The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  “I got caught up in them streets,” Josh admitted during a June interview with BuzzFeed News, a rare evening this year when he wasn’t locked up.

  Little of this came as a surprise to family members. Cousins remember being warned to keep their distance. “We knew it wasn’t the ideal upbringing,” said Joseph Sam, a nephew of Michael Sr. “They were always in trouble.”

  With his childhood saturated with grief and his older brothers descending into crime, Michael Jr. would have had to be a saint not to look for someone to blame. Conveniently, his father was already blaming himself.

  Out on the road, far away from home, Michael Sr. remained tormented by the loss of his boys. Teaching them toughness had backfired; he’d armed them with tools for survival in one world that wouldn’t work in almost any other.

  “Life was going to be tough on them,” he said. “Your skin had to be tougher than the others. But I also wanted them to make the right decisions.”

  Somewhere in these years, Michael Sr. began to lose the last of his sons—not to death or crime, but to rejection.

  On his first day of third grade, in a new town and new school, Michael Jr. was seated next to a chubby, snowy-haired boy. Michael Jr. wasn’t saying much to his new seatmate. The silence went on for so long and got so awkward that eventually the boy spoke up.

  “I told the teacher that I didn’t want to sit next to him because he was too quiet,” said Robert Dohman. “He turns around and goes, ‘Hey, blondie boy, I’m not quiet!’ And that’s the way me and Michael get along now.”

  Michael Jr. was voted “friendliest” by his sixth-grade classmates and elected homecoming king in eighth grade. His popularity was a testament to his ability to navigate the unspoken color line of a small Southern town; most of his close friends were white.

  “My grandma,” said Dohman, “was very old school and wasn’t into all that racial mixing. But when I had Michael over, he’d always be the first one to come over and give everybody a hug. Even her. He really changed the way my grandmother looked at black people. She would even smile when he came around.”

  Michael Sr. said he saw little of the outgoing side of his son, saying he was quiet at home. But coaches and teachers remember him as a precociously self-assured teenager who could start a conversation with anyone. After football games, Michael Jr. was known for going into the bleachers—uniform and pads still on—to introduce himself to parents.

  Michael could “talk to a group of 15-year-olds and then set there and talk to a group of 55-year-olds and not feel out of place either,” said Smith, now head football coach at Hitchcock. “I just never had a student that could just go and talk to a group of people. He would make friends all the time.”

  Even in what was ostensibly enemy territory. Smith recalled a track meet at Danbury, a nearby town that is 90 percent white, less than 1 percent black, and had developed a reputation for being unfriendly to minorities. Except, apparently, Michael Jr.

  “I can remember some Danbury parents cheering and rooting for Michael running the 100-meter [dash],” Coach Smith said. “You just didn’t see that, if you know anything about Danbury.”

  Maybe the biggest benefit of playing sports is that it kept Michael Jr. away from his brothers. The coaches, who also worked as teachers in the district, knew all about Josh and Chris: their obvious athleticism had never proven to be worth the trouble. But Michael Jr. was charting a path different from the men in his family. Michael Jr. greeted people with hugs, not fists. He was going to be the first to graduate.

  “Michael was a good kid,” Michael Sr. said. “He said he didn’t want to be like his brothers.” Left unsaid was that Michael Jr. clearly felt the same about his father.

  On fall Friday nights, Michael Sr. said he would find a seat somewhere in Hitchcock’s football stadium, away from the crowd and sometimes with his father, Wesley. After nearly 30 years as a father, he said, he could finally engage in the autumn ritual familiar across Texas.

  “I didn’t miss [any] home game his senior year,” Michael Sr. insisted.

  There isn’t anyone who can corroborate his perfect attendance. Family and friends say they’re sure he went to some games but don’t know about all of them. The coaches at Hitchcock High can remember seeing or, rather, hearing, Michael Sr. only once in four years: a game in Michael Jr.’s sophomore year.

  “I heard this guy yelling at Michael and I turned to Michael and asked him, ‘Who the hell is that guy?’” Smith recalled. “Michael said it was his father. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him.”

