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Homemade Dick Taters

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Got a late-night taste for tater tots by Ore-Ida? I’d rather not, my snowflake friend. If you’ve given up Tuesday night baseball for news from the Trump lane, try wrapping your mind and taste buds around these potato bombs of historic proportion. Dick Taters™, fashioned in the honor our beloved 45th “president,” might just be highly caloric enough to stop your heart in its tracks. Why reach for a proven old frozen (Ice Queen) treat when you can make a hot mess of your own?

Recipe for Disaster: Peel two pounds of Idaho potatoes (maybe the only brown tolerated in the Rust Belt), and throw in a sweet potato to achieve that tangerine glow. Parboil in pot for six minutes and just get used to that sinking feeling; it’s the environment being poisoned, democracy scorched. Shred those soft potatoes — “Shred the shit out of them!” — and mix into a bowl with salt, coal, Nazi nostalgia, oregano salt, a big spoon of All White (Alt Right?) Flour, dried dill, angry redneck, Russian vodka, and anything else you can choke down for the next four years. Don’t wash your hands. Even if they look and smell like tiny sausages. Squeeze tots into bloated likeness of a man so crooked, he makes Nixon look like a straight shooter.

Heat while High. Prebake, then set your oven for 666 and cook for 110 days. Read that pint-size copy of the U.S. Constitution and put your legislators on speed dial. Resist urge to stick your own head in the oven.

Snide Effects. This product may cause mild nausea in FBI directors. Poor baby, hope you don’t throw up all over your clown shoes. Maybe call in sick on May 9th. Anyone with the following preexisting conditions may experience extreme vomiting just smelling this food… Women. Women who may become pregnant. Women who may someday think about terminating a pregnancy. Women who may object to any fat-fingered predators. Anyone checking anything other than white on an application. Evangelicals, eat up!

Red State Diarrhea Alert. If you voted for this fucker, bamboozled by his call for jobs, swamp drainage, boy talk about kittycat manhandling, Muslim or Mexican bans, or even wishing “Merry Christmas” again, you might want to eat these tots on the toilet. These curds will run through like a goose at an all-you-can-eat breadcrumb bar. When the splatter hits the bowl, look up from your wrestling magazine, ask your better half if that job plan included a new draft for World War III. And kiss your own filthy ass goodbye.

Dick Taters™  When Trump says, “There’s no there there,” just swallow this shit wholesale. It’s toxic, piping hot.

 

Pitching for Carvel

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by Jamie Reidy

I fell for baseball like I did ice cream: instantly and irretrievably.

Like so many fathers, Rich Reidy encouraged his eldest son’s devotion to America’s pastime, playing endless games of catch. At first we tossed the ball in our tiny side yard penned in width-wise by the driveway and the neighbor’s property and length-wise by a willow tree and a Japanese maple. Later, when my throwing arm necessitated more space, we relocated to the much longer backyard.

That move north seemed like graduation day to me. Soon after, a pitch-back arrived, its silver tubing and a white net marking a highlight in the summer between third and fourth grade. Within a few weeks, I’d tattered the red ribbon that marked its strike zone. That winter, very my father and worked on my windup every night… in the kitchen. I am fairly certain that Nolan Ryan did not hone his delivery on linoleum in the area between the fridge and kitchen table. Why we didn’t practice in the living room or downstairs, I dunno. But Dad knew exactly what he wanted to see: a high leg kick and an exaggerated follow through. I thrived on every minute of that time with him, and I eventually got the mechanics down pat.

Our efforts paid off, as I established myself as my Little League team’s “back innings” guy. The Giants dominated the regular season, losing only once. In the championship game, we got the thrill of competing on “the big field,” a.k.a. where the boys in the Majors (11-12 year olds) played. I pitched the final three innings of the season, striking out the last batter. That prompted the first — and last — time my teammates ever carried me off a field.

Our manager Mr. Flannery invited us all to Carvel for a celebratory treat. A championship and Carvel? I felt like life could not get any better. Nearly forty years later, I realize that assessment was probably right.

Mom missed the game, staying home with my toddler brother and newborn sister. So, only Dad and I rolled to the Giants’ championship festivities. As we pulled into the shopping center parking lot, I spotted several of my teammates already inside Carvel. My old man had barely put his Ford LTD into park when I undid my seatbelt and flew out the door.

As I sprinted from our parking spot, I failed to look one way, let alone both ways.

“JAY-MEE!”

The urgency in my father’s voice brought me to an immediate stop. But that didn’t matter; the oncoming car wasn’t going to be able to halt in time. I braced for the impact.

Luckily, no one had parked in the spots to the driver’s right, so he screeched his brakes and yanked his car to the side, narrowly avoiding me.

I gave the driver a weak wave of thanks. He wagged an angry finger at me. Inside Carvel’s huge windows, the other Giants and their parents had seen the near accident. They smiled with palpable relief. So did I.

Rich Reidy was not smiling. In fact, he had reached DEFCON 5 faster than I’d ever seen before. He stomped over and grabbed my arm at the biceps.

“You never looked!”

I nodded in agreement as my body started trembling from the scare of the near death experience.

“Forget Carvel! Get in the car!”

Wait. Huh? I mean, sure, OK, I forgot the cardinal rule for crossing the street, but c’mon, cut me some slack: I just got carried off the field!

“But Dad, all the guys are —“

“In the car!”

Cue tears. I wished that car had hit me. In our car, I slumped down into the passenger seat. As my father sped us away, all my teammates stared, mouths agape, pointing. Where’s Jamie going?

At home, I ran crying into my room and shut the door. Mom assumed we’d lost the championship game.

I couldn’t believe Dad purposely ruined the best night of my life. I swore I’d never forgive him. It took years for me to I see I’d completely misinterpreted his reaction.

Rich Reidy watched helplessly as his firstborn ran into the path of an oncoming car. I don’t have any kids, but friends of mine with children assure me that there is no bigger fear for a parent. In the Carvel parking lot, Dad’s face wasn’t flushed with anger; it was ashen with fright. He just didn’t know how to express that panic.

A week later I arrived back at the big field for the league All-Star game. Our manager had actually skippered the team that the Giants had just defeated to win the title. In the dugout he turned to me and said, as if it had been the easiest decision of his life, “Jamie, you’re my starting pitcher.”

On the mound, I felt out of sorts. I hit the leadoff man with a pitch. I walked the next boy. Then I beaned the batter after that. Quite a start: no strikes, three men on, no outs. I finally threw a strike, which the cleanup man lined up the middle, right at me.

I managed to catch the ball inches from my nose, and quickly pivoted toward third base, trying to catch the runner leaning the wrong way. He dove back to the bag, and I checked the other two bases — everybody safe.

The next boy up hit a screaming line drive right back at me. Again, I made the catch in an act of self-preservation, before repeating the drill of checking all the runners. Two outs.

The sixth batter rocketed a line drive up the middle that made his teammates’ efforts look feeble. I made like Neo in The Matrix, bending backwards at an impossible angle to get out of the way while blindly throwing my gloved hand up. Somehow, the ball stuck in the webbing.

Our cheering section roared and my All-Star teammates pounded me with congratulations in front of the dugout. I don’t remember if we won the game or not. I only recall that top half of the first inning.

And my father’s post-game reaction.

Dad practically bounced to the car, he was so pumped up. “Wow! Did you shut them down in that first inning or what?!”

I looked at him, dubious, wondering if he’d been sneaking beers beneath the stands. I hadn’t shut anybody down. The only three batters to whom I’d managed to throw a strike nearly killed me with line drives up the middle, the surefire indication that they’d timed the pitches perfectly. But he continued.

“Everybody kept asking me, ‘How’d he make that catch?!’” Which time? I thought. “And then they couldn’t believe you had the sense to check the runners back to their bases!” OK, I had to admit that I’d been kinda impressed with that move the first time I did it. But by the third time? I mean, I was quite familiar by that time with what to do.

My father’s eyes glowed proudly. He began to speak, but then stopped. I knew he wanted to share something important. Maybe to apologize for the Carvel parking lot?

The moment passed without him saying a word. Finally, he threw an arm around my shoulder and squeezed me close. We walked to the car.

“Hey, All-Star, whaddaya say we get some Carvel?”


Jamie Reidy, a former walk-on college wrestler and Army officer, is a Los Angeles-based author. His first book, Hard Sell: The Evolution of A Viagra Salesman, served as the basis for the movie “Love and Other Drugs” in which Jake Gyllenhaal played a character named “Jamie.” His latest book, Need One: A Lunatic’s Attempt to Attend 365 Games in 365 Days, is a collection of humorous and heartfelt essays about his father and him.

Squash on the Hill

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by Caitlin Dwyer

  • This story was originally drafted as part of Creative Nonfiction‘s Writing Pittsburgh project.

Marlon is hurt. Or so he says, limping into the squash court, an exaggerated look of pain contorting his face. Coach Samantha Rosado takes one look at him and says, “Hustle up, Marlon. Okay, everybody, what’s next?”

A chorus of voices echoes around the enclosed court: “High skips!”

It’s warm-up time at Steel City Squash.  Sixth-graders are lined up against the wall, fidgeting. When Rosado calls, “Go!” the students bolt forward, their kneecaps lifting high. There’s a lot of groaning. One girl waits until Rosado isn’t looking and then walks. Marlon refuses to skip, his toes dragging along the wood, grimacing. The other students are already back to the wall by the time Marlon is halfway done.

From the wall, a short kid with an oversized yellow t-shirt tucked into his athletic pants starts yelling. “Hurry up, hurry up! Quit draggin’!”

Marlon winces and limps toward the wall.

“You’re wasting squash time!” the short kid yells. His name is Tai’Mere Thompson; at 11, he’s a veteran of the squash team here and clearly feels some authority on the court.

“Shut up!” Marlon shoots back.

“Against the wall,” Rosado orders. She has already told Marlon that he can sit out if he feels hurt, but that he can’t play a game without warming up.

“Quit wasting time!” Tai’Mere repeats, and despite an admonition to keep quiet he yells on, and Marlon yells back, and pretty soon the two of them are screaming at each other. Rosado orders Marlon off the court to cool down, and he stomps off, fuming, while Tai’Mere begins his next set of drills.

Tai’Mere and his teammates come from the Hill District, a primarily African-American neighborhood in the heart of Pittsburgh. The area has some of the city’s prime real estate: rising out of downtown with views north and south. It also has some of the worst poverty and violence in the city. Three times a week, a small group of kids from the Hill District are shuttled to the University of Pittsburgh, where they are taught the basics of squash, a racquetball-like game popular in prep schools, and mentored in skills for academic success.

Steel City Squash (SCS) arrived in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 2014, when Tai’Mere and Marlon were in fifth grade. Modeled after similar after-school enrichment programs in Boston, New York, Baltimore and Chicago, the nonprofit deliberately targeted the Hill, trying to find a place where squash would stand out.

“It is totally unknown. Squash is a white male elite culture, says SCS Squash Director Samantha Rosado.  “A lot of the top colleges have squash programs, and a lot of them recruit from urban squash teams. There are a lot of scholarships… It’s essentially a way to get them to college.”

Squash may seem like a strange sport for the Hill, but that’s the point, says Jeremy Feinstein, Secretary of the Board at SCS. “It’s harnessing the traditional elitism of the sport itself,” he told me. “If you’re a college admissions officer and you find a kid from the Hill District, and not only have they done pretty well in school but they’re a squash player? That’s not what you’re expecting to see.”

The program is held at the old Fitzgerald Field House, tucked behind an indoor track and the well-lit, broad expanse of the volleyball courts. The staircase is dark and narrow. After practice, I find 11-year-old Marlon, evicted from practice for yelling, sitting on the steps with his head in his hands, crying softly.

“I always get in trouble,” he says, his voice muffled by his hands. “I got in trouble every day for a year. I keep getting blamed.”  He looks up with big, round, desperately sad eyes. His hands lie upturned on his thighs. “It’s just gonna be like this my whole life. I’m gonna go to jail for something I didn’t do.”

The stakes at squash practice are not who learns to serve better, or who makes the team; they are the confidence and conviction of a boy who doesn’t believe he has a choice. What Rosado and the rest of the staff at Steel City Squash are fighting against is the proposition that the fates of these kids are already mapped out. They propose an alternate plan, one of achievement. They are fighting not only the pitfalls of poverty, which lock people into their own geography in a narrow way, but a larger system: one that repeatedly reminds kids of how little they matter.

***

Steel City Squash (SCS) was, in the beginning, basically a one-man show: executive director Brad Young had come from New York, where he had worked on a similar urban squash program in Harlem. Young is my brother-in-law, a dapper white guy prone to bow ties and boat shoes. That first year, he sought foundational support, set up facilities, and hired staff. He bought a bus. He went throughout the Hill District to recruit students, speaking at assemblies and local events.

SCS aimed to provide the structure and skill sets to get poor and minority youth to college. The program recruits students in late elementary and middle school and tracks with them through high school and beyond. The goal is not to craft professional squash players; it’s to hook kids into a program that will guide them academically.

The model is effective — 95 percent of students who graduate an urban squash program matriculate into a college of some kind, according to the National Urban Squash & Education Association (NUSEA), the umbrella organization that oversees 20 programs in the U.S. That’s a high rate; nationally, low-income students enter college at around 50 percent, whereas high-income students matriculate at around 80 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.com.

Athletics attract the kids, but the long-term academic focus is what gets parents on board. By the time the kids graduate from high school, they will have spent eight or nine years receiving intensive tutoring. “It’s primarily an academic program,” says Valeria McCrary, SCS Academic Director. “You have to be consistent; you have to be committed. That way, we can really work on getting you to college.”

