by Josh Wilker
“Josh Wilker, thank you so much for being here,” Terry Gross would finally say.
I’d get used to frat types bellowing my name from afar as I moved through airports. I’d cross demographics. Teens, Asians, retirees. A scene would repeat itself at the grocery store or post office or wherever, a pretty woman inching toward me hesitantly.
“I just want to tell you how much you mean to me,” she would say. Then she would begin to cry, just a subtle moistening around her big eyes.
I’d quit my job and on my last day insist on treating my coworkers to a celebratory lunch at one of the nearby deep-dish chains, and I’d raise a glass of Dr. Pepper and thank them for being so kind to me all these years when I seemed to be nothing special, and they’d express their amazement at being cube neighbors to such a massive simmering volcano of cultural influence.
“To life,” I’d say. The first sip of Dr. Pepper would bring me back to childhood days, to the first time I’d ever tasted it: a summer afternoon in the backyard, my brother and me playing outside until long after sunset, everything still left to lose.
Losing
See Klotz, Red
Losing Streak
When you look up the word “losing” in an encyclopedia the entry should say See Klotz, Red; when you look up Red Klotz in an encyclopedia, the entry should say See Losing. There should be in the encyclopedia reader’s experience something like the actual experience of losing, that faltering sense of narrative, that faltering grasp on the possibility of going through and being done with losing, losing beyond the ordering of facts, losing doubling in on itself, exponential, infinite, no up or down, beginning or end.
Red Klotz has to be the figure at the center of this encyclopedic reproduction of the vortex of losing because Red Klotz was the figure at the center of losing streaks that went on for decades. He was the coach of the Washington Generals, the opponents of the Harlem Globetrotters. It was his job and the job of the anonymous bodies on his team’s transient roster to play as hard as possible—to try to win—within the dooming parameters of a performance that included allowing several undefended gag baskets by the Globetrotters per quarter. He understood it as a job, not as a reflection on his worth or lack thereof, and this awareness of his place in the world allowed him to embrace his lot in life with indefatigable cheer, as evidenced by these remarks from a 1995 Sports Illustrated profile: “I don’t worry too much about being the losingest coach in history. It’s like if you come home at four in the morning and you hear the milkman whistling on the job and you wonder what he’s so happy about. It’s because he understands his purpose.”
I read this article when I was twenty-seven and had dropped out of my arbitrary, half-formed life in the city to spend a summer in Vermont trying to write a novel. I had not yet held a real job, had not embarked on a career and didn’t want one, not a real job, not a career. I didn’t want to embark on my life’s losing streak. I wanted to write a great novel and win. I wrote nothing but shit that summer and barely endured the days by reading old copies of Sports Illustrated.
I fantasized then and again at other particularly threadbare times in my life of running away to join the Washington Generals. I understood that the players on the Generals, though charged only with appearing to be decent at basketball, were probably much better players than I was or had ever been. They’d probably played college basketball and were goofing around for a few months before going to law school or taking that job at their uncle’s shoe store. Though I’d played college basketball too, this had been a fluke of circumstance, a result of landing by chance at a place with a basketball team that was the worst in the Mayflower Conference, the least competitive cranny of the NAIA, the secondary national collegiate athletic association in the shadow of the NCAA that always featured in its title games, televised in the afternoon on auxiliary sports cable channels, two teams stocked entirely with angular pink-cheeked lummoxes who looked as if they’d been whisked via time machine directly from getting fresh crew cuts at a barber shop in a small town in Indiana in 1952. If I’d ended up at any other college in the country, I would have just kept doing bong hits in my room while listening to Bunny Wailer and not even dreamed of trying out for the team.
And I didn’t even make the roster of that team during tryouts. At the end of tryouts everyone filed one by one into an office. It wasn’t the office of the English teacher serving as the basketball coach, as he didn’t have one at the gym, but instead belonged to the athletic director, who was also the coach of the school’s dynastic soccer squad. There were soccer trophies everywhere. There were pictures of the soccer coach and various teams of his posing around various trophies. His players all had spiky Steve Perry mullets and hot athletic girlfriends and were always sleepily shuffling around campus in postcoital flip-flops and pajama pants.
“Josh, Josh, Josh,” the English teacher said, “my writer.”
I’d been in one of his classes, some intro to journalism thing, a shamble through the days and then everyone gets a B. My enthusiastic term paper on famed muckrakers had edged me up to a B+. He’d been in the newspaper business and now was in some kind of disheveled retreat from that life. You wouldn’t necessarily notice he was retreating from something within the dim hues of a classroom, but it stood out in stark relief in the soccer coach’s office. The trophy hoister in all the photos was a young, chiseled guy with a full mustache; the English teacher was older, doughier, and his much sparser upper-lip covering seemed part of a general sense of dilapidation, along with his thinning hair, pale complexion, faint acne scars, and wire-rimmed bifocals that were always slipping down his nose. He pushed up his bifocals now and gazed at me for a while across the soccer coach’s desk.