  Those stadiums can be hubs of activity on Friday nights, and coaches are notoriously focused on the events unfolding well away from the stands. It would be easy to miss someone on game night, right?

  “Let me say this in a nice way,” Smith said. “I didn’t know him, and I know a lot of people in town. I can look up in those stands and know who’s there.”

  Michael Sr. said he didn’t make it a priority to spend any time with the parents of Michael Jr.’s friends or the alums and other regulars who would show up at school events—most of them white. “I never did know them,” Michael Sr. said. “And I never tried to go out of my way.”

  Michael Sr. said he took a job with a trucking company based out of Ada, Oklahoma, so that he could arrive in Hitchcock by the start of kickoff Friday night. He assumed his son appreciated what he considered a significant sacrifice of time and money; coming back to Texas without a load meant he wouldn’t get paid for the drive home.

  It wasn’t until earlier this year, when media outlets began saying that he had abandoned his son, that Michael Sr. learned he was being phased out of the story of his son’s childhood. He never thought all those years on the road would mean that he wasn’t there.

  “Michael’s family was the city of Hitchcock,” said Dohman, Michael Jr.’s childhood friend.

  Told what Dohman said, Michael Sr. looked straight ahead, the anger washing over him. Sitting on that patio at the nursing home, he was, for a few moments, that angry Sam boy ready to fight.

  “The city of Hitchcock didn’t buy his goddamn clothes, a roof over his head, or the bed that he slept in,” Michael Sr. said. “The city of Hitchcock can kiss my ass.” He paused. “I should have kept those gas receipts.”

  Of course, Michael Sr. never thought he would need them. He also never thought the family of a high school teammate—a white one—would get so much credit.

  Once Michael Jr. revealed in February his plans to become the NFL’s first out gay player, the two media outlets with which his publicists coordinated the announcement wrote this:

  The New York Times: Sam found a comfortable place off the field as well, in large part because of Ethan Purl, a classmate and the son of Ron Purl, the president of the local branch of Prosperity Bank. Ron’s wife, Candy, made sure their house was part recreation center and part counseling hub for their children and their friends. By Sam’s senior year, he had his own bedroom in the Purls’ house, along with chores like cleaning the pool and carrying the grocery bags. “I look at our house as a kind of safe haven,” said Ron Purl, who keeps a photograph of Sam in his Missouri football uniform in his office. “He is just another son. If he did something wrong, he got yelled at just like the others did.”

  ESPN: The relationship started when Candy Purl, Ronnie’s wife, invited Michael to dinner during his freshman year of high school. Ronnie, a man with a personality much bigger than he is, discovered a kid he didn’t recognize and demanded to know, “And who are you?”

  “Without skipping a beat, my brother replied, ‘I’m Michael Alan Sam Jr.!,’” said Ethan Purl, Ronnie’s son. “And after that, he never left.”

  “That’s a bunch of shit,” Michael Sr. said. Sure, he said, his son went to the Purls’ on weekends, but “Michael lived at home to the day he graduated.”

  “He lived with the rest of us,” agreed Michael Jr.’s sister Michelle.

  “The Purls only helped [him] in [his] senior year,” his au
nt Geraldine said. “If the Purls were really good people, they’d tell Michael that he was wrong. That he should acknowledge his mother and daddy.”

  After a brief phone conversation in which he said he didn’t have time to speak, Ethan Purl did not return repeated phone calls. Ronnie Purl declined a number of interview requests. “Without Michael’s approval I will not be able to speak with you,” he said in an email. “Being in banking, I am very aware of privacy issues.”

  Michael Sr. said he met the Purls at least once, when he accompanied Michael Jr. on one of his visits over there.

  “I just wanted to see where Michael was going, to make sure where he was going was the right environment,” Michael Sr. said.

  In fact, Michael Sr. liked that his youngest son had white friends. He was convinced his association with them might mean better grades, a high school diploma, and maybe even college—the chance at success that his other sons never had.

