The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  The selected entries are both road map and compass, for those starting out and for those like me who are still trying to improve. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that I don’t stop working as hard as we worked all those years ago, and that I don’t take any success for granted. Writing one good story doesn’t buy you anything the next time out, except for maybe a little confidence, and even that has a half-life of nothing. I’m often wondering if I’ll write a good story again, or wondering how I’ve written some of the good ones in the past, and over and over I find my way out of the darkness by reading a story I love, one that inspires me to be better and makes me afraid that I’ll fail. If nothing else, I hope that you’ll find that kind of North Star in this book.

  Being asked to edit this book was an honor, but it also made me realize how fast time goes and how far away I am from the sports desk at the Missourian. When I speak at college journalism schools, students inevitably ask me how someone gets my job. The truth is, I’m not sure how I got it. Since I had to write this essay as part of the agreement—a piece certain to read as narcissistic and self-involved—I’ve been thinking about the past 15 years and wondering about that question. The best answer I can come up with is that I’ve always been surrounded by smart people who believed in me: Greg Mellen at the Missourian, Colleen McMillar at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Mike Fannin at the Kansas City Star, and so many people at ESPN: Jay Lovinger, who changed my life; Jena Janovy, Michael Knisley and Kevin Jackson, Rob King and Patrick Stiegman, the Johns (Skipper and Walsh), Paul Kix, Chad Millman, J. B. Morris, Eric Neel.

  Mostly, though, I’ve been surrounded by a group of friends. Without them, none of this would have happened. We fell in together, pushing, pulling, helping each other, and hurting each other too—being there to read stories, sure, but also for funerals and weddings. At the risk of reverting to the schmaltz of the Missourian, I find myself thinking about them right now. The other day it was announced that Shakespeare’s Pizza, a block from the Mizzou J-School, was being torn down and rebuilt as part of some luxury apartment building, and while everything will be put back, nothing will be the same. Some spirit of the old place will be gone forever, another reminder of how fast things can disappear. God, I’m getting nostalgic and unbearable now, so I’ll wrap it up. One last story, if that’s okay.

  I remember one night a long time ago, sitting with Seth at a bar in Columbia called Widman’s. It was the low point of my quest to write the kind of stories included in this book; I couldn’t get an internship or find a single person outside of my teachers and circle of friends who believed in me. I was desperate, and all these years later I realize that the stories I loved kept me going in the face of rejection.

  I hope a story or two in this book does the same for you. I hope that in 15 years, when one of the people reading this book is suddenly its guest editor, you’ll be able to pick your best friend’s story, a masterpiece about the inevitable march of time. Maybe you’ll take a moment while writing a short essay to think about how fast it all goes, and how it feels like just yesterday you read Gary Smith or Gay Talese for the first time and wondered if you too would ever find a Jonathan Takes Enemy or get close to someone like Frank Sinatra. I hope you enjoy these stories, and I hope they help you write the stories you dream of being able to write.

  WRIGHT THOMPSON

  SETH WICKERSHAM

  Awakening the Giant

  FROM ESPN THE MAGAZINE

  YOU REMEMBER THE picture. Y. A. Tittle is on his knees in the end zone after throwing an interception that was returned for a touchdown. Swollen hands on his thigh pads, eyes fixed on the grass, he is helmetless and bleeding from the head, one dark stream snaking down his face, another curling near his ear. His shoulder pads make him seem hunched over, resigned, broken down. The black-and-white photo was taken in 1964, the final year of Tittle’s career. It hangs in a silver frame at his home in Atherton, California, not with the prominence befitting one of the most iconic pictures in sports history but lost among many mementos from a Hall of Fame career. The picture is now 50 years old, and Tittle is now 87. He does not remember much anymore, but that photo is seared in his mind. “The blood picture,” he calls it. He hates it.

  He remembers a place. It is in Texas.

