by Glenn Stout
It does not add up for Osmar or Aline, and Osmar seethes as he reads about a few other LaMia employees being questioned by Bolivian police. An investigation into the flight controller is under way too. There is no official word from LaMia yet, but to Osmar it feels so simple: it was about money. Chape flew with LaMia, he tells his family, because it was a little bit cheaper than chartering with Gol or another Brazilian commercial airline. And Quiroga did not stop to refuel when he should have, Osmar says, because it would have taken money out of his own pocket. Quiroga tried to push it to save a little, and so Filipe is dead.
Aline talks to a lawyer. There are discussions about lawsuits, about legal action. There are meetings. Some other wives and family members are interested, but many just want to move on, to try to figure out how to put their lives back together without their husband or son or brother.
Aline wants to move on too, but every time she leaves the room, Antonella tenses up. Every time she goes to the store, Antonella cries nervously. At the Paw Patrol birthday party, Aline will be alone. And at Filipe’s farm, the locker room isn’t finished, and the grass needs cutting, and the field still needs lines. Every time Aline goes there, to let Antonella run around or to simply look out over the countryside, she feels as if she is looking at a story that ends in the middle of a sentence.
That is why Aline cannot just move on. And so she keeps talking to the lawyer, keeps asking questions, even though there are no answers. Whenever she tries to ask anyone at the club about what happened, she is told that all the directors at Chape who made the decision to use LaMia were on the plane. She is told that all the directors who made the decision are dead.
Fifty-four days after the crash, Rafael Henzel walks back into his radio booth. It is January 21, 2017, and he is wearing a light shirt and hat with a green lanyard holding his credential around his neck. His seven broken ribs are still healing, but his lungs are strong. Before he puts on his headset, he sits in his seat and pauses; he thinks of Renan Agnolin, who was next to him on the plane.
There is a game today. It is a preseason match, Chape against Palmeiras, the reigning national champion, at Arena Condá. The stadium is full. Chiquinho has spent hours on the field, determined to make it a palace. It feels strange—a new team, a new time—but Chiquinho wants to make it nice, even if he doesn’t know these players. Pitico is missing and hasn’t been seen since the tragedy, and Chiquinho wonders whether it is because the dog does not recognize the new players either.
Before the match, there is a ceremony. Alan Ruschel and Neto and Follmann come out onto the field. Neto has a scar on the back of his head, his hair shaved away in a patch. Follmann is in a wheelchair, his right stump wrapped in beige dressing. He wears a black neck brace. Alan puts one hand on the back of Follmann’s chair and walks gingerly, still stiff and sore after spinal surgery.
The fans sing and wave paper origami with the club’s crest on it. The surviving players join members of their teammates’ families in the middle of the field. Atlético Nacional conceded the Copa Sudamericana final to Chape, so the Chape players are now campeões eternos—eternal champions.
Winners’ medals are draped over the necks of widows and children. Many of the wives wear their husbands’ jerseys backward, so that the names are on the front. From his chair, Follmann lifts the trophy through tears. When Barbara, the wife of Ananias, receives his medal, she cries out and raises her hands and points with two fingers to the sky.
The new players walk out of the tunnel and onto the field. Chape’s board has been reconstituted, and a new president has been elected. A new coach, Vágner Mancini, has been recruited. A new front office is in place, and in six weeks the team has been rebuilt: 25 players signed, a group of coaches brought in, and a support staff hired.
Some teams lend players to Chape to help. Some who played for the team earlier in their careers feel a pull to return. Túlio de Melo, a renowned forward, had played briefly for Chape in 2015 and is supposed to play for a team in Qatar in 2017. The salary is big and the destination intriguing. Then he receives a message from his friend Neto while Neto is still in the hospital after the crash. It says, “The club needs you,” and Túlio de Melo comes to Chape instead.
The game begins. The fans behind the goal brandish their flags as usual. It feels good to cheer. Palmeiras scores the first goal, but then Chape bends in a free kick, and the ball is nodded across the goalmouth, and Douglas Grolli, a player who grew up in Chape’s youth academy and has come back to help it rebuild, nudges it over the line.