  “He wasn’t messing with the black guys trying to sell drugs and doing drugs—I thought that was a good thing,” Michael Sr. said. “As long as he wasn’t doing nothing crazy, wasn’t in no cult, I was all right with it.”

  When Michael Jr. was at the University of Missouri, Michael Sr. began noticing some changes in his son, he recalled. There was that road trip from Dallas to Houston with Michael Jr. and one of his college friends, Vito Cammisano, a member of the men’s swim team. What struck Michael Sr. was his son’s taste in music.

  “He knew all of them white songs,” Michael Sr. said. “He knew country, Taylor Swift, all that stuff. I’m like, What brother knows all of them white songs? That tripped me out.”

  On another one of Michael Jr.’s trips home with Vito, Michael Sr. noticed their relationship seemed much closer than a simple friendship. How else to explain Vito coming home for the holidays? Michael Sr. waited until they returned to Missouri to broach his suspicions to his wife. “I told JoAnn, ‘You know, Mike ain’t bring his girlfriend but he brought this dude. That’s kinda funny,’” Michael Sr. said. “But she swore up and down” that he wasn’t gay. “I kept asking Mike, was this boy funny? ‘No, Daddy, no. Ain’t nothing wrong with Vito,’ he’d say.

  “He didn’t act gay then either,” Michael Sr. said of Vito.

  But during a visit to Missouri for one of Michael Jr.’s games last fall, Michael Sr. became certain about Vito.

  “I shook that boy’s hand, and that boy’s hand felt like a woman’s,” Michael Sr. said. “And the boy looked different. I told my brother that that boy right there is gay.”

  When they went out for dinner later that night, Michael Jr. showed them a picture of a woman he said he was dating; Michael Jr.’s Instagram account has lots of pictures of him in college posing with young women.

  “I still had some suspicions,” Michael Sr. said. But other family members “didn’t wanna believe it. I had intuition about that boy.”

  That intuition was finally confirmed this year. On February 4, Michael Sr.’s birthday, he received a text message from his son. “I could tell his PR guy wrote that message because Mike don’t talk like that,” Michael Sr. said. “It was some bullshit. I wanted to inform you that I’m gay.”

  That’s all you’ve got to say? Michael Sr. remembered texting Michael Jr. in response. “He texted me back, Happy birthday. So I went out and got drunk.”

  Five months later, in his room at the nursing home watching the red carpet show before his son would receive the Arthur Ashe Award, Michael Sr. grew wildly upset. He started calling and texting family members and friends.

  With Vito at his side, Michael Jr. had been asked what was the most difficult part of coming out. He told the interviewer that it was telling his friends. Michael Sr. was incensed.

  “If it was so hard to tell his friends, why didn’t he tell us first?” Michael Sr. said. “It was harder for him to tell us.”

  And it probably was. One recent afternoon, Michael Sr.’s brother Charles asked if Michael Jr. might go back to women. Michael Sr. responded, “Women don’t really want to mess with you after doing all that gay shit.”

  Michael Sr. is never going to be the spokesman for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. He’s not thrilled about his son’s sexual orientation. But he also hasn’t disowned his son. He never says his son is going to hell. He doesn’t talk about trying to cure him or make him straight. In his own rough-hewn, coarse way, Michael Sr. has accepted that his son is gay. “I love my son,” he said, “and I don’t care about what he do.”

  The family rift that the ESPY Awards exposed to a national audience had been there, deep and wide, for a while.

  Seven months earlier, in December 2013, Michael Jr. came to Houston as one of the nominees for the Rotary Lombardi Award, which is awarded to the best college lineman or linebacker. Instead of asking his family to attend as guests, he invited the family of Missouri football teammate Will Ebner.

  “We found out Will and I were going to be part of his family representing him,” said Elaine Ebner, mother of Will Ebner. “If someone else had come from his family, I would have wanted them to be center stage. I know my place. Mainly, I just wanted to be whatever he wanted me to be.”

  Michael Jr.’s aunt Geraldine managed to score tickets from a friend who was a member of the Rotary Club. She also sat in the area designated for family. “When I got there, [Michael Jr.] was glad to see me. It’s always good to have family there,” she said.

