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Rules of Exception

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SL Essay

by Matt Enuco

Matt-Enuco-Sox“Hey, you could have a real job,” Alan Regier suggested from his pitcher’s mound pulpit. I sat in the crowd of minor leaguers at my first spring training with the Chicago White Sox. Regier’s lesson sounded hollow when I thought back to 30 games in 30 days in the previous season. By the end of that season I had lost 15 pounds, played through a pulled quadriceps muscle and suffered garden variety injuries on a daily basis. I’m not talking about 30 show and goes, or batting practice at 5 p.m. game at 7 p.m. I had the dubious honor of playing with true rookies. This meant report at 11:30 a.m., extra hitting at 12:30, weights at 1:30, orientation and stretch at 3, team defense at 3:45, batting practice at 4:30, find time for dinner at 5:30, starters stretch at 6:30, and play at 7. Rinse and repeat for 68 games in 75 days. Most of us did this in pursuit of a once in a lifetime dream and a slim chance of success. But, make no mistake; I earned every cent of that $1,050 dollar a month salary. I sat underneath a scorching Arizona sun at 6:30 in the morning and dismissed his pedantic words of wisdom.

Ozzie Guillen popped out from behind a fence when Regier finished and offered his words of encouragement. His energy was infectious. He bounced around to illustrate every concept he wanted to express. There wasn’t anything lost with Guillen. He was going to drill home the basic baseball mantra: play hard, respect the game, respect the organization, and never put your pants underneath your cleats. His passion fueled a dimming flame in me to play baseball. I was reminded that it was a gift to be here and they could find a thousand guys working in cube farms that would mortgage their future for the opportunity in front of us. Even still, it felt like work.

Two weeks later I was on a plane heading back to New Jersey.

As spring training report dates roll out and the players migrate to Florida and Arizona for a month, I’m reminded of how lucky I was to have been there. After I decided to end my baseball career I searched for a “real job.” It took me three years to land my second career as a teacher. The entire process was more emotionally grueling than any practice or game. And since being hired I have learned what it means to have a job and go to work.

For many of the athletes I met on my journey to professional baseball the skills came easy. At each level, from college to summer leagues and then professionally, the weaker athletes washed out. At the top rung of this ladder are the athletic phenoms. I met the 18-year-old slugger who deposits balls in the upper deck during batting practice, the million-dollar arm with a two-cent head, the first round pick from LSU and the 29-year-old career minor leaguer. Even though I was a 36th round draft pick, we could all share the experience of being exceptional. We were exceptional.

In college I often wondered what it was like to be a regular student. My teammates and I never knew what it was like to have two or three classes for the day, hammer out some homework and then have complete freedom in front of us. I had to plan a gym session in between class and prepare myself for a six-hour practice later that night. I complained about it then, but I would sell my soul for another shot.

The reality that we came to was that we were different from most people. The kind of person it takes to be a collegiate or professional athlete is different from your average Joe. We practice, tweak, and train. We scrutinize each part of the game ad nauseam. If you ever find yourself at a social gathering with guys who played college ball, they’ll break down a 2-1 change-up to the six hitter in the fifth inning of a three-run ball game. It seems insignificant, but to those guys it could have been the turning point in a season.

All of this cathartic drivel I’ve just given you is the sum of what I once was. I used to be exceptional, but now I’m just a regular guy. And that has been the hardest lesson for me to learn, and most importantly, accept. I’m not used to accepting mediocrity. I assess, revise, train, practice, and improve. For me, accepting mediocrity is the equivalent of accepting failure.

So, to my friends who are still playing, cherish every at bat and soak up every moment sitting in the dugout. Alan Regier was right; you could have a real job. Your exceptionality will run out, and probably sooner than you’re ready to admit. Only the exceptions to the exceptional get to choose when it’s over. Most of us are told when the magic well has dried up.

Matt Enuco was drafted by the Chicago White Sox in 2006 and spent one season in their minor league system. After leaving baseball, he earned a master’s degree in English and creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania. He now teaches writing at Wilmington University as an adjunct.

For Opening Day

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SL Essay

by Trapper Haskins

I was a Memphis kid with a Chicago hat. There was nowhere I went that summer that my blonde, unruly locks weren’t covered by the same blue wool and red embroidered “C” that my baseball heroes wore. I was seven years old, and as I sat looking out the window of a CTA train, or rather the “L,” an unfamiliar city passed by in an unrecognizable blur. Riding on rails was a foreign thing to me. The trains I knew carried coal, carried chemicals, but not people. My grandfather, a lifelong Northsider, sat next to me with a Cubs hat of his own — a floppy brimmed bucket hat adorned with buttons and sweat stained from a thousand innings under the sun before the lights brought night baseball to Wrigley.

wrigley-field

We rode the Purple Line from Linden Station stopping at Noyes and Dempster, the car getting increasingly full of revelers dressed in blue. At Howard we changed trains for the Red Line and continued toward the ballpark taking on fans at every stop until it seemed unimaginable that the train could hold any more. And yet it did. We passed graffiti-sprayed rooftops, the great and sprawling Graceland Cemetery, and came so frighteningly close to the buildings we passed that I was sure whoever laid the tracks had gotten their math wrong.

The hissing and clanging of the rails quieted, and as we rolled to a stop at the Addison platform Wrigley Field rose into view, the steel framework standing like a cathedral to summer. Or maybe futility. It was a hulking slab of Midwest Americana older than half the teams that visited there. The park had, until then, always seemed to me more a legend than an actual field. A haunted place.

The doors of the train slid open to a scene of roiling humanity below at street level, and the car cleared. Vendors of every type shouted for your dollar with T-shirts, peanuts, and tickets for sale.

Hats. And buttons. And pennants.

Grandpa bought a program and led me through the tangle of people, past the turnstiles, and up to our seats in the bleachers. At first sight I was awestruck by the enormity of the outfield. It was an impossibly broad expanse of green. There was no way only three fielders could cover it even if their names were Mumphrey, Martinez, and Dawson. We saw the Cubs play the Pirates that day. I don’t know who won. It doesn’t matter now. Grandpa taught me how to keep score that afternoon by recording the details in baseball shorthand — a “6-3” ground-out, the backwards “K” for a called third strike, and the penciled in diamonds denoting runs scored. By the bottom of the ninth inning there was the whole game written out like some cryptograph, a coded language for the faithful.

My father taught me to play the game of baseball. My grandfather taught me to love it — its cadence and choreography, its geometry and grace.

In 2003 after their playoff collapse just five outs shy of the World Series I asked my grandfather if he was disappointed, if he was grieved that yet again the luckless Cubs had let redemption slip away.

“No,” he said, “this is the way of things.” Then he added, “Just wait ‘til next year.”

It is a game of small victories where failing as a batter less than 70 percent of the time is a benchmark of success. You learn to make peace with your losses.

My grandfather died the following May at the age of 92. The Cubs were two games out of first. Born in Chicago in 1911, he never saw them win it all. So, when I flew back to Chicago for his funeral I went to the only place I could to be near him. I rode the Purple Line to Howard and changed trains to the Red. I passed the graffitied rooftops and Graceland Cemetery where he would be buried the following day only half a mile from his beloved ballpark. The doors slid open, and I walked down from the platform at Addison and through the tumult and the clamor of wandering hordes and vendors hawking wares.

Hats. And buttons. And pennants.

And there on the corner of Clark and Addison I bought a scalper’s ticket — Section 229, Row 11. Sitting halfway up on the first base side I looked out over that green lawn toward the ivy and the bleachers. Surely someone in those outfield seats was there for the first time, maybe with their own grandfather. I kept score the way mine had shown me one hazy and distant afternoon. We lost. The players’ names were different, but the teams, the game, and the field — that hallowed field — ever the same.

I don’t know my grandfather’s birthday. I’ve never asked. But for me Opening Day is a more fitting time to honor him anyhow. Because we have waited. Because this is next year. And because the promise of October belongs as much to us as anyone.

Trapper Haskins is a writer, musician, and long-suffering Cubs fan. His writing has appeared in WoodenBoat Magazine and American Songwriter. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee, where he plays vintage (1860s rules) baseball.

ON THE REBOUND WITH RUS BRADBURD

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SL Interview

On the Rebound with Rus Bradburd
by William Meiners

Rus Bradburd is a pretty giving guy. About a decade ago, I traveled with Nick Reading (Sport Literate’s own Nick Reading) to Las Cruces, New Mexico to see our old Purdue buddy Kevin Honold, a guy, like us, then working on his second MFA at New Mexico State. Rus, a writing mentor to Kevin, loaned him his red pickup truck for our weeklong stay.

I got to know him a little more through three books he’s written. A college coach who worked for both Don Haskins (the real man behind “Glory Road”) and Lou Henson, Rus left the hardwood and life on the recruiting trail for his own MFA program and a gym rat’s commitment to the writing craft. Three years ago, Rus judged our essay contest, submitting himself then to an interview about his first book of fiction, Make It, Take It. And in the spirit of renewed March Madness, he recently subjected himself to the interview that follows.

William Meiners: As a former college basketball coach who made the jump to writing, your first three books were about basketball, though all very different. The first, Paddy on the Hardwood, is a memoir, maybe even an example of a traveler’s narrative as you document your time as a semi-pro basketball coach in Ireland. Forty Minutes of Hell is the biography of Nolan Richardson, the somewhat controversial and misunderstood basketball coach. For the latter, it seems you had to turn into an investigative journalist and a historian just to uncover the story. Can you talk about your approaches to each of these examples of creative nonfiction?
Rus Bradburd: The Irish book began as a diary because I feared I was going crazy. “Nobody would believe this stuff back in the States, I’ve got to write this down,” that sort of thing. And although we came in last place, from a literary standpoint that was a very lucky coincidence, and that worked well in the book. In the early drafts of Paddy on the Hardwoodthere was no basketball, nothing on the court. But I had a few writer pals tell me I had to have some basketball. I had to dig up the stats, and in Ireland the records are very spotty. Also, frankly, I cheated on the order of things, meaning I moved the Irish music stuff around, staggered it throughout the book so there’d be a balance, a back and forth, between music and the team.
With Forty Minutes of Hell I began in a very different way than the final results might indicate: I was going to “out” Nolan as a paranoid egotistical racist. Which, in retrospect, is how 99 percent of the media portrayed him when he was fired at Arkansas. But in digging up the history and background and doing dozens of interviews, I slowly came to believe that Nolan was right about nearly everything. Yet I still had to expose his imperfections, his humanity, which he wasn’t happy about. And finally, I had to hide the book from him until it hit the stores. He’s a strong personality and I feared he’d try to influence my very personal take on his life.

WM: With any form of creative nonfiction writers are trying to arrive at a truth. And of course good fiction rings truthful. What were the biggest challenges in arriving at what may seem like discovering something of yourself in Paddy and teasing out the complex life of Richardson in Forty Minutes?
RB: In Ireland I had to come to grips with basketball, the complicated history of how it had dominated my life in an unhealthy way. I think good memoir often exposes the writer as a jerk — or at least as a dope, or imperfect. Of course, this was easy to do in my case. The Nolan Richardson book made me realize the incredible privilege I’d been afforded by being white, even in a black man’s game. I mean, the history of the game points at this, but nobody wants to hear it. For example, John Wooden, the UCLA coach who won all those NCAA titles, got his start in an era where the coaching fraternity was segregated. But so did nearly all the great coaches, from Henry Iba to Bobby Knight to…well, anyone who began before Will Robinson at Illinois State in 1970. And all of us involved in sport like to imagine the games that were never played: who was better, Bill Russell or Kareem, that kind of thing. But as far as coaching is concerned, Americans were cheated out of the best games — they were never played. We never saw Clarence “Big House” Gaines against Dean Smith. And John Wooden never had to face John McLendon.

WM: Were you worried about pissing anyone off with either book? Or do you feel just have to let the writing fly and deal with that later?
RB: The great Chicago journalist John Conroy told me that there is no nonfiction book worth its salt that doesn’t anger some people. With Paddy on the Hardwood, though, it was touchy because there are people I love, and they don’t come off well in the book. Players who were decent guys look bad. I got away with it because I pointed that camera at myself. Nobody looks as foolish in that book as the author. I think with the Nolan Richardson book, well, he’s such a lightening rod for controversy that I knew there’d be no way to make everyone happy on doing his story. And I avoided the star players who I felt like would feed me standard lines. Instead I talked to people who had no voice, or at least weren’t his best players, or the obvious choices but would speak in cliché.

WM: We last spoke (formerly in the SL Q&A sense, anyway) not too long after Make It, Take It, your novel of linked basketball stories came out. At the time, you told me writing fiction seemed more difficult. Is it still tougher a few years later? And what makes it so?
RB: This question looks to me like a banana peel up ahead on the sidewalk that I’m so dumb I’ll still trip over it. Fiction, in my case, involves no research, no facts, no interviews. I imagine that Cormac McCarthy has to get things right if he’s portraying Mexico in 1940, but I don’t have to fret. It’s all in my head. So I think what I’m up to in nonfiction is that I’m collecting all this stuff I found buried, and now I’m deciding what to keep and what to throw away and how to lay it on this big wooden table and make shapely design. And I’m looking for patterns that surprise, or threads I didn’t know existed. So in that way, it feels like more work, that I have so much to sift through and my challenge is not to make it too long of a book. With fiction, I often feel like I need more advice. I don’t know the material well enough, as strange as that sounds. So I lean on Robert Boswell, Antonya Nelson, and a yet-unpublished Chicago writer who has saved me so often named Barry Pearce. And after some back and forth with them, I can finally show my best work to my wife, the poet Connie Voisine.

WM: What does Connie do with it?
RB: As a poet, she has an even tougher language-level take on my manuscripts than the other readers that I’ve leaned on over the years. As my wife, she gives me the thrashing I so deserve, but I’ve learned the hard way to only show her my best work. It’s less traumatic that way.

WM: After your college coaching career, you told me, you miss being around inner-city kids. What specifically do you miss most about those relationships?
RB: I found the Chicago guys I coached endlessly fascinating and I could relate to them. In retrospect, basketball gave me a window into an interesting culture: black inner-city life. Yet my view and experience with African Americans is mostly limited to the basketball world. And as a college professor now I’ve come to realize that while the coaches are intensely interested in recruiting tall black guys, the rest of the university is apathetic to this portion of the population. Studies show that the racial diversity on many campuses is pretty sad — away from football and basketball. Sport is the leader in racial progress, and it’s often the only place you’ll see it on a college campus.

