A to Z

by Alessandra Nolan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think we should go.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hm…” I say

He rolls the window down, lets the air out.

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

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

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

“Everyone here is named Wallace.” Croot announces.

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

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

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

“From the memory of pain?” I asked

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

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

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

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

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

“Well this is it.”

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

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

“Okay” I announce, breathless.

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

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

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

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

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

by Michael W. Cox

It was August and I was dribbling a ball alone on the asphalt, settling into a zone where none might reach me, though I wanted to be reached—wanted someone to step inside that cage and challenge me to a game. I had just finished a construction job—my very first job, ever—and saved a little money for my freshman year at WVU, which would start in 15 days. Nixon had resigned on TV the day before, sweaty lip and all, and my father had died a few months before that, wasted by a thing that had invaded his gut and worked its way up into his brain. I was into being orphaned—half, anyway. It got me points somehow, explained away my sullen moods and made me mysterious to the pretty blondes I knew but wished I knew better.

My leather ball sounded good on the court, but the city park lay empty, just me at mid-day inside a tall cage. I hit my jump shot, 12 feet, then a quick fake and fadeaway, same spot. Anyone might see, I knew, so I styled and profiled and dazzled no one with a hook shot that made the net whisper my name. Or someone called my name, maybe, and I looked up toward the railroad tracks and saw a boy who’d graduated high school with me stumbling my way, down the gravel incline to where I was making leather do fantastic things. The boy hurried across the scrabbly grass and stepped inside the fenced court.

“You’ve got to help me,” he said. “I just busted jail.”

He wore a thin blue T-shirt, gray pants that were too big, grass-stained shoes, and I can still see the look on his face some 30 years after the fact, this boy who’d shared my homeroom 180 days a year the previous four. He was in trouble with the police, and I hadn’t even known. He was vague about what he’d done, and I can’t remember the vagaries now anyway. Something bad—a robbery, a housebreaking—but nothing awful, like a rape or killing or manslaughter.

“You broke out of jail?” I said, trying to get my mouth around the word. I couldn’t really imagine what his nights in jail had been like, the days, the routine, though I’d dribbled my ball past that jailhouse a million times when I had been younger and lived in a different part of town. The jail lay between my house and the ball court, and nothing, not the leering eyes or cursing words of an inmate out a window, nor the thrown rocks of the feral children who lived at the bend in the dogleg beyond, could keep me from my date and those hours spent worshipping unto the chain net.

But the boy from my school at the ball court—if I remember right, he was in tears, like your drunk uncle might do at the holidays when he looks at you and thinks of all the years you have in front of you, and all the ones he’s already pissed away. You walk away from your drunk uncle, perhaps, just a little bit embarrassed. But there on the court, a wet-eyed jail break in front of me, what move would I make? I wondered. Would I turn, callously, and sink a jump shot and say “tough shit”? Or would I just listen, not knowing what to do?

A train whistle blew up the river. It whistled again far upstream, a coal train with black freight that would makes its way, eventually, to the Ohio, headed for the steel plants up north—Wheeling maybe, Pittsburgh. The B&O was running a lot of coal in those days, more and more of it dug by machines, costing men good jobs and leading them to do bad things, occasionally, like knock off a gas station, sell drugs, or traffic in whores.

The boy babbled something about having just left our homeroom teacher’s house, a man who’d been our coach in high school. He lived down the tracks maybe half a mile from the park. Now there was a man of action, our teacher-coach, but that man had only told the boy to give himself up, to go back to jail, where the boy belonged, rightly, a ward of the county. And then our teacher, our coach, had slammed the door in the poor boy’s face, leaving him to wander, desolate, my way.

“Please,” he said. “Help me. I’m innocent, I swear.”

Those tears again, running down his face, falling down onto what must have been his county-issued shirt.
I’d stayed overnight with this boy once, a few years before. He’d tried to work himself into the starting line-up for the basketball team by cozying up to me, the coach’s favorite. We stayed in a cabin down by a stream, he and I and a few other boys. There might’ve been a bottle of wine involved, but I probably abstained, considering myself religious at the time. At one point that night he took us all down to the creek and jumped in and stayed under for five whole minutes, claiming there was an air pocket up under the tree on the edge of the bank. Apparently he was right, but he spent the rest of that night in the cabin cold, shivering in all his wet clothes.

Standing on the bank of the creek, a friend of his had called him a fool. I couldn’t dispute that, especially when I saw his head emerge, finally, in the flashlight I held for five long minutes. He was prone to try foolish things, like beg the first familiar face he saw for help after busting jail. I felt sorry for him, but the truth was, in the calculus of friendships and kin, he was far, far down the list, not much more than an acquaintance. Someone who quit the team when things didn’t fall his way. Someone who sat in the back of homeroom, yukking it up with one or two boys from up his way, far out in the sticks—pretty country, granted, but another world.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” I said. “I don’t even have a car here, if I’m supposed to get you out of town.” I gestured to the empty parking lot over by the restroom. I had no money either—not on me, not needing cash when all I had planned to do was shoot a little ball and lose myself in the game. The boy was beyond my range of assistance, unless I was supposed to lie for him or something—not that I would.

The tears dried up and the boy looked a little wild-eyed, plotting his next move maybe, or trying to think what one thing he could say to get me to help, to drag me out of my zone, but the more I thought about it, the more outrageous I thought it was that he would even approach me in the first place—better if he’d just kept moving along the tracks, eyes straight ahead, leaving me to catch a glimpse of his passing through town as I shot some ball, him in his world, on the run, and me in mine, the clean boundaries of the cage, with its easy rules and conversations.

Just over his shoulder I saw a police car moving down the hill. I was relieved, but I worked hard not to show it. The boy followed my eyes, and turned, and saw.

“Christ,” he said. “Coach called the police.”

It was a deputy car. It rolled slowly toward the cage. The deputy parked and got out and motioned to the boy.
“Shit,” he said.

He walked over to the car. The cop pointed my way, asking the boy who I was, and the boy just shook his head. The cop cuffed him and put him in the backseat and drove away. That was the last time I would see that boy, ever, but I didn’t know that at the time. I watched the deputy car disappear over the crest of the hill. Then I turned my back to the basket, faked right and dribbled left and shot from the side of the key. Soft, no spin, it slipped nicely down the metal net. It didn’t feel the same, even so.

Michael W. Cox has published nonfiction in such venues as New Letters, River Teeth, Kestrel, the St. Petersburg Times, and the New York Times Magazine.

Since its beginnings, Sport Literate has published primarily creative nonfiction, true stories with all the tricks of fiction, including scenes, recreated dialogue, car chases (or not) and more. For more examples of that form, check out the links to some of our favorite magazines below.

Bellevue Literary Review

Brevity

Crazyhorse

Creative Nonfiction 

Fourth Genre

Massachusetts Review

Michigan Quarterly Review

The Missouri Review 

Prairie Schooner 

Quarterly West

The Sun

A Basketball Jones

by Maureen Stanton

One winter not long after my boyfriend, Steve, died, I became a basketball fan, or I should say, I became a fan again. My initial enthusiasm for basketball was inculcated in me by my father, a Celtics fan. My father is first-generation Boston Irish, his parents off the boat from County Galway, peasant Irish (not the “two toilet” class, he says). The Celtics, their name itself, the cloverleaf and leprechaun logo — this was my father’s home team. I remember my father explaining the rules, which were different from the “girls” basketball we played in school, in which guards could travel only half the court. The archaic “girls” rules were abolished in 1970 when I was in fourth grade, the same year that Fisher Elementary decreed it acceptable for girls to wear pants to school. I didn’t know who was responsible for these changes, but to my 10-year-old self, they seemed sudden and life-altering. I remember the thrill of wearing pants on a weekday, how it felt transgressive, as did crossing the half-court line for the first time.

In my family, we had enough kids for a starting line-up of a basketball team, with two subs. My four sisters and two brothers were uninterested in sports or too young respectively, and so for a while fandom was a way to claim my father. For my tenth birthday, my father bought tickets to a Celtics game at the Boston Gardens. Before the game he took me out for my favorite dinner, steamed clams. I hadn’t known one could eat steamed clams in the winter; I’d eaten them only at summer clambakes sponsored by my father’s employers, Sylvania (like our television) and later, Polaroid (like our camera). That night at a small diner in Dedham, Massachusetts my father asked if I’d had enough to eat. A midden of empty shells on the plate before me, I nodded politely, though I remember feeling hungry still, and embarrassed by my appetite, which might have been greed. I remember wishing I could sit in that restaurant all night eating steamed clams drenched in butter and talking to my father.

After dinner, we drove to Boston Gardens, parked, and found our seats. I was thrilled with the sheer size of the arena, the buzz of the crowd, excited that I would watch my hero in person, John Havlicek. I recall my father explaining how the parquet floor was somehow removed when the Bruins hockey team played; I marveled that there was ice — an entirely different landscape — hidden underneath the wood panels, as transformative a phenomenon as the shift from dresses to pants, from half-court to full. Of the game itself, I recall little. I can’t even remember if the Celtics won or lost. I’m sure if they won, my father and I would have reveled in the victory on the drive home, and if they had lost, we would have reviled the injustice, either way bonded in our devotion to the team. Reveled or reviled — one letter changes everything, as can one point in a game; destiny can pivot on the smallest change. Maybe I fell asleep on the ride home, for it was a “long” 40-minute drive to our hometown. The details are lost, but I’ll never forget that night because it is the only time in my childhood that I recall having my father all to myself.

