The Best American Sports Writing 2018

by Glenn Stout

  Eventually Burchfield Sr. got a call. “I told him get a good physical,” says the promoter. “If the doc says okay, I’ll get you a fight. No problem.” In the first week of May 2007, Tillinghast, in a brown suit and tie, addressed the media about his comeback fight, a card headlined by Manfredo Jr. “I feel like a big brother lost from his family getting reunited again,” said Jarrod. “I’m back. I’m gonna put a couple of years in before fighting for a championship myself.”

  The following Friday, the Tillinghast faithful packed the Twin River Event Center in Lincoln, Rhode Island. Jarrod hoped that one fan in particular would be ringside. Jerry Tillinghast Sr. On January 18, 2007, Jerry walked out of the John J. Moran Security Facility of the Massachusetts Adult Correctional Institution after nearly 30 years in prison. But that seat for the fight would remain empty. “I wanted to go but my parole officer said I couldn’t,” says Jerry. “I got mad. I asked ‘why not?’ He said it was the atmosphere. Not good for guys like me.”

  Around 9 p.m., fans stood up as the lights dimmed. “Wel-come back!” blared out of the arena speakers. “Your dreams are your ticket out.” In his skull-and-crossbones shorts, Jarrod entered the ring to the theme of the hit ’70s TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. The fight, however, would be far from a joke. His opponent, Jeffrey Osbourne Jr. (4-4-1) of Davenport, Iowa, wasn’t some hillbilly pushover, but a guy who’d gone to war with five top prospects.

  Within the first minute of the bout, Tillinghast’s comeback was in jeopardy. An Osbourne overhand right crushed Jarrod’s nose, spraying blood across his face. But by the second round, the hometown favorite had settled down. Eight-year layoff? Looked like eight months. Jarrod flashed firepower, danced around the ring, traded bombs with the relentless Osbourne. “This looks like a championship fight!” yelled TV announcer Vinny Pazienza. With the crowd standing for the entire fourth round, Jarrod unleashed a furious barrage of left hooks and right hands. Yet the Iowa middleweight wouldn’t go down; and as the final bell rang, the decision was in the hands of the judges. “After four rounds we have your decision,” proclaimed ring announcer John Vena. “Your winner, and still undefeated, Jarrod Tillinghast!”

  “It’s hard to describe how you feel at that moment,” says Jarrod, who jumped up and down, then lifted Osbourne in the air out of respect. “Hearing your name again like that? It’s electric. A high only a fighter knows.”

  For Fight of the Night honors, Jarrod earned a $1K bonus. Anxious to maintain the momentum, Burchfield Sr. put Tillinghast on a card the following month at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. Again he electrified the fans, knocking Santiago Hillario unconscious in the first round with a brutal left hook.

  It would be the last time Jarrod ever stepped in the ring to fight.

  V

  Mist falls on a Saturday night on The Hill, and Jarrod sits in his regular corner of Costantino’s Venda Bar and Ristorante. As the former fighter waits for his boys to show, he sips his Tito’s-and-soda and tries to explain his decision to leave boxing for a second time. Pressure from his future father-in-law, he says. Get a degree. Go legit. Civilized adults don’t dole out punishment for a living. So a few days before his August 10 bout at Twin River, Jarrod called Burchfield Sr. and said he was taking another break. Over the next few years he got a BA in education online from Ashwood University, married Ruggeri in 2011, and had two sons, Sebastian and Julian. “I’ve wanted kids all my life,” beams Tillinghast. “I’m a great daddy.”

  As for his own father, Jarrod was thrilled to see him walk free. Happy to have him around. They love each other and both would probably take a bullet for the other, but their relationship is still complicated. “When I came home I said, ‘Listen, we’re not playing catch-up,’” says Jerry, in regard to lingering resentment. “‘I’m sorry. I love you. But either we move on together or we don’t. It’s your choice.’” Jarrod insists it’s not his anger that has caused friction but three decades of institutionalized living. “Was I mad at him for going to jail? There were moments I was pissed,” says Jarrod. “But I’m over that. I just figured when he came home we’d spend more time together. I guess everyone’s different though. He was programmed different. He’s used to being alone.”

