The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  It wasn’t that sports were unimportant at Haverford. The cross-country team was excellent and the baseball team promising. Even the hoops squad had once been formidable, back in the ’70s when it starred a deadeye forward named Dickie Voith, who later scored an invite to Golden State Warriors training camp. No, it was just that there were a lot of things at Haverford that seemed even more important.

  Jeremy knew this. Even so, he was unprepared for what he saw upon walking into the men’s room at the campus center one afternoon that spring. There, standing at the urinal next to his, was a fellow student reading a chemistry textbook while he peed.

  With a highlighter in his mouth.

  That was when Jeremy finally snapped. He decided right then and there—midstream—that he had to leave. A month later, after considering transferring, he announced that he was taking a year abroad, in Spain, to clear his mind.

  It seemed fitting. Coming off a dismal season and burdened by an 11-game losing streak, Haverford had just lost its best player. The Streak was about to go national.

  It took a committed optimist to assess the roster the ensuing fall and see in it the potential for greatness. Fortunately for Haverford, or perhaps unfortunately, the team was led by the most committed of optimists.

  David Hooks was one of those coaches who believed in the impossible, even when other impossiblists wouldn’t. This was a man whose glass could be dry, shattered, and tossed into a recycling bin and still be half-full. He’d grown up in Dayton, Ohio, where as a rugged six-foot-three power forward he’d made second team all-conference in a conference that included future Trail Blazers star Jim Paxson. Inspired by his coach at Oakwood High, Hooks went on to become a high school coach and later a DIII assistant at his alma mater, Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Haverford was his first collegiate head coaching job.

  Now, in October 1990, in his third season as Fords coach, Hooks stood in front of his team at practice, eyes afire. In years to come, with his soft cheeks, deep-set eyes, burgeoning belly, and booming voice, Hooks would bring to mind a clumsy, affable Berenstain Bear. But for now, at 33, he was fit and sturdy, his brown hair cropped close. He looked like an athlete. And he had a plan to halt the Streak.

  “This season,” Hooks declared, appraising the pale, skinny players, “we will be the best-conditioned, hardest-working team in America.”

  The players assumed this was hyperbole. It was not.

  In the weeks that followed, the Fords ran through endless defensive “foot fire” drills followed by endless defensive slides. For a break, they ran endless wind sprints—“fivers” in Hooks’s parlance. Sometimes the coach scheduled practice from 10:00 p.m. to midnight and then from six to eight the next morning. After doing the math, some of the players slept in the small, musty training room, wrapped in towels.

  Hooks’s strategy might have worked—emphasis on might—if not for a few important factors. The first was the Haverford gym. Alumni Fieldhouse (or the Quakerdome, as students called it) was a giant concrete box that housed three basketball courts encircled by a running track. For games, Haverford staffers wheeled out bleachers and red tarps in an attempt to create intimacy. It did not work. The worst part, though, was the floor: ¹/8" of rubber seemingly spray-painted on top of concrete. It was like a great red magnet. On the rare occasion that a player arrived at Haverford able to dunk, the Quakerdome reduced him to weak finger rolls within weeks.

  Then there were the players themselves. These were not elite athletes, but rather student-athletes, the kinds whose bodies weren’t built for endless defensive slides. By the end of preseason, almost half the Haverford players were nursing groin strains.

  Yet Hooks remained confident. These things take time, after all.

  If there was a glimmer of hope for the Fords that fall, it arrived in the form of a trio of new recruits.

  On the second day of practice, the first of the three, six-foot-seven big man Tim Ketchum, blacked out, destined to miss the season for a condition that at first was thought to be heart-related but was ultimately deemed benign. Not long after, recruit number two, point guard Jacopo “Yak” Leonardi, injured his back, ending his basketball career at Haverford. As for the third, a six-foot-five forward with flowing hair named Hunter, he never even showed up for practice. He decided to play Ultimate Frisbee instead.

