The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  But with only minutes left, Chongqing surged. First, a pass from Patrick nearly fell short but still found its receiver, who booked it into the end zone. “We make plays, we win this game now,” McLaurin said, the score tied. A minute later, Fitz nabbed the ball after it bounced off a Shanghai receiver’s hands, for the turnover. “That’s why I love you, baby!” Fengfeng yelled as he jumped on Fitz. A few plays later, another bomb delivered to the far corner clinched the game: Chongqing 24, Shanghai 16.

  The post-championship celebration was like a million before it, but also completely different. A local TV station interviewed McLaurin, who could barely move his arm after a hard hit had popped his shoulder out of its socket. A little boy asked for his autograph. The Dockers sang, “We Are the Champions.”

  I found Marco changing back into his sweats, quietly satisfied. “My baby’s grown up,” he said, recalling their earliest practices. Weezy outsourced his postgame comments to Drake. “‘We started from the bottom, now we here,’ right?” he said. “‘Started from the bottom, now my whole team fucking here.’” On the way to the airport, the Dockers joked about who would play who in the inevitable movie about their triumph. Fat Baby picked Daniel Wu, the Hong Kong actor. Marco? Kung-fu star Ashton Chen. What about Fat Baby’s wife, Yangyang? “Sandra Bullock,” Fat Baby said.

  Soso said the team’s story reminded her of the movie Alexander, in which Alexander the Great and his men were determined to “go east” at all costs: “‘What is ahead, I know not,’” she said, paraphrasing a speech from the movie. “‘I just want to go east. If some men want to return home, they may return home. The rest of us will continue east . . . We can’t give our true hearts to everyone, but to give them to our compatriots is enough.’ . . . I don’t remember exactly, but it basically went like that.”

  This, it seemed, was the real appeal of American football to the Dockers. Figo would go back to his job at the local government office, and Soso would go back to working long hours at her design firm. Fat Baby would go back to not going into work. But now, whenever they watched Any Given Sunday or Remember the Titans or Rudy, these stories weren’t just stories anymore.

  The celebration continued in Chongqing the following week, but McLaurin had trouble enjoying it. He needed surgery on his shoulder, and his current job didn’t provide health insurance. He was also applying for new jobs, in China and the United States, as well as law schools. Chongqing was fun, he said, but it was starting to feel small.

  The Dockers were having their own issues. Two weeks after the championship, they met at a teahouse. Marco and others criticized Soso for not doing enough to recruit new players. If they weren’t happy, she said, they could start a new team. Fat Baby almost stormed out of the room. “Chinese people don’t know how to come together,” he told me. “It’s deep in their bones.”

  Starting a Chinese football team might have been the easy part. From the beginning, it was never a question of if McLaurin would leave Chongqing, but when. “No one else can lead the team,” said Fat Baby, and he included himself. That’s the way things tend to go in China: It’s simple to get a project off the ground. It’s hard to build something lasting.

  After the final game, Figo posted a note on WeChat. It was a photo of McLaurin in full Dockers regalia, face all serious. Figo had added a caption: “The person in this picture, Christopher J. McLaurin, joined us in September 2012, became our head coach, and made us understand what real football is. From the beginning, he told me countless times, ‘I want to make you the strongest football team in China!’ Every time, I said, ‘Yeaaaaahhh!’ But in my heart, I had doubts . . . Then in 2013, he said, ‘I want to start a Chinese football league and play a tournament with the whole country!’ Again I thought, ‘That’s too hard, so many cities, they’re all amateur teams. There are rules, travel fees, so many other problems!’ But he did it. He did everything. He organized the league and led us to become the national champions! This guy, who’s six years younger than me, taught me: if you have a dream, you should protect it, work hard, and persevere to accomplish it.” Fengfeng left the first comment: “I love him.”

  SCOTT EDEN

  No One Walks Off the Island

  FROM ESPN.COM

  1. The Escape

  JUST BEFORE DAWN one day in late April 2012, four young Cubans stood on an otherwise deserted beach, peering hard into the Caribbean darkness. They were trying to escape their native country, and they were waiting for the boat that would take them away. Thirty minutes passed, then 60. Still no boat. Three men and one woman, the group had arrived at the designated spot close to the appointed hour: 3:00 a.m. By design, the rendezvous point was located on one of the most isolated coastal stretches in a country famous for nothing if not isolation—so remote it could be reached only by foot.

