Uncategorized

And In This Corner…

Michael Gawdzik

From time to time, coach made his fighters stay in a pushup position while he whacked them with a bamboo stick. “Humility is the way to greatness.” So he beat them to keep them humble, to have them know that, no matter how hard they trained, they would never be better than a bamboo stick.

I had come to South Korea to get as far from Indianapolis as possible. It was 2013, I was fresh out of college, looking for adventure, and had just spent months listening to old teachers complain incessantly about the state of Indiana education. It was a sermon I wanted no part in writing. What I wanted was to get rid of everything, leave the country, burn my couch, break up with my girlfriend, crush my bike, disembowel my bed, and stomp on all the frozen loaves of bread in my freezer. I wanted to get in a fight and see what I was made of.

So that’s what I did. I heaved my couch into a dumpster, tossed my bed in next to the couch, turned down teaching suburban kids on the south side of Indianapolis, and sold my bike for twenty bucks. I gave the bread to a buddy, broke up with my girlfriend, and headed for the airport. By day I would teach Korean children conversational English, and by night I would learn how to punch and take punches; I would learn how to box.

The gym was all hardwood floors crisscrossed with electrical tape. To the right of the door was the coach’s desk littered with forms, empty food containers, and a big green ledger filled with the progress of boxers. The place smelled like sweat, rubber, and rice. Mirrors hung on all of the walls and hand wraps and jump ropes hung from the posts of the ring in the back of the gym. A pile of towels stiff with blood sat in a corner. The first night I got my gloves coach told me to hit the heavy bag for nine minutes. Jab, cross, hook to the body, hook to the head. My gloves were thin, black, and shiny like a beetle shell. I got too excited and fought that bag like I could win. The next day at school my hands shook so much I could barely hold a pen to grade papers.

Movement, balance, flow, strategy — concepts that, when followed, allow a boxer to transcend the fistfight into a tactical test of skill. At best I had flashes of coherence, but only flashes. Weeks passed. I started sparring. I began to feel confidence percolating through my fists. The muscles in my body relaxed, allowing me to take deep breaths and move less like a robot and more like a boxer.

For my first sparring session coach and I sparred three one-minute rounds. He, fit and short with gleaming black hair and pearl skin, came out of his corner, chin down, gloves up, shoulders loose. There’s a saying among boxers to be afraid of the guy who looks relaxed in the ring. Coach could’ve been napping as he stalked toward me. I, on the other hand, couldn’t hear anything outside the pounding of my heart. He faked a right cross to my head to cover a left hook to my body. I brought my arms over my head, exposing my ribs. His hook landed flush against my stomach and all the air inside me vanished. He finished with a hard jab to my nose. I crumpled to the canvas while he strolled to the nearest corner.

Getting punched in the face didn’t hurt immediately like I’d thought. I got all the other aspects of it though — the sudden shock, disorientation, buckling knees, blurred vision. If I was hit really hard, my mind would go blank. My whole world would skip like a record, and, when I came to, I’d either be down or still on my feet with my opponent coming at me.

My first taste of victory came against a Korean guy named Ji-Ho, who was in his late twenties and wore thick glasses. I punched him once in the gut then threw a jab and a cross to his head. I dropped him to the canvas. At the end of sparring, I lifted weights then ran a half-mile up Buramsan — the mountain near the gym — turning around at a cluster of Buddhist temples, before shadow-boxing back.

After training, Ji-Ho told me in broken English over beers and cigarettes about a boxing tournament happening in a few months in a small town twenty-minutes south of North Korea. I demanded he run up to the gym to tell coach I wanted to fight. Moments later Ji-Ho came down and said coach would sign me up in the morning.

A few weeks before the tournament I watched all the Mike Tyson I could on my laptop. Mercedes, Colay, Canady, Nelson, Bruno, Spinks — Tyson destroyed them all, anyone dumb enough to step in the ring with him. And in studying his destruction, I took note of how to keep my feet apart and chin down, how not to grin when I eyeball my opponent, and how to hit, as Tyson’s coach told him, “with bad intent.”

My coach had me sparring at least four times a week. With only two weeks before the fight, I started seeing myself as a mad dog, fighting sometimes six rounds in a night, getting beaten mercilessly, rarely landing any punches of my own. Now the pap-pap of gloves hitting punching bags and the tik-tik of jump ropes skimming the floor stayed with me well after I’d showered and gone to bed.

The morning of my fight was cold, and the air smelled like gasoline. My coach, two other boxers, and I piled into a car and drove the hour north to the tournament. As we drove, I thought of nothing other than my opponent. I boxed him in my mind, slipping all his punches while landing my own ferocious combos. I wanted to destroy him and prove to myself that, as long as I was conscious, I would never stay down.

Then reality hit. Why did I even sign up for this fight? I thought, as I entered the cold gym, thousands of miles away from home. And why did I think that studying Iron Mike’s knockouts would ever help me, a tall, freckly, skinny white kid with small hands and a big mouth? All the Tyson fights I had watched began to haunt me: Tyson hitting Michael Johnson so hard in the ribs Johnson crumpled to the canvas; Tyson calling his knockout against Francois Botha like Babe Ruth calling a home run; Tyson peppering Steve Zouski with organ deflating punches; Tyson knocking down Peter McNeely, the poor goofy bastard, twenty-two-seconds after the ding of the bell.

Ding.

I meet him at the center of the ring. He smashes a jab through my guard. I stumble back against the ropes, eyes on the canvas, bracing for impact. A few hooks to my ribs drops me for the first time. The ten count starts. I wait for eight, then spring back up. Something is different; time moves in fits. I’m stiff with fear; my mouth is dry. I avoid him for rest of the round.

Ding.

Coach pours water into my mouth. He tells me to punch fast then move away.

Ding.

Conjuring every Tyson knockout, I come out ready to do damage — to hit with bad intent. I meet him in the center, whip out a jab then a cross. Both slip through, connecting flush on the bridge of his nose. He stumbles back, coach cheers, and, for the briefest of seconds, I am Iron Mike Tyson.

My opponent comes roaring back — walloping my head and ribs with big rights and snapping lefts — at one point knocking me through the ropes to dangle half out of the ring. The ref helps me up by the shoulders, dusts me off, then, signals for us to continue.

Ding.

Coach had come with me on my last run before my fight. We ran in silence past the pear orchard and alders up to the summit of the mountain. As the frozen road tilted to the black sky, coach pulled ahead. I stopped once to catch my breath, sucking in the biting air with my hands on my knees, before continuing. I kept going, gravel and ice crunching under my feet, up the mountain, toward the forest and temples cast in moon and shadow.

Michael Gawdzik  is a teacher by day and a writer in Indianapolis, Indiana, by night. He enjoys
traveling and attempting to bestow his enthusiasm for reading and writing
on anyone willing to listen.

Touched by the Greatest

John Julius Reel

Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s corner man, was a fan of my dad’s column in the New York Daily News, so in the summer of 1978 my dad, brother and I were invited to spend the day at The Greatest’s training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania.

A month earlier, I had been left off the Little League all-star team, despite having made it the two previous years. I hoped that meeting one of my heroes might snap me out of my slump.

We woke up early, and Mom dressed Joe and me up in plaid pants, fat-soled, Buster Brown shoes and wide-collared, short sleeved pull-overs, the kind that made my armpits itch and stink.

“Geez,” I said. “It’s not like we’re going to church.”
Mom would not be swayed.
“You’re meeting important men today.”

Dundee said he’d pick us up at the News Building. The last time Joe and I had been there, we’d run into Jimmy Breslin in the hall. His huge head, bushy hair and eyebrows protruding off a top-heavy frame had reminded me of a bison. He’d just grunted at us, with a cigar clenched between his teeth, then made some wisecrack that none of us understood. Dad nodded and smiled, until Breslin went away. The nicest guy had been the cartoonist, Bill Gallo, who invited Joe and me into his office and drew us our very own Big Bertha, who asked us in a bubble of dialogue to play ball.

The biggest highlight of that previous trip into Dad’s office hadn’t been his co-workers, but the building lobby, with its wall of clocks, each one set at a different time, for a different city around the world, and the centerpiece, an enormous globe with a railing around it, spinning on the same axis as the actual earth.

Today, as usual, we took the bus then the Staten Island Ferry into the city, then another bus outside Whitehall Station, getting off on Madison Avenue, a block away from what Dad called, “the quintessential spot to make sissy in the city,” the Yale Club. After leading us in to do our business – the urinals went straight down to the floor, like something you could prop up mummies in –, Dad gave the doorman a big hello on our way back out the revolving door.

“Little does that guy know,” Dad said, once we were walking home free down Vanderbilt Avenue, “that your old man was once arrested for pelting a New Haven cop in a campus snowball fight. I falsely pleaded ignorance.”

Once at the News Building, on 42^nd Street, we waited for Dundee’s limo beneath the mural above the entrance. The motto, “He made so many of them,” was sculpted into the stone. So many men, I guessed, since that’s what the mural showed, and that’s what the streets teemed with. Well, we were off to see the greatest of them, although he’d recently lost his title to Leon Spinks.

The rematch would be held in a month, on September 15^th, the day after I turned 11.

***

John Stearns was Bad Dude, Dave Kingman was Kong, and Pete Rose was Charlie Hustle. A few months after Reggie Jackson hit three homers in a single game in the previous year’s World Series, off the first three pitches he swung at, the Reggie Bar had come out. Joe and I agreed that the “Mr. October Bar” would have sounded better, although the second-rate name was small beans next to its wrapper – orange and blue, the colors of the Mets. Reggie Jackson was a Yankee! How could such a colossal error have been overlooked?

There was also Doctor J in basketball. The shots he was known for, the dunk and the finger roll, “didn’t even exist,” according to Dad, back when he’d played. We’d even heard of Broadway Joe, although more for Namath’s commercials with Farah Fawcett than for his football heroics. “A man about town,” my dad called him.

Of course none of these nicknames compared with The Greatest.
“Someone or something that’s impossible to forget” was how Dad defined greatness.
He’d often use the word when practicing with Joe and me. “Great play!” he’d say, or “Great catch!” Or even after we struck out: “Great swing!”
Sometimes, happy to be home after a long day’s work, or just lolling around the house on the weekend, waiting for Mom to call us into dinner, he’d pat one of us on the back, and say with an emphasis undiminished by his signature irony, “One of the all-time greats!”
We never doubted that’s what we were to him, and our plays and our swings as well. We were his sons, after all.

Perhaps Dad was great. He called his columns his “stuff,” the same word he used for a pitcher’s ability to get guys out. For instance, the Mets’ Jerry Koosman had “lost his stuff,” having gone from a 20-game winner in ’76 to a 20-game loser in ’77. This season he was doing even worse. Meanwhile, Tom Seaver, who’d been traded to the Reds the previous year, hadn’t lost an ounce of his. A few months ago, he’d thrown his first ever no-hitter. The Mets had tanked since he’d left. With the Mets, first he’d been Tom Terrific and then The Franchise, living up to both nicknames.