  Thus the 1990–91 Fords roster combined a lack of size with a lack of experience to devastating effect. The team had only four upperclassmen and two players over six-three—make that one, after springy power forward Russ Coward broke his leg. So in most games a six-foot-two sophomore forward named Jon “Feds” Fetterolf jumped center. The team’s best three-point shooter, Eric Rosand, had a fractured finger on his shooting hand. As for Dan “Greenie” Greenstone, the hardworking sophomore orator, he was not only devoid of discernible natural talent but had scored all of seven points the previous season.

  The new season began exactly as one might expect. First came the Rochester debacle. Now you might be wondering why a coach, armed with such a roster and in the midst of a losing streak, would schedule the defending DIII national champions in a season-opening road game. If so, you would not be alone. But Hooks—whose heart was usually in the right place, if not always aligned with his brain—believed in exposing his team to the best.

  Similarly, a different coach might not have appraised this array of talent and thought, You know what I should do with these boys? Run an up-tempo offense. Because usually when you possess a deficit of talent and size, you want to limit possessions. Slow it down. Grind it out. But Hooks? He taught his players the Kansas two-break. He encouraged them to push it up the floor. He was trying to build a system, after all.

  So Haverford lost. Big. When the Streak was at 15 games, the Fords traveled to Lebanon Valley College, in rural central Pennsylvania. The Lebanon Valley football team sat behind the Haverford bench in the packed gym, heckling with gusto. Early in the game one of Lebanon Valley’s big men, a ripped, suspiciously old-looking guy, follow-dunked on Feds. Then he emitted a primal yell, dropped the ball on Feds’s chest and, to the great delight of the crowd, shimmied.

  In the locker room at halftime, Hooks ripped into the Fords in a courageous attempt to motivate them. He roared, “Come on! BE MEN! We have 12 players with five fouls each. THAT’S 72 FOULS WE CAN USE!”

  Without pausing, Hooks continued: “Why are you afraid to take a charge? Come on . . . are you going to let yourself be intimidated by some 25-year-old rapist?” Hooks stared the players down, eyes burning. “I once got hit in the nuts with a lacrosse ball going 90 miles an hour, and I still might be able to have kids. So what are you afraid of?”

  Hooks’s speech did not have the intended effect. To the contrary, like many things Hooks said, it just raised questions. After all, these were Haverford students. They were taught to think critically. To question authority. And so that’s what they did. Didn’t 12 times five equal 60, not 72? And, if you thought about it, shouldn’t they be afraid of a 25-year-old rapist? And what of Hooks’s testicles? What did they have to do with toughness? Hooks didn’t choose to get hit there, right?

  Adding to the awkwardness in situations such as these, Hooks was both a poor speller and not much for grammar. One time, in the middle of a locker room sermon designed to whip the team into a frenzy, he wrote ARE WE WINNING OR LOZING on the board. More than once he described an opposing guard on a scouting report as having a descent handle. He labeled the nylon sack holding players’ wallets as the “Valuable Bag,” which led to philosophical discussions between Ketchum and Nick Cirignano, an amiable freshman guard—because, while usually one would call such an item the valuables bag, once filled with wallets it was, technically speaking, a valuable bag.

  So at Lebanon Valley, as often was the case, Hooks’s speech only confused the players. They went out and lost by 57.

  By Christmas the Fords were 0-9 and the Streak stood at 20. Hooks responded by holding three-a-days over break. The team’s first game
of the new year was against Earlham, a fellow Quaker college in Indiana, a rare opportunity to pick up a win. Here is how Earlham coach Pat Williams summed up the game in the paper the day after: “It was like UNLV playing Princeton, with us as UNLV. We’re not in that situation very often.”

  It only got worse. In mid-January the Fords lost by nearly 50 to a Johns Hopkins team that starred a deadeye shooter named Andy Enfield, who would one day lead a Cinderella team to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.

  After losing to Washington University in St. Louis by 49, the Fords went national. The USA Today sports section included a blurb on Haverford’s 26th consecutive loss. To the players, it was embarrassing. After all, who joins a college sports team expecting to lose like that? They had become the Washington Generals of DIII. The possibility of the first winless season in the school’s history loomed.