“We’re going to do something where you will be one of the alternates,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant, and then after he explained it for a while I still didn’t quite know, but later, when I compared notes with the other mediocre aspirants who’d been told they were alternates, I got the picture. The English teacher didn’t have the heart to cut anybody, so instead of the customary twelve-man roster, there would be ten real members of the team and six leftovers who would rotate on and off the active squad as the eleventh and twelfth men. At home games we would all sit on the bench, though only two of us would be in uniform, depending on whose turn it was to benchwarm, and for road games only two of us would make the trip.
This arrangement caused me to miss out on the team’s most storied moment, when our leading scorer, the melancholy Grateful Dead fan, Nick, poured in forty-six points in a dramatic triple-overtime away game loss to a conference foe who had a star, a black guy, also erupting for over forty points. An actual black guy! This was a real college basketball game!
“It was huge,” one of my teammates, the backup point guard, Rat, told me while we were shooting around before practice a day or two after the loss. “Everyone played, everyone pitched in. Nick was epic, but all of us were part of it. Everyone.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Everyone?”
“It hurt to lose that game,” Rat said, his voice thickening. “But we grew.”
I became a permanent member of the roster in the second semester. Imagine being the backup to the backup forwards on a team in the middle of a relentless losing streak, and then imagine this role as a promotion. After the Christmas break some of our players had dropped out or flunked out. In their absence I became a college basketball player in full standing, which, if nothing else, in later years would provide some thin fumes of plausibility to my fantasies of running away to join Red Klotz and the Washington Generals. We lost unceasingly, and so my official playing days came to an end with a long losing streak. It was different from the losing streak of Red Klotz because Red Klotz was doing his job. He knew what he was. He knew his role. I was involved in something more formative. I took it personally, as more in an extended series of evidence that in life there’s a fundamental, intractable differen
ce between those bound for happiness and those doomed to flounder. One day well into my team’s losing streak I overheard the school’s championship soccer coach as he stood outside his trophy-clogged office. He and his all-conference goalie, Jimmy, were cackling about my basketball team.
“Some people know how to win and some don’t,” the soccer coach concluded. “They don’t have any winners.”
M
Mandarich, Tony
I hacked at windshield ice with a plastic scraper. Freezing rain fell. Slush leaked into my sneakers. It was a Sunday morning in January, and I was a few minutes away from disappearing into a vision of Tony Mandarich. Certain questions were bothering me. Why had I put on sneakers? Why did I live in Chicago? Why anything? I had not made good choices, or any choices at all. Even the scraper in my hands was subpar, ineffective. How did it even get here? Who decided? And now there was someone, an innocent, sure to suffer as a result of all this lifelong spineless wandering: my son.
Some people know how to win.
I was hearing those words again, the celebrated soccer coach assessing my inept Mayflower Conference basketball squad. For years I’d been in the habit of imagining I’d reacted to these words differently, which is to say, done something instead of nothing at all. I imagined myself instead whirling around the corner with glares or curses or, my favorite, the benevolent gaze of an enlightened mystic. I have transcended your pitiable obsessions, your trophies and abundant brisk coeducational poontang, your grasping, your infantile sorting of life. Oh how they would suffer to be so benignly and thoroughly appraised. But eventually I’d settled into years of never turning the corner at all, instead accepting my original response as unchangeable, my adult existence a slide down the wall into a semifetal crouch to revel perversely in the notion that I didn’t know how to win and so would never win, could never win. That last part was the key: because I couldn’t win, the pressure was off. I stopped hearing the chattering of the champions; the pronouncement had entered my bones. But now I was hacking at windshield ice with a piece-of-shit scraper, and the words were coming back.
Some people know how to win and some don’t.
I’d been hearing the words resurface elsewhere too. I’d be holding Jack in my arms, dancing and murmuring songs, trying to get him to sleep. Or I’d be walking him in a carrier through my menacing worn-down neighborhood, his warm body pressed against my chest. Or I’d be at work, staring at a photo of him that I’d tacked to my cubicle wall, the thinness of the wall on my mind, not even a wall, barely anything. The Big Idea to write a best-selling celebration of Mark Fidrych had been punctured. I’d run it by some people who’d helped me get an earlier book of mine out into the world, and the response was muted. Crowded marketplace, nominal subject appeal, blah blah blah. My own feelings that the biography of a one-season wonder could somehow soar to the heights of great literature also flagged, resulting in the common coda of all Big Ideas: What the hell was I thinking? Also punctured by this time was the blind, groundless hope that the money from my job would be enough to cover our bills. All my flaws, my habitual submissions, my tendency to fold, how could this not affect my child?
