by Josh Wilker
There’s no way to know whether my first memory was once attached to that event, but what can’t be denied is that for a very long time I wanted to follow my brother everywhere. Even longer than that I wanted to avoid all risk. There’s a hesitation in everything I do, a permanent separation. Something similar occurred to one of the key figures in this encyclopedia (see Sasser, Mackey):
The second piece of personal history that Mackey shared was as a 7 year old, witnessing his 5 year old brother run past him and his sister at a crosswalk and get hit by a car. The vehicle struck the boy in the chest and threw him some 100 feet in the air. His brother was “dead at the scene” but the EMTs managed to revive him. According to Mackey, his brother was never the same physically or emotionally after this accident and that it seemed to ruin his life. Even though he was just a seven year old at the time, Mackey was wracked by guilt that he had somehow failed in his responsibility to watch over and protect his brother.
“The Mackey Sasser Story,” Competitive Advantage,
www.competitivedge.com/mackey-sasser-story, accessed March 30, 2014
Hesitating with every step is a stunting way to live, and, more than that, it creates distortion, a remove from life that acts like a breach into which fantasies and anxieties and longing flow. In other words, it lends itself perfectly to fandom, to living at a safe remove through others. What’s missing from life itself exists in shadow form in fandom, in the devotion to a team for a game, a season, a lifetime. My brother and I became fans together, fans of everything, the wide world of sports, but fans most specifically of the Red Sox, who, throughout our childhood and many years of adulthood, disappointed us. When the team finally won it all, my brother and I were in our thirties, finally after a long hesitating delay edging off into separate lives, and we reunited for the victory parade. I have a picture from the parade, my brother smiling, confetti on his Yaz hat. The duck boats carrying the champs have just rolled by. In the years to come, through investigations, suspensions, rumblings, and hearsay, asterisks began to descend on some of the passengers of those boats. The burrs of an asterisk snagged on the fringes of the championship itself.
“You know all those guys were juiced up in ’04,” was how a fellow passenger on a Pace Bus put it to me. He’d noticed my Red Sox cap. I’d been trying to take a nap, to catch up from another night in the stretch of sleeplessness for Jack that had continued after our trip a few days earlier to Wrigley, but I’d only been able to verge on unconsciousness. Calvin Schiraldi had been strumming a guitar and trying to harmonize the Everly Brothers’ tune “Bye Bye, Love” with Harold, the mustachioed mannequin assistant to Bill Bene, the dummy only able to produce a sound like that of a white noise machine, which then turned to the sound of booing, then to the groaning sound of a bus. The passenger who had spoken sat across from me. He had on mirrored sunglasses. He pointed at my cap.
“All juiced up,” he repeated. Schiraldi and Harold were gone. I felt like I’d been dropped into my seat from a jarring height.
“Everybody was,” I snapped.
“Sure, sure,” the man across from me said, and then before I had fully recovered consciousness he had steered the conversation, which soon revealed itself to be a monologue in which my role was to periodically nod, to the magnificence of the 1985 Chicago Bears.
“Never see a team like that again,” he said again and again. He recapped in chronological order the regular season and each playoff game, emphasizing the terror opposing teams experienced, occasionally highlighting some particularly crumpling hits by Singletary, Hampton, McMichael, et al. He was an older guy, big and loud, with the mulleted shoulder-length hair and stonewashed jeans of a younger man from the 1980s. He took off his mirrored sunglasses at one point, and I saw that there was something wrong with his eyes, one of them looking past me, the other through me. I was still smarting about his comment about my championship team and had been looking for a chance to shoehorn into his monologue some biting speculation about the asterisk-meriting substances flowing like a filthy anabolic Ganges through the locker room of an NFL squad in 1985, but when I saw his eyes I swallowed that thought down. It wouldn’t have stopped his love for his team anyway.
“Never see a team like that again,” he concluded, then rose abruptly and got off the bus, not even looking my way, let alone saying good-bye. As the bus pulled away from him he walked in one direction for a few steps and stopped, then turned and started haltingly in the other. My face ached from the polite smile I’d plastered on it throughout his detailed season recap. He knew everything about that team. You’re going to tell him everything is tainted, everything is blurred? He knows that anyway, even if he doesn’t know which way to go when he rings the bell and gets off the bus. Everyone knows it. Nothing is untainted but what is sacred and nothing is sacred but stupid love.
