The Best American Sports Writing 2018

by Glenn Stout

  “Are you kidding me?” she says. “It was so much bleaker than that.”

  Out in Denver, in the dark of the hotel suite, they watch movies, a Christmas special, then The Accountant and Deepwater Horizon. Everybody sleeps in the next morning. Nothing matters but the wait, not the losses piling up, not anything, until January 11, when the doctors deliver surprising news.

  No cancer.

  A month later, a perfect Sunday, Pat Riley cranks his black 1971 Chevelle, wanting to escape the busy streets of Miami Beach, aiming toward the vast nothingness to the southwest. He downshifts, the 502-horsepower Chevelle bucking and roaring under the yoke of the lower gear. The sound blasts off the art deco facades. Since his daughter’s news, the Heat have, improbably, gone on a winning streak. The team won at home and on the road, knocking off the Warriors with a last-second shot, fighting out of an 18-point fourth-quarter hole to beat the Nets. They’ve run off 13 straight victories, transforming themselves from a team that was better off tanking to a playoff contender.

  Now on the road, Riley is exhaling.

  The stereo plays “Listen to the Music,” then “Born to Run,” and he turns up the volume. He laughs and talks to people a lane over in traffic when he accidentally grinds the gears. A circle of sweat spreads on the back of his shirt. He seems light and happy, and he says he’s been reborn.

  His arm hangs out the window.

  “I owe everybody a lot,” he says. “A lot. I owe them all a lot, but . . .”

  He pauses, considering how many times he’s climbed a mountain only to get knocked down and start climbing again. “I don’t owe them anything anymore,” he says, forcefully, as if conviction will make the words true. He’s trying, still deeply invested in the positive parts of building and running a team but saying he’s free at last from the negative motivations he’s never been able to control. In two days, he and Chris are flying to the Bahamas to sail around on a boat with their oldest and best friends, a break after the stress and joy of the past two months. He would have never done that 10 years ago, he says.

  His slicked-back hair is white now and a little fluffy on the sides. The outskirts of Miami pass in a blur of car dealerships, no-cover strip clubs, and canals. He shifts gears and accelerates, hurtling away from the city where he’s worked these past 22 years.

  “I don’t have to get pulled back into this one more time,” he says.

  He almost got away. That’s the thing. Four years ago, he missed his chance. Now, of course, he sees the lost moment so clearly. He remembers the night, August 10, 2013, his 50th high school reunion, a party decades in the making, part of the Schenectady he’s carried with him: intense loyalty for the people who held him up, and a loneliness Chris could sense when they met. He longed to go back—to the time and the place—and two months after the 2013 Finals, flush with back-to-back titles, he did.

  He served as social chair for the event, booking the Four Tops and the Temptations. No detail escaped his attention; he even stopped at a local production studio to review the short video that would play during the event. His close friends Paul Heiner and Warren DeSantis oversaw logistics. Riley demanded to pay for all of it, a bill that eventually topped $160,000.

  “This f—ing ridiculous reunion of yours,” Heiner came to lovingly call it.

  Stage lights bathed the gymnasium in purple. The music started, one familiar hit after another. Pat and Chris danced right up in front. If it’s possible for an entire life to lead to a single moment, this was it: back-to-back titles for the second time in Riley’s career, listening to the music he and his wife loved, in the place where his journey began. He couldn’t remember a happier time, and somewhere in the revelry, he realized he should walk away from basketball. “I thought this is what life should be,” he says. “Friends, family, and fun. A lot of thought about enough is enough. A time to leave with all debts paid to the game and nothing to suck me back in.”

  The Four Tops came out for a duet with the Temps and called Pat up onstage.

  The band kicked into “My Girl.”

  A yellow spotlight pointed down on him when the last verse came around. “I don’t need no money, fortune, or fame . . . ,” he sang, a little shaky. “I got all the riches, baby, one man can claim.”

  He pointed at Chris in the front row, and for just a little while, it seemed as if he might get out, a legend by any definition, with nine rings as a player, assistant coach, head coach, and president, his marriage and family intact, nothing to prove.

