The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  The town is named for a Salish subchief. In 1871, Arlee, a Nez Percé by birth, acquiesced to the U.S. government’s demands that the Bitterroot Salish relocate. This put him at odds with the head Salish chief, Charlo, who stayed in the Bitterroot Valley until 1891, when he marched north under military escort. Embittered, he had called Arlee “that renegade Nez Percé.” On the reservation, the Salish were forced together with the Pend d’Oreille, their historical allies, and the Kootenai, a northern tribe with a different language. Government officials assigned them Anglicized names, and in 1909 Congress passed legislation opening the reservation to settlers. Many tribal members sold their allotted land, and Chief Charlo died in 1910; Native youth were forced into a Catholic boarding school, where nuns told the children that the devil was in them. The town of Charlo, 30 miles from Arlee, is now almost entirely white. Arlee is not. The town’s most popular gathering places are Wilson’s, a grocery store; a community center full of basketball courts; and the gleaming gymnasium that looms over the one-story public high school.

  Because of its size, Arlee competes in Class C, the division representing Montana’s smallest schools, most of them in mining and ranching towns or communities in Indian Country. The state’s seven reservations—home to members of the Salish, Pend d’Oreille, Kootenai, Blackfeet, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine, and Chippewa-Cree tribes—share a deep passion for basketball. In 1904, just 13 years after James Naismith invented the game, a team of Native girls at a boarding school near Great Falls competed in a tournament at the World’s Fair in St. Louis and were proclaimed world champions. In 1936, a team from the Fort Peck Reservation won a state high school championship; its stars, three brothers, went on to anchor a group that beat the Harlem Globetrotters.

  “Indian ball,” as it became known, was characterized by full-court-press defense and high-scoring, improvisational fast breaks. The game is predicated on speed and cooperation. “It’s not very individualized,” says Don Wetzel Jr., a Blackfeet Nation descendant who manages the Montana Indian Athletic Hall of Fame. “You’re not taught to be like that. To make your people happy is one of the greatest things you can ever do.” High school stars from the past remain celebrated today: names like Jonathan Takes Enemy, Sharon LaForge, Elvis Old Bull, Malia Kipp, and Mike Chavez remind people of on-court triumphs and, in many cases, off-court trials.

  Montana’s best-known reservation teams have come from the plains east of the Rocky Mountains: from Lodge Grass, on Crow Nation, and from Browning and Heart Butte, on Blackfeet Nation. But for the past decade, the basketball program in Arlee, which is in the foothills of the Mission Range, has touched the hem of this elite. In 2005, a group of parents, including John and Becky Malatare, started a youth basketball clinic. Between 2009 and 2013, Arlee’s boys went 88-34; the girls went 105-39 between 2011 and 2016. During that time, both teams secured divisional titles but fell short at the state level. Zanen Pitts, a 32-year-old rancher and Pend d’Oreille first descendant, took over as the boys’ coach in 2013. He installed a system that combined the freewheeling speed of Indian ball with defensive strategies borrowed from college programs. “There is a structure to our chaos,” Pitts says.

  In 2014, Phil Malatare entered high school. He had dedicated most of his young life to two pursuits: horn hunting—searching for the freshly shed antlers of bull elk—and playing basketball at the community center. His arrival turned the Warriors’ defense into something terrifying. During his freshman year, the team lost in the state semifinals; during his sophomore year, they reached the championship; last year, they went 25-1, and Phil played nearly every minute of the championship run. Just before the end of the game, someone in the crowd called him a redskin. Then, in the final seconds, he jumped for a rebound that clinched the victory. In his bedroom, he hung news clippings of his victories and defeats, for motivation, along with the cleaned skull of a buffalo he killed.

  After last year, Phil was the only Class C player named to the ALL-USA Montana Boys Basketball team. This fall, when the Great Falls Tribune previewed the state’s best high school players, it listed Phil first. Watching Phil on the court, Wetzel got to thinking about Old Bull and Takes Enemy, each of whom he played against. “He’s more like Elvis,” he says. “Elvis was deceptively quick. Phillip is flat-out quick.” Don Holst, a former head coach for the University of Montana and a principal of Arlee’s elementary school, saw it differently. Old Bull was a shooter; Phil, he says, has “this innate ability to see things.” Pitts earnestly compared him to the NBA star Russell Westbrook. “I like Russell’s pull-up jumper a little better,” he once said. Whenever Phil arrived at basketball camps, kids flocked to him. At one game, his father heard a boy scream: “Phillip Malatare touched me!”

