The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  In the bottom of the inning, the Indians’ staff lost control. Orel Hershiser fell apart, finally running out of duct tape and glue. He walked Fred McGriff and then, on four straight pitches, walked David Justice. His replacement, Paul Assenmacher, walked the pinch-hitting Mike Devereaux. The Braves pushed over two runs. In a battle of wills, the deciding question was control.

  In November of 1996, eight months after the accident, my uncle Gary took me horseback riding in southern Indiana. We rode through the fog and chill of Hoosier National Forest. During the day, we never spoke about Jason, but I felt my uncle’s concern in the way he treated his horses and me, and in how he’d carved out a day for us to be in silence in the forest. I felt it saying good-bye when he handed me his AA token—15 years sober. I keep it on my desk now, along with a Greg Maddux baseball card. Wherever I’ve lived, both have traveled with me like two amulets.

  On the back of the coin is a prayer you’ve probably seen cross-stitched on the pillows in your grandmother’s house or on the bumpers of diesel pickups: GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE, THE COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN, AND THE WISDOM TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE. The prayer is often called the Serenity Prayer, but I think of it as the Control Pitcher’s Prayer.

  As a struggling young pitcher, Maddux found Harvey Dorfman, a former sports counselor and baseball guru—the troubled pitcher’s Yoda. Maddux cited Dorfman in his Hall of Fame induction speech. For Maddux, his time with Dorfman represented a graduate course in control. What could he control? From his classic, The Mental ABC’s of Pitching, Dorfman addresses the issue of control in reference to the Serenity Prayer: “That wisdom . . . requires introspection and awareness that is often obscured by the emotions of the moment.”

  The emotions, plus a tired right arm, made the moment too big for Hershiser.

  John Smoltz once said of Maddux, “He never did more than he was capable of doing. He stayed within himself and stayed within his ability.”

  Later in the chapter, Dorfman quotes one of his most famous clients at length:

  Greg Maddux learned long ago to distinguish between what he could and could not control. “I can control the pitches I make, how I handle my mechanics, how I control my frame of mind. It benefited me most . . . when I realized that I can’t control what happens outside of my pitching,” he explained.

  In 1995, Philadelphia outfielder Ryan Thompson said of Maddux, “He’s so good it’s funny. It’s like he’s controlled by somebody.” Funny to say, the somebody is himself.

  Driving home after the game, I asked Jason where he went after the top of the seventh. Nowhere, he said. Just walked. It made him uneasy, he confessed, to care so much about something over which he had no control.

  Jason hadn’t returned until the middle of the eighth. Retaking his seat, he raised his thick eyebrows twice, allowing the faintest of smiles. Jason knew things I didn’t. But at that moment, I knew. The Braves were going to win. This game. And the Series.

  “Let’s go, Gregory. Six more outs.”

  8. The Looking Glass

  I wasn’t sure how long he could keep it up—sprinting from one end of the dark court to the other, stopping under each basket, jumping up, slapping the backboard 10 times, and then back again. But he kept going. It was the middle of February and a winter storm had knocked out the power across campus and the entire Brasstown Valley. We were sitting at our desks, Jason in front of his Maddux shrine, when the world went dark.

  Our routine that winter was to head to the gym every night after dinner, from 7:30 to 9:00. We’d shoot, lift, play one-on-one. The gym was like an old church—smooth, worn-out wooden floor with dead spots, a leak in the roof, the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead. Deserted on most nights, we had the entire court to ourselves. The college once had a powerful team, but when the school dropped the program in the late ’60s, it also stopped maintaining the gym. I was grateful that there wasn’t much of a crowd for our games of one-on-one. As the vow went deeper, Jason became unstoppable. Usually I could steal a game or two by outworking him and getting hot from the outside, but that winter he was too quick, too strong, too focused, too Jason.

  Some nights we played intramurals, and I was grateful for the reprieve. We could compete together and I could watch him beat someone else. Our team—a motley collection of former high school players of varying abilities—barnstormed through the fraternities and other intramural teams in front of crowds that sometimes reached double digits.

