The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  When I asked Hammon why she turned down the University of Florida job, she said that Popovich and the Spurs had more to teach her. “If you’re interested in cars, it’s like Henry Ford coming and saying, ‘Hey, why don’t I teach you about the Model T?’”

  Her goal is not to save the sport from itself, or to prove that women can thrive in male-dominated professions. She doesn’t have time to worry about taking on doubters. “My motives shouldn’t be to change people’s minds,” she said. “My job is to be the best that I can be, and if that changes your mind then great, but I can’t be consumed with how you feel about me.”

  Kerry Howley

  Everyone Believed Larry Nassar

  from New York

  I

  * * *

  Larissa Boyce was 10 when her coach, John Geddert, forced her legs into a split so hard she cried. He pulled her right leg up toward his torso, sending shooting pains through her groin and hamstrings, and he kept pulling. “Racking,” as it’s called, was common practice at the gym, but it was evidently too much for Larissa’s mother, who marched onto the mats and told Geddert to take his hands off her daughter. From then on, Larissa would train under Kathie Klages, a relatively low-key coach with unruly red hair and glasses at Michigan State University’s Spartan youth gymnastics team. Klages, like Geddert, considered herself a dear friend of an athletic trainer named Larry Nassar and sent her gymnasts to him.

  When, six years later, Larissa felt ready to talk about the fact that Larry had penetrated her with his hand without warning, she approached Klages. Larissa remembers her office as a small room with a desk, a window, and green carpet. “‘I have known Larry for years and years,’” Larissa recalls Klages saying. “‘He would never do anything inappropriate.’”

  Larissa named another gymnast who had been touched, and when Klages called her into the office, she told her the same story. Klages countered by bringing in college gymnasts, who said that Larry had touched “around” the area but that it was never “inappropriate.”

  “That’s not what happened to me,” Larissa said. Klages, who has been indicted for allegedly lying to police about this and another such instance, maintains that no one ever came to her with complaints of sexual abuse.

  According to Larissa, Klages said she could report the allegations but doing so would have “very serious consequences” for both Larry and Larissa. Larissa couldn’t look at Klages, so she stared out the window. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. Afterward, she cried in the bathroom and resolved never to tell anyone again. She worried that Klages would tell Larry.

  The next time she went to visit Larry, he closed the door, pulled up a stool, sat down, and looked at her. “So,” he said, “I talked to Kathie.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Larissa said. “I misunderstood. It’s all my fault.”

  It was 1997. Most of Larry Nassar’s victims had not yet been born.

  II

  * * *

  It has by the fall of 2018 become commonplace to describe the 499 known victims of Larry Nassar as “breaking their silence,” though in fact they were never, as a group, particularly silent. Over the course of at least 20 years of consistent abuse, women and girls reported to every proximate authority. They told their parents. They told gymnastics coaches, running coaches, softball coaches. They told Michigan State University police and Meridian Township police. They told physicians and psychologists. They told university administrators. They told, repeatedly, USA Gymnastics. They told one another. Athletes were interviewed, reports were written up, charges recommended. The story of Larry Nassar is not a story of silence. The story of Larry Nassar is that of an edifice of trust so resilient, so impermeable to common sense, that it endured for decades against the allegations of so many women.

  If this is a story of institutional failure, it is also a story of astonishing individual ingenuity. Larry Nassar was good at this. His continued success depended on deceiving parents, fellow doctors, elite coaches, Olympic gatekeepers, athletes, and, with some regularity, law enforcement. Before getting caught, he managed to abuse women and girls whose names you know—Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney—and hundreds whose names you don’t.

  As of November 5, it looks likely that Nassar has destroyed the sport’s governing body, USA Gymnastics. In an open letter citing the “struggle to change its culture,” the U.S. Olympic Committee began the process of decertifying USAG, which withheld knowledge about Nassar from its members for over a year and whose former president was recently arrested by U.S. Marshals for disappearing Nassar-related documents. The organization is being sued by hundreds of accusers represented by “37 or 38” law firms, according to the lawyer charged with organizing them; it’s hard to keep count.

  Nassar has pleaded guilty in three separate trials and been sentenced to a collective minimum of 100 years. Michigan State University has settled with 332 women for half a billion dollars. Karolyi Ranch, the dated, isolated training camp where Olympians were required to see Nassar, has been shut down. Yet strangely little has been said about the man, his strategies, his undeniable and persistent success in serving his own needs. One can read news reports for hours about athletes and judicial process and, inescapably, the triumph of “finding a voice” without being informed of what, precisely, this man had done to any of the athletes whose voices required finding. News broadcasts are hard to parse: a dozen medal-winning gymnasts, of three different generations, “speaking out” about what was typically and unspecifically called “abuse” but that many of them had understood to be “treatment.” There are logistical questions. How had he molested girls who were never alone with him? What, precisely, motivated coaches and administrators to protect him—at great risk to themselves? With what rhetorical magic had he argued himself out of complaint after complaint?