*

In the 1988/89 NBA playoffs, the Detroit Pistons squared off against the Celtics in the semifinals. I rooted for the Pistons, against my past, my childhood. I was surprised that my allegiance had shifted. I’d moved to Michigan to be with Steve, but even after five years residing there, I still felt like an easterner, a Bostonian. I never called myself a Michiganian, or even worse, a Michigander, like some goosey state bird. I maintained my New England snobbishness even as I grew to love Michigan, its vast space, down-homey country fairs, and the best swimming of my life. I swam in Lake Superior off Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in October, skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan’s turquoise water off North Manitou Island on a beach that was utterly uninhabited, and again, slipped into Superior’s icy bath on a hundred-degree day after hiking Isle Royale, a dot of land in the greatest of lakes. I fell in love with Steve quickly, six weeks, and I decided to move to Michigan with him. (We’d met in New York, where we both worked temporary jobs.) Immediately upon my arrival in his home state, Steve took me to a pristine spot on Lake Michigan — a national forest with a little trafficked beach — and I fell in love with the whole state then. Steve and Michigan — Steve was Michigan for me, the reason for being there, for staying.

The Pistons were Michigan, too, and that first winter after I’d moved into a new house in a new city to take a new job, a year that was defined by grieving for Steve who had died of cancer at aged thirty-one, I became obsessed with the Pistons. I don’t know what prompted me to watch a game, to become involved with this team of strangers playing a game that hadn’t interested me for a decade. I only remember being enraptured, a sudden onset of fandom like catching the flu. I fell for the Pistons.

I loved the studied perfection of Joe Dumars, dark as a coffee bean, handsome and quiet. The librarian of the game, he quietly put the ball in the net like shelving a book. In contrast with the big men, Dumars was small and compact, with a stealthy excellence. I recall a free-throw streak during that season; game after game he sunk every foul shot. Dumars was a man I could count on. I admired Isiah Thomas’s intelligence, his easy nature, and Vinnie Johnson’s quiet, working-class talent — unceremoniously Vinnie got the job done. I even grudgingly respected Bill Laimbeer, a giant forward whose lumbering romps down the court seemed labored, a thuggish player with loose elbows. The dignified old-timer James Edwards, Rick Mahorn, Mark Aguirre, John Salley — the Pistons had a deep bench.

But it was Dennis Rodman I loved most. He seemed to me as graceful as Baryshnikov, as springy as Tigger, as mischievous as his namesake, that other Dennis, the “menace.” Rodman had a kind of absurd beauty; he moved with balletic grace, trotting from end to end with uncommon ease. Rodman fairly floated down the court, the expression on his face revealing — it seemed to me — pure joy, glorying in his athleticism, a feast of power and grace and speed, basketball as Bacchanalia. Dennis, a name derived from Dionysus — God of wine and orgies — the name fit.

I rooted hard for the Pistons in the winter of 1988, an underdog team who’d never won an NBA title in their history then. They were a scrappy urban bunch, mostly black players compared to the more white and long-winning Boston franchise. Steve had been an underdog in his bout with adenocarcinoma, a rare, aggressive subtype of the disease that bragged its death count. The doctors had given Steve no chance of living, no odds whatsoever. His cancer, by the time it was discovered, had already spread throughout his body, the vulnerable soft tissue of his liver, the architecture of his bones. The doctors gave him only a ticking clock, a fixed amount of time in which to play out his life — two weeks to two months, their prognosis. No sudden death, but no overtime either.

*

Steve was taller than average, six feet one, lithe and graceful. I never saw him play basketball, though he loved boxing, sparring with a huge canvas bag hung from a beam. He had beautiful biceps, and well-developed pecs and deltoids from working the bag. He loved running, too, and had been on the track team in high school. “We practiced every day after school,” he’d told me as we perused his high school yearbook once shortly after I’d met him. “The coach about killed us.” I imagined Steve running, his wild curly blonde hair matted with sweat, a look of determination on his baby face, which hadn’t changed much in the 10 years since his high school photo. He had reached his full height by 16 and he was all legs. In my mind’s eye, I see him racing through the woods behind his school, past the corn fields of rural southern Michigan on hot afternoons. But he’d quit the track team after one season. I’d asked him why. “I tried as hard as I could,” he’d said, “but when we had a meet, I came in second place.” Second place was good, I thought, but not good enough for Steve. “I’m not going to try that hard and come in second place,” he’d said. I remember admiring his strange reasoning. He would not settle for less; he wanted only the top spot.

*

A year after Steve died, back in my home state of Massachusetts for a visit, I saw Dennis T., my old boyfriend — we were on and off from junior high through my sophomore year in college, but I hadn’t seen him since I was 20. In those eight years he’d been married and then divorced six months later when his wife walked off with someone else. As sometimes happens with old sweethearts, Dennis and I got together. We knew that our fling wouldn’t last, but for a while we took pleasure in each other on those occasions when I flew from Michigan to Massachusetts to visit my family. We’d both experienced loss before we’d turned 30, and so perhaps our affair was a retreat back to childhood, a puppy love that was more comprehensible, familiar. Safe.

Dennis was an athlete, and had earned his bachelor’s degree in sports management at a college in Springfield, Massachusetts, home of the Basketball Hall of Fame. He was a Celtics fan, and so that winter we made a bet on the Pistons-Celtics series. I don’t remember what the payoff was, some token monetary amount. Dennis and I did not have much in common anymore, and we didn’t last much beyond that basketball season, but our affair infused the games with a sense of romance. Somehow my deep sadness about the tragedy of Steve’s life could be ameliorated by a dalliance with an old boyfriend, Dennis T., and by a fantasy crush on a professional basketball player, Dennis R., two Dennises. I could swoon over a sport, over players.

There is something deeply erotic about athletes, about sports: the bumping, the shoving, the pure physicality and contact, the strained all-out effort after some euphoric rush. It’s easy to love a player. Dennis Rodman in 1988 was certainly not my first crush on an athlete. When I was 10, I was infatuated with Derek Sanderson, a forward on the Boston Bruins hockey team. My father and I were hockey fans when the Bruins, led by Bobby Orr and Derek Sanderson, won the Stanley Cup in 1970. On the back of my bedroom door I’d hung that famous poster of Bobby Orr virtually flying as he scored the winning overtime goal off a pass from Sanderson. I’d witnessed that moment on television; I felt part of that history.

Derek Sanderson, like Dennis Rodman 20 years later, was the rebellious athlete, his long hair flowing as he raced down the ice, sans helmet. He was the first player in the NHL since the 1940s to sport a moustache, and long sexy sideburns. I took great care with my entry for the “Why I Want to Date Derek Sanderson” contest advertised on television. I dreamed about winning; I thought winning was a real possibility as I earnestly penned my ardor for Derek. I seriously doubt the sponsors of the contest would have allowed a 10-year-old girl on a date with a grown man. Turns out, from the 13,000 or so entries, a 76-year-old grandmother won.

Nearly 20 years later, a decade after Steve had died and years since I’d watched any professional sports, I saw an aged Derek Sanderson on some Boston-based, late-night cable talk show, telling the host about his rehabilitation from drugs and alcohol. He’d been the highest paid athlete in the world in 1972, but years later had wound up sleeping on park benches in New York City. Somehow he pulled his life together, and then toured hundreds of schools with a public service message about drugs and alcohol. I had to squint hard to see the resemblance between this middle-aged, used-up person and the gorgeous young athlete I’d idolized and loved. If the show had advertised a call-in number, I would have phoned Derek Sanderson to say that some of us still loved him, and always would. Heroes, in spite of their downfalls, maybe because of their downfalls, remain heroic to us — in memory anyway.

*

Growing up, I played basketball in the driveway next door with two brothers, Scott and Dennis (the first Dennis in my life). We played Around the World, and two-on-two. Eventually, my father installed a basketball pole and hoop at the top of our driveway. I played endless double-or-nothing rounds with my father, surprising him with my outside sinker, a three-pointer that he’d bet me 25 cents to hit, then double-or-nothing-ed me until I inevitably missed, up to $32 I remember once. I never quit while I was ahead. Was I just plain greedy? Did I think my winning streak would never end?

I started playing basketball on a team in fourth grade, and was the co-captain of an All-Star team in sixth grade. I have a black and white 4″ x 6″ photo of myself and Debbie Looney, the other co-captain, each of us with a palm on the basketball, wearing pinnys like aprons. I was a starting guard in ninth grade, and in tenth grade the women’s basketball coach tried to cajole me into playing, but I had moved to the other side of the social schema in our high school with its sharply divided factions. You had to choose between being a “jock” or a “freak.” Instead of spending afternoons setting picks and running drills in the gym, I was “down the path” getting stoned.

A year or so after Steve died, an acquaintance invited me to a pick-up basketball game at a recreation center in Lansing, Michigan, in the basement of which was an ancient half-gym, like the one in my elementary school, with hissing, spitting radiators that wouldn’t shut off even in summer, and that same stale boiler room smell. I remember wondering as a kid what on earth was being boiled in the boiler room. It smelled like boiled dinner, which my mother used to cook, cabbage and ham and potatoes, the worst dinner of my childhood.