Although the News trucks had finished their work by the time I was out and about before school, and then, when the Night Owl edition was being delivered, Joe and I would already be in our pajamas, I knew Dad’s face had been plastered across the sides of every single one. So perhaps, in what he called “the newspaper business,” Bill Reel was as much a franchise player as Seaver, Jackson, Garvey or Schmidt.

How many trucks were needed to deliver all the copies of the News sold on Sunday? In any given moment of the morning, how many faces of Dad were spread across the Tri-State Area?
“Enough to fill Shea?” I had asked Joe one day.
Joe, whose paper route gave him an insider’s view, applied his mathematical mind to the question.
“Maybe enough to fill the box seats,” he’d mused.
Still, Dad’s definition of greatness wasn’t foolproof. Failure too was impossible to forget.

In August of ’75, a year before I had entered Little League with a golden bat and glove, proclaimed an eight-year-old prodigy in the national game, Mike Vail had debuted for the Mets. He went 4 for 4 against the Padres a few days later, beginning a hitting streak that had Dad, Joe and me going directly to the box scores in the News on mornings after games, more concerned with Vail’s performance at the plate than the final score. The streak ended at 23 games, the longest ever by a Major League rookie, and a tie for the longest by a Met. By the end of the season, he was being touted as the new miracle of the Miracle Mets. A .302 average, the second best on the team, behind only Ed Kranepool. Mighty Mike! Yet the following season, he hit just .217. And this year, during spring training, the Mets had finally let him go.

He was the Met I remembered most, for being a flash in the pan – exactly what Ali hoped to turn Spinks into, exactly what I hoped to never become.

***

The back of the limo was like a tiny living room, upholstered in tawny beige with gilt lining framing the pull-out ashtrays, door handles and overlaying the window lips. Dundee sat on the couch-like seat across from us, wearing dark gray pants and an open-collared shirt with shimmering pin stripes. A thin chain traversed the triangle of exposed flesh below his neck. A fatter chain circled his wrist. The frames of his eye-glasses, and even the top of his head – tan, shiny and balding – added to the sheen of gold. He also wore cologne. Because he’d shaken my hand, I wore it now, too.

“You boys ever had to defend yourselves?” he asked.
I considered telling him about the time I’d bashed Roy Jordan’s nose back in 3^rd grade. Instead of hitting back, he’d said, “Nice punch!”
“They’re ballplayers,” Dad replied.
Mr. Dundee nodded approvingly.
“I thought I saw fire in their eyes,” he said. “That’s what makes a champion.”

The radio was tuned to WNEW New York, exactly what we listened to at home. William B. Williams and Jonathan Schwartz, the station’s star DJs, played from what they called The Great American Songbook. To them, there was Sinatra, a.k.a. The Chairman of the Board, and then all the rest: Benny Goodman, Lena Horne, Nelson Riddle… The dudes and dames of something called “The Make Believe Ballroom.”

“Hello world!” Willy B would say, as Dad drove us back from St. Andrew’s on Sundays. We had a VW squareback, Dodger blue with cream interior, and a whistle in its engine tone. Dad would tap his fingers on the ball at the end of the stick shift, keeping time with the music.

Now, in the limo, I watched him ply his trade on Dundee. The give and take of their talk, its pace, made me wonder if they were angry at each other.

“It’s all about surprising the opponent,” said Dundee. “The greatest fighters even surprise themselves.”
“But he’s 36,” said Dad.
“Ali’s still got some surprises left in him.”
“He’s not the fighter he once was though.”
“He’s different. But his personality and character are the same,” said Dundee. “That’s what makes him the greatest fighter who ever lived.”

***

By the time we got to Deer Lake, the scent of Dundee’s cologne, mixed with the smoke from the cigarettes that he and Dad sucked down to the filters and filled the gilded ash trays with, had gone to my head. Also we’d skipped lunch. At one point, during complete silence, a fart had trumpeted out of me. Not even Joe had acknowledged it with a raised eyebrow or an elbow to the ribs. Now that we’d finally reached our destination, I just wanted to be back home, flipping through and talking baseball cards with Joe, eating one of Mom’s grilled cheeses with a glass of milk, ripping farts to my heart’s content.

Dundee must have sensed that we were faltering, because, as soon as we got inside the compound’s ring and training facilities, he went off to get us “Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee” t-shirts, blue for me, red for Joe, and two brass, Muhammad Ali belt buckles, with his likeness cast in a boxer’s defensive pose, the metal the exact color and shine as the skin of the man I was now seeing in person, alone in the ring, shadowboxing, sweat sliding down him, his face transfixed, like Dad’s when he would pound out his column at the dining room table.

He gave a final flurry of punches, then shook out his legs and arms and bent to slip through the ropes, as an assistant wrapped him in a white robe. When they disappeared through a door, I thought that was it. But Dundee came over and asked Joe and me if we’d like to join Ali in a few minutes to watch the Spinks fight tape in one of the bunk house living rooms.

We immediately stood with all our stuff.

Dundee went off to find something for us to put it in. He returned with a shoebox that said EVERLAST, and Size 13. It was the biggest shoe box I’d ever seen.

***

A couple of The Greatest’s sparring partners flanked him on the sofa. The three of them wore loose, gray t-shirts and shorts and hunched down like sitting bears ready to roll forward into swift motion. The furniture seemed like what you’d find at a garage sale, or left out for the garbage men to pick up. The upholstery gave off the odor of sweet feet and something muskier that I couldn’t pinpoint. The carpet was dirty brown, and you could see where food and drink spills had been carelessly cleaned up. I stared at the soda cans in the fighters’ hands, looking as tiny as dice-rollers from my Parcheesi game.

Once, way past our bed-time, at a dinner party with some of Dad’s friends in the city, I’d overheard him tell of the time he’d seen Yogi Berra in the Yankee locker room.

“Yogi had just stepped out of the shower. Body hair covered him like a wet shag carpet.” Dad rose from his chair and propped his foot up on the seat to show how Yogi stood. “He had a slice of pizza up over his head, drooping down, dripping oil, about to send it in. And down below his paunch. . .” Dad dropped a hand to beneath his legs, as if holding a great weight there.

“Billy!” Mom said. “The children!”
“Some indelible memories you’d prefer to forget,” Dad said.
The room had burst into hilarity. It was a side of Dad I’d never seen before, nothing sacred, the life of the party, having forgotten his family was present.

***

In the bout against Spinks, there had been some controversy about a moment between the late rounds, after which Spinks came out with a second wind, key to his winning the fight by decision. Ali fast-forwarded directly to this part, with the cameras on Spinks in his corner, then pressed play. We all watched as one of Spinks’ corner men squirted a water bottle into the fighter’s mouth. Instead of spitting it into a stool-side bucket, Spinks swallowed it.

“Didja see? Didja see?” said Ali, jumping up from the sofa and beginning to bob and weave.

After a flurry of jabs, he turned to me. “Ain’t nobody gonna cheat the king! Ain’t no one gonna cheat the worl’! The greatest of ALL time! Learnin’ new tricks at 36. Ain’t over the hill, Spinks gonna get his fill. Don’t stand no chance ‘gainst an Ali who can dance.”

His sparring partners chimed in, “Das right, champ!” . . .  “Uh huh!” . . . “Gonna whup him like you whupped the rest.”

Ali followed with a fiercer and more intricate display of shuffling and shadow boxing, as I sat on a foot stool below him.

“When that bell ring, gonna be so fast, he gonna think he’s surrounded. Be floatin’ an’ dancin’. Old enough to be his daddy, they sayin’. We’ll, I’m gonna beat him like I’m his daddy. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me. I’ll whup ‘em all. Gonna go outa boxin’ just like I came in…,” he squatted down in front of me, his face as big and golden as a gong. “Shockin’ the worl’!”

He bit his lower lip and popped his eyes out, as though it was all he could do not to let fly with the fist he held under his chin. I tried to smile, but a pathetic squeak betrayed me.

I felt his hand on my head, radiating heat.
“I would never hit you, little man,” he said. “Be afraid you’d hit back.” He stood and turned toward his sparing partners on the couch. “Someone get the champ here a Mountain Dew!”
He looked back at me, noticing the shoebox for the first time, then eyed me as though he’d caught on to my tricks.
“You tryin’ to put yourself in my shoes?”
He began to back away, still glowering in his jocular way.
“Spinks is a clean fighter,” he said, suddenly serious, “and a good fighter. People have to give him credit.”
Before he could take a seat, his sparring partner returned with my soda. Ali took it from him, popped the tab and stepped forward again.
The can changed from small to big, as he handed it to me.
“You know how smart Spinks gotta be to beat me?” he said.

***

On the return trip to the city, I stared out the window, like I would on school trips, so that it was just me and the outside world, my head pressed to the cool glass, my breath fogging it. I didn’t want to think about anything at all.

Little by little, as we approached New York, more and more homes, closer and closer together, began to line the highway. The greenery shrank, and became less exuberant, with more cars parked along the streets. Then the green merged with every other color into a general grayish brown. Factories spewed filth that warped the air. Warehouses surrounded by parking lots were crammed full with rows and rows of repair trucks, school busses or delivery vans, motors cooling, routes run, cargos unloaded.

An unending stream of cars, expanded now to three lanes, whooshed past in the opposite direction, or rushed alongside of us in the pell-mell return to the center of it all, bumper to bumper in front and behind. The driver put the radio on, louder this time. Sound surged up all around us. Jonathan Schwartz spoke low, his tone confidential, as though addressing only me. He said something about Satchmo, The First Lady of Song and summertime. A pause followed, interspersed with one or two pops of a needle on vinyl, then a muffled horn, a swell of strings and a sad, slow bell.

What did I need to do to be remembered forever, to have a nickname that everyone knew, or a candy bar named after me?
“One of these mornin’s you gonna rise up singin’,” sang a voice impossible to forget.

Satchmo was still at it when I saw the News truck pass in the opposite direction, with Dad’s face blown up to billboard size, plastered across the side of it. The east and west bound lanes had veered slightly apart at that point, so my eyes could linger long enough to read, “Get the Reel Story” – the same number of words and syllables as “I am the greatest.”

A short while later, when Dundee got dropped off at Grand Central, he said to the driver, “These young men are ballplayers. Get them home for dinner.”

There was still daylight left when the limo pulled in front of our house. Dad suggested that we play pepper in the street, while Mom got supper ready. I didn’t feel like it, but said yes, because that’s what ballplayers did to be the greatest.

John Julius Reel, born and raised in Staten Island, New York, has lived for 14 years in Seville, Spain. He is the author of a memoir in Spanish, ¿Qué pinto yo aquí?, and has collaborated as both writer and editor in El derbi final, an award-winning book about the Seville soccer derby. Among his English publications, the essay “My Darlings” stands out for having been recognized as “notable” in Best American Essays 2015. His two essays in the most recent issue of Sport Literate are part of a memoir in progress.

At Dodger Stadium

by Michael Konik

You attend a baseball game once a year. You don’t follow the sport or the players. Long ago, when you were a boy, you were a true fan who knew all the statistics and the nicknames, the characters and the storylines. These days, you’re only vaguely aware of who’s starting for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and even less aware of who’s playing for the other guys. You have no investment in the outcome of the contest, financial or otherwise.

