The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  “There is a place you go to,” Hatfield tells me, speaking carefully, precisely—“call it out-of-body experience, call it state-of-mind, call it whatever you want—that is not achievable except by the most intense and pure focusing of your passion. And only after years of intense concentration are you able to reach this zone. It’s a place where the movement of your lift becomes perfect; it’s not even a part of your consciousness. You’re simply out of tune with the weights on your back: you’re part of the iron, and it’s part of you. You go down, and you come up.”

  Hatfield leans forward, as if delivering a promise. “You could literally blow a muscle out in the process, and you’d never know it. You can’t hear the crowd screaming. You never feel the sweat that is dripping down into your eyes. Nothing.

  “And then all of a sudden you’re done, and you’ve broken a world record by over a hundred pounds—and you literally cannot remember having done it.

  “I got to the point where I was able to enter that state at will,” Hatfield says.

  Hatfield grew up in an orphanage in Cromwell, Massachusetts, where he was sent with his three older sisters when he was seven.

  “Certainly I knew from that early age that I was not the same as the other kids. They all had mothers and dads, and all I had was 72 nonsibling rivals, more than anything else. You had to fight for seconds at the dinner table. You had to fight for just a little affection from your counselor. But it was kind of a strange relationship, because on the one hand there was that inadvertent rivalry, and on the other hand, there was a sense of protectiveness and camaraderie and shared passion amongst all of us.”

  Fred and I take the elevator to the top of the WWF building and walk out onto the rooftop patio. It’s a hot, hazy summer day, but there’s a good wind blowing, up high like that, and it’s a nice patio, with picnic tables and a view of the Long Island Sound, sailboats in their slips, blue water, and forests and hills beyond, and steeples and rooftops visible through the trees.

  “There’s my home, out there,” Hatfield says, pointing across the bay to a steeple rising from the woods on the farthest hill. “We live right there,” he says with a pleasant, almost childish satisfaction. I like how long Hatfield stares out there in the direction of that steeple, towards his home, and the comfort I seem to sense it fills him with. He stands there looking out across the water just a hair longer than I think you or I would, and I like that.

  Next, Hatfield takes me down to the gym that’s available for WWF employees. It’s a nice gym, of course, with a leg press, a squat rack, and a modest amount of iron. Dumbbells, barbells, etc. But it’s obvious Hatfield doesn’t train here. It doesn’t have enough weight, and more importantly it doesn’t feel quite right. It doesn’t have that lingering echo of grunts and groans and shouts. Hatfield admits that he trains at home now—that he tried to work out here, but there were a few problems, not the least of which were technical. He points out with pride the powerlifting platforms he designed—“floating platforms,” he calls them, built out of polyurethane-and-hard-rubber interlayering, to cushion the floor against the heavy weights being dropped back to the floor, as happens at the end of a heavy deadlift, or any Olympic lift.

  Hatfield explains that the whole building is a concrete frame, so that it’s rigid, and that even with his floating platforms, the whole building would shake whenever he was working out with his heavy weights. It made the pencil-necks and the “B-B’s,” as he calls them, nervous, but the most significant complication was that it kept shutting down all the computer systems, and that at the end of one heavy lift, the building shook so hard it did about $50,000 worth of damage to the computers, and they were down for a week . . .

  “I don’t have very much corporate acumen,” Hatfield says again.

  In the orphanage, it wasn’t as if everyone was chosen, except for young Fred. That might be too horrible to imagine—72 other orphans being selected for adoption, while year after year, strange Fred, young Fred, and then not-so-young Fred, being bypassed, every time. That might be too much for any human body, any human body, cell-split or not, to stand up to; though who knows what the real outer limits are? Would he have gone on to squat past his record 1,100 pounds, and on to 1,200, or 1,300 pounds? Probably not. Surely his record is very near the outer limits.

  Several kids from The Home were adopted. And Fred had his chance.

  “It was a family from New Jersey,” he says. “These people had a rich grandfather. In fact, as I understand it, the grandfather—I’m remembering things that haven’t been in my mind since the time I was 12—he had something to do with the machinery that Friendly’s Ice Cream used to make ice cream. He invented all that stuff.”

