people who came to tell them. Drown in the collective memory. No matter how advanced our technology, we will find a way to tell each other stories because there is something essential and human in the telling. We need to tell each other stories. It is a long and proud tradition that we follow from whoever it was that scratched the Epic of Gilgamesh into clay tablets to every pixel that zips onto the computers that we can hold in our hands. Hang around with these people for a while. Have faith in the craft. Find hope in its stubborn, durable magic.

  Charles P. Pierce

  Wright Thompson

  When Winter Never Ends

  from ESPN The Magazine

  Day 1: February 4, 2018

  Ichiro Suzuki steps out of the cold into the small restaurant that serves him dinner most nights. It’s winter in Kobe, Japan, where he once played professional baseball and where he comes during the offseason to train. His wife, Yumiko, is back home in Seattle. He is here alone, free from the untidy bits of domestic life that might break his focus. Every day, he works out in a professional stadium he rents, and then he usually comes to this restaurant, which feels like a country inn transported to the city. It’s tucked away on the fifth floor of a downtown building and accessible by a tiny elevator. Someone on the staff meets Ichiro at the back door so he can slip in unseen. Someone else rushes to take his coat, and Ichiro sits at a small bar with his back to the rest of the diners. Two friends join him. Inside the warm and glowing room, the chef slips on his traditional coat as he greets Ichiro in mock surprise.

  “Thanks for coming again,” says the chef, wearing Miami Marlins shorts.

  “You guys made me wait outside,” Ichiro jokes.

  Ichiro is a meticulous man, held in orbit by patterns and attention to detail. This place specializes in beef tongue, slicing it thin by hand and serving it raw alongside hot cast-iron skillets. They do one thing perfectly, which appeals to Ichiro. Tonight he’s got dark jeans rolled up to the calf, each leg even with the other, and a gray T-shirt under a white button-down with a skinny tie. His hair looks darker than in some recent photos, maybe the lighting, maybe a dye job. Either way, not even a 44-year-old future Hall of Famer is immune from the insecurities and diminishments that come with time. This winter is the most insecure and diminished he’s been.

  He doesn’t have a professional baseball contract in America or Japan. His agent, John Boggs, has called, texted, and emailed teams so often that one MLB general manager now calls Boggs “the elephant hunter,” because he’s stalking his prey. Boggs recently sent an email to all 30 teams. Only one wrote back to decline. Ichiro hasn’t spoken to Boggs once this offseason, locked in on what he and his aging body can control.

  The restaurant fills up. Customers take off their shoes. At every table, signs warn that no pictures can be taken. Ichiro waves at an older couple. A producer type brings two young women over to meet him, and Ichiro makes small talk before they bow and recede. He makes some jokes about aging and turns a wine bottle in his hand to read the label. The waiters, wearing sandals and blue bandannas, sling plates of raw tongue and mugs of cold beer with ice flecks in them. The chef installs a fresh gas can and sets down a cast-iron grill in front of Ichiro.

  “This is really delicious,” Ichiro says.

  He and his companions discuss the future, debating philosophies of business, a new world opening up. Later they turn nostalgic and talk about the past. He started training every day in the third grade and has never stopped. Once during his career he took a vacation, a trip to Milan that he hated. This past October, Marlins infielder Dee Gordon came to get something at the clubhouse after the season. He heard the crack of a bat in the cages and found Ichiro there, getting in his daily swings. “I really just hope he keeps playing,” Gordon says with a chuckle, “because I don’t want him to die. I believe he might die if he doesn’t keep playing. What is Ichiro gonna do if he doesn’t play baseball?”

  Former teammates all have favorite Ichiro stories, about how he carries his bats in a custom humidor case to keep out moisture, how in the minors he’d swing the bat for 10 minutes every night before going to sleep, or wake up some mornings to swing alone in the dark from 1 to 4 a.m. All the stories make the same point: he has methodically stripped away everything from his life except baseball. Former first baseman Mike Sweeney, who got close to Ichiro in Seattle, tells one about getting a call from an old teammate who’d had an off-day in New York. You’re not gonna believe this, the guy began. He’d brought along his wife and they walked through Central Park, thrilled to be together in such a serene place. Far off in the distance, at a sandlot field with an old backstop that looked left over from the 1940s, they saw a guy playing long toss. The big leaguer did the quick math and figured the distant stranger was throwing 300 feet on the fly. Curious, he walked closer. The guy hit balls into the backstop, the powerful shotgun blast of real contact familiar to any serious player. He became impressed, so he got even closer, close enough to see.

