The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  At 29 hours, she got out of the water, dehydrated and vomiting. “I just can’t see myself training and dragging everybody along again for another year,” she told her supporters when the team pulled up onshore in Key West. She cried a little as she said, “I think I’m going to have to go to my grave without swimming from Cuba to Florida.”

  Six weeks later, she tried again. The weather and the water were flawless. “It was like glass the whole time,” Nyad said. She had been reading Stephen Hawking, and, at dusk, as she was enveloped by the dark sea and sky, she thought about the limits of time and space. Suddenly, at about 8:00 p.m., she felt a pain like nothing she’d ever experienced—like being “dipped in hot burning oil and your body is in flames.”

  She had been stung by a swarm of box jellyfish, the most venomous creature in the ocean—an almost mythological monster with 24 eyes and three-foot tentacles that inject a poison that can cause cardiovascular collapse and cerebral hemorrhage. “I feel it in my back and then I feel it in my lungs,” Nyad recalled. “Just frozen in agony.” An emergency medical technician jumped in to wipe away the gelatinous tentacles and was stung in the process. He got back on the boat, injected himself with epinephrine, and collapsed on deck, able to take only three breaths a minute. Nyad stayed in the ocean, treading water, screaming and gasping for air.

  After the worst of it dissipated, she picked up her stroke again. At five in the morning, a medical team from the University of Miami arrived to attend to her. “It was like an ICU in the water,” she said. She was given prednisone and oxygen, and then she kept swimming. At dusk, she was stung again.

  Nyad’s nephew, Timothy Wheeler, who was working on a documentary about the swim, filmed her as she was pulled from the sea: her face is riven with terror, and then she closes her eyes and goes blank as the medical team administers oxygen. Stoll screams at her to keep breathing and not to fall asleep. Finally, air starts coming in and out of her nose, fogging the oxygen mask.

  Nyad insisted on continuing after a few hours of treatment; if she returned to the precise GPS coordinates where she’d stopped, she could at least attempt a “staged” swim. But she was too weak to swim half the time she was in the water, and the team was being swept off course. After 37 hours, the navigators gave Nyad bad news. “They said, ‘Do you want to go to the Bahamas?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t fucking want to go to the Bahamas!’ And they said, ‘Then it’s over. We’re done.’” Stoll told Nyad, “I watched you almost die last night. I really did. And I don’t think I can do that again.”

  Still treading water, Nyad said, “Other people may go through this, but they’re younger, and they’re going to do other swims.” She looked ruined, bereft. “This is the end of it. This is the end.”

  One afternoon during my visit, Nyad met with an accountant she was thinking of hiring. “All my life, whether I’ve had money or not had money, it’s the one area where I’ve been disorganized, incompetent, and haven’t done well by myself,” she told him. (Minutes before, she had left her wallet behind on the counter at a Jamba Juice.) When she was hired as an announcer on Wide World of Sports, she made $350,000 a year. “In the 1970s, it was a lot of money,” she said. “I gave it all away, took care of my friends—we went on some badass trips to Africa.”

  Nyad is capable of incredible discipline, but she can be surprisingly unheeding: she never opens her mail and rarely has anything in her refrigerator. Until 2006, she had a business manager, but things ended badly. One day, she went to the hospital for shoulder surgery, and was told that she hadn’t had health insurance in years. Even now she seemed not to fully understand her own finances. She asked the accountant, “If I get paid $50,000 for a speech, what tax bracket am I in?” He explained that it depended how many speeches she gave a year.

  She was going to make some money soon, she said, writing an inspirational book about her life. “All the biggest editors and publishers are interested; they’re all calling it probably the biggest memoir of the decade!” she said, with guileless wonder. “I’m 64 years old. I want to take care of myself and not be stupid this time around.” The accountant asked if she had a spouse or a partner. “Not right now,” she said, but explained she had friends she wanted to provide for, so that when they were old “we always have a place to live and a little money to travel.”

