by Glenn Stout
Fact is, you asked the wrong guy for this little essay.
For one thing, I’m not generally known as a glass-half-full kind of guy. I’m the fellow who writes all these dystopian sociopolitical dramas from whatever dark corner of the American experience offers the best chance for grievous tragedy. I’m not even a glass-half-empty kind of guy. I’m more the glass-broken-over-the-end-of-the-bar-and-used-to-splay-the-jugular-of-whichever-character-stood-up-and-dared-assert-for-human-dignity-two-scenes-earlier guy. I’m that kind of guy.
So when Nick Markakis breaks his thumb in the season’s last month, I’m supposed to see that as foreshadowing. And when the O’s drop two of three to Oakland, I’m supposed to run with that as my leitmotif. As it ever was, as it ever shall be. Somewhere a 17-year-old urchin with bright eyes is sticking a needle in his arm. Somewhere, a misinformed Marine officer is calling an air strike on a civilian ville. Somewhere, a wry, humanist street musician is getting shot in the face.
For Sports Illustrated to call the bullpen of Baltimore writers and ask for Simon to get loose is a twisted little joke. What about John Waters? I mean, Hairspray, that opening number? Good morning, Baltimore! Or Taylor Branch, an O’s fan who chronicled the entire civil rights movement in prose. Talk about uplift. Talk about eyes on the prize. Or Barry Levinson, for chrissake. Levinson would be perfect for this. I mean, never mind that last, saintly home run in The Natural—did you see his short flick on the Colts’ marching band? Dude had people crying real tears over the halftime band.
My wife, a first-rate novelist, grew up here. She’s the one with Brooks Robinson memorabilia scattered across her office. She’s the one who knows all the words to the “World of Orioles Baseball” song. She’s the one who met Ron Swoboda and actually told the man she was still aggrieved by 1969 and The Catch.
“It’s been 35 years,” he said. “You need to get over it.”
“No,” she replied calmly. “I don’t.”
This could have been done right and proper. Instead, the plan is to squeeze warm blood and nostalgia and little-engine-that-could optimism from The Wire guy.
And it’s worse than you know because, honestly, I’m not from here. And I grew up hating the Orioles. Hating them more than a tetanus shot. Hating them way more than the Yankees. In my childhood the big bad birds from Baltimore were forever coming to town and stomping the very humanity out of the team that I truly loved. The Robinsons. Boog. Belanger. Palmer. McNally. Cuellar. What those guys did to my youth is harden me for a lifetime of writing unhappy endings.
I am from Washington. And I was born a Senators fan.
Does the darkness make sense now? Does it? You sick bastards.
It is April 1988, and I am pretty much living inside the Baltimore Homicide Unit, a newspaperman who has finagled his way into a year with the murder police in a town ripe with bloodletting, hoping to write himself a book.
In one interrogation room, Bunk Requer is writing up a witness statement on a Morrell Park cutting, and in the larger Box, I can hear Kincaid yelling at some 17-year-old prodigy who shot and killed a man over a three-piece chicken combo outside the Kentucky Fried on Fayette Street.
I’m in the main squad room, trying to watch the ball game on the office black-and-white. Constantine plays with the rabbit ears, working to solve the insubordinate vertical hold. And the O’s are losing. Again. It is wondrous, actually. Amazing.
The dominant baseball franchise of my youth is on its way to ending the whole season in April, losing its first 21 games. The rest of the detectives are abject and disgusted, cursing the owner, the coaching, the players, the fates. One of the guys has a share in a season-ticket package and looks as if he’s ready to pull his .38 and fire five into the television, saving the last one for himself.
A uniform walks in with a transport, another witness sent downtown from Kincaid’s crime scene. He hands off paperwork, waits a moment, watches Larry Sheets ground into a double play.
“Christ. Losing again? What’s the score?”
He’s told.
“This is worse than getting the clap from your sister.”
Constantine grunts a laugh. Good one, kid.