Exposure to resources and new ideas helps kids cross the boundaries set by poverty, geography, and society. Rather than developing the neighborhood’s buildings or roads — changing the literal map of the Hill District — SCS wants to redraw mental maps. Over time, the program will transform these kids —  physically, as they begin to train for a sport; mentally, as they learn discipline and self-confidence, and as they begin to build pieces of their adolescent identity.

When I first arrived at SCS, I worried that the price of success, for Tai’Mere and his teammates, would be a dissociation from their own neighborhood. They would be transformed into college-ready scholar-athletes, but only if they were willing to let squash, with its popped-collar prep-school style, lay claim to some of the mental territory that was currently occupied by home-grown Hill District pride. So I asked Tai’Mere what he thought.

Tai’Mere has a sweet, open face that still carries its childlike fleshiness. The first time we met, he was kneeling on a swivel chair, peering over the back. During the interview, the swivel chair scooted a bit closer to me with each question; eventually, Tai’Mere had scooted all the way across the room to be next to me. His gaze was unapologetically direct. He wanted, I think, to make sure I was listening.

He jumped right into squash, he said, without knowing much about it. “I am reckless with food and sports,” he proclaimed, which seems appropriate; when he first heard about squash at school, Tai’Mere thought it was a vegetable. “We talking about FOOD?” He grinned at me, reenacting his confusion. Tai’Mere went home and asked his mother to sign him up. After learning that SCS included academic support, she agreed to enroll him.

Despite the foreignness of squash, he quickly claimed it as his own. “I felt like this was gonna be my sport,” he said. He started playing in the beginning of the fifth grade and by sixth grade, had earned his own racket – a prize gained after a full year in the program. As part of the “team,” which means he passed fitness tests and try-outs, Tai’Mere is now a big fan of the game that a year earlier was so unfamiliar to him. Being a professional squash player has become one of his life goals, after which he plans to retire and design his own athletic shoes.

Programs like SCS do change the way that students see themselves and their neighborhood. They can expose kids to teasing and bullying. But the kids coming to squash are not being transformed against their will, or their knowledge; they are actively claiming the sport as their own, and in doing so, they are establishing complex and sometimes conflicted identities.

***

“It’s a disaster!” Crystalina says, giving me a wry look. She points to the batter, goopy and lumpy, in a mixing bowl. We are standing in her kitchen in the Hill District —  there’s a big glass table, little apple-shaped ceramic dishes, and scattered bags of flour and sugar, vials of lemon essence, tins of cocoa and baking powder. It’s a school holiday, and Crystalina is baking a birthday cake for her father, who lives in another neighborhood.

At 12 years old, Crystalina Edmonds wants to be a baker. And a model-slash-actress. And a professional squash player. That last goal is a newer one, formed in the year since she joined Steel City Squash. Soft-spoken, self-proclaimed “shy,” she takes her time with her words, choosing them carefully. Yet she has a persistent curiosity that drives her to try new things despite her cautious nature — which is what drove her into squash, a sport she had never heard of before last year.

A lanky, pretty girl with delicate features and long braids, Crystalina lives with her grandmother in the heart of the Middle Hill. Her birth mother is not in the picture. Their narrow, brick-sided house stands alone in a weedy, overgrown field. Crystalina navigates her neighborhood block by block, house by house. She tours me around with a childlike sense of place: each home anchored to a past event, a particular character. She doesn’t know street names; she knows stories: “I sold candy to them. That’s my friend. I don’t know them, I know them. I don’t know those last two houses. My friend lives over here. I used to ride past them all the time, and that’s the little after-school program [where I used to go]. That, that, and that.”

“Do you like your neighborhood?” I ask her.

“Yeah…”  Her voice trails off. I ask why she hesitated.

“I’m not sure because the store up the street…it’s really crazy up there. They be shootin’. But down, like, where I live, just down the street, it’s all calm.”

This, too, is part of Crystalina’s map of the Hill: Chauncey Drive, a street that runs behind the Bedford Dwellings apartments, about three blocks from Crystalina’s house, is notorious for drugs and gun violence. She isn’t allowed to go to the store nearby to buy her baking supplies; she has to “keep straight” to another store for her flour and sugar. “They usually don’t shoot when I’m walking past,” she tells me. But nevertheless, she and grandmother, whom she calls Mom, have mapped out safe and unsafe routes, and Crystalina, like a princess in a fairy tale, stays on the paths marked safe and avoids the thorns and thickets. The demarcations matter. Even though violence is nearby, it feels far away from the areas that are known, safe, and peaceful.

“They’re neck and neck, but not really neck and neck.”  She touches her thumbs along their outer edges, making a flat surface across the backs of both hands, and I understand that she means the two areas are side-by-side. “It’s like you walking into a new world.”

This is another way of looking at the Hill: not as a single neighborhood, but as a series of pockets, individualized blocks, some of which are dangerous and some of which are family-oriented and full of children playing in their weedy yards and baking cakes. To set characteristics across the whole neighborhood is to miss the subtlety of walking it as a child: Here but not here. The candy shop. My friend’s house. The good store. The bad store. The noisy neighbors. The place with the funny Halloween decorations. The boring place.

The boring place is school: St. Benedict the Moor, a Catholic K-8 in the center of the Hill. A serious student, Crystalina is a member of the recorder society and a lover of languages (she is currently studying six languages via an app on her phone). Her curiosity makes her impatient, which is what makes school so boring. Take Spanish class, for example: “Everybody cuts her class, it’s the last period, they pay her no attention, so it’s really hard to learn. I don’t wanna listen no more!” She breaks into giggles, shy yet defiant.

This is part of Crystalina’s burgeoning adolescence: an impatience with adults that she feels are wasting her time. She wasn’t always sure, for instance, that squash was worth the time it demanded. When she first started at SCS, her main thought was, “When am I gonna go home?” She didn’t like the drills. “My arms started hurting… we had to do this thing where we bounce the ball and my arms were hurting the next day.”

The next time, however, she was convinced: “It was, like, fun…I was used to the pain.”  She added the Field House and Trees Hall, the university fitness center, to her mental list of places. Now, she travels there along the fixed route of the shuttle bus three times a week, and like her baking and her recorder and her language studies, she is mapping herself a new hobby, new habits, new goals.

Crystalina says that the SCS kids get teased at school. “They’re like squash isn’t even a sport,” she tells me. “I don’t say nothing. Well, you can say football ain’t a sport. I don’t even care to be in on that. It’s drama.”  Her posture is strong, evasive, almost defensive. She repeats again, with the deliberate apathy of adolescence: “I really don’t care.”

The cocoa frosting concocted, I bid Crystalina goodbye. She walks me to the door, explains how to drive back to the university, and stands on the porch watching me go, waving her long, thin arm.’

About an hour later, I see that I have a phone message from Crystalina. A little worried, I call her back. In her reserved way, she says simply, “I just wanted to make sure you got home safe.”

It is the first time I have ever had a twelve-year-old call to check up on me. A few minutes later, I get a text of the cake, HAPPY BIRTHDAY scrawled in goopy letters across the top.

***

“The Hill District is definitely a dangerous place,” says George Satler. A Pittsburgh homicide detective for 18 years, Satler has worked many cases on the Hill. Shootings are often drug-related and involve ongoing feuds that simmer and occasionally break into violence. Because of the unemployment rate, violence can occur any night of the week.

The surprising thing for Satler has been the pull the Hill exerts on people. When a homicide witness is placed in witness protection and offered relocation to another neighborhood, he says, they often decline. “They say, my cousins are back here, my relatives are back here, my friends are back here, all the businesses that I frequent are here… so I’m going to stay here,” Satler says. Even the financial support of witness protection – and the threat of retaliation for talking with police — isn’t enough to move people out of the neighborhood.

Perhaps that’s because, although rough, the Hill District is rich in community. In the 1930s and 40s, it was a center of culture. At Greenlee Field, the nation’s first electric stadium lights twinkled over the famed Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team: Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Cool Papa Bell ran the bases, then later the clubs on Center Street. Nighttime meant the tap of high-hats and the blare of trumpets, as Lena Horne, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington played the Hurricane Club, the Crawford Grill, the Melody Bar. Shoppers moved between immigrant Italian, Jewish, and African-American businesses and homes. The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper with national distribution and influence, championed the Double V campaign during World War II: a two-fold victory against Hitler abroad and discrimination at home. The Hill had poverty, but also industry and identity.

These days, a close community inhabits the Hill, many of them generations born and raised in the neighborhood; it is both intimate and closed, cautiously welcoming but essentially self-contained. Many homes are vacant or dilapidated; their shutters sagging, their porches rotting. The brick homes were once stately, but are now surrounded by weedy lots. A bustling new YMCA shines with promise and welcomes kids to play. The small library across the street is quiet and calm. Some blocks feel lively and commercial; others feel sapped, enervated. For a kid in the Hill District, navigating the safe and unsafe spaces is part of growing up.

The neighborhood is wary of outsiders looking to rewrite the map for their own residents. In 1957, the Lower Hill was razed to make room for Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena. Businesses disappeared and homes were leveled. The incident infected the consciousness of the neighborhood. Murmurs about gentrification ripple and subside. Now when people come in looking to “change” the Hill, there is an understandable suspicion of their intentions.

If a program wanted to be a part of this Pittsburgh neighborhood, why choose squash as the catalyst for transformation? Why not football, baseball – sports deeply rooted in Pittsburgh’s own history and community? Among their peers, the SCS kids have encountered resistance to something seen as external and foreign. Like Crystalina, some of them ignore it; others succumb, quitting mid-season to try out for other sports. SCS’ enrollment dipped at the start of last basketball season, and they are still trying to make back their numbers.

***

“We got a lot of negative comments when we started. What is squash?  Why are you letting him play squash? You don’t even know what squash is — ” Temie Thompson’s voice rises.

“And you rippin on it — ” Tai’Mere jumps in eagerly, finishing his mother’s thought.

“And you’re talking negative about it. So I tell people about the program, but they really don’t take interest,” Temie concludes. She shakes her head, unsure if she wants to continue.

It’s a Wednesday, 5:30 p.m., and Temie looks tired. She wears a jean jacket and cute thick-rimmed glasses. We’re sitting in a classroom at Trees Hall, just up the street from the Hill. This tag team conversation between mother and son —  where the sentiments rocket back and forth, echoed and amplified — is common for Temie and Tai’Mere. They operate as a team (“I’m not a very good parallel parker, but this one talks me into the space —  and he’s only 11!” Temie claims), and the 6th grader seems to pick up naturally on what his mom needs, rushing into the conversation to support her.

Temie raised her sons in the Hill District. She herself was born in the neighborhood and adopted by her grandmother because her own parents struggled with addiction. Now she works at a bank to support the family and is also completing her schooling to become qualified as a paramedic. While she and Tai’Mere’s father agree on most parenting decisions, she remains the primary caretaker. She loves the long-term, personal approach at SCS, and that it keeps Tai’Mere out of trouble —  a more difficult task as he gets older.

For the moment, however, she looks hesitant. We’ve hit some kind of awkward moment, so I decide to venture a guess at what’s making her uncomfortable.

“It’s kind of a sport for rich white people,” I suggest, and a relieved smile breaks across her face.

“I didn’t want to say it, but we got a lot of, ‘That’s a white people sport, white people play that.’” She sighs. “No, all types of races play all types of things.” She supports her son in finding what works for him — even if it means being the odd one out.

When Tai’Mere goes to visit neighborhood friends at football practice, they rib him about squash: “They gonna say, what is squash, why you playing that dumb sport, you softie.” He narrates the conversation for me, but adds: “I ain’t paid them no attention, because they don’t even know what it is.”

And yet later, he admits that he “wants to try” football. His bravado about squash weakens. His dad promised, he says, to sign him up in the fall.

***

Enduring a bit of teasing is part of the deal. 19-year-old Elhadji Mare attended Harlem StreetSquash, a well-established urban squash program on which SCS is modeled. He is now a sophomore at Trinity College. Although he no longer plays tournament squash – Trinity has the best men’s team in the nation – he credits the Harlem program with helping him gain discipline and stay focused through high school. He got teased a little, but “there’s always going to be somebody teasing you about doing something different than what’s around your community,” he said.

That novelty — doing something different than your peers – may cause some rifts, but it is also what attracts. “It’s actually the first sport I ever played,” Brandy Williamson, another StreetSquash alum, told me. Several of the students I spoke with mentioned this idea – that squash was finally right, after more traditional activities had failed to engage them.

Urban squash programs are very effective in leveraging that interest. The goal is always college. Anyone who doesn’t fit that model, or that goal, can’t take part; and one of the criticisms that alumni have for urban squash is that the programs are narrow, aimed at one single mode of transformation. A student with goals to pursue art, or join the military, or learn a trade, might struggle with the constant college academics focus; as would students with other barriers on their time, such as those with families. Urban squash programs craft a certain type of student into a certain type of scholar-athlete, readying them for college life — but it isn’t a program that serves everyone. It serves a small group of committed kids, and usually the ones who stick with it are the ones who feel like they found their sport.

“It was so addicting. I just wanted to get better and better and better. I wanted to commit and get good at it,” Williamson told me. “It was just the perfect place for me.” She now plays competitively on the Mt. Holyoke women’s team. She adds that being a Harlem-born squash player isn’t as unusual as one would think.

“There’s so many urban squash players in college that most of my matches are with somebody that I know. It’s always cool to see somebody that you know on another team, and know that you came from a similar program,” she replied. “I take pride.”