The cheap scraper in my right hand broke. By then I’d managed to open a small gash in the windshield ice. I got in the car and tossed the pieces of the scraper onto the passenger seat and stared out through the gash and tried to start driving to the grocery store but was only able to move a few inches before the wheels began spinning in icy slush. The front right corner of the car stuck out into the street. Other cars would have to slow to a crawl to get by. I would be the asshole of each crawl-by. I pressed down as hard as I could on the gas and listened to the high, burning whine of the tires. I stopped, the whine still going in my head, combining with the whines Jack had been producing all morning and the sounds my wife had been making in response, that sound of hers, an expulsion of annoyance, exasperation, exhaustion, connected as if by a thousand tiny electrical wires to a twistable bundle of tissue at the center of my head: uuuuggghh. I wanted the car to come unstuck so I could drive it into a brick wall. I stared at the gray world through the windshield opening. Was I going to have to leave the car jutting out into the street and walk back into the house without any groceries, with nothing accomplished at all?
Some people know how to win and some don’t. They don’t have any winners.
I got out of the car and went around to the back and got down into a kind of a stance and put my shoulder to the bumper. As you imagine for a moment a weak, stooped man in his forties with rain-opaque glasses bracing himself on the bumper of a car and pushing while unable to retain steady footing in ruined versions of the black suede sneakers that were in fashion in the early 1970s and again, among young slouching nostalgic ironists, in the 1990s, it might be useful to know the particulars of the vision of Tony Mandarich that was overtaking the man from within and causing him to expel sorrowful animalistic roars from his shredding voice box.
This vision first began to manifest in the world in 1987, when Tony Mandarich made the All-America team as a junior at Michigan State. He led the Spartans to their first Rose Bowl win in over twenty years. The following season he won All-America honors again while becoming a national phenomenon. He was an offensive lineman, and if he had played on the offensive line in the usual way, he’d have remained as anonymous as any other offensive lineman. Being an offensive lineman means you stand guard and attempt the hopeless task of keeping all attacks at bay. You don’t matter in terms of individual achievement. You are at best invisible and at worst—when, inevitably, something goes wrong—you are to blame. Pressure is constant. Tony Mandarich seemed to have found a way to absorb and distill this pressure into a volatile explosive embedded in the bulging muscles of his massive six-foot-six frame. He turned standing guard into a way to attack. He roared and boasted and taunted. He pancaked motherfuckers, ate their soul. He bench-pressed 545 pounds and ran a forty-yard dash in 4.65 seconds. He was impossible, an armored tank fast enough to win the Indy 500. How could he lose? In a caption accompanying a cover shot of Tony Mandarich bare-chested and enormous, Sports Illustrated proclaimed him to be “The Best Offensive Line Prospect Ever.”
That cover was the pinnacle of Tony Mandarich, the vision. Just after it appeared he was selected second in the NFL draft, behind only future Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman and just ahead of future Hall of Famers Barry Sanders, Derrick Thomas, and Deion Sanders. Many years later Mandarich confirmed that he had been taking steroids throughout his legendary college career, and he further explained that he had stopped doing so upon becoming a professional due to the NFL’s stricter drug testing policies. His failure to be of any use to the team that drafted him, the Green Bay Packers, suggested that the steroids had been the sole reason for Tony Mandarich the vision, the unstoppable destroyer. However, Mandarich himself pinned his demise on an addiction to painkillers. Upon entry into the NFL he began injecting himself several times a day with Stadol, which is often administered to women in labor. The addiction hollowed his raging desire to conquer and destroy. He stopped giving a shit about anything but numbness.
“It was euphoric,” he said of Stadol.
“You guys could sell this shit on the street,” my wife said of Stadol. She said this just as it was first coursing into her body through an IV tube a few long hours before Jack was born. A nurse and I laughed at the quip, but Abby wasn’t laughing. She explained later that the drug was an instant unwelcome riptide in her body, but ultimately it couldn’t touch the pain she was feeling. Instead, it just pulled her away from being able to speak, sealing her off from everyone.
“It was awful,” she said of Stadol. “I kept having these waking dreams. I was back on the street I grew up on, and everything was made of plastic.”
“Like the trees?” I said. “The grass?”
“Everything.”
You’re isolated, in pain. Doubt corrodes what you thought was real into
an imitation. In 1992 the Packers cut Tony Mandarich not long after the same national mythologizing entity that had canonized him publicly derided him: a caption on the cover of Sports Illustrated proclaimed him to be “The NFL’s Incredible Bust.” The cover included an inset of the earlier cover, as if to mock the version of Tony Mandarich that used to be considered real. The larger photo on the cover was of Mandarich kneeling on the sideline, glum, balding, useless.
After getting cut he was for a while nowhere but in his addiction. The superficial collective apprehension of Tony Mandarich ended there, with his fall, with him being, as he is often conjured in this new superficial age of endless internet list making, arguably the biggest NFL bust of all-time (however, see Next Ryan Leaf, the). His greatest victory, getting sober, as well as his admirable return to the NFL as a serviceable offensive lineman for the Indianapolis Colts, is not a part of the most commonly told tale of Tony Mandarich. He was fixed in place as an object of derision, a poster boy for steroid use. I can’t join in that derision because if there were a steroid for fatherhood, I would be its poster boy. You’d see me in the before and after and after-after pictures. This is always the three-step photo slideshow for steroid poster boys.