The Best American Sports Writing 2018

by Glenn Stout

  According to Mikaela, the form this takes in Park City is: teammates will invite her to join them for a movie or a party or whatever and then add, with the faintest whiff of sarcasm, “if that fits in your schedule.” Mikaela gets it. That dynamic has dogged her since high school. The day she moved into her dorm room at Burke Mountain Academy, a boarding school in Vermont for elite skiers, her roommate, Brayton “Bug” Pech, remembers saying to her, “You seem like a really nice girl and all, but I just have to hate you when you get in the start gate.” Bug, now one of Mikaela’s best friends, told me about a morning when the school canceled classes because there was such amazing powder, and while Bug and all the normal (that is, truly excellent) skier-students were out on the hill, freeskiing in the magnificent blower pow, stoked out of their minds, there was Mikaela, on the training hill by herself, working on traverse drills and ankle flexion.

  Bug quickly learned that the path to personal happiness around Mikaela is to give yourself a break for being mortal and stand back in awe. “You have to put her in her own category,” she says. “She’s an anomaly. Most people with Mikaela’s talent just rely on their talent. That’s why, when the competition gets really serious, they fall apart.” Mikaela was different. “I knew she was going to be special, because she was going to make herself into something special.”

  Skiing is an incredibly complex sport. Unlike, say, swimming or gymnastics, athletes don’t just have to learn to control their bodies. The terrain is always changing, the surface is always changing. “The training is very deliberate, and then when the training peaks, the skiing becomes more about feeling,” says Kirk Dwyer, who was Mikaela’s main coach at Burke and a major influence in her life. “You can think about it like going up a chairlift.” What he means is that you’re moving along, training, making progress in one mode, and then, to perform, you have to make a 180-degree switch. Mikaela arrived at Burke well suited to the process. “Her mentality is similar to virtuoso musicians like Isaac Stern, always trying to play better,” Dwyer says. “She’s very intrinsically motivated. She sets the bar high. She focuses.”

  Mikaela won the national slalom title at 16. Then she started winning in giant slalom. Now she’s adding speed events, winning her first alpine combined race—one super-G run, one slalom—earlier this year. She has won events by two or three seconds, in a sport where one-tenth of that is considered a decent margin. This is eminently—and maybe even unavoidably—hateable if you’re a female American alpine ski racer not named Julia Mancuso or Lindsey Vonn. Mikaela, like Vonn, has a custom training program in part because she brings money and glory to U.S. skiing and is considered the future of the sport. (None of the American men have a custom program.)

  “It’s hard to find someone who is really genuinely happy for you if you are having success and they’re not,” Mikaela says. She knows that’s only human. “I just try to be as nice as possible and make fun of myself and laugh at the jokes.” But the slacking off, by which Mikaela means floating the river or having a few beers and playing spoons on a Friday night—she has little patience for that. Champions put in the work. Champions prioritize the effort to get better, every day. She makes each decision in her life only after she’s weighed whether or not it will help her achieve. She has a new boyfriend, a French ski racer. She’s going to meet him in Paris. But she won’t visit again if she can’t finish her training block strong. “Don’t worry about it and you’ll be great, said nobody ever,” she tells me just before her nap.

  Mikaela has a recurring dream. She shows up at the mountain for a race, puts on her boots and helmet, then realizes her clothes are disappearing. So she takes off her boots and helmet, dresses in her thermals and speed suit, then buckles on her boots and helmet again. But by the time she’s done this, her speed suit has flown off. This goes on: one piece of gear donned, another vanished. Eventually, she just starts running to the chairlift so she won’t miss her start. Every step she takes, the hill gets steeper and steeper until she’s falling off a cliff.

  To say that Jeff and Eileen Shiffrin are dedicated and passionate skier parents does not even begin to cover it. The Shiffrins did not just click Mikaela’s tiny boots into bindings at age three and drift down the hill with her, snowplowing; they began methodically coaching her and her elder brother, Taylor. “Mom and Dad said, ‘Let’s do this: ski to that tree, in this position, as fast as you can,’” said Taylor, who just got an MBA at the University of Denver, where he ski-raced during undergrad, and now works on the business side of tech startups. “There were actually very specific drills about body position: head in front, knees to skis, pretend you’re holding a tray of hot chocolate and try not to spill it. Let’s do it again, and again, and again.”