  The night the power went out is the night the vow came into focus for me. Jason insisted, in the dark, that we still head to the gym. He had to keep the routine going. I protested. He persisted. We took the ball and headed into the night. Inside, the gym was dark except for the soft red pools of light in the corner, from the glow of the emergency exit signs.

  I jogged around the gym as Jason walked under the basket. In one motion, he sprang up and slapped the backboard. As soon as he landed, he jumped again. Smack! With both hands, Jason hit the glass 10 times and then ran down to the other goal and repeated.

  Jason loved the motion and the movement of the game just as he loved the flow of the party and the blurring of boundaries when he drank. Sober, the game and the court became something larger—a renewed promise, a place of possibilities.

  If Jason wasn’t drinking, he needed to play ball, to compete, to win, to streak through space and slap a glass backboard. In the moment of competing, maybe his scoreboard clicked off. He no longer had to measure himself against the standard.

  When I drank with Jason, the scoreboard of resentment I’d been updating for years would turn off. I’d temporarily forget the words promise, past, potential, Tech, All-Star. On the court, though, I rarely had the ability to concentrate the way Jason could—to become so lost in the game that the regular boundaries of time and space fade away and there is only the ball and the goal, the world shining in a vivid state of present tense.

  Greg Maddux had this ability. Jason did too. The echo of Jason’s palms pounding the backboard—flesh against glass—was unrelenting. In memory, each slap grows louder, more insistent. The night eluded my understanding then, and now I can only see around the corner of the memory.

  But if I could show you Jason on that winter night in Young Harris, Georgia—running and leaping and slapping the backboard glass again and again—then you’d see everything I need you to see.

  9. Complete Game

  Heading into the final inning, Maddux had thrown just 82 pitches. The last three outs would require 13 more, but not before Kenny Lofton slapped a two-seamer into left and scurried and stole his way around the bases until he scored. Neither Jason nor Maddux blinked.

  With two out, Maddux got Baerga to foul out to Chipper and fireworks filled the brilliant October sky—cascading lights and drifting smoke. Maddux, immediately, demanded the ball. He was not smiling. He wanted the ball. Watching the replay now, it’s an insight into Maddux’s sense of history and timing. In the moment, I saw neither the fireworks nor Maddux. As soon as Chipper caught the ball, Jason wrapped me up in a hug and wouldn’t let go. Eventually, he sat and exhaled. With the color gone from his face, the whole night seemed more like a boxing match than a baseball game.

  The game was the longest of my life. Not officially—at two hours, 37 minutes it was just average. But afterward, we sat in our seats in silence for a long time. We watched the fans flock out of the stadium and the Braves leave the field. We watched the grounds crew go to work on the Bermuda grass, streaked with paint and the divots of cleats. We were the last in our section to leave.

  We walked out of Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, through the lots of beeping, jubilant car horns, past the minivans, past the pickup trucks, past the drunk, still screaming kids our own age, and into Jason’s black Isuzu Rodeo. The same Rodeo we would climb into months later on March 20, 1996, headed to St. Simons Island on Georgia’s Atlantic coast for spring break.

  Jason and I kept our vow that winter quarter. We st
ayed sober 40 days. We made sobriety what we had often made drinking before: a competitive sport. A game. We kept the streak going all the way up until the road trip to St. Simons.

  Seventy-three days sober, on March 20, at a seaside bar, we “fell off the wagon.” Technically, we flew out of the wagon—the black Isuzu Rodeo—and afterward I slid Jason’s obituary into the desk drawer of my new single dorm room back at Young Harris College.

  On the way to St. Simons, Jason told me he’d had dinner with his dad the night before. His dad had just received his report card and insisted on steak instead of burgers. After the dinner, Charles told Jason he was so very proud of him. After the funeral, Charles told me the same story. And now I am telling you. We had traveled 321 miles. Our destination was six miles away when we pulled into the downtown parking lot by the lighthouse. We stopped at a bar. Figured we’d earned that too.

  It started with a pitcher. And then another while playing pool. I don’t remember how we ended up standing at the bar, but I remember the moment when the prospect of shots came up. And I remember exactly what we both did.

  “We good?” Jason asked.

  Translate: Stop now? Beer enough? Go home? Drink up? Your call.