  Even with the recent separation from his wife, Jarrod insists life couldn’t be better. For work, he does a bit of private training at Balletto’s Gym in Silver Lake and has recently gotten involved in a VIP travel club that he describes as “Netflix for vacations.” He can’t walk through Providence without friends honking their horn or well-wishers stopping to say hello. He needs an assistant to keep track of his love life.

  Despite his laughter and indefatigable optimism, Jarrod can’t fully mask tinges of regret. The choices made. The haunting vestiges of what might have been. A deadly puncher. He could have been a franchise. His people didn’t care what ticket prices were, they wanted to see him. You don’t have that with a lot of fighters. “I left boxing the first time for the wrong reasons,” says Jarrod, stirring his drink. “The second time I left for the right reasons. Both sucked.”

  After a couple more Tito’s-and-sodas, Jarrod mentions an idea he’s had lately. A comeback. “I’m at a five in terms of shape right now, but I’m coming down from 240.” With every sentence his voice grows more animated. “I’d have another fight for all the right reasons. I know at this age the stakes are never higher. My health, my kids. I don’t want to get hurt. But at the same time it’s one hundred percent on the table. It’s why I’m getting down in weight and then I’ll make a decision. I’d still sell seats.”

  “I always say I have a first name before a last. My dad is my dad. I’m Jarrod. A whole other beast. And if you don’t respect Jarrod, there’s going to be serious trouble. Never mind the dog, beware of the owner.”

  He smiles and finishes his drink. Then he looks over his shoulder to check if any of his Silver Lake boys are rolling up. But through the restaurant window he sees nothing but the dark, misty night.

  Some names and identifying details in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

  Mike Sielski

  Michael Brooks and the Son Who Barely Knew Him

  from The Philadelphia Inquirer

  Michael Johnson-Brooks stood alone at a pale wooden lectern in a La Salle University auditorium in early December, dressed in a man’s uniform of mourning: dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. A giant image of his father’s mustached face flickered in muted sepia and pewter on a projection screen behind him, blanketing him in shadow. To his left, next to a vase of orange and purple roses, rested a gray, metallic urn. Michael Brooks, 58, the La Salle and West Catholic High School basketball star, had died on August 22 in Switzerland. After a Catholic funeral Mass there, he had been cremated, and his ashes had been shepherded across the Atlantic Ocean during the week of this memorial celebration. It was the first time, alive or dead, he had been in the same room with his son.

  Johnson-Brooks pressed a sheet of paper against the lectern’s angled top and lowered his head into dull light, leaving in full view only the upper half of his face—the intense eyes, shaped and colored like almonds, and the aquiline nose that so many people told him resembled his father’s features. He kept his eyes on the two biblical excerpts printed on that paper, rather than doing what he had done throughout the ceremony’s first hour: stealing glances at the urn. Before arriving at La Salle, he had been nervous throughout the morning, setting aside time to pray, asking God to grant him the poise to talk about his father without his voice breaking. Whatever emotions might start simmering inside him, he didn’t want to reveal them. He did not know how he was supposed to act in such a moment—what’s the proper way to grieve for a man who shared with you so much of his blood and so little of his life?—but he did know that he did not want the moment to overwhelm him.

  “That was probably the hardest thing,” he said later, “to keep it in.”

  Sitting among the hundred people in the auditorium, looking up at him
and the screen with a proud and melancholy smile, was the woman who called him “Michael Jr.”: his aunt Aleta Arthurs Lee, Brooks’s youngest sister. More than anyone else, she had provided depth, dimension, and color to Johnson-Brooks’s image of his father. For the final 28 years of his life—until, while hospitalized and undergoing treatment for the blood disorder aplastic anemia, he suffered two strokes, the second of which was so massive that he never recovered from it—Brooks had lived in France and Switzerland. He returned to the United States just once, closing himself off for much of that time from the friends he had made in high school and college and the NBA, from the Philadelphia basketball community, from his oldest son. Aleta remained Brooks’s strongest connection to his hometown, to the people who had once known him well, to a son who barely knew him at all.

