by Glenn Stout
By day three of training camp in San Diego, Butler has found new fixations. He urges the T-Wolves to talk more on D, reminds power forward Taj Gibson to catch with two hands, and begs the big men to stop inbounding the ball directly under the rim. “We’re not the Warriors,” Butler explains later. “We have to do the little things. It’s 100–100, five seconds left, we’ve got possession. Our point guard is denied, he spins out, and we throw the pass off the goal. You’ve got to take it out to the side of the basket.”
He resists the temptation to share this elaborate hypothetical with the group. “I’m not going to do what I did before,” Butler vows. “I can’t be like, ‘Look, motherf—, here’s what we’re gonna do.’ I was too emotional, too confrontational.” He is perched behind the wheel of his white Rolls-Royce, braids tucked under a black mesh hat, Michael Jordan splayed across his T-shirt. He sings along with his buddy Luke Bryan—If you wanna call me, call me, call me you don’t have to worry ’bout it baby / You can wake me up in the dead of the night; wreck my plans, baby that’s alright—as the GPS guides him along the Del Mar coastline to a sandwich shop, where he places his college order: turkey with mustard and banana peppers.
The Rolls gleams in the parking lot. The minivan is back in Minnesota. “I miss it,” Butler says. “Unfortunately, we have to use this thing just a little longer.” He shrugs with the slightest hint of irony.
Grimy season never ends.
Chantel Jennings
Dante Pettis’s Reading List: Defenses, and Then the Definitive Works
from The Athletic
Dante Pettis knows his route.
Through the doors and to the left, past the new releases and the best-sellers, he takes a quick right and turns the corner into a thin row of books. At its tallest, the shelves are above eye level for Pettis, making it easy for him to take stock of some suggested reads and newly-placed novels.
“This guy is crazy good,” he says, pulling Junot Díaz’s connective short story collection This Is How You Lose Her off the shelf, going into an explanation of how it took him a year to read the first few short stories before finishing the book in a few weeks. Now, he’s cruising through another Díaz novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. After this, he’ll add yet another from the author to his ever-growing pile of books to read (current status: 11 books).
On the field, he’s intentional with each of his movements, pacing the No. 9 Washington Huskies in receiving yardage and on special teams.
But here, in his favorite bookstore, with no end zones to find or defensive players to break, he allows himself to slow down, to find his pace in a way that he isn’t able to otherwise.
Life will change dramatically for Pettis in the next few weeks. Soon, his college career will come to an end and he’ll have NFL decisions to make. As busy as life has been for him at Washington, the stakes will be raised. He has prepared himself for that time on the football field, but he has also prepared for that lifestyle in this bookstore.
“Have you read any of his other books?” he says as he takes Paulo Coelho’s classic read The Alchemist off the shelf. “I connected with By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept more, I guess.”
Pettis spots The Great Gatsby, his all-time favorite piece of literature.
“The way F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, I feel like it’s so poetic,” he says. “He puts together these huge sentences that he doesn’t have to, he could easily say it in a different way. But he strings them together and it comes out still.”
This past summer Pettis found a list online entitled “The 100 Books You Should Read Before You Die.”
He made it through 10 before football season started.
From the fiction section, he moves on to a small shelf of poetry, his favorite genre, and then makes a swing by the young adult shelves.
“I heard this was good, but I didn’t like it,” he says, taking one novel off the shelf. “It wasn’t captivating.”
One back cover review reads: What it feels like to be young and in love.
“Yeah,” he says, putting it back. “I did not feel that way.”
From there he makes his way to the art section. He has tried his hand at several crafts: writing poetry and short stories as a creative writing major at Washington, learning photography, even picking up drawing this fall (“I am the absolute beginner,” he says, holding the book he bought before fall camp—Drawing for the Absolute Beginner).
“Every single day you’re playing football, so it has the capability to just take over to where you’re not even thinking about anything else,” Pettis says. “I think that’s when people get in trouble because once they’re done playing the sport, it’s like, ‘Well, all I’ve done is this, what am I supposed to do now?’”
So, what does Pettis do?
He reads.
Pettis jokes that the reason he wanted to become a collegiate All-American in the first place was that during his freshman season he realized former Husky Shaq Thompson didn’t have to share a room during Washington’s bowl trip that year.
The reason why was simple: Thompson was an All-American. So, Pettis figured, all he had to do to get his own room for a bowl trip was to become one of the 25 best players in the country.
In four seasons, at least as a specialist, where Pettis now holds the NCAA record in career punt return touchdowns (nine), Pettis has almost certainly secured himself a spot.
But an equally impressive stat to co-offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach Matt Lubick is that Pettis still has managed to read two novels this football season, and he’s working his way through three books of poetry now.
“That balance puts football in perspective for him,” Lubick said. “He has a lot better balance than I had when I was in college. It helps him withstand the ebbs and flows.”
This season those ebbs and flows have come in the form of injuries. Washington has lost three starters on the offense alone (wide receiver Chico McClatcher, left tackle Trey Adams, tight end Hunter Bryant) and has struggled to find fast starts in most of its games. The Huskies dropped one to Arizona State in week seven, a game that the College Football Playoff committee is unlikely to let slide.