  John Malatare, a Salish and Cree wildland firefighter, wanted Phil to cash in his ticket to leave the reservation while it was still good. “A lot of these colleges in Montana,” John says, “will give a Native kid one chance.” On reservations, basketball stars become symbols of hope, but many have struggled to replicate their high school success in college. Wetzel played at Montana State University at Billings, but he left the team after having a child in his sophomore year. He went on to a career in public education. Not everyone has been so fortunate. In 1991, Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith wrote about the Crow stars Takes Enemy and Old Bull, who both struggled with alcohol. Others have gone to college, only to leave after feeling homesick.

  Pitts says that in five years as head coach, he has had three college coaches ask if prospects are Native, openly worrying that they might not last in school. Women from Montana’s reservations have carried a similar weight. In 1992, Malia Kipp, from Blackfeet Nation, entered the University of Montana, starring with the Lady Grizzlies for all four years. “I felt if I didn’t succeed,” she once said, “others wouldn’t get the opportunity.”

  According to Pitts and Wetzel, the skepticism Native recruits face is owed to cultural misunderstanding, and the inadequate support systems in place as a result. “Those coaches need to do a better job of sustaining ’em,” Pitts says. “They need to understand what they’re coaching.” That meant recognizing the gravitational pull of home for players from reservations, but also the genuinely distinct sports culture incubated there. Kids who grow up playing Indian ball on the reservation, whether or not they are themselves Native—the Arlee Warriors are Salish, Navajo, Sioux, Pend d’Oreille, and Blackfeet, but also white, black, and Filipino—can find the college game as alienating as campus life. For Wetzel, the businesslike nature and slower pace of college ball was challenging. “It’s conformity,” he says. Wetzel thinks schools should recruit multiple reservation players at once, the way the Lady Grizzlies did a decade ago, following Kipp’s success. “I rarely see two Natives on the court at the same time at a college level,” Wetzel says. “It does bring some magic.”

  Pitts, for his part, just wanted his players to get the opportunities they deserved. That meant a lot was riding on Phil. A good student with a supportive family, he was covered by local newspapers with headlines like “Unstoppable.” Pitts thought he had been touched by God. Sometimes he found himself pleading with him to thrive in college. “You’re doing this for every kid in the world,” he says, “that’s ever looked up to a basketball player coming off the rez.”

  * * *

  On November 15, the evening before the season’s first practice, 13 boys sat anxiously in a small classroom in Arlee’s gym. It was 5 p.m. and already dark outside, signaling the beginning of western Montana’s long winter. Coach Pitts stood at the front of the room in baggy jeans, a baseball cap covering his sandy hair, dried manure on his boots.

  “We’re here for a purpose,” Pitts said. “That purpose is to win a state championship. I’m going to chew on you, I’m going to break you down, I’m going to build you back up.” He said he was going to change their lives. “This is so much bigger than you.” He outlined the rules. Guys who disrespected teachers would not play. Guys wh
ose parents complained about court time would not play. Latecomers would not play. Exceptions would be made only in extreme circumstances: “If you want to go hunting, you’ve got some huge buck figured out, call me.”

  Pitts cued up a highlight reel from last year’s championship season and left the room. Will Mesteth often watched the tape at night; it made him feel all warm inside. But it just made Phil sad, because his two best friends had graduated, and he wanted another championship. He also wanted, desperately, to make it as a Division 1 college player.

  When the tape finished, Phil walked to the front of the room in a camouflage hoodie and a backward hat. “Everybody’s going to be intimidated,” he said. “And we got to make them intimidated. And that is going to be how it’s going to be.”