In the first moments of the game, to my embarrassment, basketball knowledge did not come rushing back to me over the span of 13 years since I’d last played. It was, in fact, not like riding a bike, or sex after a period of abstinence. I noted the irony of remembering myself as an adept player, while not remembering how to play the game. I felt adrift on that court, as I did in my life after Steve died, without the skills I needed to maneuver.

The first time I received the ball, I attempted to pivot but instead my legs slid out from under me in my treadless gardening sneakers and I nearly did a split. I froze like this for a second, and then toppled over sideways like a cardboard cutout. I made a few other fumbles, threw the ball to the other team, forgot I had the option of dribbling and had the ball ripped from my hands, until slowly like sun emerging from behind a cloud bank, I warmed up; body memory returned. I intercepted a pass and streaked down the (tiny, yes) court for an easy lay-up.

I felt redeemed when after the game my acquaintance asked me to join her city league team. Lansing is a basketball town, birth place of Magic Johnson, East Lansing home to Michigan State’s Big Ten teams. I should have known better. I joined the team, and was invited to another pickup game, this time in a high school gym. On that court, at five feet two inches I was a pygmy among Amazons, tall, strong women who had played college basketball. The gym was huge, a metaphor for how outsized I felt in it; I belonged back in the kiddie gym. Here I was lost among the long torsos and fast hands, the enormous thighs, confidence and aggression you could whiff like perfume, like the fear you could smell on me. I ran up and down the court just outside the pack of players for a few minutes, like swimming in a lap lane by myself next to a game of water polo.

After a short while, I sidelined myself. My teammate was disgusted. “Are you afraid?” she said. I shrugged dumbly. I was. “You are on our team,” she said, as if I should somehow overcome my intimidation and lack of prowess (not to mention lack of height and sheer muscle mass) and get back in the game. To her, playing basketball with the big girls was courage, was bravery. I wanted to tell her that no matter how tough the competition, playing basketball was nothing compared to watching your lover die, but I didn’t. My cowardice on the court muted my tongue.

Our team had no coach or captain, and so during official games, each player put herself into play as she saw fit. I could not substitute for Jackie, the guard who was the star, the top scorer, the lynchpin of the team. She was a gifted player with a jump shot that was a thing of beauty. She had long fake fingernails and what was called “frosted” hair back then, and she was tough and pretty at the same time. She barely spoke to me. The other guard, Lisa, was a short, chunky, bossy woman who was always furious with me for substituting for her, and so inevitably after I was in play for about one minute, she’d signal for me to come out. I couldn’t stand the tension of this situation, and I hated standing around on the sidelines feeling useless. I thought maybe one of the other players might witness Lisa’s unfairness (she was not a better player than I was), but nobody was going to step in and rescue me. It wasn’t about fairness or equity. I’d already learned that life was unfair, a lesson that didn’t sink in during my childhood in spite of my mother’s oft-repeated refrain to my oft-stated lament: “But that’s not fair!” Nobody said life was fair, my mother would say, which was not consoling in any way and still isn’t.

After a few games, I stopped attending altogether. I never officially quit or told anyone why, which was chicken-hearted, or at least immature, but I didn’t need a petty battle at every game. I was still raw from losing Steve, from watching him suffer; I didn’t have any fight left in me, any ability to confront an injustice no matter how slight. I had just emerged from an eight month shadow of numbness and grief following Steve’s death, during which I went to work and home and nowhere else. I didn’t know how to move through space or among people, how to live, how to be. I tried my best to perform my job, and luckily I had autonomy in that first year (my boss frequently out of the office, my coworkers busy with their own projects). Nobody saw me reading the same memo repeatedly, the black print on the white page incomprehensible because my brain had quit for a spell. Nobody noticed me weeping behind my cubicle, or in the parking lot.

*

When I was 11, I won the highest honor bestowed on a fifth grader at Fisher School, the Good Sportsmanship Award. I won because as the captain of an intramural basketball team, I had allowed all of the players equal court time, including Nancy and Marylou Barrett. Nancy had been kept back, so was a head taller than the rest of us, which could have bode well for our team, but she was not athletic. Her feet ducked outward causing her to lurch, her coarse black hair swaying as she keeled down the court. She seemed always about to tip. Marylou was shorter, with the same thick hair but maple-colored, a thatch of bangs across her forehead. In basketball, the Barretts could never catch up with the action, arriving down court just as the play was over.

During each game I offered the Barretts encouragement, patted them on the back after each loss, “Good game, Nancy, Marylou.” It was an “eyewash,” a term Steve and his fellow electricians used for looking busy when the boss came around. When my mother picked me up after the games, the car door was barely shut before I exploded. “They can’t even dribble. Marylou just STANDS there. I threw the ball to Nancy and she passed it right to the other team. They STINK!”

“It’s only a game,” my mother would say.

“The other captains never substitute themselves and Miss Hopkins doesn’t say anything. It’s not fair!” The coach, Miss Hopkins, like God gave the captains free will to manage our teams, as if this were a sociological experiment. I longed with every soft growing bone in my body to pull the Barretts off the court, but I couldn’t do it because it wasn’t fair.

That season, our team — the Marshmallows — lost every game and that about killed me. I remember standing outside of Miss Hopkins’ classroom on Mondays after the rankings were posted, tracing my finger down the list to find my team in last place by even more points than the week before. At the assembly on the last day of school, when I heard my name announced as the winner of the Good Sportsmanship Award, I felt like a fraud. I knew the stinginess of my own heart, knew I did not deserve the honor, as I dazedly made my way to the stage to shake Miss Hopkins’ hand and collect the award: a gold-plated medallion hitched to a triangle of red, white, and blue fabric, resting on a yellow die-cut foam mattress, encased in a black plastic box.

During Steve’s illness in my counselor, Cendra’s, office I vented my resentment toward Steve’s family for their lack of day-to-day help, and at my boss who treated me inconsiderately (she referred to me as her “girl”). I vented my anger at Steve for taking up my life with his death, for needing so much from me in his dying that I had little energy for living. None of this mattered, Cendra said, because I did all I could to help Steve; each day I loved him and cared for him until his last breath. The Catholicism of my upbringing had imbued me with the notion that thoughts were equal to deeds. But Cendra, with her doctorate in philosophy, assured me that I could be petty and selfish in my thoughts, for none of that mattered; it was how you acted that mattered.

*

Steve told me a story once about going for a run in New York. As a union electrician, he’d traveled there from Michigan for work. One night he left his hotel room wearing just his running shorts and a tee-shirt, sneakers. After a while, deep in the trance of the run, he’d become disoriented, completely lost in what looked to be a dangerous neighborhood. He had no money for a cab or phone call, but rather than asking someone for directions or help, he kept running. Night fell and he ran on. I can understand his hesitation to ask for help, the desire to continue on your path no matter how circuitous because forward motion is comforting and convinces us that we are getting somewhere, making progress as opposed to stopping, which is an admission of defeat and invites the unknown. He finally recognized some buildings and through blind persistence and dumb luck stumbled across his hotel. His feet were bleeding from his long, long run, but finally he was home.

When it came time to run for his life, Steve ran fast and hard for months and months. When he decided to stop chemotherapy and radiation and experimental whole-body hypothermia and all the nutritional treatments, he was refusing to settle for second place, a diminished life of nausea and constant pain, or the stupor of narcotics, a reduced existence with limited ability to conduct the daily acts of living — working, cooking, eating, shopping in the grocery store, walking in the park, making love.

Maybe this was why I was so crazy about the Pistons after Steve died, why I was so loyal and steadfast — if temporarily — a fan. I didn’t miss a single game that season. I organized my life around the games, marked them in my calendar, though I had nothing else that might have occupied those evenings. I looked forward to the games eagerly, treating myself to a few beers while I watched. Drinking alone seemed generally pathetic unless I was drinking during a game, which was part of the ritual, savoring one, then another, and then — why not — a third beer. Drinking while watching the Pistons was communal, in camaraderie with the thousands of fans I could see in the bleachers, and the thousands who were at home like me.

Watching the Pistons play, I was completely absorbed in something other than grief. I took refuge in spectatorship, losing myself in the intensity of the games, in the romance of athletic endeavor. I was passionate in fandom, as I had been helping Steve live, researching homeopathic cures, making travel plans to undergo alternative treatments, managing his care and monitoring his health, pushing back against his illness for a year and a half. Back then, I needed the Detroit Pistons, needed to see tall, powerful men performing feats seemingly impossible for the human body, to try with all their might for the only goal that counted, to win. To do it for me.

 

Maureen Stanton’s book, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money (Penguin), a work of literary journalism that explores the subculture of flea market, antiques, and collecting, was the winner of the 2012 Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, The Sun, and other journals and anthologies. Her work has been awarded the Iowa Review Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the American Literary Review prize, a Mary Roberts Rinehart award, and the Thomas J. Hruska Prize from Passages North. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Maine Arts Commission fellowship, and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Stanton teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

And Michael Doo Created Martin

by Robert Andrew Powell

The dream has been there forever, or at least as long as Michael Doo has loved football, which is about as long as Michael Doo has been alive. Every man in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami—every real man—loves football, and Michael Doo, he’s practically the mayor of Liberty City. When did he pluck the dream out of his head and put it in motion? Twenty-one years ago? Twenty-two? Martin Wright, his son, the physical incarnation of the dream, is 19. And before Martin was born there were a few false starts, a pair of girls birthed to a different woman than the one who ended up being Martin’s mother. Those girls grew up tall and strong with broad shoulders just like Michael Doo wanted, but they were girls, and girls don’t play football. The dream, to have a son star in the National Football League, required a boy.

