The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  Meyer’s voice changes, grows firmer, louder. “Blatant fact,” he says.

  He pauses. A fragmented idea orders itself in his mind. “Wow,” he says.

  He asks to hear it again. “Blatant fact,” he says. “It should have my picture. I need to read that to my wife. I’m gonna reread that now. Self-destructive behavior?”

  The car is quiet. Those close to Meyer say he lives in his head, with a constant interior monologue, which is why he’ll zone out at dinner with his kids or start calling people he knows by the wrong name.

  “Wow,” he says. “This is profound stuff. Profound. Now as I sit here talking about it, I know exactly what happened.”

  Part Two

  He lost things one at a time.

  He lost 15 pounds during every season as the head coach at Bowling Green and at Utah, unable to eat or shave, rethinking things as fundamental as the punt. Purging the weak, he locked teams inside a gym with nothing but bleating whistles and trash cans for their puke, forcing the unworthy to quit. The survivors, and their coaches, were underdogs, united. His children often asked why they kept moving. Shelley always said, “Daddy’s climbing a mountain.”

  His desire to mentor battled with the rage that often consumed him, a by-product of his need for success and his constantly narrowing definition of it. He threw a remote control through a television. Players whispered about Black Wednesday, about Full Metal Jacket Friday, about a drill named Vietnam. His own body rebelled against the intensity: during his time as an assistant, a cyst on his brain often sent crushing waves of pain through his head when he was stressed. He kept coaching, moving up, each rung of success pulling him further away from his young wife and kids. A voice of warning whispered even then. “I was always fearful I would become That Guy,” he says. “The guy who had regret. ‘Yeah, we won a couple of championships, but I never saw my kids grow up. Yeah, we beat Georgia a couple of times, but I ruined my marriage.’”

  At Bowling Green, at Utah, and finally at Florida, the teams celebrated with something he called Victory Meal. They’d gather after a win, eating steak and shrimp, watching a replay of the game. They’d hang out, enjoying the accomplishment. Players and coaches loved Victory Meal, and Meyer often sat at the front of the room, glowing inside.

  Then he won the 2006 national title.

  Bud Meyer joined him in the locker room. They hugged, cried, and before Urban left, he took his nameplate from his locker as a souvenir. Back at the office, he gave his secretary his credit card and told her to buy everything she could find from the game. She spent around $5,000 on blown-up photographs. Urban essentially scrapbooked, collecting mementos of the success he couldn’t really enjoy. There was something melancholy about it. Truth is, he loved reflecting—his favorite song, Jimmy Buffett’s “One Particular Harbor,” is about someone who imagines an escape, dreaming of being an old man able to look back—but he’d learned that reflection is weakness, so he didn’t indulge beyond the pictures on the wall and those moments in the locker room with his dad.

  He lost even that.

  Success didn’t bring relief. It only magnified his obsession, made the margins thinner, left him with chest pains. After the 2007 season, he confided to a friend that anxiety was taking over his life and he wanted to walk away.

  Two years after he cried with his father, Urban Meyer stood on the field with his second national championship team, the 2008 Gators, singing the fight song. After the last line, he rushed into the tunnel and locked himself in the coaches’ locker room. He began calling recruits as his assistants pounded on the door, asking if everything was okay. Back in Gainesville, his chronic chest pain got worse, and he did test after test, treadmills and heart scans, sure he was dying. Doctors found nothing, and the pain became another thing to ignore. “Building takes passion and energy,” Meyer says. “Maintenance is awful. It’s nothing but fatigue. Once you reach the top, maintaining that beast is awful.”

  A few months later, during the 2009 SEC media days, a reporter asked what it felt like knowing anything but perfection would be a failure. Meyer tried to laugh it off, but he walked away from the podium knowing the undeniable truth of the question.

  Success meant perfection.

  The drive for it changed something inside him. For the first time, Meyer needed an alarm clock. Shelley called his secretary to ask whether he was eating. Unopened boxes of food sat on his desk. He lost even when they won, raging at his coaches and players for mistakes, demanding emergency staff meetings in the middle of the night. He stopped smiling. Days ended later and later. He texted recruits in church. He ignored his children, his fears realized: he’d become That Guy.