You go for the spectacle, the grand circus of light and sound and motion, the hordes of humans swathed in blue and white. The players: beautiful in their graceful power. The field: radiating chlorophyll. The night sky: endless yet intimate. The air: redolent of grilled onions and cooked meat. Dodger Stadium itself: an elegant dowager confidently reassured by her place in history.

Being there is a pleasure, a constant offering of sensual enticements.
Except for the advertisements.
They’re everywhere.
Well, not everywhere. The players are not yet stickered with corporate logos, like NASCAR racers.

But almost every place a perspicacious marketer could hawk his goods is now “sponsored,” “branded” or “supported” by those with something to sell. The outfield wall. The scoreboard. The loge-level party boxes. The foul poles.

Yes, the foul poles. If you should chance to look at the gleaming yellow spires towering from the left- and right-field corners – and it’s sort of hard not to throughout the game – you’ll be reminded to Fly a Certain Airline. The message is affixed to a stiff banner that extends a foot or two off the pole into fair territory. If, say, Justin Turner or Corey Seager launched a fly ball toward the bleachers and the foul-line and the ball stayed just fair it would collide with the airline advertisement, simultaneously scoring a Home Run and a grand slam of value-added product placement.

Hooray.

We like to tell ourselves that Major League Baseball is “America’s national pastime,” an entertaining exhibition of grown men playing a child’s game. Maybe that’s right. For what could be more American than treating every person in attendance as a potential customer?

At the ballpark, our national urge to consume – whether pig innards served as “Dodger Dogs” or an international airline served as an umpiring tool – is reinforced with every pitch and at every interregnum in the action. Not participating in the commercial charade is only slightly less patriotic than neglecting to stand and applaud for the “Military Hero of the Game.” Few can say exactly why our brave soldiers are currently in Afghanistan or Iraq, but we all know intuitively that their sacrifices make our freedom to purchase stuff possible.

And to Fly a Certain Airline the next time we travel to the Middle East, preferably on non-war-related business.

When you make your annual sojourn to the stadium, you’re reminded at every turn how heartlessly mercenary the sport has become. This brilliant pitcher earns many millions of dollars, and that slugger earn many millions more, and, yet, in the curious mathematics of modern capitalism, they’re probably underpaid. Absent the coddled players, without their numbered presence and exalted skills, most of us probably wouldn’t pay to come to a place where our entire purpose is to cheer on cue and buy whatever’s being sold, whether $6 water, $15 beer or the comforting fiction that our cherished athletic competitions somehow transcend the tacky American imperative to make a profit.

Michael Konik was one of a trio of winners in the SL poetry chapbook contest for his collection, “Dodger Stadium Suite,” which became part of This Loss Behind Us. He is the author of many books, including the sports-gambling memoir The Smart Money and the golf-in-Scotland travelogue In Search of Burningbush. 

Speaking of Beast Quake

by William Meiners

A lot of people are putting things into historical context these days. With racist rants emanating from an authoritarian’s toilet in the White House, you might want to take some notes to address a future grandchild’s inquiry concerning your whereabouts and actions from 2016 through 2020. Indeed, writer and director David Shields likens the Trumpian era to Germany 1933.

In our mid-August conversation, I didn’t think to ask Shields about the title of his brilliant documentary…. Marshawn Lynch: A History. What sort of historical perspective could a football player just 33 years old offer? Don’t get going on Jesus now and what he achieved by 33. Yet this documentary, comprised of some 700 clips (around 10 seconds each) not only provides insight into a complicated young man, but also explores a history of protest against racial discrimination with a particular focus on Lynch’s chosen form of rebellion — silence.

Shields, a serious man of letters, is pushing the boundaries of creative nonfiction with a narration that has no narrator. True to himself, Lynch did not participate in the film. Though not for lack of trying from the filmmakers. Lynch’s group maintained a neutrality to the project, neither supporting nor discouraging the production. “Given Marshawn Lynch’s style, it would have been sort of ridiculous if he sat down for a 12-hour interview,” Shields says.

The Comedy and the Fury
It wasn’t always going to be like this. In the beginning, Shields wanted to turn Black Planet, his critically acclaimed basketball book, into a film. It’s his only book I’ve read, largely because of a blurb about its unflinching honesty by Robert Lipsyte. Covering the 1994-95 Seattle Supersonics season, Shields is anything but colorblind in Black Planet, “facing race” through myriad interactions of players, coaches, fans, and media men and their rhetorical missteps throughout a long NBA season. I told him Sport Literate was first published somewhere between chapters seven and eight of that documentary-style book.

Though the book didn’t materialize into a film, Shields says the themes of Black Planet — “race, history, media iconography, and sports morphed into the Lynch movie.” In tellings nearly 20 years apart, both stories have strong black protagonists (for a lack of a better word), both of whom are from Oakland. In the book, Shields looks intensely upon Gary Payton, the trash-talking, defensive-minded point guard of the Sonics.

“Both Payton and Lynch are very interested in violating ordinary language,” Shields says. “And I think that connects them. In their own ways, they’re both expressing a remarkable amount of comedy or fury through either silence or trash talking.”

There are plenty of laughs and tragedies in the film, often in quick succession. Lynch’s relationship with the media is sometimes jokey, other times contentious, especially as he begins providing one or two stock answers, i.e. “Thanks for asking.” As a cultural icon, Lynch becomes the punchline of Jimmy Fallon, but a contributing guest of Conan O’Brien. Graphic violence, including a Chicago cop’s murder of teenager Laquan McDonald, as well as the head trauma of football, continuously weaves in and out of the narrative. 

“The last thing we wanted was the ‘voice of God’ omniscient narrator.”
Folks wondered about getting someone famous to narrate the film. Like James Earl Jones. Danny Glover, the executive producer, could have done it. But Shields says the “kaleidoscopic, freewheeling film feels congruent with who Marshawn Lynch is.”

I like this reasoning. Though I can’t help but imagine how NFL Films might handle it via baritone voiceover and the trumpeting music.

The Autumn Wind is silent
Skittling in from Oakland.
Upon Beast Quake feet, he turns Saints and Rams into sheep,
All about that action, Boss.

Beast Mode in High Definition
Additionally, they never wanted the production to feel like a television show, or (God forbid) a three-hour NFL broadcast with the vanilla commentary of Joe Buck or Thom Brennaman, or anyone else whose dad got him the job. “That turned into a different mantra, which was to try to make the movie feel like the most kinetic Marshawn Lynch run,” Shields says. “It should be like Beast Quake… it turns, it twists, it surprises, stutter steps, reverses and repeats. It’s like a seven-second, 70-yard run.”

I remember where I watched Beast Quake — Lynch’s playoff pinball run through what seemed like a dozen New Orleans Saints. If my grandchildren should ever ask, I can tell them precisely. On January 8, 2011, I was in the bar of the Hooters Casino in Las Vegas. My friend and his friend, a banker and chiropractor, respectively, spent about six hours (two NFL playoff games) at the same craps table. I checked in with them periodically and drank alone. My live-in girlfriend, at home with the pre-existing condition of her three children, would be pregnant by St. Valentine’s Day. Our son James, born exactly 10 months after Beast Quake, brought forth the possibilities of my grandchild’s question.

Go ask Alice
Shields says the East Bay writer Alice Walker provided some cautionary advice for white folks embarking on a discussion of race. When asked what can white men do, she said: “They can sit down and listen for the next 350 years.”

Taken to heart, Shields says, “We tried, to the best of our abilities, to listen to Marshawn talk, or not talk. Especially as a white filmmaker, I don’t want to tell the audience what to think.”

Though thousands of people in multi-racial audiences have by now overwhelmingly enjoyed the film that’s also received some glowing reviews. Still is there something specific Shields would like white people to take away from the movie?

He says it has to do with the unremitting legacy of slavery, repression, and (I think) government-sanctioned violence against black people. Wearing his feelings on his own nerve endings, Lynch, Shields believes, “is trying to convey that history is real. If you feel it, then he can feel you. And if you don’t, then he’s not up for it. Much of what he’s doing is expressing the rage he experiences as a black man in America, especially a Trumpian America.”

To me, it seems, there’s an expanding lack of empathy in Trumpian times. Shields agrees, citing the profound tribalism in this great divide and the president’s uncanny ability to unleash a reptilian-like response in his base supporters. By sheer contrast to the “most powerful man in the world,” Lynch is an “extremely empathetic, loving, and imaginative person,” Shields says. “He’s also hugely aware of Trump’s awfulness. So if you think about it, Lynch could not be more presidential. If you want to talk about a beast, or beast mode, it’s Trump.”

Much Ado About Shyness?
It’s a question often put to Shields. “Are you over-reading someone who may just not like to talk?” But Shields pushes back. Through the work of his foundation and a commitment to his Oakland community, Lynch is no wall flower. And he has a lot to say when he wants to say it. 

Early in the movie, when a younger Lynch, still in high school, has a microphone thrust upon him with a demand that he ask for advice, he responds, “I ain’t got no questions.” In perhaps his last words of the film, he says, “Run through a motherfucker’s face.” That confident, beast mode mentality, may speak to his preference for action over commentary. In another clip, where he looks to be getting a pedicure beside some white guy, Lynch laments the fact that people might complain if he talks too much. So why would they even want any insipid sport cliches?

“The more I study it, the more I feel like Marshawn is a very intentional person,” Shields says. “He’s very eloquent, very lyrical, very funny.”

In the tradition of the African-American trickster, Lynch, who says Jeff Hostetler is his all-time favorite Raider, simply does not like to play by the rules of a corrupt game. Think Muhammad Ali and how hard it was for most white writers, aside from people like Lipsyte, to box him in racially as either a “good Negro” or scary one. 

“There’s a sense in which American sports media are trying to get black athletes to be vectors on the grid of American capitalism,” Shields says. “Lynch, to his great credit, says, ‘No, I’m not going to speak to your corporate capitalistic rhetoric.’ In a strange way, he’s speaking truth to power by being silent. ‘If you want to pay me a million dollars to sell Pepsi, okay, we can talk about that. Maybe I’ll do a funny commercial. But there’s no frickin’ way I’m going to give you your American sports media cliches and not be paid.’ So in a way, I would say Lynch is a savvy American capitalist.”

And that’s some tricky, complicated stuff, no matter how you slice it. If you want my two cents (and it’s about all I’ve got), I’d give Marshawn Lynch: A History two thumbs up for a rollicking ride and all its potential to make you stop and think. And to echo Snoop Dogg (and my favorite clip) maybe one middle finger to anyone who thinks highly paid athletes need to conform to the norms of a racist society.

William Meiners is the founding editor of Sport Literate.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of 22 books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBREditors’ Choice). The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel was released by First Pond Entertainment in 2017. Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018; The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is forthcoming in March 2019. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

You Forgot These

by William Huhn

There was everywhere the danger that a dance would arise. I could shrug off my other concerns, but the danger was there whenever I set my fiddle case down, whether in a walkstreet, a square, or alongside the most civil of the terrace cafés. While I also played in restaurants for tips, and plenty of “sandwich bars,” bistros, and nightspots heard my violin and sometimes my singing, I made my real money outdoors well after sundown, and could be seen still going at it late at night when the meaner elements were out, none of whom gave me trouble.