“So I went and found somebody else who would give me a son,” Michael Doo’s telling me. We’re standing in an alley off Northwest 62^nd Street, inside the Liberty Square housing project, which everyone around here calls the Pork ‘n’ Beans. It must be two in the morning by now. I’m more than buzzed on Hennessey, which Michael Doo has been pouring, all night, into little plastic tumblers. We’re leaning against a car that Edgerrin James, a running back for the Arizona Cardinals, gave to Michael Doo, an indicator of Michael Doo’s status in this community. Michael Doo pulls on a fat brown joint. It’s so oversized, a Zig-Zag zeppelin, that everyone walking by cracks him for it: “You rolled up the craig, Smokey!” Michael Doo likes to get his puff on. Everyone knows that.

“I was measuring bitches’ fingers for four years,” he continues. “I was measuring shoulders and forearms. I was looking for tall, not thin. Maybe a little thin. I was going around to find a Shaq momma to make me a Shaq. You find a Spud Webb momma you get a Spud Webb.”

When he finally found Frosty, Martin’s mother, Michael Doo told her up front about his dream, and about the role he wanted her to play. “I said to his momma, ‘Just give me a boy and you can leave out of my life,’” he recalls. “Just give me a boy.”

He got that boy. And the boy turned out to be so good at football that, when I’d left Miami a few months earlier, the dream was right on track. Martin had just finished his senior season at Booker T. Washington High School, where he’d played linebacker and tight end. A group of Florida sportswriters named him first-team All-State. The Miami Herald named him first-team all-Miami-Dade County, which might be an even bigger honor considering the talent in the city. Prior to Martin’s junior year in high school, a scout placed him among the top 100 players in the entire country, though most scouts claim Martin’s true potential had yet to be tapped.

“Booker T. Washington in Miami is loaded with talent, and nobody on the roster has more upside than first-year starter Martin Wright,” posted a scout at superprep.com. Any college program that signed Wright would likely pick up “a very talented and underrated football player from an area loaded with good ones who’s only going to get better as he gets older and more experienced.”

Another scout noted that, at a recruiting combine, “Wright was virtually unstoppable in one-on-one drills. … He used his speed to get to the QB, but he also showed his versatility by mixing in a swim move just when the linemen thought they had him figured out.”

I’m back here in Miami now, though, because someone found a way to stop Martin. Or rather, Martin, the incarnation of Michael Doo’s grand dream, stopped himself. The kid did something so inexplicable that I still can’t get my head around it. On the other hand, I’d never heard of anything as bizarre as what Michael Doo tried to do with Martin, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised the dream imploded in such a bizarre way.

I’d first learned about Martin six years ago. I was spending a season with the Liberty City Warriors, as part of a book project (We Own This Game) on youth football in Miami’s black community. Martin had once been the Warriors’ best player, I was told, back when he was a 10-year-old. He led Liberty City to a Pop Warner national championship up at Disney World in Orlando, and played so well in the title game—10 sacks and 16 tackles—that his number 61 jersey was retired. “Mar! Tin! Wright!” crowed Brian Johnson, Martin’s former coach. “That boy was awesome. He was The One.”

I didn’t focus on Martin in my book. He was 13 by then and had aged off the team. I wrote instead about his father, Michael Doo. At the time Michael Doo was operating as a street agent, a job title not found on a business card. Street agents are boosters of sorts, men—usually living in the inner city who steer athletes to big-time college sports programs. For years, Michael Doo has befriended top athletes in Liberty City, handing them spending money to buy pizza or movie tickets or, in at least two cases I know about, a car. Most of these players end up attending the University of Miami, a program Michael Doo so loves he tattooed the school’s “U” logo on his forearm. I’m not surprised Edgerrin James gave (gave!) Michael Doo a car, because I know when James was in college playing for the Hurricanes Michael Doo did him plenty of favors.

In the years after my book came out, Michael Doo and I stayed in touch. I’d catch him in the flea market on 79^th Street or at the occasional high school football game. I monitored the evolution of his nickname. Although he was born Michael Wright, he was known as McAdoo when I first met him, in honor of NBA legend Bob McAdoo, to whom his jump shot was once compared. McAdoo became Mike-A-Doo, which briefly became Michael Adoo before he dropped a vowel to form his current moniker.

I increased my contact with Michael Doo a few months before I’d left town. A University of Miami linebacker had been assassinated—shot in the back of the head in a parking lot. I looked into the murder for a bit, asking my friends in Liberty City if they knew who might have pulled the trigger. Michael Doo didn’t share any leads. Instead he talked and talked about Martin, who was about to embark on the state playoffs. The dream was alive, Michael Doo asserted. Some of the best football programs in the country – the University of Florida Gators, Boston College, the University of South Florida they all were showing interest in Martin. The kid’s grades were solid. The master plan had produced such an amazing young man, Michael Doo crowed, that in addition to football, they were looking to get Martin into modeling.

“Martin, he’s good looking, you know what I’m saying?” Michael Doo bragged as we drove up the Turnpike to a playoff game. “He be a sex object. All his teachers they be wanting to get with him. And don’t tell me about those girls in his classes. They all want him! He’s beautiful! He has poise and character.”

As Michael Doo drove, his theme song, Tupac’s “Picture Me Rollin,” looped on the stereo system. The song sounded good. Rolling with Michael Doo almost always made me feel good. I loved the way he bragged about his son. I loved the way he talked, slowly, always like he was stoned or hung over, which he probably was. At first, that slowness can translate as stupidity. It’s not. He’s not. It only takes a few minutes in Michael Doo’s company to recognize how quickly his brain works. He’s always decoding my motivations, asking why I was spending so much time with him, why I was riding shotgun to a playoff game when all I’d stopped by to ask about was the murdered Hurricanes player.

Fair questions. I was about to leave town, I explained. I’d had enough of football and Liberty City and especially Miami. After 14 years, one divorce, four burglaries, a half-dozen car break-ins and one slashing of my knee by a guy with a sword, I was headed to Colorado. I had no plans once I got there beyond training for my first marathon. Before I left, I simply wanted to spend as much time with Michael Doo as possible. He was the only eugenicist I knew. I liked him. I wanted to introduce him to my friends outside of Liberty City. Then, right when I was feeling a silly happiness in his presence, we pulled up to a toll booth and he called the attendant “a dumbass fucking cunt” and I sunk into my seat, remembering there are things about Michael Doo I need to be afraid of.

Michael Doo’s father sold produce out of a storefront on 62^nd Street. Michael Doo has claimed to work the same job, though I’ve never seen him in the vicinity of a watermelon or an orange or a key lime. When we first met, Michael Doo admitted he makes some of his money running an underground lottery. “I’m a con man,” he added. “I’ve got a gift for gab.”

His income is supplemented by relationships with some of the people who make Miami such a dangerous place to live. It’s common for anyone in Liberty City — for the cleanest, straightest, squarest dude—to traffic in the underground economy. Some of the kids’ football teams I followed were outfitted by gang leaders. A drug dealer from the nearby city of Opa Locka distributed free frozen turkeys before Thanksgiving. Michael Doo celebrates his connections to these people, for better or worse. That retired jersey Martin wore in Pop Warner, number 61? That’s a bald shout-out to a crew responsible for at least a dozen drug-related executions.

“That’s ‘cause he’s down with the John Does,” Michael Doo once told me. “He’s representing 61^st Street. That’s where the John Does are from. That’s my street. He’s representing for the John Does.”

The John Does, so called because they formed without a proper nickname, were one of the most ruthless gangs to work Liberty City. They moved kilos of cocaine weekly, defending their turf with assault rifles.

“Everyone in this neighborhood who knows me knows I’m down with the John Does,” he added, raising his cell phone. “I might get a call from Mr. John Doe any minute. [Imprisoned gang leader Corey Smith] calls me three, four times a week. He calls to ask me to check up on his [son].”

Not long after I left the city, my connections to Miami football began to lapse. I stopped surfing the Hurricanes chat rooms. I didn’t call Michael Doo on National Signing Day, when high school prospects formally commit to their colleges. It was only about a month later, as I was killing time online, that I typed Martin’s name into a search engine. I wanted to see what school he ended up choosing. Was it Florida? Was it some place less glamorous, like Memphis? I expected to read about a ceremony in the Booker T. library, with Michael Doo in attendance. There’d be a photo, I figured, of Martin pulling on his new school’s baseball hat. Instead I found this:

MIAMI (AP) – A high school football standout appeared in court Thursday, facing charges of kidnapping, burglary and grand theft. Police arrested defensive end Martin Luther Wright Wednesday after he allegedly entered a home through a bedroom window.