WM: Of course, one of the players you still talk a lot about is Shawn Harrington. For those who don’t know, Shawn was a random victim of gun violence in his native Chicago. His story is both heartbreaking and inspiring (if that’s possible). In covering up his young daughter in a full-on assault on the wrong car, he saved her but ended up paralyzed. I understand you’re working on a book about his life. Why is Shawn’s story so important?
RB: I think that Shawn’s individual story cuts through all the statistics and political arguments, all the discussion of gun control, education, politics, and race, and enlarges the issues in some unexplainable way. It’s a story of the failure of America. I mean here we have a guy who did everything right: he graduated from college, got a good job, came back to his old neighborhood to try to make a difference, and was a loving and involved father with his two daughters. Now? He’s living on $300 a month. And the odd coincidence and the time of the shooting (7:40 a.m.) point to the fact that we’re all vulnerable. The working title is “All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed,” which is lifted from a Langston Hughes poem. This is another book project that uses basketball as a backdrop, but again there’s not actually much basketball in it.

WM: When I started SL 21 years ago, I figured we’d publish a number of “Field of Dreams” type stories. Those father and son, or daughter, essays that toy with the fine line of sentimentality. My wife caught me watching that movie the other night and I was practically blubbering. I mean it, she nearly went for my son’s nighttime diapers. The writer/editor in me knows what they’re doing — a pull on the heartstrings with all the music and low-key, handsome Kevin Costner about as subtle as a beanball. Still, it always gets me. And that’s sometimes the criticism of any type of writing that’s linked to sports. It’s a game of schmaltz.
This is an absurdly long introduction to a question (complete with a second paragraph), but I think we publish a range of writing about sports — from the near sentimental to things with harder edges. In the end, we just publish what we like. That said, you recently hooked us up with Dave Zirin for an interview. Zirin, I think, is sports journalism with a capital “J.” His job is, even as a true sports fan, as he told Nick, is to tell those “house on fire” stories. With Forty Minutes, you certainly detailed the ongoing racism Richardson endured. Why should writers of sport to take on bigger issues, i.e. racism and corruption?
RB: Although I’m nearly old enough to be Zirin’s father, I’ve learned so much from him, particularly about history. And I think he’s able to connect the dots that only he notices at first. In my case, I was always more interested in the stories of human endurance and courage. I remember being particularly taken as a kid with Dan Gable and his maniacal training routines, although I think Gable wrestled in the last meet I have seen. I think that kind of attraction to other stories away from the actual game, and this window into black culture that I talk about all the time, led me to be interested in the role of sport in social justice causes. And in America, that means racial equality, or less inequality, anyway. So that kind of overlap of courage and race — and then working for Don Haskins for eight years — got me looking at the kind of issues that Zirin seems to be hammering on all the time.

WM: I know you’ve been working on another fictional work about a football team that takes over a university. Though that sounds a bit like nonfiction. Can you talk a bit about that book? What’s your two-line pitch to publishers on why that book matters?
RB: Okay, here goes: “Big Time” is an anti-sports novel that satirizes the lofty place of athletics at American universities. I’ll leave at that for now, but I will add that I used to be anxious about getting it published before college sports were reformed. Sadly, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, or not in any meaningful way. But the good news is that the book may still have hope.

WM: I turned 50 late last year. For the first time ever I started teaching a creative writing course at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, in January. I find it to be both wonderful and awful at the same time as I chatter on in what seems like some sort of performance art banter in front of my students. Mostly I try to be encouraging. How do you coach up writing?
RB: I find myself relying in class — and in dealing with young people — on what I learned from Lou Henson and Don Haskins, the Hall of Fame coaches I worked for, nearly as much as what I gleaned from Robert Boswell and Antonya Nelson. And I find a lot of similarities between writing and basketball, just in the attitude and practice. I’m pushing students to settle into the right mixture of humility and hubris. Just like in basketball, too much confidence can hurt you as much as too much fear. Also, like in basketball, you go “practice” alone, then join the group for a “pick-up game” that the workshop can be. And there’s something about being a good “team player” that makes the workshop go better for everyone, yet also helps each “player” with her own “game.” Sorry, that’s a lot of sport metaphors.

WM: Given a magic wand, a deal with the devil, or just your best career realized, what would you want the most? To be a Division 1 coach in a powerhouse basketball program? Or a writer on The New York Times bestseller list? Why?
RB: Not even close: I lost the energy for college coaching a year or two before I quit in 2000. I’m content that I did what I did. I was in seven NCAA tournaments by the time I was 31 years old. But the hours spent seem self involved now in ways that I find meaningless. Although that’s an odd accusation that a writer is calling coaches “self-involved.” In retrospect, what interested more about basketball was not the “X and O” strategy stuff, but the stories. I can’t really remember scores or plays, but there are unforgettable stories in my head from my time around basketball. I don’t worry about being a New York Times bestseller, thank goodness. But I’m much happier typing on a day-to-day basis than I ever was coaching.

William Meiners is the editor of Sport Literate.

Christmas City, U.S.A

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SL Essay

Christmas City, U.S.A.

by Michael McColly

In 1966 my family moved from the little farm town where I was born to Marion, Indiana where my father took a job as a high school teacher and basketball and baseball coach. Marion was a factory town that manufactured TV tubes, automobile frames, glass jars, and plastic Christmas decorations. In fact, Marion churned out more plastic Santas and reindeer than any other town in the world. Christmas City, U.S.A., a sign boasted outside of town, dwarfed the other two markers that announced its other two claims of notoriety: the birthplace of James Dean and home to the State Basketball Champs of 1926. Unwritten on the water towers and welcome signs on the highways, however, was any mention of the August night in 1930 when a mob stormed Marion’s jail, dragged two black teenagers accused of murdering a white man out to the courthouse square, strung them up in a tree, and tried to burn their bodies, giving Marion the infamous distinction of being the site of the last known lynching above the Mason-Dixon line.

We lived in an old farmhouse on the south side of town in a working class neighborhood populated by both blacks and whites who’d moved up from the South for factory work. There wasn’t much on our side of town except the VA Hospital, the town dump, 38th Street Park, and the Christian College, where Methodist missionaries taught Christian mathematics and Christian biology to their converts from poor countries I’d never heard of — like Ghana and Honduras. Walking home from school I passed by the campus and gawked at these foreign students, innocent smiles locked onto their faces, dressed in ill-fitting second-hand clothes. To me they looked like someone’s prized doll collection come to life. But when they looked back at me, and the broken, queer sounding words came out from their lips, I felt like mountains or giant trees from a jungle had popped up out of the monotonous middle-American landscape.

Summer evenings, coming back from the grocery store, my father would drive slowly by the park to keep tabs on his black players at 38th Street Park, which was where they all hung out. He pulled up to the curb, leaned his head out the window and studied their play. Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, he might holler out something to one of his guys, more for his sake than theirs, forcing my sister and me in the back seat to duck for fear of being seen: “Hey Pettiford! You got any feet? Use ‘em!” Thank God he never got out. I watched him watching them, his face softening from its usual hardened stare, as these black young men ran the court like they were some part of his youth that he could never have back. For my father, too, had played basketball in college and baseball in the minor leagues until he had to quit when age caught up with him.

The year Bobby Kennedy campaigned in Marion for president I made the fifth grade basketball team. We had uniforms, an electric scoreboard, referees with striped shirts, cheerleaders, and everything. Our team was half black and half white. I played forward, two other white kids played at guard, and two black guys who were cousins played center and forward, James and Clayton Stanton. Often my mom took some of my teammates home from the away games, and since James and Clayton lived down the street, they came with us. I don’t remember getting a ride with their parents, not that they didn’t come; they did. Sometimes I could see James’ mother sitting in a big old coat off by herself in the corner of the gym with his little sister. James lived across the street from the RCA plant where his mother worked. I often wondered, since she worked there, if they had TVs in every room of their house. If he had a lot of TVs, I never found out because he never invited me inside. But I did discover that in James’ house, as it was in my dad’s, there was no father.

My friendship with James began after that first season, and when winter turned to spring, he and his friends started coming to shoot hoops. My house became the place to play outside of 38th Street Park because my father had paved our driveway, found an old goal at the high school, and made an official backboard with a black square above the rim to guide our bank shots. From here, it wasn’t too long until I was allowed to follow James and his friends to the park. It was different at the park, however. I was usually the only white kid playing. So I got kneed or pushed around more than most, sometimes because I was white and sometimes because I played like a coach’s son — calling fouls or traveling until I learned to keep my mouth shut. But if things got too rough, James, and then some of his friends, came to my defense: “Just play ball and leaved that boy alone.” This was a risk for James. Even though he was respected, his respect came from his athletic abilities and not from bravado. He held a quiet presence among his peers. And they often made fun of him for being a momma’s boy, going to church, and baby-sitting too much for his little sister.

My relationship with James was a risk, too. But not as far as my parents were concerned; they were “good” liberals and relished their progressive tendencies in our small town made up mostly of republicans and redneck democrats. No, it was my relatives and neighbor men who often went out of their way to offer their so-called wisdom: “I seen some white boys down at the park. I don’t know if I would go there if I was them? Niggers you can’t trust with tour breath, you know? They’ll steal ya blind or knife ya, they will.” I just shrugged my shoulders and acted like I didn’t hear them. But I heard everything they said, and the words echoed in my head every time James and his friends took me down to the park.

That March, Marion lost in the state finals to an all-black team from Indianapolis. Then Martin Luther King got shot in April and Bobby Kennedy in June, and suddenly people seemed to say and do things I’d never seen before. Fights broke out at school. Fires were set for no reason. Streetlights got shot out and yahoos raced around in pickups stirring up old black people who were afraid to leave their houses. Night after night my parents sat in silence and watched the sad faces of Huntley and Brinkley as they described a world that seemed to be falling apart. But I was obsessed with basketball and didn’t care or know any better.

I would hang out at the park by the hour, playing, or more often watching from the sidelines the older guys running, waiting for that rare chance to get in. Fights, shouting matches, and dramatic debates broke out over who fouled whom with endless reenactments of rule interpretations. In fact, their whole way of playing began to fascinate me as it seemed not at all like the rational and orderly form taught by my father. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, but somehow I felt drawn to the distance they created between themselves and the white world just off court. It was like I had traveled to some distant country, when all I did was walk three blocks from home. Watching these black men and boys, I realized they were completely different here than they were around white people. They spoke in a language that was both English and yet not English. I could never figure it out. Sometimes it seemed like when they talked they were playing a game, turning words and sentences inside out, making jokes and coining new phrases, more like singing than speaking. Their cryptic jokes, especially those of the older guys, depended on secret meaning and signals I knew nothing about. Even their laughter seemed to originate from some unknown organ in their bodies. I’d never seen any white guy laugh like they did. Grown men, too, doubling over and falling on the ground, like people in seizures who needed wallets or spoons stuck in their mouths to keep them from swallowing their tongues. Sometimes it was funny to watch them and other times I found myself becoming nervous. Life was supposed to be more serious, I thought. What could they be seeing that I couldn’t that made everything so funny?

The big games were played on Saturday afternoon and almost every night during the summer. Men drove over from nearby Muncie or Kokomo. A crowd would form and guys would have to wait sometimes for hours to have the chance to knock off the team holding court. They came in long, low-riding, dark Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs, never station wagons or trucks or convertibles like white men drove. When someone new arrived, the men hanging around for the next game turned to see who had arrived. Slowly the car door opened and two or three pairs of long legs came out as they sat changing their shoes. Stepping out dramatically, the music of Curtis Mayfield and James Brown floated them onto the court. These weren’t the happy, snappy songs my sister and her friends listened to, jumping around in our yard; these were moody songs of love, with emotions that sank down the spine, into the groin, and then out through the shoes, inspiring images in my mind never before dreamed of.

Then they took off their shirts, revealing upper bodies that projected masculinity and majesty that magnified their true size. And by the time they’d run up and down the court, their skin took on a sheen that made them look the color of oiled guns.

If there was a game going on, newcomers stayed in their cars and drank tall bottles of Pepsi. But if all the men were shooting around between games, they ambled up the court, their bodies lanky like spiders, going sideways and circling around, casing the competition, nodding, slapping hands, allowing everyone to notice their presence. A player with a reputation commanded respect and got the ball as soon as he came on court. I remember one of my father’s best players, Avis Stewart, who’d returned from college, showed up. He wore a dark head band to keep back his afro, a ragged, sleeveless sweat shirt, trunks with his college emblem on them, and suede Converse tennis shoes the color of his gold skin. He towered over everyone, proud but cool, like a magnificent hawk that flew down from atop his perch. He took the ball, spun it in the air, and then dribbled around in and out through his legs to get a feel for it, as if it were a religious object that required ritual preparation. Then with a flip of a wrist, he put a little ‘English’ on the ball and made it bounce back to him so he could take a jumper. After he made the first shot, the ball came swiftly back to his waiting hands. Hitting the first shot was a good sign, hitting a third or fourth in a row cut the chatter and the court cleared. All eyes turned to Avis. He held out his hands and waited for the ball, his long gold fingers stiffened as if in some kind of trance, almost like they were separate from his body. From baseline to baseline, ‘round the world,’ we followed each of his shots as they sank with a sweet ring, hitting the bottom of the chain net and plopping out. Each shot propelled him faster and faster, making him even a little impatient for the ball to be back in his hands. Finally he missed. The spell he’d created broke and the court flooded with players again.

After more warming up, a game emerges suddenly out of the chaos. With white players a game came slowly; someone had to always organize it, line players up, five here and a group of five over there, pointing out who was guarding whom, setting up a defense, figuring out who should bring up the ball. But not so with black players; their game just began. Its logic came from within the game itself.

Once play started the game was all that mattered. No one was supposed to leave or concern himself with matters off-court. And the best players seemed oblivious to friends, dogs, kids, and even women. The world outside was forgotten. To be within that rectangular space, inside that timeless dynamic, a part of a rhythm and movement that they had created called them every weekend and every spare summer night. When I think about it now, the basketball court was perhaps the only place black men could be together in public without suspicion outside of their church.

Sometimes a ball would careen wildly off the rim, destroying the rhythm momentarily. But this was my moment — a chance to enter the game and thus their world. I ran to retrieve the ball as it rolled all the way to the swing sets or into the street. As fast as I could, I ran back to within heaving distance, and with all my might flung the ball with as much speed and accuracy as I could to the guy waiting for me off court, who gave me what I wanted most: a nod, a quick jerk of his head, his chin pointing to me in approval, acknowledging my presence.