I’d wrung as much music as possible from Brussels since arriving some three months ago, and not once yet had my fiddle brought out of hiding the discontent in these street and squares, a discontent no music of mine could have reached if it tried.There was a hatred out here, beyond the capacity of even love to confound, but I played a way unaware that I had reason to fear, and my music mainly seemed to awaken just the good in people.

Soon I’d be leaving for the southern French provinces, in my vision of keeping forever ahead of winter and living for music alone, but even here up north, in September, with chills coming on in the evening, my fiddle could pull a crowd. Toes began tapping from the instant my opening notes sprang. Often that’s all I got out of them, but other times even when I was playing badly, they broke into dance.

My roadside recitals could also inspire acts of rudeness ⏤ the passerby who cursed my playing, a rock band that set up well within earshot of my mere violin, then flooded me out. But the dance moves ranged from bits of swing to traditional stepping, and once two shirtless breakdancers performed to a jig that a wandering guitarist accompanied me on….  With such gaiety all was forgiven of the unhappy few. Soon all the night’s revelers merged again into the passing stream, but not before I’d given some of them an interlude of joy.

I was anxiously alone in Brussels otherwise, living under  a subletting arrangement soon to expire, and not sure where exactly my gadjo soul would take me after France, when I crossed over into Italy. The fable of the carefree beggarman, whom God remembers and watches over no less closely than over all of us, struck me as true to life; and I had in music a spiritual protector, against which the mortal and mundane were no match, and which gave me courage. But most of the friends I’d made since coming here, including a German woman I’d dated for a month, had withdrawn to their native lands or vanished altogether by now. If on many nights I felt like a dreamy soldier, astray on foreign soil, glad not to know what the next day held, at times I grew solemn and restless with no steady friends around. I was about done with Belgium anyway, and having long since “conquered” the capital, I began branching out to the lesser cities more. I wanted to play them all before leaving.

They, too, couldn’t get enough of my fiddle, and their enthusiasm occasionally equaled what I’d ignited back among the Brusselois, but fewer dancers gathered at these farther corners, and even at their height the eruptions rarely climbed above a score of hands clapping in rhythm to my licks. Nobody threw in for a riot. Their zeal never devolved into the brave rituals of the mosh pit.

Liège, Ghent, and Lille felt just lifeless to me. I made barely enough gelt to justify the travel, and I never went back to these places. Bruges charmed, but again ⏤ no money. Antwerp paid its buskers well, and the finest musician I’d jammed with in Belgium, a Scot no less, was based there, but I disliked the city. Although nothing leapt out at me that I could point to, I’d gone twice now, and somehow both times gave me the willies. I was picking up on the discontent without knowing it and didn’t understand why I felt uneasy, just as now I couldn’t quite explain my reluctance to return to Antwerp.

After all, that Scotsman could play a mean ukulele! He kept mostly to his native Scots folk style, which I’d relished, then he’d go off on some jazz fusion riff of his own unworldly stamp. Even when introducing himself as “Ian V,” he’d been riffing, I’m pretty sure, as this couldn’t have been his exact name. “Fifth,” he added, while crushing my hand, “as is spelled with a ‘ph.’” Whether he meant “Ian the Phifth,” “Fiphth,” or even “Phiphth,” I hadn’t pondered. I was too busy getting me and my fiddle ready to join in the fun he provoked. With his passion for music un feu grégois (”a wildfire”) ⏤ a phrase I loved, having only just learned it ⏤ Ian quickly became as much a kindred soul as a minor hero of mine….  And in the end I couldn’t leave this little country without attempting to connect up with him for one last duo.

If I’d known that Antwerp, like any city, harbored the hate that had no earthly opposite, even Ian V’s ukulele couldn’t have enticed me back. My doubts about this Bohemian life I led were enough disquiet for a traveler. But you can’t plan to avoid malevolence, and the just stand I took against it was improvised. And of all the darkness I faced down that night, only my own made me afraid, only what all true fiddlers take to the floor.

***

The hour-long train ride to Antwerp’s Centraal Station put me, just after dusk, within strolling distance of the Meir, a spacious rue happily unavailable to cars and renowned for its shops. My mission here, as anywhere else, was to bring cheer to a few people, and for that I needed no companion whatever except for my fiddle.  But Ian V performed on the Meir every Saturday night from what I could tell, so that’s where I’d go.

It was warm out. I felt less lonesome already, having left Bruxelles behind, where the police had begun to view me as a well-dressed parasite. I was sick of watching them leaf through my passport as if they wanted to altogether stamp out fiddle playing.

I’d hardly started walking before the perplexities of the Flemish straat names had once again thrown me off. A wrong turn, and I found myself wandering an addicts’ alley just off Van Maerlantstraat. Glassy eyes looked out from shadows and stairways.  Through the grimy windows of an abandoned office building tiny spurts of flame revealed faces. I jaywalked toward the houses across from it and felt no safer. Here, too, the sidewalk listed like old grave slabs, littered with small ziplock bags here and there. Beneath a working streetlamp lay a syringe among scattered cubes of car glass.

My encased violin drew attention, but the users hung back, wary of an outsider. Though no police were near to hinder trade, only one dealer approached me. I shook him off by pretending not to understand the French he made his pitch in.

But around another corner, my pathway led to better en-virons. A recently paved road banked by Art Nouveau façades welcomed me. Just as I was getting that “all’s right with the world” feeling, though, a coven of prostitutes rose into view. The slit in the mini-mini of the closest ran so high it poked the cage of my animal spirits. Two others loitered near her, all in front of a rococo house whose window frames, with lurid purple-red glows within, resembled baby Doric columns.

I tried to not look as I passed, but I couldn’t not look. The close one nudged aside her leather lapels, exhibiting a lacy black bra; then with a pirouette she shape-shifted away from me, her spike heels clicking. When I caught up with the woman, now posted by the wrought-iron gate of the house, she calmly greeted me with a bright “bonsoir.”

Beauty makes me think impossible thoughts. I can’t and couldn’t help myself; and after returning her hello, I trembled to ask for directions to the Meir. She proffered them in the most elegant français anyone ever heard; and with a touching “faites attention” ⏤ touching, that is, my wrist with two fingertips ⏤ she, too, sensed that I was out-of-place here. So she asked, “Is it you would like to make love to me?”

“Where?” I stumbled, falling back into my native tongue.
“Chez moi,” she said.

I loved that “chez moi” ⏤ so direct, so clear. And I might have gone inside with the filledejoie, because I believed she cared about me. But rather than go, I began to wonder what her name was, and whether anyone loved her, besides God and maybe a mother somewhere. Then a feeling of almost a prayer came over me, and with simple words of parting I left her to the mercy of these endless streets.

No sign of Ian V reached my ears as I walked along the Meir, but I found the small plaza we’d played in twice before, and I set up in front of its central feature: a pallid statue of Anthony Van Dyck, the famous student of Peter Paul Rubens. Van Dyck’s painting had stood on its own so entirely that he became known in Flanders, then across Europe, as “Rubens II.” A graying redhead filled me in on all this while I struggled with my tuning pegs and she smoked. But she strolled off, denying me a chance to repay her in song for the two cigarettes she’d shaken from her pack into my open violin case.

I wasn’t necessarily hoping to become a second Ian V on the Meir that night, but this spot felt well-suited for any kind of lesson from a master; and the entranceway to the popular store Galeria Inno, forty feet away, drew people to the area and would do so till around eleven, closing time, even if Ian didn’t show.

Rain threatened, but since lamplight brightened the walkways, no one cared. But maybe Ian wouldn’t want to risk it. His was an exceptional uke. He called it an “akulele” and said that the secret of its rare sound lay in its maker’s choice of hand-carved spruce for the top. Reluctantly, he even let me give her a try. I doubted I’d ever strummed an instrument more alive, but with Ian so nervous I returned the “akulele” before my fingers could form a proper chord.

He might show up yet. The rain was holding off, the night still pleasant. The drafts allowed short sleeves so long as I played with passion. With my bow the sword I lived by, I struck the first notes of a rag, the nimble “Pig Ankle,” and soon after I was having at a high-speed tune whereupon my fervor grew uncontained, like that wildfire I’d learned the French for. Again I proved that wherever I stood in the open air, whether I pushed southward or hung on in Belgium till someone turned off the fountains for the winter, I’d have the light of my fire, and I could lean on it to the last.

But I’d have moved on to other plazas or burgs this minute if I could have, since this one wasn’t valuing my music. All I’d earned so far, besides the smokes ⏤ which I hadn’t asked for ⏤ was a comment from a crank, “Cigarettes kill people!” as he made a big display of stepping around my case.

“I’ll be fiddling this next one on your grave!” I thought, and I wanted to toss off a few bars of Schumann’s lone violin concerto (said to be a work of madness) for these outriders streaming by, but I couldn’t since I’d never learned it. Instead I hit them with “Orange Blossom Special,” which soon won me my train fare. If Ian was still ensconced at home, at least I was in the black.

Another musician came along, his guitar in a canvas slipcase strapped across his back, his girl in tow, wrapped around his pinkie finger. You’d have thought he was Irish or German till he opened his mouth ⏤ “We heard you, like, last weekend… with that ukulele dude” ⏤ then you knew he was American. I  remembered his girl more than him. Though she wore discount jeans and a pleather jacket, like last week, again I was asking myself, how did a loser like that get such a drop-dead girlfriend? If not him, I remembered his faded green vest ⏤ a US Army jacket with its sleeves amputated.

“You must mean Ian V,” I said. “You seen him around?” I also remembered that they’d tried to muscle in on our gig.
“Haven’t,” he said. “He could play that motherfucker.”
“I like what is these ⏤ a veeolin?” said his girl, in an accent I couldn’t place. She stepped forward ⏤ “You can make lot of money with these… veeolin” ⏤ and turned to face her guy. His eyes answered her suggestion. Her hair floated like candyfloss, not pink but a warm beige, a downy ridge cresting above the nape of her neck.

The guy walked around her. “I’m Gil, by the way.” Gilbert smelled like booze. He put out a hand that I shook. Then he ran his fingers through his long dirty blondness, in 80s throwback style, a revealing gesture: his mane was rapidly thinning.
“And this is Tarsie.”
“Why you always do this shit? You don’t tell them small name when first meeting the people,” Tarsie said. With one hand she pointed at herself ⏤ “I’m called Tarsila” ⏤ with the other she took mine in hers.  She held on for an extra pulse or two. And nor were her eyes afraid to hold mine.  She was spicy-icy hot this woman, and evidently a handful.

Last week Ian was done with this guitarist in an instant. Planting his blank gaze on Gil’s army vest, as if it said all anyone needed to know, he’d asked him if he knew the chords to “Greensleeves,” which Gil did not.

“A’m sorry,” said Ian, “bit ah don play reels wi’ a mon wha doesn’t ken ‘Greensleeves,’” or something like that.

But Ian wasn’t here to save me this time, and I had no witty defense at the ready when Gil asked, “Wanna maybe join forces for a jam, like impromptu?”
“Sim sim!” Tarsie clapped. “You play with us!”

While failing to identify this strange language the woman spoke, I also wondered how she fit in musically ⏤ did she sing?