There was nothing about a signing ceremony. There were no pictures of Martin in a baseball hat. Scouring the web, I could find only one other article about what happened, in an online-only, by teens for teens section of the Miami Herald. It was just as cryptic:

Martin Wright … is currently awaiting trial in the Miami-Dade County jail. Martin is being charged with kidnapping, burglary and grand theft after he broke in a young woman’s home and tried to take her baby. The woman woke out of her sleep to scare away Wright, which in turn caused him to steal her cell phone. As of today Martin received no bond.

I called Michael Doo right away.

“I just want to figure out what to do with my motherfucking son,” he told me over the phone. “I’m trying to keep him out of jail.”

By the time I book my flight back to Miami, Martin is out of jail, on probation. The plan is to interview him. I want to ask about the crime, of course. What exactly happened and why? Sabotage was my working hypothesis. I wonder if the pressure to fulfill his dad’s dream prompted Martin to do something so spectacularly over-the-top that the dream died on the spot. Was the break-in an act of rebellion? Was there pressure? If so, was he trying to defuse it? Had he ever heard of Todd Marinovich?

Anyone I tell about Martin brings up Todd Marinovich. Even friends who barely followed football bring up Todd Marinovich. He was the Robo QB, the California phenom on the cover of Sports Illustrated while still in high school. Todd’s father, Marv, had trained his son to be a quarterback from the second Todd popped out of the womb. Mythically, young Todd was barred from ever drinking a soda, or eating a Big Mac. Consultants drilled him on hand-eye coordination, leg speed, and throwing mechanics. Todd proceeded to play for USC, the college his father had attended, and then for the Oakland Raiders, the professional team his father had played for. By 1993, two years after he was drafted in the first round, he washed out of the NFL.

Marinovich was first arrested in college on drug charges. He was subsequently arrested a half dozen more times. In 1997 it was for growing marijuana. In 2001 it was for heroin possession. He formed a band called Scurvy and tried for a comeback in the Canadian and Arena football leagues. In 2000, he was arrested during a Los Angeles Avengers practice on rape charges (he was cleared in that case).

It’s easy to craft a theory for Marinovich’s flameout. He was groomed for football from birth. He never got to be a kid. He never made his own choice about his profession or his destiny, so he sabotaged it. He blew up the dream. If he could do it, Martin could do it, too.

“No, no, no,” Erian Stirrup, Martin’s girlfriend, tells me in the hallway of the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building. Lawyers stride past, dress shoes clicking on the tile floor. Erian, a basketball player who attends the legal magnet program at Miami Senior High, makes her case that football — and Martin’s potential distaste for it — didn’t cause Martin’s legal troubles. “He loves football. I don’t think it defines him, but if you take away his football he wouldn’t be the same. Football is his thing.”

I meet up with Erian at the courthouse because by the time I get to Miami, Martin is already back in jail. He’s violated his probation somehow, claiming he wasn’t aware of how his electronic ankle monitor worked in tandem with a second monitor he kept in his backpack. Erian has no idea why her boyfriend separated himself from his backpack, as he was accused of doing. Neither does Michael Doo or Frosty, Martin’s mother.

“When I first found out I didn’t believe it,” Erian tells me, speaking of both the probation violation and the original arrest. “And I still don’t know why it happened.”

The file on the state of Florida v. Martin Luther Wright is stored the courthouse record room. The file contains the flat facts of the case. Martin’s age at the time: 18. His weight and height: 190 pounds and 6’1”, two inches shorter than he is listed on scouting websites. The crime took place early on a Wednesday morning three days into a new year. Martin was arrested and arraigned the same day, and sent to jail without bond.

Just a week before I flew down, Martin pled guilty to charges of kidnapping, a first-degree felony, and burglary with assault or battery, also a first-degree felony. The paperwork on file indicates Judge Barbara Areces cut him a huge break. Declaring Martin “is not likely to engage in a criminal course of conduct,” and that “justice didn’t require” Martin to “suffer the penalty imposed by law,” she declined to officially rule him guilty. Instead he was placed on probation and ordered to attend boot camp, in Miami, over the summer. His father also had to pay $458 in court costs. In lieu of a signature on the final ruling, Martin was asked to leave his fingerprints. The inky smudges are right there on the document: Left Thumb, Left Index, Right Thumb, Right Index and so on, the whole deal.

When the probation hearing begins, I take a seat on a wooden bench in the gallery. At Martin’s first arraignment, after the break-in, his attorney produced a parade of character witnesses. The star witness, head coach Tim “Ice” Harris from the Booker T. football team, expounded on Martin’s fine future, with its certain scholarship to a top football program. None of those witnesses are here today. There are only four other people in the gallery with me, and I don’t recognize any of them. Not even Michael Doo is here yet.

I absorb the scene: Judge Areces on her bench. The familiar courthouse phrase “We who labor here seek only the truth” partially obscured behind Florida and U.S. flags. A woman I presume to be the prosecutor arranges papers on her desk. Martin’s attorney walks over to say something to her. “Get away from me with that,” she snaps at him. “I am not having a conversation about this.”

A line of prisoners troops in from a back room. They are seated in the jury box, handcuffed to each other. Martin sits at the far end of his row, as removed from the gallery as possible. He wears an orange jumpsuit, “Miami-Dade” in black letters crawling down his right leg. I watch him closely. His face is hairless and baby smooth, making me wonder if he’s even old enough to shave. His jailhouse peers, definitely old enough to shave, stare straight ahead, nobody showing an expression. One by one they’re called to stand as a clerk recites charges. Cocaine, heroin, trespassing. Plea deals are accepted, trials postponed and rescheduled.

Martin stares straight ahead like a veteran. He shows no emotion, save one tell: his lips. He chews his lower lip, then sticks it out then pulls it back. He puckers as if he’s sucking on a piece of hard candy. He rotates the pucker in a slow circle, then pulls his lips back in place. In his manacled hands he holds a yellow legal envelope, which he fingers as his lawyer stands to speak.

“I would like to resolve this matter today if possible,” Martin’s lawyer tells the judge. Right then, Michael Doo and Frosty slip into the gallery. Michael Doo leans over to tell me that the lawyer, whom he hired, plans to argue that the monitoring device malfunctioned, that Martin didn’t do anything wrong and this is all a misunderstanding. Martin watches us out of the corner of his eye, never making direct contact. Without ever facing us, he hands his manila envelope to a bailiff, who flips through the contents before handing the envelope over to Frosty, who in turn hands it over to me. It’s stuffed with all the letters he’s received since he’s been in jail. I read though the letters while the attorney lobbies the prosecutor and the judge.

“What the fuck do you mean you want to bring our relationship to a stop?” Erian wrote, apparently in reply to one of his letters. “You can’t do that. … I put up with too many bitches and too many rumors for you to let some shit like this break us up. I wish you were here so I could slap your fucking face off.

“P.S.:” she added in different colored ink. “This is the letter I wrote you when I got your first letter. I was really mad!”

Frosty sent Martin biblical passages, Psalm 51 about repentance and Psalm 133 about family unity. In other letters she begged him not to grow complacent in prison. “You know Jesus Christ and your parents are not settling for that.” She asked him to proofread the letters he sent home to her, and to pen a copy of each letter to keep his writing skills sharp. She wrote a bit about the case, telling him to keep his distance from any haters.

“Because they can’t understand that if you have all these people behind you and all these colleges want you why would you go and do something STUPID like what you did? The answer to that question: Talk and tell GOD on bended knees about what you’ve done.”

The letters from Erian, though never racy, are so emotionally intimate I feel uneasy reading any more of them. I stack the letters together to place back in the envelope. The top letter is a note from Erian that I’d inadvertently flipped over. On the back of the letter, Martin has signed his own name, more than 30 times. After each signature, he’s appended the number that was on the back of his high school football uniform. Martin Wright #88 Martin Wright #88, again and again.

The hearing ends before I can ask Erian about that letter. The judge decides Martin has burned the favor she’d handed him. The probation violation isn’t going to be resolved for at least a week. (And when it is, Martin will be ordered to boot camp where he will live, incarcerated, for most of a calendar year.) A bailiff leads the inmates away. Before vanishing into the back room, Martin allows himself to make eye contact with his mother. Frosty taps her heart twice with her fist. Martin does the same.

The deposition of the victim, Demetrice Steed, is on file at the courthouse. On the night of the crime she was 30 years old. Her daughter, Amani, was 19 months. Amani’s father, who lived elsewhere, was a 32-year-old supervisor at a flower warehouse. The break-in took place “maybe like four in the morning,” Steed said.

“I heard a sound… And I looked up and he was like right there in my face. And he had Amani under his arm and I’m like, my exact words, excuse my language: ‘What the fuck you doing?’ And I snatched Amani back. And honestly he looked just as terrified as I was. And when I snatched her back he snatched my cell phone. And I’m like this out the window. And he ran.”

Steed didn’t have to call the cops. Police were in the neighborhood in response to another, separate break-in, and Steed’s hysterical shouting was enough to draw their attention. A perimeter formed around the house. A fingerprint was lifted from the windowsill; there had been a screen on the window, which Martin had removed. Steed was asked to describe the young man she confronted. Did he act deranged? Did he appear to be on drugs?

“I can’t really say he was looking like he was out of it,” she recalled. “Or if he was looking like I have something to take. But he snatched the phone and he ran.”