My father had two lives: basketball season and the rest of the year. He coached baseball too, but there wasn’t as much passion for this in Indiana. But then nothing in our town could match the magic people felt for high school basketball. Nothing.

Not religion, not politics, not music, not the county fair in August, not even the trial of a woman and her lover who supposedly sawed up her husband and threw him in the Mississinewa River. When November rolled around, people talked of nothing else. In the barbershops and beauty salons, in the bars and bowling alleys, at church and even in funeral homes, everyone elsewhere talked basketball.

In Marion, everyone know the names of the 12 players on the high school team, the Sutters, the Prices, the Pettifords; everyone knew their families, the coach’s record, the schedule, the chances for a state championship. A spell came over our town when daylight waned and the darkness of December pulled people indoors. The stores brought out the purple sweaters and sweatshirts, the gold shirts and neck ties, the purple pumps and pant suits — all to match our school colors. The booster club sold stickers and pins and people stuck them onto bumpers and winter jackets. The signs on the stores no longer advertised sales and specials, but changes weekly to cheer on the team. Even the dentist, who my mom always suspected of being a John Bircher, took a break from his battle to get “the U.S. OUT OF THE U.N.” to lend his billboard to the cause. Week by week through the winter, basketball crept into our consciousness, taking over our lives, shutting out the world except for what was known of our rivals in the other factory towns of central Indiana. The War in Vietnam and the civil unrest in cities and on campuses were far away.

Basketball somehow kept our town together. It removed barriers and eclipsed the mundane circumstances of our lives, allowing us to celebrate the energy of youth — the beauty and innocence of young men who didn’t have much future off court, but who had promise and passion and a jump shot. Ironically, in these winter rituals the most feared and mistrusted members of our community, the black male teenager, often took center court. And they became my secret icons — heroes who couldn’t be heroes for white boys growing up in Indiana in the sixties. I idolized the players on my father’s team, black and white. I sat with them on the team bus, shot with them after practice, ate with them at restaurants before the game. I was privy to a world that boys and even adults in my town envied. I witnessed the pre-game pep talks, the half-time strategy sessions, the post-game celebrations. In awe I watched them shower, their long, lean, Herculean bodies, ageless and true. I watched my father whispering in their ears, his arms around their backs, yelling at them from courtside, talking quietly to them in the dressing room after they lost a game. I lived every moment of every game with them. With each shot, each defensive move, each pass, I followed the ball from player to player as if I were out there with them. I knew their nicknames and moves, and practiced with them in my driveway, muttering to myself the play-by-play, switching roles as I became each player. And as it was in my fantasies, it was the black players in real life who secretly captured the imaginations of the throngs of white people jammed into gymnasiums all over Indiana.

At that time there were maybe four or five black players on Marion’s team. Industrial cities like Fort Wayne, Anderson and Muncie also had black players, (and of course there were all black teams in Indianapolis and Gary), but by and large there was a clear taboo against blacks dominating any team of influencing the style of good old Hoosier high school basketball. Even for those teams which had several black players, five blacks were never allowed on court together. No one ever said exactly why. But everyone knew. They wouldn’t be able to do the set plays, chaos would break out. They needed a little smart white point guard to direct traffic. Once when several of the white players had fouled out, I remember that four black players and a Chinese American guy were sent to the floor to finish the game. Of course we won. But if we had lost the blacks would have been blamed, not the whites for fouling out. Yet everyone could see the dynamic of the game change with each black player added to the court. The pace of the game quickened and the fans got more excited as the style changed from the white game of defense and passing inside to the big man, to the black game of finesse, speed, shooting, and blocking shots.

From the bleachers I watched as did all the people in town lucky enough to have a ticket. Seven thousand people clung to their prized season tickets which people won in a lottery at the beginning of the seasons, while others procured them through clout or via family inheritance. The ticketless and the night shift huddled around radios. And the streets emptied from seven to nine o’clock. Everyone kept the players in the center of their mind, whispering prayers for each free throw. But when these heroes of Friday and Saturday night slipped out of their uniforms and walked out of the gym, those who had the wrong skin color became “colored boys” again who live on the wrong side of town.

I could never understand the hypocrisy that warped the people on my hometown, who otherwise seemed to see life so clearly and simply. When you’re 13, you don’t know how things get twisted like this, and it bothers you because in school and in life you’re trying hard to fit all the pieces together. It didn’t make sense why people distrusted one another because of the color of their skin. The riots and burning down of the cities, the KKK marches, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy seemed like scenes from folktales or stories in the Bible. Surely the good would win out in the end over evil. Yet distance always creates the illusion of righteousness: racism wasn’t our problem; what we saw on the nightly news had nothing to do with us, the good people in Marion, Indiana. Besides history told us that slavery and all the terrible things white peoples did to black people happened a long time ago. All that was fixed and forgotten. Yet, now that I look back, it never occurred to me to question why there were no black people at my church or at the Elk’s Club swimming pool or teaching at the high school or working anywhere but in the factories.

Then one day I was looking at an old scrapbook at my grandmother’s house. My cousins were showing me the obituaries of my grandfather, proving to me what I refused to believe when they showed me the rafter in the garage. I kept staring at my grandfather’s picture and rereading the newspaper clippings, wondering why what my cousin’s had told me had been omitted: that my grandfather had not simply died in the early morning hours, but had been found hanging from a rafter by my 10-year-old father when he went to the garage to look for his basketball. I flipped through the pages looking for him, but my grandmother had apparently unconsciously left him out and instead I could find only page after page of my ancestors, the poor Celtic-American farmers with stern faces and stiff bodies, who stared back at me as if judging me for my grandfather’s unforgivable act. And then, more horrible still: in a fold of a page I came across a yellowed newspaper article, unfolded it, and read the headline: “Mob Storms Jail in Marion,” Below the headline was a photograph of those two young black men hanging from trees on Marion’s courthouse lawn. With the image of my grandfather still trying to find its place in my mind, I stared at their heads drooping like puppets, their feet hanging off the ground, their bodies thin and long-stretched out of proportion, tongues hanging out of the corner of their gaping mouths. Below, looking up at them, glassy-eyed and giddy, some with remnants in their hands of the boys clothing as souvenirs, were the citizens of my home town — men and women, teenagers, relatives, uncles and aunts, perhaps even my grandfather there somewhere in the crowd.

After seeing that picture in my grandmother’s photo album, I would stare at those terrible trees on the courthouse lawn that I recognized from the photograph. And at Christmas when the town square was bedecked in holiday lights to proclaim our town’s status as “Christmas City, U.S.A.” I couldn’t help seeing the shadows of those teenagers hanging from the same trees gaily strewn with wreaths and reindeer.

When James and I reached 14, he looked almost like a man. He’d grown tall and the muscles in his arms and legs had grown thick and pressed out his skin. He became the star athlete in junior high. He was the team — the halfback, the pitcher, the 100-yard-dash-man. He hit all the home runs, blocked the shots, ran for the touchdowns, and captured the ribbons for the longest jumps. And when he pitched all you remembered seeing was not the white of the ball but the white of his clenched teeth as he struck you out. One Saturday, playing football in our yard, James ran so hard for a touchdown that he bulldozed an evergreen bush and it snapped off at the base. Confessing to my parents, he cried, promising my mother he would give her the money to buy a new one. But it didn’t matter. My mother worked at the urban League and slipped political pamphlets into people’s doors of McGovern. She liked that I had black friends playing in our side yard and spending the night. James could have burned our garage down, and she wouldn’t have cared. My father liked him too and would stand and watch us playing in the driveway, coaching James on how to flip his wrist for his jump shot: “Son, you’re gonna hit a lot more of those shots now if you follow through like I showed ya.”

James spent hours at our house, coming over when I wasn’t even there to practice and shoot around. When we went on vacations, he came over and mowed our yard and checked around to make sure the papers weren’t piling up on our porch. Sometimes, too, he spent the night. Lying there next to him in the dark, I thought about what would happen if some of my relatives would come over and see him next to me in my bed. Feeling him there breathing next to me, his eyes staring wide open into the dark, it felt like the Earth might crack open and swallow us down into that molten ball of fire at its core. Or, I thought, lightning might strike our house, like in a Frankenstein movie, and transform us. Him into me and me into him. When he went home after breakfast, I felt a sense of relief. My two worlds collapsed back into one. And I would go back into my room and quickly brush off his hairs left on the bed sheets, the little o’s that looked like they had spilled from out of a book.

It seemed like sometimes he never wanted to go home, and would stay past dinner, refusing my parents’ invitations to eat with us because he felt like he was imposing. So as we ate, we could hear the ball bouncing on the driveway and the goal shake when he missed a shot. At the time, I never understood why he didn’t want to go home, but now that I think about it, who ever wanted to be home at 14? My house was a refuge for James. His black friends made him uncomfortable, and at times teased him for being square and a mama’s boy. One day after losing yet another game to him at 21 and a little annoyed that he had been at my house nearly all day and showed no sign of wanting to go, I made up my mind to ask him a question that I knew he didn’t want to talk about — his father. I figured maybe he would just leave rather than talk to me about it. I knew the subject upset him because once he and his cousin Clayton fought over something about his father. James and I were resting between games, sitting against the giant ash tree that shadowed the court and hung over our garage. When I mentioned his father, he didn’t say anything, which was what I expected. James spoke only when spoken to, and then not always. So I asked him again, “How come you don’t have a dad, James?” He fidgeted, began itching his back, pulled up on his socks, then tried to spin the ball on his index finger but couldn’t. I pressed for an answer, ignoring his discomfort. “Everybody has a dad. How come you don’t?”

“No, I don’t have no dad,” he finally shot back with unusual emotion.

“Wol’ why not? What happened to him?”

For once I felt like I had ruffled his poise and made him sweat. He looked sick, and his mouth opened but no words came out. Then incredibly I saw tears like steel ball bearings sliding down his cheeks. He tilted his head up toward the branches overhead and blinked and blinked, trying to keep them wide open, hoping to keep gravity from letting them spill out. I was sorry I’d ever asked and wanted to take the ball from his hands and run for a layup, hoping he’d follow and all would be forgotten. Embarrassed for him, I tried to look away, but his Adam’s apple kept lifting and falling down his throat as he tried to swallow down his pride. He clinched his teeth and then burst out his explanation, choking between breaths, his eyes still staring up into the branches, as if I were looking down on him: “My daddy killed himself, put a gun in his mouth behind our house in the alley and blew out…”

I never heard the rest of it. I sat in silence, looking at the grass, afraid to see his face. Then he got up and stumbled around like a newborn colt, took a couple of shots and went home.

As James and I got older, we became absorbed into our separate racial spheres except during basketball season and in the summer when he would drop by my housed for a game. Our games became so intense sometimes I lost my temper and stomped into the house or threw the ball well into the neighbor’s yard. My temper had become a serious problem and often I had to be set down for getting so mad at myself in the middle of our games. It was like some kind of spell came over me and I lost all sense of reality. James, of all my friends and family, never judged me for it. He simply waited until I returned to myself. And then beat my ass one more time. Sometime we nearly fought, pushing and shoving for a rebound, or slamming each other against the telephone polls that held up the backboard. His jaw tightened and his eyes became small. Sweat poured off his forehead even in December. I loved playing this way, pushing out the world, maintaining my focus on his eyes and daring him to come in and try to get around me. We knew each other’s moves so well, we could close our eyes and play.

No longer a kid, James at 15 and about to enter high school had a reputation at the park that got him picked quickly for the big games. I could only play in the games with younger or white guys or when they weren’t enough players to make five on each side. In the big games, I remained a spectator. I could tell James felt uncomfortable when he would be allowed in game after game and I would be ignored or overlooked. He lobbied for me, pointing me out in that awful moment when the team had four players and a guy scanned the court looking for his fifth, taking his time to feel the power he had to make grown men feel their worth. “He’s the best shooter on our team, pick him. You know who his dad is, don’t ya?” James urged an older teammate. But the older black guys usually chose their friends.

Sometimes as I watched him play, I found myself envying James, envying his blackness and the world he lived in. I spent hours surrounded by black guys either at the park or playing sports in school. Unbeknownst to them, and perhaps even myself, I tried to imitate them on and off the court. I longed for a black leather jacket and shiny, exotic-colored three-inch heels, but my parents never allowed them. All I got was a bandana and colored shoestrings for my ugly white high-top Converses. I listened to the Jackson Five, Marvin Gaye, and the Motown sounds. I slipped their expressions subtly into my speech. I fantasized about the black girls they talked about. Alone in my room, I practiced that bounce and drag to their gait before the mirror.
One day, standing around on the sidelines waiting to get into a game, James pulled a muscle and waved me in to take his place. At first, I thought he just wanted my help, but hobbling off he pointed out a guy and said, “You got the guy in the blue sweatshirt.”

None of the older guys said anything as I took his place. I played like it was life or death, running as fast as I could up and down the court, thrilled to be jostled and pushed around for the ball by men twice my age. When I waved James back in, he shook his head. Our team won and won again, and I played three times that day thanks to James’ injury. Later, when we finally lost the court, James and I walked to the drugstore for a Coke. He had stopped limping, making me wonder if he had really been injured at all.

Breaking into the games I learned didn’t necessarily mean I was allowed into the game. I was still white and an outsider. Sometimes it felt like three teams playing at once — the opposing team, my team, and me.

I played whole games without once getting passed the ball. I got the ball only through my own rebounding efforts or by stealing a pass. When the ball did come my way, my sole option was to pass it back. But I didn’t care. I concentrated on defense, setting picks, and rebounding. Only toward the end of games, with our team well ahead or if I was wide open, did someone pass me the ball. But then, out of fear, I’d often pass it back, which drove them crazy. “Man, shoot the damn ball!” But if I made it, it was like I had grown six inches and my hair turned from thin blond spikes to a thick Afro. Then I was in rhythm of their world and I didn’t want out.

Most Sundays my family got together after church for dinner with my relatives — either they came for a visit or we drove over to my grandmother’s. One day, I wasn’t sure if they were coming or not, and so when James stopped by to play a few games, I grabbed my ball and slammed the kitchen door behind me, tossing it ahead to James for a lay in.

My relatives lived in a small farm town 20 miles away where no blacks ever lived, or even thought to stop and get gas. My uncles and grandmother weren’t exactly generous in their opinions about the “coloreds.” My grandmother, years ago, had attended Klan rallies with my grandfather. She was bred into a world that feared African-Americans, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners of all kinds. A dyed-in-the-wool Republican, she talked like FDR was the antichrist until the day she died.