  They had spent the previous 30 hours hiking there, without sleep, and had reached varying levels of emotional distress; the stakes were high. Covert interests in Miami and Cancún had made the arrangements from afar. Their goal was to extract from Cuba a baseball player of extraordinary talent and propitious youth. Just 21 years old at the time, Yasiel Puig already was well known to both Cuba’s millions of fervid baseball fans as well as officials high in the hierarchy of the Cuban state-security apparatus.

  With Puig was Yunior Despaigne, then 24. A former national-level Cuban boxer and a friend of Puig’s from their teens, Despaigne had spent the previous year recruiting Puig to defect, under the direction of a Cuban-born resident of Miami named Raul Pacheco. If caught and found out as an aider and abettor, Despaigne would inevitably face serious prison time. He and Puig had together made four failed attempts to escape the island over the previous year. The authorities were almost certainly wise to their machinations. They needed this trip to work.

  According to Despaigne, in the escape party were Puig’s girlfriend and a man who, Despaigne says, served as a padrino, or spirit guide, a kind of lower cleric in the Afro-Catholic religion of Santeria. Sometime before this latest escape attempt, Puig and his girlfriend had sought out the padrino; a vatic ritual had revealed that their voyage would end in good fortune, Despaigne says. The couple decided to take the padrino along so as to improve their chances for safe passage.

  From the start, the journey had seemed both hexed and charmed. Two days earlier, they’d hitched a ride from Cienfuegos, the city they all lived in, to a sleepy seaside hamlet called Playa Girón, where, around nightfall, they were supposed to meet the guide who would leave them to their smugglers. Instead, they spied what appeared to be a squadron of police milling around close to their planned meeting place. They drove past without stopping; they placed a few frantic cell-phone calls; they managed to reconvene with their guide 35 kilometers up the coast in the town of Playa Larga. But almost immediately, right near the beach, they ran into two policemen. Among the guide’s first instructions: “Run!” They ran along the beach and then into the sea—it was tranquil and waveless there—and waded in water up to their necks. They could see police on land trying to pursue. Dogs barked, and the beams of flashlights played in the air and on the water. When they saw the lights range over the water, they dived. Eventually, the police gave up, but the Cuban coast guard did not. The guide’s course took them along the edge of a fjord-like inlet that cuts deep into the country. On its western side stretches a vast Evergladian swamp—the Ciénaga de Zapata, one of the most prodigious wetlands on earth. It was slow going. During daylight hours, they picked their way through dense mangrove thickets, careful to keep their distance from the packs of crocodiles that lazed in the lagoons and among the marsh grasses, and careful not to walk on the beach, far easier though it would have been, and risk exposing themselves to the coast guard making regular patrols just offshore. At nights, they resumed hiking along the beach, occasionally plunging into the water up to their noses, driven there by swarms of mosquitoes.

  Now, at the rendezvous point, dawn broke. In the gray morning light, the group came to a decision. Despaigne and Puig, vete
rans of the defection process, knew that the smugglers who helmed these vessels—lancheros, as they’re known across Cuba—would almost assuredly not want to risk capture by attempting a daylight pickup. And so the group decided to give up. They would surrender. All were severely dehydrated, and starving, having ditched their provisions when they were forced to run from the police into the sea. They would start walking back toward the nearest settlement, some 40 kilometers in the direction they’d come, and in the meantime attempt to flag down one of the patrolling coast guard ships. Better to go to prison than die in the Ciénaga de Zapata.

  They’d walked about 400 meters when the padrino stopped; he said he had to go back. At the rendezvous point, he’d left something important behind: the figurine of Elegua, a Santeria deity, Lord of the Crossroads, a powerful spirit in the faith’s pantheon of them—in the words of Despaigne, also a believer, “the one who opens and closes the way.” You don’t leave Elegua behind. All four turned around and trekked back, except the guide, who at that point had had enough and abandoned the group. They found Elegua resting safely on the sand; Puig was the one who reached down and picked it up. That’s when, raising their eyes to the Caribbean horizon one last time, they saw it. A vessel. It appeared to be approaching. At first they thought: coast guard. But as it drew nearer its details emerged: 40 or 45 feet, outboard engines of many growling horsepower—a long, lean, late-model cigarette boat, “like the ones you see,” Despaigne recalls, “on Miami Beach.”