  The tighter he gripped, the more things slipped away. The blatant fact. The Gators beat Georgia, another step closer to perfection. He’d been skipping Victory Meal, heading straight to his office to watch film, but after that win he stopped in. The room was almost empty.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” he asked.

  His strength coach and friend Mickey Marotti didn’t want to answer.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” he repeated.

  “Coach,” Mickey said, “they don’t come.”

  The unbeaten streak reached 22 games.

  Four days before the SEC title game against Alabama, Meyer got an early-morning phone call: star defensive end Carlos Dunlap had been arrested and charged with drunken driving, threatening the perfection, triggering the rage, which had always been connected for Meyer. He wanted order, and this desire had turned him in a circle, or, more accurately, a spiral: losing filled him with loathing, for himself and everyone connected to the loss, and over time his personality came to define losing as anything short of perfection. His rage was the exhaust of whatever hidden motor turned inside him. After the campus police officer delivered the news about Dunlap, Meyer went to the office, overcome, driving in the dark. That week, everything came apart.

  He popped Ambien but couldn’t sleep.

  The morning of the game, early in a quiet hotel, Meyer waited to do an interview, and when his public relations guy, Steve McClain, saw Meyer gaunt in the television lights, he felt panic. Meyer’s pants sagged off thin hips. McClain called Shelley Meyer and asked her to come down: they needed to talk. An intervention loomed. That afternoon, Florida lost to Alabama, and afterward, the cheers from the Crimson Tide echoed in the concrete halls of the Georgia Dome. Meyer limped to the bus, ghost white, settling next to Shelley in the front right seat. His head slumped. An unopened box of chicken sat on his lap.

  He’d lost 35 pounds that season.

  Six or seven hours later in Gainesville, around 4:00 A.M., Meyer said his chest hurt, and he fell on the floor. Shelley dialed 911. She tried to sound calm, but a few shaky words gave her away.

  “My husband’s having chest pains,” she said. “He’s on the floor.”

  “Is he awake?” the operator asked.

  “Urban, Urban,” Shelley pleaded, “talk to me, Urb. Urban, talk to me, please.”

  Meyer lay on his stomach, on the floor of his mansion, his eyes closed, unable to speak. Soon he’d resign, come back for a year and resign again, but the journey that began with hope in Columbus in 1986 ended with that 911 call and the back of an ambulance.

  Urban Meyer won 104 games but lost himself.

  Meyer didn’t just give up a job. He admitted that the world he’d constructed had been fatally flawed, which called into question more than a football career. Follow the dots, from quitting to asking why he’d lost control to trying to understand himself. Who am I? Why am I that way? When the facade fell down, the foundation crumbled too, so he needed more than a relaxing break. If he came back and allowed the rage to consume him again, his quitting would have been meaningless. He didn’t need a piña colada. He needed to rebuild himself. His dad sneered at the weakness when he quit, leveling his stark opinion: “You can’t change your essence.”

  Five months after retiring, Meyer woke up early in a hotel near Stanford Univer
sity, there for his new job as an ESPN analyst. His chest didn’t hurt; a doctor finally thought to suggest Nexium. Turns out esophageal spasms mimic the symptoms of a heart attack. That morning, he went for a run, on a whim grabbing a book he’d started the night before: LEAD . . . for God’s Sake!

  He ran with the book in his hand, stopping on campus to sit and read. He ran an hour, read an hour, back and forth. The sun climbed, and he couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. He finished that day and emailed the author from his phone, saying, “That is the most profound book I’ve ever read.”

  The novel tells of the winningest high school basketball coach in Kentucky, a man consumed by success. When players make a mistake, he punishes their weakness, destroys watercoolers, but he doesn’t understand why his star breaks his hand punching a wall. They skipped Victory Meal because I did. Finally, his family fades away. The character’s son begs him to shoot baskets, and the coach can’t make time. When things collapse and his team can’t win, the man is forced to ask, “Why do I coach?”