  He stayed.

  It’s mid-February, and even as the Heat push toward the eighth and final spot in the playoffs, the rise and fall of the Big Three shadows the season. The week before the All-Star break, Dwyane Wade appears on Yahoo’s popular basketball podcast. For the first time, he says a driving reason for his departure from Miami was hurt feelings over Riley never calling him. Wade says Riley didn’t reach out, and Dwyane felt he deserved respect after helping deliver three titles. Heat PR man and longtime consigliere Tim Donovan doesn’t alert Riley to the interview, but Pat has clearly heard about it because he shows up late for a lunch and immediately wants to tell his side.

  When the conversation naturally drifts toward other topics, he steers it back.

  Riley says that Wade’s agent asked to deal directly with the owners instead of Pat, so he merely honored that request. Mostly, he just wishes the whole thing had gone differently. “I know he feels I didn’t fight hard enough for him,” he says. “I was very, very sad when Dwyane said no. I wish I could have been there and told him why I didn’t really fight for him at the end . . . I fought for the team. The one thing I wanted to do for him, and maybe this is what obscured my vision, but I wanted to get him another player so he could end his career competitive.”

  When he describes his reaction to Wade’s leaving, it’s always in terms of how sad it makes him feel, and while his emotions toward James’s return to Cleveland were primal in the months, and even years, afterward, now he understands why LeBron had to leave.

  “He went home because he had to go home,” he says. “It was time. It was really time for him to go home, in his prime. If he’s ever gonna do anything in Akron again, this was the time to do it. Otherwise, he’d have had a scarlet letter on his back the rest of his whole life.”

  But of course, Riley says, almost immediately after LeBron left, Bosh’s camp wanted to reopen a deal they’d just finished, knowing the Heat had money and felt vulnerable. Bosh threatened to sign with the Rockets. In the end, Riley gave Bosh what he wanted. Now he wishes he’d said no to Bosh’s max deal and given all that money to Wade. (James and Bosh declined to comment for this story. Wade issued a statement thanking Riley for their years together.)

  “You never think it’s gonna end,” Riley says. “Then it always ends.”

  The Heat’s climb into playoff contention hits a spot in Riley’s brain nothing else can hit. You’ve still got it, Riley. One more time. It starts as a whisper, which these days he says he chooses not to hear. With the team clawing toward that eighth and final seed in the East, he says, “I’ve let go of all the stuff that used to hold me to the grind.” He and Chris sit at a back table at a South Beach steakhouse, looking out at the water. A staff member calls him Coach.

  “Am I different?” Pat asks.

  “He’s on his way,” Chris says.

  “I’m on my way,” he says, smiling.

  “I can’t say the craziness isn’t still there,” she says.

  “I wanna win, honey,” he says. “We both wanna win.”

  Reaching into her purse, Chris hands him a small ziplock bag of pills, a cocktail of homeopathic medicine and vitamins they take to ward off the kudzu creep of time. Both preach the effectiveness of Eastern medicine. Although Pat went to a therapist only once—five minutes into the session, he burst into tears, stood up, and never returned—Chris says he’s done a lot of soul-searching about many things, mainly his father, the taproot of his drive and his inability to stop driving.


  She stops and starts, trying to articulate her thoughts.

  She exhales.

  “He’s good,” she says finally. “He’s much better. He’s clearly forgiven his father. That’s the peace he’s made. Now, whether he comes to peace with himself with that is another thing.”

  She hears what he says about not owing anyone anything anymore.

  “He’s talking about it,” she says. “Do I trust it?”

  She’s right to be skeptical. Sitting on his desk at the arena, he’s got a monitor with a live video feed from the practice court. On a random Tuesday during the second half of the season, around 4:30 in the afternoon, he works at his desk. With the team on the road and no players to watch, he leans over a piece of paper, grinding on a task he should probably delegate, drawing up the seating charts for a charity dinner.

  “He’s putting in 12 to 14 hours,” she says.