An inning more and the TV is shut down. The detectives drift away. Me, I say nothing to anyone, of course, but from deep within, I can feel the shrunken Grinch-heart of a Senators fan growing. In fact, I can feel love everlasting. The O’s are really awful this year. They’re so bad, so desperate in fact, that I can once again devote myself to a baseball team.
I got to Baltimore in ’83. Even went to the first game of the World Series when someone laid a ticket on me. Watched impassively as the O’s beat the Phillies for their last title. Ripken, Murray, the Demper. But they weren’t mine. They were still the Visigoths who had raped and plundered their way through old RFK Stadium. But now, this exquisite misery, this Homeric run of failure that reminds me of Howard and Epstein, McMullen and Brinkman and Casanova, that gently fingers the broken part of my baseball soul.
I came aboard in ’88. Six years later, when my son was born, I was still waiting for what we all assumed would be a return to the power and the glory, to The Oriole Way. It never occurred to me that Ethan might grow up as I grew up, and that he might go away without the two of us sharing so much as a winning season.
A week ago, I sat up late watching that 18-inning epic in Seattle. The game ended magnificently, and of course, I wanted to be around other people. Baltimoreans. Fans. It was four in the damn morning.
Still, I was wired. I walked down to the 7-Eleven for I don’t know what, hoping against hope. The aisles were empty, but a 20-something kid was stumbling, half lit, around the register, trying to pay for a Big Gulp. He’d come from a house party, he told me. They’d been playing poker, but then the ball game got good, and instead of dealing cards, they sat around drinking, hearts in their hands, waiting for the Orioles to sneak away with another one.
“Even the guys who aren’t from here were into it. You gotta love it. I mean, a different hero every night. Taylor f—Teagarden!”
“You from here?”
“All my life. I never seen a season like this. Have you?”
Not for a long while, I allowed. I wandered home, thought about texting my son, but no, this all comes too late. Too many years late.
Except the next night at 7:08 P.M., my phone throws out its little tone, and I see a text from an 18-year-old university freshman, who is with a childhood friend also in school in Beantown.
Sitting atop the Green Monster with Thomas Bottomley. Yelled “0” in the anthem. Now fearing for my life.
I thought of my son at Fenway, draped in that Adam Jones jersey, bird cap crowning him at the jauntiest of angles, surrounded by rows and rows of embittered Sox fans for whom this September is dry, empty death.
You go, brah, I texted him. Die like a commando.
The Kid stays in the will. If he makes it back to the dorm, I mean.
GARY SMITH
Why Don’t More Athletes Take a Stand?
FROM SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
PARDON ME, I’D like to interrupt your regularly scheduled programming and introduce you to America’s rarest athlete: Wonman Joseph Williams. His first name’s a Korean word that means full harmony, but you don’t need to check his papers. He’s a defensive back on a Division I football team. You know, a student-ATHLETE.
He’s a 19-year-old who stands up during team meetings at Virginia so that he won’t fall asleep, but not because he’s sluggish or disengaged. You see, he’s attempting to do something that’s nearly impossible at a college in the United States today. He’s trying to be a student, an athlete, and a human being. He’s trying to live in full harmony.
Lotsa luck, kid! See you around!
Wait. That’s him again, darting through a frigid rain and dripping into UVA’s Alderman Library. His eyes fix on a student whose head has sagged onto a table amid the laptops, books, and coffee cups. “That’s one of the hunger strikers,” murmurs a classmate.
“He’s two days in. They’re doing it for the Living Wage Campaign.”
Full Harmony stares in puzzlement. He has attended Living Wage rallies on campus, has friends in the crusade. He knows what’s at stake for the thousands of campus workers barely scraping by, many on incomes at or near minimum wage. He knows the scrapers too: the old black dudes who scrape the snow and dog crap off this gorgeous green playground for the mind that Thomas Jefferson wrought nearly two centuries ago, the women who scrape the gravy and mayo off the plates in the dining-hall kitchens. Full Harmony’s not another one of those students who cross campus with their eyes locked on their smartphones. He sings out greetings to total strangers, popping the bubble wrap around his school’s elite matriculants, slicing at the distance between the students and the townies who serve them, perplexing all who’ve yet to perceive what he and they share. So how—besides the fact that he’s a student-ATHLETE, one of 444,000 young American men and women who annually turn over their lives because they wish to play a college sport—has he missed hearing about this hunger strike?