  “That hit home,” Meyer says. “That was in my backyard. Even closer, that was in my living room. It brought me back to 1986 and why I made a decision to get into coaching, as opposed to what was going on in 2009—chasing perfection. Never one time did I say, ‘To go undefeated at Florida.’ All of a sudden, every step, every time I had a cup of coffee, every time I woke up in the morning and shaved, it was all about somehow getting a team to go undefeated at Florida.”

  The coach in the book forms a relationship with the school janitor, a mystical Christ figure, who becomes a spiritual guide in his search for himself. Meyer left Stanford looking for his own guides. “Without anyone really knowing it,” he says, “I went on a yearlong research project. How can you do both? How does Bob Stoops be a good dad and husband and still have success?”

  Meyer traveled to Norman, Oklahoma, and met with Stoops, who said, “Live your life. When you go home, go home.”

  He flew several times to Texas to sit with Mack Brown, who told him to remember when he loved the game. Before you wanted a perfect season, before million-dollar homes and recruiting wars, once upon a time you loved a game.

  Meyer visited West Point, stayed with Nate in coach Red Blaik’s old house. He sat with Army coach Rich Ellerson in the little café behind the cemetery, in the shadow of General Custer’s grave. Holding hot cups of coffee, they talked about the essential truths often hidden by the contradictions, the things obscured by money and success. Ellerson told Urban that football itself helped nurture and protect its values. The snippets of life lived between the snap and the whistle could purify everything bad that people did to the game. “It clarifies,” he said. Meyer, who’d seen the lines blurred in the SEC and within himself, said he wasn’t sure. Ellerson offered his sermon on MacArthur and the Corps and the West Point mission: “To educate, train, and inspire . . .” Urban stared at him. “Wait a minute,” Meyer said, “you really believe this.” They talked about why they loved a game, following the question: Why do I coach? At Bowling Green, he’d loved tutoring his players in math. Could he have that back again? The game was the problem, but maybe it could be the solution too.

  West Point came in the middle of a 13-day road trip with Nate, maybe the best 13 days of Urban’s life. The two helicoptered to Yankee Stadium, hung out for almost a week in Cooperstown, where they held Babe Ruth’s bat. “I was seven years old again,” he says.

  Back home, Urban slept in. Shelley couldn’t believe it, getting up around 7:30 to work out, leaving Urban in bed. When he finally dressed, he’d walk a mile to a breakfast place he loved, lounge around and watch television with the owner, then walk a mile back.

  “His mind shut off,” Shelley says.

  Shelley begged him to do this forever. She’d never seen Urban so happy. He coached Nate’s baseball and football teams. He played paintball. The family went out for dinners, and Urban was present, cracking Seinfeld jokes and smiling.

  But he still felt empty. He’d ask, Is this it? He missed the ability to make an impact; he’d gotten into coaching to be a teacher. A challenge grew from his trip to West Point: What if he could have the feeling of Bowling Green on the scale of Florida? What if he could answer the question posed in the novel: Why?

  Yet beyond the intellectual journey, he missed football on an almost biological level, deep down in the place where his ambition—where his love, and his rage—hibernated. In early November, he stood on the sideline at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa. The crowd roared. God, he loved the crowd. Sometimes, when it felt as if they’d never lose again at the Swamp, he’d slip his headset off just for a moment and let the noise cover him like a hot rain. In Tuscaloosa, with LSU and Alabama waiting to take the field, the stadium lights bright on the green grass, something awoke. The person standing next to him looked over to find the old Urban Meyer, eyes dark and squinted, arms crossed, muttering, “I miss this.”

  In late November, Meyer wanted to accept the Ohio State job. Shelley demanded a family meeting. They had all gathered around Thanksgiving in the Atlanta apartment of their oldest daughter, Nicki, who played volleyball at Georgia Tech. Shelley told the kids to ask anything. He heard the fear in their voices: how could he be sure he was ready to go back?

  “We wanted him to make promises,” Shelley says.

  During the fall that Urban spent searching, as the rumors circled about his return to the game, Bud Meyer was slipping away. Lung disease had left him frail and weak. Urban used his freedom to visit whenever he wanted. Around the LSU-Alabama game, Urban and Bud watched a television news report about the open Ohio State job. Urban’s picture appeared on the screen.

  “Hey, you gonna do that?” Bud asked.

