The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  During the 2010–11 school year, he was living in Lake Odessa (pop. 2,018) and had begun substitute teaching and volunteering in the Lakewood weight room. The community considered itself lucky to have him; he would later be hired as football coach. He had a key card to the school and keys to the athletic department rooms.

  Kayla was 15 going on 16 that year, a sophomore, and was new to the area. Interested in church, livestock, and playing sports, she was the type of teenager who earnestly worked to improve herself in every area of endeavor. Before that year, a family friend told her that if she wanted to prepare for sports, she should talk to Mr. Curtis, the former major leaguer.

  She did, and soon Curtis had drawn up a workout regimen for her and was opening the gym in the early mornings for her and her brother. The two became close. She became friends with Curtis’s second-oldest daughter, who was her age. The family was so welcoming of her, and she was so grateful, that she invited them to her basketball banquet her sophomore year.

  That following summer, between her sophomore and junior years, Kayla, who had been training for cross-country in the Lakewood weight room with other athletes, began having problems with her hip flexors. Curtis offered to do manual resistance hip flexor exercises with her in the weight room, in the company of his two eldest daughters, with whom he did the same exercises. A little intimate? Perhaps, but if Kayla was uncomfortable about what was happening, she would have had every reason to think she was the only one who was.

  The exercises continued over the following days and weeks, but the venue moved: first to a room adjacent to the weight room, and then downstairs to the windowless trainer’s room. The sessions were now one-on-one and out of the view of other students. In the trainer’s room, Curtis worked her muscles in ways that began to make her feel uncomfortable: “He’d touch all around my leg, and he’d touch up near my hip bones and inside of my hip bones,” she would testify.

  But she didn’t say anything, instead convincing herself that the problem wasn’t that Curtis was crossing lines, but that she held those lines to begin with. To be the best athlete one can be, one has to overcome self-imposed limitations and break out of comfort zones. So when Curtis asked to give her an athletic massage—no, he wasn’t a physical or massage therapist, but he had lots of experience with people at the highest levels of such things—she said yes.

  He laid her down on the trainer’s table on her stomach and started with her hands—“Relax, you’re too tense,” she testified he said. Then he progressed to the shoulders. Then he removed her shirt, leaving her in just a sports bra.

  “I’m uncomfortable, but I don’t say anything ’cause in my head I’m going through all the talks that he had talked in class, and how he was such a Christian guy. And so I was like don’t—you know—don’t think there’s something happening here that’s not. You know, don’t offend him,” she testified.

  It unfolded increment by increment; Curtis made small talk the whole time. First he flipped her over on her back, exposing her front, and began massaging her stomach. Then, abruptly, he vaulted onto the table, and was suddenly straddling her.

  “And once again I tell myself, ‘Well, he’s just trying to have a better angle at massaging my abdomen,’” she testified.

  She said Curtis asked her, “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

  She didn’t say no. So Curtis removed her sports bra and began massaging her bare breasts. Kayla stared at the ceiling.

  “I try to rationalize why he could think that it was okay to do that,” she testified. “I was trying to figure out how it could better me as an athlete, ’cause that was the idea of this massage. And I couldn’t figure out like how that could make sense. And I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t even open my mouth to say anything.”

  Later in the trial, John Cottrell, vice president of counseling services for the Grand Rapids YWCA and an expert witness for the prosecution, told the jury about “tonic immobility”: “a neurobiological process that essentially paralyzes the body in a defensive way so that pain is not felt and resistance isn’t even possible.”

  Child victims rarely fight back, Cottrell would say. Far more common is for children “to acquiesce, to follow instructions if instructions are given, and to endure things pretty much silently.”

  Eventually Curtis pulled her sports bra back down, covering her. He finished massaging her shoulders, and dropped a bead of sweat on her. Then he reached down and swiped his hand over her crotch, on top of her spandex.