The baby slept through the robbery, only waking to a rush of tears and hugs from her mother. Steed doesn’t think Martin was trying to take the baby, or that he could possibly have wanted to. The most serious charge against Martin wasn’t something she lobbied for.

“When [the police] were saying kidnapping I was like, ‘Oh, my god!’ But at that time I was like, ‘Oh, whatever it takes.’ Cause at that time I’m upset….she’s my only child.”

Q: Was there any resistance to you trying to take the child?

A: No, no, no. …He was just as afraid as I was.

Q: Did Mr. Wright ever touch you?

A: No. I don’t even know him.

After court adjourns, I drive to Steed’s house, which stands one block over from Michael Doo and Martin’s house. I park on the street and walk through a chain-link gate into a small grove of identical concrete bungalows. It’s subsidized housing, a project. Lots of “old people” live in the development, Steed said in her deposition.

A young woman answers the door wearing a pink bra and a towel around her waist. Her hair is an elaborate cascade of long, loose, slick curls. Cursive black tattoos twirl across her smooth skin. She tells me she’s the victim’s younger sister.

“I don’t know him from a can of paint,” she says. Neither does Steed, who isn’t home right now. After the incident, friends and neighbors stopped by asking if the women knew who Martin is, or if they knew who Martin’s father is, how plugged in he is? Did they know that Martin has a college scholarship all lined up and that he doesn’t need for anything?

“A can of paint,” she repeats. “We’d never seen him. We’d never heard of him.”

Her version of what happened syncs up with the police report and her sister’s deposition. If the air conditioner had been working that night the windows would have been closed and there never would have been a problem, she says. “[Steed] came running around here to my room saying, ‘Someone tried to take my baby!’ She said he had his leg through the window – you have to climb a bit to get in. She said he had the baby in his arms, cradled under his arm like a football.”

Before I’d seen the court files, I’d wondered if the victim was a girlfriend, someone with whom Martin might be fighting with the intense and irrational passion of a high school kid. After learning the victim was twelve years older than teenaged Martin, I figured a relationship was unlikely. Still, I asked. Were Martin and the victim seeing each other? “No, not at all.” Was Martin trying to hook up with her? “No. Can of paint, remember?

“We don’t know why in the world he would want to take that baby. We think maybe he wanted the jewelry that was on the baby, but we don’t know. Maybe it was a dare, like he was trying to impress his friends.”

I can see Martin acting on a dare, I guess. People do dumb things sometimes, especially young people. But what a dare! I’ve been call-the-police robbed in Miami more than once, but never when I was home, much less asleep in the room. That’s a provocative act. If he was only trying to take the baby’s necklace, which was a spelling of her first name, that would mean he mugged a 19-month-old. That’s a provocative act, too. It’s much more than a prank. Whatever his motivations, there is no doubt Martin committed a real crime.

I’ve been in town two full days by this point. Michael Doo and I have gone out both nights, enough time for me to decide that the comparisons between Martin and Todd Marinovich are superficial. Yes, they were both raised to be football stars, but I never heard of Todd’s father measuring the arms of Todd’s potential mothers. Marv Marinovich played college and professional ball. Michael Doo did not. Marv Marinovich was and remains a well-known trainer, a specialist in core strength exercises. Turning kids into professionals is his life’s work, and Todd was supposed to be his model client. Michael Doo likes to hang out with professional athletes like Chad Johnson and quarterback Dante Culpepper, but he was never one of them. In his own way, Michael Doo did actively groom his son, ordering Martin to jog home from youth football practice or to drop on command, perhaps when the pair were watching TV in the living room, and pound out five sets of 50 pushups. But Michael Doo also provided guidance that was less than athletic, at the least. Marv Marinovich did not spend his nights at the Pork ‘n’ Beans, as Michael Doo and I do on my last night in town.

We watch playoff basketball on a TV someone had dragged into the alley. We make a run, in Edgerrin James’ car, in search of Zebra snack cakes. Michael Doo insists on that brand, white cake with white frosting. I sit in the front seat, Michael Doo driving, and a guy named Snoop in the back. We swig Budweiser longnecks as we drive to the house of one of Michael Doo’s friends, where Michael Doo picks up a pork chop and rice waiting for him. He steers toward the Hialeah warehouse district, eating the pork chop with his fingers and drinking his Budweiser as he drives. When he finishes the beer, he tosses it out the window onto Northwest 61^st Street, where I can hear it bounce but not shatter. (The plate of rice flies out the window, too.) During the search for snack cakes, which we eventually find at a gas station, he shares his theory that the Cubans who run Miami want Liberty City to remain poor, and our difficulty finding Zebra-brand snack cakes proves the conspiracy.

Hours later, we’re back at the Pork ‘n’ Beans. Michael Doo leans against the car, a halogen light glowing over his head. He’s talking about the laundry room across the alley where, he says, half the people in the Pork ‘n’ Beans were conceived. As he talks, I stare at his puffy face in the yellow light. I notice the deep creases around his lips.

“Martin want to be me,” he says when I ask why he thought Martin broke into the house and grabbed the baby, “but he don’t want to put in no hours, no work. You want to be like Edgerrin James but you ain’t even gone to college? This is a typical kid, taking the easy way out. You feel me? You feel me?”

Before Michael Doo and I hooked up at the Pork ‘n’ Beans, I’d stopped in to see Brian Johnson, Martin’s coach on the Pop Warner championship team. After Michael Doo, Brian was the first person I called when I stumbled upon the news of Martin’s arrest. Since then, Brian and I had spent weeks trading theories on what went down and why.

“I’ll go back to his father,” Brian said in the living room of his small house in Liberty City. He lay on his couch like he was in a therapy session. We talked during the small window between Brian’s day job delivering auto parts and his volunteer gig coaching a semi-pro football team. After practice, he still had to work his regular night shift at the front desk of a Miami Beach condo.

“The apple don’t fall too far from the tree,” he explained. “Michael Doo raised Martin to be a football player, but he raised him to be something else, too, maybe without even realizing it.”

Brian was a central character in my book. During my reporting I had had to ask him some obvious but possibly insulting questions. He’s a black man raised in Liberty City. How come he’s never been to jail? How come he didn’t run with a gang? How come he doesn’t spend his nights rolling up the craig at the Pork ‘n’ Beans? The leader of the John Does grew up just down the block. How come he doesn’t keep in touch on the phone?

Because doing all that is a choice, Brian told me. It’s a lifestyle choice. In Liberty City it’s possible to stay out of trouble. It’s possible, if someone wants to, to marry one woman, to put two kids through school, to work a couple steady jobs and own a house, even if a stray bullet will fly through the front window of that house from time to time and even if the police won’t bother to file a report when it happens. In Liberty City, no blood means no foul.

“It smacks me like this, man: In certain ways he thought he was playing God,” Brian elaborated. “But there’s only one God. And things happen a certain way because of God. The idea of Michael Doo raising a child to be a football player knowing he wasn’t righteous himself? That’s what it comes down to.”

Brian has worn a cross around his neck since the day I met him. Another cross hangs on a wall near the TV. He’s never been overtly religious, though, not one of those people who are always talking to you about your beliefs and your soul. Instead, we talked about how Martin wore No. 61 in Pop Warner, at his dad’s insistence, in honor of the John Does street gang. We talked about how one of Martin’s best friends, a star running back at Northwestern High, had been arrested in a sex scandal involving a 14-year-old girl. We talked about how too many of the kids Brian has coached, innocent nine-year-old boys when he had them, are now in jail on charges as serious as murder.

“Martin sort of had the attitude like, ‘I’m a thug, man,’” Brian said. “’My dad wants me to be this — a football player — but this is who I am.’ It’s destiny. I really think that’s his destiny. I feel his arrest was inevitable. That’s the way he was headed, period.”

I looked around the living room, at Brian’s TV, then at a wall where I spied a picture of the Pop Warner championship team Martin played on. Brian needed to get ready for practice.

“Anytime you play Frankenstein it’ll backfire on you,” Brian said. “This is where God slaps them in the face, that’s what I’m thinking.”

On my last morning in Miami, I make one last trip to the victim’s house. There’s construction on the street near the crime scene, so I park a half-block away, in front of the Brownsville Market, a corner grocery that advertises “sandwitches.” I walk to the victim’s house and knock, but nobody answers, not even her sister. On the ground I see a small blue bag of animal crackers. There’s an inflatable toy chair and an empty purple plastic bottle of bubble soap. Just off the stoop is a window, closed. The sill is chest height, about five feet off the ground. I try to raise my foot to the glass but I can’t quite reach.

As I walk back to my car I can see Michael Doo’s house just about a block down the street. Edgerrin James’ car is parked out front. I’ve got a few minutes still, so I walk over to say goodbye. Michael Doo’s front door is open behind a locked screen. I call out his name: Mack! Mike! Michael! Mack Adoo! No response. I dial his cell phone, which I can hear ringing inside.

I look around. A housing project looms next door, protected behind a barbed wire fence.  Michael Doo’s house is fortified, too, with steel mesh screens on the windows and the sliding back doors. There’s a rusty white van in the driveway, a new addition from the last time I stopped by. There are a few planks of wood in the yard, pieces of his roof that rotted and have fallen off. He leaves them in the yard deliberately. “I like to keep the heat off me,” he once told me. Too nice a house and people would start asking questions.