  “I don’t know,” Urban said. “What do you think?”

  Bud turned to face him, gaunt in the light. An oxygen tube ran to his nose. Twenty seconds passed, the silence uncomfortable. Thirty seconds.

  “Nah,” Bud said. “I like this s— the way it is. I don’t care who wins or loses.”

  His response couldn’t have been more out of character. Never before had Urban asked his dad for his opinion and not gotten direct, blunt advice: “I think you should . . .” In his father’s answer, there was a measure of absolution—maybe for both of them. Sometimes walking away isn’t quitting. Sometimes, when the fire burns too hot, walking away is the bravest thing a man can do. Bud offered the best mea culpa he could, in his own way. Maybe he knew this would be one of their last conversations. Ambivalence was his final gift. Whatever Urban chose to do with his future, he could walk through the world knowing he had his father’s blessing. They never discussed coaching again.

  Two weeks later, Bud Meyer died in his son’s arms.

  Three days after his father’s funeral, five days after his family demanded promises, Meyer accepted the Ohio State job. During his first news conference, he reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a contract written by Nicki, which he’d signed in exchange for his family’s blessing. These rules were supposed to govern his attempt at a new life, as his father’s example had governed his old one. So much was happening at once, and as he said good-bye to the man who molded him, he began undoing part of that molding.

  He went to work.

  Meyer unpacked his boxes, setting up little shrines on the blond wood shelves of his Ohio State office. To the right, positioned in his most common line of sight, he placed a blue rock with a word etched into it: BALANCE. Behind the rock went a collage of photographs, the orange of a sunset from his lake house—his particular harbor—and of his old church in Gainesville. The shrine was a gift from his pastor in Florida, a prayer from people who love him that he won’t lose himself again.

  Framed above his desk hung the contract he signed with his kids, written on pink notebook paper.

  MY FAMILY WILL ALWAYS COME FIRST.

  I WILL TAKE CARE OF MYSELF AND MAINTAIN GOOD HEALTH.

  I WILL GO ON A TRIP ONCE A YEAR WITH NICKI—MINIMUM.

  I WIL
L NOT GO MORE THAN NINE HOURS A DAY AT THE OFFICE.

  I WILL SLEEP WITH MY CELL PHONE ON SILENT.

  I WILL CONTINUE TO COMMUNICATE DAILY WITH MY KIDS.

  I WILL TRUST GOD’S PLAN AND NOT BE OVERANXIOUS.

  I WILL KEEP THE LAKE HOUSE.

  I WILL FIND A WAY TO WATCH NICKI AND GIGI PLAY VOLLEYBALL.

  I WILL EAT THREE MEALS A DAY.

  Part Three

  Seven months later, Meyer drives through the outskirts of Cleveland, 60 miles from Ashtabula, past the refineries and smokestacks, his son Nate in the backseat. They’re almost at the Indians’ stadium, where Urban is scheduled to throw out the first pitch in a few hours. Meyer’s living his life, keeping the promises he made.

  “I’ve really been working on that,” he says. “I’m gonna do that in the fall. I’m gonna go home. I’m not gonna bring my work home with me and not be able to sleep at night. I’m not . . .

  “. . . that’s easy to say now.”

  The season is still a few months away. He hasn’t lost a game yet. That’s what pushed him into the darkest corners of his own personality. He squeezes the steering wheel.

  “Can I change?” he asks.

  The question hangs in the air. In public he talks a good game, but he knows how hard the next year will be. Maybe, deep inside, he already knows the answer. The skies darken. Rain will soon land on the windshield with heavy thumps.

  “TBD,” he says. “To be determined.”

  Father and son play catch in the rain, standing in shallow left at Progressive Field, the bowl of seats empty around them. Urban smiles when Nate backhands a grounder, a schoolboy grin, the one that believed what the girls whispered in the hall back in the day. Meyer’s enthusiasm is as powerful as his rage. Halfway is for other people. When he took his girls to Rome and Israel for nine days, they begged to sleep in just once. Nope. “We attacked Rome as hard as you possibly can,” he says and then mimics his own stern voice: “‘We are gonna have fun on this vacation!’”