  In memory, this moment lingers and the decision hovers in midair, but in truth, I just shrugged. Smiled and shrugged.

  “The signals we give should be clear,” the poet William Stafford writes. “The darkness around us is deep.”

  You know the story from here. Your images are as good as mine. I have no memory of riding shotgun down a dark seaside highway. I can’t see the confusion of lights at the traffic circle or the moment Jason slammed on the brakes, flipping the Rodeo, sending us out into the night. When we landed, Jason snapped his spinal cord and I—I spent the nights and years that followed searching for solid ground.

  On or off the diamond, if Greg Maddux shrugged—playing dumb, deflecting a question, appearing aloof—it was for a purpose. His career is a testament to purposeful self-knowledge and the refusal to budge, to forget, to become someone he was not.

  EMT and hospital officials had trouble identifying who I was. I didn’t help. The hospital records state: Patient is a well-nourished, well-developed white male who is intoxicated and confused and unable to provide any significant history. His companion was DOA.

  Every day can’t be Game 1 of the World Series. The critical moments of any life only become so in the rearview. But standing in that sports bar, I knew. I knew Jason’s blind spots and the miles we had traveled together. I knew he needed me. He knew that I knew.

  We good? he asks.

  And keeps asking.

  And I smile. Smile and shrug. And the gold liquid pours and the keys are in his pocket.

  10. Free Baseball: 1996

  I did not stand with the swelling crowd at the Westview Cemetery in Atlanta under a bright, spring sun. I was in bed at the Southeast Georgia Medical Center with a broken nose, a broken foot, and road rash. I didn’t miss, however, a single game Greg Maddux pitched that season. Except for one. The last.

  Maddux went 15-11 with a 2.72 ERA and made 18 home starts in 1996. The drive from Young Harris was 100 miles. Gas was a dollar and a quarter. I had a 1986 Ford Thunderbird with over 180,000 miles and a shoddy transmission.

  I drove down the rhododendron-lined highway and rolling Appalachian hills into a smog-enshrouded traffic hell. Park. Pay. Walk. I disappeared into the crowd of fellow believers. We marched down gridlocked Peachtree Street, past scalpers and T-shirt hawkers with car audio systems and sidewalk stereos set to Whoomp! There it is! Whoomp! There it is!

  And there it was. Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium. Home. Scheduled for demolition. Final season. Farewell, friend. Designed with all the aesthetic subtlety of an East German architect, I entered its gates repeatedly that season to watch Greg Maddux on a mound of soft dirt—in night and day and sun and shade—do a very difficult and direct thing.

  His record didn’t reflect his brilliance. Compared to his four previous historically transcendent campaigns, the 1996 season for Maddux was a struggle, a grind. Bad breaks. I didn’t find there a single extended metaphor. Everything was metaphor. I couldn’t cry about Jason. I couldn’t speak about Jason. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jason. The terms shock and survivor’s guilt didn’t fill the Big Empty. So I committed myself to the Braves and Maddux and the rapture I found in those hours.

  I kept score; I listened to Skip and Pete; I tried, and failed, to tune into Maddux’s pitches. I hiked the concourses with echoes of the crowd through the haze of cigarette smoke and dried piss, each sticky step over a strata of spilt Coke. During the pennant race, I stood in concession lines with fellow-citizens of the South and argued SEC football. The push and pull of the people, the game, its music, the hovering humidity, even in the night—it felt like home.

  If you destroy it, they’ll still come.

  On the drive back north, I would wrestle for miles. You wanted to be him. And you wanted him gone. You wanted to shine alone. Some nights in the hypnotism of the highway’s white lines, I wanted to rip my teeth out. Sometimes, I shut my eyes and let the car drift and tried to remember . . . the hum of the tires, the bump of the reflectors, the shoulder of the road . . .

  Back in the mountains, in my single dorm room, I tried to sleep. I focused on Maddux’s next scheduled start. The ballpark. The lineup. Tendencies. My elaborate lullaby.

  “A baseball season is a novel written in the dirt,” Atlanta sportswriter Dave Kindred once wrote. “There is no rushing to the end.” The conclusion to the novel of ’96 came in two parts.