I notice that Michael Doo has posted the envelopes to more than one hundred recruiting letters on the outside of his front door. The letters, protected behind Saran Wrap, are numbered in black magic marker in the order that they were received. Pitt, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas State. The letters go on to fill the other walls of the foyer. Letter 284 is from Illinois. Letter 285 is from Ohio University. Also posted is Martin’s report card from the second nine-week grading period. On that Michael Doo has scrawled a smiley face.

I call out Michael Doo’s name once more, and this time he responds with an angry, “What?” A minute later he lumbers into the foyer, squinting in the sunlight that shines through the screen door. He’s not wearing a shirt. I take in his soft stomach. A cross on a chain dangles between two full breasts. It’s 2:00 in the afternoon. I have woken him up. He’d been out until six the previous morning, he says. Frosty was already at work by the time he crawled home. His voice is gravelly, even slower than normal. I ask if I can get him anything.

“Get me a Pepsi,” he says. “I can’t start my day without a Pepsi.”

I run over to the Brownsville Market. When I return with a cold two-liter bottle, I grab plastic cups from atop his microwave and pour us both some soda. He settles onto the couch. It’s dark inside, the windows shaded and the sliding glass doors blocked by metallic blinds. Michael Doo grabs a remote control, pressing a button to make the TV screen change from ESPN to squiggly lines. He’s fast forwarding through a videotape, he tells me, trying to find highlights of the Pop Warner Super Bowl back in 1998, back when coach Brian Johnson felt Martin was the most promising young football player in Miami.

“Fuck. Fuck, man.” Annoyance spills from his mouth. The video machine isn’t working. “Boom!” he shouts, pressing the play button, but the footage on screen remains fuzzy. I walk around the house as Michael Doo fiddles with the remote control. In the tiny front hall, there’s an Edgerrin James poster from his days as a Colt. There’s a larger-than-life cutout of Clinton Portis, a former Hurricane now on the Redskins. There’s a small framed picture of Malcolm X. There is that same photo of the Pop Warner championship team I’d seen at Brian’s house. I identify Martin from his jersey, number 61.

That jersey is stored in Martin’s bedroom, which also serves as Michael Doo’s memorabilia museum. In a closet, on hangers, Michael Doo keeps signed, game-worn jerseys of Liberty City stars he’s cozied up to: Edgerrin James’ collegiate number five, and then an Arizona Cardinals jersey in James’ current number 32. Chad Johnson’s black and orange Ocho Cinco, the Northwestern High jersey of Antonio Bryant, who went on to play for the Dallas Cowboys, and a Houston Texans jersey signed by Andre Johnson, another former Hurricane. I stay in the hall, where I spot a framed photo of Martin, wearing a dress shirt and tie and standing in the front yard. In the photo, Martin’s throwing a backhanded peace sign. I try to think about what it would be like to grow up here, in this small house, surrounded by posters of football players your father has focused his entire life on having you emulate. Football is clearly a priority. I mean, the closet in Martin’s bedroom overflows with other people’s jerseys.

“I want to show you this, the finest minute of Martin’s life,” Michael Doo calls out. He’s talking about a play in that Pop Warner championship game, when Martin was 10 years old. “The other team was like, ‘We fucking quit!’ Martin gets the ball and he destroys those motherfuckers.”

I’m not interested in watching Martin’s old highlight reel. I ask Michael Doo to forget about the videotape and he agrees, to my relief, rising from the couch to join me in the hall. We both survey the memorabilia. I ask him about the MLK picture that hangs opposite Malcolm X, and that sparks a memory about his son. He tells me that recently, sometime in the past year, he saw Martin signing a piece of paper, a homework assignment or something. Instead of signing the name he was born with, Martin scrawled the name he wanted to be known as.

“He signed that paper Michael Doo! You believe that? He want to be Michael Doo! I told him, ‘You’re goddamn crazy. I named you Martin Luther after the greatest man who ever lived. Michael Doo! You ain’t Michael Doo, I’m Michael Doo.’ That’s crazy!”

The synapses of my brain fire all at once, the picture aligning like the squares on a solved Rubik’s cube. He signed his name Michael Doo.

I flash back to the courtroom and the manila envelope Martin handed to his mother. On a letter from his girlfriend he signed his name Martin Wright #88, over and over, as if practicing. He is Martin Wright. He is number 88. He is the person his father wants him to be. Martin Wright #88, football player. I recall the quote from the night before at the Pork ‘n’ Beans. “Martin want to be me but he don’t want to put in the work.” I wrote it down at the time because I thought, Work? What work does Michael Doo do? Now, in this light, that quote reads differently. “Martin want to be me.”

Michael Doo is known in Liberty City. He has juice. Politicians ask for his help prior to elections. National Football League stars give him cars, and include him in thousand-dollar lunches at Joe’s Stone Crab. Drug dealers, the financial pillars of Liberty City, call him on his cell phone. He goes out all night, sleeps past noon, and hangs out with famous friends every weekend. “Martin’s father, he is known,” Erian Stirrup told me. “Martin being his father’s son, everybody knows Martin.”

Martin was created to be a football star. He was born to be like Edgerrin James and Chad Johnson and Bubba Franks. But he was raised to be Michael Wright. He’s a boy who wants to be like his father. He wants to be a king of Liberty City. He wants to be Michael Doo. I flashback again, to coach Brian Johnson and his theological musings. Michael Doo tried to play God, Brian would say, but what he ended up doing was creating a son in his own image.

It’s a clean thesis. On first blush it reads too clean, too pat. Yet it stayed in my head on the plane back to Colorado, and it stayed in my head over the months that have since passed. The more I tossed it around, studied it, scrutinized it, the longer it held up. Man can’t play God. Man can only play man. It was a theory I’d convinced myself was bulletproof until I fly back to Miami eight months later, and Martin tells me exactly what went down.

“I got too big a head,” he says. “I started believing my own hype. I thought I could get away with anything.”

I arrive back in Miami on the day Martin is released from custody. I first meet with the victim, Demetrice Steed, at the crime scene. She shows me her daughter, Amani, all Mickey Mouse pigtails and a pink shirt that states “Just Be Glad I’m Not a Twin.” Steed grants a tour of her bedroom, where black powder from the police fingerprint dusting still darkens the windowsill. She points to the bed she and Amani slept on that night, right below the window. The break-in so unnerved her she subsequently asked her sister to move in. And she now keeps a gun in the house. If Martin or anyone else were to try to break in again? “Excuse me, but I’m going to blow that fucker’s head off,” she says.

I also attend a “victory party” Michael Doo organizes for his son, at a community center in Hadley Park, where Martin had played youth football. I show up in time to catch Martin’s arrival. He looks fantastic. Months of boot camp push-ups and sit-ups and mandatory long-distance marches have done his body good. A crisp white shirt stretches over his chest. A black tie, dress pants and shiny black shoes complete the outfit. His scalp is shaved tight. He hugs his friends from high school, his father’s friends from the Pork ‘n’ Beans, and his mother’s friends from an exercise dance class that meets in the park’s community room.

“I wish I was Michael Doo,” Martin tells me at the party, when I get a chance to ask about his relationship with his father.  “I want to be Michael Doo. I want everyone to call me Michael Doo. But they won’t, ‘cause I’m not. I can’t fill nobody else’s shoes but my own.”

The party is a hundred people and music and chicken and rice and red beans and fat orange slices of potato pie. It ends early as Martin must be back home by 9 o’clock; he remains under house arrest for the near future. I return to the house with him. Aside from his brief and botched probation, it is his first visit home in almost a year. No recruiting letters remain on the front door.

“I’m so excited to be back,” he says as he rifles through the detritus in his bedroom. Michael Doo has recently removed the celebrity jerseys from Martin’s room, for safekeeping at another location. Martin pokes through his emptied closet, picking up footwear signed by an NFL friend of his father. “These are the cleats I was wearing when I was arrested,” Martin notes. He picks up a purple helmet, embossed with stickers from Booker T. and Northwestern high schools. “And this was the helmet I was carrying. I was on my way to practice for the Dade-Broward [county] all-star game when they tackled me to the ground. My instincts was like to run, but the cop had a piece.”

I ask how in the world he came to be arrested in the first place.

“I got in trouble because I had thought I could get away with anything,” he explains. “I was living like a baller, like I was in the NFL only I was still in high school! I was buying new clothes every week, I was making it rain on my friends, I was getting checks from my sponsors.”

Checks? Sponsors? He says athletes in his father’s circle routinely gave him money. “There was this charity basketball game thrown by [Miami native and Washington Redskin] Santana Moss. And I went around to everyone there and said ‘Where’s my check?’ I left that gym with $5000.

“It went to my head. I had cash. I was All-State. I had too big a head. I started staying out all night, with my friends, doing whatever. My dad was telling me to come in at night but I wouldn’t do it. So then he started cutting off my privileges.”

Among other punishments, Michael Doo cut off Martin’s income stream. Completely. With no cash coming from his father, Martin called up Edgerrin James for some spending money.

“And EJ says, ‘No man, your dad says I can’t give you nothing,’ Martin relays.

“So I started making calls to my other sponsors. I called all around the country. I called up Andre Johnson and Bubba Franks. I called Chad Johnson and he said, ‘Sorry, Martin, you’re dad asked me to cut you off.’