No. She was the beggar woman. Rather than dig in an Hermès handbag for French perfume, she picked around in a wire-mesh bin till she found a tall paper cup clean enough not to offend the passersby. Then she freshened her lipstick.

After gathering up my earnings from my case, I applied my bow to “BakåtVista” ⏤ a melody that a Finnish flute player had taught me in July. I hoped the tune’s simple guitar accompaniment wouldn’t overexpose ole Gilbert’s thin talent. Not long into the number, though the guy was butchering it nicely, Tarsila’s smiles persuaded a tall black guy, wicked handsome, into pushing a bill into her cup. Something he said in a heavily inflected French made her laugh. He took little notice of Gil or me, but nor did he let Tarsie’s looks keep him from his night.

The guitarist abruptly nonsequitured into U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name.”  It took me a minute to hit on a violin sound not wholly unreminiscent of “The Edge,” and by the end I was also assisting Gil with my voice. We drew a sizable crowd and won more paper, which like that precious first bill, went straight from the cup into Tarsie’s pocket. She didn’t look like a thief. Keeping the container free of bills was a trick of the trade: you wanted them thinking you needed the money.

“So much people like these veeolin!” ⏤ Tarsie smiled, emptying the coins onto the velvet lining of my case ⏤ “especially on night like this of the weekend, when the people come out drunk from the bar.” A fistful of change stayed in the cup, enough to draw attention to our cause when shaken.

“A little early for that, Tarse,” said Gil. Having leaned his cheap axe against Rubens II’s pedestal, he extracted a half-size bottle of chardonnay from the daypack Tarsie had been carrying ⏤ “Ain’t nobody drunk yet!” ⏤ and unscrewed the cap.
“No, isn’t early. They drink starting soon as dark!”
“This isn’t Lisbon, Tarse,” he said. (Ah, she spoke Por-tuguese.) He offered her firsts on the wine, but she waved it away. I, too, declined. Gil said, “Antwerp you gotta wait till like eleven before the drunks are down.” He swept his hair loss back before taking a drink. “Not bad…still cold. You shoulda seen us came out here like a month ago.  Place was raging till like two AM even on week nights.”

I assumed Gil was just your everyday drunk, but when he learned I’d lived in LA for a year, he slackened his jaw and admitted to having been “big into dust” back in his home city, San Diego, a factoid that didn’t exactly clarify why Tarsie stayed with him.

We played more, but I kept scanning for Ian among our fleeting fans and the night walkers drifting past. His reappearance felt imminent, even after I began holding out little hope for it.  I couldn’t play Gil’s songs well, except maybe the folky R.E.M. anthem “Swan Swan Hummingbird,” but then, neither could he; and when I stopped trying and let my fiddle droop,  Gil stopped, too. He unhooked his guitar strap and sank back against the plinth of the Van Dyck.

“Fuck,” he said, “that kid must be freaking.” He reached the chardonnay by his hip.  Tarsie snapped up one of the cigarettes in my case and asked, “Is okay?”
“Help yourself.”
“I mean, that poor fucking kid,” Gil said, and swilled what was left of the undersize bottle.
“What kid are we talking about?” I asked.
“Ours. Our boy,” Tarsie said, touching a flame to the rette. “You don’t know? about our boy?” She shot Gil a cautious glance ⏤ “We have a boy,” puffs of smoke veiling her face.
“No way,” I said, as it dawned why she stuck with him.

Worse, the baby was “in hospital,” not breathing on his own. The two-month-old had had heart surgery. As Gil put it, the kid was “just lying there all by himself with all these, like, tubes and wires and shit sticking out of him. Fuck if I know what any of ‘em do.” He felt inside the pack for another bottle. Tarsie added that her baby had been “the same like this” for two days now.

Ready to give up on Ian, I was about to claim my share of the coins and bills and decamp.
“The doctors say he’s past worse danger,” Tarsie said.
Or I could just give them my whole night, I thought. They couldn’t get anything else off me, just my night.
“We owe the hospital like two million francs,” Gil said.
“It’s private hospital,” Tarsie said, proudly.

In my head I converted the absurd sum into US dollars: fifty thousand.  Gil was thirty or so, Tarsie maybe twenty-three. Together they had hardly more than his iffy musical gifts and her appetite for panhandling in their favor, less fifty-thousand dollars and an ailing child.

“How long you guys known each other ⏤ or been dating?”
“Like a year maybe.”

Gil watched me calculate the magnitude of their plight.
“A year in next month,” Tarsie beamed.  After a deep last drag, she flicked her cigarette into the smokefall.

On my nod Gil put the wine down and stood up with his guitar. The temperature had fallen, and we needed a show-stopper, so I went for a fast one, just to hear if he could keep up; and damn if he couldn’t! Sort of. He played confidently anyway, the new broken father. We drew another crowd ⏤ tourists, slackers, a nurse in lime scrubs, a clutch of officemates….

Then I encouraged Gil to go solo, just to see if he could hold our audience on his own.  He fooled with the tuning till it was close enough. After a gaze of reflection, he took a breath and sliced off the keyed-up chords of a John Lennon ballad. Although Gil was drunk and banished ⏤ and his mistake could die at any moment ⏤ his pained voice and missing guitar technique made him a folk legend when he sang, “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small/ by giving you no time instead of it all.”

Ian V would have pricked up his ears. Gil was channeling the late Beatle. A silver ponytail appeared amid the bobbing heads and sang quietly along and alone…. “A working class hero is something to be.” But everyone who listened knew Gil wasn’t a hero of any class. He was neither Tarsie’s nor even his own hero. It’s hard for a man not to be his own hero, and the folk adored Gil for showing them how hard. The entertainment took on a life I didn’t think the dusthead had in him.

Someone else I recognized arrived now, at the edge of the growing crowd. A wiry-framed figure, mid-fifties, clad in navy-blue pants, a light blue shirt, and a blue-black beret worn aslant, had paused to take us in, if not to listen to us. It was no Ian V standing back there but, rather, someone who’d had some trouble with the ukulelist, as I recalled. He was wearing the same hammy outfit as before. It’s remarkable how local we rootless souls keep until we disappear for good.

He hugged the same sketch pad to his ribs, a pencil stuck between his knuckles. With his free arm he shook a tea tin of change at the flow of pedestrians. The man drew comic portraits for a living and was fishing for takers. Last week when I saw him talking to Ian, I didn’t know it at the time but he was  trying to sell the musician on having his portrait done.

“So Ah bit,” Ian said afterwards. “And Ah din especially mind him wanting to make a cartoon a me.” Ian would have said no more about the fracas that I’d observed arise between them.  I had to press him for the backstory: it seemed the man in blue had violated a code. He’d laid a hand, uninvited, on the shiny carving work of Ian’s uke.

Gil left off strumming. As the clapping dwindled, all you could hear behind his John Lennon fans was the tin shaking and some brusque Flemish words. Tilting a smile at Gil, Tarsie poured another haul of coins into my case, five feet in front of us. The artist seemed to pause at the rush of metalic sound. And Gil smiled back at Tarsie.  He had delivered. His music had opened the hearts of our audience. Now we just needed to follow up. Almost any old song would do.

Caricaturists, like stick man back there, were usually a harmless stratum in Flanders. Hunting for tourists, they idled about the squares or fountains, or along the borders of sidewalk eateries. When he’d come around last week, at first I’d barely noticed him. I was caught up in rosining my bow. Then I heard an acrid curse ⏤ something Gaelic, probably the meanest word ever to exist in any language ⏤ and I looked over at Ian, who had him by the wrist. Though wearing an amused look on his blank face, the Scot was angry and held on, poised between letting him go free and a desire to punish.

But I quickly forgot about “the geeze” ⏤ and whatever other names Ian had had for him. And I hadn’t thought of him once since that episode and never as a threat, but here he was getting his tin in the faces of our people, scaring them off. His aggression startled me. Before, he’d gone away with no outcry. After all, the Scotsman hadn’t actually hurt him, just given him a bloodless hand.

Hoping I could both calm down the poor bag-o’-bones and make amends for Ian’s transgression, I waved him over. The staff of Galeria Inno was herding the last-minuters out the glass doors. I’d get my caricature done, a keepsake I could tuck into a letter to my parents or someone, but the artist stayed away. He looked like a washed-up sailorman in his blue getup, and with the bearing of an alley cat he eyed me like I wasn’t there.

Meantime, Gil was speculating that he, Tarsie, and baby would make a killing in Italy. Tarsie believed Gil, but what about the boy? No burden he. If the kid pulled through, said Gil, he’d make “an extreme prop,” and with that, he chewed off the über-intro of “Pinball Wizard,” a superb sequel to the Lennon, just what we needed to kick the show up yet another notch.

Where could I lay on a little fiddle? I wondered, the wood beneath my chin. But now the cartoonist bounded toward me and, standing between me and my case, was strangely staring.

“Bonsoir, Monsieur,” I said, speaking my most amiable French.  “I have much respect for artists.”
“Oui,” he stared.
“I have an idea,” I said, the Who chops gathering, the eyes of the artist narrowing.  Gil again proved he could sing: “EversinceIwasayoungboy, I’veplayedthesilverball.  FromSohodowntoBrightonImusthaveplayedthemall….”
“Let’s make a trade.” I stepped closer and talked at his ear: “I’ll play a tune for you”⏤ I lifted the fiddle for emphasis ⏤ “while you sketch my caricature; and however much money comes in while you draw and I play, will be yours in exchange for the picture. Çasuffit?”
“He stands like a statue, becomes part of the machine.”
“Baises!” said the man.
This word meant “kiss,” and it could also mean “fuck” as in “fuck me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, lowering my fiddle, as his stink ⏤ of body fluids, drink, and soil ⏤ reached me.
He was homeless.
“Thatdeaf, dumb, andblindkid ⏤ ”
“Baises!” he reiterated, puckering his hole.
“Who?”I stammered.
“Toi!” he rejoined.
“He’s a pinball wizard! There has to be a twist!”

I sidestepped, seeking refuge in Gil’s cluster of Who fans, hoping to play among them. The sailor turned, keeping me in his line of stare. Then saw my case. Most of the money we’d earned lay at his toe-tips, which poked through the filthiest tennis shoes you ever saw. You could barely tell they were blue.  I thrust my fiddle and bow into Tarsie’s good hands. By the time I got a hold of his funky shirt, his fly was unzipped over my case. His pad fell from where he’d stashed it under his arm. Gil quit playing. I yanked the shirt, popping a button, but mon vieux bent his knees to weight himself, still trying to pee.

Plunging my shoulder into his, I knocked his frame off balance. But he only almost lost his footing. He snapped back like a palm tree after a gale and once more stood over my case. Now when I went for him, he fought me one-handed, his other down at his junk, his cursing in pluperfect American ⏤ “I’ve got you fuck bastard” ⏤ that lapsed into a bout of Belgian-French curses.  En Belgique even the street people wax trilingual.

In my clearest King’s English I said, “You’re not fucking doing this!” then just creamed the guy with a body check. He stumbled backward, his tin wheeling in the air. Coins rang on the cobblestones. Backwards toward the statue he tripped on the steps and broke against the marble pedestal, where he deflated like a bag, now, of bone fragments, his half open shirt exposing a mottled pink chest. With his beret missing, he was bald as a vulture save for a ring of slick gray straggles. His zipper gaped, but by some grace his privates weren’t public.