  Shortly after coming to Lakewood, Kayla had been taught by a teacher to shake the hand of adults after each encounter. It would make her look more professional, and would benefit her as she got older. It had become a habit, one she was proud of. After it was over, she shook Curtis’s hand, and went home.

  In 1999, Baltimore rapper SisQó put out his first solo album, Release the Dragon. Its sales were moderate until January 2000, when the novelty single “Thong Song” was released. Propelled by its catchy, goofy refrain—“Let me see that thong!”—it shot up to number three on the Billboard charts. By that spring, it had reached terra firma of American mainstream tastes: the major league baseball clubhouse.

  Under late manager Johnny Oates, the Texas Rangers of the era had a policy that children were welcomed in the clubhouse. The administration of that policy was hands-off: Oates trusted his players to sort out the particulars of etiquette. Until one day in April, when Royce Clayton, the team’s African American shortstop, was playing the song, and Curtis walked over to the stereo and turned it off. Clayton turned it back on; Curtis turned it back off. The two got in each other’s faces and nearly came to blows.

  “This shit happens 20 times a year in a major league clubhouse,” Clayton told me recently. The difference this time, he said, was that reporters saw the confrontation and took an interest—and Curtis took an interest in explaining his side.

  “He decided to keep talking about it,” Clayton said. “He decided to go to the media and self-promote about how good a Christian he is. And the media bought into it, and I knew why: it was because we’re in the Bible Belt, and here was a black dude he could go after, saying, ‘He was listening to profanity in front of kids.’”

  The incident was one of many during a career in which Curtis was known more for his aggressive proselytizing and capacity for moral reprobation than anything he did on the field. In Texas, his teammates complained that he’d turn off Jerry Springer when they watched it in the clubhouse before games: “We’d be like, ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’ And he’d be like, ‘This isn’t good for you to watch,’” former teammate Frank Catalanotto said.

  In New York, Curtis would throw away the porn some players kept stashed in the bathroom. When management suggested that Curtis keep an eye on second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who they feared was partying too hard, Curtis took the assignment to its mall-cop extreme, yelling and banging on Knoblauch’s hotel room door to make sure he was there. He clashed with Derek Jeter, chastising him in front of reporters for fraternizing with then-friend Alex Rodriguez during a bench-clearing brawl between the Yankees and Mariners, and offending him by persistently soliciting him to attend chapel after Jeter had already turned him down.

  “Chad just couldn’t stay around any longer because that act gets tired,” one Yankees official told author Ian O’Connor. “Once he became comfortable here, he became a preacher, and it ran its course.”

  For his part, Curtis told ESPN’s Outside the Lines, “If I have something that I believe is the truth and it’s necessary for other people to come to some type of a recognition or grip of that truth, then I want to share it.”

  Curtis was conscious of how public perception could advance his reputation for morality. He somewhat famously snubbed NBC’s Jim Gray for an interview after hitting his walk-off home run in the 1999 World Series, in retaliation for Gray’s aggressive line of questioning to Pete Rose earlier in the playoffs, though the decision to boycott Gray had been made ahead of time by the team.
He became a go-to quote for reporters on performance-enhancing drugs for his strongly reproving stance. To him, baseball and the rest of the world had become too wishy-washy. If Curtis’s firmness got him labeled as “intolerant,” then so be it: “We live in a society that practices tolerance and acceptance, which at the root is a good idea,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “But, you step back sometimes and say, ‘What is it that we tolerate? What is it that we are accepting? Is anything acceptable?’ My answer to that is, ‘No. Not everything will be tolerated.’”

  At the same time, he used the media to project an impossibly wholesome image of himself. He recounted getting married in his minor league uniform so as not to be late for batting practice. (His wife and kids still believe he’s innocent, by all accounts.) He told the Dallas Morning News that he began each morning by charting which of his prayers from the day before had been answered. He confessed to the L.A. Times to cheating in a Sunday school card game and said, “That might have been my all-timer” in terms of moral depravity.