He flashes a text to one of the Living Wage campaigners, a classmate named Hallie Clark: I didn’t know y’all were hunger striking.
We sure are, she replies.
A thought and a nervous tickle run through him: he needs to join them. He needs to stop eating and watch the muscles on his five-ten, 207-pound body begin melting away so that Mama Kathy, the woman he hugs when she swipes his ID card at the dining hall, and Miss Mary, the lady he always chats with at the convenience-store cash register in the basement of Newcomb Hall, and all of their coworkers can . . . But, c’mon. He’s busy rehabbing the surgically repaired ligament in his left ankle, the one that wiped out most of his second season, so he’ll be ready when spring ball starts in a few weeks . . . and besides, imagine what his coaches would say . . . and really, sports and social justice, they just don’t mix anymore. Who in the last 40 years, in the wave after wave of American student-ATHLETES—not to mention the 4,100 young men on the rosters of the four mainstream professional sports each year—has made a stand like this?
Good. He can’t hear that bitter cackle in the distance. It’s one of the old, gray warriors from the front lines of the 1960s and early ’70s who’d be willing to bet what this kid’s going to decide. It’s John Carlos, the bronze medalist in the ’68 Olympic 200 meters, who raised his black-gloved fist on the medal stand to bring attention to racism in the United States and brought all hell down upon his head. “Athletes today?” he cries. “They don’t know history! They don’t want to come out of their box and risk people taking away their lollipops!”
Full Harmony whips out his cell phone again. Coach can’t say no if Coach doesn’t know. Count me in, he types.
Eat your last meal, Hallie replies.
Full Harmony’s last meal: a double burger, chicken nuggets, french fries, and a chocolate chip cookie, to the din of a pounding rain in his girlfriend’s car in a McDonald’s parking lot at 10:30 P.M. on a Sunday in February. Gone in four and a half minutes—he’s never been one for ceremony. He balls up the wrappers, his excitement rising as the grease settles. He’s your crème-de-la-crème college student, carrying a 3.43 GPA in one of his university’s most selective and challenging majors, Political and Social Thought, while doing volunteer work at a Charlottesville Boys & Girls Club, mentoring Charlottesville teenagers in the Collegiate 100 Society, teaching English as a second language to a refugee from Burundi in UVA’s Visas program, raising funds for the homeless as part of his fraternity’s untiring community service, and, oh yeah, playing on an ACC football team. Doing this, though—true activism for a greater cause—is what he dreamed college would be back when he signed up for it, but he has barely seen a trace of it in his three years on campus.
At 9:00 A.M. the next morning he enters the anthropology building, Brooks Hall, and joins the gaunt gang of protesters. Perhaps he’s naive. Perhaps they are too. Nobody, especially Full Harmony, regards him as anything more than Hunger Striker Number 13 . . . except for one woman. Emily Filler’s a UVA grad student and an adjunct instructor at nearby University of Mary Washington who’s serving as the Living Wage Campaign’s publicist during the strike, and when Hallie casually mentions Full Harmony’s extracurricular activity to her, she knows at once: a handsome, high-cheekboned, square-jawed, ever-smiling, humble football player hunger-striking against his university administration’s wage policy for thousands of mostly African American campus workers. Yahtzee!
She calls Frankie Jupiter, reporter for CBS affiliate WCAV, and by the time the hunger strikers have gathered on the steps of the Rotunda for their daily noon rally, Jupiter’s got a camera rolling and a microphone under Full Harmony’s jaw. Capturing his vow that he won’t eat until UVA, the biggest employer in town, does what 17 of the other 22 elite universities considered to be its peers have done and agrees to pay its service-sector workers a “living wage.” That’s a sum that the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, calculating the cost of living on a city-by-city basis, has determined for Charlottesville to be $13 an hour, which is anywhere from $2.35 to $5.75 more than the starting wage for UVA service workers.