  Nassar is neither charismatic nor smooth; he is nerdy, a little awkward, a little “Inspector Gadget,” as one gymnast put it. He is a man who laughs a lot and snorts when he laughs. He tells dad jokes and never dirty ones; his voice is nasal and his patter never-ending. His talkativeness, particularly on technical matters relating to the body’s response to injury, can verge on excessive, even logorrheic. “Sometimes,” says a former colleague, “it was like, ‘Okay, Larry, that’s enough, got it.’” Yet he projects such kindness, such determined, tireless selflessness, that people around him are rendered inarticulate when they attempt to express his essential benevolence. “He was such a kind man,” says the father of a girl Nassar abused many times, his voice bright with incredulity. “I really cannot say enough good about Larry, because he is just a wonderful man,” Nassar’s neighbor Jody Rosebush told the Detroit News last year after the allegations emerged. He had helped shovel snow; he had rushed across the street in bare feet when she’d had a sudden medical issue. “He will do anything in the world for anybody. We all love Larry. We really, really love Larry.” Jessica O’Beirne, the host of a podcast called GymCastic and perhaps the most biting editorialist about Nassar and his myriad enablers, had him on the show before the allegations were made public. “I just love Larry Nassar,” she said by way of introduction. “He’s totally amazing . . . He’s just amazing. I think he’s awesome. And that’s from personal experience. He’s just . . . he’s great.”

  Much-loved Larry placed himself in a position of authority in the least-monitored space full of children and proceeded to become the most successful pedophile in sports history. Beyond the choice of medical school, the apparent research interest in the sacrotuberous ligament, the intense focus on a world populated by 11-year-old girls, the useful belief in alternative therapies, there was also this: his incredible brazenness. Nassar molested young girls in his office while their fathers watched. He molested elite athletes under blankets in busy gyms teeming with people. Even a paranoid parent would not have perceived a meeting with a doctor in an open gym, a few feet away, to be an encounter requiring vigilance. Your daughter was safe because you never left her side. When mothers
might have a moment of pause, a flicker of suspicion, there was the reassuring thought that no man would try something right in front of them.

  “It’s like that story,” the mother of a gymnast tells me, “‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’? It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I believe it was a little child who finally says, ‘Doesn’t anybody know that the emperor has no clothes on?’”

  It was a little child who alerted the townspeople in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, but upon reflection, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” demonstrates precisely the opposite lesson of that learned through the decades-long saga of Larry Nassar. In order to be heard, the little child does not need to age 20 years, join a chorus of other adults telling the same story, and be corroborated by digital evidence of the king’s depravity. The king, in Andersen’s story, is immediately exposed. The story of Larry Nassar is that of a man more skilled at deception and a world more credulous.

  III

  * * *

  Trinea Gonczar, now 37, is the oldest of three in an athletic family and the most intense. At six years old, just starting out at Twistars—the gym owned by John Geddert, who had forced Larissa into a split—she looked at her mother and demanded to know why she hadn’t been put in gymnastics earlier. Three years later, the gym was her entire existence outside school and the only social life that mattered. “Those girls just melted into one another and became one,” says Dawn Homer, Trinea’s mother, a tall, soft-spoken woman and founder of a medical-billing company. “They were one another’s best lives. It was like a cult, and I don’t say that in a bad way.” Trinea’s sisters excelled at volleyball and basketball; Dawn noted that there was less cultlike intimacy on these teams. When Trinea was selected for Geddert’s team at nine years old, Dawn was required to attend a meeting. “One hundred percent of the girls will be injured,” she recalls a coach saying. “But we have a trainer right here.”

  Larry was, in Trinea’s words, the “dorky escape from John,” John being a man you’d need to escape from because he might, in a rage, twist your arm, shove you against a wall, and call it, as he did five years ago in conversation with police, a “discipline meeting.” (A prosecutor later ordered Geddert to undergo counseling.)

  “I don’t have a good reference to compare him to,” Trinea says. “I don’t know another coaching style. We won. We were good. John made a good product. We were hand-selected. You were picked. Measured. Your toe point was measured, your muscles were measured, your splits were measured.”

  Gymnasts were afraid to disappoint Geddert, afraid to admit to injury lest they be accused of lying. By contrast, Larry was unfailingly reassuring: He had a plan to make you better, a series of discrete steps to get you back on the mat. He knew what was wrong, had likely “attended a conference” or “given a lecture” on precisely the injury in question, and knew how to fix you. You might feel hopeless, but your career as a gymnast was not over. He pushed girls to talk about their goals, their dreams of gymnastic greatness. Dawn Homer and other parents recall being moved to tears as Larry promised their worried girls that they’d continue to be the athletes they were meant to be.

  In 1990, when Trinea was nine, her hip began popping out of its socket whenever she was on bars. Larry suggested that she needed more work than he could provide in the gym and asked if she might come over to his apartment with her mother. Trinea knew this invitation was considered an honor among the other nine-year-olds with whom she spent all her time, and she was proud.

  When she arrived with her mother, another girl was leaving. Larry had filled his bath with ice water, and he left the room while Trinea undressed and lowered her shivering body into it. On the toilet, an egg timer ticked through 14 minutes. She flipped through a USA Gymnastics magazine he’d left by the tub. When she came out, in shorts and a T-shirt, he gestured toward a table in the living room.