There is a whoosh of energy, as if the whole stadium has welled up together. Some fans scream. Others cry. Many in the stands are wearing tiny earpieces so they can hear Rafael describe what is happening right in front of them. In his booth, Rafael’s eyes go wide and he bellows, “Gooooooooooal!”
He takes a breath. “My heart overflows! My heart overflows!” he shouts. “Chapecoense! The team of our heart is reborn with a goal from its past!”
Graziele takes the baby pants out of the drawer. There are tiny blue jeans, pastel slacks, and striped shorts. She folds them, organizing them in different stacks. Then she puts them back in the drawer and takes out the baby shoes to evaluate.
She does this every day. It is her therapy. She likes to organize the baby clothes and the baby shoes while she feels the baby kick. She likes to be in the baby’s room, where there are giraffes on the wall and a soccer ball in the mobile and pictures of Tiaguinho beside the diaper-changing pad. She likes to make a mess so that she has to tidy up again.
Her therapist tells her it is okay. It is okay for her to have a photo of Tiaguinho on the wall above her bed so she can feel him watching her sleep. It is okay for her to have a collage of their pictures covering the wall near the baby’s room so she can feel as if she is not alone. It is okay for her to believe that her husband is going to be reborn as her son. At the body-scan ultrasound, she sees the baby’s features and is relieved. She tells her mother, “The baby has his eyes.”
The baby will be born in July. Tiaguinho hoped it would be born on July 22 because that was his father’s birthday, and now Graziele hopes it will be then too. She has also decided that the baby’s name will be Tiago. It was so obvious; in January, her friends and family had a gender-reveal party for her, and when she cut the cake and saw that the inside was blue, everyone shouted out “Tiago!” and threw confetti. Graziele cried. She wants to take a picture of Tiaguinho with her to the delivery room. She wants her husband to be there too.
Graziele does not love soccer. She follows Chape a little, but she lives in Bom Jardim now, her hometown about three hours northwest of Rio. She does not stay in close touch with the other Chape wives. She has her parents and Tiaguinho’s parents nearby. She has Tiago in her belly. She has her pictures. She has voice messages from Tiaguinho on her phone that she listens to under the covers.
Aline Machado leaves Chapecó too. Aline is in Gravataí with Antonella. She plays Paw Patrol with her, and when Antonella asks about Filipe, she tells her that Filipe is in heaven. Aline says he is with Nina’s daddy and Julia’s daddy so that Antonella doesn’t feel as if she is the only one. Sometimes at night before bed, Antonella looks out the window and points to a star and says, “Look at Daddy.”
Aline’s life and Graziele’s life go on without Chape. So do Rosangela’s and Val’s and the lives of so many others. They move away because of the crash. They have to.
Others stay. Chiquinho still takes care of the undersoil and the topsoil, still keeps an eye on the drainage system when it rains. After a few weeks, he and his men put away the blankets, throw away the dog food, and take down the tiny house out near the shed with the rakes. Their dog, Pitico, disappeared after the crash, and Chiquinho understands. But every evening around dusk, as he rides the bus home from work, Chiquinho looks out the window anyway, craning his neck in the hope he might catch one more glimpse of Pitico, somewhere else in the city running and playing and chasing the birds that swoop low.
> Follmann stays too. His neck brace is off, and he has a German prosthesis and already walks easily on it, so he doesn’t need a wheelchair. He goes on a Brazilian television morning show and shows off his singing voice. He laughs, just as he did before the crash, and says he is eyeing a career as a Paralympian. He jokes that it should be no problem because his iron leg never gets tired.
Alan Ruschel and Neto stay as well. They rehab and train, sweating through extra work on the side during practices. They watch the new players revel in the crowds at Arena Condá, energized by the chants and the songs and the ritual, in the 71st minute of every game, when the fans shout “Vamos-vamos-Chape!” over and over, in homage to the 71 people who died in the crash.