  She had attended award ceremonies and Hall of Fame inductions in Brooks’s place, happy to stand in for him, honored on his behalf. She had fielded all the questions from those who wondered what he was doing in Europe and why he had been gone for nearly three decades—questions that came with greater frequency after his death. She was the one who had put Michael Jr. in touch with his father, who got them talking once a year or so, who filled the intervals between those phone calls and brief FaceTime sessions by telling Michael Jr. about the big brother she hadn’t seen in person since 1998 but still loved so much. She explained her brother, accounted for him, excused him, protected him, devoted herself to the preservation of his good name. She helped Michael Jr. to understand his father and, ultimately, to forgive him. She had given a phantom bone and flesh and hopes and regrets.

  Brooks had occupied a unique place in Philadelphia basketball—a national player of the year who had heralded a renaissance in the Big Five and who had been held in such esteem that he was named captain of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team; a native son who was at once famous and forgotten; a once-transcendent figure who had managed, for all practical purposes, to disappear. He had given a brief phone interview, just a half-hour, six weeks before dying, but he had consented to speak publicly only at Aleta’s urging, as a response to an article speculating about him and his withdrawal, and in the interview he had shed only so much light about himself. Why had he cocooned himself from the history he had made, from the teammates and coaches and competitors who had witnessed him make it, from a deeper relationship with his eldest child? What, if anything, about his past or his personality led him to that choice? He had left the answers to these inquiries, and others, ambiguous, and his death had renewed interest in and curiosity about the story of his life. Aleta was the one who knew that story best. To tell it as fully as possible, to satisfy that curiosity, you had to begin with her, and with the young man, 28 years old, who was about to speak.

  Michael Jr. began without extemporization, in a flat monotone, diving right into Psalm 23, the text so common at funerals and memorials, so recognizable within popular culture. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want . . . It was better to open with something familiar, with phrases he already knew by heart. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . It would help him gain, and maintain, his composure. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

  He paused, and his voice acquired volume and texture.

  “And I have one that’s on behalf of myself,” he said. “It’s a short, short verse, but it’s something special between him and me. It’s Proverbs 19:21: ‘Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.’”

  The room silent, he stepped quickly to the front row and sat down, falling in among those who had always assumed they would meet Michael Brooks again, someday.

  The Ride to Stardom

  Brooks’s friends and acquaintances still look for reasons that he cut himself off from his country, from them, and often they home in on his parents’ interracial marriage, with his father, Rudolph, who was black, and his mother, Rita, who was Italian. It’s a convenient armchair diagnosis to explain that which seems inexplicable—difficult childhood leads to identity crisis, which leads to inner turmoil, which leads to seclusion and comfort on another continent—but it’s incomplete. Both he and Aleta said that in the roiling 1960s and ’70s, the family’s racial and ethnic composition created more tension in their Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood, which was cleaved along the same lines that their household blurred, than it did among the Brookses themselves.

  Yes, Aleta heard the stories about what her mother endured while Rita was pregnant with her: blacks skeptically eyeballing her and her belly from a distance, whites egging the Brookses’ porch and calling Rita a “n— lover.” Yes, on his way home from school, Michael sometimes ran along the underground trolley tracks to avoid the slurs and confrontations. And yes, it wasn’t unusual to see Rita emerging from the front door of the Brookses’ rowhome, on the 5700 block of Belmar Terrace, to smack Michael’s backside with a broom, literally sweeping him back into the house and away from the gangs that patrolled the corners during those charged, anxious times.

  This was life for the Brooks children: Michael, the eldest; his sister RiRi, a year and a half younger; and Aleta, eight years younger, the baby of the family. This was normal for them. They didn’t like it, Aleta said, but they didn’t grapple with it. Who grapples with things that are normal? Any suggestion otherwise practically offended them. After their parents divorced and their father moved out, the three children watched their mother work her way up from teller to assistant manager at a local bank, saving what she could to put them through Catholic school, instilling in them the parallel beliefs that they would always look for the best in people while they lived under her roof and that they could make their own judgments and choices once they were old enough. Besides, if the cruel words of outsiders cut Michael too deeply, there was always that decaying hoop and backboard nailed to a light pole at the corner of 58th and Willows Avenue. There was always a court nearby, where, he said, “I was just Michael Brooks the basketball player, not Michael Brooks the half-breed.”

