The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  Old pictures of the couple show Horace decked out in a three-piece suit and diamond rings and Margaret swaddled in furs. My grandfather lived fast and large—he liked his liquor and his tobacco, and he was also an ace gambler. Gin rummy was his big game and he fraternized with high rollers like Minnesota Fats and Dean Chance. Anywhere there was a backroom card game or pool hall, from Los Angeles to Colorado Springs, Horace could be found—he supported the family off his winnings. One morning, when my uncle was in high school, he remembers waking up and seeing a large hearse parked outside the house. Horace had been playing poker with a mortician, who had put the car up as collateral. My grandfather was wickedly funny, with round cheeks and an infectious laugh, which usually indicated he was up to something naughty. Fortune laughed along with him—he won at all sorts of things, not only cards but raffles and games of chance. I guess you could say he was just a very lucky guy.

  For his bride, Horace built a little brick house on Sixth Street, in Kansas City’s Northeast quadrant, and that’s where my father was born. One year later and 10 blocks away, my mother came into the world, the granddaughter of those pioneers who had roamed the prairie. Her mother, Virginia, was wry and hardy, just like her Nebraska ancestors; her father, Carl, was serious and civic; he studied law at Northwestern and the University of Missouri before losing his life savings in the stock market crash—a stroke of ill fate that left him forever cautious. During the Depression, his clients paid him in tea sets and fresh eggs; when he could no longer afford to stay in business, he joined the Chamber of Commerce. He was the type of man upon whom it weighed heavily that he had been too young to join the First World War and too old to join the Second.

  Their neighborhood in Northeast was a place where kids played wiffle ball on streets lined with elms so broad they made a canopy over the passing cars, and where milkmen dropped daily deliveries on the back porch. It was also strongly Italian—Margaret learned to make meatballs and marinara from her neighbors, who had nicknames like “John-John” and “Uncle Charlie.” No one will tell me if this was one of the corners where the powerful Kansas City mafia took root; the question elicits ellipses. “They were wonderful cooks and had beautiful daughters,” says my uncle. “Everyone was nice,” says my mother, blithely, “and we all felt very safe.”

  Maybe the mob wasn’t there, after all. Or maybe it just didn’t fit into the neat narrative that postwar Kansas City liked to tell about itself—one where, in the words of Ernest Hemingway (who worked briefly for the Kansas City Star), the “food [was] good” and people spoke “the purest American.” The best of the good food was barbecue, of course—slow-smoked ribs smothered in a thick tomato and molasses sauce at Arthur Bryant’s, out near the A’s stadium, or the lighter and tangier brisket across town at Gates. My grandfather also favored DiMaggio’s deli, which peddled dishes that smacked of the Deep South, like sow’s ear sandwiches and pickled pig’s feet. Over at the Plaza, the architect J. C. Nichols was busy constructing that “purest American” myth, driven by a belief in the supremacy of leafy subdivisions. It was the age of consumption—TWA, based in Kansas City, made the metropolis a hub for traveling salesmen and women shopped at Harzfeld’s, with its famous Thomas Hart Benton mural, while the men wore Woolf Brothers suits. That luxury store had been founded years earlier by Herbert Woolf, a relative of the British writers Leonard and Virginia. Their Kansas City cousin raised prizewinning ponies on 200 acres outside of town, and threw extravagant Jazz Age parties for the likes of Pendergast and Teddy Roosevelt—a lifestyle of excesses and vice, the type of thing that 1950s Kansas City preferred to leave behind.

  It was in this buoyant baby boom atmosphere that my parents grew up. While they knew each other distantly as children (my mother remembers my dad as the one trying to kiss all the girls in Sunday school), they didn’t really meet until they attended Northeast High. How do I begin to describe my father to you? Smart, so smart, and darkly handsome; a practical joker, large-hearted and fun. A wide-ranging curiosity. An inventive mind. That huge, voracious lust for life. Of course he would go for my mother—warm, friendly, with her Natalie Wood looks and her glass-half-full optimism. They started out dating each other’s best friends, but soon my dad was driving my mom around in his little red Karmann Ghia. He took her to the Savoy Grill to eat lobster, and to his favorite Mexican joint for hot enchiladas. Occasionally, they’d head out to the Starlight Theatre to catch a show, and to skateboard in the parking lot, my mother standing on my father’s feet as he steered.