  There was a chair a few feet away, by the television, where Dawn sat that day and many, many days afterward. It was angled such that she could see only Trinea’s head and shoulders. Larry maintained a steady, quick patter with Dawn through the treatment. He asked about her other girls. He told them about his plans to move beyond athletic training and go to medical school; he wanted to be a doctor like his grandfather.

  Trinea—60-odd pounds, curly brown hair (it was 1990, and it was a perm), hands ripped from bar work—was all muscle. When she showed the neighborhood boys her six-pack, they told her she looked like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, which she did not take as a compliment. Like Nassar, she was a talker; at the mall, she greeted every single person until her mother told her to stop talking to strangers. Nassar bent her knees, placed her leg over her hip, turned her over, and placed her on her stomach. He moved the table, with her on it, while he worked. While she was on her stomach, out of her mother’s view but without breaking the flow of conversation with her, he penetrated Trinea with his ungloved hand.

  “Anytime she is in pain,” Larry said to Dawn, “no matter what time, what day, you call me and I will get her in for treatment.”

  It was true; he always did. Larry spent hours teaching Dawn how to tape Trinea’s shins. He came over to the house for dinner.

  “Larry fixed my ankles,” Trinea says. “He fixed my shins. He fixed my knees. He fixed my shoulders. He fixed my wrists. We called it ‘the magic of Larry’—he could fix you so you could compete. And I always wanted to compete.”

  “We had the best clinic available to us for gymnastics injuries that anyone in the world could have. We had the best,” says Dawn. “We were so lucky.”

  At Twistars, the idea of family was more than notional: Larry proposed to another athletic trainer at the gym and asked Geddert to be a groomsman. Trinea attended the wedding and thought Nassar’s bride the luckiest woman in the world. When Trinea was 15, a cyst ruptured on her ovary and she required surgery; it was the Nassars standing over her as she opened her eyes.

  In the late ’90s, another gymnast came to Trinea and said Larry had penetrated her with his fingers. She was looking for corroboration, support for her intuition that something was not right. It’s a scene Trinea plays over and over in her head. “He does that to me all the time!” she said lightly, happy to be in the position to comfort someone. “You’re fine.” Trinea’s lawyer estimates that she was molested 856 times.

  IV

  * * *

  Nassar’s interest in women’s gymnastics extends deep into his history, which matters because there are two stories one can tell about Larry Nassar: a man who drifted slowly into darkness and a man whose career goals were structured by desire. In high school and college, Nassar was an athletic trainer, essentially an on-site EMT for athletes, taping and icing and bandaging. By the late 1980s, he was working with USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University, and John Geddert. He worked regional and national meets, shook hands, and dealt with injuries as they arose.

  “He was tireless in taking care of the kids,” says William Sands, the research scientist who has probably published the most on the sport of gymnastics in exercise medicine and someone Nassar considered a personal hero. “He was up early and went to bed late. He would do anything for an injured athlete. He was an astonishingly giving person.”

  Who was paying him to be at all these meets remains unclear because the people who can elucidate these economic relationships tend to be themselves subject to ongoing legal action or are employed by the legal quagmire that is USA Gymnastics. But a word that emerges frequently in conversations about Nassar is volunteer. He volunteered, for instance, at Geddert’s gym 20 hours a week. He volunteered at the 1987 Pan-American Games and volunteered at the 1988 Olympic trials. According to Sands, Nassar maxed out two credit cards working his way up, cementing a reputation as someone who could identify an injury, concoct a plan, and get an athlete back on the floor. Liked and trusted and ever-present, he knew the body and knew the sport. Whereas another doctor might ban an injured athlete from competing altogether, Nassar could tell her which tricks were still safe
to perform. He was, by almost all accounts, good at what he did.

  By the late ’80s, Nassar had decided to become an osteopathic physician, which entails being trained in osteopathic manipulative therapy, learning to move a patient’s joints and muscles in ways said to relieve pain and dysfunction. OMT is based on the intuitively appealing but largely unsupported idea that a wide array of diseases spring from musculoskeletal irregularities, and one therefore expects to be touched differently by an osteopath than by an MD; one expects to be folded and bent and cracked. Manipulated. He chose, too, to practice alongside athletes in contexts that lacked the intermediary structures of a traditional doctor’s office—receptionists, insurance companies, medical records. After his residency, he was named the national medical coordinator for USA Gymnastics, the organization responsible for selecting and training Olympians.

  If you’re old enough, you remember watching Kerri Strug hurl herself in the air, land hard on a badly injured ankle, collapse, and guarantee all-around gold for the American team. This was taken at the time to be evidence of athletic heroism and American grit, fodder for sponsorships and presidential photo ops and write-ups in which it was not mentioned that her vault had been, in the end, unnecessary; the team had the scores to win. But stick with the camera a bit, beyond memory, and watch coach Martha Karolyi carry a crying Strug toward a young, dark-haired physician. This is the moment Nassar becomes “the Olympics doctor,” the man who cares for the athletes millions of children aspire to be, and his access to girls widens inexorably, constrained only by the number of minutes in the day.