  Nyad has not had a serious relationship in decades. (She had an affair at the end of her time with Lederman, and, she says, “I think part of my not being with someone else all these years was because I deserved to punish myself.”) But she and Bonnie Stoll are very much a team. They have matching tattoos that say ONE HEART, ONE MIND in Japanese. They talk and text constantly and see each other daily—Stoll lives 10 minutes from Nyad, in a modern house with a Leni Riefenstahl photograph of Jesse Owens, which Nyad bought for her, hanging in the living room. “She does as much for me as I do for her,” Stoll told me. “I don’t want to be on Diana’s coattails; that’s not my position.”

  After the near-fatal swim in 2011, Stoll and Nyad were deeply divided about whether to finally let go of the Cuba dream. Stoll had become convinced that there was something almost suicidal about persisting. She told me, “Sometimes Diana’s not very evolved—and it pisses me off! She can react out of desperation. She can be desperate.”

  “My journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat,” Nyad told an audience a month after her third failed attempt. “Sometimes if cancer has won, if there’s death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary. But that ocean is still there. I don’t want to be the crazy woman who does this for years and years and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida and I will swim from Cuba to Florida.”

  Nyad has always believed that a champion is a person who doesn’t give up. (In high school, she hung a poster on her wall that read, A DIAMOND IS A LUMP OF COAL THAT STUCK WITH IT.) But another kind of person who doesn’t give up is a lunatic. “I sort of thought, ‘Oh, she’s crazy’—and she is on some level crazy,” Nyad’s friend Karen Sauvigne told me. Sauvigne, a former triathlete who completed a 400-mile bike ride when she was 60, said, “On some level I can approach understanding.” But, after Nyad’s friends saw photographs of her face swollen and disfigured by stings, Sauvigne said, “we were all, like, ‘Give it up, girl.’” Candace Lyle Hogan, a former girlfriend who has accompanied Nyad on every Cuba swim since 1978, told me, “I’m afraid from day one that she’s going to die. That body of water is a wilderness still. It’s strange out there.”

  On August 18, 2012, Nyad made her fourth attempt. She swam for 51 hours and was stung repeatedly by jellyfish. (At night, she wore a protective mask that left only her nose and lips exposed: she was stung on the mouth.) When her team finally pulled her out, there were sharks in the water around her and a severe tropical storm above. Nyad resisted, “shaking her head angrily,” according to a live blog that Hogan kept on the boat, though there was “lightning, thunder, and roiling winds tossing her tiny escort vessel up and down on the waves.” She relented only when they convinced her that lightning might kill one of the kayakers.

  Stoll told Nyad that she would not accompany her on a fifth attempt at Cuba: she was increasingly disturbed by her friend’s inability to accept defeat. “It didn’t matter how many people—experts!—told her that the Cuba swim couldn’t be done,” Stoll said. Munatones told Nyad, “I don’t think it is physically, humanly possible. There are just too many variables.”

  “By this summer,” Nyad told me, “everybody—scientists, endurance experts, neurologists, my own team, Bonnie—said it’s impossible.” But Nyad was convinced that with each failed attempt she’d learned something. She enlisted Angel Yanagihara, the world’s foremost box-jellyfish authority, and collaborated with a prosthetics expert to produce a silicone mask, with eyeholes for goggles and bite plates that secured the mask over Nyad’s lips while still allowing her to breathe. Munatones said that swimming in that protective gear would be like “w
earing lead shoes to walk up Mount Everest.” Nyad, on her website, acknowledged that the mask “slows me down, by about 0.3 mph. And it forces me to swallow much more seawater than good for the stomach. But I simply need to remember, when enduring the difficulty of the mask, that it protects me from stings . . . No other way.” She had a simple plan for dealing with the weather this time. She emailed her team, “We will not, under any circumstances, interrupt the swim for storms this year . . . no matter how severe.”

  Stoll thought that no amount of preparation could suffice. “Something can always go wrong and something always will go wrong,” she told me. But at the last minute she decided to go with Nyad, anyway. “I didn’t want to have regret. If this is what Diana was going to do, then I’m with her.”

  In Havana, the night before the swim, Nyad felt a cold coming on. Hogan gave her a massage before she went to sleep, and she woke up 10 hours later “feeling fantastic,” she told me. Before a swim, she forces herself to keep her adrenaline contained, so she has energy available to fend off crisis. “When something means a lot to me, I don’t want to give it a lot of dispersed energy. I want to keep it within myself.”