  My father also had Horace’s sense of flair. He was a fashionable dresser (“Madras was big in those days,” says my mother) and collected unusual jewelry, like black sapphire rings. He was an excellent pool sharp and quick at poker and bridge. That’s not to say he wasn’t industrious—in college, after a full day of biology classes, he would work nights on the railroad or at the labs. But he also indulged in games on the side—he could deal a deck so fast that it would look like he’d cleanly cut the cards, when in fact he’d placed them strategically so. He and his best friend developed a racket where they would pretend to be strangers and clean up with the bets, my dad dealing his pal the winning hand. My father, who had a rich tenor, loved to sing songs from Guys and Dolls, especially “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” (“I dreamed last night I got on the boat to heaven/And by some chance I had brought my dice along”). He, too, was a very lucky guy.

  One summer, early in their relationship, my parents took jobs as camp counselors with the city. They’d drive around in a large bus, picking up kids from the poorest neighborhoods and taking them to play archery and other sports in the wooded parks. The children teased my parents about their budding romance and my parents, in turn, fell in love with their tiny wards. After they’d drop the children off at home—on blocks where the houses had no doors, where windows were covered with thin sheets to keep out the wind—my parents would go out on a date, then buy ice cream cones to take back to the kids at the end of the evening. Kansas City was still segregated at that point, and the old downtown around 18th and Vine suffered from terrible and endemic poverty. Racial inequalities simmered; in ’68, they exploded. My parents watched the city burn from the roof of their college dormitory; elsewhere on campus, kids were burning their bras and their draft cards. Change was necessary—and when it came, it was violent, and it engulfed Kansas City’s heart in transmutative flames.

  By the time the Royals came to town in 1969, my father was growing restless. He wanted to see the world. In many ways, Kansas City is a leaving town, a place for pioneers and rovers with an eye on the distant horizon. And so, in 1972, when he got an offer to do his PhD in New England, my dad and my mother packed up and moved east—truly east, original-colonies east. My father didn’t go back to Kansas City much after that. He said it was because he hated the Midwest humidity, those sticky evenings that smother the lungs and send lightning storms racing across the plains. Now, I think he avoided it because of something that happened a few months after he left. One night, my grandfather Horace was driving home. Maybe he had been at a card game—wherever he was, it was late and he was speeding in the rain. A cop pulled him over; the rookie had his gun cocked; the gun went off. It was a terribly inauspicious accident. My father had to fly back to town to keep his uncles from enacting vigilante justice over the death. Margaret, in the blasted shock of sudden loss, sold most of her possessions and moved to Florida. And just like that, my father no longer had a home to go home to.

  Perhaps this was the beginning of the end of my parents’ Kansas City. Horace was gone; my mother’s father soon followed. Her mother moved to the suburbs, her brothers moved to California. The trees that lined the spacious boulevards began dying from Dutch elm disease. Meanwhile, urban blight took over the downtown area. The mob ran wild, using the local Teamsters to run casinos in Las Vegas and bombing buildings along the River Quay. The FBI’s bid to bust the Kansas City bosses for their involvement in the Tropicana Casino, dubbed Operation Strawman, eventuall
y took down most of the Civella crime family. At the city’s methadone clinics, addicts could run into William Burroughs, the once-great Beat, whose counterculture lifestyle had gone from glamorous to infirmly grim. And the Royals, after a brief run on top—reaching the championships in 1980 and winning the whole shebang in the “Show-Me Series” in ’85—started their three-decade-long losing streak. The story of Kansas City that my relatives told, when I was growing up and would visit in the summers, was one in which a glorious yesterday had slid, perhaps irrevocably, into blighted decrepitude.