Through all that, Pettis has led the Huskies with seven touchdowns on 49 receptions. But, he has—because of injuries, inexperience, and the departure of the speedy John Ross—been a bit of a one-man band. Last season, the Huskies were No. 1 in the nation with 47 passing touchdowns. This season, they’re at 45th.
But the Pac-12 title, the only benchmark Pettis really set for himself when he got to Washington, is still within reach for the second season in a row.
Pettis’s top-five all time books:
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz
By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, Paulo Coelho
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Jesse Andrews
In most meetings Lubick has with Pettis or on the occasions when the two sit next to one another on flights, Pettis tends to recommend novels or collections of poetry to Lubick that, Lubick admits, he has yet to read.
But right now, the book Lubick sees as one of the most important for Pettis this season has been the notebook that Pettis has kept to detail the minutiae of each matchup and scheme the Huskies have faced this season.
“He brings his notepad everywhere he goes and writes things down and then recopies it,” Lubick said. “I think there’s a big correlation to why he doesn’t make a lot of mental mistakes.”
Lubick, who arrived at Washington in February after spending four seasons with Oregon and three with Duke before that, has coached plenty of talented wide receivers, but he said he has never seen someone four years into the system take notes as Pettis has this year.
For Pettis, who already loves words and books, the reasoning is simple—everything can make more sense when it’s written down. It’s just one more book in his collection.
“There are so many things that go into being a receiver that most guys underestimate,” Pettis said. “Simple things like understanding the whole play concept, or knowing what yard the route is supposed to be run at—stuff like that. If you write it down, it makes it way easier to remember.”
One NFL scouting source, speaking on condition of anonymity for competitive reasons, compared Pettis’s physical and mental skill set to that of the Texans’ Will Fuller, and said that Pettis’s talent in special teams could give his draft stock a boost similar to the way Adoree’ Jackson’s did.
“A guy like him who’s not only talented enough to play inside and out,” the source said of Pettis, “but also smart enough that he can handle the mental aspect of the game . . . he’s the kind of guy that’s going to prepare well, do all of the little things right, and keep finding ways to get better.”
And for Pettis, who’s currently working his way through three separate books of poetry—Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel (R. H. Sin), What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (Raymond Carver), and Citizen: An American Lyric (Claudia Rankine)—one of the ways he knows he’s going to keep getting better in football is by spending time away from the field, specifically in a book.
Or three.
Michael Lananna
Born to Be a VandyBoy
from Baseball America
Thank you teddy and Susan—I am honored to speak about your son . . . and our teammate.
Cars never drove down the street in front of Forney Abbott’s house.
Born in Houston and raised in 1940s Palestine (No, not the Middle East. Palestine, Texas. Pronounced PaleSTEEN), Abbott’s formative years came before cell phones and Xboxes and color TVs. He didn’t even have a diamond nearby to play on, no chalky foul lines or fertile grass, just the white lines and the hot, black asphalt of a mostly deserted street.
When he was seven, eight years old, Abbott would take a baseball and march onto that street like he was Joe DiMaggio and it was Yankee Stadium. Instead of throwing from foul pole to foul pole, he’d go light pole to light pole, hurling the ball as far as he could over the power lines that stretched above his head and aiming for the pole 100 yards away.
He did this every day, until one day, a car did drive down the street in front of Forney Abbott’s house. And inside that car were two scouts for Major League Baseball teams, one for the Pirates and one for the Cardinals. Abbott, now 77, doesn’t remember their names—a few too many blows to the head in the boxing matches of his youth sapped him of those memories. But he remembers them stopping their car, on their way to some recruiting mission in nearby Houston or Tyler, and talking to this seven-, eight-year-old kid out on the street and watching him throw. That car would continue to stop, usually once every month or so, and the Pirates scout—who lived in a small town about 15 or 20 miles away—would give the young Abbott pointers. Okay, here’s how to throw a baseball.
The scout kept coming by until Abbott was 11 years old. For that, he’s always been thankful. Still, as a teenager, playing for his high school team and summer league teams, Abbott would draw criticism for the way he threw. Other kids would always tell him he was throwing the wrong way. But he knew they were the ones who were wrong. He knew he threw hard. He didn’t have a radar gun to prove it, but he always felt as though God had granted him the ability to throw a baseball with velocity.
Abbott never had the chance to test his arm in the professional ranks. He joined the Army. Served in the Korean War. And when he returned, he moved to Clarksville, Tennessee. He turned his attention to coaching kids, just like that Pirates scout once coached him. He felt, again, as though God had given him this gift for a reason. God wanted him to share it.
Over his adult life, Abbott has helped thousands of kids—and some of those kids’ kids. At any time, he could have several 11- or 12-year-olds out in his front yard—instead of in the street like he was—working on drills to strengthen their bodies, arms, and minds.
There was one kid, among those thousands, who was different. One kid that no uppercut to the jaw could ever jostle free from his memory.