  He insists he’s different, and while Chris Riley believes he’s sincere in his desire, she understands his personal code, perhaps even better than he does: the better the Heat play, the louder the siren song of more becomes.

  “How do you change what got you everything you’ve got?” she says.

  “It’s embedded,” he says.

  When she looks at him, she sees a man with an incredible tolerance for pain and work, but she also sees a sixth-grader getting a standing ovation from the nuns.

  “You perform to get your goodies,” Chris says. “You can psychologically know your issues, but the key is: can you change the habits?”

  The stretch run is a test. With just 20 games left in the season, Riley has done the math. The Heat need to go 13-7 to beat out the Pacers and Bulls for the eighth seed. Tonight, in March, Cleveland is in the building, photographers hanging in the private underground concourses, trying to snap a photo of LeBron. Watching the digital clock in his suite, Riley leans back on a red chair with his arms crossed. He’s holding court with one of his oldest friends, Peter Gubar, who sits on a low-slung couch to his left. The playoffs are within reach.

  “You’ve crept up from the bottom,” Gubar says. “You’re right on the cusp.”

  “Are we really the 11-30 team or the 17-4 team?” Riley says.

  LeBron doesn’t play, resting, and the Heat blow out the Cavs. There’s almost a fight at the end of the game, and after it, Miami flies to Cleveland for an immediate rematch. Already, Riley is thinking about setting the table one last time, not necessarily winning a title but putting the pieces in place. He isn’t going to Cleveland, he says when asked, because that time in his life has passed. In 1985, for Game 6 of the Finals, he wanted to wear a white tuxedo and a shamrock bow tie in Boston—“a lot more hubris then,” he says—but now that belongs to Spoelstra and the players.

  “I will go work in the garden and pick some fresh vegetables and play with my grandson while they battle,” he says. “We will have a great meal as we watch the game on TV.”

  “You have a garden?”

  “A major plan,” he replies. “Right now all imagery, but I see it.”

  He sees the vegetables, with Chris in those thick gloves with a shovel, yet he also sees one more title run. The competing visions leave him conflicted. “I NEED ONE MORE,” he writes in a text message immediately after talking about the garden. “AND I KNOW THIS WILL BE THE TOUGHEST TO GET.”

  The team wins that night in Cleveland and keeps winning, muscling past Chicago and Detroit. On the second full day of the NCAA tournament, the Heat finally make it to eighth place alone.

  Riley flies west to scout games.

  That first night, he stops over in Malibu before a flight to Sacramento in the morning. He lounges on the deck. The clock on his phone says 4:48 p.m. It’s the “golden hour,” as he calls it, which usually means he turns on the “R&B 2” playlist, watching the sun set to a soundtrack of the Chi-Lites and Frankie Beverly. But today, he listens to just a few songs on repeat, by singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, “Something More Than Free” and “Traveling Alone.”

  They’re about loneliness and labor and the emptiness of being made to travel a road not of your choosing. I’ve grown tired of traveling alone. The ocean is close enough that the waves drone white noise instead of rising and falling swells. His two lives flash through his mind, the one he keeps dreaming about and the one he’s actually living. The songs repeat again. He calls Chris to talk about what he feels. Three decades ago, they planned a life here, in their heart home with this view every day. He wants more Malibu and less Miami, feeling his “tipping point” close at hand, as he puts it, but there’s another flight to catch in the morning. He stares out at the sunset.

  “Instead of this,” he says, “I go to work!”

  The memories come again, punching walls in Miami after losing a playoff series, unable to face the team; headlines in New York when he left—“Pat the Rat”—back to 1985, a cramped, un-air-conditioned locker room beneath the Boston Garden. The Lakers screamed and poured champagne. They’d finally beaten the Celtics—and in Boston—avoiding three straight Finals losses and the likely end of Riley’s career. No more newspaper stories about the “LA Fakers.” Pat had wanted only to find Chris. Where was she? Then he saw her, leaning against the wall by the training room. “I was across the room by the shower entrance,” he says years later, “but noticed she was watching and waiting for me all the time to free myself of the others. When we finally locked eyes and moved toward each other, that path opened like the Red Sea. The tears just flowed before we could embrace. Tears just flowing with happiness, joy, and relief at the sight of each other and this big moment. We embraced hard, and I lifted her up. My Girl Chris, man. She said we earned this. She said this is ours forever.”