  As a freshman at West Catholic, Brooks was the last player on the bench . . . for the freshman team. He was 6-foot-3 but frail and willowy, a kid whose confidence outstripped his ability. Bill McDevitt, one of his classmates and teammates, remembered Brooks arguing in the locker room one day after practice with one of the team’s better players over which of them would make it to the NBA first. The debate seemed ludicrous to McDevitt at the time, but the following year, Brooks returned taller, stronger, and more skilled. It was impossible not to notice his evolution, even if, to his family, he was the same Michael he’d always been. In the Brooks home, he was still the prankster big brother, rousing RiRi in the middle of the night, chasing her around the house as if they were Looney Tunes characters, then ducking back into his room when Rita woke up, leaving his sister alone to suffer their mother’s wrath. He had a habit of rocking his head while he slept, and he’d wake up in the morning with his hair swept up in a cotton-candy-style cone, then spend several minutes sculpting his Afro and, as Aleta put it, “practicing his moves” in the mirror to make sure his clothes fit just so, then ask no one in particular, I’m a good-looking guy, aren’t I?

  The sequence never failed to make his sisters laugh, to keep them seeing him as a carefree teenager when, on the basketball court, he was becoming a man before everyone’s eyes. In his yearbook graduation photo, he wore a white tuxedo and black bow tie, and his entry included a nickname that hinted at his physical maturity: “Feet.” By the end of his junior season, local college assistant coaches—Jim Boyle at St. Joseph’s, Bill Michuda at La Salle—had become fixtures at West Catholic practices. During his senior season, 1975–1976, he led the Philadelphia Catholic League in scoring and rebounding, carried the Burrs to a 28-3 record, and established one of the city’s great individual basketball rivalries, between him and West Philadelphia High’s Gene Banks.

  A grade behind Brooks in school, Banks—and h
is recruitment—eclipsed every other high school athlete or story in Philadelphia. The Daily News assigned a writer, Gary Smith, to cover Banks and Banks alone: the man-child as reporting beat. “I benefited from Gene,” Brooks once said. “I could improve without pressure.” The two had competed against each other in ferocious summertime pickup games at Sherwood Playground and in the Sonny Hill and Baker Leagues, but they weren’t close until Brooks showed up one afternoon at Banks’s house for a visit, an overture to get to know each other better. Before long, Brooks was charming Banks’s mother, walking her through Rita’s spaghetti recipe, helping her chop peppers and stir the red gravy. “That’s where our friendship grew,” Banks said.

  Banks eventually chose to play at Duke University, but Brooks picked La Salle, a decision that came with tangible benefits for him, his mother, and his sisters. He received a full athletic scholarship, and Bob Herdelin, a local real estate mogul and himself a former basketball star for the Explorers, bought a 1,700-square-foot twin home on the 5300 block of Chew Avenue, a short walk from campus, for the Brooks family. There is no available evidence that Herdelin was acting on behalf of La Salle and no indication that anyone there knew of the transaction, La Salle athletic director Bill Bradshaw said, and there are no records of Herdelin’s making any financial contributions to the university. Property records showed that Herdelin purchased the house for $16,000—he signed both the deed and the mortgage—and both he and Aleta, in separate interviews, confirmed his role in the family’s relocation. “We did the Jeffersons thing,” Aleta said, “and moved on up.”

  Regardless of the reasons for his choice, Brooks helped reinvigorate the Philadelphia college basketball scene at a time when its relevance and cachet were in decline. Over the 1974–1975 and 1975–1976 seasons, Villanova, Temple, Penn, St. Joseph’s, and La Salle combined for an aggregate winning percentage of .494. Six times in that two-year span, a Big Five team won no more than 11 games. The rivalries had lost their vibrancy; an infamous Daily News back-page photo captured Harry “Yo-Yo” Shifren, the endearing vagabond who was the unofficial mascot of the Big Five, sleeping during a sparsely attended doubleheader. But the subsequent four years saw the city’s programs ascendant, the Palestra once more a bubbling pot of screams, streamers, sweat. Villanova posted three 23-win seasons and advanced to the 1978 NCAA tournament’s regional final. Penn made its astonishing run to the 1979 Final Four. And under two head coaches, Paul Westhead and Dave “Lefty” Ervin, who encouraged breakneck basketball, Brooks became the most dominant player in the city and one of the most thrilling in the country.