They watch the team win or tie 20 of its first 24 games, and they work harder. Marina is nervous about Alan’s spine, but she goes to the games with him and watches and chants in the 71st minute too, because she knows he is unbowed; team trainers think he might be ready to play by the middle of summer. Rafael Henzel has told Alan and Neto that he cannot wait to call their names again.
Inside the team, the coaches make a decision: they do not talk about the tragedy anymore. They did for a month or so, but then they decide the locker room needs to look forward. “We need to write our own history,” the new coach tells the new players, even if it is with some of the old pieces.
That is why, before every home game, Chape still does concentration at Hotel Bertaso. The coaches still talk about strategy and tactics. The players still sit in the hall on the second floor, playing music and texting and filling the time until the bus leaves for the short ride to the arena. And then, as kickoff approaches, they still run out to play on the same field of those who came before them, the field that Chiquinho prepares by seeding and mowing and watering that bare patch down at the end.
Tim Brown
There Are Hundreds of Baseball Journeymen, but Only One Cody Decker
from Yahoo Sports
Cody Decker is a 30-year-old professional baseball player with 11 major league at-bats and, because minor leaguers are expected to be poor and grateful for it, a running tab with his parents. When he does become a regular big leaguer, and he will too, just ask him, the first check he writes will have their names on it.
We’re standing one morning in the parking lot at UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium, where he played in college. There are banners on poles around the complex. His name is on one of the banners. He’s wrapping his bats in wax paper so the pine tar doesn’t get all over everything in the back of his Ford Explorer and over the dull crinkling of the wax paper he’s quoting a character from a movie, some movie, who’d said, “I don’t want to see the past. I want to see where we’re going.”
He smiled.
“I love that line.”
He is today a Milwaukee Brewer, they being organization number five in the past 15 months, assuming, as he said a few times this morning, they remember they signed him, because nobody’d told him yet when he was supposed to report for spring training.
Over three hours that felt planned to the minute and wholly frantic at the same time, Decker had hit off a tee and hit short flips and hit regular batting practice and took grounders from his knees and took grounders from his feet and caught bare-handed flips from a catcher’s squat then put on all the gear and caught a full bullpen and then took off the gear and drove across the complex to a small gym, where he squatted lots of weight and deadlifted lots of weight and jumped rope and swung a kettlebell between his legs and slammed a medicine ball to the ground and did these spidery things across the floor and probably that wasn’t all, it was hard to keep up.
He’d talked almost the whole time, in part because I’d been asking a lot of questions. I had the sense he would have been talking anyway, like that perfect line drive four feet to the left of the exit sign in the batting cage, that line drive that came off the bat barrel just right because he’d kept his body parts connected and stayed inside the ball and driven through the ball, that perfect line drive wouldn’t have been real unless it were narrated too.
“That’s the one, Skip,” he’d shouted, and the man throwing batting practice, 69-year-old Rick Magnante, said, “Yeah it was,” while heaving another pitch from behind a screen.
“Eh, that wasn’t it, Skip.”
“Nah, it wasn’t.”
There’d been a handful of other players around the complex. A few ex-Bruins, mostly minor leaguers. There was a man rocking a baby carriage while playing catch with Lucas Giolito, the former first-rounder who two months before had been dealt from the Washington Nationals to the Chicago White Sox. Brad Miller, the shortstop–first baseman (–second baseman?) for the Tampa Bay Rays too. And Cody Decker, sweated up from three hours of baseball, with still a three-mile run ahead of him, and with a single goal still out there.
“I just want to play baseball for the rest of my life,” he says. “That’s all.”
Then he looks at you, like, And you can’t talk me out of it.
He’s 30.
“No,” he says. “I’m not done.”
He has just those 11 at-bats, those wonderful few weeks with the San Diego Padres two Septembers ago. Those can’t be it.
“Not even close,” he says. “I have a lot more to do.”
This he knows.
“Because I belong there,” he says. “I’ve spent my entire life doing this, to do that.”