  Her first night in the water, the mask was agony, abrading her mouth and forcing her to swallow so much salt water that she threw up constantly. On her second night, there was a storm, and the support boats had to move away to avoid hitting her. For two hours, Nyad treaded water, becoming severely chilled. “I really started hallucinating badly,” she said. “I thought I saw the Taj Mahal. I saw all the structure of it and I was talking to the shark guys about it: I thought we got off course and we’re over in India.” Stoll told her that if she came across the Taj Mahal she just needed to swim around it.

  “It was choppy out there, but who cared?” Stoll said. “Everything went our way—everything. No sharks, the currents, the wind. We were being pulled in the direction we wanted to go.”

  “I was cranking,” Nyad said. “And, even with the rougher seas, we were moving with a good current and with me feeling well. And when I came to put on the mask at night Bonnie said, ‘I want to tell you something. You’re never going to have to put this mask on again.’”

  The navigation team had calculated that the swim would take three nights—maybe four—but the current and the conditions indicated that they would arrive in Florida before sunset on the third day. Stoll told me, “It was like Mother Nature just said, ‘You know what? Let her fucking go.’” In the water, Nyad recalled, “I’m starting to think, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to make this thing.’ Before that moment, you have no idea when you’re going to finish. Is this going to be four days, and you’re going to have to find a way not through this night but through the next night?” When she lifted her head to breathe, she saw light along the horizon, and a thrill went through her: “I saw the sun was coming up. I saw this really white light.” But it was better than sunshine. “Bonnie said, ‘Those are the lights of Key West.’ And I cried. I still had 14 or 15 hours to go. But for me that’s a training swim.”

  As Nyad approached land, the team on the boat saw it before she did. “My vision’s real bad now—my swim-clouded, hallucinatory vision,” Nyad recalled. “But I see all the shark divers getting in and Angel Yanagihara getting in, and I just felt like there were a lot of people in the water all of a sudden.” They were nearing the reef just off Key West. “I started thinking of all the places I’d trained and all the people who helped, all the fund-raisers,” Nyad said. “I remember the first attempt, and how it was so upsetting to be told that you’re so off course you’re never going to make it. Once we crossed the reef, it was not really a euphoric celebration but just, ‘You didn’t give up. You fucking didn’t give up.’”

  At two in the afternoon, Nyad stumbled through the shallow water onto the sand, where hundreds of people had gathered to cheer her on. Her lips were as swollen as a clown’s. She staggered like a toddler taking her first steps. Stoll stood in front of her, a few feet up the shore, urging her forward, until finally Nyad stepped out of the water and fell into her arms. She managed to tell the crowd, “You’re never too old to chase your dream.”

  Late this fall, to raise money for charity on the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, Nyad had a two-lane pool installed in front of Macy’s, in Herald Square, and for 48 hours she swam back and forth through the calm, chlorinated water. Every 15 minutes, another person joined her for a shift in the second lane—a high school student from a local swim team, her friend Jacki from L.A., Richard Simmons. During the day, there were throngs of people standing and staring, but by four in the morning it was frigid and dark, and the crowd had shrunk to a dozen spectators who couldn’t believe what they were seeing. “She’s been in there for how long?” a waitress getting off her shift asked.

  It was Nyad’s second night in the pool, and as she swam up to the edge so that Stoll could feed her peanut butter she was starting to sound less coherent. (At one point, she asked when they were going to start using “the other pool.”) “When she’s been in the water for a long time, she turns into her mother, my grandmother,” Timothy Wheeler said. Lucy had Alzheimer’s disease at the end of her life, and there was a similar sense of disorientation and vulnerability. “Her voice, her facial expressions—everything.”

  At the edge of the pool, Nyad didn’t look strong and confident, as she does on land. She looked weary and pickled and frail. She drank water through a straw that Stoll gently guided into her mouth, then started retching and threw up into a plastic garbage bin, which Stoll held out for her. Stopping to vomit made her cold, and she shivered in the water. It was hard not to wish that she would just stop swimming and get into bed.

