The Best American Sports Writing 2018

by Glenn Stout

  ALI.

  Howard Bryant

  Serena, Venus, and the Williams Movement

  from ESPN: The Magazine

  You watch the protests, hear them outside your window and see them on TV, millions of women marching across the globe on January 21. You talk with a man you’ve known since 11th grade—white, respectable, of unremarkable wealth or accomplishment yet carrying a learned smugness, completely secure in the legitimacy of his status—who you discover is offended more by the vulgarity of the protest signs than the vulgarity that created them. Fortified by the protections and perks of maleness in perpetuity, he speaks of the women as a minor inconvenience, a moth on his tweed. “It was a moment, not a movement,” he tells you. “It changed nothing.”

  After a lifetime of diminishment, these words should carry no value, yet they remain inside you, eating at you. During this same conversation, he tells you of his “loss of respect” for civil rights icon John Lewis, and you know then that this person you’ve known for decades is not only talking about the women marching. He’s talking about you too.

  You watch the Australian Open championship between Venus and Serena Williams with this tumult in mind, and when Serena becomes a champion again, It was a moment, not a movement rises up like bile, and you wonder whether their presence will not feel like defiance. But you know better. It will not.

  You see them hug, see the teary fans. The humanity of it all. You want to trust that this breathtaking show of respect for these two champions is part of the natural ritual of sports—swords falling as the twilight nears, a ceremonial and final, unifying act—but you cannot shake the slights.

  If you have eyes and a heart, you see just how difficult these matches really are. You see Serena turn her back to Venus after a point to cloak her emotion. She will scream “Come on!” directly toward Victoria Azarenka, but she will not embarrass her sister. You see Venus, and when she says to the audience, “Serena Williams, that’s my little sister, guys,” she receives compliments for being gracious and elegant, but she is both elegant and protective. Even in their finals, it was never one against the other but two against everyone.

  Watching weak shots get pummeled, you realize that the legacy of Venus and Serena cannot be found in a trophy case but in all of the athletic big hitters—the Maria Sharapovas and Garbine Muguruzas—who now define the women’s game. The Williams sisters became the measure, and if you couldn’t hit with them, you couldn’t play. In turn, they forever diminished the championship hopes of the waifish and the crafty, the Agnieszka Radwanskas and Carla Suarez Navarros, and thanks to the sisters, there will be youngsters weeded out of the game earlier because they just don’t hit the ball hard enough. You see a sport revolutionized. You see legacy in action.

  You watch the patriarchy step on the Williamses, even when it wants to blow them kisses. Serena thanks the crowd, the tournament, her blood—but not her new fiancé, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, an omission that was mentioned often by broadcasters. In your mind, you flip through years of victory speeches, trying to remember a moment when Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal or Andy Murray was chastised for not mentioning his spouse or girlfriend by name. You can find none.

  As an all-Williams final became inevitable, you hear only the legend Chris Evert giving credit to Richard Williams, head of the family that didn’t belong until the championship trophies piled so high even the critics finally had to surrender. You remember talking with him at Wimbledon 2012. He spoke about his daughters, about the family not being wanted by the blue bloods of tennis, and you knew by the way his eyes fixed on you—older black man to younger one in the United Kingdom—that he was really talking about America, how if you are not white, you don’t get to be smug because you’re not protected by perks in perpetuity, how you never have the luxury of determining what is a movement and what is a moment because you are always the target.

  “There was only one way: win,” Richard Williams said, and when the sisters are standing on the podium in Melbourne, you see their excellence triumph, their blood vindicated. “Win and make them deal with us. Win and they have to give you a seat at the table, even if they don’t want you there.”

  Reid Forgrave

  The Concussion Diaries: One High School Football Player’s Secret Struggle with CTE

  from GQ

  Zac Easter knew what was happening to him. He knew why. And he knew that it was only going to get worse. So he decided to write it all down—to let the world know what football had done to him, what he’d done to his body and his brain for the game he loved. And then he shot himself.

  My Last Wishes

  It’s taken me about 5 months to write all of this. Sorry for the bad grammar in a lot of spots.

  I WANT MY BRAIN DONATED TO THE BRAIN BANK!! I WANT MY BRAIN DONATED TO THE SPORTS LEGACY INSTITUE A.K.A THE CONCUSSION FOUNDATION. If you go to the concussion foundation website you can see where there is a spot for donatation. I want my brain donated because I don’t know what happened to me and I know the concussions had something to do with it.

  Please please please give me the cheapest burial possible. I don’t want anything fancy and I want to be cremated. Once cremated, I want my ashes spread in the timber on the side hill where I shot my 10 point buck. That is where I was happiest and that I where I want to lay. Feel free to spread my ashes around the timber if you’d like, but just remember on the side hill is where I would like most of my remains. I am truly sorry if I put you in a financial burden. I just cant live with this pain any more.