As James and I fell into our usual competitive games of one-on-one, I lost all sense of time and concern about my relatives’ visit. But when James pulled up short on a drive to the basket and turned to look up the driveway, I knew instantly that they had arrived. I turned to see my grandmother getting out, followed by my aunt, uncle and two cousins. They waved, expecting me to run up to the car and help them unpack. But seeing James beside me on the court, the older adults walked toward the house without turning back. My cousins lingered longer, pulling picnic baskets from the trunk, looking at me for some sort of reaction. James, paying them little if any attention, continued shooting. Suddenly I felt small and getting smaller. My older cousins, who I revered, seemed to get taller and taller as I feared introducing them to James. Then James seem to become unnaturally prodigious, reaching his hand above the rim to tip in a shot, his body getting wide and thick, his shoes and elbows crowding me. I didn’t know what to do, but had to do something quickly. “Got to go,” I said, turning to James and seeing all of his blackness, his dark face and arms, his pink skin under his fingernails.

As my cousins edged closer, both curious but with little interest in playing, I pleaded to James out of panic. “Maybe you ought to go on home now.”

“I just want to shoot around some,” James said, draining his favorite shot from the corner. “That’s okay with you isn’t it?”
Of course it was. He could have come in and ate with my relatives and no one would have said anything. My uncles might have been nervous and might grandmother might say something stupid like, “I’ll bet you don’t get no pie like this at your house do you?” But I choked. I told him he had to go home and asked if he didn’t mind going the back way — behind our garage, over the back fence and through the field.

“Why through the back yard?” he asked.

“It’s closer,” I whispered. Not true. It was out of his way.

“Closer?” James looked embarrassed, his mouth opened looking for something to say. Then he looked over to my cousins and tossed me the ball. Without looking back at me he walked past our garage to the back fence. He climbed over it and into the empty field that separated our house from the black neighborhood behind it.

“No you can keep the ball until tomorrow,” I said running after him. “Maybe there’s a game at the park?” I was sure I could say the right thing to get him to understand. But as I reached the fence and called out his name his fast walk broke into a run.

The next time he saw me at the park, he acted as if nothing had happened. But the die had been cast. And as we grew older and went to high school, we came together only when we were playing at the park or during basketball season when the world around us, for a brief time, reduced to a colorless blur in the corner of our eyes.

Michael McColly, in 2000, won a creative nonfiction award from the Illinois Arts Council for “Christmas City, U.S.A.” In 2007, his book The After Death Room, a work of journalism and spiritual exploration centered on the AIDS epidemic, won the LAMDA Award. He teaches creative nonfiction, journalism and literature at Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University.

Dave Zirin Interview

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By:

SL Interview

Dave Zirin on Sports: Two Things at Once

by Nicholas Reading

In a sports’ world that is too often reduced to top 10 lists, highlight gifs, fantasy leagues and box scores, Dave Zirin approaches athletics as what it is and has always been, a lens through which we can view both society’s successes and failures. I spoke with Dave on the Friday before the Super Bowl, discussing his love and in-depth knowledge of sports, what drives him as a writer, and of course, the NFL (see who he liked to win the big game) complete with thoughts on Cam, Peyton, and CTE. When Zirin plays, he plays for keeps. We also touched on the political nature of athletics here and abroad, TMZ, a fitting slogan for the Olympics, and what’s looming on the sports horizon.

Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation and he writes a weekly column called the Edge of Sports. A frequent contributor to ESPN, CNN, NBC, and FOX, Zirin, in my opinion, is one of the most important sports journalists today.

Nicholas Reading: You’re a bit of a rare breed. What brought you to the intersection of sports and politics as a journalist? Was there a defining moment?
Dave Zirin: Oh, my God, that’s really kind of you. What brought me to sports writing was a lifelong love of sports. I grew up playing sports, I grew up memorizing everything about sports, and it’s something that has always meant everything to me. It’s been an essential part of my life. When I got into politics, one of the things that was interesting to me was that all of the things I thought I knew about sports were all of sudden under a different kind of lens – just some of the basic narratives that I thought I knew about – people like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, the Olympics, the World Cup, everything started to look different. And it has been a very fascinating process for me. And at the point in my life I was really trying to understand if sports should be rejected or if it should be reclaimed because there is something good in sports. Or if it is really about that displacement – public funding for stadiums, racism, sexism, homophobia, and really coming to grips with the fact that sports are two things at once. It has two different traditions, good and bad, fair and foul. I’m trying to do my best to revive and dig up that tradition of social justice that does exist in sports and try to make it come alive for a new audience.

NR: Have you faced any blow back? Was anyone saying, “Just let sports be a game?”
DZ: You definitely do get some of that. And I feel it. I really feel it, and I’m sympathetic to it. I would love for sports to be ala carte. I really do wish sports were just the fun of the game and the artistry, no different from going to a play or an opera, just another form of cultural entertainment. Unfortunately, the very power of sports has made it something else. If I wasn’t talking about it it’s not like these things would cease to exist. The Washington football team would still be called the Redskins. The St. Louis Rams would still be moving to Los Angeles. These things would still be happening. To call out these things, and it’s not just me to doing this; I’m not some kind of lone wolf. But to say the house is on fire is not the same as being an arsonist. We’re not setting the house on fire. It’s burning independently of us. And pointing it out, that the fire is raging, is a prerequisite to putting that damn fire out. Not just reveling in the fact that the world is burning.

NR: I have to ask about Cam Newton. You wrote your own open letter, which I thought was great, and recently Cam has said, without reservation, that he felt a part of the criticism he has received is because he is African American. Will these comments open eyes or just make more folks deny any racism?
DZ: Well, it’s interesting because his exact words were that he is an African-American quarterback that no one has seen before. We have gotten past the point where it has been normalized to have African American quarterbacks. I mean, Russell Wilson has been in the last two Super Bowls, for goodness sake. What Cam Newton is trying to say is that he is going to be authentically himself, even if it puts people on edge. And that means he’s going to keep smiling, keep celebrating, he’s going to keep being him. He was acknowledging that makes people afraid, but it’s actually an important thing to address. He has to still be himself. It reminded me so much of another athlete who was also very clear that he was going to be himself and that is Muhammad Ali, who said “I don’t have to be what you want me to be” early in his career. That was his great statement of independence. Now I’m not comparing Cam Newton to Muhammad Ali in full. Ali risked years in prison opposing the Vietnam War, all manner of hate and death threats and all the rest of it. But in the 21st century it is still very liberating for a lot of people to have Cam Newton be willing to be himself in a manner that can be described as unafraid. It’s still rare, it’s still powerful in his willingness to do that and it’s making him friends and enemies all over the place.

NR: Not to be too NFL heavy…
DZ: No, that’s okay. It’s funny that you don’t want to be NFL heavy. Sometimes people ask me why I cover the NFL. The NFL is so hegemonic in the US sports world that to be a sports and politics writer and not talk about the NFL should be utterly irrelevant; it is basically to not be a sports writer. Eighty of the top 100 sport shows watched last year were all NFL games. I mean, it’s not even close. So, I have no problem with you being NFL heavy. If we’re talking sports and politics this is the number one discussion in town.

 

NR: This has to do with CTE. Antwaan Randle El recently came forward and expressed his feelings that he wouldn’t play football again if given the chance due to his physical and mental ailments. Calvin Johnson is retiring at 30. What’s your opinion on the future of the NFL and when do fans value players’ health and future as much as our own?
DZ: It’s interesting because we really are at a point where the NFL has an existential problem. The journalist James Reston once said that the press is much better at covering revolution rather than evolution, and I think that’s what we are looking at here in that the popularity of the NFL is evidence that it’s not going anywhere this year, next year, five years from now. But there is this kind of 20-year generational issue that hangs over the league, and it has to do with everything you are saying. Science is not the league’s friend. Currently we can find out about CTE, this horrific brain disease that affects NFL players who have to have these repeated sub concussive hits. Of course, it can affect anybody who gets repeated concussions, but there’s nothing quite like the NFL where if you get a concussion it never really gets the chance to heal because you are constantly in this motion of playing this sport where you are running into other people. It’s so interesting to see what the next 20 years are going to bring because the science is going to improve and we’re going to get to the point, I think very soon, where we’re going to be able to detect CTE not just in the dead, but in the living. When that happens, you might see players retiring in mass at 26, 27. Or signing release forms that they’re never going to sue. And you’re going to have parents, so many parents, and this is already happening, that prevent their kids from playing youth football. That’s why the NFL is involved in this ferocious, and utterly unprincipled PR campaign that is all about getting kids to play this sport. This is what we’re dealing with. So who knows what it’s going to look like in two- or 30 years’ time. I think that’s the CTE issue kind of at large. What’s going to happen to a sport when more and more families aren’t letting their kids play, particularly if their kids have skills at multiple sports?

 

NR: You write not only about American sports but also sports and its politics around the world. Have you noticed any differences in the manner in which athletics, or athletes, or even fans, are viewed outside the US?
DZ: Yes. It’s not that the fanaticism is any different, and I’m talking about hyper fandom, it’s really a global phenomenon and it tends to reflect whatever country it happens to be in. What it means to be a sports fanatic in Egypt is very different from what it means in Serbia, what it means in London, what it means in New York City. I’d say the biggest difference between the US and the rest of the world is what we’ve been talking about. It’s about American football versus soccer. The big difference between football and soccer is the fact that soccer, I mean, how do you monetize soccer is what marks the biggest difference. In other countries politics is less policed. When athletes are political it is less corporatized. In Greece recently two teams sat down in the middle of the field to protest the migrant crisis and had a two minute moment of silence for the children who died in the passage from Syria over the Aegean sea and the PA announcer read out their complaints. Now imagine that happening at the Super Bowl. Or at any US sporting event. I mean, you just can’t. That’s what we’re dealing with.

 

NR: Recently Johnny Manziel was in the news again for all the wrong reasons. I feel sometimes that kind of story gets more press. Where an athlete screws up or does something wrong. What athletes do serve as good role models? Who should we be looking at?
DZ: It’s so interesting because the sports industry has become this 24-hour thing and it’s being run much more from the bottom up instead of the top down. In other words, it’s being run, in terms of what’s being covered, through the Internet and social media more than it gets run by what executives think we need to know. In some ways that’s very progressive.  For example, this Peyton Manning HGH story, or violence against women, that’s happened from the bottom up. Or the controversy over the Washington football team name. That has happened from the bottom up. Not from the top down. And that’s great. But what also happens is that profits get governed by clicks and by attention and by eyeballs because there is so much competing for attention. It’s just proven by these scandals what generate clicks, more than an athlete’s social consciousness, more than charity work, and all the rest of it. So that’s what I think creates this gutter culture. This US magazine of sports. Where TMZ can start its sports site and can have it be very popular very quickly because it is willing to dwell on these kinds of scandals. Which aren’t illustrative or indicative of how most athletes are living their life. But it is what draws the most attention.

 

NR: As a sports journalist, what is the state of the profession? Is it where it should be or has it been reduced to sound bites and 90-second highlight clips?
DZ: That’s exactly right. It’s so crazy, man. I mean the sound bite culture, the 140-character culture, the twitter culture, it makes it very difficult, sometimes, to talk about the more substantive issues. But, at the same time it makes a broader audience. And an audience that feels they are being under-served by this culture. So if anybody is listening out there, who is an aspiring sports writer, I would just say, don’t be afraid to be counter intuitive. Because there are a lot of people who do feel that they are under-served by this climate, where everything is TMZ and the rest of it.

 

NR: What sports writers do you go to? What outlets do you go to for your sports journalism?
DZ: There’s a lot out there. For me, honestly, it usually governed more by stories than by individual writers. The work by people like Jessica Luther who has a real focus on the issue of violence against women in sports, or the work by people like Christopher Gaffney, who has been covering what has been happening in Brazil with the World Cup and the Olympics. That’s the kind of stuff that I look for. What is great about this moment is that anybody can write these stories and put them up. So there’s a lot of good out there. Sports Illustrated’s new website Cauldron is really good. Medium is really good. Sports on Earth still puts good stuff up. Vice Sports, Patrick Hruby’s stuff, there’s no shortage of things for people to find. And I would suggest people search on the basis of the issue more than on the basis of the writer. Then they can discover some of these new writers who are cropping up all the time.

 

NR: A few questions about your writing. Obviously your love of sports brought you to your profession, but what brought you to writing?
DZ: For me, and for a lot of people who write, it’s just the desire for some form of self-expression. Usually we read books that really touched us. For me it was reading James Baldwin and just seeing the power of words. And then when I read James Baldwin’s articles about Sonny Liston as he prepared for his fight against young Cassius Clay. That for me was kind of mind blowing as far as what sports writing could be. The thing that I love about writing and what I love about being a writer is that we live in such a deeply, deeply superficial society where people are judged so quickly on what their jobs are. When you meet someone one of the first things they usually ask is what do you do and whatever answer you give is how they start to define you. And it’s really messed up if you think about it. So many of us don’t have the choice as to what our job is going to be, yet, people still define us by what they are. And being a writer, it really does not require someone else to sanction you or label you as such but you can self identify and you can work on your craft and it doesn’t really matter what else you’re doing to pay the bills.

 

NR: So who you like this weekend (still pre-Super Bowl)?
DZ: It’s interesting; this is the first Super Bowl in a while, largely because I’m such a Patriots hater, where I haven’t really been stressed about the Super Bowl! I really don’t give two craps about either team too much. But I do like the Carolina Panthers. I do like the way they play. I do like Cam Newton. I certainly don’t like the way that Peyton Manning has gotten such an unholy pass from the media about things that other quarterbacks would get roasted for and the latest HGH scandal just being the latest incarnation of the ways in which Peyton is protected by big media and the NFL. So I’d like to see the Panthers win only because I feel like it would upset all the right people. If the Broncos win I’m not going to be crying into my cheese dip on Sunday night, unlike last year when tears flowed in a manner that I’m ashamed to describe.