  They chose Fred, this strange young bull, to go with them on a trip across the country, that summer—to take him out on a test run, a 90-day trial.

  Except they didn’t want to take Fred’s three sisters, who were also in The Home—a younger sister, nine, and two older sisters, 13 and 14. Fred was 12.

  He went anyway. Just to say he’d been. And to check it out; to give it a chance.

  They drove west in a big brand-new ’55 Cadillac, a yellow hardtop. The deal was that the grandfather, who wasn’t going on the trip, would let the mother and father take his Caddy on this trip if they brought the grandmother along with them. There was a daughter too, who was Fred’s age.

  They left New Jersey and went through Pennsylvania. Fred remembers that, because it was the first time he’d ever seen an oil well. And even though they didn’t have any air conditioner, they drove in the day, and stopped at motels in the evenings. There weren’t many superhighways back then, if any, so they went through a lot of small towns. It was all new to Fred, stuff that he’d never seen before, maybe never even dreamed before, and it must have wedged in his mind like a crack of light or must have pried open some spaces inside him, like roots spreading, and tried to let something else in. Some abatement of the franticness and rage, perhaps, though perhaps too, it only allowed in oxygen, which enabled the flame to burn brightest.

  “We stopped at all the typical tourist places,” Fred says. “The Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon . . . We drove through Yosemite, including the tree, which was almost impossible to do, with that big brand-new Cadillac . . . There was only about one inch on either side of the car.”

  It didn’t work out. Fred rode in the backseat and knew, they all knew, it wasn’t going to work out. He sat back there with the daughter, this quintessential American family, and surely they must have been able to sense even then his otherness, his animal-ness—his hot raw heart burning in the backseat of their car like a lump of lead that has just been pulled from a bed of coals.

  “We were driving across the desert,” Fred says. “I remember the guy was driving, the father—his name was Emmett Huntz—and I had my arm out the window with a little piece of paper in my hand, and it was flapping in the breeze, making a horrible racket; and I was doing it just to piss everybody in the car off.

  “And all of a sudden Emmett was swerving the car wildly like that!”—Hatfield waves his arms, flaps them like a stork’s wings.

  “Well, I come to find out I had my arm out the window so far that it was about to get taken off by this bridge that we were passing!

  “It became very clear to me that I didn’t want to have any part of this family,” he says. “And I missed my three sisters, who were at the orphanage without me. I felt sort of a sense of protectiveness, and I said, ‘There’s no way these three girls are going to grow up without my influence.’ And so I opted to go back to the orphanage.”

  You mention the squat to Fred Hatfield, and the old lifter will talk to you about concentric strength, static strength, and eccentric strength; about starting strength and explosive strength . . . He will talk about tissue leverage (interstitial and intracellular leverage stemming from fat deposits, sarcoplasmic content, satellite cell proliferation and the accumulation of fluid) . . . extent of hyperplasia (cell splitting) . . . stroke
volume of the left ventricle . . . ejection fraction of the left ventricle . . . motor unit recruitment capacity . . .

  “Do you ever get under a heavy weight,” I ask him, “and find yourself thinking, ‘I can’t get this today’? And if so, what do you do?”

  There is a long pause while Fred searches his memory valiantly for a time when he might have been mortal.

  “If I ever have felt that,” he says finally, speaking very carefully, “it was only extremely occasionally. Offhand, I can’t remember any . . .”

  “Have you ever had to scramble, to continue training?” I ask him. “Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t have access to a good gym?”

  Hatfield rejects that notion out of hand; bats it away.

  “You have to learn to take control of your life!” he cries. “You have to ensure that doesn’t happen!

  “Only a fool would go into the desert without water!” he cries.

  “Have you ever felt passion, Rick?” he asks me later. “Do you know what it is?”

  “Well, yes,” I begin, “I’ve . . .”

  “Passion,” says Dr. Fred Hatfield. “Allow me.