  I don’t want anything expensive at my funeral or what ever it is. Please please please I beg you to choose the cheapest route and not even buy me a burial plot at a cemetary. . . I also do not want a military funeral. If there are color guardsmen or anyone else at my funerial or whatever you have I will haunt you forever.

  I want levi to keep playing clash of clans on my account. I am close to max have spent a lot of time playing that game. Though you think its stupid, I ask you keep playing it for me when you can and let my fellow clan mates know what happened. My phones passcode is 111111, so that’s six 1’s. . .

  Levi gets my car, it will need a oil change and breaks/tires done her shortly. Please take care of old red. It will need cleaned out as well because I am a slob.

  Thank you for being the best family in the world. I will watch over you all and please take my last wishes into consideration. Do not do something I do no want. Just remember, I don’t want a military funeral like grandpas. It is my last wishes and last rights.

  I am with the lord now.

  —Look, Im sorry every one for the choice I made. Its wrong and we all know it.

  November 13, 2015

  Zac Easter texted his girlfriend shortly before 10 a.m.

  “Can you call me when you get out of class? I’m in hot water right now and idk what to do”

  He typed as he drove, weaving Old Red, his cherry red 2008 Mazda3, down the wide suburban boulevards of West Des Moines. He’d already been awake for hours, since well before sunrise. At 5:40 a.m., he texted Ali an apology: “Sorry about last night.” Then he started drinking. By now he was shitfaced and driving around the suburbs. She called as soon as she got out of class, and he was slurring his words. Ali was scared. She wanted him off the road. She talked him down and into a gas-station parking lot, and then he hung up.

  “Do not leave,” she texted back at 11:27 a.m.

  Ali Epperson was nearly 700 miles away, at her contract-law class at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland. In football terms, Zac had outkicked his coverage: Ali was an ex-cheerleader but no vacant princess. She had a diamond stud in her left nostril and a knifing wit. They were a pair of scrappers whose jagged edges fit. Zac loved Trump; he kept a copy of Trump: The Art of the Deal in his bedroom. Ali was a budding progressive: a first-year student at a good law school who’d interned at Senator Tom Harkin’s D.C. office. They were just friends in high school; she used to cut fourth-period music class to
hang with Zac. After they graduated, they became more than friends.

  Sometimes he called her Winslow, her middle name, and only Winslow knew the full extent of Zac’s struggles in the five and a half years since high school: the brain tremors that felt like thunderclaps inside his skull, the sudden memory lapses in which he’d forget where he was driving or why he was walking around the hardware store, the doctors who told him his mind might be torn to pieces from all the concussions from football. She knew about the drugs and the drinking he was doing to cope. She knew about the mood swings, huge and pulverizing, the slow leaching of his hope.

  “I’m not leaving,” he texted back.

  “Promise?”

  He pulled into a Jimmy John’s and ate something to sober up, sending Ali Snapchats every so often to prove he wasn’t driving. Then, a couple of hours later, he texted her again:

  I’m home now. Don’t worry about it

  Zac. You promised you weren’t gonna drive.

  Ok sorry Alison. For everything. Idk

  what’s happening to me, but I’m sorry

  I brought you into it.

  Don’t be sorry you brought me into it.

  I told you I’d always be there for you.

  I just want you to get better.

  Idk if there is better for ppl like me.

  Like I said before. If anything happens

  to be just by a chance of luck. Tell my

  family everything

  Zac Easter went inside his parents’ house, past the five mounted deer heads on the living room wall, past the Muhammad Ali poster at the top of the stairs (“Impossible Is Nothing”), and into his room: Green Bay Packers gear, bodybuilding supplements, military books bursting from the shelves, a T-shirt he got from his high school football coach with the words BIG HAMMER.

  His laptop was open to a 39-page document titled “Concussions: My Silent Struggle.” “MY LAST WISHES,” it began. He’d created the document five months ago, and the final revision was made today.

  Zac Easter grabbed some ammunition, packed up the .40-caliber pistol he’d given his dad as a Father’s Day gift, and drove a few miles down the road to Lake Ahquabi State Park. It was a place where he’d gone swimming throughout his childhood; he and Ali liked to go there and lie on the beach and look at the clouds. “Ahquabi” is from an ancient Algonquian language. It means “resting place.”