 

NR: If Peyton retires, win or lose, is the HGH story dead forever? If he comes back, will we hear more of it?
DZ: It all depends on new information. That’s the thing about it. And the reason I’m even talking about it now is that I’m kind of gob smacked by this new story that came out about these private investigators who went to the home of the HGH whistle blower and misrepresented themselves as police officers to the parents of this guy, Charlie Sly, who is the intern who gave the initial interview. And the day after the PIs go to their home and they call 911 and you can hear the 911 tape of the whistleblower’s sister in a very frightened manner calling 911 saying there are people here who are saying they’re police, we’re scared, and all the rest of it. But without new information the story will die. And if he retires with a victory, yeah, that’s all people are going to remember, absolutely and positively because that’s the way that sports works. But we’ll see what happens.

 

NR: Anything you’d like to add here that wasn’t covered?
DZ: Just that people should keep a very, very close eye on Brazil this year with the Olympics. I wrote a book called Brazil’s Dance With the Devil and went down to Brazil a bunch and looked at how the World Cup and the Olympics were being planned and everything that’s happening right now in Brazil with the economic crisis, with the spread of the Zika virus, and with a lot of dissatisfaction in the country as a whole. I mean this is the sort of thing that is keeping me up at night. I think about the uses of sports and I hope people keep a close eye on this because the Olympics could come to your town next and that’s not anything you want.

 

NR: That sounds ominous.
DZ: Yes. I’ve said before that the slogan for the Olympics shouldn’t be, “Bigger, Faster, Stronger,” or whatever it is. It should be, “Something wicked this way comes.”

 

NR: Well, like I said, we really appreciate you talking to us. I really enjoy reading your work.
DZ: Thank you.

Nicholas Reading is the author of the chapbook The Party In Question (Burnside Review Press, 2007) and Love & Sundries (SplitLip Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, jubilat, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, and San Pedro River Review. He serves as the managing editor for Sport Literate.

Interview with Jack Ridl

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by Sean Prentiss

Sean Prentiss interviewed Jack Ridl on March 4, 2010, at Margaritas Mexican Restaurant in Holland, Michigan. Jack Ridl (pronounced Riddle) is a retired professor at Hope College in that town. Jack’s father, Buzz Ridl, was the University of Pittsburgh basketball coach from 1968 –1975. Jack’s newest book of poetry, Losing Season, is a chronological narrative of a basketball season in small town America. Jack also has another book of poetry Broken Symmetry published by Wayne State University Press to go along with three chapbooks. Sean Prentiss is assistant professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids.

SP: How did you become a writer? How did you go from being a coach’s son to a poet?
JR: Looking backward from my current age, I see that I would have been an artist of some kind even had I not been a coach’s son. My father, without pressure, taught me how to be an athlete. But I didn’t have much skill. I became an athlete through determination and an act of imagination. I had to do that to survive the expectations of most everybody. I had to pretend to be great. Developing a life of imagination was occurring all the time. It was how I got through things. I know I daydreamed all the time. I remember my father saying, “Get back here,” meaning, “Get back to the real world.” It was never mean-spirited. My wife, if she were here, would say I’ve always been this way.

 

SP: What athletes or coaches influenced you as a writer?
JR: I’ll start with my father because he was incredibly inventive. For example almost every coach in the game today would know about the offenses and defenses he invented, whether or not they knew he pretty much invented them. My dad was doing the motion offense back in the late ’50s. He just thought, “What if I have everyone move?” He created the amoeba defense, now called a match up, that so many teams now use. The idea he had was not a zone or man-to-man but to guard or fill passing lanes. The year he died, he taught John Calipari that defense.

But why he was influential to me as a poet was because he cared about the game, not what the game would lead him to. So I care about the poem rather than where the poem will take me. And my dad taught me how to respond versus impose. So when players came to play for my dad, he looked at their strengths and worked with those strengths. That’s so valuable as a teacher and a writer. It’s very William Stafford-y. You let the material come in and work with it rather than imposing your will on the material.

The player who influenced me was Oscar Robertson. I would pretend I was him all the time. What was influential about Robertson was that he mastered everything about the game. He wasn’t just a shooter or a point guard. And then he could respond like a jazz musician. You could tell this was a guy who respected the game and learned everything. To me, every part matters. The line breaks, whatnot, they all matter in a poem. It’s not one thing, it’s all the parts.

 

SP: Can you talk about why you wanted to explore America’s obsession with sports?
JR: What little American town doesn’t have a team? Sports just seem to be so central. On news channels, there is news, sports, then weather. The big three. My father didn’t understand the obsession. He loved the game but didn’t understand the energy that goes into being a fan. He once said, “I love the game. I just don’t understand why all these people are here.”

Also, where else can we go that allows us to laugh, cry, yell, boo? Rock concerts. I wish poetry readings would be like concerts. Everyone just sits there and assesses poetry. Where else can this natural part of who I am have a place to express who I am?

 

SP: Can you talk about the similarities and differences between sports and writing?
JR: One thing that is really really important is loving to practice. I loved practice. I did theater, and I loved rehearsal. You try this and you try that. I was always experimenting. I was always wondering if I could do this or do that. That experimentation enabled me to write without feeling defensive. It was always, “Let’s see what happens if I change.”

The second thing was learning to live without knowing the outcome. An athlete needs to accept this. Athletes always talk about the next game. So you learn that you never know what is going to happen. The poet Paul Zimmer told me, “You never learn to write poetry. You must learn to write the next poem.” What the next one asks of you, you don’t know. So for me, that lack of knowing is a place I’m very used to. I sit down to write having no idea what will show up. And if it is lousy, I never worry. I go on to the next one. It’s like losing a game. Time to go on to the next one. After that it’s all those buzz words. Just do it. Discipline. Hard work. But this kind of hard work is more play. Basketball players know this.

I also just like it. I am really grateful for the fact that something happens in the doing, in the writing, that is separate from depending on success. You can win the game and score 40 points, but what happens when you’re playing the game? Whether you win or lose, what happens during the game? That time you’re spending in the game is so enriching.

When our daughter was very little, she asked, “What is art?” We said art is a place, a safe place to be yourself. I always wanted students to think about what happened when they are writing. The monks say, “We’re in prayer.” I like being in prayer.

 

SP: I’m thinking about sports movies and how so many sports movies are overly sentimental. Yet I know you promote sappiness and sentimentality in your poems. Why?
JR: Well, my friend Mary Ruefle wrote an essay about sentimentality and how the word “sentimentality” has “sentiment” and “mentality” in it. I like that idea. I’m just trying to be sort of Zen-y with that word. Though I don’t think sentimentality is the right word. I just wish we had appropriated the word for what we want it to mean. I don’t want overly emotional. I don’t want anything to do with that. So I don’t know what the word is for not telling the reader to feel but instead inviting them to feel. Showing the reader emotion, that’s not what we should be afraid of now. It’s dishonest emotion that I hate.

When I was teaching, my students would tell the class, “Sorry this is cheesy.” They didn’t understand the difference between tender and cheesy. My daughter said, “I’m worried about being cheesy.” I said, “You can’t be cheesy if you are yourself.” When a poem fails with sentimentality to me, it’s because I tell the reader what to feel.

“Dare the sentimental,” said Richard Hugo. If you pull back so far what have you got? Dead wood.

 

SP: A review said that Losing Season “is a book that can bring people into poetry.” Can you talk about this? About if you were hoping to bring people into poetry?
JR: I wasn’t trying to bring people to poetry. Now, I think this is going to sound cutesy, but I wanted to bring these poems to people not the people to poetry. By writing this book, I get a chance to give people something that has been taken from them—poetry. School is often the last train station for people. If they don’t get poetry when they are in school, they might never get it. I’d rather have them love the worst poem than take it away from them. I hold out hope that what we do enriches people’s lives. So these poems were like that. I wanted to give them to people who might be at the last train station.

And one of the things that writing does is show a culture. Poetry in general hasn’t really looked at one of the central parts of this culture—sports. It’s looked at politics, religion, the arts, education. It writes about just about anything else. Sports, uh-uh. So I thought, it’s only right to do. Then I felt permission to write about sports because Thoreau writes about beans. Melville writes about whales. Poe writes about a bird. American literature is really strange.

 

SP: This book has a sustained narrative, a beginning, middle, and end. What were the challenges and the rewards to working with a chronological narrative in a book of poetry?
JR: Well, that was not a challenge at first because I didn’t realize it was happening. Then I noticed it and said, “Oh my god. There might be a narrative.” Later I thought, “Can I try to have the narrative not be there? What if I create a series of poems in such a way that the reader goes, ‘Is this a novel in poems?’ and then thinks, ‘No, I’m making it up.’” Could I create this book of poetry in such a way that the reader turns this into a novel? It seems as if that did happen.

Once I realized this book could be novelistic, I had to search through and make sure I didn’t manipulate anything. What I expected was a response where people say, “This is more like Spoon River, the book by Edgar Lee Masters.” I thought they would see this as a documentary of a town. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted them to see this book as a novel, so I’m glad you did.

 

SP: Along with my last question, was it hard to construct a book that had to have each poem stand on its own while also working as a whole?
JR: I did write them to stand alone. Paul Zimmer said to me, “Never write a poem that can’t stand alone.” Richard Jones at Poetry East wouldn’t know a basketball from a kumquat, (don’t tell Richard I said that!) but he took a bunch of these basketball poems and published them. So I figured they were working on their own, even outside of sports. So I really tried to make them so they’d stand alone. So someone can say about each poem, “Yeah I can experience that” and not need the whole book.

 

The Gym, January

Ice hangs from the roof.
Inside, the great furnace
huffs the heat up into
the bleachers. The cement
hallways shine. The glass
in the trophy case shines.
The trophies shine. In
the locker room, each scarred
locker stands solid against
the concrete block walls,
the benches steady in front.
Against one wall, the blackboard,
chalk and an oily rag sitting
in its trough. In the corner,
a water fountain. One door
opens outside, another
to the court. The gym floor
glistens. The blue W in the center
circle glistens. Above it all,
the scoreboard. Outside,
the temperature stays below zero.

 

SP: What made you decide to have this be a losing season? Why not a successful season? Why not a championship season?
JR: Because that’s what you come to know best as a coach’s kid. You know the consequences of losing. Winning is just the absence of losing. For my sister and me, our fears were all about what happens when you lose. The barber scares you about your old man. I remember being eight-years-old and getting a haircut. The barber has his scissors in his hand and asks, “Why didn’t your dad play Doran?”

I always wanted other parents in the town’s eye like my dad was. I wanted newspaper headlines like, “Buick dealer blows sale at the end of the day” or “You call that a root canal?” for the dentist.

Being a coach’s son was just too hard on us as kids. It was an exciting world, but I don’t know how many people know how awful it is. My father always said, “It’s my world. Don’t let it bother you.” That’s not something as a child you can handle. Blood stuff. It’s tough. Tough stuff.

 

SP: This book has a very ethereal feel. There are all these quiet moments with snow falling and empty hallways and sad lives and desperate hopes. Can you talk about that mood?
JR: Hearing you call this book “ethereal” means the world to me. You being along with me in these poems, that makes me so happy.

The book opens with Coach at age fifty realizing what he can’t do anymore—hit his free throw shots anymore, hit the jump shot. So he steps outside of time and pulls weeds. The book opens with that word, but spelled t-h-y-m-e. In the first poem in the book. Coach “gets up, goes over to the garden, reaches for the ball, stops and pulls some weeds growing through the oregano, basil, sage, and thyme.”

And Scrub is forever hoping, Scrub is about neglect. He’s thinking, “I’m on the team, but not really. I’m in the family, but not really.” He’s in so many ways outside time.

There’s not a poem about an actual game. So there are no moments of high tension. Yes, the equipment manager is doing his job, but the big moment is when he looks at a car in the parking lot and reflects on his wife. Or Star goes into K Mart and has this metaphorical experience where he thinks, “Maybe I have wasted my life.”

The snow throughout the book is meant to be snow, but it’s also the objective correlative, the spirit of things. Sometimes the snow comforts, sometimes it hides a dead dog. Sometimes it just piles up against the door, like at the end.

 

Night Gym

The gym is closed, locked
for the night. Through
the windows, a quiet
beam from the streetlights
lies across center court.
The darkness wraps itself
around the trophies, lies
softly on Coach’s desk,
settles in the corners.
A few mice scratch under
the stands and at the door
of the concession booth.
The night wind rattles
the glass in the front doors.
The furnace, reliable
as grace, sends its steady
warmth through the rafters,
under the bleachers, down
the halls, into the offices
and locker rooms. Outside,
the snow falls, swirls, piles
up against the entrance.

 

SP: Can you talk about the endings of your poems? It seems like sports poems’ endings can be easily made to be loud and big. But so many of yours are slow and quiet and hushed. Why?
JR: I didn’t, um, know consciously that my endings were doing this until I was on a panel with Naomi Shihab Nye and Conrad Hilberry. A question from the audience was about structure of a poem. Conrad said the poem usually begins with something small and opens out into something big. Then he went on to add, “Except for Jack’s poems that start really big and get smaller and smaller except that the small thing in the end does something big.”

There was a poem I wrote called “Love Poem,” and because of its cheesy title, I’ll affirm it by saying it was in the Georgia Review. The beginning line is, “The smaller the talk, the better.” The ending lines are, “When we wake I want us to begin again never saying anything lovelier than garage door.” The implication at the ending is subverting the whole notion of love, that we really can’t live up to it. So, I think that these poems in Losing Season are similar. When the Equipment Manager leaves the gym, he sees these kids kissing in this car. He realizes that he’s older than when he left the building, and he thinks about his wife and all they’ve repaired, which is a great word because it also means to re-pair. It’s this quiet moment, this hush, this resonance of lifelong love.

Maybe a poem that undermines all that is where Scrub is dreaming of making his last shot. It’s all tense. But, still, the big moment disappears. There is no last shot. And what appears to end that poem is Scrub at the dance with his dream girl, “and Jennie cups her hand around Scrub’s neck.”

It’s hushed but it’s huge.

 

SP: Can you talk about your titles? They seem very telling, as if you’re letting the reader know exactly what is to come. A few examples are “Pep Rally,” “Coach Tells His Wife about the Big Game,” “The Big Snow,” and “Before the Game.”
JR: It was a big decision to do that. And these titles are very different than my other poems where I really have a great time coming up with titles like “The End of Irony.” These titles in Losing Season were like newspaper titles.

There were a couple of reasons. These weren’t poems to figure out, these were poems to experience. So with these simple titles, I was like, “Here it is, go experience.”

I think with poems, more than with novels, titles have an integral part to play. The poem’s title is doing something to the poem. In one sense, in this collection I put the narrative in the title. The poems are the lyrical response to the narrative titles.

