by Glenn Stout
“It was his way of avoiding something that he couldn’t talk about because he didn’t know enough,” she said. “That’s the key thing. He didn’t know this young man enough to even have a conversation about him. That’s not cool, and that’s what, I think, he was struggling with.
“He felt like the NBA let him down a little bit, and Europe embraced the heck out of him. I believe his loyalty was to that, because they did that for him. And you have to understand Michael as a person: very laid-back, a don’t-bring-me-no-bad-news guy, everything is cool. He liked the fact that European people were just chill like that. Their way of life worked for who he was as a person, and you have to remember he started a family there in addition to his child here. I don’t think it’s that Michael just didn’t want to come back. It’s that he didn’t really see any need for it at the time. But with age comes wisdom. He was there for 28 years. He started to understand, ‘You know, I need to see what I can do, maybe head back.’”
In all those years, though, he returned to the United States just once, to San Diego in 1998 to visit his mother, who lives there still, and Aleta, who was in town on business. He never came east on that trip, never set foot inside West Catholic or the Palestra or on La Salle’s campus, never made time to see Michael Jr., and never returned to the United States again. Even after doctors had diagnosed his aplastic anemia, in 2011, Brooks had five years to deepen his relationship with Michael Jr., cognizant that his situation might turn dire, that his body would stop producing blood cells, that he would be vulnerable to infections and other trauma, that he might need a bone marrow transplant. Yet he never really closed the physical or emotional distance between them.
It was just another contradiction that Michael Jr., the more he interacted with Aleta, the more he learned about his father, had come to accept. As he aged, as he gained more perspective, he realized that he couldn’t be the reason that Brooks had left and stayed away. Four years ago, he said, he forgave his father for his absenteeism: “I just wanted to release myself of that burden. By forgiving him, that gets rid of the animosity I had toward him. That gets rid of all that kind of stuff. It makes it easier so that when I think about him, it’s good thoughts, even though I didn’t even know him.”
There was an opportunity, then, for a total reconciliation. Aleta talked with Brooks and Uberti about having them fly over to visit, about bringing Michael and Michael Jr. face to face at last. Brooks just needed to get well first. To hear him talk about his condition was to assume his full recovery was a formality, even though he had been undergoing chemotherapy and receiving transfusions and platelets. With each round of treatment, he would tell Aleta, Well, I knocked out those three, as if they were nothing more strenuous than a few basketball practices when he was in his prime. In mid-August, there seemed reason to be optimistic: he entered the hospital to receive a bone marrow transplant.
On Friday, August 19, remembering that Aleta’s 50th birthday was coming up on the 22nd, he called her after completing four days of chemo and teased her about her age. Call me Monday, he said, so I can wish you a happy birthday.
On Monday, Aleta’s birthday, her husband, Chris, took her to lunch in Chestnut Hill. As they sat outside, she took a photograph because, she said, God had given her such a beautiful day. When they returned to their home in Wissahickon Hills, Aleta phoned Jacqueline Uberti for an update on Brooks. This is how Aleta remembered their conversation:
“Aleta, they say there’s no hope.”
“What? What are you talking about? They say there’s no . . . what? What? What do you mean there’s no hope?”
“I don’t know. First, let me say happy birthday because he would want me to tell you that.”
“Why can’t he tell me this?”
“Because he is unconscious. They have him on morphine. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”
Brooks’s body had rejected the transplant. Sobbing, Aleta melted to the living room floor. Chris picked her up and put the phone back to her ear. After composing herself, she called Michael Jr. to tell him—“I couldn’t believe it,” he said—then called Uberti back at 5 p.m. Uberti put her phone to Brooks’s ear and told Aleta to talk to him. She did, for 15 minutes.
“I told him I loved him,” she said, “and I told him I’m sorry and I don’t want to say good-bye to him and this wasn’t supposed to happen but he shouldn’t be in pain anymore, he shouldn’t be suffering, and it’s okay.”