Because the minor league hits and home runs were real. Because surely there’s somebody out there who can see that. Because this is what he is if not who he is—but maybe who he is too sometimes—and just because the game seems to have one opinion of him does not mean that is real, not today and not tomorrow. So he’s going to play baseball for the rest of his life.
“Because I said so,” he says. “Because I decided it’s not enough yet.”
So he does what he must, and that means getting after it at UCLA almost every day and choosing to believe and, after years of being a corner outfielder and infielder who could catch some too, he’s recast—and retrained—himself as a catcher who could play some corner outfield and infield too. It’s also meant gigs selling comic books and pouring drinks and checking IDs at the door and driving Uber and acting and writing and making movies and emceeing a trivia night—Antihero Trivia Night, officially, and it’s a raunchy, charming, hilarious kick in the pants that devolves/evolves into dance contests, karaoke jags, and full conversations using only Ric Flair “woos”—at a joint on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica.
There are more like Cody Decker. Not exactly like him, because, seriously, look at that last paragraph. Most haven’t hit 173 minor league home runs, for one. But they’re out there, and they’re packing for spring training too, and they’re not done either, just ask them. Maybe they can run. Maybe they can defend. Maybe they’re just good guys to have around. Maybe they’ve been unlucky, the right guy at the wrong time in the wrong organization. There’s no telling, no explanation, really, for the borderline cruelty of the ballplayer who tops out in Triple A, who’s told, yeah, he’s really very good at the game but, whoa, not so fast, he’s also never going to be a regular big leaguer and never going to make any money at it. This is not to say Decker is one of those, not yet, because that Decker is here at all says something about who he is.
“This kid,” said Pat Murphy, who managed Decker for most of three summers with the Padres and is the bench coach in Milwaukee, “was not a high-end prospect in terms of how scouts do it. This kid taught himself to hit. And just when you think he can’t play a position—it doesn’t look perfect, maybe—but he gets it done.”
Murphy considered Decker, the whole of Decker, chuckled, and said, “If he ever got a shot, he just might do something. I know this, he ain’t quittin’.”
It is to say every day, every decision, and every at-bat begin to carry the weight of the past 30 years, or at least the last 10 or so, and then it becomes easier to root for a man such as Cody Decker, who—damn it—is trying to
get there and have a good time getting there and has had it with the notion he won’t hit major league pitching when he’s almost always hit all pitching and, besides, maybe a guy deserves more than 11 shots at getting a big-league hit.
Beyond that, beyond believing he’s good enough and that the Brewers will understand that soon enough if they don’t already, Decker loves a good story. So when I asked him why baseball and not, say, football or accounting or chemistry or something, he said, “You ever see The Natural? Baseball’s the only thing of all those things that’s just magical.”
I asked if he’d read The Natural, a book that ends not with fireworks and happy tears but with, “When Roy looked into the boy’s eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears.” He said he had and much preferred the movie, because no good story ends with bitter tears.
Beyond the good story, he loves a happy ending to the good story, and there’s hardly a better ending to a good story than the guy with 11 big-league at-bats on his 30th birthday hitting (and catching) his way into a few more at-bats and making a decent living from them. That would mean Cody Decker was right about what his bat could do given the chance, and also that the good guy—that being him—won in the end, which is the point of this whole thing. That and paying back his parents.
Meantime, he quotes more movies. He runs through the entire history of KISS, the band, when a KISS song comes on in the weight room, and finishes by calling Paul Stanley “the best front man ever,” and maybe he’s joking and maybe he’s not. He tells of being incredibly moved by his recent trip to Israel—Decker is Jewish and is playing for Israel in the World Baseball Classic. He replays the past 15 months—Padres to Kansas City Royals to Colorado Rockies to Boston Red Sox to Brewers, and admits to them being, at times, unnerving. When I ask if he’s scared it’s close to over, if all the moving around is a bad sign, if he thinks maybe he’s only holding a spot for the next guy and the next guy isn’t too far off, he grins and summons a line from Doc Holliday in Tombstone.