U
Uggla, Dan
One day in late June: pure mercy. I walked over to the lake with Jack strapped to my chest. He’d been in a rough stretch, crying all the time, not sleeping. I’d hoped the sight of the wide water of Lake Michigan would help. It didn’t. Jack grimaced and wriggled. But there were some people playing tennis nearby. I imitated the sound of a racket hitting the ball, our faces inches away from one another.
“Thock,” I said.
Jack brightened and laughed. I said it again. He laughed again. You’d need to be Kandinsky to capture that laugh, its merciful release: flocking wheeling colors, love-struck jazz.
“Thock,” I said again, and again Jack laughed.
I wanted Abby to hear it too, so I called her. She listened. Then I called myself and left a message. I wanted to hold onto it.
Later that day he was crying again and, as I held him, jerked his head back and smacked it on a doorframe, something that I’d let happen before and had vowed to never let happen again. The impact made him cry so hard he could barely breathe. My wife and I started screaming at one another.
“Give him to me!”
“He’s my son too!”
This tug of war, another repetition of something I’d vowed to forever avoid, occurred in the back area behind our building, our voices echoing up off the brick.
“He needs less stimulation,” Abby said firmly, evenly, the first of us to calm. “Just please go inside. Call the doctor.”
I called the doctor’s office and explained to a nurse Jack’s elongated misery, the days of wailing. The nurse suggested a few hundred milligrams of baby Tylenol, but I misinterpreted her suggested dosage while doing the math in my head. Abby identified my mistake—that I’d given him far more than the recommended dosage—after Jack fell asleep. Fell unconscious. Another call to the doctor was made, the answering nurse this time a distracted dullard who coughed a lot and referred me first to poison control and then backed off that when I desperately advocated my hope that Jack was not poisoned.
“But don’t hesitate to take him to the emergency room,” she said.
We hated the emergency room, hated the idea of young scared doctors in shitty sneakers ramming him clumsily with needles. We instead decided to just let Jack sleep and hope the inflated dosage wasn’t doing him irreparable harm. We stood there squinting at him in the bedroom. It’s hard to see the slight movement in a baby’s chest that indicates breath.
All this had happened before—the wailing, exhaustion, the arguing, the uncertainty, the bedside chest-staring vigils, the fuckups, the terrifying awareness that Jack’s life, his tiny fragile sipping of air, was at the mercy of my porous grasp.
The ideal athlete is one able to shape the world to his or her wishes. There’s no force in the wishes. The wishes are soft, a whispering, and the shaping of the world is as seamless as wind ruffling the leaves. When I think of the greatest and most beautiful real athletes, the ones who have momentarily verged on this ideal, I see the nearly effortless motions of Gretzky, Pedro, Schubach, Montana, Bird—their bodies not particularl
y powerful, not bulging with muscles, not wrenching against some external force but allowing some larger rhythm to flow through them.
Most people, though, stagger toward adulthood channeling something more closely resembling all-star second baseman Dan Uggla. You don’t want to imagine yourself thin and surrendering to forces greater than you. You want to imagine that you’re thick, powerful, sturdy, like Dan Uggla, whose physical presence in its entirety—his intense gaze and granite jaw and squat, barrel-chested frame—suggests he will somehow remain standing throughout earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, and whatever other calamities the disintegrating ecosystem will be throwing our way in the near future as all other vertical manifestations of civilization fall to horizontal rubble.
And yet throughout his career, which began the year I got married, Dan Uggla has demonstrated himself repeatedly and dramatically to be at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He has gone into long, terrible slumps and then broken out of them with blistering hot streaks. He stands at the plate and uses his huge muscles to swing as hard as humanly possible, then hopes for the best. Sometimes he hits prodigious home runs; other times he strikes out.