  “Are you Puig?”

  “Are you Despaigne?”

  The lancheros wanted ID confirmation, and before anyone knew it, Puig, Despaigne, Puig’s girlfriend, and the padrino had waded out and climbed aboard to meet their ferrymen. As Despaigne and the rest would later learn, these men were the leaders of an alien-smuggling-and-boat-theft ring with links to the Mexican cartel Los Zetas. At least two were fugitives from American justice, their names on the wanted lists of several law enforcement agencies. The lancheros apologized for their lateness; they’d gotten lost.

  As Cuba receded, the four defectors went quiet. The moment must have been bittersweet. They’d finally escaped, yes, but they were leaving home, maybe never to return. None in the group made mention of the historical import of the body of water they’d spent the last two days circumnavigating, the place where they’d officially become traitors to their country and enemies of the Revolution. They’d fled their nation through the Bahía de Cochinos—more commonly known as the Bay of Pigs.

  2. Jilted and Afraid

  It was September 2013, 18 months after his escape, and Yunior Despaigne was recounting this story in the office of a Miami lawyer named Avelino Gonzalez. One of only four people in the world with complete, firsthand knowledge of Yasiel Puig’s flight from Cuba, Despaigne was telling him a tale that had never been told, one that afforded a window into a dangerous and secretive Cuban smuggling underworld, and one that took many hours to relate in full: the Bay of Pigs adventure. The rivalrous bands of cutthroat smugglers. The cloak-and-dagger midnight getaway. Millions of dollars at play. Betrayal and murder. Smugglers threatening Puig. Lancheros shot to death on the side of the road. And if Despaigne was to be believed, it was a story of great legal value for Gonzalez.

  Avelino Gonzalez, himself a former Cuban defector, is the plaintiffs’ attorney in two ongoing civil lawsuits: the first, filed in July 2013, against Yasiel Puig, and a similar, earlier one against the fireballing Reds’ relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman. Both contain explosive claims. The suit against Puig alleges that the slugger, while still in Cuba, had accused a man of offering to help smuggle him off the island. The man claimed to be innocent. But he went to prison and, according to the lawsuit, was mistreated there to the point of torture. He is seeking damages in U.S. courts to the tune of $12 million. The suit against Chapman claims the pitcher conspired with the Cuban government to shanghai an innocent man. That one, as originally filed, seeks damages of $18 million. The suits contend that Chapman and Puig hoped to establish the appearance of loyalty to the government, freeing them to plan their own defections.

  Despaigne had come to Gonzalez, in part, out of desperation. He had lived since he arrived in the U.S. in the Miami suburbs of Sweetwater and Hialeah, where almost every Cuban migrant to the U.S. first winds up. Late last year, Despaigne lost his job with a construction contractor, and for the moment his only consistent income comes from the boxing lessons he gives to kids at a local gym—$60 per month, per student. Six-foot-four and 240 pounds, he looks the part of the heavyweight he once was, despite the nascent appearance over his belt of a retired athlete’s paunch.