I peeked at Gil’s fans. They’d stuck around, and others had joined them. All were enjoying this drama of the grotesque. None knew if I’d injured the man. His feral eyes were unclosed, but he was lying across the stone ⏤ until again on the move, crawling to his feet up the base of the statue. I called for Tarsie to put the fiddle away. My relief that my blow hadn’t paralyzed him turned to dismay that it hadn’t when he went for my case again. I blocked his way, now, to protect Tarsie, who was nudging the case offstage with the point of her boot.

Gil materialized next to me.
“No worries, Gil, seriously.  I can handle it.”
I turned not away from the vagabond.
“Sure?”
“Oh, sure.”
Gil backed off. Tarsie scolded him, “What is this you do? You want to beat up a old man?  Bring me guitar blanket.”

She didn’t mind if I beat him up by myself, while she and Gil stashed the money in his canvas case.  I’d worry about that later.  My opponent turned and spat on Rubens II.

“That was beautiful,” I said to his back.  “Now get the fuck out of here before next time you don’t get back up.”

With shrills of laughing, as if obeying orders, he galumphed forward and went behind the monument.  “You ain’t nothin’!  Baauh, you ain’t nothin’!”⏤I could still hear him.  But he came around the other side, nearly stepping on his beret, which he scooped up and flipped back on.  He paced the cobbles, also grabbing his pad, lurched my way indecisively, then abruptly turned down Otto Venius, the nearest sidestreet.

The gawkers wanted to get on with their night, but not far along Venius, the cartoonist took a beer bottle from a window niche, stashing his pad in same.  He drank off the beer.  The bottle shattered on the opposite building.  Everyone who heard looked, but he shot his glances only at me, while spouting garbles of obscenities and insanity.  “It’s my country!  He tells me get out, and it’s my country!” he screeched.  “My country!”  Then more awful laughter.

With his proud appendage on display again, he pranced from wall to wall, streaming with abandon, while all of Antwerp watched.  After belching, he tucked his bishop back inside and was ready for another run at me.  After madly grinding the glass underfoot, he exited the sidestreet with one fist raised, shrieking, “You ain’t nothin’, fuck fuck bastard, fuck….  Get out! connard, un connard!  Un connard in my country!”

I couldn’t figure why he was calling me a duck (”uncanard”) and only later learned he wasn’t.  I had to look up this word “connard.“  You don’t want to know what it means.

He assailed me with “This is mymymymy country!” while throwing a flurry of punches.  I blocked them easily enough, but it wasn’t easy.  He was aging, out of breath, and unyielding.

“Your country’s ashamed of you,” I said. He burped another loud one and tried to kick me. I stepped sideways, keeping him facing me, and said, “I do more for your goddam country than you’ll ever do.” Another absurd punch thrown missed. We were pacing through a circle I couldn’t break out of.

“Please just leave us alone!” I implored. He swung two more fists, gnashing his teeth, nostrils flaring. His smell.

“Let me tell you what you are,” I heard myself say. “You’re disgusting. You have no friends. Nobody on God’s earth gives a fucking damn about you, not your own goddam family….  How could they? You have no family. You’re a zero, a drunk ⏤ a fucking street bum! Why don’t you crawl off somewhere and die? No one would even notice.”

The circle broke. He gazed at me as intently as ever, but pain entered where before had been only dark vacancy. My words sank home, deeper than his scant store of hope. His fears took hold: the picture I’d drawn of him held true.

“You ain’t nothin’,” said the voice; “either,” it didn’t say, but I heard it in a kind of thought-echo caught in the aftertone of his failing croak. He tried for more laughter, but veered toward a cry. I thought, then thought better of asking him for my portrait again.

Now he was walking the plaza in confusion and talking out loud, as to convince himself that “this is my country.” But since an invisible tether connected us, he kept circling back as if about to unhinge anew, and I caught a shard of wisdom in his closing dispatch to the enemy.

After some French about the “star of my eyes,” which he aimed skyward and I couldn’t quite parse, his filmy stare fell on me a final time. He returned to English, his voice pitching up to a high songful register. “Go on, go on!” he said.  “I’ll follow you! I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right….  I’ll follow you.”

But off he went, a man whose gait told of a ship that was listing, always listing, always about to be overwhelmed. Upon reaching into the niche for his pad, he receded along the barred windows of Otto Venius until gone. The wrought-iron secured the people inside by keeping him out, him along with the street ladies, criminals, drug addicts, the other drunks, and the rest.

Near the Van Dyke lay an upside-down tea tin, a stubby  pencil, and the odd coin.  These things must have been valuable to the man. I should have gathered them and called after him, “Wait, sir!” Like a small prayer rising on his behalf, for him and all the friendless souls out here, “You forgot these,” I’d have said when reaching him.  Maybe then he’d have felt like an ordinary citizen of this country of his, not like one of the many who had lost the fight and left nothing of value behind.

Like any believer in the Golden Rule, Tarsie divided the pot, including the bills she had stowed, with perfect justice. She gave herself a third, the same as each musician.  But I   was no longer intent on this outcome. I got my money, but I’d squandered a chance to stand outside myself and see what only the few ever see ⏤ themselves in another.

Ian V’s every pick had made good on a promise ⏤ that music alone can arm you against the world ⏤ but he never did return with his akulele, and from this night on, the peculiar beauty of his playing began to defy my powers of recall. The sound of the tea tin, on the other hand, stayed fresh in my ear, for the seafarer came around often in the nights that followed my last in Antwerp, which turned out to be my last in Belgium.

This essay, which earned the writer a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays, originally appeared in Thema.

William Huhn lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and their two-year-old son. His narrative essays have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and cited six times as a “Notable Essay” in The Best American Essays series, most recently in 2018 (“Grave Ivy,” Flint Hills Review #22). Huhn’s poetry has been featured in the The Carolina Quarterly and can be found on the popular website Verse Daily. His essay “The Pagadder” appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of Pembroke Magazine.

The Crazy Coyote Chase

by Scott Palmieri

On all days but this one, a middle-aged man wearing a coyote mask, pedaling his bicycle near a school, would raise concern. But not here, at the Crazy Coyote Chase, the annual fundraiser for my daughter’s middle school. The 5K is over, but it will never be forgotten, its runners gnawing orange slices, tracing names on results lists, tossing numbered tickets in baskets. There are still mutterings over the chaos, what will surely go down in the annals of PTO infamy.

But there is little time to dwell, as I near the start line of the second and last event of the morning–the Fun Run–with my three children: my daughter who loves to run, my son who loves to win, and our sixth grade Coyote, the daughter who hates to run. I can understand how the term “Fun Run” can be, for some, like saying “enjoyable angina” or “happy hernia.” I don’t love long distance running much, either. But every year, I run a 6.9K for charity, sponsored by a local tavern, known locally for its 69 beers, some of which are offered at race’s end. To survive longer distances, I tell my suffering self that there is no finish line, hoping to keep my pace and table doubts, when I start wondering how I’ll possibly make it.

But the Fun Run is only a mile, and we are here to promote physical fitness and teach those “never give up” metaphors, while we raise money for field trips and school programs. Someone blares from a bullhorn for the mingling parents and children to get ready. A few feet ahead of me, my daughter who loves to run and son who loves to win have wrangled their way to the start line.

The race begins, and we cross the one busy road to a quiet neighborhood, as I try to keep view of my two determined runners who have dashed ahead. Last year, I worried less about leaving my daughter who hates to run, when she kept an easy pace with her old friend Erin, sharing with her a sweet obliviousness to competition. Two days ago, Erin’s mother, my wife’s second cousin, died of a massive heart attack. Just 42, she battled weight her whole life, an unsuccessful stomach reduction surgery and an abusive boyfriend, Erin’s father, whom Erin does not remember.

At the first flagger, my daughter and I separate. It is here where the already infamous 5K went terribly wrong, when my wife’s cell phone rang, as she and other parents on the Crazy Coyote Chase Committee, stationed in the cafetorium, were overseeing the registrations, silent auctions, raffles and racing medals. The call came from another middle school mother, who oversaw the course, and her first sentence, I assert, has never been uttered before: “The coyote went the wrong way!”

My love for quotidian chaos makes we wonder if a coyote has ever been accused of such a thing. Just moments into the race, the teenaged volunteer who first donned the mask turned too soon, veering the wrong way for the real runners, in their nylon tank tops and runner shorts, who saw this sanctioned event as an inexpensive way to record their monthly time. It was too late to save them, though the flaggers lassoed the rest to the correct course.

One real runner, in particular, will never forgive this. He resembled Will Ferrell but an enraged, caffeine-charged children’s soccer coach Will Ferrell from the movie Kicking and Screaming, who would crash into water coolers, calling himself a “Tornado of Anger.” Tornado, in his running gear, hairy arms and legs, dwarfed the middle-schoolers in their sweats and hoodies and jeans, a sight gag befitting the star of Elf. And as he neared the end of his 5K, a seasoned runner like Tornado must have wondered why he was so far from the end. One can only imagine the anger that festered in the sweat and breath with each extra step. The course photographer snapped a picture as he came through the school driveway toward the finish line, as a tween in jeans, having run about a mile less, seemed to be gaining on him, Tornado pushing to the end, his painted perm still in tact, atop his haggard countenance.

I am not one to judge too harshly the middle-aged still “living the dream,” having played ten years now in a men’s baseball league. One night, while I was teaching a summer class, I wore sliding shorts and a jock strap beneath my khakis, hidden along with long blue baseball socks, so, after breaking down Othello, I could dress more quickly into my uniform in the field’s parking lot and play a few innings.

When Tornado finished, he ripped off his number bib and aimed his rage at the retractable ropes and posts, lined with cheering parents and teachers. He panted past the air-tattoo artist and the crowd of children waiting at the rented rock wall and through the open door that led to the cafetorium. As with most serious runners after a race with questionable integrity, he looked for the first mother he could yell at.

“Take my time off the list! I want my money back! I can’t believe this!” yelled Tornado, competing with the booming version of “This is How We Do It” that bounced from the DJ’s speakers.

One father tried to negotiate peace, as Tornado peppered the PTO, and the mother with the cash box counted out his 25 dollars and 25 for his wife, who was shaking her head but whose disgust was later clarified when she said, “I’m so sorry for my husband.” The small troop of the other real runners entered, sweating, smiling, taking it much better than Tornado, who jumped in his sports car, grunting on his way out at the bubbly teacher’s aide who yelled, “Thank you so much for coming!”

Near the end of the Fun Run, my own competitiveness kicks in after I see my daughter who loves to run and my son who loves to win safely slip across the busy street and back to the school, past the last flagger. I am proud of their inner athletic fire. But I keep thinking of Erin’s mother, who tried her best, too, just a few weeks from finishing her degree at the local university, the diploma to be given posthumously to Erin, who will cross the stage to accept it. Those were the thoughts that swirled when I first heard the news, in my office, as I struggled to speak, trying not to break for my colleague, who, in the loveliest of ways, said that some children are hardwired for this. Perhaps this is already true for Erin, in good part from her mother’s efforts, never wanting her daughter to be known as “the girl whose father is in prison” or “the girl whose father fractured her skull,” and certainly not as “the girl who has no parents.”