Students very often, because they are taught that poems should be difficult, try to have their reader figure out the poem. So students think that poems should be hard. But students seldom get to experience those complicated poems. They figure them out and then they move on to the next difficult poem. But they never really read them. I don’t want to figure out that a poem is about a dog. Just tell me. Now I’m in that experience with you. All kinds of things can open up because you’ve given me the bottom line. I’m not telling someone to not write a dense poem. It’s that Donne didn’t write a poem thinking, “This will be hard to figure out.”

 

SP: Can you talk about form? Almost all of your poems, except maybe two or three, seem to be long and thin. Why?
JR: That was to embody pragmatism. Americanism. Cut to the chase. No long lines. Because it seemed appropriate for this small town, nothing artsy fartsy. The world was fix-your-car, utilitarian. How do you get a structure that suggests Americanism? Nothing fancy here. I grew up in that culture. Mill working people. Don’t put on airs here. My father was very impatient with anything that seemed to be showing off. I remember him saying, “Why do these Sports Illustrated articles always toss in things I don’t know anything about?”

 

SP: Why are readers so drawn to Scrub, the bench warmer on the team?
JR: Because he’s a dreamer, but he has a very moving reason for his dreams. He dreams to survive. He doesn’t have any way to get through life if he doesn’t dream. It’s the only world he has. Every other world has kicked him out. And then he’s so goofy when he thinks, “Someday I’m going to come back home and have a dog.” He just wants an everyday life. But he’s got no hope of getting out. He’s still going to be in the same damn town all his life. Poor guy. He doesn’t dream of getting out of there and showing up the town. He just wants to be with them, but he never gets to.

 

Walking Home Late After Practice

Walking home late after practice,
Scrub kicks the snow, imagines

each flake a phony word, a lie,
a promise he believed, floating
up off into the air, mixing
in the wind, melting. Scrub

keeps walking, passes
under the streetlight across
from his house, sees the light on
in the kitchen, pauses, looks

back, suddenly starts to dance,
dance under the long deflected pass
of the moon’s light. His feet
slide softly over the layers

of snow piled and trampled hard
by schoolkids, teachers, people
heading to a friend’s house. Scrub,
the dancer, whirling himself

into the soft night, into the wild
applause of the falling snow.

 

SP: I read that Losing Season took you 20 years to write. Can you describe the process?
JR: Twenty-five really. My wife says, “I remember you starting this. It was twenty-five at least.” This book was material that was there all along but I put it aside for very human reasons. I didn’t want to be the coach’s kid. I wanted to be my own person. So you publish three volumes of poetry and three chapbooks and you become your own person so you can write about being the coach’s son.

But what really killed me while writing this book was “belief,” “not belief,” “belief,” “not belief.” “Will this book work? Can I create a narrative in this book?”

The process was one poem at a time until there were maybe twenty of these. And then a few journals were so affirming of these poems that I thought, “I can create a town, and then I thought I could create a novel-in-poems that takes place in this small town.” So it was nice that way, just coming to me. The writing is so much smarter than I am. It’s helping me along.

 

SP: You’ve won lots of awards, and some very big ones, for your teaching. What role do you see teaching playing in your life?
JR: I can’t believe how lucky I am. I’m amazingly grateful for my students. A little tiny school like this, Hope College. I’ve had sixty-five students go on to get MFAs and do great things with their writing. It’s crazy. They went to terrific programs. It’s not me, it’s them, these great students.

I’m grateful that I love teaching so much. The poetry thing would have killed me. The competitive side of it. To place my wellbeing in that, I just don’t know if I would have survived.

I appreciate your understanding that I’m saying these things about my students in a delighted way. I love to give stuff to people.

 

SP: Jack, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for a great conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

JR: Yes. It means everything to have someone attend to the poems as thoughtfully as you have, Sean. Thanks so much.

 

Losing Season: Everybody Talks

It’s the way December
turns into March. It’s
the teeth on the right side
tight, all eyes finding a way
to see around the corner. It’s

not making the coffee,
not saying good morning
anymore, not fixing
the dent in your car,
the draft under the door,
the difference between
the two of you.
Sean Prentiss is the author of the memoir, Finding Abbey: a Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which won the 2015 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography. Prentiss is also the co-editor of The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, a creative nonfiction craft anthology. And he is the co-author of the forthcoming environmental writing textbook, Environmental and Nature Writing: A Craft Guide and Anthology. He lives on a small lake in northern Vermont and serves as an assistant professor at Norwich University.

Winter Wonderers

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Whatever your own midwinter blues, we think you’re sure to be moved by a pair of thinkers on skis. Frank Soos, a Sport Literate veteran with three Best American Sports Writing nods, ponders deeply, slowly through snowy Alaskan woods. Linda Keyes, an SL rookie, let’s it all fly with a downhill tale from the Colorado slopes.

Another Kind of Loneliness

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Another Kind of Loneliness

by Frank Soos

It is dark outside. I’m alone in the ski hut, adding layer on layer to my ski clothes. Though some trails at the university are lighted, I will take the longer, darker path through the woods. The last thing I do is strap on my headlight, feeding the battery pack down my back under all my clothes so it will stay warm next to my skin.

This may be crazy, setting out alone when it is already 20 below. But I know these trails so well that when I cannot sleep one of my tricks to overcome insomnia is to ski them in my mind. Each hill, each turn, I travel behind the science buildings, the student apartments and married student housing, across the small lake, then seemingly deeper into the woods on the other side because I am never really that far from a road. It’s there I have sometimes met the great horned owl, heard it first and then spotted it. Once it spit down one of its compacted regurgitated pellets, sending it tumbling into the snow at the base of the big spruce where it roosted. A gift? A judgment?

In America it is almost a criminal offense to be lonely. At the very least it’s unhealthy. Crazy, as I’ve said. Roy Orbison (bleating): “Only the lonely know the way I feel tonight/Only the lonely know this feeling ain’t right….”

I need to be here alone in these woods.

For 30 years I made my living as a teacher, a reluctant public man. Teaching has its many pleasures. It also has its costs for a shy person. Somehow I knew I could teach in the way that equally shy people know they can go on stage and act. The two are not unrelated. Up there in front of a class, I was a performer with a clear role. Up there, I spent a good bit of energy keeping myself inflated. Students have a right to expect you to be pretty much the same person every day. I could do that; it was something I was good at. But to do it, I had to go away from people to get my self back.

I am a most moose-like man, tall, gangly, clumsy and slow, above all an animal given to loneliness. Moose, except for those moments when the urge to mate comes over them, would rather be alone. You might see them in any weather, nosing in the snow browsing for willow shoots, standing in lakes reaching to the bottom for weeds. You will rarely see them, male moose particularly, in the company of other moose. Moose are ruminants.

My wife Margot’s son has recently returned from Africa, from Ethiopia and Namibia. He went to India as a junior in college and has returned many times. I have no interest in these places. Rightly or wrongly, in my mind they stand for crowds of people. Here are places I imagine myself going to: the high desert of the American Southwest, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the open ocean. Having been to the Refuge once, I would go again, stay longer in a place where sometimes a person can go for hours without hearing another human sound, that of a passing airplane.

Having tried once unsuccessfully to take part in a Quaker meeting, I know I am no good at what the Buddhists call sitting. I cannot be still, cannot quiet my mind. Though I tried a time or two, I see now I have no interest in quieting my mind. That people can and do amazes and baffles me.

I am a ruminant, too.

Once on my skis, I step into the set tracks and begin. At first, I am inclined to move too fast, to rush through the glide that makes skiing skiing, not just running on boards. When I come to the first long flat, I double pole and kick double pole, then return to a stride and begin to find a rhythm I can relax into. I seem to myself to be going slower, but actually I am moving faster than the herky-jerky way I began.

Rather than a skier, I was made to be a basketball player. In my fashion I was. I could run the floor, jump high, block shots and rebound, even shoot a little on some nights. Basketball, though, is a social game, as socially complicated as any game I know. Each player is endowed, at least in principle, with all the same powers, to go anywhere on the court, to pass, to shoot from anywhere. Each player must share these powers with his teammates in complex proportions in accordance with his skills. The only hierarchy on a basketball floor is one imposed by the players themselves and their coach. Here is where I got into trouble. With every missed shot, every bad pass, I imagined my teammates passing judgment on me, and deservedly so. Some games, I got so I wouldn’t shoot the ball at all. Who was I to be taking another shot when I had just missed one two feet from the basket?

Every Sunday in season, I ski with a group of guys, the SCUM, Sugai’s Class of Uncoachable Men. Incrementally, Susan Sugai has made us better skiers. Along the way SCUMs have become a social institution as well. The old Birch Hill ski hut has become our defacto clubhouse. Sometimes we come together to clear trails, have a season-ending potluck, go on summer bike rides. These are good people, good friends. We kid around; we sometimes work out pretty hard; nobody blames me for skiing poorly or envies me in the unlikely event I ski well. But the SCUM probably stretch me to the limit of my sociability. In the jostling give and take, I find myself yearning to hit the trail, to ski away to quietude.

In that quiet, what do I do? What do I think about out there, my headlight bobbing along in the dark? What should I do beyond putting one ski ahead of another? Sometimes, I am ashamed to say, I review perceived slights and recriminations, fresh quarrels: things somebody said or did that seemed hurtful to me somehow. I grind away at such an event over and over, review every detail of what was said and what I might have said or done in return. I grind it to dust, wear it out. I just can’t mess with it anymore. Somehow the hurt is made to go away. Is this what the psychologists mean by “working through” a problem?

If I truly am like a moose, it seems like I should have a tougher hide.

Maybe instead I should seek better to know myself. Samuel Beckett believed we could never come to know ourselves fully no matter how hard we tried. I think I believe that as well, but I think, perhaps like Beckett himself, a person still has to keep seeking to know. But where?  And how?

I could do like Montaigne and ceaselessly fork over every thought that goes through my head. Montaigne compared his own restless mind to a field left fallow and allowed to go to weeds or to “masses and shapeless lumps of flesh.” In other words, a mess-making machine.

What’s up there in my head is like a big balloon. Skiing along, I fill the balloon with words, images, things seen, things heard, things imagined. Many of these thoughts must be so private they can be shared with nobody else. Not because they are banal, sexual, or self-aggrandizing and therefore embarrassing, morally questionable, possibly crazy if exposed to the light of day, but because they are just so many shapeless lumps. Taken altogether, they make a landscape that exists in my head and my head only. In this way they are like the paintings of Yves Tanguy. What are some of those strange tuberous things? Those figures that could belong on cave walls, in kindergarten drawings, in art-as-therapy? Those shapes that look like jigsaw puzzle pieces, parsnips, amoebas, architecture from another planet? It would be wrong to call them misshapen because they rarely attempt to represent anything we know. Their titles, “Extinction of Useless Light,” “The Mood of Now,” say, are jokes against any viewers who might try too hard to make meaning when the paintings are meaning in themselves.

When I stand in the yard while the representative from Bigfoot Pumping and Thawing drains the septic, I want a full report on the state of my plumbing. Nothing serious, the guy assures me as he works his hose around, just a few solids.  That’s it, solids. I’m looking for solids. I think this matters. I’m looking for solids, lumpen shapes that will become somehow meaningful. I persist in the belief that the mind is capable again and again of taking itself by surprise, thinking new, fresh thoughts, at least new and fresh to me—and possible to others. Who can know?

When I was an undergraduate, I spent the better part of a summer reading Beckett’s great trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable in a Grove Black Cat edition with eye-burningly small print. Determined to soldier through, I only realized later, rereading in bits and pieces, that in many places these books were funny—funny in a special sort of way. Molloy shifts his sucking stones from certain pockets in his greatcoat to his mouth, back to certain pockets. Not exactly a Sisyphean labor, but in the ball park if you look at it in the right way, a kind of struggle with the question of how to be alone with yourself, with the question of how to fill your life in the face of the howling void.

One of my professors from graduate school days had a serious drinking problem. When he turned up for writers’ workshop drunk, he’d wail to us: “We all die alone.” One of the women in the class whose problem was pills, would wail back, “Why, John, why?” I don’t know why, either, but I do think we do die as we pretty much live, alone.

When I am in a running race or ski marathon, a century bike ride, despite being in the presence of others, I am essentially alone. Once here in Fairbanks, I found both my hamstring muscles cramping in the last 10 kilometers of the Sonot Kkaazoot, a 50-kilometer ski event. I could see my fellow SCUM Dave Bloom suffering in much the same way. But seeing his pain did nothing to alleviate mine, did nothing to make my own struggle to the finish any easier. I have never asked Dave whether my presence did anything to help him along. To do so would be out of character.

What do people think when they see a moose browsing along a road or trail on a cold day deep in winter? Do they think, say, that this animal is unhappy out there? That it is lonely? There is no getting around the fact the moose is alone, but it’s we people who think too often of being alone as a desolate state, that being alone is in itself an unhappy way to be, “So lonesome I could die,” as Hank Williams put it.

Recently, the famous socio-biologist E.O. Wilson was on the radio extolling the virtues of ants. Ants may be the most socially connected of all animal species, and, E.O. Wilson would say, one of the most successful. Why, he wondered, were there not more species behaving like ants?

I have had varieties of moose encounters on the trails. Like me, their habits are irregular; they prowl the trails by day and night. Once on the baseline trail, I passed a cow lounging in the snow; she hardly gave me a glance. Once I encountered one on the Beaver Slide; she turned toward me, laid her ears back, put her hackles up, and lowered her head making it clear I could not pass. I turned and went back the way I came. Moose don’t much like my headlight; it sometimes makes them bolt. Most of the time, though, moose go their way and I go mine, each of us alone with our thoughts.

If we are not knowable even to ourselves, my errands into the wilderness wherein I seek to know must only alienate me more from the rest of the group. Why, I wonder, can’t I be like an ant instead of a moose?

In our town, there is a man who lately can be seen trudging up and down Farmers’ Loop Road or University Avenue with four shopping carts. In each he has built a tall cardboard tower. Who can know what he has inside them? But one-by-one, or sometimes two-by-two, he pushes his carts along. I may see him sitting beside the four all neatly aligned; I may see him pushing one to meet the others as if he is continually making and remaking a train. Not so different from Malloy’s sucking stones in his greatcoat pockets.

In much the same way, each Beckett narrator from Malloy to Malone, to the Unnameable himself in his urn set on a bar is not always alone but is always alone. Each man is charged with the same chore we all have been given, to make a meaningful world out of what? Of the contents of our own heads?