  These things come to him on a barstool on the next-to-last day of the 2016–2017 season.

  He orders a double martini.

  The story doesn’t end with the embrace, he says.

  He stirs his drink with a spear of olives.

  Twenty-one years later, in 2006, he mistakenly threw away the ring he won that night, along with all his Lakers rings, the real ones mixed together with dozens of worthless samples for the Heat championship ring he was designing. The company gave him exact replicas, but they felt too shiny, with not enough dents and scratches, so he put them in a bag and beat them against a wall. Instead of adding scars and patina, he just knocked loose a bunch of diamonds. When he got them fixed, he locked the replicas in a safe at home. With Pat Riley, there’s no self-curated shrine to his own former glories. The past can’t possibly compete with the season he’s living and breathing today, waiting out the next-to-last afternoon with a martini in a South Beach bar.

  It’s April 11, five days since the Heat slipped out of that eighth playoff spot they’d worked so hard to earn. He feels tired and depressed. The losses and the shrinking math have pushed Riley into a hole, drowning in the darkness. He hates how a loss, even after all these years, crushes the joy he’d felt hours earlier playing with his grandson. One game remains, tomorrow night. Miami needs to win, then hope for Chicago or Indiana to lose. Inside, he already knows the truth. In about 18 hours, they will come up one victory short of the playoffs—all these months culminating in exactly nothing, just a guy coming home and staring at a quote on his mirror: Warriors don’t live in the past; the past is dead; life is now and the future is waiting.

  Over drinks, the day before that 82nd and final game, next season comes into focus. They’re not good enough to beat the Warriors with the current lineup. He’s not good enough. The team needs at least one star, and probably two, to compete.

  The sun makes the waterfront room feel light and easy.

  A bartender talks with a singsong Dublin lilt.

  Sitting on his stool, Riley tells stories about the Native American chief Tecumseh, and about an old thoroughbred horse who broke his leg in the homestretch and got a bullet to the head instead of a garland of roses. Finished with his martini, Riley orders one more before heading home to dinner, plann
ing his good-bye speech to this team he’s grown to love. The simplicity of tomorrow clarifies him. He smiles. In the late-afternoon happy hour glow, he sees himself clearly, not as he wants to be but as he is. No roses for him, just a long stretch of track and a bullet with his name on it, one day, when he can’t run anymore.

  “You know the greatest lie in the world?” he says, starting to laugh. “Pat’s retiring to Malibu.”

  Sally Jenkins

  Manning Adds Some Meaning to a Final Game Without Much

  from The Washington Post

  There was a glaze of ice over everything, a cold slippery sheen that made it hard to get a purchase and invited benumbed feet to quit trying. Only a few durable souls tailgated in the parking lot, hunched over grills that poured out smoke along with breath vapor, and a gusting wind blew it around and seemed to suggest everyone should just go home. Inside MetLife Stadium, two hopeless teams played a pointless game. Yet that was what made it so unexpectedly interesting because there is an integrity in what players do when it counts the least, and so Eli Manning was worth watching on this worthless day.

  “It was cold, and we were not playing for much,” Manning said later.

  For his entire 14-year career, Manning’s easy, undemonstrative demeanor has been mistaken for complacency. It has subtly undermined him, made it harder for his critics to value him on his best days despite two Super Bowl victories and made it easy to denigrate him on his bad ones, of which this was one. But respect had to be paid as he fought through this day, fought the wind chill, fought the injuries that decimated the New York Giants, fought all the uncertainty over his future and fought for an 18–10 victory over the Washington Redskins that lifted the Giants’ record to 3-13. When it was over and he was jogging off the field, after completing just 10 of his 28 passes for 132 yards, a faint noise came from that thin shivering crowd. They were chanting his name.