I finish at a decent pace, but I fear that my daughter who hates to run has drifted back too far, that this will be more of a disastrous day and she’ll end the race by herself, she, who, after braving through the day we heard the news, broke down that night, a frustrating math problem giving way to everything else. But here she comes, among others trying to end well, chugging at a good pace, finding another gear I didn’t know she had. I am so proud and remember her smile the year before and Erin’s smile, as they swung their connected hands across the finish line.

We enter the after-party, where the winners are announced- for what has been earned, what has been spent and what has been chosen at random. Despite the 5K, the morning has been a success. The PTO has raised good money, and we have had our workouts. But I am struggling to name the metaphors, as we help clean, sweep the floors, box up the extra tickets and t-shirts, reassemble the tables to their rows. A year ago, Erin’s mother smiled and waved, as they drifted out of the doors, off to start the last year of her life, just the twelfth of Erin’s, with all that time and distance to come.

Try your best? Run your race? Find another gear? If I can’t find the lessons, I worry that my children will believe it’s all foolish and brimming with dangers, as if we’re all just chasing coyotes. But the best metaphors are never easy. Perhaps time will help, perhaps next year, when the Crazy Coyote Chase Committee invites you, one and all, with the promise to do better and to cheer you, in your suffering self, when you don’t know how you’ll possibly make it.

Scott Palmieri is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Leaflet, The Alembic, and Teacher as Writer. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching Little League, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.

NBA Live

by John Krumburger

Before the game an anticipation
shared with strangers, each of us possessed
of the same silly towel
meant to wave above our heads.
There is the light show, the noise,
the food (high calorie, low nutrition, over-priced),
the cheerleaders (minimum wage caricatures
posed for maximum leering),
and the souvenirs (capitalism on steroids).

But where is the playground joy,
the heart’s tongue flung open
trash talking with gravity?
Or do they feel it even here
-corporate sponsorships emblazed on their chests?

With a drum roll the contest commences:
EVERYBODY CLAP YOUR HANDS,
lights flash, each play repeating on screen;
the artistry –
crossover dribble, step-back jumper, no look pass –
the food, the cheerleaders, the souvenirs,
the halftime acrobats.

And then finally the score tabulated, certified, accepted.
We come down like a flood,
like an army on the move,
like one sinuous body descending stairwells
then surging through long halls
to where doors release to the street
and the bowels of downtown:
taxis, drunks, hangers-on, more souvenirs,
the flatulence of buses,
the surprise of bells.

When beauty and grace devolve,
the soul retreats.

                                     There,
there I spot the soul.
She is a woman with a cup held for coins
or bills and a sign which says
NEED CASH FOR WEED.

And still more commuters are flushed out
–the stroboscopic after flash
exciting their neurons
in the absence of having a dream life–
coming down like the tail end of a bender,
bursting into the neon and exhaust
in a hurry and without gratitude,
shoulders hunched against the cold.

John Krumburger has published in Great River Review, Comstock Review, Rhino, Another Chicago Magazine, Artful Dodge, Flint Hills Review, and elsewhere. In 2008 Backwaters Press published The Language of Rain and Wind, his first full-length volume of poetry. His latest volume of poems, Because Autumn, was published in 2016 by Main Street Rag Press. He lives with his wife in Minneapolis and works as a psychologist in private practice in St. Paul.

by Scott F. Parker

1.

After months of emailing with the Timberwolves PR office to schedule today’s meeting, here I am at the team practice facility underneath the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis. When I signed in at the registration desk I was directed “down the stairs, toward the back. Can’t miss it.” I missed it. With the gym’s shades pulled down to keep media and passersby from ogling and disrupting, the black rectangles blocking the windows look like the screens between me and someone’s PowerPoint presentation, not the dividers between the normal everyday outside world and the glamorous mystique of professional basketball. Though the door is locked, there is a noticeable absence of spectacle. I keep thinking the scene surrounding Kobe Bryant and the Lakers must be much sillier, and that if this were the 1990s Chicago Bulls there’s no way I’d be the only reporter here.

Hoping to make out some players, I peek through the cracks on the edges of the blinds, but all I can see is someone’s sweatpant’d shins standing still. Anxious about being late, I’m twenty minutes early. I sit on a bench outside the gym door and wait to see someone I recognize. It’s my first time as “media,” doing a profile for the University of Oregon alumni magazine, so I’m trying to look like media. I’ve worn khaki pants and a shirt with buttons. (Although, now that I think about it more, do sports journalists wear pink shirts? And what about pink socks? At least I’d make Craig Sager proud.) The first person after me to try to go into the gym is an athletic-looking guy, whose air of strained responsibility, more than his height, reveals him as a non-player. He turns out to be a team trainer, and once he decides knocking won’t get him in (he’s lost his key somewhere) takes out his phone and tries to call someone inside. After sending a series of calls straight to voicemail and electing to just wait for practice to end, he’s happy to talk with me about the team. Some of the guys, he tells me, are hard workers who show up every day eager to put in their time. Other guys are lazy and whine about any extra work they need to do. Because the guys who are difficult to work with are often good enough that people with something to gain are willing to put up with their immaturity, it’s the latter group the trainer spends most of his time with. He tells me this in the unimpressed tone of someone saying, “I didn’t make the world the way it is, but I know how it works.” I get the impression that it’s nice for him to be able to condescend personally to such rich and famous young men, implying that without him “working them out” these elite athletes would turn into out-of-shape washups before the next game tips off. Am I making this trainer sound smug? I don’t mean to. He’s just telling me—with a lot of honesty—what his job is. Who wouldn’t play up the importance of his job to the “media”?

I tell him I’m there to interview Luke Ridnour, who went to my college and once borrowed a pencil from me for a sociology test. “Luke is great,” he says. I can tell already he’s grown accustomed to speaking in the platitudes of professional athletics, but it’s clear that he means what he says about Luke, even though Luke is in the hard-working camp of players who the team does not assign to the trainer for mandatory workouts and he doesn’t know him as well as some of the other guys. He knows I know, who “other guys” refers to here and doesn’t bother to name names. It’s the young guys with “attitude” and “a sense of entitlement” and “a lack of discipline” that it sounds like really live up to their reputations that he mostly works with. And maybe they would be washups without his and others’ constant doting.

But I’m here to talk to Luke. Luke is the team’s starting point guard. He came over from the Milwaukee Bucks this season as a free agent and outplayed the younger (and oft-injured) Johnny Flynn for the starting job. At 30, and in his eighth season after three years of college, Luke is the oldest player on this young team. And he’s no washup. Lasting eight years in the league, most of that time as a starter, is no small accomplishment. He hasn’t lived up to the expectations of some who thought he’d be an elite NBA point guard, the next Steve Nash. But he did play with USA basketball in 2006. He was invited to the NBA skills competition in ’05. He has been good enough to get Amar’e Stoudemire to publicly campaign for him to be the new point guard in New York. I take a moment to review what I know about him: raised in Blaine, Washington; good enough that I heard about him as a high school player while I was in high school five hours south in Portland; three-year starter for the Oregon Ducks; winner of many awards and much praise; not all that academically motivated as a student; a kind and thoughtful person; great ball skills; flair of a performer; not at all interested in celebrity; Christian. And the questions I plan to ask him: When did you know you were good? How do you adjust to going from standout player in high school and college to capable but unremarkable professional? How do you keep sane amidst all this hoopla? What do you make of an interview like this? Why are you doing it? What, if anything, do you hope to get out of it? All variations of my one real question: What’s it like to be you? I’m curious about all NBA guys, but Luke is especially compelling, as our lives feel (to me) somewhat connected. I’m a month older than he, an inch shorter, have a similar body shape, and play the same position (at a much lower level of proficiency, it goes without saying) in basketball. Later, when he tells me nothing feels better than running in the open floor and making the crucial pass that sets up someone else’s score, I’ll have that special feeling of validation that comes when someone you respect tells you something you already know.

But before we meet, I must wait for practice to end. While I go through my notes, the other media arrive in small groups. They’re a bunch of guys who look like journalists straight from wardrobe. Carrying familiar and worn pocket-sized Steno pads and guts they don’t yet fully believe in, they walk in their ill-fitting jackets through what has become routine: rolling in just in time to bullshit with one another for a few minutes before asking those standby hard hitters: “Tell me about last night’s game.” “What are you thinking about tomorrow’s opponent?” Younger guys, some as young as college newspaper reporters, I suspect, have cameras instead of pads. Full-sized mics like you see on the news swing in every hand gesture. All these guys look as casual and unimpressed with this as I’m trying to look in my pink socks. And they are all guys. No women. I affect an athletic posture and pretend like Luke is an old friend I’m waiting to see. It’s only due to some technicality that I’m forced to wait out here, with the media. But it’s cool. I’m cool. Really.

As I’m standing athletically and coolly around, a PR guy emerges from the practice gym and asks each of us “media” who we’re here to talk to. The pros say Coach Rambis and Kevin Love (who recently set the NBA record for consecutive games with a double-double). A few—why not?—say Michael Beasely, who is talented, controversial, and often not far from a good story. Reaching me, the unfamiliar, casually athletic and cool, pink-shirted young man, he says, “Are you the Oregon guy? We’ll try to get you some time with Luke.”

In the gym, practice is wrapping up. Martell Webster leads a series of one-on-one games. They play to one. Winner stays. These guys are taller than you’d think. You expect them to be tall, sure, but this is really tall. They seem to disprove everything I know from personal experience. When I see guys this tall at the gym they are universally uncoordinated and play awkward post basketball, hoping for an easy putback. But these guys are tall and dribble and shoot as well as anyone. Martell Webster, for one, appears in person as if he were designed for basketball: perfectly proportioned, strong, quick, and agile. But he plays one-on-one without strategy, making moves without aim, hoping to out-quick and out-athletic his opponent and get open. He wins one game by making a difficult turnaround shot. I can’t help but thinking that even a guy like Kobe who specializes in making difficult turnarounds wouldn’t rely on one in this situation. He’d just use his technical craft to get an easy shot. But Webster lacks the patience for that. He makes four moves at once, and ends up confusing himself more than the defender, who quickly becomes the offensive player.

Beasely is here too, pulling his shorts up around his groin for some reason. He has spandex on underneath, like everyone did in the ’90s. His legs are perplexingly thin, and he like everyone is disorientingly tall. He shoots gently from just outside the court’s sideline, makes it, and then lies down on the floor. Webster says, “Beas, let’s go.” Beas makes noises, indicating, No, he prefers the floor and is tired. Webster is disappointed in his guys, no one wants to play anymore. They make their way over to the far side of the gym where there is a small lobby, tables, chairs, fridge. They pull out drinks. Millions of dollars a year and free sports drinks. You can tell by the ease with which they take the drinks it would never occur to them to pay for these. It’s nearly impossible to even imagine them knowing where their wallets are. These are the gods of our era, and they will never be troubled by the likes of a dollar or a bottle of Gatorade.