  Eileen started training her daughter on gates when she was six. The next year, Mikaela began racing. Soon after, she lost control near the end of a run, spun around in a complete circle, and still won the race by 10 or 20 seconds. A parent of another skier turned to Eileen and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Eileen is casual and friendly, offering me leftovers at a dining table that has family snapshots hanging above one end and Mikaela’s five huge World Cup globes lined up on a credenza nearby. She’s smart and game for anything (including studying German and chemistry alongside Mikaela while her daughter was finishing her high school diploma; now the two watch Madam Secretary and Blue Bloods together). She’s also a serious athlete. As a girl, Eileen spent three hours a day hitting a tennis ball against a wall. When not practicing her ground strokes, she watched as many matches as she could to study technique. She brings her intense commitment to practice—along with a belief that if you study, you can master anything—to all parts of her life.

  For instance, when Taylor was in sixth grade, he tried out for the soccer team but didn’t make the cut. Eileen bought four soccer nets for the family basement, ordered a complete set of World Cup soccer DVDs, and spent every evening that winter in the basement with Taylor, running him through drills. At tryouts the following fall, the coach thought Taylor played like Neymar’s little brother. “What on earth have you been doing?” he asked Eileen.

  Eileen is not paid by U.S. Ski and Snowboard, but she’s recognized by the organization as one of Mikaela’s coaches, along with team coaches Mike Day and Jeff Lackie. She approaches her job with the sense of purpose and attention to detail of a forensic scientist at a murder scene. “You have to study the sport like you would study precalc or physics,” she explains. “You have to be willing to think about it that in-depth.” Eileen will, say, spend an hour or so in the evening with Mikaela watching tapes of Marlies Schild, the 2011 slalom world champion, asking questions: Is she keeping her shoulders facing out at this point in the turn? Or is she not really facing her shoulders out but driving her outside shoulder around? How much separation does she have between her upper and lower body? How is she using her ankles and knees?

  Few athletes’ parents have the time, inclination, or athletic experience to do this, and that has given Mikaela “a pretty big advantage, almost an unfair advantage,” Eileen admits. She insists that her parental contribution ends there, that she has not also bequeathed to her daughter a significant competitive streak.

  I ask Eileen what I think is a simple question: when did Mikaela become faster than her?

  “With skiing?” she says. “I don’t know. Mikaela says when she was 11 or 12—which is . . . no. But I don’t race against her. I never really compared or had that situation. I still ski pretty fast, faster than a lot of people are comfortable with me skiing. They are always like, ‘Why aren’t you wearing a helmet?’ So, I’m not sure.”

  “But when did you cross the threshold to saying, ‘My kid is a better athlete than me’?” I rephrase.

  “Better skier. Well, probably when she was . . .” Her voice trails off.

  To be clear, we are talking about 2017 World Cup overall champion Mikaela Shiffrin. “I don’t know. I’m not really sure,” Eileen says. “That’s such
a hard question. I never really think about it.”

  On the slopes, Mikaela steers her body like a Nascar driver classically trained at the Bolshoi Ballet—with such precision, grace, and control that it’s hard to comprehend the power required to hold your lower body at a 30-degree angle to the ground while keeping your torso upright, all while moving down iced ruts at 80 miles per hour.

  U.S. Ski Team coach Jeff Lackie says, “Mikaela separates herself from the field by using every inch of the turn to extract speed, building momentum whenever possible. You never tire of watching athletic genius.”

  Right now, Mikaela’s focusing on turning before the gate. Pretty much nobody can turn before the gate. If you think about turning before the gate, you’ve missed turning before the gate and you’ve probably missed turning before the next gate too. The window of time and the acreage of snow in which to perform the maneuver are just too small. Mikaela recognizes this. She knows the effort to turn before the gate is basically a Zen exercise. You keep working toward it. You keep not getting it. You stay committed to the practice.