  Hooks remained stubbornly optimistic. “If I had to do it over again, I’d do it the same way,” he told the Haverford paper, the Bi-College News, of scheduling so many tough games. As for the losses, he saw a silver lining: “It’s been a year of hard lessons, but that’s O.K., because most of these kids still have two years to take these lessons and do something with them.” In the locker room he told the players, “I know you think I’m crazy, but we’re going to win a national championship at Haverford.”

  It was around this time that the players learned something interesting about Hooks’s background. Years earlier he had earned a master’s degree from North Carolina–Greensboro—in, of all things, sports psychology. For his thesis, Hooks had interviewed Bobby Cremins, Dean Smith, and, in a seminal moment in Hooks’s life, the great John Wooden himself.

  The topic of that thesis?

  How to motivate college basketball players.

  Week by week, the Streak grew: 27, 30, 32, 34.

  Even during those dark days, the team remained close. Haverford might not have been a big-time program, but its players possessed something that players at most big-time programs don’t: genuine affection for each other. They came from an array of backgrounds—sons of pastors, Coca-Cola distributors, small-town teachers, and big-city professors, but they were all smart. All committed, to a degree they would later marvel at. They ate together in the cafeteria, enduring Vegetarian Night, when the school served something called a cheese cutlet. They hung out in the library, the unlikely epicenter of Haverford’s social scene. On weekends they drank Keystone Light and sat in their dorm rooms throwing Nerf footballs back and forth and telling Hooks stories. And at parties they served something they called Red Wave Punch. (In an attempt to make the Fords sound more formidable, Hooks had rechristened the team the Red Wave.) Its ingredients included all manner of strange liquors, and it was supposed to be consumed only by players and friends of the program. It was awful. It was wonderful. The recipe is still handed down today.

  Now, as the ’90–91 season drew to a close, Haverford had two chances to win. The first came in late February, in the biggest game of the season—and every season, for that matter—against Swarthmore, aka Swat. The two colleges were historical rivals, competing across all sports for the annual Hood trophy. Most games, Haverford drew only a couple of hundred fans; against Swarthmore crowds often topped 1,000.

  This season’s matchup held more import than most—because of the Streak, of course, but also because it was Senior Night at Swat. And as the fates would have it, Swarthmore’s best player that season was a senior named Mike Greenstone.

  An outsider might not have pegged the two Greenstones as brothers. Mike was six-two, broad-shouldered, and blue-eyed. On the court, he played with fluid grace. He had been a star in high school before Swarthmore. Confident and serious, he already knew what he wanted to be (an economist) and how he was going to achieve that goal (Princeton grad school). Dan? At five-eleven and 160 pounds, he was skinny, gangly, and a bit goofy, the kind of kid who always had bedhead and never seemed to master the act of shaving. Whereas Mike was earnest and intense, Dan was sarcastic and self-deprecating, the type of guy who pursued arguments to their logical if at times awkward conclusions. He was not, he would happily tell you, exactly killing it with the ladies. He’d been a reserve until his senior year at a small private school in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. If not for Haverford and Hooks—who’d recruited Dan, much to his surprise and delight—it’s unlikely he would have been playing college basketball.

  Partly because of this, and partly because it was his nature, Greenie worked his ass off. With few physical advantages, he relied on hustle and defense. “It was almost like you could see the basketball player inside trying to rip through that skin that was holding him back,” Hooks would say many years later. “It was amazing to watch his never-ending effort to play through the lack of talent.”

  Greenie had been conflicted about the 1990–91 season. He hated losing as much as anyone else on the team. On the other hand, because of all the injuries and his hustle and improvement, he was playing serious minutes as the sixth man. He didn’t score much—just over three points a game—but ask anyone on that team and he’d tell you that Greenie was its heart and soul.

  Which explains in part why he’d been so disappointed the first time Haverford had played Swarthmore that season, a few weeks earlier. In that game, which Swarthmore won easily, Mike Greenstone had scored 18 points. Dan? He went 0-5 from the field. Though he did manage to rack up five fouls.

  Now, as Greenie prepared for the Swarthmore game, he felt a swirl of emotions that one would never wish upon someone that age.