Regrets are for losers, Michael Brooks had said. But his sister didn’t believe he felt that way at the end. She couldn’t believe it, because of a conversation they had not long before he died. His doctors were still searching for a bone marrow donor for him, and if they could find one within his family, preferably a male, it would increase the likelihood that the transplant would be successful. Aleta told him that she had discussed this possibility with Michael Jr., and that he was willing to donate his.
No, Brooks told her. He doesn’t owe me that.
The Only Sound in the Room
One by one that morning in December, from the lectern in that La Salle auditorium, they had shared their remembrances of Michael Brooks—Gene Banks and Bill Bradshaw and Greg Webster and more. They were men Michael Jr. had never met, telling stories he had never heard.
“It gave me a chance to see he was a good man,” he said. “He was a good person. People make mistakes in life, and I get that. It was good to hear people reflect on him because it kind of gave me memories of him that I didn’t even have.”
The urn did not contain all of Brooks’s ashes. The rest remain in Europe, with his family there. It took weeks for Aleta to finalize arrangements to have some of them shipped to her on a one-stop flight from Geneva to Philadelphia. Her mother, Rita, having lost her only son, could not bear the responsibility. Her sister, RiRi, suffers from a chronic illness. “I’m my brother’s keeper,” Aleta said. Her daughter Alexis accompanied her to the customs area of Philadelphia International Airport on the day the ashes arrived, and when they saw the box, Aleta refused to touch it, because the Michael she knew was 6-foot-7, gentle and powerful, and now there was just this . . . cube . . . that anyone could carry, with HUMAN REMAINS stamped on its side, and she began to cry. She keeps the urn on a table on the second-floor landing of her home. Every day, she descends the stairs, looks at it, and says, Good morning, Michael.
She has a video, sent to her by Jacqueline Uberti, of his funeral Mass in Switzerland. She will allow only one other person, Michael Jr., to watch it. He plans to do so on August 22, the one-year anniversary of his father’s death. It seems right.
Michael Jr. did not make basketball his life, as his father did. He works full-time in the recording industry, as a marketer and manager, but he has an idea to form a summer basketball league geared toward middle school and high school students who perform well academically. “I love the game,” he said. “It’s in my blood.” Through email and social media, he keeps in contact with his siblings in France. In mid-May, he noticed on Instagram that Jasper would be traveling to New York, and the two of them met for dinner at Gallagher’s Steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan. It was the first time he had been in the same room with his brother.
After Michael Jr. had finished speaking at the ceremony, Aleta rose from her seat, hugged him, and went to the front of the lecture hall. “This,” she said, “was the true essence of who my brother was.” Suddenly, there on the screen behind her was Michael Brooks, sitting at a rich brown table in a white-walled room.
What followed was a two-minute, six-second video that Brooks’s friend Yuval Keren had recorded in January 2016. In it, Brooks is bald, skinny as a rope, his face coated by a salt-and-pepper beard, and he is seated at a table, having dinner with several people. One of them holds a pen in front of Brooks’s mouth, pretending to interview with him, and asks, “Do you have anything else to say to your family or any of the people watching you over in the States at home, or anybody else?”
Brooks does.
�
��I miss you. I love you. And God bless you.”
He stands up. The lights in the room flicker out, then come back on again, as if he has stepped on stage and a spotlight has found him. He opens his arms with a flourish and recites the narration that begins “Have You Seen Her,” the 1971 hit by the Chi-Lites, about a man who has lost the woman he loved.
I know I can’t hide from a memory
Though day after day I’ve tried.
Around the table, the people with Michael Brooks clap in time with the beat as, a cappella, he continues to the next verse. In a flowing black funeral dress, Aleta snapped her fingers and swayed her hips. Michael Jr. leaned forward and listened to the only voice in the room. It was his father’s, and it was a song.
Elizabeth Weil
Mikaela Shiffrin Does Not Have Time for a Beer
from Outside
Mikaela Shiffrin slept great. She always sleeps great. Then she ate two fried eggs, plus toast, no coffee, as she does every morning. Now it’s 9 a.m. on this bright June Thursday, the fourth day of the third week of her six-week early-summer training block. Her schedule prescribes a morning strength session, so off we drive from her parents’ house in Avon, Colorado, to the Westin Beaver Creek, where she works out when she’s in town.