***

It’s 3 p.m. and chaos reigns at St. Benedict the Moor: kids are darting in and out, school buses are idling, parents are trying to keep up. A teacher pulls aside a young lady for yelling in the hallway. Brad Young is networking the halls, shaking hands with a smiling parent and saying, “We’ll see you Saturday.”

St. Benedict the Moor fits SCS’ socio-economic profile. To send their students to the program, schools must have minimum 70 percent free and reduced lunch population. So far, SCS has three partner schools and a total of 37 students, with a goal of 45 by the end of the year. A few individuals come from other schools; to qualify for the program, they must speak English as a second language, be from a recognized minority group, or be the first from their family to go to college.

The squash kids spill out of classes in fits and starts. They wear blue slacks, white shirts, and plaid ties that look like miniature cravats. They seem uncontrollably excited and utterly bored at the same time.

We lead them outside and through the crowds and onto the mini-bus. Physically, they could walk to the SCS program. The distance is less than a mile and easily traversable for energetic young legs. But between here, the safety and structure of school, and there, the safety and structure of the university, there are too many distractions, too many offshoots in the wrong direction. So every day, SCS staff pick up the kids and drive them just five minutes to a world that is both proximate and new.

“It’s not really bussing these kids out of the mean streets of the inner city. It’s walkable. It’s an adjacent neighborhood,” says Jeremy Feinstein. “And yet the invisible boundary between a place like the Hill District and the University is vitally important to cross.”

Off the bus, kids straggle into a classroom and dump their backpacks into laundry baskets. Valeria McCrary moves with graceful reserve, greeting them and giving each student a little squirt of hand sanitizer. Some kids go to change into athletic clothes; others grab fruit from a basket. One girl is doing push-ups in the center of the room while someone else tries to stand on her back. Tai’Mere’s squash shoes — all team players get a standard pair — have been mixed up with another student, and he is running around lifting everyone’s feet up and peering at the soles for the initials Sharpied there, bemoaning the fact that his feet are the same size as a girl. Crystalina and her friend are applying perfumed lotion to their arms. McCrary approaches students individually, not intrusive but checking in, reminding, prodding, prompting, asking. Eventually, they start to take seats.

As the Academic Director at SCS, McCrary oversees the hour of homework help during the week and provides academic enrichment on weekends. She meets with families as well as the kids’ teachers from school. With a background in counseling, she focuses not just on academic skills but problem solving, self-discipline, and self-expression: “We’re trying to tackle the kids from a more holistic approach.”

Today, Crystalina is practicing spelling. She mutters under her breath, repeating the words. When McCrary calls her up to show her the Star Chart, Crystalina gets a smile on her face and bounces back to her seat. She has gold stars all across both Squash and Academics. McCrary likes to make sure the kids get positive feedback, and she calls parents regularly to inform them of their child’s progress in the program.

Tai’Mere has a spottier star chart — a few stars here and there, but some empty spaces, blank days. I ask McCrary about his progress.

“Tai’Mere…” She pauses, chuckling. “He does well academically, but the only thing that brings him down is his mouth. He talks a whole lot. He wants to say what he has to say before he forgets it, but sometimes it’s just not the right time. It’s getting him in trouble.”

With a Chicago Bulls hat strapped to his backpack and a reading assignment spread in front of him, Tai’Mere looks relatively quiet at the moment. He found his shoes; he was separated from another girl for tickling her, then from another boy for bothering him; and now he’s reading about the history of video games. After a long silence, he looks up from his homework: “Did you know that the first video game ever made was in 1958?”

McCrary raises her eyebrows. “I did not know that.”

Tai’Mere sings, a made-up tune: “Nine-teen-fifty-eeeeeight.”

“Shhhhh,” McCrary says.

He goes back to his work. The electric lights buzz; someone is typing; McCrary speaks in a low voice with another student. Another moment goes by.

Tai’Mere sings: “Nin-ten-dooooooh.”

He continues to punctuate the quiet with outbursts, comments, scraps of songs. When he finishes reading, he asks permission to use a laptop so he can research African-American attorneys for a report. I suggest Eric Holder, the former attorney general of the U.S.

“No, I want someone black,” he says.

“He is black,” I tell him, but Tai’Mere chooses Michelle Obama because she is “both a woman and a lawyer.” He reads Wikipedia for the next 30 minutes, with occasional outbursts of “WHERE’S HARVARD?” and “IS SHE REALLY ONLY 51?” tossed over his shoulder, more comments than actual posed questions.

The other kids ignore him. McCrary shushes him half-heartedly, smiling at his enthusiasm when he isn’t looking. At 4:30, Rosado pokes her head in the door. “Ready for squash?” she asks, and Tai’Mere slams the computer shut. Crystalina places her homework into her backpack, smiles, and goes to line up behind him.

***

“I work on the Hill, my family lives on the Hill, they go to school on the Hill,” says Temie Thompson. “Technically, we just sleep in another neighborhood.”

Born and raised in the Hill District, she has based her life there — even though a recent raise at work disqualified her family from their income-based housing. As a result, the Thompson family moved to another neighborhood last fall. She wants to move back as soon as they can figure out housing. Her voice is full of conviction when she adds, “We’re from the Hill. I’m from the Hill District.”

“Me too,” adds Tai’Mere, who is sitting nearby.

His little brother, who is playing the corner, lifts his head and chimes in, “Me too!” I can hear the sense of belonging. They are knit into the neighborhood; Temie admits that it’s not an easy place to grow up, but her daily life and her community are there. Leaving is difficult and undesirable.

But leaving is what the SCS kids will do, eventually. That idea bothered me: was this weird sport dividing kids from their neighborhood? Then I talked to Leroy Dillard.

“It isn’t weird,” he admonished me. “It’s a beautiful game. Youth today need other activities besides basketball, basketball, basketball.” A coach in the Pittsburgh school system for four decades, Dillard was born and raised in the Hill District. He has no involvement with Steel City Squash, but he knows sports, and he knows the Hill. Good athletic programs are not about the identity of who runs them, he says, but about the attitude of the coach. “They don’t have to come from the Hill District… it’s just that they have to know how to deal with the kids,” he told me. “You have to know where they’re coming from.” Like Brandy Williamson, Coach Dillard doesn’t think of squash as different or weird; it’s just another option.

When Tai’Mere proclaims, “I felt like this was gonna be my sport,” part of what a good coach has to do is grant him that. It is his sport. Tai’Mere is not borrowing squash from the Ivy League. He is not trying it out in order to see if he fits into that world; he doesn’t even know where Harvard is. His vocabulary is entirely personal: I like this. This is mine. My sport. To place identity markers onto him — this is a weird sport for you — is almost an act of severance – of denying him a prior claim, stripping him of something he’s already sunk his teeth into.

Setting new goals, whether they be athletic or academic or personal, is one way of claiming identity. Tai’Mere and Crystalina are beginning to shape their own hopes for the future, and if those goals sometimes conflict with their peers’ expectations or the expectations of the outside world, that’s not their problem. Their only job, as middle school students, is to establish and expand the boundaries of their own expectations for themselves. Crystalina, for example, has thought about joining the army to help her see the world. We are mixing dough, our hands caked in flour, when I suggest that she could become an army doctor. She scrunches up her face.

“Yeah, but then I have to go to school for doctor…ing.”  Still hesitant, she asks, “Isn’t there something like docterette…a doctory diploma?”

“Oh a doctorate!”

“Yeah, my friend’s mom went to school for a doctorette… I think that’s the word. But that’s too long. I could go to school for a long time, but I gotta pay for it.” But she looks thoughtful, and later, when the cake is in the oven, tells me that she has been teaching herself Mandarin Chinese, and that she wants to go to Alaska. For a kid who has carefully stuck to the delineated boundaries of her own neighborhood, she is starting to think outside the box.

Valeria McCrary thinks exposure to new opportunities is an advantage the SCS students can return home with: “Don’t forget about where you came from. Even though you can leave your home and get your education, come back and make change to your community.”

For the kids in SCS, leaving the Hill District is still a long way away. Decisions about college are distant. For right now, they have to worry about drawing a Sumerian wheel for social studies, or memorizing the word patrician, or hitting a solid serve-and-return in practice — which can be challenging enough.

In practice the next day, there’s a new recruit in the program who doesn’t know how to handle his racket; he’s flailing and whiffing. Rosado puts him in a court with Tai’Mere to run some drills. There’s a risk that Tai’Mere will get impatient and stomp off the court, or just start to yell again.

Instead, he walks over to the kid and helps him adjust his grip. “Here, hold it like this. You gotta get the grip right so that when you swing, it’s like, goin’ down, and then don’t swing all crazy. Here, like this.”

The new boy watches, unsure, and imitates the motion. There is a patience to Tai’Mere suddenly. His manic energy is gone. He knows how to do this. He has become a teacher.

I get a glimpse, in that quiet, intimate moment between two young boys bent over a racket, of how this works. Buried under the fidgeting and complaining is an unconscious map. Discipline, knowledge, and confidence have sketched new behaviors and habits, and for these kids, squash isn’t unfamiliar. It’s theirs. This is their territory, newly claimed and just barely explored: a whole world, waiting.

 

Caitlin Dwyer is a freelance writer and teacher who often writes on education. She holds a Master of Journalism degree with honors from the University of Hong Kong and a B.A. from Pomona College. Her literary journalism has appeared in Quartz, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Asian Review of Books, and others. She is also a monthly columnist at Buddhistdoor Global.

After Midnight

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Literary JournalismAfter Midnight

by Barney T. Haney

I thought there would be beer. A midnight curling club in the Midwest in the middle of winter? Come on. Tammy tells me again, in earnest, that curling is about the people. Inside, I groan a little. It’s Friday, opening night of the Circle City Curling Club’s spring league. I’d envisioned bearded hipsters pontificating over microbrews, pushing free tastes.

We’re at the Artic Zone Iceplex just north of Indianapolis in Westfield. The small arena hosts junior hockey leagues and open skates and, most recently, a curling club. I know next to nothing about curling. I have worn dress shoes to stand on the ice for the next two hours. Tammy, an avid curler and the club’s treasurer, leads me between the 147-foot sheets, which are far longer than they appear on television. Skippers shout for their sweepers to brush harder, willing them with the depth of their howls. Throwers launch themselves to the left and right of me. A man in a faded Superman ball cap with a salt-and-pepper ponytail cascading past his shoulder blades blurs past in an impossibly graceful yoga-like position that resembles the pigeon. Sweepers work at blinding speeds mere centimeters off the stones with sweat dripping from the ends of their noses. Stones roar down the sheets, growling like jets flying miles overhead. The vibration rumbles through the ice. There is no pause, no let up, no time to drink beer. I’d assumed that curling was a glorified version shuffleboard. This is sport!

Tammy introduces me to the club’s members. The Circle City Curling Club is very white, but otherwise covers a surprisingly vast demographic. Club members ages range from 10 to 70-plus. They are hippies, golfers, college coeds, retirees, a doctor, a chemist, an insurance auditor, a sports psychology professor, an architectural photographer, a bagpiper, those whose knees bend, and those whose knees don’t. There is a single bearded hipster among them and he turns out to be one of the most competitive.

“Why do people join?” I ask Tammy.

“I don’t know,” she says and smiles as if this is a wonderful thing, and it is.

curling-squatingIt’s impressive, this blend of generations and genders. The Friday Night League is made up of 19 males and five females. Scores are tight across the board, and the sportsmanship is uncanny. It’s been my experience that competitive sport leagues are often petri dishes for buried hostilities, but there’s not a whiff of sizing-up to be found.

Steve, a slim, middle-aged man, shows me his Apple Watch. His heartrate is 176 beats/minute. He’s burned 200 calories after a mere half hour of sweeping stones. He averages 8,000 to 9,000 steps in a match, which equates to roughly four to four and a half miles.

“Sweeping miles,” he corrects.

“I can’t feel my feet,” I tell him.

“You’d stay a lot warmer if you were working,” says Barb, a 70-year-old with a stylish short, spiky silver hairdo. Barb is an icon in the club. She and her late-husband, Jack, were instrumental in getting the CCCC started. Now she emails her kids when she gets home to tell them she made it and is drinking her Sambuca.

By the end of the night, I am exhausted. Steve finishes at 525 calories burned. A 20-something compares his Fitbit calorie count of 517. The stones are stored and brooms are packed away. We bid one other good morning and head out. On the drive back to my apartment, I pass cops clearing the revelry off the strip, the feeling slowly returning to my feet. When I get home, I Google Sambuca.

 

I am invited to a broom-stacking! Should I go? Yes.

Broom-stacking is curling code for beer drinking. It’s a weeknight and I have to teach early the next morning, but I find it disgraceful not to honor this new phrase.

The host’s smile tightens when I enter the Ram Brewery. I’m not well. She keeps one eye on me while craning her neck to locate the bouncer. The roads are a mess. On the drive, a semi coated my windshield in greasy road slush then, to my horror, the deicing washer fluid sprayed out the side of my car’s hood. I navigate the last six miles of heavy highway-traffic through a two-by-eight-inch swath, gripping the wheel so hard I think the airbag will deploy. No one is going to be here, I tell myself. I should have texted. I should have called ahead.

“I’m supposed to be meeting the curling club,” I tell her.

Her face softens. She leads me toward the riotous noise coming from the back of the bustling brewery. Around the corner in a narrow dining hall the tables have been arranged into a long row. The scene is like a village come to honor the curling gods with a fried tenderloin and stout feast. They hurl stories down this ceremonial sheet and roar with laughter.