Those are the lumps, misshapen only if we attempt to assign them given shapes. Stray thought is shapeless. If we invent names for what they are, haven’t we achieved a kind of freedom?

Some may believe in the talking cure, but I believe in the walking cure, or more specifically the skiing cure. Peace is best found through movement. Kick and glide, my pole snapping out of my hand and back again, the steady rhythm that scarcely alters at all except on the steepest hills. It is while striding that I find myself clipping off the kilometers, traveling stretches of trail with no later recollection of having passed over them at all. Surely I did; otherwise, how could I be here now?

In better times, I think bigger happier thoughts, thoughts that may carry me far away from myself and these ski trails. Some of these thoughts slip out, but they slip out the way air can be carefully released from a filled balloon. The rest evaporate, sublimate, dissolve. They are gone. Even those I’ve selected to save, trivial and profound, will be gone by the time I put my skis in my ski bag, climb in my truck and go home. And the rest, those I might commit to paper or a computer disk? When I am gone will they go with me? Just as lost?

I do think it is possible to use exercise to wrestle the mind to exhaustion from time to time. It is possible to stay out skiing long enough, to find myself far from the ski hut or my truck that I have to concentrate on every stride to get myself back, to concentrate on the downhills especially, since nothing is worse than falling at this point. Every bit of energy I have left will simply drain into the ground. When I do fall, I lie there on the snow thinking of nothing except how to untangle my skis and poles, shift myself around and get up. In this strange way, I have achieved a kind of tranquility, the mind finally at rest, empty.

There is some of this fear of losing everything meaningful in Beckett’s narrators, maybe in Beckett himself. Words are frail, words are nothing. But if anything can, words will save us from nothingness.

Montaigne’s essay “Of Idleness” ends with a little joke against his readers, and on reflection, himself: He says of his “chimeras and fantastic monsters, …in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.”

That’s the trick, the joke both Beckett and Montaigne are in on. Thoughts find some sort of order once they are consigned to words on a page. No matter how baggy and rambly Montaigne’s thoughts may seem to be, no matter how desolate Beckett’s narrators’ stories may be, they represent the mediated word. As Montaigne would have it, if not a cultivated field, at least a carefully weeded one. No matter how disparate my own words seem when committed to the page, they have more order than my rambling night-ski thoughts. We’ve all picked; we’ve all chosen. While I can’t speak for Beckett or Montaigne, for me it may be a small victory, but it’s all I’ve got.

 

Frank Soos is author of two collections of short fiction, Early Yet and Unified Field Theory, the second of which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In addition, he is the author of a book of essays, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite, featuring two essays that appeared initially in Sport Literate. His most recently completed manuscript, The Team We Got, is a meditation on basketball as played in the Southwest Virginia  coal fields in the 1960s built around his hometown team, the Pocahontas Indians, featuring the writer as admiring fan and mediocre player.

Powder

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By:

Powder

by Linda Keyes

It’s an old skier’s joke, “Which would you rather have, hot sex or a powder day?” Real ski lovers know which is harder to come by, and I am a powder girl.  I’m also a married, working mother of preschoolers, so frankly both are a rare treat these days. That’s why I put my daughter in ski school at our local resort on Tuesday mornings. I wanted, no I needed, a couple of hours of mid-week skiing with the mountain to myself.

My husband is envious, but his work schedule is less flexible than mine. We fell in love in the Colorado Mountains and learned to backcountry ski together. Before kids, our idea of a romantic weekend was snow camping. We were never cold in our down sleeping bags, zipped together inside our mountaineer’s tent, waiting for dawn and the next perfect powder run. The excitement of high country couloirs and windy ridges fueled our passion for each other. Now however, our typical ski days involve crowded bunny slopes, painful rope tows, and tearful girls with runny noses. Shared powder days are rare. You might say the thrill has gone.

Then one Tuesday I found myself alone on the backside of the mountain. I’d dropped my daughter at her ski lessons.  We’d had no new snow since the weekend and I thought I might find a place to make fresh tracks back where the slope angle scares away the masses. I zipped past the barrier with signs marked “Danger! Experts Only!” and “Don’t ski alone!” I figured if I stayed on the ridge and out of the trees, I’d have nothing to worry about.

Standing on the edge of the deserted and scraped-up slope, I gazed across the valley at the untracked backcountry lines and sighed. I heard the soft sound of skis slipping up from behind. Another skier glided past and stopped just beyond me where the rope marked the edge of the ski area boundary. He was too bundled up to make out his face. What I noticed were his skis, skinny old-time touring boards with three-pin bindings and leather boots. Skis of my youth, the kind of gear I had learned to telemark in with my husband. The kind of gear I had before kids and a job and responsibility.

I couldn’t help but remark, “Wow, those are some skinny skis!”

In a low voice he responded, “Wanna ski some powder?”

I was caught off guard.

“Umm. Okay. I dunno.” I paused and his goggles remained trained on my face, “OK, yes! But where?”

He gestured to the other side of the rope. From the top of the piste where we stood all I could see was a steep, windblown drop off with minimal snow cover, almost bare. I must have looked dubious.

“You cross this slope then drop down into those trees.  No avalanche danger. There’s an amazing untracked bowl below. From there we swing back around to join the resort. Easy skiing!”

If I leaned out far enough I could just make out a low angle slope of virgin snow scattered with young pines.

Reason took hold. “I can’t. My daughter is in ski school. I have no backcountry gear. I have to get to the front of the mountain before noon”.

“No worries. We’ll be back in 45 minutes. And you will have had the best run of the season. The best!”

I gave a skeptical look, probably lost to him under my helmet, goggles and neck warmer.

“It’ll be soooo fun.” Then in a lower, more conspiratorial tone, “You know you want to.”

His attitude should have put me off, but he was right. I did want to. A soft flutter of snowflakes blew across my face, tickling my cheeks and lips.

“Really 45 minutes? No avalanche danger?”

“Promise!”

He held out his gloved hand to introduce himself. “Ro-bear-toh.”  His voice, previously unaccented, rolled over the “R”. For a second I began to feel a little giddy.

We ducked under the line, ignoring placards that threatened fines and loss of lift tickets for crossing the barrier, and began to step our skis across the exposed rocks. A frigid gust of wind stung my nose. What was I thinking? No one knew where I was. No one knew where we were going. I had no beacon, no shovel, no probe. My daughter was expecting me in ski school down below and here I am taking off out-of-bounds with a complete stranger. My husband would kill me (if I didn’t die in an accident or avalanche). And he’d be jealous – jealous of the powder.

Halfway across the scree by now I yelled, “Roberto, I can’t do it. I have to go back.”

”Aw, come on, we’re almost there. It’s gonna be nice!”  Then, whispering, turning on the accent “Fresh tracks. Just a quick run. Nobody has to know.”

From where we stood now I could appreciate the full expanse of snow awaiting, shimmering seductively in the sun. Roberto beckoned with his pole. I glanced back over my shoulder but the yellow rope boundary was already out of sight. I pushed my hood off my helmet, leaned forward, and pushed off.

A couple of minutes later we were frolicking through the pine grove, Roberto making large arcs across the hill on his skinny skis while I bounced in tighter, neat turns around the treetops peeking through the snow.

“Yes!” I yelled as flew past my companion.

“Slow down!” He urged, “Savor it. Let’s stay together.”

I paused to let him catch me. Below us an untouched valley of pure white snow lay waiting, surrounded by rocky peaks jutting up into the cloudless sky.

“Just wait ‘til you see what comes next,” he said.

Gaining speed now we took a long traverse, cresting a small rise at the top of a deep and inviting bowl, the powder light and glittery in the cold air.

“You go first,” he insisted.

I took a deep breath, dropped into the fluffy abyss and floated into another world. I was young again. Husband, children, and job disappeared in one great crystalline whoosh. The turns were effortless. I floated across the slope, sparkles of snow flying up and around me. I coasted back and forth, feeling only joy, my knees pumping up and down in perfect rhythm with the mountain and the sky.

Too quickly it was over, leaving the two of us panting from the exertion and exhilaration at the edge of the wood leading back the resort. I gazed back at the undulating s-curves carved in the bowl above us. My face was flushed and my heart still racing when Roberto said, “Ooh, that was good!”

Suddenly I felt uncomfortable. Embarrassed even. What would I tell my husband? Should I tell my husband? Is sharing the ecstasy of fresh powder with someone else cheating? I slipped back under the cord marking the ski area boundary and avoided eye contact with Roberto. On the return trail we didn’t speak, and the lift ride to the front side was awkward. As we waved good-by however, I felt a sudden tinge of disappointment. Would I ever have another powder run like that again?

That night after the kids were tucked in and the skis hung back up in the garage, I confessed to my husband. He would have read it on my face anyway. I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the week. I skied every Tuesday until the end of the season, but I never saw Roberto and his skinny skis again. My husband got wise however. Instead of date nights, he takes me into the backcountry, for our own tryst in the mountains, re-igniting our passion for each other with the rare and exquisite pleasure of powder snow.

Linda Keyes is a telemark skier and writer in Boulder, Colorado. She supports her snow and literary habits by working night shifts in the ER. In 2014, she won the American College of Emergency Physicians Medical Humanities writing award.

Channeling Mr. Jordan

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By:

by Alessandra Nolan

The season after my father died, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918. Being born in Rhode Island and from prudent Irish blood, he was a Red Sox loyalist from childhood on. But I, in what must’ve been a disappointing turn of events for him, was born a Jersey girl with a penchant for being contrary. Thus, I turned out a Yankees fan. So in the games leading to the 2004 World Series, when the Red Sox came back from a three game deficit to defeat my beloved Yankees and then stormed the Cardinals in a straight series win, I felt him smile from beyond the grave. I remember buying a pack of smokes and a Coke Slurpee at the 7-11 when I heard the Sox won. I hadn’t watched a single game of the series. Really, I hardly watched baseball at all. Stepping outside, I looked past the light pollution in my coastal Jersey town and up towards the stars. I imagined my father’s head floating up there, the way they teach you God floats around in Catholic CCD. I pointed a finger towards the sky. Boston, I thought, still sucks. But if a World Series was Chuck Nolan’s dying wish then, Amen, let the curse be undone.

Making that connection was easy. Memorializing is easy. After he died, my father became a mythical creature with a few concise tall tales. I’d recall favorite memories on cue, laughing through stories of him weaving dental floss around the necks of mine and my sister’s Barbie dolls and then hanging them from the ceiling fan. “Barbie suicide” I would parrot, repeating what he called his deed, his apparent punishment for us leaving their naked bodies strewn across the shower floor. There were other easy facts. My dad loved golf. He liked Motown, enjoyed baking pies, smoked like a chimney. He was a Red Sox fan, a Giants fan, a Larry Bird-era basketball fan. These tiny preferences built a laudable memory of a man I hardly knew. For 17 years I loved, cherished and resented my dad for his whole self. In death, I drew him as a stark caricature and carried that with me, remembering what was easy to remember in an attempt to keep the sorrow at bay.

It was only natural then, nine years later, for grief to finally appear. Destruction and regression happened quickly. First, I quit my job. Immediately after, I quit trying to leave the house at all. It was my second November living in North Carolina and being what the blessed folks in these parts know to be a stubborn Yankee, I figured I was destined to melt in this strange autumn heat. I trudged to my graduate classes in sweat-soaked sun dresses, turned down bourbon in lieu of unsweetened iced tea and made no effort to find joy in the quaint and confederate town of Wilmington, North Carolina. I missed my friends, my home, my family and I missed knowing what missing my dad felt like. In the hours outside of class, I moped around the air-conditioned comfort of the one bedroom apartment I shared with my fiancé. On good days, I wrote. Otherwise, I watched TV.

Inside the television, sports stories from my father’s era lived. The Netflix-Gods offered a series of sports documentaries and athlete biographies — every sport and every human condition — Greek tragedies played against the backdrop of infields and metal bleachers. I settled into my couch and barely moved for weeks.

Croot, my fiancé, worked long and late hours. He would return and humor me if I was awake. He’d pick the popcorn out of my hair and answer questions I’d written down about various sports technicalities I was too lazy to look up. Usually though, he’d come home to half-eaten frozen pizzas, a glowing box and a sleeping wife-to-be. Our couch sagged. I felt the pillows soften and redistribute themselves under the weight of my body. Often, I was lulled to sleep by a series of halftime whistles, shot clock buzzers and the sound of a roaring crowd.

The documentary cycle lasted longer than I think both of us expected. I was determined to make it through every sports-related program Netflix had to offer. Within three weeks, I was down to two and saving the best for last. The first: a three hour and 50 minute PBS special on boxer, Jack Johnson. The other: a seemingly lighthearted account of Michael Jordan’s foray in baseball.

In a ritualistic manner, I planned and scheduled the viewings. I would save Jack Johnson’s for last as I placed more value on the historic relevance of its subject matter. I would force Croot to sit through that one with me. But until then, I would watch Michael Jordan’s disastrous attempt at baseball. To prolong the expectancy, I decided to ceremoniously clean. I dragged myself and a vacuum around the house, stripped the couch of cushions and cleaned the crevices of a month’s worth of popcorn and cat fur. I made the bed. I washed some dishes. I scrubbed my hair. And then, I opened a window and unlocked my door. Holding the remote with authority, I pressed play.

The 1994 Jordan baseball debacle, to my father, was nothing more than a publicity stunt. I remember hearing sportscasters lament about the idiocy of the White Sox for giving him a shot. I was in second grade, and a Bulls fan, since the Bulls were a winning team and red seemed an acceptable enough color. Michael’s retirement did little to my 8-year-old psyche. I simply switched teams. The Knicks, after all, had Ewing.

But now, at 26, I sit crying for the Michael Jordan of 1993-94. The documentary paints his baseball attempt as an epic battle. Athletic egotism had nothing to do with it. Listen, pleads the Sports Illustrated journalist who initially wrote that Michael was ruining baseball; this is a tale of a loving son. He’s sorry for writing that original story now. Spellbound, I sob, becoming too involved in the story of Michael as a grief-stricken child, who upon losing his father loses his will to play basketball. In his loss, he gains the desire to pick up a baseball bat. Baseball, we learn, was his father’s dream for him.