  “Passion,” he says, “is not ‘the need to achieve.’ Instead, it is a burning desire to exceed all bounds!” He pauses, then says, “IT IS NOT A ‘COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE’; RATHER, IT IS UTTER DISDAIN FOR ANYTHING LESS!

  “NOT ‘SETTING GOALS,’” says Dr. Squat. “GOALS TOO OFTEN PRESCRIBE PERFORMANCE LIMITS!”

  There is a stern pause.

  “THERE IS NOT FORCE OF SKILL OR MUSCLE,” says the Doctor. “RATHER IT IS THE EXPLOSIVE, CALAMITOUS FORCE OF WILL!”

  It should not surprise a gentle reader that just a few weeks before my visit, at the age of 50, he broke the record for the 198-pound bodyweight class, with a squat of 860 pounds.

  Hatfield drives me out to his house, where I meet his trim and friendly and hospitable wife, Joy, who also used to be a competitive powerlifter. I look at pictures of their children, and pet their dog T-Bone, who they adopted from a pound. He’s a fine dog; it’s a fine, nuclear family.

  On the drive back, we get caught in a traffic jam. Hatfield’s driving. I ask him if he has any secret rituals in preparing for a record squat, such as the 1,100-pound lift that he and Joy referred to as “The Giant Squat.” And once more, Hatfield referred to being able to “go to another place.

  “There’s a place within each person’s mind where there is no pain, no negative force,” Hatfield tells me once more. “Where only positive forces dwell. And that’s the place I need to be, to put that kind of weight on my back and have the capacity to ignore the sound of the crowd, and the pain; the fact that my shoelace is untied, or that the judge is picking his nose—or any of the other disconcerting cues in my immediate environment. Those things must be completely ignored in order to execute the task at hand, which is nothing more than sheer movement: going down, and coming up.

  “I can’t feel anything, I can’t see anything—and yet I must feel and see everything, at the same time. And it’s a matter of pure movement, with no other sensations creating distracting noise.”

  The jackhammers blast away, up ahead of us. Cement mixers groan and growl and roar. It’s some kind of construction ahead, instead of a wreck, or perhaps it’s both. Hatfield jerks in his seat, as if willing himself to be free of the jam. “I don’t know what happened with this traffic,” he says. “Aw, Gawd,” he huffs. “We’re only half a mile from our exit.”

  The jackhammers chatter louder. “It’s right there,” he says, “the exit that we’re trying to get to.” He exhales. “In sight of it!” he says. Blows out steam; rocks, fidgets.

  To try and calm him down, I brag on that dog of his—that sweet hound T-Bone.

  Hatfield looks uncomfortable for a minute—looks uncertain.

  “I wouldn’t know the first thing about what constitutes a good dog,” he says finally. “If it’ll not crap on my rug, I like it.” He laughs nervously. “That’s why T-Bone is still there. And he loves kids too. We got him at the pound when he was less than a year old.”

  “First dog you’ve ever had?” I ask.

  “No, out in California, we had a couple of Lhasa apsos. They were fine, you know? They weren’t real nuts about being on a leash, but other than that, they were fine. Then we moved to a bigger house, and they turned—I swear to God—into Satan. They started chewing up my furniture, peeing everywhere. I had to sell ’em both.

  “Then we got a pit bull. But then he ate a Brittany.

  “So then we had another dog, sort of like a dingo type of dog. And I just couldn’t housebreak that dog for anything. I have not had good luck with dogs,” Hatfield concludes.

  “Somebody had already worked with T-Bone, though,” he adds. “It was obvious. Because he would fetch, and heel, and sit, and all of those things.” Hatfield stares out at the glacier of traffic, none of it going anywhere. “He appeared to be a very well-trained dog already, when we got him from the pound.”

  I remembered the way he used to rage, when he would approach that iron bar, in the olden days. What I think might have finally happened within him is that the calm has finally arrived, or almost arrived—that it has come as if from within the iron, leaving the iron like a fever.

  Serenity lay beneath the rage, it seems, but surely it must have been a long way down there, and the iron, the weight, so heavy.

  CHRIS BALLARD

  Haverford Hoops

  FROM SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

  “YOU WANT A STORY?” my brother said. “You should write about the Streak.”