  The first game of the season was on December 8, against a larger school from the Rocky Boy’s Reservation. A couple of thousand fans filled the gym at a tribal college 40 miles north of Arlee. Will’s hair was shining in a double braid courtesy of his mother. Phil was wired even though he had spent the morning deer hunting.

  “We’re not nervous,” Pitts said.

  “I’m nervous,” Phil said. His teammates appeared relieved.

  On the mirror behind Pitts was a flier for a suicide-prevention hotline; all but three of the tags on the bottom had been ripped off. He opened a box, revealing sleek, hooded warm-up shirts. The boys’ nerves melted away in a chorus of hollering. Pitts choreographed the team’s entrance, instructing the boys to fan out onto the floor once Will’s grandfather, father, and uncles hit the drum and started the honor song. “I want everyone to know,” he said: “The champs are here.” The boys fell silent, and Pitts prayed:

  Our Father in Heaven

  We bow our heads humbly before you

  For the great opportunity that we have to play this game.

  To separate ourselves from the world.

  We ask, Father,

  That thou will bless us with strength and wisdom

  And give us the ability to be safe.

  Bless our opponents

  That they also can come out and perform at their highest potential.

  That they can be safe as well.

  And most of all,

  Let the refs keep up.

  * * *

  Before the previous season’s championship game against Manhattan Christian, David Whitesell, Arlee’s superintendent, spent long hours considering what might follow a loss. In the event, Whitesell was planning to increase counseling both for the community and the team. It was a lot, he said, “to place on the shoulders of a bunch of adolescent boys.”

  The cause of his concern was a proliferation of suicides that had swept the Flathead reservation in recent months. It started in the fall of 2016, with a few teenagers. Then in the winter, just before the 2017 divisionals, the Malatares awoke to discover that a close friend had taken her own life—a woman Phil considered to be “like an auntie,” and an aunt of Will’s by blood.

  Pitts and John Malatare told the boys that when people came to see the Warriors play, they briefly escaped their worries. But the suicides continued; they had become what public-health professionals call a cluster. In April, a former Warrior who quit the team shot himself after attending the funeral of a friend who committed suicide. The former teammate survived, but Pitts was haunted. “The adversary is so strong,” he said. “It’s just there.”

  Between November 2016 and November 2017, there were 20 deaths by suicide on the reservation, according to Anna Whiting Sorrell, an official with the tribal health department. Phil said he had known “a few” people who had died by suicide. Asked to clarify, he said, “Twenty or thirty.”

  In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control released a study examining suicide rates among Americans by race and ethnicity. In 2014, the last year for which the researchers compiled data, non-Hispanic Native women between the ages of 15 and 24 committed suicide at a rate of 15.6 deaths per 100,000, or three times the rate of non-Hispanic white women and five times the rate of non-Hispanic black women of the same age. Young Native men had a rate of 38.2 deaths per 100,000 people. Among young people, the suicides often come in clusters, as happened in 2013 and 2014, on Arizona’s Gila River Indian Reservation; in 2015, on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; and last year, on the Flathead reservation. Some there, like Pitts, blamed technology, social media, and bullying. Others looked to the boarding schools that removed a generation of children and created a cycle of abuse. Whiting Sorrell had come to think of suicide—along with alcoholism and drug abuse—as a symptom of intergenerational trauma, the inherited grief among indigenous communities resulting from colonization. Whitesell said that the community’s kids needed to learn to “survive their past and their present.”

  Part of that, he thought, was getting kids to talk openly about mental health. Upon taking the superintendent job in 2015, White­sell sent the school staff to prevention training and had them take what’s called an adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) quiz, a 10-question test to assess trauma. According to ACEs data the CDC collected in 2010 from more than 53,000 people in 10 states and the District of Columbia, 40.7 percent of participants reported no adverse childhood experiences, while 14.3 percent reported four or more, scores that were linked to increased health and behavioral risks. “I scored a seven,” Whitesell says. Many kids in Arlee, he says, would most likely register right around there. That trauma can manifest in many ways. Suicide, Whitesell says, was “an option. It can’t be an option.”