First: a warm-up on a spin bike. Ten minutes, moving her legs in circles in her Lululemon shorts, much like half the women here are moving their legs in circles in their Lululemon shorts—no big deal. Then we go into a small glass-doored room labeled MIKAELA’S CORNER. The Westin didn’t know what to do with this space, so the hotel gave it to Mikaela so she could do Olympic lifts. It’s an asset for the hotel to have this tanned, blond, 22-year-old ski goddess training here—though she does, let’s just say, ruffle some patrons’ senses of inner peace. Her body fills out her skin in a way that just looks fuller and better than anybody else. It’s like she’s a freshly blown-up balloon and the rest of us have been hanging around losing air for a few days or weeks.
But in this private back room, there’s no one cowering in self-hatred at the sight of Mikaela’s epic, confidence-destroying legs except her father who, of course, feels not self-hatred but pride. Back in their youth, both Jeff Shiffrin and Mikaela’s mother, Eileen, raced alpine. When I ask Jeff, who is an anesthesiologist and has come to chat with me on his way to work, how they did it, how they managed to raise this specimen, perhaps the best skier in the world right now, on track to become maybe the best skier of all time, he says it’s all very simple. “If you have a kid who is going to a ski race, you go to the lodge beforehand so you can say, ‘Here’s the nearest bathroom, here’s where you put your backpack,’ so the kid can be better prepared and have less stress. At age six, you teach her how to juggle, for coordination and focus, and at seven you teach her how to unicycle, for balance.” There: now you know.
Mikaela wraps up her set. Papa Shiffrin, who handles the logistics of his daughter’s ski racing and refers to himself as “Sure Pa,” goes to the hospital to work. So far, so good. Then Mikaela moves out of her corner into the gym proper, and for a while all is still well in the Westin. The other gym-goers, both locals and hotel guests, continue pleasantly about their golden Vail days. Some recognize Mikaela, but whether they do or don’t doesn’t really matter—this isn’t a story about fame, or even winning, exactly. It’s a story about being the kind of person who not only knows how to win (that’s not really the hard part), but can execute on the never-ending tedium required. Still, to get it out there: Mikaela has won 31 World Cup races, the 2017 World Cup overall title, four World Cup slalom titles, three World Championship slalom races, and an Olympic gold medal in slalom. And she’s on track to win more races and more championships than any skier ever. Lindsey Vonn may be only nine races away from catching up to Swedish legend Ingemar Stenmark’s record 86 World Cup victories, but Mikaela already has 24 more World Cup wins than Vonn did at her age and three more than Stenmark did when he was 22.
Mikaela tries to keep her success low-key and her mind not on beating others but on being better tomorrow than she is today. After she won gold in Sochi in slalom, she did lose her focus for a few seconds and told a reporter that she wanted to win five medals in the upcoming 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. (Who doesn’t?) But then she backpedaled and started talking again about putting in the work and staying strong.
Mikaela’s quads look capable of leg-pressing entire alpine villages. Her glutes, halfway up her 5-foot-7 frame, are abrupt, definitive forces of nature, the Rockies rising out of the Midwest. But it’s her concentration and discipline, and her ability to turn physical instruction into action, that are the real killers. Today, as almost every day, she isn’t working out with a partner or coach. There’s no minder, no entourage, no fuss. She does have an esoteric piece of gear called a GymAware PowerTool, which costs $2,200, looks like a small bomb, and measures lifting metrics like bar angle and velocity. But other than that, she’s just an extraordinarily fit young woman with an iPhone, a silver watch, a few turquoise anklets, some very cute braids, and a list of reps and sets to get through.
