The Best American Sports Writing 2018

by Glenn Stout

  Our short Saturday runs become longer, more-frequent “training runs.” We continue down to City Hall and over the Brooklyn Bridge, and later around the lower perimeter of Manhattan. We run on the East Side and the West Side, and sometimes we join a group that runs a 17-mile course at night up Riverside Park to the George Washington Bridge and back. Ginger and I log hundreds of hours of conversation, running side by side, talk that grows more intimate as the miles pass.

  The first time we meet for dinner, I barely recognize her in street clothes. Our conversation is awkward and disjointed. We’ve never sat across from each other, never looked in each other’s eyes. It takes a while to adjust.

  First road race. Ginger and I stand at the starting line in Central Park with fifty or so others on a frigid fall morning.

  My husband cheers for me at the finish line.

  He wants children badly, but I’m ambivalent. “No matter what,” he says, “I promise I’ll always make sure you can run.” This is how he gets me to agree.

  What can a pregnant runner wear? In desperation I buy a tennis outfit—a sleeveless, empire-waisted top and bloomers with an elastic waist. It’s all I can find.

  “You look like a float in a Memorial Day parade,” my husband says.

  There is no cheering when I galumph down the street, no tubas or drums or applause—just the occasional dumbstruck pedestrian pausing to watch. I imagine him thinking, That really takes the cake.

  First daughter: Charlotte.

  First marathon: New York.

  First line of first published novel: “Lydia ran.”

  My heroes in those days:

  Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon. She wasn’t looking to make history; she only wanted to run. But in 1967 the marathon was closed to women. So she entered as “K. V. Switzer” and ran in disguise for four miles until the race director, Jock Semple, jumped off the press truck and shouted, “Get the hell out of my race!” The picture of him trying to rip the number off her chest made headlines.

  Grete Waitz, the first woman to run a marathon in under two and a half hours.

  Miki Gorman, who won the Boston and New York Marathons twice each.

  Toshiko d’Elia, who was born in wartime Japan. “We starved,” she told a reporter. “My mother would stand on food lines all day and come home with a cucumber to feed a family of six. I dreamed of being a bird so I could fly away.” She started running at the age of 44, waking at 5 a.m. to set out before work. I remember seeing her: tiny, hair in pigtails, flying beside the earthbound others.

  I loved these women, who were not encouraged to run; loved watching them float, fly, set records—gracefully, silently, defiantly.

  The 1980s are the boom years. Everyone is running. Sweat-wicking fabric. Shoes with gel cushioning and waffle soles. Sports drinks. Orthotics for every ache below the knees.

  Men wear running shoes with tuxedos.

  Running can improve your sex life, body image, and mental health, I read. Run to feel centered and empowered, to shed extra pounds.

  I don’t know: I just love it. I need no other reason to run.

  Our move from New York to New Jersey is wrenching and inevitable. There’s so much I’ll miss about the city—most of all my regular runs with Ginger.

  Tamaques Park, in the town where we move, is like a bus depot on Saturday mornings: groups of runners leave every 15 minutes, starting at 6 a.m. I fit into a pack made up of middle-aged men, including a psychiatrist who tells all his patients to run.

  After a long run in the winter, tiny balls of ice hang from their facial hair like Christmas decorations. In the summer their nipples bleed from rubbing against their shirts.

  My second toe is longer than my first, a condition known as Morton’s toe. If the toe box of my running shoe isn’t broad enough, the toenail pushes against the shoe, bruises, blackens, and falls off.

  How often has this happened to me? Ten times? Twenty?

  In Maine, where we have a cottage, I call the local sporting-goods store to see if they know of any women who run long-distance. They put me in touch with Evelyn, who was co-captain of the cross-country team at Bowdoin College with Olympian Joan Benoit.

  I run with Evelyn and her fiancé, a lobsterman, and with their friends and cousins. I run with carpenters and fishers of Irish moss and sometimes with strangers. “Where are you running?” I ask. “What’s your pace? Can I join you?”

  “I saw you running,” people say to me often.

  “Yes!” I say.

  And that’s it. Nothing ever follows this exchange.

  My husband keeps his promise, even after the marriage begins to fail.

  Now, though, if I linger too long around him, he says in irritation, “Go running, will you?” Translation: Go straight to hell.

  You cannot cry and run at the same time. It’s one or the other. Crying tightens your chest and makes your breathing jagged. You can either give in to the grief or let it go.

  In this period, when there are no arms that can placate me, nothing to make me feel better, all I can do is go outside, take in the familiar streets and woods, and run. After a few minutes I begin to feel a heightened awareness of the world around me, a sense of connectedness.

  And pleasure. Something sweet that cuts through the grief.

  Then they stop, most of the runners I know. Their reasons are many:

  My knees gave out. (“And so will yours.”)

  My back went bad.

  My hip.

  Plantar fasciitis.

  A torn meniscus.

  My sciatica was killing me.

  Surgery for my ACL.

  The kids.

  So boring.

  The arthritis in my toe.

  Who has time?

  And then I fell.

  I got hit by a car.

  So I gave it up.

  The unspoken message: And so will you.