Club President Dan introduces me to the team he’s taking to the Curling Senior National Championship in Medford, Wisconsin. Our conversation revolves around chicken feet, embryo transplants, North Dakota State football, dairy cows, southern Minnesota, inner China, fecal samples, curling on cruise ships, pension plans, hologram houses, and dedicated ice.

Competitive curling happens on two types of surfaces: arena ice or dedicated ice. Arena ice, which the CCCC curls on, is your common public skating rink ice. Often uneven, its surface tends to change from day to day, sheet to sheet. Stumbling kids’ skates leave gouges too deep for the Zamboni. These conditions are difficult for even the best of club’s curlers to overcome and make it nearly impossible to finely calibrate one’s game. Dedicated ice, on the other hand, is an art form. High-quality water is essential (reverse osmosis or deionized water is preferred), the ice is leveled, pebbled, and kept at an exact temperature for optimum stone performance. Perhaps the most significant distinction between dedicated ice and arena ice is its influence on how a curling club visualizes itself. Dedicated ice is swagger. Dedicated ice makes a club thrive. Its all-access ice time allows a club to offer “learn-to-curls” — cash and recruitment cows — at family-friendly times. It opens opportunities for hosting bonspiels (weekend-long curling tournaments) which bring revenue to the club and to local vendors, creating incentive for sponsorships. Most importantly, it has the potential to save the CCCC from extinction, which, Dan tells me, is a troubling reality. Attendance is down 40 percent from the fall. The late-night ice time is taking its toll. Recently the club’s board has had to shift its focus from building the club to sustaining it.

Dedicated ice would likely change the clubs’ circumstances in dramatic ways, but getting there isn’t easy. The cheaper ice-making machines start at $350,000 and the special curling Zamboni can cost $13,000. Then there’s the land, the housing facility, the insurance. It’s a Herculean task, and without strong membership the chance of a club’s acquiring dedicated ice is bleak. The Artic Zone is the fifth venue the CCCC has called home in the last 10 years. The recent return of minor league hockey to Indianapolis has rejuvenated the city’s youth and adult hockey leagues. Arenas compete for the revenues amateur hockey brings. The CCCC has been left with the choice of curling at midnight or not at all.

The ceremony at the Ram Brewery ends with hearty rounds of embrace and plans to meet again. When their ice times were better, the CCCC gathered here after curling each week to analyze their matches over cold ones. Now they meet here once a month for dinner. There’s a genuine sweetness about this that resonates with me. I clean off my windshield in the parking lot and the roads, though no less messy, somehow seem not as bad.

 

There is an open sheet this Friday night. Tammy invites my wife Molly and me to “Learn to Curl.” It’s long been a desire of Molly’s to curl. Tammy and her husband Wes, a certified instructor, will be giving us this clinic. Lisa, a petite woman in her late-50’s, who will compete with Tammy at a bonspiel in Fairbanks, Alaska, later this month, will join us for extra practice.

Wes is shy. He has the trunk of a rugby player and keeps his elbows tight to his sides as if to apologize for taking up space. Despite the cold he wears a white cotton T-shirt and black synthetic workout pants that stop short of his ankles. Tammy met him at a hockey game. He introduced her to curling. After her second lesson, they competed in a mixed-doubles bonspiel in Nashville, placing second. At their wedding, the ring bearer carried their bands down the aisle on the pad of her curling broom. Tonight, Wes seems nervous. It is obvious that he has a specific idea in mind, and that things must be just right: “Please, Barney, stand over here. Just a little more, please. Stand over here. Now over here.”

I feel as if I’m having my picture taken. I move a step to the left then another then another. I don’t dare laugh, nor do I look at Molly, who I know is busting up inside. I step to the right and, thinking that I am back where I started, I move to the left a little.

“Over here, please,” Wes says. I step over there.

In 2010, watching the Winter Olympic curling from our couch in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I tell Molly, this is our chance. My dream of Olympic Gold suddenly seemed tangible. Schuster’s American team looked bad. Curling looked easy.

Now, six years later, with a stone finally in hand and my foot snug against the hack, the sweet scent of gold returns to my nostrils. I rear back, push off, and immediately lose control of my body, wobbling as helplessly as a toddler, my legs begin to spread further and further apart, an unpleasant strain makes itself known in my nether region, and just before I fall flat on my face, I desperately heave the stone forward only to watch it stop short of the hog line—the required distance to count as playable.

“That’s alright!” Wes yells from the opposite end of the sheet.

Curling is far more challenging than it seems. Learning how to deliver a stone reminds me of learning how to pitch a baseball. All that concentration on form and movement only to see that ball fly out the side of my hand. My next stone torches the house, threating Wes’s ankles. A little less weight, he coaches. Don’t forget to turn the handle, Lisa says. Ten to 12. Two to 12. Balance, Wes says. Get your butt up. My legs tremble from the strain and a tender bruise is forming on the inside of my left knee.

Molly, a former hurdler and triple jumper, goes next. It is my job to sweep for her, naturally. Here I think I will do well. Sweeping is something I’ve done plenty of.

“Harder!” Wes shouts from behind the house. “Harder!”

My pressure or pace? I don’t know. Panic sets in. The eyes of the club are upon me. My broom head is going to foul the stone any second. Get closer, Lisa says. Sweep faster. The 147-foot sheet turns into the road to forever. By the time I make it to the end of the sheet I’m pulling my coat off. Sweat runs down my legs. Steve’s Apple watch is full of shit. This is far more taxing. Molly’s stone sits in the house’s 4-foot ring — what an angel. I’m winded and my legs burn from the awkward shuffling. She goes on to throw a house party. I stink up the place and have a ball doing it. Curling takes precision and balance and calibration. My brain and body can’t quite put it together. Lisa, who’s been encouraging all night, looks me square in the eye and says that my struggles are probably due to weak thighs. Thank you, Lisa.

 

Late-season and club attendance is down. Those that show move languidly toward the nearest chair with little more than a grunt of hello. We’re watching “Curling Night in America” on a flat screen in the breakroom, waiting for public skate to end. A man with winter in his beard laments that moments earlier he was watching this in his living room, warm and in a comfy chair. Below us, on the ice, the teens couple-skate to Journey’s “Faithfully” under cosmic black lighting and spinning strobes. Ceaseless waves of shrills crash upon the rafters. Somewhere down in that beautiful chaos a drop of sweat forged by the heat of two young palms is freezing on the ice. Curling cannot compete with this in Indianapolis. Not yet. The Butler University team arrives trailed by a student film crew. Their energy is electric, but separate. They don’t interview any of the other club members; not that anyone seems to mind. Some subs show up, including a College National Champion from the University of Tennessee, who raises some eyebrows and a few grumbles. The skin under Tammy’s eyes has turned a shade darker since I’ve met her. She talks financial strategy with Adam, a fundraiser at nearby Wabash College. They’ve located a potential space at a casket warehouse.

“I told the board members I will take change,” Tammy says. “Clean out your piggy banks!”

The club is desperate to have dedicated ice before the 2018 Winter Olympics. Olympic-generated interest has historically created significant spikes in curling club memberships across the country. It’s what inspired the CCCC founders. But even ardent supporters find it hard to overlook a midnight playing schedule. The club is making a high-stakes gamble, but it may soon lose itself if not for attempting the impossible. Tammy tells me they’ve raised $50,000. If they can double it by the end of 2016, they hope to start bidding on facilities.

Hope can be a source of tension. Tonight it’s getting the better of Tammy. I ask Jeff, the club’s co-founder, about the possibility that their dedicated ice vision is “A Field of Dreams” fantasy. If you build it, I ask, will they come? He tells me a story about nagging a sports editor at The Indianapolis Star to do an article on the club in 2009.

“I kept calling him, saying, ‘Hey, we’re curling and, you know, do you need a story?’ He said, ‘Nah, eh, and uh,’ then finally he says, ‘Look, it’s a rainy day story.’ Well, a month or two later, it was just pouring down outside, right? So, I get on the phone and I call him and I’m like, ‘Hey, look out your window.’ So, he relented. He said, ‘Fine, fine, fine.’ So they came out and they did a story on us and it became a big front page deal on a Friday or Saturday, I can’t remember, but, man did it get a lot of play. We had a curling clinic promoted in the article, scheduled for two or three weeks later. Typically, for a clinic we get between 15 to 20 people, so we estimated for like maybe 50 to 60 people coming. I think we had between 250 to 300 show up; I lost count. We had two hours for that clinic. It was basically, walk on the ice, this is what a curling stone looks like, next! We didn’t have a chance, we didn’t have a prayer of doing anything. We had no clue that it was going to be that popular. It’s funny. A lot of our members were at that clinic.”

Later, I will find out that Jeff contacted every last person who came that day and rescheduled individual curling clinics for those who were still interested. Impossibility be damned—I like their chances of getting dedicated ice.

The last of the teens return their skates. The Zamboni slugs over the ice leaving a slick trail behind it. I stay until the hacks are screwed down, then wish them luck and head for the exit. I’m 10 feet from the door, when someone bangs the on the Plexiglas behind me. Two of Jeff’s teammates haven’t shown, they’ve got a sub on the way, but would I curl a couple of ends till she gets here?

What the hell.

To be fair, I give them full disclosure about my lack of ability. They smile and nod. The tiredness they had in the breakroom is gone now that we’re on the ice. You’re up first, they say. I get my right foot in the hack, butt up, eyes forward. I don’t think about it. Jeff gives me a target and thrust: I am balance and grace. The stone rotates in a fine arc as if the ice is a canvas, the line a painter’s stroke. Into the house it goes, finding a cozy little room in the front half of the 4-foot diameter, igniting an explosion of heckling. My stone scores the lone point of the first end. The next end, I place one on the rim of the button, then set a guard. Again, my stone scores. It’s glorious, this feeling. I don’t want it to end. Jeff’s sub shows up and—best of all—it is Lisa. I’m all redemption song: “Look at what these weak thighs did!” I yell and point at the scoreboard.

“I’m sorry,” she says, confusion in her watery eyes, “do I know you?”

 

Barney T. Haney teaches English at the University of Indianapolis and is an editorial assistant for Sport Literate. His work has appeared in Fiction Writers Review and Mid-American Review.

To learn more about  the Circle City Curling Club, check out their website.

 

Lessons Learned with Robert Lipsyte

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SL Interview

Lessons Learned with Robert Lipsyte

by William Meiners

Maybe these are the end of times. The Cubs and the Indians in the World Series. The absurdity of a presidential election where the GOP’s best offering makes Charlie Sheen seem like a reasonable man — Winning! Or not. I’m on the lookout for those galloping four horsemen, though hopefully after the Cubbies make their own history.

I thought a lot about Robert Lipsyte thislipsyte-book summer, when I saw him in the O.J. documentary, and speaking of his days covering Muhammad Ali for the New York Times. If writers need role models (and why wouldn’t we?), Lipsyte would be one of mine. I shared our Ali-covered “22nd Summer” issue with him and reached out for an interview. His perspective — in a dozen answers to follow — shows he’s a man for all times, past, present, and forthcoming.

William Meiners: Between the insanity of the current presidential election and some turbulent times in an Olympic year, I suspect you’ve had a few flashbacks to 1968. Nearly half a century later, do you think we’re just rolling through some cyclical part of history or could the United States be grappling with longstanding problems that just seem insurmountable?
Robert Lipsyte: Both. We haven’t come close to solving those problems although we’ve certainly seen enough progress to make the choirs brave. We understand and in some cases even acknowledge how far we need to go in giving all Americans, especially women, African-Americans, and the poor a fair deal. I keep coming back to my Dad’s line: “Everybody should pull themselves up by their own boot straps, but it’s up to society to make sure everyone starts out with a pair of boots.” I think sports sometimes gives us a false picture of progress — there are so many rich and celebrated African-American men in football and basketball — but the injustices continue. Which puts more pressure on black athletes to step up and white athletes to support them.

WM: At the end of August, you wrote about one particular flashback, actually a great article in Slate. Recalling Tommie Smith and John Carlos, you said Colin Kaepernick’s not standing (subsequently taking a knee) for the national anthem was the “boldest display of athletic activism since the 1968 black-power salute in Mexico.” With several football players following suit, as well as a diverse group of women from other sports, do you think this is the beginning of reactivated activism in sports?
RL: A few months later, I still hope so, that this is the Athletic Revolution Redux. Smith, Carlos, and Ali were commercially crushed for their principles, none of them got their corporate endorsement due, and the athletes who followed took note and allowed themselves to be co-opted. They became shoe salesmen. My current optimism is based on the WNBA standing up with T-shirts and protests, and high school football teams taking a Kaepernick, which tells me there are thinking young players out there and progressive coaches allowing them to express themselves.

WM: Much of the reaction to Kaepernick, besides twisting his protest into a slam against military men and women, focused on the idea of “shut up and play,” or go sit on the bench. The suggestion perhaps being that he’s achieved beyond the status quo, so he should be happy with that. What impresses you most about his protest and how might his actions help in not just inspiring others, but also fostering change?
RL: Years ago, I covered a high school team whose middle linebacker came out as gay. When one of the players complained about having to undress and shower with a gay teammate, the captain said, “You’re a football player, just suck it up.” That’s always stuck with me. That’s what they’re supposed to do. We’re drawn to these players for their physical courage, which they’re proud of, but what about their moral courage? Suck it up, the way activists, single moms, the disabled, do every day. When football players suck it up it’s usually to hide pain or injury so they don’t lose their jobs. Suck it up when a principle is on the line. That’s what Kaepernick did. “Shut up and play” is for wimps.