  In the fall, Whitesell’s son Greg, the Warriors’ co-captain, got a concussion playing football, his fifth, and had to stay home from school for three weeks. He struggled to eat and felt depressed. That confused him, because he was a star and a state champion. He almost felt as if he had no right to be sad, and that just made it worse. Greg didn’t hunt like Phil and Will; off the court, he loved video games and hanging out with his friends. Now Greg started to isolate himself and to sleep a lot. “I was tired of being depressed,” he says. “You just get tired of everything.”

  One night he sent a despairing text to a couple of friends. He was considering climbing out his window to start running when he saw headlights in the driveway. It was two teammates, Lane Schall, a gregarious ranch kid, and Darshan Bolen, Phil’s cousin and foster brother. Greg told them he didn’t want to live anymore.

  Dar sat with him while Lane went to get Greg’s mother, Raelena. She spoke with her son for about 45 minutes, then took Greg to a hospital in Missoula, where Whitesell met them. (He and Raelena are divorced.) Greg spent that night in a bare room with scratches on the wall. “I felt like I didn’t belong there,” he says.

  The hospital staff determined he wasn’t an immediate risk and sent him home. For weeks Raelena woke up every couple of hours to check on her son, and Greg regularly saw a counselor. Then basketball season started. He kept his experience private until he learned that a younger teammate was battling depression, at which point he told the kid he had been through similar struggles. Lane and Dar never talked publicly about that night. But, Greg said later, “if they didn’t show up, I don’t think I’d be here now.”

  * * *

  In December, in a game against a team from Seeley-Swan, Phil racked up 48 points, 16 rebounds, and nine assists in 24 minutes of play. Afterward, Adam Hiatt, the head coach from Montana Tech, a college in Butte that competes in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics conference, texted Phil, hoping that he would enroll.

  But Phil had other ideas. Sometimes he envisioned going to a powerhouse program like Oregon, but the idea of leaving Arlee caused an almost physical discomfort. He had been approached by a Division 1 school in Washington, and a small California school had offered him a full scholarship, but he brushed them off. The path to reconciling his athletic ambitions with his desire to stay close to home ran through Missoula: the college town just 24 miles south of Arlee, home of the Division 1 University of Montana Grizzlies. But the Grizz had offered Phil on
ly an invitation to walk on, meaning he’d have to try out and pay his own way.

  Tech, on the other hand, was offering a full scholarship. Phil was the team’s No. 1 recruit. Becky liked the idea. But Phil said he needed more time, and sure enough, soon a coach from the Grizz reached out again. “They’re dangling that carrot,” Becky said.

  By January 9, the Warriors were 8-0 and had outscored their opponents by an average of more than 40 points per game. That evening they played Mission, a larger high school in St. Ignatius and a rival, just up Highway 93 from Arlee. In the stands, Becky sat next to Hiatt. “He’s the best player in the state,” the coach said of Phil. John Malatare sat a couple of rows away, calling out traps.

  Sitting with Hiatt, Becky digressed, as is her habit, talking about her son’s dietary preferences—“Phil doesn’t eat salad; he eats chicken”—and how he and John would leave in the middle of the night to hunt buffalo.

  “That’s crazy,” Hiatt said.

  But mostly Becky discussed Will Mesteth and how much Phil loved playing with him. “They grew up together,” she said. A few minutes later, Will carved his way to the basket. “Will, No. 3,” Becky said suggestively. “There he goes.” And then, a few minutes later: “No. 3, his grandma is a Malatare. So they’re related.” But Will’s shot was off. In the stands, his dad, Big Will, yelled, “Get him the ball!”

  Will’s parents had him when they were in high school, and he was largely raised by his tupye, his great-grandmother. Will got into powwows as a boy, singing and dancing; his grandfather gave him the claw of a black bear for protection, and he kept a collection of more than 20 pairs of Air Jordans. Will’s mother, Chasity Haynes, is Salish and Navajo, and now works in the Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ enrollment department. Big Will—no one calls him Will Sr.—was a Sioux and Salish football star who went to play at the University of Montana but got kicked out before he played a game. Now he was a cop on the tribe’s drug task force. Big Will desperately wanted his son to complete college. But Will’s college prospects depended on the intensity of his defense and the accuracy of his three-pointer.