Abbott will never forget Donny Everett. He gets emotional thinking about him now.
“I was glad to know Donny,” Abbott says. “It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
Abbott still remembers the day Donny and his father, Teddy Everett, pulled up in front of Abbott’s carport about eight years ago. Donny stepped out of the passenger’s side with the widest smile, a younger, spitting image of his burly blond-haired father. Together with Teddy, the 11-year-old Donny strolled toward the 70-year-old Abbott, who was sitting outside, and introduced himself.
“Mr. Forney,” Donny began. He always called him Mr. Forney. Never Mr. Abbott. Never coach. Just Mr. Forney. “Can you help me?”
“Son, I don’t know,” Mr. Forney said, “What do you need me to help you with?”
“He wants to be a baseball player,” Teddy interjected.
“Well,” Mr. Forney laughed. “What does he do?”
“He pitches.”
“Okay, if he pitches, that’s good,” Mr. Forney said. “What does he want to do with this if he wants to be a pitcher?”
Abbott will never forget the look in the 11-year-old Donny’s eyes after he asked that question—the urgent sense of determination, the desire, a simmering dream on the precipice of reality. Abbott knew, in that moment, that Donny would get to where he wanted to go, that this kid was going to be something special. He was already special.
“Mr. Forney,” Donny said, looking up at the 70-year-old man in front of him. “I want to be a major league baseball player.”
The eyes in the Soddy Daisy (Tennessee) High dugout didn’t blink as the 6-foot-2, 230-pound linebacker of a 17-year-old lumbered by them, bat in one hand, glove in the other, shaking the ground beneath him.
“That’s Donny Everett!” their eyes seemed to scream in adulation. They weren’t expecting this—THE Donny Everett running toward the bullpen. No. 14 wasn’t supposed to pitch today.
It was March 21, 2015—the fifth inning of a game between a loaded Soddy Daisy team and Everett’s visiting Clarksville Wildcats. Everett was playing first base and batting cleanup, his Wildcats down, 3–1, to the Trojans. Standing in the hole, Everett saw his head coach Brian Hetland, who was coaching third base, motion for him to head toward the bullpen. Hetland and his senior star had discussed the possibility of Everett, the Clarksville ace, making a relief appearance in this game in lieu of a standard side session; now, Hetland was pulling the trigger.
Everett took his bat to the bullpen, running past the astonished Trojans dugout, and only managed to throw eight or 10 warm-up pitches before he heard Hetland yelling, “Donny, Donny, come on! You gotta go! You gotta go!” Two batters had reached. There was a helmet waiting for Everett at home plate. It was his turn to bat.
Everett ran back onto the field, dug into the batter’s box, and didn’t waste a single breath. The right-handed hitter muscled the very first pitch he saw well over the left-field fence. A no-doubt, go-ahead three-run home run. Everett trotted around the bases, stepped on home plate, pivoted, and immediately sprinted back toward the bullpen. This time, every player in Soddy Daisy’s dugout was on his feet, staring in awe at the titan who thundered by them. Soddy Daisy coach Jared Hensley grabbed three baseballs out of a bucket in the dugout, waved them tauntingly at his players, and yelled, “Hey, do you want him to sign these balls for you too?”
The next inning, Everett took the mound. Three batters faced. Three strikeouts. A fastball touching 98 miles per hour.
That’s just one Donny Everett story, of many. The very next game, he touched 101 miles per hour.
“I’ve been in this area for 28 years,” said Hetland from his office along the first-base line of the Clarksville High baseball field. “He’s definitely the best high school talent and player and pitcher that’s ever come through Clarksville in that time period, for sure—and maybe forever.
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“Because there’s not many who can throw 100 miles per hour, and know where it’s going.”
Hetland remembers the 101-mile-per-hour game clearly—March 23, 2015, on a cool night at nearby Northwest High in Clarksville. There might’ve been more Stalker radar guns than fans in the stands that night.
Everett shoved, striking out 14 and allowing two runs (one earned) in six innings. The Herculean right-hander never liked coming out of a game—that night especially. Hetland remembers his mound visit being like a Joe Frazier–Muhammad Ali fight when Everett finally reached his pitch count.
All night, the stands were buzzing. The fans couldn’t help but see the numbers flashing on the guns in front of them. At one point an alum in the crowd went up to the Northwest High coach between innings and said, “You’re not going to believe what I just saw.”
Some guns had 99. Some had 100. Some had 101. It was all the same to Northwest hitters. They couldn’t touch it.
Mike Wagner, an area scout for the Yankees based in Tennessee, had seen Everett the week before throwing four to five miles per hour slower. Wagner had followed the right-hander closely, had done a home visit, gotten to know him and his family intimately. Wagner wasn’t in the stands that night. But his bosses were. Scouting director Damon Oppenheimer and national cross-checker Brian Barber.
“As an area scout, that’s as good a feeling as you can have—on your scouting director’s radar gun, the prospect that you like and they’re there to see, is up to 100 miles an hour,” Wagner recalled, laughing. “That was a great night. It was one of those nights I won’t forget.