WM: From best-selling jerseys to death threats, Kaepernick has become a focal point in this polarizing debate over issues brought forth by the Black Lives Matter movement. He kind of joked (at least hoping it wouldn’t happen), that someone murdering him would only prove his point. Of course, recent fatal police shootings in Tulsa and Charlotte continue to illustrate the problem. How can athletes bridge a gap in what seems like such a great divide?
RL: We all have responsibilities as citizens, but jocks live off the fantasies of fans, the illusion that they are special. Well, act special, at least help get the dialogue going. The danger, of course, for them is that fans see their humanity and the illusions are spoiled, better they should remain video game heroes, replaceable avatars with sportswriter back stories.

WM: The start of the NBA, which is even more of a “Black League” than the NFL, is upon us. What, if any, protests, do you anticipate? Do you think the league will try to suppress them?
RL: I’m watching this with great interest. Carmelo Anthony’s call for involvement using that powerful Instagram picture of the great black athletic activists — Ali, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Kareem — was a reminder that there have been heroes who were willing to take risks. LeBron followed that up with a few others at the ESPY’s. Now we have to see if they are true activists or just yak-tavists, dribbling through the zeitgeist. Pro basketball players are probably in the best position to create change — the owners know they could start their own league if need be.

WM: I’m all for free speech. Let them pry the pen from my cold, dead hand. I don’t have a gun. But that means knowing that even misinformed (downright stupid) speech is allowed in this country. For some reason that makes me think of Jake and Elwood Blues running the Illinois Nazis off a bridge. I would hope most people would want to run Illinois Nazis off a bridge. But they’ve got a right to congregate. With the baseball season winding down we saw Steve Clevenger, a second-string catcher from the Seattle Mariners, suspended for the rest of the season for making insensitive remarks about protestors in Charlotte on a private Twitter account. His words actually echo a lot of what you might hear on Twitter and Facebook. Is this a double standard for two second-string signal callers?
RL: Clevenger is an exemplar of the dark side of wanting athletes to step up and speak their minds (see Curt Schilling, John Rocker.) They tend to be reactionary and ignorant (not stupid) from having existed in the tunnel of their games since they were kids, owned by rich men, and taught to roll over for alpha males. Interesting that most of the fools are white. Suspending a second-string catcher on the DL for the rest of the season in September looks better than it is. I was surprised that there was no reprisal against Kaepernick, although pleased. I think he’s a hero. I also think that he represents a coming generation who wants to do the right thing. I sense Trump — who in many ways is a model of Jock Culture’s underside of bullying, intimidation, know-nothingness — has disgusted many people and managed to make them uncomfortable with a magnified reflection of their own selfishness and bigotry.

WM: You and I first talked for a Sport Literate interview in 2000. That particular issue featured “Christmas City, U.S.A.” — Michael McColly’s basketball essay which is really about racism. There was another essay about the rise and fall of Mike Tyson. For the first time, in our pages anyway, we gave some voice to issues concerning social justice. As a young journalist for the New York Times, did you make a deliberate decision to be a “progressive writer,” or did your voice somehow shape the things you wrote about?
robert_lipsyte-head-shotRL: That’s a good question I’ve been trying to answer for myself these past 50 years. I was not an avid sports fan growing up, my parents were totally unaware of sports (maybe they knew about Jackie Robinson). They were New York City public school teachers in Harlem and black Brooklyn, whose dinner table conversations were about inequality and the quest for social justice through education. So I came to the Times at 19, as a copyboy, with a flair for feature-writing and not much sports history or x’s and o’s expertise. I got a lot of freedom at the paper, became a columnist relatively quickly, and so picked my own stories, or at least chose the way I would approach them. Being sent to the 1964 Cassius Clay — Sonny Liston fight was the big break of my career, got me attention and set the course. Through Ali and the book I wrote with Dick Gregory (“Nigger”) I met Malcolm and leaders in the movement and solidified the attitude with which I came into sports. It was no deliberate decision for me to see thoroughbred horse racing and NASCAR as models of class in America, it just seemed plain. Look down at floor during a Final Four and see that something like 80 percent of the players are black and they represent 80 percent white schools. I did try to remind myself that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (I could get interested in courses for horses and restrictor plates), but I think most writers are directed by a GPS deep in their psyches, unless they are just doing shtick.

WM: You covered Muhammad Ali all the way back to his Cassius Clay days. From a pure charismatic standpoint, has there been another athlete who could touch him? If not, who has come close?
RL: I’ve always thought Billie Jean King was the most important athlete of the 20th century; consider her impact on half the world’s population for starters. Charisma? How do you measure that? She was as much fun to be around as Ali, and her impacts on ending shamateurism and opening the discussion of LGBTQ matters were enormous. She came close.

WM: In that 2000 interview, you talked about Ali being such a perfect match for the times. He simply reacted, often with great humor, to what was thrown at him. Do you think he may have been an accidental activist? Other than keeping him out of the ring in his prime, what did his three-year ban from fighting do for his legacy?
RL: Those three-plus years changed him from an uneducated boxer and dogmatic follower of the Nation of Islam to a man who came to understand his world. The only way he could make a living was on the college circuit. He was boring in the beginning, but he listened to the questions and learned from them.  By the end of his exile, when he said things like he didn’t want to be another black man sent by white men to kill brown men for a country that did not give him full rights, he knew what he was talking about.

WM: You never pulled any punches writing about Ali, speaking to the cruelty in which he mercilessly hammered boxers who called him Clay and perhaps abandoning his friendship with Malcolm X. Yet everything in his life, including some three decades of living with Parkinson’s disease, formed his life story. As someone who helped share the stories of one of the famous men in history, what do you think were Ali’s three greatest accomplishments?
RL: Besides the pure joy he gave as the most entertaining athlete of our time? One — Growing Up —  Being open and able to change and develop. Two — Staying Sweet — He was incredibly warm and kindly to his fans. Three — Suffering with Gallantry — He was the championship model for being a patient with unself-consciousness and dignity.

WM: I thought “O.J.: Made in America” was a stunning documentary, really putting into historical perspective all the turmoil between the Los Angeles Police Department and the city’s residents of color. Of course, it’s hard not to view O.J. Simpson as a Shakespearean hero in his own rise and fall. In that sense, what was O.J.’s tragic flaw?
RL: What was Othello’s tragic flaw? Jealousy? Pride? Self-deception? I think you’re right about O.J. as a Shakespearean hero, mostly in the context of the new documentary, a brilliant piece of film-making. But there were also more mundane flaws and they were obvious early, especially his neediness to be accepted, even loved by white men with power whose own sense of masculinity was enhanced by being in O.J.’s presence, under the testosterone shower, whether it was in movies, sports TV or Hertz commercials. They understood, if O.J. didn’t, that he worked for them, at their sufferance. O.J. was a faithless, abusive husband, and an ingratiating, accessible subject for journalists, not exactly a heroic balance. I found him easy copy, likeable, enormously cooperative, and narrowly self-absorbed — the same traits I found in Trump as a subject in the Eighties and Nineties — which made both of them, in my mind, suspect. (Chalk that up to Journalist self-doubt rather than prescience.)

WM: Ali and O.J. were contemporaries, but I don’t suspect they ran in the same circles. Yet they were superstar celebrity athletes decades before our “celebrity-obsessed” culture. How were they alike? How were they different? What lessons could each offer today’s “trending” athletes?
RL: O.J. was the alt.-Ali, also a soothing antidote to Brown, Russell, all those hard black athletes who intimidated white Americans with their uncompromising senses of self. O.J. was a grinner (see Magic Johnson), saying you’re O.K. with me to the white fans who wanted to think they were colorblind while also feeling good about themselves for bestowing their tolerance on a black man who pretended to love them back. Ali, who never denied his blackness (his put-downs of Joe Frazier’s hair, skin and facial features is a different, fascinating topic) loved everybody in a narcissistic way, while O.J. loved only his fantasy version of himself. Cautionary lessons for other athletes? First, get to be the best in your game, two, offend no one, three, make a pile and hold onto it. In other words, Be Like Mike. I’d like to think that for many of the new, more thoughtful breed of athlete, that’s no longer enough.

Robert Lipsyte, a former ESPN ombudsman, was a longtime New York Times sports columnist.

William Meiners, a freelance writer and teacher, is the editor of Sport Literate.

Safe At Home

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Safe At Home

 by Charles W. Brice

For Malik Hamilton

Last night, Andrew McCutchen, “Cutch” to us, slammed a tough one
into right field that hopped happily over Minnesota’s Eddie Rosario’s
left shoulder and dribbled onto the wall where Rosario, like the lame god
Hephaestus (what was he thinking?), took his sweet time retrieving the orb,
while Cutch, speedy as Apollo’s chariot, rounded third base and smashed
into the Twin’s Mount Olympus in the earthly form of Edwardo Nunez.

Their collision made the Hadron Collider blush and set the Richter Scale
thumping. The men who used to be in blue, but are now in gray,
called interference on Mount Olympus and sent our Pittsburgh Apollo
to the safety of home plate. Later, Cutch made poetry of the event,
“Definitely a foul there,” he said. “Fifteen yard penalty, roughing the passer,
automatic first down.” Andrew, our passer, was safe at home,

as I hope he is tonight and all the nights of his young life. I hope
he avoids the men in black who threw Eric Garner, Samuel Dubose,
Jonny Gammage, Walter Scott, John Crawford III, Dontre Hamilton,
and so many African American men out of the game forever,
out before they got to third base — passers, under
the lights of this long American night.

 

Charlie Brice is a recovering psychoanalyst. His first poetry collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, was published by WordTech Editions in June, 2016. His poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Avalon Literary Journal, The Paterson Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Spitball, VerseWrights, The Writing Disorder, and elsewhere. He is an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review’s Poetry 2015 International Poetry Competition, and his poem, “Wild Pitch,” was named one of the 75 best poems in Spitball magazine.

What is Lost, What is Gained

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What is Lost, What is Gained

by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Earrings, wingbacks, beads to a necklace and their string, sunglasses, bike gloves, cans of coconut water, jerky, hair rubber bands, tire pressure, energy, fear — in every communal shower in small town schools something slides down the drain. A visor, a pair of bike gloves, a set of house keys, remain somewhere in the grass. Slide out of jersey and an unidentifiable object bounces to tent floor. On such rides, everyone is stripped of riches, reduced to the body, the tongue, to the necessary speech, the hook.

Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of 22 books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, selected for the Nebraska 150 Book List. Her collaborative book with artist Sally DeskinsIntimates and Fools, is a Nebraska Book Award 2015 Honor Book. Her book Drink won the 2016 Independent Publisher Bronze Book Award for poetry. Her recent collections are An Apparently Impossible Adventure and Leaves of Absence. Her essay “Seven Cities of Good” was an honorable mention in Pacifica Literary Review’s 2015 Creative Nonfiction Award. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Mad Dog Goes Yard

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Mad Dog Goes Yard

by Tom McGohey

The Tigers’ Bill Madlock was an unlikely candidate to become the 12th Major Leaguer to hit four home runs in one game, joining the likes of Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, and Mike Schmidt (Gehrig and Schmidt in consecutive at-bats). He was a four-time National League batting champ, but in his 15-year career he hit a modest 163 homers, with a career-high of 19 in 1982. Though he had “some pop,” as announcers like to say about players with middling power, he was not the kind of belter that made opposing teams pitch around him.

But against the Orioles on June 28, 1987, “Mad Dog,” as he was known for a rabid temper that was as much bite as bark, was lofting home runs into the left field seats at Tiger Stadium like he was playing “HORSE” using paper wads and a wastebasket. A power surge all the more shocking considering that when the Dodgers, his fifth team in 14 seasons, released him on May 29, he was batting an embarrassing .180 and had played in only 21 games. It seemed the Mad Dog, 36, had become a toothless, mangy mutt only four months in baseball-years short of euthanasia. But Tigers’ manager Sparky Anderson, remembering Madlock’s smart approach to batting from his days running the Cincinnati Reds, embraced GM Bill Lajoie’s plan to add a veteran right-handed bat to a team that was sputtering along at two games over .500, 5 ½ games behind the Yankees in the American League East Division. And though the core of the 1984 World Series Champs was still in place, the odds of reprising that brilliant season were looking murkier than stale water in the concession hot dog steamers.

Twenty-five years earlier, when I was 10, my father took my brother and me to our first major league baseball game, Tigers vs. White Sox. The Tigers won on an RBI double by Jake Wood, (a once promising infielder who slipped into mediocrity and out of baseball after a half dozen seasons, his career preserved only in the franchise stat books and the memory of a fan prone to nostalgia even at the age of ten.) It was a hot, humid day, and I ate so much peanuts, Cracker Jacks, cotton candy, hotdogs, and soft-serve ice cream that after the game I threw up on the sidewalk of what is now Kaline Drive. (My apologies, Al.)

Now I was returning the favor, treating the old man to what I anticipated at the time could possibly be our final outing at the old ball park at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. In a few weeks, I was moving to North Carolina to attend graduate school, and my father, widowed the previous year by my mother’s death from cancer, had recently announced his engagement to a lady from Toronto, a recent widow herself, and that they would be starting their new life together by resettling in a place new for both of them.

At the time, Madlock’s signing did not inspire much excitement in me. That old guy? I thought. What’s he got left? But as the stand-in for the quiet, polite Jake Wood in this reprise father-son ritual, Mad Dog and his reputation for fisticuffs — he was known to punch his own teammates, as well as opponents who crossed him — did lend an air of celebrity scandal to his arrival.