  Days later, Michael Jr. graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in parks, recreation, and tourism. Everyone in the family—except Josh and Chris, who were both in jail—made the 600-mile road trip from Texas to celebrate the first of JoAnn and Michael Sr.’s children to graduate from college.

  To commemorate the occasion, Michael Jr. posted a picture on Instagram of himself in a cap and gown, a wide smile on his face and an elbow comfortably resting on the mantel of a fireplace. “It’s been a long time coming,” read his caption. He was alone in the photo and made no mention of anyone else being there—in that or any of his other public social media posts from the time.

  Later in December, during the week of the Cotton Bowl in Dallas—Michael Jr.’s final college game—Michael Sr. said his son borrowed his car and spent all of his time with Vito and teammates. Michael Sr. also said his son lied to him about the location of the team hotel and then didn’t call him, or return any of his calls, for the rest of the week.

  “I had to call him to get him to bring me my car back,” Michael Sr. said. “I kept calling and calling. He didn’t bring the car until the last day, and the game was the next day. He didn’t talk to me or nothing.”

  In May, on the weekend of the NFL draft, Michael Jr.’s family was conspicuously absent when TV cameras followed him around at his agent’s home in San Diego. He declined an offer from his father’s family members to attend a draft party they wanted to host in Dallas, his aunt Geraldine and Michael Sr. said. Instead, he spent the weekend in California with Vito, some friends, and his agents.

  “If he’s so ashamed of us,” Geraldine remembers one of his sisters telling her, “why doesn’t he just change his name?”

  The day the Rams drafted him—when he was so happy that he kissed Vito and smeared his face with celebratory cake—might end up being the pinnacle of Michael Jr.’s NFL career. Now, cut from his second team, he is learning something his father learned long ago: life can take what you want most.

  Since 2000, Outsports noted, every single Defensive Player of the Year from the five major college football conferences made it onto an NFL team—except Michael Sam Jr. And it’s not that he played poorly in preseason. Far from it. He totaled 11 tackles and three sacks, a figure that left him tied for fourth in the league. His bold announcement of his sexuality, which garnered him glamorous accolades, may have also destroyed his football career.

  Disappointment and loss are feelings Michael Sr. knows well, of course, so the two Michaels have more in common now than they may have ever had. And yet Michael Jr
. doesn’t come to his father—or anyone in his family—for comfort. He keeps his distance.

  To Michael Sr., sitting in his wheelchair or taking a drag on one of his Kools, that distance can feel like death. He doesn’t want to lose another son.

  JEREMY COLLINS

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux

  FROM SB NATION

  1. First Pitch

  THE JOKE, said Braves broadcaster Skip Caray, is that if half the people who claimed to be at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium during the Bad Times (1985 to 1990) had actually been there, no seat would’ve been available. Jason and I were there—wandering, hounding autographs, chasing foul balls across acres of empty seats. We smoked our first cigarette in the solitary shade of the orange upper deck in left-center field. Once, with no crowd noise to compete with our pubescent jeers, Padres slugger Jack Clark turned and flipped us a bird.

  The stadium organ waltz of another Braves lost season was the soundtrack of our summers.

  Routed. The Cellar. Loserville, USA. Defeat for the Braves was inevitable until it wasn’t. In the summer of ’91, enchanted words—Magic Number, Clinch, The Pennant—belonging to distant cities—New York, St. Louis, L.A.—could suddenly be touched each morning in the paper. Now only winning mattered. And the game rewarded us each fall by finding new ways to break our heart.

  The Twins of Minnesota that fall. The Blue Jays of Toronto in the ’92 Series. The Phillies—the fucking Phillies—in the ’93 NLDS. The Strike in ’94.

  But then there was 1995. On October 21—World Series, Game 1—Jason and I and 51,874 fellow Braves fans poured into Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium. Now college roommates with almost calloused baseball hearts, we wedged into Section 311, high up, directly behind home plate. On the mound, warming up, blowing into his right hand between pitches, stood Gregory Alan Maddux.