  I don’t know if that story is still true. Lately, the city has enjoyed something of a renaissance—the downtown is full of art galleries and food trucks, and even some hipsters; a new concert hall curves across the skyline. What has happened to the families who had to make way for the food trucks and the hipsters, I do not know; their story is not part of the tourism brochures. This new Kansas City, this shiny millennial town, is not my parents’ city. This city belongs to other people, a generation who may not know and may not care about the pioneer tracks that start in Independence, about the crime bosses and the Sunset Lounge, about the kids who used to play wiffle ball on Chelsea and Van Brunt, and the kids who couldn’t afford wiffle balls down on 18th and Vine. Already, these things take on the air of fable. We are already at a degree of remove—it was my father who drove that convertible out to the Starlight, my mother who watched the holiday shoppers on the Plaza, not me, and assuredly I have gotten the details wrong, assuredly there are things that I will never know, already the past is slipping away. The gulf grows wider even as I write this. How many details are needed, after all, before one can say to oneself, “This is what I have lost”?

  This inexorable change, time’s riparian flow, is neither good nor bad, in the way that death is neither good nor bad—it just is.

  The last time I visited Kansas City, it was the Fourth of July. We sat on the grass, in the hot twilight, watching the fireworks burst in patriotic showers of light over Independence. My mother called my father to let him hear the sounds of the cicadas singing their dying songs. A cousin took me to the National Frontier Trail Museum, where I jotted down dutiful notes. (“Before starting on the Oregon Trail, a typical family would need 600 lbs. of flour, 120 lbs. of biscuits, 400 lbs. of bacon, 200 lbs. of sugar . . .”) I had no idea where we were headed that I would need this information, but maybe I could absorb a bit of where we came from. One thinks of the opening lines from a Hemingway short story: “In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that now have been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople. You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true.”

  Before my father had his surgery, my brother wanted to get down all the stories about his Kansas City childhood. But for reasons that remain obscure, my dad refused. A week later, after so many bad breaks in the hospital, after so many things had gone unthinkably wrong—including a delirium in which my father dreamt the nurses were trying to break his spirit, a delirium that precipitated a heart attack and a Code Blue, a delirium we knew had broken when my dad made feeble jokes through his oxygen mask and tried to talk about Texas Hold’em with the orderlies—my father told me he wanted to record his early memories. “That’s a good idea, Daddy,” I said. Instead, we held hands and I let him rest. I thought there was time. Twenty minutes later, the surgeons told us they needed to start on the 12-hour operation to save his arteries. He fought for two days, and I remember a moment when it seemed our luck was finally turning. Leaving the OR that night, I looked up at the clear sky, at the flocks of white seagulls and a sliver of crescent moon. It felt like a new beginning. That was the night my father died.

  At the funeral, one of the hospital’s nurses sent us a card. She had been there as my mother and I sat with him around the clock, sleeping by his bedside, anxiously checking his vitals. She said that whenever she came into the room, she had felt the radiation of a vast and unseen force. It was a force, she said, of tremendous love.

  I think of this love, of my parents’ love—for each other, for us—when I see the couples kissing in front of Kansas City’s fountains, which now gush the color of Royals blue. My father used to swim in these fountains, to cool off from the heat and to make my mother laugh. Always the risk-taker, he would dive through the subterranean tunnels in the fountains in front of the art gallery, the ones with the beggars and the angels. My mother waited up above at the water’s edge. Around them, Kansas City glowed in the midsummer dusk; ahead of them glimmered the future. And my father swam, down into the blue water to impress my mother—and beyond them the Missouri impassively flowed—and my mother stood by the water’s edge, waiting for him to surface.