Nonetheless, his former All-Star fielding skills diminished by age and portly physique, Madlock still had potential as a part-time DH on a team looking to jump-start a lineup still loaded with talented if slumping hitters, and he rewarded their faith immediately with eight hits, including a homer, in a four-game series with Boston, and with four hits in a game against Milwaukee. Explaining this torrid resurgence, Madlock said at the time, “They seem to throw more breaking balls for strikes over here [in the American League]. And when you make a mistake with a breaking ball, it’s usually up. In the National League, they throw more forkballs and a mistake with a forkball is usually in the dirt. And batting average doesn’t mean as much over here. Here, we’re talking home runs and RBIs. I’ve messed myself up a few times already, swinging for the fences. I’ve been up and down because of it.”

A down streak included an 0-21 slump that got him benched for two games before returning to the lineup against the Orioles June 28, as the DH, batting second. Why Sparky decided to reinsert Madlock for this particular game, who knows? Maybe just a gut move based on experience: .304 career-hitters generally figure things out on their own.

Whatever the reason, the move paid off in the 1st inning, with Madlock hitting a two-run homer to left, which probably surprised Orioles’ starter Eric Bell as much as it revived the Sunday afternoon crowd of 31,606 fans, who didn’t have to wait long to recover from the three-run homer by O’s Fred Lynn, off Jeff Robinson, in the top half of the inning. Unfortunately, Madlock’s quick-strike counter blow didn’t do much for Robinson’s stuff; he gave up three more earned runs in the 4th inning, when he was relieved by Mark Thurmond, who promptly gave up another run, in the 5th, leaving the Tigers in a five-run hole. Madlock, as if deciding it was up to him to keep the Tigers from getting blown out, responded with another homer, a solo shot off Jeff Habyn, again to left, in the bottom of the inning. The Tigers added a run in the 8th on a Chet Lemon single, scoring Kirk Gibson from second base. In the meantime, Eric King, the Tigers’ third pitcher, had shut down the O’s through the 9th, and the Tigers came to bat still trailing by three.

Fanatical numerologists with a spiritual bent might have ascribed the Tigers’ ninth to a miraculous trinity of divine power: a three-run deficit erased by three consecutive homers, the first by pinch-hitter Johnny Grubb, a former All-Star limping through a final season that would end with anemic stat line of 2/13/.202; the second by catcher Matt Nokes, who would finish the season with a career-high 32 homers; and the third, by our snarling hero, Mad Dog, the crowning blow of a hat trick that even the most faithful of sporting prophets or statisticians never would have bet on. (Alas, for stat-heads seeking record confluences of streaks, no matter how arcane, Madlock’s tercet did not come in consecutive at-bats: he flied out to short stop in the 2nd.) So improbable was this power surge for a hitter better-known for stinging singles and frozen-rope doubles that my father and I could only shake our heads and laugh in wonderment at what we had just witnessed.

No matter the outcome, I was gratified that this game, more than likely our final one together at Tiger Stadium, had provided so much drama in such an unexpected fashion. Of course, I wanted the Tigers to win, but to expect more seemed almost greedy. What could possibly top that 9th inning?  Certainly Madlock had used up his allotment of swan-song heroics usually reserved for Hall of Famers like Ted Williams. That he had granted my father and me extra innings in a farewell outing 25 years after our first game at Tiger Stadium should have been more than any grateful son could expect. But I was greedy. You always want more — more thrills, more odds-defying feats from aging players summoning powers unimagined even in their prime — even when a part of you recognizes that such unrealistic thinking more often than not leads to bitter disappointment.

At that point, I was just hoping Madlock would get another at-bat. The odds of that happening looked bad in the top of 10th when the Orioles put men on first and third with two outs, Cal Ripken at the plate. The future Hall-of-Famer was having another All-Star season, with 17 homers and 51 RBI by midseason. And worse, after four innings of shut-out relief, the O’s appeared to be catching up to Eric King’s fastball. The unpredictable skills that had produced a 4.02 ERA, lamentable for a part-time starter, depressing for a reliever, were resurfacing. I think everyone in the stands, myself included, expected Ripken to do something dramatic. He struck out.

The Tigers, facing Doug Corbett, went down in order in their half of the 10th. Still, regardless of what Orioles did next inning, Madlock would get to bat in the Tigers’ half. Willie Hernandez, MVP and Cy Young winner from the 1984 championship season, faced three potentially tough outs in Eddie Murray, Fred Lynn, and Ray Knight, and put them away in order, but not before a couple of fly balls by Murray and Lynn made me squirm more than they should have. Even in a proverbial bandbox like Tiger Stadium, they were not close to clearing the fences.

Nokes led off the bottom of 11th with a single. That brought Madlock to the plate. Of course, everyone in the stadium, myself included, was hoping for a fourth homer, and chants of “Maad- daawg, maad-daawg,” like cheers for a rabid pit bull in an illegal dog fight, swelled and circled the stands. I wasn’t a chanter, too shy and reserved for that, especially in front of my father, but as each refrain grew louder, my heart rate pumped faster. Who wouldn’t want him to swing for the fences in that spot?  My father, that’s who. He was old-school, as they say, grew up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and valued good old-fashioned, conventional wisdom-percentage baseball strategy. And the conventional wisdom here was obvious: move the runner over. Beneath the cheering, more like a high-pitched ecstatic pleading, and the chanting, and the simultaneous slapping of plastic seats, I could hear my father mutter in a dry, sarcastic tone, as if he were a crusty old manager with decades of experience and dismissive of the fans’ emotional demands, “Move the runner over.”

And of course, that was the smart call. Put the runner into scoring position, and a single brings him home. Walk-off homers were for perennial bombers like Gehrig, Mays, and Schmidt; they were for majestic mastiffs, not for scrappy, rabid — figurative or real, and the verdict in this case was 50/50 — Mad Dogs. After all, what were the odds of Madlock hitting a fourth homer? Sabermetric gurus filling front offices today would scoff at the possibility. Future generations of fans looking up such a stat and finding Madlock’s name would, with good reason, think it was a misprint. Or at best, the name might register with the same blankness that I felt when seeing names of batting champs from the 1880s. Walk-off singles — does the term even exist? — just doesn’t ring like walk-off homer. Moving the runner over required one thing from Madlock: a sacrifice bunt. Could he make the mental downshift from adrenaline-fueled aggression of swinging for the fences to the cool calculations of laying down a good bunt? Remember that Madlock himself, recognizing the difference between small-ball and long-ball approaches to batting in the Senior and Junior loops, had confessed that he had “messed myself up” trying to hit homers when he returned to the American League.  Keep in mind also that Sparky Anderson, despite winning two World Series with a Cincinnati lineup that featured some legitimate bashers like Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, and George Foster, had acquired his managerial chops in a small-ball league that disdained adopting the DH, and played percentages so faithfully that he earned the nickname “Captain Hook” for changing pitchers at the first sign of trouble.

Sparky liked to talk. Sparky loved to talk. Talking was like breathing for him, and he never required a respirator to support his entertaining if inflated soliloquies with reporters. With so much verbiage on the record, he was bound to contradict himself now and then. For example, he once said that “Players have two things to do. Play and keep their mouths shut.” But in Cincinnati, he was also known for having two sets of rules for stars and role players. Madlock may have been the star this day, but as part-time DH at the end of his career, he had a clearly defined role: shut up and follow orders.

Would Sparky give Madlock the green light to swing for immortality or make the conventional call for a bunt? You’d have to be a naïve romantic to hope for the former. The pragmatist in me accepted that Madlock would be bunting; the romantic was silently begging for him to hit a homer. Such an improbable ending would elevate what had already been a memorable game to the status of an immortal one. If this did prove to be the last game my father and I attended, I could not imagine a better ending to a shared passion that had started 25 years earlier with my first sighting of the luminous lime green grass of the playing field at Tiger Stadium, and other images that for some odd reason became indelible in the memory of a 10-year-old kid: Rocky Colavito’s five o’clock shadow, already a dark blue-gray for a Sunday matinee game, and the chaw-stuffed cheek of White Sox veteran Nellie Fox, which seemed to swell with each swing in the batting cage.

So it came down to this — would the Mad Dog defy his master and attempt to go yard, knowing that if he failed he’d likely be sentenced to Sparky’s dog house for eternity (which would end with his being waived), or would one of the game’s most volatile yappers shut up and follow orders? For me, it came down to another question: should I honor my father’s time-honored wisdom and stale if savvy percentage-based practicality by issuing vibes to chill any impetuous cravings for immortality twitching in the Mad Dog’s feverish brain and calloused hands, or assert my own independence by openly joining the rest of the chanting mob around us in howling for the intoxicating reward of a risky, selfish act that was more likely to end in failure, and possibly defeat for the greater good of the team?

Madlock ended the suspense on the first pitch, laying down a bunt on the third base line. A charging Ray Knight fielded the ball cleanly, but not in time to make a play on Nokes at second. Madlock was thrown out easily, but he had done his job. He moved the runner into scoring position. As he trotted back to the dugout, the crowd reacted with cheers just a shade deflated by disappointment at being denied a fourth homer.

Or maybe I’m imagining that, projecting my own mixed feelings. In my mind the perfect scenario would have had him swinging away until he either connected or got two strikes, ratcheting up the suspense and stoking the crowd to a hysterical pitch, and then laying down the perfect bunt. But that would have been a foolish strategy, if not outright stupid. He might have struck out or, worse, hit into a double-play, leaving the Tigers with two outs and no men on base. He did the right thing, whether on Sparky’s orders or not, and clearly he’d been following orders. And I suspect that even if he’d been given the green light, a fantastical possibility, Madlock still would have been bunting all the way. He may have had a volatile temperament, but he was still a pro, an aging veteran who understood that a greater, if unspoken and lesser celebrated, glory came with doing the simple, fundamental things in the game correctly. That appeared to be my father’s reaction, anyway. He just looked at me, smiled, and nodded his head.

The next batter, Kirk Gibson, was intentionally walked, bringing Alan Trammell to the plate. He hit a single up the middle, scoring Nokes. Game over. Tigers won 8-7.

 

After acquiring Madlock, the Tigers played .649 ball, going 71-39. They entered the final week of the regular season trailing Toronto by 3 ½ games, and swept the Blue Jays in a four-game series at Tiger Stadium, clinching the Divisional title on the last day of the season on a home run by Larry Herndon. (Emotionally spent after that tense finish, they lost the ALCS to the Twins in five games.) By that point, though, I had moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, for graduate school, where I watched that miraculous sweep in a local laundromat-bar called “Suds and Duds,” wearing my newly purchased Tigers’ North Star starter’s jacket, despite the 90-degree-plus degree weather.

Shortstop Alan Trammell was the star of that team, hitting a career-best .343, 28 homers, 105 RBIs and placing second in AL MVP vote. In what proved to be his final season, Madlock contributed a solid but underestimated stat line of .279 / 14 homers / 50 RBI, all the more impressive considering that he appeared in only 87 games. In one of those endless musing of ‘what if” scenarios so popular in sports, especially baseball, I liked to think that extra-inning win over the O’s three months earlier was the difference in the Tigers winning the division and going home. There was no Wild Card in those days. What if Madlock hadn’t laid down that lovely bunt? What if, following my impetuous yearning for the splashy, history-making play instead of my father’s calm, rational demand for the smart play, he’d swung for the fences and missed?

It turns out that game was the final time my father and I sat in the stands at Tiger Stadium. He’s 90 now, and still a rabid sports fan, still rooting for the Dodgers — the “Doyers,” as he calls them, in some strange patois of Brooklynese he’s never explained — partly out of loyalty to octogenarian announcer Vin Scully, more so out of loyalty to the National League for disdaining the DH, a stubborn refusal that, so the argument goes, allows managers to show off their strategy and guts by lifting a dominating pitcher for a pinch-hitter. The latter issue is an ongoing point of contention when we get together during summer visits. He ended up leaving Michigan the same year I did, relocating to North Carolina, as fate would have it, with his new wife (a Canadian born and raised in England who couldn’t tell the difference between a Blue Jay and an Oriole, but otherwise a lovely lady), a three-hour drive away.

We still watch games together during those visits, but only on TV, as his wobbly gait can no longer carry him up the grandstand steps, which now would appear to him like one of Escher’s endlessly looping mazes. But his memory is still sharp. When he starts carping about how the DH has corrupted the game, I remind him that it was a DH who provided the dramatics of our final game at Tiger Stadium. He responds with a disdainful grunt betrayed by a flicker of a smile fighting suppression. Sometimes the joy of such personal memories trumps the purity of national pastimes.

I’ve seen some dramatic homers with my father at Tiger Stadium: Reggie Jackson’s Homeric blast in the 1971 All-Star Game, a liner that pierced the fading evening summer sky like a mythic hero on the way to carving its own constellation, was still rising when it hit the metal stanchions of the lights in left-center field.

A no-doubt mortar shot by Lance Parrish in the 7th inning of the Tigers’ clinching Game 5 victory of the 1984 World Series against the Padres. It landed a few rows behind and to the left of our second-row seats in the left-field stands, close enough that I stretched my arm high overhead, hoping the sonic force of cheering would bend the ball’s trajectory into my mitt. It did not. Succumbing to such naïve optimism was still a thrill.

But the best homer I ever saw at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull was the one that never was.

They say a walk is as good as a hit. Sometimes a bunt is as good as a homer. And sometimes a nod is as loud as a cheer of thousands. Sometimes louder.

Tom McGohey taught composition at Wake Forest University for 20 years. He has published essays in Fourth Genre and Thread.  His essay, “Friday Night Fights with Mom,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2006.