“Now I’m the big man on campus, see? I have a reputation to uphold. My clothes have got to be fresh, you know what I mean? Fresh! I need new shirts. I need new jeans. Everyone at school knows that on Mondays I show up with a brand new pair of sneakers.  Every Monday, every week. There’s pressure on me in a way. I’ve got to be fresh.

“And so I went over to these crack houses down the street over there and even they told me, ‘No, man, your dad says no.’”

Martin is still holding his football helmet. He looks down at it, then tosses it from one hand to the other. He looks up and holds my eye.

“So that’s when I started breaking into houses.”

He worked alone. It wasn’t a dare, or a hazing or gang-related or anything like that. Income was the sole objective. He broke into houses all over the neighborhood. With his connections and name in Liberty City, fencing the loot was easy. The money he made allowed him to keep up appearances. His clothes remained fresh. He continued to make it rain.

The break-in at Demetrius Steed’s house wasn’t as random as it first appeared to be. It certainly wasn’t the deliberate act of career suicide I’d originally hypothesized. Martin didn’t think he’d get caught. And even after he was caught, he told me, he didn’t think he was really in trouble. He didn’t expect to go to jail, much less spend the whole year incarcerated.  He honestly thought he’d still go on to the college of his choice, right on schedule. What did him in was the kidnapping charge.

“I didn’t know there was a baby,” he says. “No idea. I stepped through the window and it was dark and I picked up the first thing in front of me. I had no idea anybody was even home.”

I believe him. He had no reason to take the baby, and he is honest about everything else. It sounds like bad luck, the kidnapping charge. It also sounds karmically appropriate considering all he’d gotten away with before. I listen to his voice. I study his posture. Does he feel remorse? Does he realize he did something wrong? I think so, but I still ask if he might be tempted to rob a house again. He looks at me like I might be the dumbest person in the world.

“Ah, hell no,” he snaps. “Hell no.”

I read that Todd Marinovich was arrested again, in Newport Beach, California. Police found him in possession of a gram of methamphetamine, a metal spoon, and a hypodermic needle. It was his tenth arrest on drug charges. Marinovich appears permanently off track, a lost cause. That’s not the case with Martin. He looks good, strong, fit. He’s focused on his future, on getting into college, on playing football again. “I will go wherever I go, and then I will raise them up,” he promises. “I can’t wait to get back on the field.”

Whether his goals are his own, I can’t say. Michael Doo calls out to Martin from the living room. While I stand witness, he orders his son to perform 50 of these modified jumping jacks learned in boot camp, with Martin’s heels hitting his ass on every hop.

“Right now, here?” Martin asks.

“If your instructor at boot camp told you to give him 50 jumping jacks, then what would you say to him?”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“Then that’s what you say to me. I gave you one day to cool off and it’s already over. Give me 50!”

“Sir, yes sir!”

Martin bounces out 50 reps, right here in the living room. Michael Doo narrates the workout. From now on Martin’s life will be eat, run, and read, in that order. “We behind,” Michael Doo barks. “We don’t have time to be wasting, we behind.” As he lectures, his son jumps in front of him, getting in shape for football, doing what the man he wants to be put him in this world to do.

 

Robert Andrew Powell has written three books about sports, including Running Away, a memoir, This Love is Not for Cowards, and We Own This Game. His journalism has appeared in Harper’s, Howler, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Slate, Mother Jones, Inc., 5280, Runner’s World, the Kansas City Star, on public radio’s This American Life with Ira Glass, and in The Best American Sports Writing anthology. He has won a James Beard Award for his food writing and has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award. He lives in Miami.

Dinty W. Moore on literary truths and flash nonfiction

by Nicholas Reading 

Sport Literate: You write in your collection of essays Between Panic and Desire, “Human beings, truth be told, are inept narrators of their own lives.” If this is true, and I agree that it is, how then does writing and telling stories create, or recreate that truth?

Dinty W. Moore: Well, first off, there are fictional stories, which have their own truth certainly, and then there is nonfiction, which has become my passion over the last 20 years. And of course, there is a contradiction: if people are inept narrators of their own lives, how can they write memoir and call it truthful?

My thought is that the struggle between flawed memory and truth is part of the journey of any writing about the self — poetry or prose — and that journey, or struggle, is what gives energy to the stories being told. A memoir in which the author’s stance was “This is exactly what happened, I’m sure of it, and there is no room to question” would strike me as very flat, and unbelievable.

This doesn’t give the nonfiction writer license to just make stuff up, however. The reader expects and deserves the best the writer can do to capture events accurately, to interrogate memory, to be honest when not sure of something. The writer has to do her damndest to get it right, even though memory is a slippery devil and we are indeed inept narrators. The sophisticated reader knows that and accepts it. But lying is something else, and a writer needs to know the difference.

SL: You write in many different facets — as an essayist, a fiction writer, a poet, as an editor of anthologies, and you write about the craft. What aspects of these genres are different, and what aspects are germane to them all?

DWM: What is common to every one of those modes is the need to look at every sentence that you write, or every line, and ask, “So that sounds good, but do I mean it? Do I believe it?” I don’t do this in early drafts. My early drafts are a sloppy process of spilling language onto the page hoping to stumble upon something interesting and fresh. But as I get further down the revision process, in draft 10 or 20, I start asking myself the hard questions. A sentence or line that sounds lovely can be dangerous, because it can be camouflage for a half-truth or an outright inaccuracy. This applies to fiction too. Sure, we make it up, but do we actually believe it? Would that character actually leave that baby on the stoop?

SL: You also are a teacher at Ohio University and I am curious to know what advice do you offer to young and aspiring authors?

DWM: Well, at the beginning, the advice is simple. Write a lot, read a lot. If you don’t love sentences, the way they work, the inner machinery and engineering of language, you probably don’t belong here. That’s beginner advice. Knowing how to help writers very far along and quite talented is a different challenge, and one that keeps me on my teacher toes.

SL: You edited an anthology of flash nonfiction, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction. How are the challenges of writing flash nonfiction, or fiction, different from longer essays or pieces of fiction?

DWM: The challenge is to tell a full story, give a complete experience of some sliver of life, in so few words. It is not enough to summarize “a story I would tell fully if I had more space.” You need to compress so much in each sentence, and each sentence must do double- or triple-duty, so that the flash story has scene, characterization, point-of-view, and movement. The author must create that “burst of self-awareness” that the term “flash” implies. It doesn’t just go by in a flash: it illuminates, like a flash gun.

SL: You close the introduction to that book, by saying, “My hope is that you enjoy this book and learn from it, but most of all my hope is that you’ll be inspired to write, revise, and write some more. And then keep writing.” In short, what value does writing offer to an individual, either professional or personal? What value does it offer to the reader?

DWM: Some writing opens the mind, expands what we know, how we understand. Some writing opens the heart and soul, expands how we feel, how we empathize, how we grow. True for both writer and reader. That’s enough value for me.

SL: Given that you write in many different modes, I am curious to know where you started and what writing offered to you?

DWM: I grew up in a lower middle class family without many books around. My dad was a car mechanic. I knew no one who wrote seriously, or wrote as an artist. So like so many young writers, my passion for the way words work was funneled into journalism, the high school newspaper, then the college newspaper, then a brief career as a journalist. I was 30 years old before I realized I could do the kind of writing that I do now, which is what I actually wanted to do all along.

What did writing offer me? It was a challenge, one that I still enjoy.

SL: Besides essays, Sport Literate publishes poetry as well. You, in fact, were an early poetry contributor. What draws you to poetry and — this is a big one — what constitutes a successful poem?

DWM: I am not much of a poet. I would only embarrass myself if I tried to answer your question.

SL: You write honestly in your own work and seem to open yourself up to vulnerability. Your nonfiction, I would say, is particularly powerful because of this aspect. Was this approach always easy or did you have to work to get to that point?

DWM: I was not able to be honest, or vulnerable, as a young man, but when I started to become serious about my writing, and started writing short fiction, I immediately recognized that the writers who spoke to me most powerfully — Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Harry Crews — held nothing back, gave all of it on the page. I’m not comparing myself to any of those folks, but I learned from them, not just about mechanics and craft, but about heart, honesty, and risk.

SL: I offer many thanks for your kindness to judge Sport Literate’s essay contest. What are the qualities that you are looking for when selecting work?

DWM: Sentences, carefully shaped and crafted, full of color, sound, smell, taste, and texture. And urgency.

SL: In closing, could you share what role sports and leisurely activities have played in your life?

DWM: I am never happier than when playing tennis, or gardening. Riding a bike is in there too. And just last year, someone handed me a golf club, and much to my surprise, I loved the game. Oh yes, swimming. Which reminds me, I should turn off my computer now and go outside.

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Nicholas Reading is the author of The Party in Question (Burnside Review Press 2007), and his poetry has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod, jubilat, and other literary journals. He’s also the managing editor of Sport Literate. Interested in more Reading? Visit www.nicholasreading.com.

Dinty W. Moore is author of Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals (Random House/Ten Speed 2015), as well as the memoir Between Panic & Desire and Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. He recently edited The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers. He’s also the editor of Brevity, the essential online journal for brief creative nonfiction.