  By 2011, Despaigne had decided he wanted to leave Cuba for the United States, in part because the government’s boxing authorities booted him out of the national athletic system, an injustice, he says, motivated by the fact that his uncle—the notable middleweight Yordanis Despaigne—had defected to the U.S. in 2009. But it wasn’t until he received a phone call from Pacheco in the spring of 2011 that he truly began to plot an escape. Pacheco, born June 24, 1984, who had known Despaigne since childhood and had fled Cuba on an improvised raft, was calling from Miami. He promised the boxer $150,000 and a Hialeah house bought and paid for if Despaigne could persuade Puig to make another defection attempt. Despaigne recalls the sales pitch: “Puig’s going to sign for millions of dollars. There’s going to be money for everybody.” (According to a source close to Pacheco, Pacheco maintains that he promised nothing and that it was Despaigne who initiated the whole thing—that the boxer called Pacheco in Miami for help in financing both Puig’s and Despaigne’s escape.) Regardless, over the course of a year, Pacheco wired more than $25,000 in total, which Despaigne passed along to Puig and his family in thousand-dollar chunks. Eventually, the boxer prevailed in persuading Puig to leave. But within a year of arriving in Miami, Despaigne had received only $70,000—less than half the money Pacheco had promised him, and no house. It was around that time that a frustrated Despaigne became aware, through local news coverage, of the lawsuit against Puig. He sensed an opportunity. Of his decision to approach Gonzalez, he says, “At first I was going to leave this alone, but promises were made to me.” He’d also begun to receive death threats, including one at gunpoint in Hialeah: “I have a little girl, and I can’t be getting threats like that.” A Cuban lawyer might be able to offer protection in a way that seemed safer, to a recent Cuban migrant, than dialing up a police station out of the blue. Jilted and afraid—seeking vengeance as well as security—he paid his first visit to Avelino Gonzalez in early September and began unspooling his florid tale.

  The details of the narrative Despaigne relayed to Gonzalez would ultimately become the contents of a signed affidavit dated December 6, 2013—part of an amended complaint filed this January by Gonzalez in the ongoing case of Miguel Angel Corbacho Daudinot v. Yasiel Puig Valdes.

  A story has emerged from Despaigne’s affidavit, the lawsuit, and its proceedings. It spawned a five-month investigation by ESPN The Magazine that included analysis of an array of legal documents and interviews with more than 80 people: Cuban baseball players in the U.S. both retired and active, talent scouts, sports agents, former MLB and players’ union executives, federal law enforcement personnel, former Cuban government officials, former Cuban and American spies, Miami lawyers who have represented and are representing alleged smugglers who were and are the targets of criminal investigations, and—to use a quantitative phrase of deliberate vagueness—a number of smugglers themselves, who agreed to be interviewed under conditions of anonymity motivated by obvious fears. (Puig, through his agent and the Dodgers, declined to comment for this story on numerous occasions. On April 16, however, a statement was released via his agent saying that Puig will have “no comment on the subject” and that he is “only focused on being a productive teammate.”) It also involved a series of in-person conversations with Yunior Despaigne held at the office of Avelino Gonzalez and at Despaigne’s home with the assistance of a translator. (In many hours of inte
rviews with Yunior Despaigne over the course of many weeks, his story never changed. However, discrepancies were later discovered between what he said in those interviews and a handful of details that appear in his affidavit. Avelino Gonzalez attributes these errors to oversimplifications made in an attempt to condense a highly complicated series of events. He says an amended affidavit is forthcoming.)

  The Magazine’s investigation ultimately unearthed information regarding the inner workings of the complex smuggling operations that specialize in the extraction of baseball players from Cuba. For the narrative of Yasiel Puig’s defection, however, Despaigne remains a rare and singular witness.

  3. La Bolsa Negra de Béisbol

  Some 36 hours after leaving Cuba, they reached their destination: a white-sand-and-resort-rimmed island off Cancún, about 400 miles as the crow flies from the mouth of the Bay of Pigs, known as Isla Mujeres. It was another grueling, near-sleepless journey wrought with anxiety. To stay awake, Despaigne says, the lancheros snorted lines of cocaine. Despaigne is not ashamed to admit that he did too. (Puig, according to Despaigne, did not partake.) There were delays. Halfway into the passage, in the middle of the Caribbean, they ran out of gas. The lead lanchero, a burly thug known as Tomasito, had to radio a colleague on Isla Mujeres who brought a 50-foot yacht to come refuel them, but not before the group spent a fretful night adrift at sea on the dead-in-the-water cigarette boat, pitching, rolling, and, at one point in the wee hours, coming hair-raisingly close to getting plowed under by a passing containership. Then, within some miles of Isla Mujeres, they had to fake-fish for several hours, waiting for nightfall before entering port, the better to evade the Mexican naval patrols that had, in the past, nabbed Tomasito’s boats.