  This was last year, over a beer. My brother is 41 now, a successful doctor with two kids. And here he was, still talking about his Division III college basketball team.

  You know those stories about a wise coach who inspires a group of plucky overachievers to overcome the odds and win state, or whatever?

  This is not one of those stories.

  In the beginning—before the run at the record, the national media, and the fellatio strike—there was just a college basketball team and a coach.

  In the fall of 1990, they huddled in a locker room in Rochester, New York. The young men sat on metal benches. In front of them paced a burly, exuberant 33-year-old, though David Hooks didn’t pace so much as stampede around the room, trailing optimism in his wake. He spoke to the players of opportunity. Of playing like caged lions. Of leaving it all on the floor. And then, because Haverford College was a Quaker school, he asked if any players wanted to speak.

  Dan Greenstone, the team’s skinny sixth man, raised his hand. “There are two ways you can look at it,” he said, peering around the room. “You can think, We’re playing the national champions! Or”—here Dan affected a mock-scared tone—“We’re playing the national champions. Which one is it going to be?”

  Inside each of those young men, something stirred. Why couldn’t they beat the University of Rochester?

  Thirty minutes later, the Fords took the floor. And over the next two hours, they did indeed make history.

  By losing by 70 points.

  The Haverford sports information director confirmed it afterward: the 104–34 defeat was the worst loss in the school’s nearly 100 years of basketball.

  Years later, Greenstone points to that evening as the moment when his idealism was fatally pierced. “Because,” he says now, “it just seemed to me that we were working really hard and we cared a lot and that should be enough.”

  He pauses. “And let me tell you, it most certainly was not.”

  Exceptional basketball teams require certain ingredients. Talent, of course, and great coaching, as well as chemistry and a strong work ethic. These are the teams you read about in books and see in movies. They provide inspiration, teach us lessons.

  But what about bad teams? Not the merely mediocre, but those that achieve transcendent, soul-sucking badness. Teams that can lead men to question their purpose on this planet—that can cause a coach to sit deep into the night, cross-
legged on his living room floor, eating bowls of Frosted Flakes, trying not to cry and watching late-night ESPN games, just to be reminded of the way basketball can be played. Those types of teams also require their own peculiar alchemy. And they also teach lessons, if different ones.

  The Haverford basketball squad of the early 1990s was such a team, and it has its own story, an epic quest for victory. Not to win a national championship, or a conference, or a tournament.

  No, the Fords were just trying to win one game.

  Let’s start at the beginning, back in the spring of 1990, when the Streak was fresh and new and almost endearing, the way funny-looking babies are before they grow into funny-looking adults. George H. W. Bush was still in office. The Black Crowes had just released their debut album. Pretty Woman was in theaters. And the men’s basketball team at Haverford, a liberal arts college of 1,200 in the leafy northern suburbs of Philadelphia, had just completed its 12th consecutive losing season, finishing 3-21 and dropping its final 11 games.

  Of the players, Jeremy Edwards took the losing the hardest. A six-foot-three sophomore shooting guard, Jeremy was far and away the best player on a team that was both undersized and undertalented. A legitimate high school recruit from St. Albans in Washington, D.C., he could slash to the basket, stick midrange jumpers, and run forever. With his short dark hair, olive skin, toned physique, and killer smile, he was also the closest thing at Haverford to a matinee idol. And he took basketball very seriously. Four or five times, he’d cried after losses.

  Jeremy was exasperated by Haverford. Not an Ivy, nor a “name” liberal arts college on the level of Williams or Amherst, Haverford was a progressive, intellectual school with a serene campus featuring duck ponds and 19th-century stone buildings. There were no fraternities, no football team. Instead, there was an honor code and a fervent embrace of the then-dawning political correctness movement. This was a school where “women” was often spelled “womyn,” where the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance held kiss-ins, and where the student-run pizzeria changed the Hawaiian pizza to Canadian Bacon and Pineapple, lest any Hawaiian student be offended. That no one had ever seen a Hawaiian student at Haverford was beside the point.