  The call had come the previous February. Dan wasn’t in his dorm room, and there was no voice mail back then, so his mother tried the front office. People there called the basketball coach.

  That’s how it came to be that Hooks was the one who knocked on Dan’s door that day, his face drained of its usual enthusiasm. Your father is dying, Hooks said. His cancer has spread. It’s serious. It’s time to go home.

  That afternoon Hooks drove Greenie to the airport. He walked his player through security to the gate—you could do that back then. Then Greenie and his brother and Hooks and Lee Wimberly, the Swarthmore coach, sat together and talked. About everything. About nothing.

  A few days later, David Greenstone passed away at age 52. The New York Times ran an obituary. The funeral was held on Friday, February 23, in Chicago.

  When Dan returned, he said little about it. There was nothing to say.

  Now, a year later, it was Senior Night at Swat. Dan’s mother and grandmother flew out. Both wore Swarthmore sweatshirts.

  On a cold, rainy night, the Swarthmore gym was jammed. The team was 16-4 and headed to the postseason. The Fords were 0-24. The Streak stood at 34.

  Mike Greenstone started, of course, and scored a few buckets early. Then Dan came into the game, and the Swat crowd heckled him mercilessly. Dan tried to ignore it and focus on the game.

  By halftime Swarthmore led by 25. Then, in the second half, Mike Greenstone broke the 1,000-point barrier. On, of all things, a four-point play. The player who fouled him? Yup, you guessed it.

  The refs stopped the game, and Swarthmore held a ceremony honoring Mike. He was presented with a game ball. The crowd showered him with love. His hair looked perfect.

  Swarthmore went on to yet another win, and Haverford to yet another loss. Only this game was different. Let the record show that on this night, even though Haverford lost by 36, the Fords’ leading scorer was not sophomore guard Joey Rulewich, or Rosand. In front of his mother, in a gym where the opposing fans yelled “GREENSTONE’S BROTHER SUCKS!” all night, Dan Greenstone went 6 of 7 from the field. He pulled down five rebounds, hit his only free throw, and, in scoring a career-high 15 points, knocked down both of his three-point shots.

  After swishing the second, Dan backpedaled down court and, without looking, pointed a finger at the hecklers in the stands.

  Beating Swarthmore would have been emotional and certainly vindicating. But it also would have been highly unlikely, as all but
Hooks would have acknowledged. Vassar was a different matter.

  Only once all season had Haverford finished within 19 points of an opponent, and it had been against Vassar, in December, when the Fords lost a heartbreaker, 69–64. Now the season finale loomed.

  Hooks stayed up most of the night, watching film and working on strategy. Greenie did visualization exercises in his dorm room. The buzz on campus built. “Vassar Last Chance for Ford Victory,” blared the Bi-College News. The Streak stood at 35.

  In his office, athletic director Greg Kannerstein mulled the potential ramifications of a loss. After all, Haverford was starting to enter historic territory. The Division I record for consecutive losses was 37, by the Citadel back in 1954–55. For Division II it was 46, by Olivet in 1959–61. And for Division III, the record was 47, set by Rutgers-Newark from 1983 to 1985. There was still time for Hooks and his team, but not much. Just the previous spring, Haverford had been named a top-10 liberal arts school by U.S. News & World Report. Kannerstein knew that going down as the worst college basketball team in history wouldn’t be the best thing for the school’s reputation. And a nice long off-season would be all it would take for the media to sniff out the story.

  In the first half against Vassar, Haverford did little to inspire confidence. Jumpers clanged off the rim, layups rolled out. At halftime Vassar led by 11. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the Fords closed the gap in the second half until, with only 30 seconds remaining, they were down but six, 70–64.

  That’s when the magic began.

  Rising up on the wing, Greenie swished a three-pointer, his fourth of the night, to give himself a new career high of 19 points. Vassar missed two free throws. The teams traded possessions, but Haverford came up dry. Then, with only seconds left and the Fords still down by three, they had one final chance. It would have to be a desperation heave. Just inside the midcourt line, Rosand—the kid with the broken finger—caught the pass, turned and released a 38-footer. The buzzer sounded. The ball hung in the air.