Full Harmony finishes the interview, hoists a sign—WORKERS ARE PEOPLE TOO!—and becomes the loudest chanter of all: One! Two! Three! Four! No one should be working poor! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! UVA! Living wage!
A hundred students, a handful of them his friends, stop and gawk, then hurry away. Damn. Full Harmony, empty stomach, watches them all head off to lunch.
He awakens on day two to a discovery: nothing’s harder to ignore than a hollow belly. Get up, he tells himself. Get moving. He crosses campus and slips into the football trainer’s room, bracing for the tap on the shoulder and the nod toward the coaches’ offices. He begins banging out his hour and a half of rehab work: underwater treadmill, calf raises, balancing exercises, stretches, crunching towels and picking up marbles with his toes, cold and hot whirlpools. It hits him halfway through: he’s operating a Maserati on an empty tank. He drags himself into the locker room, pouring his last few volts into that high-beam smile, the everything’s-hunky-dory look, just in case. The football facility’s crawling with assistant coaches and athletic department staffers. Either they still don’t know . . .
. . . or just don’t care. Yeah, maybe he can get away with this because of the scarlet W he wears. Walk-on. He’s accustomed to feeling like a penny in a gold mine, dressing over here in Walk-On Corner, aka the Hood. Because in the Hood you don’t get your own locker, sharing one with another walk-on, and you’re not even just a number—you share that with someone far above you on the depth chart—and you’re not allowed to take out your frustration on the starters or the second-stringers in practice because We gotta get them to the game, son! Just wrap ’em up and keep ’em vertical! And still Full Harmony loves it, approaching every practice as if it’s the ACC championship game in front of 73,675 screamers, bent on being a weekday superstar.
He has found himself on the field for only a handful of kickoffs in the second halves of games that the Cavaliers have salted away . . . but his teammates, they know Joe-Joe. That’s what they call him, because no one named Wonman or even Joseph—that’s the name his nonfootball friends call him—could possibly be as hyper and happy, as earsplitting and ever-ready as Joe-Joe. Quickest on the scout team to suss out the first-stringers’ offense and call out the appropriate defense, to call aside Cavaliers wide receivers and warn them about what they’re tipping off, to clap and bellow, “Give that boy a scholarship!” when one of his fellow scout-teamers makes a play.
He exits the locker room and surveys the facilities where football players pump their iron, do their cardio, eat their meals, and attend their study halls, all far from the rest of the student body. He gazes at the two state-of-the-art synthetic practice fields, with a third one, a $13 million indoor facility, about to get green-lighted by the school’s trustees, the Board of Visitors, because, well, what if it rains? Green-lighted at a b
udget meeting during this very hunger strike, even as administrators are insisting to the strikers that budget constraints prevent them from paying a living wage! That’s like food to Joseph. It fills his empty tank with fury.
How has all this happened in the blink of the evolutionary eye? Twenty-five hundred years ago, the earliest of such athletic fields—gymnasia—were being built by the Greeks. Centers where philosophers strolled and teachers instructed young men in ethics, morals, science, math, and poetry, where the playing field was a grand courtyard surrounded by libraries and lecture halls and classrooms with the intent of fully harmonizing the development of body and mind. A lad couldn’t run, jump, or hurl anything without learning how to question, how to think, how to see connections.
Somehow it has all become about separation, the promising athlete culled from the pack as early as nine or 10, placed with his select peers on travel teams, enthroned on an ever-rising pedestal through high school, isolated from the student body in college, fattened on the myth of his onliness by well-meaning coaches, parents, and fans, then pricked and prodded weekly for psychological advantage by those same coaches: THEY don’t think you’re good enough! They don’t respect you! Us against them, you against the world, the cult of self-anointing the athlete as its Ultra Self . . . Is it any wonder in 2012 how many players, rather than join their teammates to hug and celebrate after catching a touchdown pass or nailing a game-winning three-pointer, strut away from them and glare? Showed you I’m special! Showed you I’m better than all of them (and even all of “us”)! Is it any wonder that from such soil, no such thing as a sportsman social activist has sprung since the days of Jim Brown, Bill Russell, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Bill Walton?