  Mikaela is a really nice, smart person—I feel compelled to say that. She’s thoughtful and grounded, under her beautiful skin and all that muscle, and when I tell her I want to find a way to share the normal 22-year-old side of her life, she gamely takes me through her Instagram feed. We look at a story posted by an actress from Glee. Another posted by a cliff-jumping champion also sponsored by Red Bull. A third from a tawny-skinned fashion blogger. “She’s #tangoals,” Mikaela says. “I would get skin cancer if I was that tan all the time. But still.” Later we watch a video of Julia Mancuso training on a beach with her hunky husband. “This is not okay. I would love to be on the beach,” Mikaela says. “If I could just dip my toes in an ocean for a second, I would be over the moon.” I point out that she could fly to Maui, train on the sand, and dip her entire body in the sea. But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. Telling Mikaela now, in the months leading up to the Olympics, that she could fly to Hawaii and train there is really not all that different than her teammates saying, if that fits in with your schedule. It’s disrespectful—subtly so, perhaps. But still. The remark fails to honor who Mikaela is.

  Mikaela is gracious and lets it slide.

  Lindsey Vonn has always worked harder than anybody else on the hill. On Instagram, Mikaela finds a post of Vonn doing one of the same core exercises she did this morning—plank position, feet suspended from a rubber band, body stiff in a linear plane. Only Vonn’s hands are not anchored to a box, as Mikaela’s were; they’re clutching rings. Mikaela laughs nervously. “Oh, that’s like what I did today, only twice as hard.” But she still wants to try it.

  Wanting to work the hardest is not just stealth-killer goody-two-shoes behavior. Skiing fast is the result of preparation and flow. This may be the key to success in all sports, maybe all of life. To win you need to work the hardest, because knowing you’ve worked the hardest is what will allow you to believe in yourself and stay out of your own way in a race. This idea is the core lesson of The Inner Game of Tennis, published in 1974 and written by W. Timothy Gallwey, one of the most influential sports training books ever written. “The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills,” Gallwey writes. “He discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”

  Eileen loves this book. Kirk Dwyer made all the skiers he coached at Burke read it. Only if you’ve done enough training, only if you’ve tried hard beforehand, can you fully relax during a race.

  The trouble, for most of us, starts with the fact that we don’t always do all the work. We don’t do as much as Mikaela, or Lindsey Vonn, and this is not just a technical or physical problem. It undermines our self-confidence. Mikaela makes us see our weaknesses, our lack of full commitment. We want to win, but we don’t want to win at all costs. Maybe we’re scared to try that hard. Maybe we don’t know how. Almost none of us truly give 100 percent. We give 98 percent, or 95 percent, maybe less. Then, even though we may have dedicated our lives to a sport, even though we may be among the best in the world, we go out there and lose. Or we go out there and get hurt. “You don’t want to be second-guessing yourself on the way down,” Mikaela says. “And you don’t want to be skiing at 110 percent.” If you stretch yourself too thin, you snap. Mikaela likes to race well within her ability. “One of my theories is that if I just train more than everybody and I’m strong and I watch more video and understand the sport better, my 90 percent will be enough.”

  Enough so that, come February, she can fly to South Korea, fall asleep on the mountain, and win.

  Dave Kindred

  The Case for Lefty Driesell

  from The Athletic

  I’m sitting in Lefty Driesell’s office. It’s a room in his fourth-floor condo facing the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia Beach. It’s also a Lefty museum filled with portraits, trophies, and memorabilia. There’s a picture of Lefty’s 1933 Ford convertible and one of Lefty as a high school coach in 1956. The best piece in the museum is Lefty himself.

  He played for Duke when Mike Krzyzewski was four years old. He recruited against Dean Smith when Smith was a kid coach being hung in effigy. He breathed thrilling, everlasting life into dead-ass programs at Davidson College and the University of Maryland. Uniquely combative and comic, Lefty Driesell remains one of an unforgettable kind.