This pattern may have peaked in the 2008 All-Star Game. I have never seen anyone play worse. He made two gruesome errors in a row at one point, then added another a few innings later. Meanwhile he also went hitless, stranding six runners on base while striking out three times and hitting into a double play. I had at first been dutifully rooting for the American League as an extension of my Red Sox fandom, but as the game wore on I began just rooting for the game to end quickly in any way possible so as to spare Dan Uggla further humiliation. He and his powerful yet powerless build seemed to be stuck in a loop from which he would never be able to escape. I know this loop. You can’t handle any chances. You’re at the mercy.
Uncle
In my first year as a father, instead of studying—or so much as identifying—useful fathering skills or setting up a college fund or even making sure there was enough windshield wiper fluid in the car, I learned all I could about Sneeze Achiu. I’ve already related what I know about his football career in the late 1920s and his early years in pro wrestling in the early 1930s, but there are traces of Sneeze Achiu up into the 1950s. He seems to have hit a second peak of local popularity in the 1940s, when he occasionally took to the wrestling ring against a man known as Gorgeous George. By the 1950s Gorgeous George would rise to national fame that would imprint his flamboyant style on arguably the greatest athlete of the twentieth century, Muhammad Ali. Sneeze Achiu would be left behind in Oregon, where, sometime in the early 1950s, he would deliver what seems to be the world’s final sonnenberg. This sonnenberg resulted in his last recorded triumph, which was quickly followed by his last recorded defeat. The action is related in a 1951 article from the Eugene Register-Guard titled, “Gorky Forces Achiu to Quit”:
Gorky had Achiu in plenty of trouble throughout the first fall but suddenly Achiu turned the tables and in a matter of seconds gained a fall after applying a Sonnenberg and a body press for that first fall.
In the second fall Gorky used everything in the books to get Achiu on the canvas in preparation for a sky high knee drop that rendered Achiu helpless and unable to continue the match.
This kind of defeat is comprehensive and personal: there’s no time clock or scoreboard in play, no presiding authority making some decisive signal, no teammates present to help absorb the blame. There’s just an individual at the mercy. All that can be done is to say uncle.
And so Sneeze Achiu finally disappeared, and with him went the sonnenberg. The first year of fatherhood for me was, among other things, a searching for this word, sonnenberg. I could never confirm its apparent meaning. It had something to do with flight and with a transformation so complete as to be a kind of surrender.
Right around the time it disappeared with Sneeze Achiu from the sports pages the word sonnenberg appeared as the name of a small downhill ski area in Vermont, part of a boom in downhill skiing in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the areas that rose up at this time have faded away, but Sonnenberg was still there when my family moved to Vermont in the 1970s. I never really liked downhill skiing—the crowded white smugness of it all, the anxiety and terror of boarding and unboarding a chairlift, the hordes of hotshot cackling kids bombing past me, the simple fear of falling down a steep icy slope—but I loved Sonnenberg, even though nobody else did. My memory of skiing at Sonnenberg is so vague and stripped of specific details that it’s nothing more than a tone. Key to this tonal memory, somehow, is the association I’ve always had with Sonnenberg and another local ski area, Suicide Six. In my memory Suicide Six was representative of its name, a terrifying cluster of steep, icy slopes; Sonnenberg was gentler, a warm, bright, safe place, a manifestation of the Germanic origin of the word: sun mountain.
The first year of fatherhood for me was Suicide Six, every new day like being a beginner standing at the top of a black diamond slope, no other way to go but straight down into it, loss of balance and subsequent contortions inevitable (see agony of defeat), unrelenting but for the occasional unpredictable pause, which offered a chance to dream-glimpse some other place, a Sun Mountain. All I ever do, have ever done, is dream of a Sun Mountain. It’s in my blood. My mom and Tom were looking for a Sun Mountain far from the earthly snares of New Jersey when they moved the family to Vermont. They could have moved elsewhere and were in fact considering Sneeze Achiu’s wrestling turf, Oregon. They chose Vermont. Our specific landing point, Randolph, was decided upon because my Uncle Bob, my mom’s younger brother, was living there, and he was in Randolph because he was in love with a woman named Ellen. Ellen and Bob were over at our house a lot. They were young and bright and beautiful and always made me laugh.