Life After Death in Golf

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Life After Death in Golf

by Randy Steinberg

If you’re an elite professional golfer, you will most likely, when your playing days are done, be enshrined at the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine, Florida. This is the case for the top stars in most major sports. From halls of fame to retired numbers in the rafters to naming streets and stadiums after players, if you’re good enough your namesake will endure in a public place of honor. If you were a pro player but not good enough to make the Hall of Fame or have an avenue named after you, you’ll still be replayed and re-streamed in perpetuity, and thus millions of people will know about your accomplishments.

Going down a rung from the professional ranks, if you are a member of a swanky golf club, you might be lucky enough to have your framed photo on the wall of the main dining room. You’re smiling in tie and jacket. You are remembered in a highly personal way.

But what about the public course hacker, which is most of us after all? What is life after death in golf like for we common folk? Remarkably, your legacy might endure in a very visible way, too. You will not receive Hall of Fame, Golf Channel, or Country Club level attention. No rafters, TV replays, or dining room adornment for you. You’ll certainly have no face. Your name and dates might be displayed but not on a wall or in any place of prominence. Rather, your memorial is more likely to be a plaque or a marker on a bench by the 14th tee, a rock by the 7th green, the base of a tree along hole #2, or even a ball washer on, well, any tee box. You will live forever beneath a clump of windswept pine needles or buttressing someone’s rear end as they wait for the foursome in front of them to clear. Your name will be splashed with sudsy water every time a player cleans his ball.

Because golf is my passion perhaps I’ve only noticed this tradition on the golf course, but in my four decades I’ve played many sports, and I cannot recall seeing a memorial plaque to anyone on a tennis changeover bench or a ball return slot on a bowling lane. Are pick-up basketball men remembered with signage beneath the hoop at the town courts? Are softball players given markers on the trash cans where all the post-game beer cans are tossed?

Lest anyone think I’m putting down the practice of remembering a friend or loved one on the golf course, let me dispel that notion. Though I sometimes think it a peculiar tribute, it speaks to the uniqueness of golf — especially the way it honors its amateur and very average players. Cooperstown celebrates baseball greats, but are amateur baseballers accorded any status on town and city diamonds? Canton is a sacred space for the legends of the grid-iron, but are touch football men similarly remembered at the local playground?

I’m sure, in response to this essay, I’ll be corrected. Friends of Jim, who loved ultimate Frisbee, will tell me they honored his memory with a Frisbee-shaped escutcheon by the side of his favorite proving ground. Susie was remembered with a marker at mile 11 on her favorite biking trail, her survivors will state. It does happen in other sports and athletic endeavors, I’ll be told!

Though it might not relate to their hobbies or avocations, others may point out that crosses by the side of the road, where an accident occurred, are common ways to remember someone who has died other than at a gravesite or in a hall of honor. However, it would be an imperfect (if not inapt) comparison because I’m unaware of any golf course memorial that notes a golfer died on the exact spot where it is affixed. That might make some morbid sense if it indeed was practiced in such a fashion. Ralph had a heart attack walking up the slope toward the 15th green and fell 30 yards short of the fringe: let’s put the plaque on that spot, with of course a free drop to anyone landing on it. I doubt any greens keeper would be amenable to this, but in an eerie way it would be fitting.

All kidding aside, what does the practice of memorializing people on the golf course say about the sport? Why does golf seem to treat death differently than other hobbies and pass-times, even down to its most unheralded practitioners?

***

One possible answer could be in the way golf is defined, which is the subject of much debate. Is it a sport or a game?

This question has been asked ad nauseum, and if any sports radio hosts are silly enough to pose it anymore, they can be assured of a precipitous ratings drop. But when discussing the way golf treats death, it might be worth revisiting.

Years ago, I might have sided with the “game” proponents. In as much as Nicklaus, Watson, Snead, Jones, Hogan, Player, and Trevino were great golfers they didn’t look like much. They didn’t have the appearance of a modern-day (even latter day) athlete. Flab and pudge abounded. I’m sure most of them smoked cigarettes and drank. Indeed, golf is the only sport in recent memory where a professional player can actively be seen smoking (a cigar) during a round. There are certain major league pitchers who appear wide in the mid-section, but can you imagine any one of them with a Camel in the corner of his mouth as he winds up for a pitch?

This is not to say the golf legends I mentioned did not have great hand-eye coordination, superior concentration, and nerves of steel. Of course, to a man, they did, but compare them to golfers of the present day. There are exceptions, naturally. There are overweight golfers (John Daly and Brandon de Jonge immediately spring to mind) and averaged-sized men on the pro tours, but the rule is a tall, lean, toned, intimidating figure. Tiger Woods may have ushered in the modern player and made what was once a game, a sport, but the ground he broke is now worn over on the men’s and women’s tours. A 300-yard drive 30, 40, and 50 years ago was seen as near-miraculous. Now it is routine, with drives of 350 yards or more not too jaw dropping.

Pro golfers are muscled and physically prepared in ways their forbearers would not have thought about. Technologically, golf is cutting edge and it, along with most of the other “sports,” has its own 24-hour television network. Bridge and golf were games in the 1950s, but cards remain a game in the 21st century while golf, the arriviste, has gone athletically mainstream.

Thus, if we see golf as a sport, the urge to memorialize its participants on the field of battle, so to speak, is more understandable. A plaque by the dartboard or the poker table doesn’t feel appropriate because the players just lounged and gabbed and drank. But on the golf course, where the mighty strode and struck — just like the heroes of the Iliad — an impermeable tribute is fitting.

Given that I’ve noticed the phenomenon of on-course tributes to everyday players is a more recent one perhaps there is something to the notion that golf as “sport-over-game” has taken hold — and thus the impulse to memorialize amateur players in the same manner as professional golf heroes makes a lot more sense.

But if this analysis feels incomplete, there’s more that lends golf uniquely to the on-course tribute.

In the famed golf movie Caddyshack, Rodney Dangerfield’s character Al Czervik quips, “…country clubs and cemeteries, biggest waste of prime real estate.” Why did he pair the two together? Both can be places of calm and rest and contemplation. If you are alone on the golf course, things can be as quiet as the grave, and you might stop a moment to reflect — or view someone’s memorial.

One could say the same about skiing, whether downhill or cross country, but skiing is a sport of constant motion, and even if you do stop it’s probably 20 degrees out and you’re unlikely to ruminate for long. And let’s face it, there’s not much to ponder on a hard-top tennis court or the town hockey rink. If you’ve seen one court or rink, you’ve seen them all, but even not too well tended public golf courses have their own charm and individuality. These sui generis attributes bind course to player, and after the player is gone those left behind understand how much the course meant to that person. Thus, they wish to mark forever the synergy of environment and man.

What’s more, golf courses and graveyards are both enjoyed best in perfect weather, if the latter can even be enjoyed, though many a golfer might wish he was dead after a blow-up round. Both settings have exquisitely tended grounds and invite tranquility. A rower, skimming along his favorite river on a calm evening might be similar, but he can’t stop the boat to view a marker (if it could be placed anywhere). On the golf course, you can pause your round to view a plaque in bucolic settings. I’m not sure if those who set up memorials for friends and loved ones on golf courses consciously understand that, but I don’t think it can be coincidence.

Lastly, golf is a sport that reveres tradition and history. Naturally, other sports do as well, but I don’t think to the extent golf does. Golf predates most other modern sports, and what other contemporary athletic endeavor has more picayune rules and devotion to etiquette than golf?

No one would think it odd if a baseball player was ejected from a game for corking his bat, but should a player be disqualified from a tournament for kneeling on a towel? The latter example did indeed happen when a professional golfer (Craig Stadler) had to hit a shot from a kneeling position. He didn’t want to muddy his pants so used a towel, not in any way to aide his shot, but simply to keep his trousers clean. No matter to the rules committee: he was tossed from the tournament.

Pickup basketball is a far rougher experience than a refereed game. What constitutes a foul in the NBA would be considered patty-cake on the playground court. But amateur golf can be just as serious as the top ranks. Go to a public course and try stepping in someone’s putting line or talking during a backswing. You will find little tolerance for such a breach of etiquette no matter what level of golf. Some golfers naturally — unfortunately — cheat, but gaining an edge by getting away with a rule breach, which is seen in most other sports as admirable, is frowned upon in golf. Golfers are famous for turning themselves if an infraction occurs. You’ll never see an NFL defensive back admit he held the jersey of a wide receiver, and you’ll never see a major leaguer on second base cop to stealing signs from the opposing team’s catcher. But in golf, if a player accidentally moves a ball he is addressing, more often than not, he will announce the violation.

How does this relate to life after death in golf? Most athletes, no matter what sport they play, see themselves as part of a brotherhood, but I believe fraternity in golf is stronger than all others. Thus, we take our golf identity with us to the grave, and it is no surprise that those who survive us seek to keep the fires burning brightly for the fallen. And they do it on the golf course, which bonds the quick and the dead to its terrain, its traditions, and its etiquette in a far more palpable way than can any other sport.

***

My grandfather passed away in 2007 in Florida. My grandmother moved closer to us after that (to Massachusetts), and she died in 2015. They were both lifelong golfers, avid fans of the sport and most anything related to it. Combined, they easily played the sport more than 100 years. When my grandmother passed, we had my grandfather’s remains brought to Massachusetts so they could be buried together.

At the funeral service for my grandmother, everyone was encouraged — per Jewish custom — to throw a handful of dirt on the casket. I opted for a sprinkling of golf tees. I recall, before I made the offering, looking to the Rabbi for any signs of disapproval. A more orthodox interpreter of the faith, he did not have a problem with this gesture. There was a smattering more controversy when my mother inquired as to what kind of headstone she could fashion for her parents. She wanted it to be in the shape of a golf green or something to that effect. The rules regarding what kinds of symbols and insignia can be used in a Jewish cemetery are rigid, but it seems my mother’s idea did not violate any Hebraic, death tenet.

I have not been to too many cemeteries, but I can’t say I recall any gravestones that display golf symbols. Again, I’m sure someone will point out where I am wrong on this, but whether or not the practice is common, perhaps this is the better way to honor the passing of a golfer.

As for me — and I’m speaking to my heirs — I would prefer to forego an on-the-course tribute. I understand the impulse, but to me it’s close to a backhanded compliment. Perhaps if you were to emblazon my name on the 18th green of a course I frequented, where it could never be missed, I might agree to the gesture. Every golfer who played the course, each round, would have to see my name and even perhaps aim for it depending on pin placement. But on a bench, beneath a tree, fastened to a ball washer. No thanks. Bury my heart in the graveyard and adorn my resting place there with golf imagery, but don’t remember me with signage on a rock besides the 13th tee.

I wouldn’t go so far as to incorporate these wishes into my last will and testament, but if this essay could be considered, in the least, legally binding, I hope my successors will heed it.

Again, I beg pardon to those who have paid tribute to a loved one with this kind of memorial. My thoughts on their efforts to remember a father or a husband may seem condescending and rude, but from an eschatological point of view I wonder if any of it matters.

When the sun burns out in another five billion years and flares in its own death throes, the planet earth will most likely be engulfed and incinerated. When this happens, if humanity is even around and still playing golf, all the courses and the Golf Hall of Fame and all of our memories and tributes and everything else will be gone.

What of life after death in golf then? Will any of this matter — this essay included — when the solar system is gone, and there is no one to remember the memories of anything, let alone golfers?

Whether you prefer plaques on the golf course over golf imagery on a cemetery headstone, or vice versa, your best hope is that God or the supreme being or whomever is a golfer. For one thing, it would make all those golf jokes in which God or Jesus figure that much more appropriate. More importantly, all the ball washer and bench markers (and graveyard ones too) will most assuredly matter, for God will have taken note. People might not remember the tribute on the rock or the tree or the headstone, but the Lord will. This may not be much comfort to the atheist-golfer, but for all the praying golfers out there it will be sweet redemption.

As for me, I prefer to remain agnostic about golf, religion, and golf-course memorials. Though I might not want an on course tribute for myself, it’s a testament I’m proud to say is unique to golf. You might not have played to the level of Arnold Palmer or Jason Day, and you may have not been a country club patrician, but you can be remembered in a way that weekend warriors in other sports wouldn’t even contemplate.

 

Randy Steinberg has a master’s degree in film/screenwriting from Boston University. He taught screenwriting at BU from 1999-2010. Since 2011, he has reviewed films, television shows, DVDs, and books for Blast Magazine.com. He has published essays, articles, and short stories in Boston Magazine, The Good Men Project, and The Heat City Literary Review. This is his second Sport Literate essay. He lives in the Greater Boston area.

Enigmatic Frenchman

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by John Gifford

It was the final day of the 1989 Tour de France, and French rider and race leader, Laurent Fignon, sat in the start house at the head of the course, straddling his Raleigh, preparing himself for the 24-kilometer (15-mile) time trial that would take him from Versailles to Paris: his hometown, and, on this hot July day, the sporting capital of the world. Dropping his gaze, strands of his long, blond hair fell from his head, radiating out like spokes from a hub and shielding his face from the reporters’ cameras. After three weeks and over 2,000 miles, it had come down to this final stage. The race was Fignon’s to win or lose. What was he thinking? Was he contemplating his strategy? The painful saddle sore he’d acquired in the Alps just a few days earlier? The 50-second advantage he held over American Greg LeMond, whom had just departed the start house ahead of him? Perhaps he was imagining the taste of the champagne he’d sip later that evening, after claiming his third Tour de France victory.