  On a December morning, he’s sitting in his usual spot on his couch, flipping through a photo album. His breathing is labored. There is fluid in his lungs. Waistline aside, Tittle doesn’t look much different now than he did in his playing days: bald head, high cheekbones, blue eyes that glow from deep sockets, ears that have yet to be grown into. His skin is raw and flaky, and when he scratches a patch on his head, a familiar line of blood sometimes trickles down. He shares his large house with his full-time helper, a saint of a woman named Anna. His daughter, Dianne de Laet, sits nearest him, leaning in as he touches each yellowed picture.

  “That’s at Marshall High School!” Y.A. says, pointing to a shot of himself in a football uniform worn long ago, long sleeves and a leather helmet. That takes Y.A. back to his tiny hometown of Marshall, Texas, near the Louisiana border. Friday nights in the town square, where “I’d neck with a girl, if I was lucky.” Brown pig sandwiches at Neely’s barbecue. And football, always football. In 1943, he says, Marshall High traveled 200 miles to play Waco, ranked second in the state. The Mavericks pulled off the upset, and on the couch he recites the beginning of the newspaper story: “From the piney woods of East Texas came the challenging roar of the Marshall Mavericks, led by a tall, lanky redhead with a magical name: Yelberton Abraham Tittle.”

  He is slightly embarrassed as he utters his full name. As a teenager he reduced it to initials, and it later became legend. Remembering his Texas days seems to bring a youthful spirit out of him, which is why Dianne gave him this album today. But then he flips to a photo of himself during his college days at Louisiana State, and something slips. “Where did you get these pictures?” he says to Dianne. “I haven’t seen them.”

  She knows that he has seen these pictures many times, of course. Some even hang in his house. Dianne is 64 years old, with blue eyes shining from a face that she tries to keep out of the sun, and it is hard for her to watch each old photo bring the joy of a new discovery. She lives feeling a loss for her father, a loss that he doesn’t feel for himself—until something stirs it up. That happens when Y.A. mentions that his phone has been strangely quiet, considering that Christmas is in a few days. He suddenly realizes that he hasn’t heard from his best friend from high school. “I don’t think Albert died, did he?” he says.

  “He died,” Dianne says, with the forced patience of having to repeat news over and over. “He died a couple months ago.”

  “Oh yeah, right. He was such a good friend.”

  “Jim Cason”—Y.A.’s best friend from the NFL—“also died about a month ago,” Dianne says.

  “You said Jim Cason died too?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Damn,” Y.A. says, closing the album.

  “You’re the last leaf on the tree,” Dianne says.

  She remembers her dad. It’s not the person he is now. Some years back, doctors diagnosed dementia. Friends always ask Dianne if his condition is related to football. She can’t know for sure but thinks he’s simply getting older. In the past year, Y.A.’s memory loop has tightened like a noose. He repeats himself every minute or so. It has left a football legend, whose speaking engagements used to take him around the country, incapable of holding normal conversation and limited to a handful of topics: his late wife, Minnette; his four children, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren; football; the hope of a vodka rocks each day at 5:00 p.m.; and, most of all, his hometown of Marshall, Texas.

  Anyone familiar with Tittle’s football career knows that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. His body was supposed to crumble, not his mind. He was famous during his 17-year career—as a backup with the Colts, as a star with the 49ers, and as a legend with the Giants—for not only playing through pain but fo
r retaining a wit in the face of crushing losses. But Dianne has watched her dad regress in inches, too small to notice during daily visits from her nearby house but devastating when considered in their totality. “I haven’t lost him,” she says. “But I’m losing him.”

  Still, she believes—hopes—that the dad she’s known all her life resides somewhere inside, bound up and waiting to be freed. That person arrives in flashes, mostly when he talks about a party that he has hosted for 27 years in a row at his house on the shores of Caddo Lake, 20 minutes northeast of Marshall. What began as a way to give Tittle’s former teammates a taste of East Texas evolved into an annual event, a rite of spring, with friends from every stage of his life sitting on the porch as the sun set, drinking beers and eating barbecue, strumming guitars and howling country songs, listening to the host’s yarns grow more elaborate as the cooler emptied and night descended into morning. His golden rule of storytelling: “Lie to tell a truth.” When folks would mercifully stumble to bed, Y.A. would issue an order: be at the dock to go fishing at 7:00 a.m. They would always be there, black coffee in hand. Y.A. would usually oversleep.