  “Is it surprising to me that he’s done what he’s done?” Clayton said. “Absolutely not. People hide behind a lot of bullshit to do what they wanna do.”

  Kayla was no shrinking violet, no product of a broken home, not the sort of recourseless victim that predators are known for seeking out. The day after Curtis massaged her bare chest, she went to weightlifting, supervised by Curtis, with the aim of confronting him after everyone left. But Curtis beat her to the punch: “Kayla, we need to talk. Something went terribly wrong,” she testified that he told her.

  Out came a rambling quasi-apology. There were compliments (she’s a hard worker, she’s a moral person, she reminds him of his daughters), quoted Bible verses, and acknowledgments tinged with a self-serving air (he said it was the most unfaithful he’d ever been to his wife). He made frequent use of the conspiratorial “we” when discussing the incident, and framed it as a teachable moment for both himself and Kayla. “Like it was a lesson for the two of us,” she testified. “He somehow worded it whereas it was wrong, but it wasn’t too wrong.”

  He said he had “an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other,” according to Kayla. “He said it was an inner struggle and [that] he needed to take these thoughts captive and just throw ’em out.” In the midst of all this, he asked Kayla if she was a virgin.

  Still, Kayla accepted his apology and believed that it would never happen again “with my whole heart,” the phrase itself indicating how badly she wanted to believe him. Normalcy quickly returned. They resumed doing hip flexor exercises together. Nothing inappropriate happened. Until several weeks later—when the two found themselves back in the trainer’s room on Labor Day, when Lakewood’s most dedicated athletes didn’t skip their workouts.

  More hip flexor work. More poking and prodding: “Does this hurt, does that hurt?” Kayla lay still as Curtis worked her shirt and shorts off incrementally, leaving her in a sports bra and spandex. All the while, he was moving side to side around the table, seemingly engaged with giving a strenuous massage, acting as if removing Kayla’s clothes was an incidental by-product. Then he removed her sports bra.

  Kayla tried not to look at him, but she caught a glimpse of his eyes: “They looked animalistic, or demonic,” she testified.

  He leaned down over her and kissed her breast. At the same time, he took one finger, reached underneath her spandex, and penetrated her vagina.

  It lasted only several seconds, but it was long enough for Kayla to realize that she was in danger, and to react. Slowly, gingerly, she pushed him off of her, and said, “No.”

  It was making eye contact with Curtis, and seeing a man she had once revered as a moral authority shamefully slink down into a chair “like a little kid when you slap their hand,” that sent her into convulsions of bawling. It was the hardest she had ever cried.

  It was too horrible to face head-on, so she scrambled for alternate explanations. The first that came to her mind was that what had happened was some sort of test—of her own morality, of her friendship with Curtis’s daughter—and that she hadn’t passed. At trial, Cottrell would testify that 95 percent of sexual assault cases with children involve a known relationship, and that for the child to blame themselves is common: “Because they hold this person in esteem and because [children] are vulnerable, they will assume this person wouldn’t hurt them, so if something bad happened, it must be the child’s fault,” Cottrell testified.

  Kayla hysterically vocalized this sentiment to Curtis. At that, Curtis reassumed the role of the calm, poised authority figure. He put his hand on her thigh and said, “Kayla, you’re wrong. You did pass. You have to understand that.”

  Another lecture followed, and it confused Kayla. On one hand, Curtis accepted responsibility and said he was sorry. On the other, he put in Kayla’s mind what would happen if she told anyone.

  “He’s like if you go to the police, he’s like I will lose my job . . . [His wife] will be extremely hurt, and I probably won’t see my kids again,” she testified. “‘But Kayla, that’s not your fault. I made this decision, and these are the consequences I have to deal with. If that’s what you need to do, go to the police, then that’s what you need to do.’”