  BRIAN PHILLIPS

  The Sea of Crises

  FROM GRANTLAND

  The White Bird

  WHEN HE COMES into the ring, Hakuho, the greatest sumotori in the world, perhaps the greatest in the history of the world, dances like a tropical bird, like a bird of paradise. Flanked by two attendants—his tachimochi, who carries his sword, and his tsuyuharai, or dew sweeper, who keeps the way clear for him—and wearing his embroidered apron, the kesho-mawashi, with its braided cords and intricate loops of rope, Hakuho climbs onto the trapezoidal block of clay, two feet high and nearly 22 feet across, where he will be fighting. Here, marked off by rice-straw bales, is the circle, the dohyo, which he has been trained to imagine as the top of a skyscraper: one step over the line and he is dead. A Shinto priest purified the dohyo before the tournament; above, a six-ton canopy suspended from the arena’s ceiling, a kind of floating temple roof, marks it as a sacred space. Colored tassels hang from the canopy’s corners, representing the Four Divine Beasts of the Chinese1 constellations: the azure dragon of the east, the vermilion sparrow of the south, the white tiger of the west, the black tortoise of the north. Over the canopy, off-center and lit with spotlights, flies the white-and-red flag of Japan.

  Hakuho bends into a deep squat. He claps twice, then rubs his hands together. He turns his palms slowly upward. He is bare-chested, six-foot-four and 350 pounds. His hair is pulled up in a topknot. His smooth stomach strains against the coiled belt at his waist, the literal referent of his rank: yokozuna, horizontal rope. Rising, he lifts his right arm diagonally, palm down to show he is unarmed. He repeats the gesture with his left. He lifts his right leg high into the air, tipping his torso to the left like a watering can, then slams his foot onto the clay. When it strikes, the crowd of 13,000 souls inside the Ryogoku Kokugikan, Japan’s national sumo stadium, shouts in unison: “Yoisho!”—Come on! Do it! He slams down his other foot: “Yoisho!” It’s as if the force of his weight is striking the crowd in the stomach. Then he squats again, arms held out winglike at his sides, and bends forward at the waist until his back is near parallel with the floor. Imagine someone playing airplane with a small child. With weird, sliding thrusts of his feet, he inches forward, gliding across the ring’s sand, raising and lowering his head in a way that’s vaguely serpentine while slowly straightening his back. By the time he’s upright again, the crowd is roaring.

  In 265 years, 69 men have been promoted to yokozuna. Just 69 since George Washington was a teenager.2 Only the holders of sumo’s highest rank are allowed to make entrances like this. Officially, the purpose of the elaborate dohyo-iri is to chase away demons. (And this is something you should register about sumo, a sport with TV contracts and millions in revenue and fan blogs and athletes in yogurt commercials—that it’s simultaneously a sport in which demon-frightening can be something’s official purpose.) But the ceremony is territorial on a human level too. It’s a message delivered to adversaries, a way of saying, This ring is mine, a way of saying, Be prepared for what happens if you’re crazy enough to enter it.

  Hakuho is not Hakuho’s real name. Sumo wrestlers fight under ring names called shikona, formal pseudonyms governed, like everything else in sumo, by elaborate traditions and rules. Hakuho was born Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal in Ulaa
nbaatar, Mongolia, in 1985; he is the fourth non-Japanese wrestler to attain yokozuna status. Until the last 30 years or so, foreigners were rare in the upper ranks of sumo in Japan. But some countries have their own sumo customs, brought over by immigrants, and some others have sports that are very like sumo. Thomas Edison filmed sumo matches in Hawaii as early as 1903. Mongolian wrestling involves many of the same skills and concepts. In recent years, wrestlers brought up in places like these have found their way to Japan in greater numbers, and have largely supplanted Japanese wrestlers at the top of the rankings. Six of the past eight yokozuna promotions have gone to foreigners. There has been no active Japanese yokozuna since the last retired in 2003. This is a source of intense anxiety to many in the tradition-minded world of sumo in Japan.

  As a child, the story goes, Davaajargal was skinny. This was years before he became Hakuho, when he used to mope around Ulaanbaatar, thumbing through sumo magazines and fantasizing about growing as big as a house. His father had been a dominant force in Mongolian wrestling in the 1960s and ’70s, winning a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics and rising to the rank of undefeatable giant. It was sumo that captured Davaajargal’s imagination, but he was simply too small for it.