One day several years into our life in Vermont my brother and I were out in our side yard throwing a Frisbee with Uncle Bob. He jogged toward one of my throws and then, instead of catching it, leaped up and made his arms into an O, through which the Frisbee passed. The histrionic intentional miss was in itself hilarious, and Ian and I started laughing. But our uncle, with characteristic dryness, expanded the instance of physical comedy in such a way that allowed us not only to see the whole thing as a parody of the wide world of sports, our dualistic religion of wins and losses, but also to throw our bodies into the liberating joke.
“The World Championship of Frisbee Missing,” our uncle said.
What followed that was the most prolonged fit of laughter in my life, the laughter coming in easy renewing waves as we spent the rest of the afternoon and as deep into the dusk as we could possibly go running all over the soft grass inventing new ways to miss. Surrender your grim intentions, your winning and losing. Surrender your wrestling for a blessing. Surrender Sun Mountain. You’re at the mercy. Say fuck it, say uncle. Just miss.
V
Van de Velde, Jean
We were downstairs in the room with a futon mattress and a recliner chair. Jack was standing with his hands braced on it. It was a few weeks away from his first birthday. I’d been downstairs with Jack since I’d gotten home from work, and Abby had just joined us after taking a bath. For the last few days Jack had been standing for a few seconds at a time. He would let go of what he was holding onto. It looked like he was now ready to give this another try. I was sitting close to him, on the floor at the foot of the futon, and Abby was sitting on the futon. She was about three feet away from Jack. Jack let go of the arm of the recliner and stood there wobbling, looking at Abby. Abby stretched her arms out wide, an invitation.
You want to stop time, but when? For Jean Van de Velde, would it be at the tee on the final hole of the 1999 British Open? At that moment he held a three-shot lead, a cushion large enough to virtually guarantee the low-ranking French pro an astounding major championship. But time did not stop, and the lead vanished with the rapidity usually known only in dreams. Van de Velde hit a weak drive, then a misguided second shot tha
t ricocheted off the grandstand and into deep grass. He blasted his ball out of the grass and toward a water hazard. It seemed at first he would have a play on the ball from the edge of the water, so he took off his shoes and waded in. This is where time most commonly stops in the collective memory of the moment, as it is at this point that the most famous image accompanying stories of Van de Velde’s collapse materialized, the visored Frenchman in the water with his pants rolled up above his knees. He has one pale bare foot up in the air as he steps gingerly through the water, trying to keep his balance. The obvious message to anyone with any familiarity with golf would be: this man is in deep trouble. This man has gone completely off course and is battling the elements. This man looks a little silly and frail. As Van de Velde searched for his footing in the water, the ball that he thought he would be able to play sank further into the muck, forcing the golfer to take a penalty drop. He hit the ensuing shot into a sand trap. He then chipped out of the bunker to within six feet of the hole. The ensuing putt was not an easy one, especially given the circumstances. If he made it, he would still tie for the lead and enter a playoff with two other golfers. He sank it. Stop time right there, with Jean Van de Velde pumping his fist and throwing his riddled ball into the gallery, into oblivion. Still alive.
Jack stood there without holding onto anything. I was close enough to him to kiss him on the cheek, which I wanted to do, but for once I held back. He had a T-shirt and shorts on, no socks or shoes. He looked at Abby. Abby smiled back, holding her arms out wide. Jack wobbled like a barefoot golfer in the water. In his recent experiments in standing he’d start to wobble, then grab onto something, but this time the wobbling gave way to something else altogether, forward motion, four short but undeniable paces from me to his mother. Our son’s first steps. Such a moment is often rendered in television advertisements with great sentiment, music swelling, sunlight streaming in, life insurance pitch looming. It wasn’t like that. It was like that trick where someone pulls a tablecloth out from under all the place settings and nothing moves, except instead of a tablecloth it was like someone had yanked a covering off of everything in the entire world, leaving the world both brand new and miraculously untouched but for one slight, tender wobble. Abby and I just started laughing. We couldn’t stop.