  I met him 40 years ago at Maryland, where he once called me “that sumbitch.” I had last seen him 20 years ago, when he took a job that provided him a tiny, bare, cinderblock office at Georgia State. After he retired, I lost track of him. Then, this fall, I saw a sportswriter’s note arguing that Lefty should be in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. I thought, He’s not in?

  So I went to Virginia Beach. Lefty’s 86th birthday comes up Christmas Day. He has a hitch in his gitty-up, which happens if you’re old and fall hard on the beach. The good news is he’s bright-eyed, alive, laughing, and doing the Lefty thing of telling stories that wander in circles until he lands on a punch line and everybody has had a grand time.

  It was a gorgeous day in November 2017 when, without warning, Lefty drops us into 1956. Suddenly, he is in full comic flight. Lefty in comic flight was, is, and forever will be priceless.

  We have fallen into another century and Lefty is coaching the Newport News High School basketball team, the mighty Typhoon. It’s the last seconds of a big game. A kid on the other team is crying.

  “We’re one point ahead,” Lefty says, “and we fouled the kid and he started cryin’. They could beat us if he made the free throws, but he’s cryin’.”

  Lefty still has that Virginia Tidewater voice, the drawl there but gone raspy. He’s a big guy, 6-foot-5, once an athlete shambling along all loosey-goosey. Now he walks so tentatively that he reaches for door frames and leans on a cane. As always, his ears stand away from his bald head. The lobes quiver in tune with his oratory.

  Lefty scoots to the edge of his chair. He’s leaning forward, about to topple over, and he’s rubbing his fists into his eyes, the way a squalling baby might. Lefty is having himself some fun.

  “The kid is moanin’. ‘Ah cain’t shoot, Ah cain’t shoot.’ He gets down on the floor and he’s beatin’ on the floor. They want to beat us so bad. They’re our big rival from the other side a town. They never beat us. Nobody ever beat us, 25-0 my first year, 57 straight for the school. He’s cryin’. ‘Ah cain’t shoot.’ Their coach comes to the official and says he’s gotta substitute for the kid. ‘He’s too emotional, he can’t shoot, he’s too nervous.’”

  That day, in 1956, Lefty was fresh out of Duke. He’d played some there, but no more than you’d expect from a too-small pivot man who couldn’t shoot. In that picture on his office wall, Lefty looks about five days older than his Typhoons. No one could have imagined what that guy would do. He would create an era. Not many coaches create eras, and Lefty did it in a good plac
e. He became so famous in Washington, D.C., that he stole newspaper ink and TV time from Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan.

  But right now we’re back in Newport News, and even if Lefty, the kid coach, was wet behind the ears, he knew what he knew and he knew there was no crying in basketball.

  “So the official comes to me about a sub, and I say, ‘Absolutely not. You let the boy shoot. I don’t care if the boy’s cryin’ or havin’ a nervous breakdown, he’s gonna shoot.’”

  The kid missed the first one.

  “He starts cryin’ again and moanin’, ‘Ah cain’t shoot. Ah cain’t do it.’”

  Lefty was again asked to allow a sub.

  “And I say, ‘Never.’”

  Another miss. Game over.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna beat me,” Lefty says, “with a nervous breakdown.”

  Charles Grice Driesell coached big-time basketball for 41 seasons. His teams won 786 NCAA Division I games. When he retired in 2003, only Bob Knight, Adolph Rupp, and Dean Smith had a bigger number. A nice number, 786, but only a number, and it doesn’t begin to tell you everything Lefty did or even most of what he did. By the power of his personality, he brought in customers eager to see his freewheeling teams and be there for whatever the hell Lefty would think up next.

  Maryland’s campus is in College Park, a half-hour from the White House. The school’s pitch to him for the basketball job included lines Lefty never forgot. It was 1969. Ted Williams managed the Washington Senators. Vince Lombardi coached the Washington Redskins.

  “They told me the summers belonged to Ted Williams, the falls belonged to Vince Lombardi and the winters would be Lefty Driesell’s,” he said. “That sounded pretty darn good.”