  Other people came and went from the pool, swimming beside her, in synch or not, sharing a little of her journey. The light started coming up, and the sky glowed purple for a while, then grew cloudy and foreboding. Sometimes, there were lots of people cheering her on, and it seemed as if Nyad were at the center of something exciting, and then there would be a lull, and the enterprise would seem dubious and isolated. There were long periods of dullness when time went by slowly, but it seemed to speed up toward the end. Diana Nyad did not stop swimming until her time was up.

  CHRISTOPHER BEAM

  The Year of the Pigskin

  FROM THE NEW REPUBLIC

  THE DAY OF the first game of American football ever played in Chongqing, China, Fat Baby held court in the locker room at the stadium of Chongqing Southern Translators College. “Stadium” would be generous, actually—it was a soccer field with stone bleachers. So would “locker room,” in reality a pile of clothes and equipment strewn across the benches. Even “football team” was arguable, come to think of it, but that’s what the Chongqing Dockers were there to prove.

  Fat Baby and his teammate Bobo had just returned from a trip to Japan, where they’d bought matching Under Armour skullcaps. “You can’t find these in Chongqing,” he said proudly. One of the team’s founding members, Fat Baby (his real name is Zeng Xi, but like most of the teammates he goes by his online nickname) juggled the roles of wise elder (he was 29) and class clown. He first got into football after watching movies like The Longest Yard—the 2005 Adam Sandler remake, not the 1974 original.

  As game time approached, Fat Baby slipped on his favorite pink cleats. It didn’t look easy—he called himself Fat Baby for a reason. Later, I asked if the pink cleats were meant to scare his opponents. “Yes,” his wife, Yangyang, interjected, “they’re scared he’ll fall in love with them.” Yangyang, tall and matter-of-fact, wasn’t a football fan. “I hate sports,” she told me. But as a nurse, she supported Fat Baby’s passion to the extent that it would help him lose weight.

  Marco, the Dockers’ captain, scurried over, looking anxious. He was smaller than average, especially for a former personal trainer, and his facial expression tended to hover between pensive and pissed off. When he got excited, his voice plunged from alto highs to baritone lows. He wasn’t typical captain material, but he had mapped o
ut a meticulous plan for the team’s development, and media was key to his strategy. The more people knew about them, the more players they’d attract, the better they’d get. Today’s contest, against the Beijing Cyclones, was their first home game, a chance to show everyone that they weren’t just a bunch of posers in uniform, but an actual American football team in southwestern China. Unfortunately, a 6.6-magnitude earthquake had hit Sichuan Province that morning, so only a couple of news outlets had showed up to see them play.

  Marco took the referee microphone out to the middle of the field to test its range and to show off his football English: “Holding, defense, number 27, first down.” On the opposite fence, a red propaganda banner hung: UNITED, WE PROGRESS, BREAKING BOUNDARIES, WE INNOVATE, STRIVING TENACIOUSLY TO BE FIRST. Behind it, a strip of Chongqing skyline: identical-looking office buildings next to skeletons that would soon be identical-looking office buildings. From the air, Chongqing resembles a Sim City created by a 10-year-old off his meds. Perched between two rivers, fringed with ports, Chongqing has exploded economically in the past decades, with an urban population of seven million and the second-highest GDP growth rate in the country. All this development makes Chongqing the urban incarnation of China’s modern identity crisis. It’s a city where the Liberation Monument dedicated to the 1949 Communist victory is surrounded on all sides by Cartier, Armani, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Starbucks, KFC, and Häagen-Dazs; where Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing party secretary, is both reviled for his corruption and beloved for his populist policies; where you can be late to dinner because, when someone said to meet at the Wal-Mart in your neighborhood, he meant the other Wal-Mart in your neighborhood.

  Chris McLaurin, the team’s 26-year-old American coach, wanted badly to win. He didn’t let it show, exuding the air of calm authority the teammates had come to rely on. But ever since he had arrived in Chongqing the previous fall, the Dockers had dominated his life, nights and weekends spent coaching, planning, promoting, recruiting, all on top of a full-time job at a government-run investment firm. Without McLaurin, Fat Baby told me in English, “we would be a piece of shit.”