Still, slowly, quietly, all around her, people start flipping out, needing—and failing—to adjust to the fact that here in this gym is this person with these legs and this ass who is flawlessly, unassumingly executing maneuvers that none of them could do with her precision and grace if they made it the focus of their lives. A man goes to pick up a kettlebell from a rack behind Mikaela, who is doing seismic squat jumps, and just melts down, worrying loudly about disrupting her to the point where she has to pause and comfort him. “No, you’re fine. You’re fine,” she says. When she loads a bar with 100 pounds, holds her squat for 45 seconds, and then explodes up into space, another guy bursts out, “That’s amazing! I can’t believe you can do that! Holy Moses!”
Mikaela does her triple jumps, her agility drills. None of the exercises are that complex. We can all do this stuff, sort of—just like we can all keep ourselves from eating the entire bag of chips.
Eventually, Eileen comes in, after her own workout, wearing Hokas and basketball shorts. Mikaela is on the U.S. Ski Team, but she’s also on Team Shiffrin, and her mother serves as her 24/7 unpaid coach. Eileen, it bears noting, does not think Mikaela does everything perfectly. It’s her job—not as mother but as coach—to find flaws. She scrutinizes Mikaela’s every movement (often repeatedly, forward and backward, in slow motion, on video), searching for imperfections and ways to crush those imperfections out.
Eileen is also here to make sure that I don’t intrude too much on Mikaela’s two-hour workout and thus keep Mikaela from getting home to her parents’ house in time for her nap. In the elevator to the parking garage, I ask Mikaela how she wants our day to go. I could take her out to lunch or dinner. “I need to go on my ride later,” she says. Then she adds, with just the slightest hint of an edge, “I don’t know what’s on your schedule.”
The tone is understandable. Given that Mikaela is the U.S.’s designated darling in the run-up to the 2018 Olympics, there have been a lot of nonathletic obligations: photo and video shoots (and attendant hair and makeup) for sponsors Barilla, Bose, Red Bull, and Visa, interviews for other media. But Eileen suggests that, even amid these obligations, there may be room for improvement. “I think you should be nicer,” she says.
A word about naps: Mikaela loves to nap. She also loves Bode Miller, and she’s seen his movie, Flying Downhill, at least 20 times. And she remains so crushed out that even now, when Bode congratulates her on races—for instance, he called her name and hooted at her when she was walking through the crowd on the way to collect her World Cup overall title last March—she says, “I still can’t believe he knows who I am.”
But the naps: Mikaela not only loves them, she’s fiercely committed to them. Recovery is the most important part of training! And sleep is the most important part of recovery! And to be a champion, you need a steadfast loyalty to even the tiniest and most mundane points. Mikaela will nap on the side of the hill.
She will nap at the start of the race. She will wake up in the morning, she tells me after the gym, at her house, while eating some pre-nap pasta, “and the first thought I’ll have is: I cannot wait for my nap today. I don’t care what else happens. I can’t wait to get back in bed.”
Mikaela also will not stay up late, and sometimes she won’t do things in the afternoon, and occasionally this leads to more people flipping out. Most of the time, she trains apart from the rest of the U.S. Ski Team and lives at home with her parents in Vail (during the nine weeks a year she’s not traveling). In the summers, she spends a few weeks in Park City, Utah, training with her teammates at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Center of Excellence. The dynamic there is, uh, complicated. “Some sports,” Mikaela says, “you see some athletes just walking around the gym, not really doing anything, eating food. They’re first to the lunchroom, never lifting weights.”
Last summer, while Mikaela was in Park City, she overheard some of her teammates in the lunchroom talking about what they did for fun the weekend before and what they might do this upcoming one. “You want to go float the river?” Mikaela recalls one saying to another. “Let’s get a group of people together.”
This mystifies Mikaela. “That takes freaking five hours to float the river,” she tells me. “And I’m like, honestly . . . Do you forget how wonderful it feels to lie in bed and not be doing something in like the two seconds of spare time you have?”
Her dedication causes some tension, even passive aggression. If you’re focused at the expense of being social, and you win all the time, by huge margins, and are blatantly ambitious, you’re considered, well, standoffish. And you’re going to catch shade.