  That party is never far from his mind, even now. In December, as if on cue, the anticipation of hosting for a 28th year creeps into Y.A.’s consciousness. “We have to do it,” he says to Dianne.

  She is wary. Most of his teammates are dead. The prospect of a few widows surrounding her confused and crestfallen dad seems terrifying. But in California, he spends his days in the TV room of an oversized house as his memory evaporates. Maybe, she wonders, his memory can briefly be restored in Marshall. Maybe geography can somehow transcend disease.

  “We’re going,” Dianne says.

  Dianne hopes she can give her dad the kind of miracle he once gave her. On December 17, 1949, in Houston, Y.A. was playing in a charity football game when suddenly an eerie feeling told him to go home. He hitchhiked four hours to his house in Marshall, and early the next morning, Minnette, pregnant with their first child, awoke covered in blood. She had suffered a placental abruption and was hemorrhaging. Minnette was rushed to the hospital. Men weren’t allowed in the delivery rooms back then, so Y.A. pounded on the door, desperate for any update. Minnette survived. Their child, a little girl, had gone so long with so little oxygen that doctors pronounced her dead on her birth certificate. But the doctors were wrong. Dianne was alive—four trembling pounds, cradled in her dad’s hands.

  So it’s fitting and somewhat ironic that of all the Tittle kids, Dianne is the one whom Y.A. now calls “my quarterback. I do what she says.” In a family of athletes, she suffered from exercise-induced anaphylaxis—potentially fatal allergic reactions brought on by physical activity. Still, she grew up trying hopelessly to connect with her dad. She watched all of his games, studying them for clues into what football revealed about him. Fans saw him as a star, larger than life. She saw him as human—a target on a field, a limping hero at home. Y.A. tried to bond with his daughter by ironing her clothes, but at heart he was the type of father who had no sympathy for splinters or stubbed toes and who wouldn’t talk football without one of his sons present.

  It was not easy for a country boy from Texas to raise a beautiful teenage daughter in the 1960s. He initially disapproved of her marrying her hippie boyfriend, Steve de Laet, whom she met at the University of Colorado. And he initially disapproved of her decision to become a poet and harpist too. “The only Sappho I ever knew played for the Green Bay Packers,” he liked to say.

  In 1981, Dianne ran a marathon, and when her allergy began to fight her from the inside, hardening her mouth and swelling her skin, she thought about how her dad always played through pain—through blood, even—and she finished. At a family gathering a year later, Dianne said: “Dad, sit down. I’m going to do something for you on the harp.”

  She recited one of her original poems, and afterward Y.A. said, “What Greek was that?”

  “Dad, it’s called ‘The Hero.’ It’s about you.”

  Dianne has tentatively planned the annual party for March, but Y.A.’s health might prevent him from flying. In January, Y.A.’s breathing was so bad he thought he was dying. “This is it,” he told Dianne. He was placed on oxygen. But over months of daily conversations with his “little bitty brother” Don—he’s 84—Y.A. asks hundreds of times when they’re going to Caddo Lake. Finally, Dianne books the party for the last Friday in April, but days before they are due to leave, Y.A. comes down with bronchitis. They board the plane to Dallas anyway. On the flight, he collapses from lack of oxygen; passengers have to help him off the floor. The entire trip seems like a bad idea. But then Don picks up Dianne, Y.A., and Anna at the airport, and they drive three hours east, off I-20 and to the end of a long country road, where a white house emerges from the blooming dogwoods. A sign reads: TITTLE’S BAYOU COUNTRY EST.

  “It’s magical,” Y.A. says.