  Around sunset, Zac took a picture of the lake, then he posted a status update on Facebook:

  Dear friends and family,

  If your reading this than God bless the times we’ve had together. Please forgive me. I’m taking the selfish road out. Only God understands what I’ve been through. No good times will be forgotten and I will always watch over you. Please if anything remember me by the person I am not by my actions. I will always watch over you! Please, please, don’t take the easy way out like me. Fist pumps for Jesus and fist pumps for me. Party on wayne!!;)

  Growing up, his nickname was Hoad. On Saturday mornings, the three Easter boys—Myles Jr. was the eldest, then Zac, then Levi—would crowd around the TV to watch Garfield and Friends. Odie was the mutt—impossibly energetic, tongue wagging, ears flopping. Friends with everyone. That was Zac. “Zac never stopped running. Everything he did was at full charge,” says his mother, Brenda. Over time the name evolved, the way nicknames do—Odie morphing into Hodie, Hodie shrinking to Hoad.

  He was a sweet, curious kid, and seemingly programmed to destroy. He went through four of those unbreakable steel Tonka dump trucks—broke the first three and disassembled the fourth, trying to figure out how it worked. He was seven. One winter, the family couldn’t figure out why the lightbulbs on the Christmas tree kept bursting. Faulty wiring? It turned out Zac was taking swings at the bulbs with a baseball bat. As he got older, the blast radius got bigger. He was Tom Sawyer reborn: unleashed, unbound Midwestern middle-class American boy. The Easter family’s acreage was off a dirt road, surrounded by cornfields, just east of where The Bridges of Madison County was filmed, and Zac and his brothers would go on hikes to the creek, bringing along an artillery of Black Cat fireworks to blow up minnows and bullfrogs. As a teenager he graduated to the family’s Honda Recon ATV, his first taste of real adrenaline and real recklessness. He’d fly through the woods, build jumps, and hurdle over them. “GODDAMMIT!” his dad, Myles Sr., would yell from the porch as he shot by.

  Zac was fearless, certain of his invincibility, confident he could push his limits to the very edge yet always stay in control. He was perfect for the one thing that mattered most in the Easter family: football.

  When Myles Easter Sr. talks about his own football career, there’s a joyful worship of the sport’s violent side: “I just wanted to knock the fuck out of somebody.” He was a safety at Drake University, a small school in Des Moines. He and Brenda got together in 1982, soon after his football career ended, and they married two years later, which meant she was now married to football too. Before Zac was born, Myles took a job as defensive coordinator at Simpson College, a Division III school in Indianola, Iowa, a town of 11,000 known for an annual hot-air-balloon festival. He never made his boys play football—it was more like it was just assumed. “I loved football,” he says. “I was getting to the point where I loved it more than the kids did back in high school.” Not that the boys didn’t love it too. They’d come to practice every day and hang off to the side with the kickers. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, they’d sneak up to the overhead track at Simpson College’s century-old gym and listen to their dad’s halftime pep talks.

  The Easters were a Minnesota Vikings family, but early on Zac defected and chose the Green Bay Packers. Zac loved Brett Favre—he had the same swagger. Zac’s elder brother, Myles Jr., was taller, faster, talented enough to earn a college football scholarship and a spot in his high school’s sports hall of fame. Zac was shorter and slower, but he was the toughest son of a bitch on the field. “He was out there to fuck people up,” says Myles Jr. “He was there to do some damage.” He had a lot to live up to, and he wasn’t born with what he needed, so in high school he secretly began taking prohormones, a steroid-like supplement banned in many sports.

  It worked. “Zac was a thumper,” his father says, standing in the family kitchen. “Of all the boys, he was the one who wouldn’t show pain, who’d be fearless . . . He’d throw his head into anything. He was the kind of guy I like on defense.”

  Myles Sr. pauses, takes a heavy breath, and shrugs. On the mantel behind him is a picture of Zac sitting in the back of a pickup, cradling the ten-point buck. When he speaks again, his voice is a stew of pride and guilt: “He was my type of guy.”

  From “Concussions: My Silent Struggle”

  I started playing youth football a year early in 3rd grade because my older brother was on the team and my dad was the coach. I started off playing the two positions that I played throughout my career, linebacker and full back. I remember being one of the hardest hitting linebackers ever since I started. You could even go back and ask some of the old players on the 49ers if you don’t believe me because I’m sure they only remember me leading with my head. I even remember Austin Shrek’s dad offering to buy him a PS2 if Austin would learn to hit as hard as me on game days . . .

  I learned around this age that if I used my head as a weapon and literally put my head down on every play up until the last play I ever played. I was always shorter than a lot of other players and learned to put my head down so I could have the edge and win every battle. Not only that, but I liked the attention I got from the coaches and other players. I can look back and remember getting headaches during practice. Of course by now, I had gained the reputation from my coaches and classmates about being a tough nosed kid and a hard hitter so I took this social identity with pride and never wanted to tell anyone about the headaches I got from practices and games. In 6th grade, I really became a road grater as a fullback and running back. I was short and chubby, but I would try to run over the linebacker’s every time I go
t the ball. I’m sure my parents still have the game tapes to prove it . . .