  I cannot imagine it. I cannot imagine the day I will sit on the floor to lace my running shoes for a last time.

  It’s 1995. I’m in a new city: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A single parent. Divorced. I have a couple of running friends, but mostly I run alone in the city’s big woodland parks.

  I no longer designate a single day of the week to do hill work. Every day is hill work.

  The woods become my holy place.

  Maybe it’s because I am alone. Because I’ve stopped keeping training logs. Because I am older. Because these hilly parks are so beautiful that I become exquisitely aware of my self on these rutted trails: the rustling leaves, the sky, my breathing, the hill I mount, the squawking crow—all of it part of the same fabric. This is what I have loved above all else, only now I feel it more fully than ever before.

  My daughter Charlotte is a teenager, and rebellious. Later, when she recalls these years, the punch line of every incident will be my turquoise spandex tights:

  She leaves a note to tell me she’s run away from home. I figure out she’s at a coffee shop called the Beehive, and when I stomp inside and find her with a backpack full of beer, I’m wearing my turquoise spandex tights.

  She’s forgotten to bring a check for her high school ski club on the last possible day to register, so I tuck the check in my pocket and go by the school on the way back from my run. She is standing beneath a tree, smoking with her friends, when she sees me running toward her in my turquoise spandex tights.

  Fifty years old. Sinewy. I keep tights, a T-shirt, and a spare pair of running shoes in the trunk of my car. You never know. Like the postman, I run through rain, snow, and sleet. But not ice.

  Falling:

  On wet leaves, on ice, on roots, on broken sidewalk.

  On cement, years back, when I was seven months pregnant with my second daughter.

  On the bridle path in Central Park, where I slid on the dirt like a baseball player trying to steal a base.

  Always stunned. Always getting up and saying, “I’m okay! I’m fine!”

  On the
metal grate over the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. A medical student sits on the curb with me while her boyfriend runs to get napkins for the blood that spurts from my chin and knee. My hand throbs.

  “I’m fine!” I insist. “I’m okay.”

  They pay for a taxi to take me home.

  I ice my knee, try to stop the bleeding, think as I always do: One day I will fall, and that will be it.

  And then: I wonder if I’ll be able to run tomorrow.

  By 2003 running is no longer fun. The problem is my ass, my tuchis, my keister, my behind.

  It has a name, this not-at-all-funny pain in the butt: piriformis syndrome. Common among runners and people who sit for hours—bus drivers, writers, cops.

  Sitting hurts worse than running. The radiating pain makes me feel like an animal with a limb caught in a trap. I want to chew off my leg.

  I get MRIs, physical therapy, cortisone shots, new diagnoses.

  I buy a wedge cushion, more-cushioned running shoes. I give up desk chairs and running on asphalt.

  I wait to feel joy. Run, limp, wait some more.

  I think of Jock Semple shoving and clawing at Kathrine Switzer—and she ran on.

  I think of all the injuries that plagued the women runners I admire, all the tendons and muscles and ligaments torn and repaired. I think of my friend Ginger’s countless surgeries—and she ran on.

  I think of Toshiko d’Elia, eight months after a cancer diagnosis, completing a marathon in under three hours, setting a world record for women over 50.

  A year passes. In this limping, aching period I buy a new house three minutes from a 644-acre woodland park with plenty of hilly trails.

  Start doing yoga every morning.

  Carry my wedge cushion with me when I travel.

  The pain begins to dissipate.

  And then one day an awareness: I ran and nothing hurt.

  Sixty. In running clothes I look like a plucked chicken.

  “I saw you running,” an acquaintance says.

  “Yes,” I tell her.

  Slowly, I think.

  But the joy has returned.

  Until close to the end of her life, Toshiko d’Elia was in the pool every morning at 7 a.m. She swam a mile, ran in the water, did yoga. Then, in the afternoon, she ran three to five miles. “That was her day, until the day she couldn’t,” said her daughter in her New York Times obituary.

  Sixty-seven. I am still running.

  John Branch

  Cheers on a Soccer Field, Far from Las Vegas

  from The New York Times

  I was on the sideline of a soccer field two Saturdays ago, watching my 12-year-old daughter and her Novato teammates. I don’t remember much about that game, but Novato won, and one of the goals was scored by the smallest girl on the team, a quick and feisty forward who wears a long ponytail and jersey No. 8. We whooped and cheered her name. I found out later that her parents weren’t there that afternoon. They were in Las Vegas for a getaway weekend.

  About 36 hours later, I was on my way to Las Vegas myself, rushing to join my New York Times colleagues to cover the latest mass shooting, maybe bigger than them all. I hadn’t covered one of them since 1999, when I was in the wrong place at the right time and rushed into the aftermath of Columbine.

  A colleague of mine and I checked into a massive suite at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, 11 floors directly below that of the shooter. It had the same view of the concert ground across the Strip, where investigators in the daylight were picking through the carnage of the night before. That was about when my wife sent me a text. That little soccer player’s mom was at the concert the night before, she said. She’s missing.