  They spend the afternoon on the back porch, staring at the lake. A breeze crosses through. Condensation from cold beer leaves rings on their table. Dianne studies her dad, hungry for flickers of memory, but he seems to be getting worse. Ten or so times each hour, he utters a version of this: “I grew up in Marshall, Texas. I went to Marshall High School—the Marshall Mavericks. I went to LSU to play football so that I could be closer to my older brother Jack, who played at Tulane. He was my hero.”

  He hollers at Anna to bring him a vodka rocks and makes a few crude jokes, as if returning home has transplanted him to his teenage years. It’s all too much for Dianne. She walks to the dock and stares at the muddy water. It’s clear that there won’t be any magic on this trip. “His memory is gone,” she says, as if she needs to confirm it to herself. The party seems like a looming disaster. One of his few living high school teammates can’t make it. Her brothers are unable to attend. She’s out of energy and patience, and she feels guilty about both. Her eyes turn glassy. Something more than a party is at stake.

  “You’re witnessing a family tragedy,” she says.

  The lake seems to calm her, as it did the dozens of times she came here as a child. Soon she remembers today’s tiny moments that made her smile. During lunch at Neely’s barbecue—a Marshall staple almost as old as Y.A. is—everyone stopped and stared and pointed. Waitresses wanted a picture. Two teenagers approached him, calling him Mr. Tittle. Y.A. sat with them over brown pig sandwiches, talking about their football careers, not his. When it came time to leave, Y.A. reached for his wallet—he always pays—but the boys had already picked up the tab. It gave Y.A. a fleeting moment of honor, and it gave Dianne a fleeting moment of reassurance. She sometimes forgets that he is still a sports icon, even as she’s more protective of him than ever.

  It’s dark now, and the mosquitoes are fierce. Dianne heads back to the house. Y.A. slowly lumbers inside from the porch. He sinks into a couch, panting so hard that it resembles a growl. It’s been a long day.

  “You still breathing?” Don asks.

  “I’m still breathing,” Y.A. says.

  Y.A. coughs hard most of the night, and by morning he is exhausted and croaking, his voice a scratchy wisp. But he has enough energy to venture into Marshall for a glimpse of his childhood, maybe the last. In the passenger seat of an SUV, he seems more alert, guiding Dianne through the outskirts of town as if he’d never left. They drive a mile down a thin, sleepy road and over a hill—a stretch he used to walk in the dark after football practice—until they arrive at a grassy lot, barren except for the crumbled foundation of a brick house that burned down a few years ago. A NO TRESPASSING sign hangs on a tree.

  “Here it is,” Y.A. says. “I grew up here.”

  They park on the lawn. A man from a nearby porch looks over suspiciously, then turns away. “This brings back so many memories,” Y.A. says. Dianne sits in the car, waiting to hear stories that she’s heard many times. He used to tell her about the hundreds of bushes that filled the yard and how in 1936, at age 10, Y.A. would pretend to be Sammy Baugh, taking a snap, rolling right, throwing to them. “Th
ey were my receivers,” he would say. The ball would lodge in a bush and he’d run to it, then throw to another, then another, for hours—Complete! Twenty-five yards! Touchdown!—fighting through asthma, through an allergy to grass, dodging snakes, sick with himself if he missed two bushes in a row, fascinated with spinning a ball long and well. His father, Abe, would come home from his job at the post office and be furious, his yard decimated. But Y.A. couldn’t stop. Nothing made him feel so alive.

  It’s quiet in the car.

  “This is a bit sad for me,” Y.A. says.

  Seconds pass. “What are we going to do with this property, Dianne?” he says.

  “Dad,” she says, trying hard not to tear up, “a young woman owns it.”

  Again, silence. As Dianne slowly steers the car away, she says, “This might be our last trip out here.” Soon after, Y.A.’s sadness seems to have cleared from his mind like a bad throw. He directs Dianne past the cemetery where his parents rest, past the old grocery store, past the Harrison County Courthouse, to a brick building. “This is the old Marshall Mavericks High School,” Y.A. says.