  The man working out alone in Central Park was Ichiro.

  His agent and those close to him think he’ll sign with a Japanese team if no offer comes from the major leagues. Television crews floated around the Ginza district in Tokyo the night before asking people what they think about Ichiro’s future. Ichiro, as usual, is saying nothing. He’s a cipher, keeping himself hidden, yet his yearning has never been more visible. His old team, the Orix Buffaloes, wants him back desperately—but Japanese spring training started three days ago and Ichiro remains in Kobe. For a private man, these three days speak loudly about his need for another season in America. Over the years, he’s talked about playing until he’s 50 but also of his desire to “vanish” once his career ends. Those two desires exist in opposition, and if America never calls, he holds the power to make either of them real. He can sign with Orix, or he can fade away. The choice is his.

  These are the things working in his life at dinner, a cold Sunday night between the Rokko mountains and Osaka Bay. Ichiro finally stands to leave. Two customers step into the aisle and bow, not the perfunctory half-bow of business associates and hotel bellmen, but a full to-the-waist bow of deep respect. Is this what the end of a great career looks like up close? Ichiro hates not playing baseball, but he might hate playing poorly even more. When he’s slumping, his wife has said, she will wake up and find him crying in his sleep. The first time he went on the disabled list as a major leaguer was because of a bleeding stomach ulcer. That year, he’d led Japan to a victory in the 2009 World Baseball Classic, winning the final game with a base hit in extra innings. The stress ate a hole in his stomach. Weeks later, a Mariners team doctor told him he couldn’t play on Opening Day. Ichiro refused to listen, Sweeney says. Before the team ultimately forced him to sit, the doctor tried to explain that a bleeding ulcer was a serious condition that could actually kill him.

  Ichiro listened, unmoved.

  “I’ll take my chances,” he said.

  Day 2: February 5, 2018

  The next morning at 11:46, Ichiro moves quickly through the Hotel Okura lobby. A hood covers his head. This 35-story waterfront tower is where he always stays, an understated gold and black lacquer palace that looks designed by the prop department from You Only Live Twice. His green Mercedes G-Class SUV is parked directly in front of the hotel and he climbs inside. The ballpark he rents, literally an entire stadium, is over the mountains, and he takes a right onto Highway 2, then an exit onto Fusehatake. He uses his blinker to change lanes.

  The temperature is 38 degrees and falling.

  A waterfall in front of the hotel is frozen mid-cascade.

  On the drive toward the stadium, it begins to flurry.

  Once there, he changes into shorts and steps out onto the field. A hard wind blows. Passing clouds drop the mercury even more. Ichiro isn’t here in spite of the brutal cold but because of it. Japanese culture in general—and Ichiro in particular—remains influenced by remnants of Bushido, the code of honor and e
thics governing the samurai warrior class. Suffering reveals the way to greatness. When the nation opened up to the Western world in 1868, the language didn’t even have a word to call games played for fun. Baseball got filtered through the prism of martial arts, and it remains a crucible rather than an escape. Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh wrote in his memoir: “Baseball in America is a game that is born in spring and dies in autumn. In Japan it is bound to winter as the heart is to the body.”

  A group of people always works out with Ichiro. Today there are 11 of them, not one a serious athlete. One is the chef from last night. One is a white guy who runs like a wounded animal. All of them wear long pants, because only a maniac would dress for this weather in shorts. Every day, the workout is the same. They stretch and jog. Ichiro runs the bases, and the rest follow him around the path. He takes 50 soft-toss swings, hitting the ball into a net, then he stretches again and steps into the batting cage.

  Five people stand around the outfield with yellow crates and gloves.

  Outside the stadium, two fans wait by the road with a gift of chocolate candy. They bring him this every year. A woman named Minako traveled here from Tokyo to find a crack in the bleacher walls wide enough to see through. She too makes this pilgrimage once a winter. As she stands on her toes and trains her binoculars on Ichiro, she wonders aloud whether this might be the end. Ichiro doesn’t believe so. Last year he came within one hit of setting the single-season record for a pinch-hitter. The year before, he hit .291 playing in 143 games. His friend and former Orix BP pitcher, Koji Okumura, says Ichiro’s swing has changed over the years. He now opens his hips and shows his chest to the pitcher earlier. “His eyesight is deteriorating,” Okumura says. “He’s trying to adjust to survive. He knows his death as a baseball player is getting closer.”