  When Maddux took the ball for World Series Game 2 against the Yankees, I sat in front of my tiny TV in Young Harris and had trouble breathing. Grief grants previously random dates new weight. October 21. That night marked the one-year anniversary of Jason and Maddux beating Cleveland. C’mon, Gregory. Jason. Do it for Jason.

  And then Maddux did precisely that. Eight innings. Shutout. Four hits. They couldn’t touch him. And he knew it. He was almost smiling. With each strike, each Yankee groundout, my heart cracked.

  Jesus, Gregory, yes. Shred these motherfuckers.

  The feeling was vicious. By the seventh, tears swelled in my eyes. Jason, Jason, Jason. The Braves headed home up 2–0 with the stage set. Three games in Atlanta. Win two and I could say good-bye to the season, the stadium, and maybe even Jason.

  The Braves dropped Game 3, 5–2, after Bobby Cox pinch-hit for Glavine in the seventh. In Game 4, up 6–3 in the eighth with two outs and two on, All-Star reliever Mark Wohlers, whose fastball reached 103 miles per hour, had Jim Leyritz down 1-2. Fastball, fastball, fastball. A pitcher, Dorfman writes, must never forget who he is. On the fourth pitch, Wohlers shook off Perez. Wohlers threw a slider. The fat, dumb ball trailed back over the plate. Leyritz unloaded. The goofy, idiot ball hung in the air forever, but it was gone. Game tied. Game lost. Series tied. Series gone.

  I couldn’t stop watching the slow-motion replays of the slider. Something twisted in my gut; I could not accept the result. My mind and stomach looped and the room spun, but I couldn’t take my eyes away. Wohlers’s slider became the wreck I couldn’t see, the tears I couldn’t cry. It kept happening. The ball floating, moving in the wrong direction.

  Slack-jawed, I turned off the television. I knew this script. Unlike Jason, my baseball spiritual arrangements tended toward something darker. I knew Maddux’s masterpiece was for naught. I knew in the way you know a team having grown up with them, that the Series was lost. I sensed some incredible waste. I couldn’t watch anymore. I couldn’t deal. It’s not over till it’s over, but for me it was over. I would read about it all later. And I did. Years later.

  The next night, as the Braves lost Game 5, 1–0, I went to the gym and shot 1,000 three-point baskets. That was the goal. Shoot 1,000. Five nights a week, in the months to come, basket after basket, I shot until blisters opened on my feet and then I shot some more.

  When Maddux lost the deciding Game 6, 3–2
, I was at the gym shooting threes. I shot my 1,000. Showered. Did homework. Before going to bed, I stole a glance at a muted ESPN and saw a grinning Wade Boggs on the back of a police horse, celebrating.

  The morning after the World Series defeat, with a backlog of homework, I finished The Iliad. Achilles’ friend Patroclus is killed. He rages. Can’t sleep. But Achilles kept grieving for his friend, the memory burning on. He honors his friend with funeral games. Competitions. Races. Sport as mourning. Reading, I felt comforted by invisible hands. I decided to play intramural basketball the next semester for Jason. Each long-distance shot now had a purpose. And each time I released the ball, I encountered something else.

  You can’t see it now, the gym is gone, but in the winter of 1996, you could stand under the basket, look up, and spot a series of handprints running up and down the foggy glass.

  11. Another Spring

  During that school year, I kept my uncle’s AA token and a Greg Maddux baseball card by the lamp on my desk. I’m holding the 1995 Fleer Ultra Gold Medallion Number 129 right now. Maddux, centered in mid-throwing motion, is wearing the road grays with a gray T-shirt underneath. The background of empty stands and shadows suggests the old Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Maddux’s mouth is open. Eyes lasered. His face is pure concentration, as if he were flying a plane, playing the violin, completing a heart transplant.

  Maddux is alone in the image. As every pitcher is. The mound a small and unforgiving island on a larger stage where one’s capacity for concentration is only as good as the next pitch. I’ve stared at this piece of cardboard more than any grown man should care to admit. Maddux’s expression and movement—effortless, frozen in time on the card—take on a certain childlike quality. “May what I do flow from me like a river,” Rilke writes, “no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”