  Kayla asked Curtis what he was going to do, and he said he was going to talk to God, and keep it between himself and God. Then, just as Kayla was getting ready to leave and ponder the most difficult decision in her life, a decision with nothing but horrible outcomes on both sides, Curtis asked her to pray with him. “I didn’t want to say no,” she said. “Prayer is always good.”

  After the prayer, and after he told her that her confronting him was a “step in the right direction” for him, and that it would never happen again, she turned again to leave. He again called her name.

  “Did you enjoy any of that?” he asked her.

  She said no.

  “And he turns it into a lesson, and he goes, ‘Well, good, now I know that if you ever get into a situation with a boy, you’ll be able to make an excuse or go home or something like that.’”

  She listened to Christian music on the car ride home, went through the motions of helping to clean up after her family’s Labor Day party, jumped in the shower, and resumed bawling uncontrollably.

  At trial, Cottrell testified that child victims “try to maintain a sense of normalcy as much as possible,” as both a denial mechanism and a way to exert control. That’s what Kayla did in the months following the incident. She continued to banter with Curtis in the weight room, though there would be no more trips to the trainer’s room. Her friendship with Curtis’s daughter, who she couldn’t bring herself to hurt, actually deepened, and she found herself going over to the Curtis house regularly.

  “I decided I was gonna pretend,” she testified. “And if I was going to make this commitment to pretend like nothing happened, then I had to make it look like nothing changed much.”

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  “He told me he didn’t think that we should text anymore because he didn’t want his wife to be mad.”

  Teaching was a natural second career for Curtis for several reasons, among them that his father had also been a teacher. The family moved around to accommodate his jobs: Curtis was born in Indiana, raised in Middleville, Michigan—30 minutes from Lakewood High School—and went to high school in Arizona.

  But his teaching career, like his playing career, would be marked by short, contentious stints. After getting his teaching certificate at the evangelical Cornerstone University, he lasted only two years at his first job, as a phys ed teacher and coach at Caledonia High School, just outside of Grand Rapids. As he had in the major leagues, he immediately began irking his colleagues, who felt he imposed himself, in this case by disregarding preexisting weight-room teaching techniques. “Mr. Curtis thinks his way is the right way,” one teacher told me. “It was his way or the highway. We’d been teaching it one way and the baseball legend wasn’t buying in.”

  The superintendent who had brought Cu
rtis to Caledonia, a friend of Curtis’s, wound up being imprisoned for embezzlement. With that, Curtis’s position was eliminated.

  His next stop was NorthPointe Christian School, a fundamentalist Baptist school in Grand Rapids whose rigid handbook explicitly bans clothing with “graphics and words of secular musical groups,” “extreme hairstyles” like dreadlocks and mohawks, and low-cut tops for girls. On paper, the place was right up Curtis’s alley, and he excelled at first, becoming the school’s athletic director and creating a football program. But the relationship soured, and he was gone after two years. Principal Todd Tolsma would not tell me why Curtis was dismissed, but he said, “Chad Curtis’s separation was unrelated to any issue that has been publicized with the charges and trial.”

  I asked Curtis why he was dismissed, and he demurred at first. But then he said that he butted heads with the administration over its laxity about enforcing the strict guidelines in the handbook. When I pressed him for specifics, he cited the ban against low-cut tops: a girl had been revealing cleavage in class, and when a teacher (not Curtis) complained to the administrator in charge of dress code, the administrator let the matter slide.

  “My take was, you either have to take the rule out or you have to enforce it,” Curtis told me.

  That Curtis had two short tenures at two different schools before he was accused of molesting children invites the obvious question: did he do anything untoward at the previous schools, and did the schools, by getting rid of him without contacting law enforcement, look the other way?

  The prosecutors looked into this and couldn’t find anything they could introduce at trial, though Barry County prosecutor Julie Nakfoor-Pratt stressed to me that “the door is always open.” Lake Odessa superintendent Michael O’Mara said that Lakewood’s review of Curtis complied with proper background check protocol, including fingerprinting.