  But Stacee Etcheber was not my story. The gunman was. I spent a week mostly about 100 feet below where the shooter committed mass murder, trying to solve the mystery of what he’d done. I talked to people, followed every lead, and wrote stories. It’s what reporters do. It was a news story, as horrific as they come, and we’re trained to keep our emotional distance from the things that we cover.

  Late that night, I stood in front of the window, the same one that a madman broke 11 floors above and used as a perch to shoot hundreds of people he did not know. The body count was on its way to 58. I thought about home.

  Stacee’s family soon announced that she died. My wife and I didn’t really know Stacee much—obviously not well enough to notice that she was not among the few dozen people at a rec-level girls’ soccer game. But some of our closest friends were dear friends of hers, and our town is small enough that there was probably no more than two degrees of separation to the family.

  My family was among the hundreds of people, friends and strangers, who crowded onto the grounds of an elementary school and held candles aloft during the vigil. My daughter was one of the dozens of kids who solemnly held roses in her honor, and she hugged her classmate and teammate when it ended. She and a couple of friends made a cake and delivered it to the Etchebers’ house the next day.

  Orange was Stacee’s favorite color, and on Friday, after people bought as much orange ribbon as they could find at all the local craft stores, an army tied ribbons all around town, from the trees on downtown’s Grant Avenue to the posts in front of Pioneer Park. My wife and her friends tied them around the trees in front of the middle school where Stacee’s daughter goes to school, along with mine.

  I missed it all. I was as close to the site of the shooting as you could get, and yet felt fully disconnected from the effect of the tragedy. One night I walked to the memorial that sprang up in the median of South Las Vegas Boulevard, the kind of now-familiar post-shooting memorial that I saw at Columbine almost two decades before, with balloons and flowers and candles. I found a photo of Stacee that had been placed in the middle of it all, and took a picture and sent it home.

  In Las Vegas, Stacee was just one in a crowd, part of a list. But she and her family were all anyone talked or thought about back in Novato, and that is where I got my news. I heard that Stacee’s husband, a San Francisco police officer, was running with Stacee through the barrage of gunfire when he stopped to help someone; he told his wife to go on and never saw her alive again. I heard that television news trucks were parked in front of the house. I heard stories of friends pulling over in their cars to cry at the weight and nearness of it all. There were beautiful and crushingly sad Facebook posts in Stacee’s honor, the kind you see after every tragedy, except these were written by people I knew well.

  I heard my wife, who grew up in a nearby town, tell me that she had never been more proud to call Novato home.

  I checked out of that Mandalay Bay suite on Saturday morning, excused from reporting duties, and flew home in the hopes of making my daughter’s soccer game. I found the red rose from the vigil, starting to fade and wilt, in a vase on the kitchen counter. When we got to the game, we and the other parents were somewhat surprised to see Stacee’s husband and extended family there too. Warming up with the girls was No. 8, with her long ponytail.

  We all wore orange ribbons, attached by safety pins, including the girls on both teams. The Novato team wore orange armbands with the initials “S.E.” Before kickoff, both squads came across the field to the spectator side and lined up in straight lines. Our team’s coach asked the parents to stand for 30 seconds of silence. And then two of the league’s better teams played a rather meaningless soccer game, only this one felt about as meaningful as anything I’ve ever watched.

  And it was late in the second half when the ball suddenly swung from one end to the other, and Stacee’s daughter gave chase through three retreating opponents and beat them all to the ball. And in one blink-and-you-missed-it moment, she booted the ball into the corner of the net for what held on as the winning goal.

  Her teammates chased her and swarmed her, and they and she looked as free and happy as girls can be on a sunny fall Saturday afternoon with their friends. The parents jumped and cheered as loudly as I’ve heard parents cheer at a kids’ soccer game. Behind my sunglasses,
I was bawling. It was the first time I’d cried all week.

  Wright Thompson

  Pat Riley’s Final Test

  from ESPN: The Magazine

  The digital clock above the door in Pat Riley’s presidential suite counts down the minutes to tip-off. The room is in a back hallway underneath the arena, a few feet from the secret path beneath the bleachers that he takes to his seat. I sit on the couch and read a laminated prayer card the team made for the game. Nobody else is here; his wife, Chris, is out blessing different parts of the arena. Tip-off is 29 minutes away, the last game of the season. The Heat need to win and see one of two other teams lose to make the playoffs. Still no sign of Riley. For the past two months, he and I have spoken nearly every day, which continues to shock his wife, who knows how private he can be. But earlier today, someone with the Heat suggested I tread lightly. The boss is in a mood. A peak state of Rileyness.

  Then my phone buzzes.

  “R u here?” Riley texts.

  He sends his assistant, Karen, down to get me.

  “It’s tense,” she says as we climb the stairs and approach the glass walls of his office, where he sits in an easy chair near the sofa, alone. It’s quiet and dark, the blinds half-drawn, blocking out the view of the water. A three- or four-day growth on his face makes him look gaunt and tired. Around him, he’s got the talismans that might bring him luck: a strange statue of Buddha reimagined as a Heat fan, and a Bob Dylan lyric taped to his bookshelf: “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

  Karen hands him a coffee, in one of those thin green Gatorade cups.

  He sighs, and shifts his weight, and sips.