As the Tour’s leader, Fignon had the privilege of starting last and he’d elected to have time splits relayed to him during the race to keep him apprised of his performance. And in what would prove to be perhaps the most momentous decision of his career, the Frenchman declined to have his bike outfitted with aerodynamic handlebars, which LeMond was using today, just as he had a couple weeks earlier, when he’d won the Stage 5 individual time trial. Nor, for that matter, did he elect to wear a helmet, as LeMond and many of the other riders had — a choice less about practicality, perhaps, than vanity. Fignon had a blond ponytail which would flap in the breeze as he made his way onto the Champs Elysees in front of, not only tens of thousands of spectators lining the Paris streets, but also three billion television viewers around the world who were watching what had turned out to be the most exciting Tour de France in recent memory, and, one that, in less than 30 short minutes, would deliver the closest finish in its long history.

At last, Fignon sat up in the saddle and clipped his shoes into the pedals. Now clutching the handlebars, he took a deep breath and exhaled, listening as the official counted down the final five seconds. Cinq! Quatre! Trois! Deux! Un! Then the clock beeped and the crowd roared as Fignon — already a two-time Tour de France champion and the country’s greatest hope to win the 1989 event — rolled out of the start house wearing the maillot jaune of the race leader, his brown legs turning a massive gear, his blond ponytail flapping in the wind as he made his way through the frenetic streets of Versailles, toward Paris, and history.

At the 5-kilometer mark Fignon’s longtime coach, Cyrille Guimard, told his star rider that he’d lost 10 seconds to LeMond. Fignon couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Mild panic set in. He pedaled faster.

***

I stood among a small crowd that day, watching the race from inside a sporting goods store in a Carlsbad, California shopping mall. I was 19 years old and a passionate cyclist who hoped to one day turn professional and ride in the Tour de France. Six years earlier, I’d watched Fignon win the 1983 Tour and I was thrilled to see him competing for a third title today after winning the Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) only the month before. Like my father, I was heavily involved in bicycle racing. But whereas his favorite rider was Bernard Hinault, the famous Frenchman and five-time Tour de France champion, who was nicknamed “The Badger” for his unrelenting tenacity, Fignon was my hero and I cheered for him now, even as the others rooted for LeMond, America’s best rider. It was easy to understand why. LeMond was a nice guy. He was always smiling and willing to talk to the press. The French loved him because he was fluent in their language. Fans around the world admired him because he gave them hope. After surviving a hunting accident only a few years earlier, and now vying for the Tour de France title, with residual shotgun pellets still imbedded in his body, he seemed to suggest that anything was possible. Watching him sail along the streets at 34 miles-per-hour, hunched over the aerodynamic handlebars in an efficient, wind-cheating posture, he reminded me of Superman.

Fignon exuded a different kind of charisma. With his wire-rimmed spectacles and thin, blond hair, he was the most unique and interesting rider in the peloton, as far as I was concerned. The other riders had nicknamed him “The Professor,” not only for the eyeglasses he wore, but also for the fact that Fignon was one of the few riders in the peloton to have completed his baccalaureate exams. After winning the Tour de France in 1983 and 1984, he was one of cycling’s biggest stars, and yet he shunned reporters and cameras. When he did give an interview, he appeared guarded and mysterious. I wanted to know what he was thinking, and he gave the impression he didn’t want you to know. He was aloof. He was distant. His responses to questions were often witty quips. I liked that. He had an appetite for Stephen King novels. I liked that, too.

What many reporters and fans disliked about him was his arrogance. After his 1983 Tour victory, Fignon traded his Renault for a Ferrari. “Everyone drives one of these!” he said with a sniff, much to the dismay of the French who were discovering that, in Fignon, they had a hero they could not afford, nor tolerate. He threw water bottles at reporters, spat at cameras, and generally allowed the world to see him at his absolute worst. Still, I liked him. Fignon seemed to go at his pace and do things his way, something I’ve always tried to do.

Mostly, I admired Fignon for his ability on the bike, and for his graceful, flowing style, which, unfortunately, wasn’t apparent on the final day of the 1989 Tour de France. I assumed the saddle sores were tormenting him. Still, he was a brilliant tactician and I had confidence he could hold on to the lead, especially given the final stage’s short, 15-mile course. Having begun the day with a 50-second advantage over LeMond, it seemed reasonable that he would win, even if the American turned in a brilliant performance. I think everyone expected this, because when the Frenchman crossed the finish line that day, collapsing and falling to the ground, reeling in the reality of his defeat, the cameramen mobbed him while the television announcers exclaimed — never mind that Greg LeMond had just made what may have been the greatest comeback in sports history — “Laurent Fignon has lost the Tour de France!”

The loss would haunt him the rest of his life.

***

It was a crash that heralded the end of my cycling career. While out on a training ride one day I overlapped another rider’s back wheel. I remember looking down at my front wheel veering into the other wheel and knowing I was going to go down. A moment later I was sliding across the highway, feeling the pavement peeling away the skin on my knees and elbows, and burning a hole into my chin. Fortunately, I’d been wearing a helmet, though the crash had still knocked me out for an instant. I don’t remember falling or hitting the ground; I only remember overlapping the other wheel, and the sight of a distant car approaching as I slid across the highway on the side of my face.

I was out of commission for several days. I couldn’t walk or drive my car. I didn’t ride my bike again for weeks, and when I finally did, I began to realize I was never going to become a professional road racer. Whereas I’d once been fearless on my bike, now, riding at high speeds unnerved me and I was afraid of crashing. I might have overcome this setback — rather quickly, even — but my day job prevented me from spending more time in the saddle. Time I needed to reacquaint myself with high speeds, and to put in many miles on the road. Time I didn’t have. Time I spent, instead, at the office.

It simply wasn’t going to happen for me, and as frustrating as this was, I had to accept it.

Eventually, I sold my bike and took up running. It was a sport I loved, and still do, for its inherent simplicity. Not only this, but running shoes are much less expensive than a racing bicycle. And I can get a great workout in 45 minutes — the same amount of time it used to take me to warm up before a long bike ride.

***

Fignon always considered himself a winner. And he was. In addition to his two Tour de France victories, he won the French National Championship in 1984, the Giro d’Italia in 1989 — after losing this same race on the very last stage only five years before — and was twice winner of the Milan-San Remo classic (1988 and 1989), to name a few of his accomplishments. As his team’s leader — Fignon rode for the Renault, Système U, Super U, and Castorama cycling teams before spending the final two years of his career as co-captain and mentor to the rising Italian star, Gianni Bugno, on the Gatorade-Chateau d’Ax squad — he was often expected to allow his teammates to win smaller, less prestigious races. Instead, especially during his prime years in the mid- to late-1980s, Fignon rode in these races to win, preferring to bask in the glory himself.

When his teammates complained that he was too quiet, that he never discussed his personal life with anyone, Fignon said, “They are paid to ride for me, not be my friends.” He once commented that his combative nature was essential to him being able to compete at such a high level, an attitude reflected, perhaps, in the Federation of International Cycling Professionals (FICP) rankings. In 1989, the year he lost the Tour de France by eight seconds to Greg LeMond, the year the press awarded him the Prix Citron (Lemon Prize) for his rudeness during the Tour, Fignon was the world’s No. 1 rider.

By virtue of his previous Tour de France wins, and all-around talent, he was a star and allowed to do things his way. Things like climbing off his bike, ducking into the team car and abandoning a race if he started poorly or if the weather conditions were not to his liking. Others might criticize him, but Fignon always found a way to come back and contend for another victory. As a professional, he knew the exact conditions necessary for him to have the best chance of winning, and, in the absence of such criteria, he had no problem waiting for the next race, and favorable conditions.

This attitude helped teach me the importance of listening to my own body, that I didn’t have to train if I felt tired, that it was okay if I didn’t want to run in cold weather. While I haven’t always enjoyed the luxury of deciding when and how I’ll train, now that I do, I’m reminded that a champion knows when to compete and when to rest.

In my own athletic endeavors, from racing bikes to running, I have always remembered Fignon, his temperamental personality and the competitiveness he displayed throughout his career. While serving in the Marine Corps, I ran 20 miles or more every week. As enthusiastic as I was about competition, I entered races and sometimes won them. Much of my semiannual performance reviews were based on my Physical Fitness Tests (PFTs), which consisted of a 3-mile run, 20 pull-ups, and 80 sit-ups within a two-minute period. These reviews were actually competitions, with accolades and bragging rights going to the winner. I trained for them like someone obsessed, usually finishing at or near the top of my company. Everyone who knew me regarded me as a model Marine, both for my work ethic and for my physical fitness — qualities I’ve tried to carry into civilian life and middle age.

I still run, primarily for enjoyment, but also for the health and psychological benefits it brings. Going out on a hot summer day and putting in five miles is one of the most invigorating and cleansing things I know of. Often, I’ll think of Fignon and what others must have thought at seeing him ride by, his blond ponytail streaming out behind him, so cultured and debonair, and yet always willing to attack and compete for the win. When I see another runner up ahead, something in me changes and I find myself turning the situation into a race. Maybe it’s a way of briefly reliving my athletic prime, or perhaps it’s only a test to find out how much gas I’ve left in the tank. Regardless, I give it everything I have to catch and pass the other runner. Even more motivating is spotting another runner behind me. This forces me to push myself, to increase my speed and focus on my form to ensure he doesn’t catch me — because I tell myself that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. This is as much a mental challenge as a physical one, and it’s a game I recall playing during my cycling days, when I would put my head down and push a big gear, trying to establish a steady rhythm to put as much distance as possible between myself and my nearest competitor. As I pedaled, I would try to emulate Fignon, even his facial gestures. I grimaced. I squinted. I even forced myself to smile while ascending steep hills. Though my legs and lungs were burning, I persevered, knowing it would certainly demoralize my opponents to see me smiling while they, too, were suffering.

***

In the years since the 1989 Tour de France, it’s been proposed time and time again that, had Fignon simply used aerodynamic handlebars that day, as LeMond did, he would have won the race. Granted, at the time, these strange triathlon handlebars were still a novelty in the European peloton. And because of the obvious aerodynamic — and time saving — advantages they afforded, they were also controversial. But they worked for LeMond, who demonstrated just how much more efficient they were than Fignon’s handlebars, which forced him to scoop air like a sail, slowing him, costing him the race.

It has also been proposed that, had Fignon worn an aerodynamic helmet, as LeMond did, he would have won the Tour de France.

Some have dared to suggest that Fignon could have won the Tour simply by cutting off his wind-catching ponytail. But of all three scenarios, this was certainly the least likely. After all, if there is anything the French expect of their champions, it is panache, the concept of verve, style, flamboyance. When one wears the maillot jaune, they believe, this person, above all others, must ride with panache. For the French, it’s a matter of style and pride. And dignity. Fignon understood this, perhaps better than any other rider in the 1989 Tour de France. And he upheld this concept to the best of his considerable abilities, which led to his defeat.

The French never forgave him for it.

***

Part of what intrigued me about Fignon was the Tour de France, itself: the world’s largest annual sporting event and, arguably, the greatest, covering over 2,000 miles in three weeks, attracting more than 10 million spectators along its route, fans who come out to see some of the most elite athletes in all of sports — athletes who race 100 miles or more during a single stage, burning up to 10,000 calories a day — push their bodies to limits humans were not designed to reach. The event is so arduous and demanding that teams groom their young riders, limiting their involvement to a select number of stages, sometimes for several years, before allowing them to complete an entire Tour. Which makes Fignon’s 1983 victory even more remarkable. It was his first time competing in the event and, at 22, he became the youngest rider in half a century to win it.

***

In 1987, after Greg LeMond’s near-fatal hunting accident, Fignon was the only European rider, outside LeMond’s own team, to send the American a get-well note.

***

Over the years, I lost track of Fignon. After I took up running, I no longer subscribed to the cycling papers which had once kept me informed about the sport, and I found myself less interested in following the Tour de France, probably because I no longer recognized any of the riders.

To my great surprise, however, some years ago, during graduate school, one of the students I tutored brought his physiology textbook into the writing lab one day. On the book’s cover was Fignon, a photo from his racing days. He sat on a treadmill in what looked like some kind of medical laboratory, his long, blond hair falling onto his bare chest, to which was connected all sorts of electronic devices to monitor his heart and lungs. There was even a tube fitted into his mouth to measure his maximum rate of oxygen consumption. Elite cyclists have always astounded scientists for their seemingly superhuman endurance capacities, and I suppose Fignon was at the top of this list for not only for his athletic abilities, but also his colorful character. He made you want to look at him and listen to what he might say next. And, like him or not, you respected him for what he could do on a bicycle.

By now (2010) we were well into the Internet age and Fignon had long since retired from professional cycling. Occasionally, something would remind me of him and one day it occurred to me that I could search the Web to find out what The Professor had been up to in recent years. I was elated to discover that he’d written an autobiography, We Were Young and Carefree, which had just been published in English and which I wasted no time in ordering. I was also shocked to learn that he had just died of cancer at the young age of 50.

It took several weeks to receive the book, which shipped from England. When it arrived, I read it in a few short days, fascinated by Fignon’s account of his life — before, during, and after his cycling career. But I was saddened by the pain he surely carried around with him in the years since the 1989 Tour de France. For the opening chapter of his book, which is entitled, “Eight Seconds,” begins with an epigraph:

“Ah. I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour de France by eight seconds!”

“No, monsieur. I’m the guy who won the Tour twice.”

 

John Gifford is the author of the story collections, Wish You Were Here (Big Table, 2016) and Freeze Warning, which was named a finalist for the 2015 Press 53 Short Fiction Award. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Saturday Evening Post, Southwest Review, U.S. News and World Report, and elsewhere. He lives in Oklahoma.