The documentary opens with a crime scene. Cameras flash signs of 74 West and the I-95 ramps in Lumberton, NC. That, I acknowledge, is where I am. Lumberton is just over an hour away in a part of North Carolina that I’ve never been to, but that seems so close now. The director’s voiceover tells the story of James Jordan’s murder. Travelling from Wilmington to Charlotte one night, Mr. Jordan allegedly pulled over to rest just south of Lumberton. According to highly debatable court testimony, Mr. Jordan was victim to a random theft. The perpetrators shot him in his sleep, dumped his body in a South Carolina swamp and took his $43,000 cherry-red Lexus. A fisherman found the body, though it was so badly decomposed that at the time of its discovery, no one knew it was him. He was hastily cremated before being identified — apparently standard practice for strange bodies found on the South Carolina side of Gum Swamp Creek. Two weeks later, a comparison between his dental records and impressions taken by the South Carolina authorities confirmed his identity.

With the documentary paused on the still frame of the funeral, I call Croot to relay my new knowledge.

“Oh?” he replies, distracted, when I finish going through the facts. He is not nearly as excited as I want him to be. “Yeah,” he responds to my silence. “I think I remember that story now.”

“Oh.” I feel a little deflated. I feel as though I was maybe the only person who knew the whole story of Michael Jordan’s father. Or at least, the only person who earned a right to know. “Did you know it happened around here?”

He tells me he thinks he remembers hearing something about it and it occurs to me that he was holding onto highly sensitive information that should’ve been shared. I resist the urge to tell him so. I’m sitting upright, eyes still fastened to the television. On the screen, Michael Jordan wears Ray Bans.

“Okay, babe. I gotta get back to work. I’ll see-“

“Oh, and um, Croot.” I inhale and pause. “Mr. Jordan. His gravesite is like 40 minutes from here.” I’ve pressed play again. I watch Michael and the other pallbearers carry a casket out the church’s front door. I assume the casket contains his father’s ashes. If not, I assume the casket certainly houses his father’s spirit.

“I think we should go.”

We hang up after our “I love you’s” and “see you soon’s.” He assures me he’s game for the gravesite adventure and so I print directions from Wilmington to the burial site in Teachey. Just the idea of visiting the grave is delightful to me. I come to think of the trip as a means to seek closure. In class the next day, I tell some of my more sports-savvy friends about Mr. Jordan’s location. I tell them I want to bring an Ouija board to get help with my March Madness bracket and ask his spirit about Oklahoma City’s chances for the season. Some laugh. A few look concerned.

For years during which my father was both alive and dead, I operated under the assumption that he would’ve preferred me to be a boy. He had three girls, but I was the daughter charged with playing sports and eating Triscuits with him during Sunday night football. In childhood, I pleased him by executing a white girl’s version of a layup and by resisting the temptation to pick flowers during recreational soccer games. By high school, I was a decent enough tennis player to make the varsity team as a freshman. My father was smitten. I was more interested in the post-practice activities; long hours spent at the track smoking cigarettes in my tennis skirt and drinking beers with the boys from detention. Oblivious and clearly deluded, my father invited scouts from D-1 schools to see me play. Two weeks to season’s end, I stopped showing up at practice. Shortly after, I stopped going to school. By that time, my Dad and I were only talking through shouting. He was disappointed. He shouted words like “potential” and “promise” and “wasted talent.”

I spent most of my 15th year sleeping in a cocoon of clothes on my bed that I never bothered to put away. One rare day, when I was away from my nest, my father — drunk and annoyed by the mess — decided to rip apart the content of my dresser drawers. He tossed desk drawers too, broke perfume bottles. Tiny glass animal figurines — shattered. Old youth soccer trophies were snapped in two. I held the two pieces of a broken giraffe and stared at my bare wall. Mere days later, a fight between us grew cold and loud. Something animal growled inside me and I lunged toward him, arms flailing. His fist stopped me. I felt the slow lumps of his four knuckles against my right temple. We were both stunned submissive.

Ultimately, my parents did what you would do to a bad puppy — at 16, they sent me away to obedience school. Time apart mended wounds, but we were strangers when we talked. For the six-month period of peace before the brain-tumor-removal-gone-wrong, we talked on the phone about Tiger Woods and Sammy Sosa. We chatted lightly about cross-country season, our genetic predisposition to weak ankles. At the end of seven minutes or so, the line would grow quiet. I would wrap the phone cord around my finger over and over until he would cough vaguely and with relief, hand the phone to my mother.

After the surgery, as he lay dying for a month in a hospital bed, we talked about my upcoming basketball season. He never let the phone go during those conversations and I didn’t mind. I’d wrap the cord around my arms and listen to him breathing into the receiver. The morphine drip worked on him, as it does many tough men, and he was loose enough to speak his love and say his goodbyes. I responded appropriately, but couldn’t bring myself to believe in his love or his death. In my first basketball game immediately after he passed, I fouled out hard within the first seven minutes.

Croot and I set a date. We didn’t have a date for our wedding, but we set a date to visit Mr. Jordan’s grave. We scheduled our trip for a Saturday morning in December, bright and early, before Croot’s work. We would visit. With every day I crossed off the calendar, Croot tried to understand. He asked the question I dreaded: why? He asked it over and over.

“It’s not like he’s not really famous or anything.”

I told him I just needed to. “To get a feeling,” I’d say. Really, I had adopted Mr. Jordan as my surrogate, southern father.

I read more about Mr. Jordan’s murder. I read about conspiracy theories, mishandling of evidence, the blame the media put on Michael’s gambling. It was all old news. One of his alleged killers sought an appeal and thought he would walk out a free man. He claims only to have been a part of the robbery, not the killing. He’s still in jail. I made a mental note to ask Mr. Jordan about his attackers when we go.

Mr. Jordan’s grave is at Rockfish African Methodist Episcopal Church cemetery in Teachey, North Carolina. We venture inland, down route 40 West. Leaving Wilmington, we pass route 74, the highway Mr. Jordan was driving on when he was shot. I begin to ask Croot if we would have a better chance at finding his spirit if we go to the crime scene instead, but stop myself. I have directions to the grave and feel uneasy enough already venturing out of Wilmington — into what I can only assume is deliverance country — with New Jersey plates. We don’t need to risk getting lost.

Croot drives, talking at length about the coastal resort he works at. They have two parrots there, Gabby and Abby. The birds love him. He tells me about guests and his boss and how busy they are for the slow season. I fixate on the birds and the fact that they’re male parrots with female names. Gabby is slightly neurotic and has plucked out most of his colorful feathers leaving tufts of gray regrowth in their place. I tell him I think the bird is going through a gender identity crisis. I threaten to set them free. Croot sighs.

We travel in neutral silence then for a long time. The air is 40, but the sun is hot. Croot keeps opening and closing the window. We pass some road kill — a gray mangled, decapitated mess. I strain for the opportunity to stare at the mounds of pink insides spilling out of what was his neck. His blood is water splashed from a fountain, shiny and reflective on the hot pavement.

“I think that was a coyote.” Croot says.

“Hm…” I say

He rolls the window down, lets the air out.

We exit into the town of Wallace. It’s a rundown, nothing town with a landscape similar to any mid-American place. We pass a gas station, a five and dime, rows of rainbow-colored trailer homes, the dump. Just out of town, we drive past abandoned farm homes with crumbling foundations. Something in me has always loved the bones of houses. I look at them like modern day ruins. My favorite of this lot is a dilapidated two-story beauty with land for miles and boots by the mailbox. The porch is collapsed and every window but one is burst into jagged glass fireworks. Grass grows through the wheelchair ramp leading to the front screen door. On the lawn, three decent looking vehicles are parked in varying positions. A clothesline with clean sheets hangs out back. It’s inhabited. A skeleton house with a family inside; a true oddity.

I navigate us down a road I suspect was just recently paved and into the empty parking lot of the church. In the documentary, the funeral procession poured from the church’s front doors with Michael Jordan at the lead. The video footage captured him in a suit and dark sunglasses. Mourners gathered at the bottom of the church’s stairs. Today, there is not a soul for miles. The announcement board has no words posted. Croot reads the lengthy name of the church aloud. I stare at my palms. He parks, I feel, too close to the road and I ask him to reverse to hide the car and the license plates against the church’s side wall.

The parking lot backs up to 12 old, old grave stones; the kind that look like Halloween decorations that could fall over with a cold breath. I walk over them to the newer section, glancing from memorial to memorial. In the graveyard, the sun seems to touch everything. We look pale in this exposing light. I don’t take my eyes off the ground. Most graves have bouquets of fake flowers placed at the head. At the tree line, green plastic stems poke out from a pile of real, brown leaves — a makeshift grave for polyester blossoms.

“Everyone here is named Wallace.” Croot announces.

He’s walking through the old section still. The air is thick with the smell of decomposition. I try to reason that it’s just trash — the humid smell of the south without orange blossoms — but I swear it’s coming from the ground. I stop, briefly, at what looks like a misplaced, unfinished piece of sidewalk. The name James Jr. Jefferson scrawled by hand — the words carved out by someone’s finger.

Since we planned our trip to the grave, I’ve been daydreaming about introducing my father’s floating head to Mr. Jordan’s floating head. I’ve been imagining how pleased my father will be to meet him. Being here now, it feels all wrong. I’m not a stupid person. I recognize the connection I’ve been artificially trying to forge. In the unsettling weeks of homesickness and despair, I looked for comfort in the arms of a connection I was never able to foster with my late father. I wonder though, in attempting to resurrect our connections to the dead, are we — the living — merely distracting ourselves from the suffering we feel at the pit of our own mortality?

I think of a dear friend who at 18, suffered from kidney failure, faced death and by the grace of God received a transplant. When he told me about it, I asked if it still affected his life now, nearly seven years later. I was wondering about his general health, the technicalities of the procedure, and the lifespan of an alien organ. Instead he told me about the night terrors he has — of waking up in from a deep sleep to the sound of his own screams.

“From the memory of pain?” I asked

“No, not at all.” He explained, “From being so close to dying.”

His answer stunned me. He lived on the edge, in a limbo between life and death, in constant physical pain. And yet what rattles his subconscious still, nearly 10 years later, is the memory of his proximity to death. I think of my father’s labored breathing — the hollow rise and fall of his collapsing chest after we pulled the plug. It went on for an hour.

Could he see the other side? I asked. No. He said in the moments he thought he was slipping away, he saw nothing. I wonder about the fairytales I’ve told myself — heaven, God, floating spirit-heads, life after death. I’ve honored my father by trying to please a spirit that may or may not be there. Michael Jordan played baseball. I watch documentaries. Someone cared enough about James Jr. Jefferson to stick their finger in wet cement and mark his grave. And for what?

My memory of my father was nothing more than a myth. I wove imaginings of happy times spent together, made calculated lists of his dreams and goals for me from thin strands of idealized memories. And when, nine years later, I sought to make yet another flimsy connection, reaching out to a headstone and gravesite of a sports legend’s relative — thinking in a stream: sports, story, myth, father, expectations, grief — and was left dissatisfied with the outcome, there was no denying that this grief was not the fabricated kind I’d been using to compensate all these years, but the grief for a man I could no longer construct, whose figures and likes and memories were so few that there was no longer any new stories to tell. I was grieving now, not for the death of the father I knew, but for a father I imagined and never even had. The real man rests in a grave I haven’t visited in nine years.

I watch Croot’s thin legs maneuver around the graves. He takes delicate steps, careful not to disturb anything. He looks back at me with the everything sun shining over his head and smiles. I tell him I’ve found Mr. Jordan’s grave, though it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

“Well this is it.”

We stare down. It’s a concrete twin bed cut in half and buried shallowly. Mr. Jordan’s fake carnations are a faded, Technicolor red. For many moments we don’t say anything. I fold my hands together in front of my stomach because I don’t know what else to do with them and they glue themselves to each other. I can see myself in the reflection of his mirrored grave cover. I look at the grave, then at myself, then around the yard, and back again at my own sunlit reflection mangled in the fiberglass. My head and neck float around the perimeter of the body length monument as I shuffle around his resting place, taking desperate inventory. Beside my reflection, I can see shadows of twisted, leafless trees far above me. I stop and settle at a spot directly above his nameplate. It is a concrete square, in light gray, and rests on top of where his shins would be, if there was a body down there. James R. Jordan, it reads. And just underneath: 1936-1993.

“Strange.” It’s the first words either of us has spoken since we found him. I untangle my palms from one another and point down at exposed handles on the left side of the grave cover. “Those are supposed to be buried, right?” I’m barely audible. Croot crosses the grave.                             “Ground must’ve settled.” He whispers too loud in my direction. Crouching down, I brush some pine needles and a prickly burr away. The reflective plastic isn’t as cold as I expected it to be, just slightly warmed, slightly unsettling and so I stand. With the ground so soft, I think I can feel myself sinking.

“Okay” I announce, breathless.

“Okay.” Croot agrees. He snaps a few pictures as I charge towards the car. I call orders for him to get a picture of the concrete slab with the handwritten name. I don’t know why exactly, the words just come out of my mouth. When Croot settles into the driver’s seat he looks over at me. He looks as though he can’t contain himself, as though a thought has just occurred to him that must be let out.

“I wonder when the last time Michael Jordan was here,” he bursts like a star struck 10 year old. I shake my head and shape my lips into something of a smile. I love him. I can’t handle my own brooding at that moment. I will myself to lighten up, but pulling out of the parking lot I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve been disrespectful somehow. Mr. Jordan, after all, is not my father.

Miles from the graveyard, I see my inhabited skeleton house again.

“Slow down,” I tell Croot who slows just enough to view the home in a single mind’s frame. I study its rotting wood, crooked shutters. I’m sure it was once a color, but now it is just the color of dust. On the second story, the only intact window is now fully raised, open wide. There’s a curtain hanging in that window space, ivory with age, but wholly intact; it is a beautiful antique lace. It flaps in and out, the wind tossing it across the windowpane until, for a single moment, it stays billowing inward. A pocket of air pushes in toward the middle of the room. The fabric on either side of the window adheres to the sill, capturing a semi-circle of outside air. The trapped wind reminds me of my father’s final inhalation; the swollen breath inside his risen chest. I feel Croot looking at me and turn to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror. When I look back at the house, the curtain snaps back tight against the window frame.

Alessandra Nolan earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She is now freezing in Ithaca, New York, where she works as an assistant editor at Momentum Media Sports Publishing. She has received honors from Gulf Coast and recently completed artist residencies at Norton Island and Wildacres. Although she should be spending her time finishing her book (a memoir about her experience in a controversial therapeutic boarding school), she requests that anyone who’d like to discuss sports documentaries ad nauseam, please contact her.