On the far end of the court, Bill Laimbeer is working with Nicoli Pekovich on some post moves. I catch a butterfly in my stomach seeing Laimbeer close up. Suddenly I’m eight years old and he’s the mythic villain from television. Ditto to a lesser extent Rambis. These were formative players in my earliest tracking of the NBA. Both played on teams I hated, teams that kept my beloved Blazers from their much-deserved title. I’m intimidated by them in a way I’m not intimidated by the players or the other coaches. Speaking of Rambis, there he is off to my right, surrounded by media. He’s sitting in a chair against a black rectangle spotted with Timberwolves logos. This is the one section of the wall that isn’t gym white. It will make for an imposing image when it’s broadcast on TV tonight, but in context it makes for a wimpy, slapdash display. I drift over to listen. One reporter asks, “What about last night’s game?” And every other reporter acts like this is very interesting and will be a breaking story to his readers/listeners/viewers and shoves his microphone in close.

Here now is the PR guy, who says, “Luke’s on his way. We’ll set you up over here,” directing me across the court, where Laimbeer can’t help but notice me walk past Pekovich, to a table and two folding chairs set up along the baseline. Luke is coming from the lobby area with a Gatorade and meets me there. We’re introduced, we sit. I tell him I’m very happy to be writing about him because I went to UO with him and have followed his career. He’s soft spoken and polite and seem sincerely appreciative of my interest. I do not tell him I bought his Seattle jersey and used to wear it when I played pickup games in Korea. He’s wearing warm-up pants and a T-shirt, but it’s obvious from his forearms that he’s much stronger than he appears on TV. Also much stronger than he was in sociology class ten years ago. He remains smaller and lighter than any of his teammates, but his scrawniness has more substance to it now. Still, if you didn’t know Luke was an NBA player you’d never think it to look at him. He looks like one of the generically athletic guys you went to college with. Which is essentially who he is, except he’s wildly coordinated and creative with his body. I notice we have the same buzzed haircut, and I wonder for a second how he ended up on that side of the tape recorder and I on this side?

We are who we are, though, and I start with my questions. “How was having your dad as your coach impactful on your development as a player?” “Why did you choose Oregon?” I get the sense he has prepared remarks after hearing these questions so many times before. He too knows the clichéd language of the professional athlete meant to give the impression of conveying information while being essentially vacuous. I don’t blame him for this. I suspect in his shoes I’d say the most boring things I could to limit reporters’ interest and protect myself from public attention. But I want to convince him I’m the one to open up to, because I’m the one who gets it, gets that inside the character of the white point guard from the small town in Washington is a real person, who feels things relating to professional basketball and this improbable life he’s living. But even if we took sociology together, I’m not here to be his friend. I’m here to get him to give me a good quote. Ugh. I didn’t realize how hard this would be for me. I need to ask better questions. I try his family. He slows here, says he wants to keep his family private, then offers more answer than he really needs to. Then, after, he asks me not to write about what he says, and I tell him I won’t. I try to get him to describe what he likes about basketball and he starts to animate: “I just love to play basketball, to see people have freedom to play and run. That freedom, when a team gets to run up and down and play fast, I love that. I hope fans see how much I enjoy the game. And I really enjoy competition.” He’s open and almost eager to talk basketball once I get beyond surface questions. The other subject he’s comfortable on is religion, and he keeps directing the conversation there. It’s a big part of his outlook on life. It brings him peace, he says, and I take him at his word because he’s one of the most peaceful dudes I’ve ever talked to.

The PR guy reappears and says time is up. I’ve had my twenty minutes. I ask for two more. Luke doesn’t seem put out by the request, he seems more curious about what else there could be to talk about. PR guy says, “Okay, two minutes.” A janitor arrives at the table and sweeps a table full of half-full plastic bottles into the trash. “No recycling?” I should have asked Luke. How many bottles go to the trash in the course of an NBA season? And why? But I’m preoccupied by my time running out (maybe this is part of an explanation of why I’m a writer not an athlete) and floundering. I ask about friendship in the NBA and get more clichés. I want to ask about race in the NBA and whether he remembers a high school rival named Brandon Brooks who I played with in middle school and was temporarily a local legend,¹ but I don’t know how to fit that into my story and there isn’t time for a detour. Finally, I ask if he, as one of the NBA’s best free throw shooters, has a routine at the line. Charmingly, he’s unaware of his percentage or that he’s in the top ten in the league in the category. It turns out he does have a routine and that no one has asked him about it before. I have the bit I need for my story and I have the connection I wanted to make. “I bounce the ball three times, saying ‘I love you, Jesus’ on each bounce. Then I shoot it.” And with that, the PR guy is back to say “Luke’s time is up.” We shake hands and I’m guided toward the door.

Before leaving, I look on the court. Pekovich is being put through drills by the trainer I met earlier. He’s to move laterally along the sideline touch-passing the ball with the trainer. He’s more or less doing it, but he’s frightfully uncoordinated for a professional athlete. I wish I were tall and strong right now. Of course, I’d rather be my size and have Luke’s skills, but I’d settle for Pekovich’s size and strength if that would keep me in the gym.

2.

After the interview, I go home and write up my notes. Many of my questions went unasked in the rushed visit, but I like what I got. There’s enough here for me to accomplish the goal of describing what it’s like to be Luke Ridnour. My thesis—I’m deciding this will be a piece with a thesis—is that Luke’s mental approach to life and basketball is fundamental to his success as a player. Mostly I think this is about God and how faith allows him to not feel pressure. One of my big claims will be that in claiming to be chosen by God, Luke is actually not arrogant at all but thoroughly humble. Being chosen means his ability is beyond his ultimate control. There’s nothing for him to be prideful about.

This is a good story, I think, but I need some live game observations. I go online and buy a good ticket to an upcoming game. The Timberwolves have a neat program where tickets are priced according to demand. And, despite Kevin Love’s season, no one in this town cares about the Wolves, so when the opposing team is the lowly Sacramento Kings, I’m able to afford a pretty decent seat, midcourt eleventh row. I write to my editor to ask if the magazine will reimburse me. He tells me the team should be giving me tickets and that I need to ask the PR guy who set up the interview. So because I’m a rookie and didn’t think of that I’m out $100.

I get to the arena good and early for the Sacramento game. The team comes out for one of the most perfunctory warm-ups on record. Is this the cause or effect of being the worst team in the conference? Some guys stretching, some guys shooting jumpers, some guys just sitting on the bench. It’s clear stress and pressure are not problems with this group. Beasely is over there in the corner hoisting up ridiculous shots, sending them fifty feet up in the air and watching them fall straight down at the hoop. Most are air balls. One or two hit the rim. Several carom wildly off the backboard and basket standard. No one takes particular notice of Beasely’s routine. Maybe this is his normal pregame routine? When he eventually makes one, he decides he’s had enough warming up and takes a seat on the bench to casually give the impression of a person considering getting around to stretching sooner or later. Meanwhile, there’s Luke working up a sweat sharpening skills that might actually come in handy in a game. He gets a running start at half court, changes directions two or three times, and takes a pull-up jumper from eighteen feet, nailing it in off the back iron. He does about eight of these. Then he shoots a series of short runners with either hand. Then free throws. Then corner threes, a spot from which he’s one of the league’s best shooters. The rest of the Wolves are somewhere in between, effort-wise.

Within a few minutes of the game starting, Beasely is pulled for picking up two early fouls. He shouts, “I’m gonna fuck someone up today,” loudly enough for the lady next to me to hear and repeat for anyone in the section who missed it. This is the highlight of the first half. The Kings are quite bad, the Wolves are worse. Neither team has a chance at the playoffs, and a loss would be to either team’s advantage for improving lottery position in the draft. Halftime is fun because the couple next to me leaves and now I can stretch out a little. The lady to my right kicks over her family-sized trough of soda pop, which spills in her purse and under the feet of the people in front of us. She is extremely embarrassed and expresses her embarrassment by cussing loudly about the lid’s maker’s incompetence. This is more entertaining than the game. It’s too bad for the two who skipped out. Luke makes some nice shots in the third quarter, leading a little comeback. The Kings’ lead is down to . . . who cares . . . it’ll be up to thirty again shortly. The real excitement comes when Luke Ridnour, polite Christian boy from Blaine, Washington, smallest guy on the court, gets into a legitimate NBA scuffle with DeMarcus Cousins. Cousins is about a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Ridnour, but Luke is eager to earn a technical foul. He gets a push in, a little tough guy gesturing. What a great and rare sight it is to see Luke provoked to the point of response. (This is one of only two technicals Luke earns all year. Cousins, by contrast, who is only a rookie, will earn a respectable fourteen technicals, good for fifth in the league.) The rest of the game . . . it really doesn’t matter. Besides the fight and the flood of soda pop in our section, the warm-ups were more interesting than the game. I want behind the scenes. When I get home I email the PR guy and ask for tickets.

3.

PR guy has set me up with a press pass to the Chicago Bulls game, featuring likely MVP Derrick Rose and the best team in the Eastern Conference. He told me where to park, too, but it’s not clear whether this will be comped or not, so I take the bus. I find the entrance I’ve been instructed to take. It’s connected by walkways to the new Target Field, where the Twins play, and an abyss of downtown office buildings. Throngs of young, professional-looking people are moving in the opposite direction from me, as if fleeing the arena. One hundred other lives I could have pursued. Inside, people everywhere, young fans lining up early, more of the business suits coming and going to the light rail station. Giant posters of players on the walls; Luke strains to appear intimidating. I make my way down a flight of stairs, am directed to the media room. Security finds my name on a list, hands me a pass. I’m in. I’m early, so I have lots of time to kill in the media room before anything gets going. There are a few guys at tables, eating fried food, watching SportsCenter, and bullshitting with one another. I want to do some eavesdropping on these guys, but don’t realize this is what I want to do until I’ve foolishly taken the table closest to the drink machine, three tables over from where they’re seated. I can’t think of a good reason to reposition myself unless I go up to them and say, “Hi, I’m new, can you guys lead me through this,” and that’s just not the kind of thing I want to say here. Time passes, more guys arrive to eat fried food. These sports reporters are on the whole not a very athletic looking bunch. I recognize a couple from the practice a few weeks back. I calculate that these guys do this about fifty times a year (forty-one regular season games, preseason stuff, and when KG was in town the playoffs) and have for who knows how many years. They are far removed from the novelty of this I’m experiencing. I get up to explore. There’s a media room with workstations set up. You can bring your own laptop and plug into an AC source and printer, or if you’re old you can use the station to write on paper. There’s a media department pumping out monstrous stacks of talking points, statistics, recent T-Wolves articles. It’s all very impressive in volume and generic in content. There are loads of articles about Ricky Rubio, who along with Kevin Love is the hope of the organization. His absence casts a dark shadow over the organization’s future. Luke, who is essentially a placeholder for the younger Rubio, is all but ignored in the literature—as he is by the fans. I follow some reporters into a hallway where we wait for Kurt Rambis to come answer questions. He emerges from locker room, is still very tall. You expect these guys to be tall, but you’re always surprised by what tall actually means in person. He does TV first. There’s camera, lighting, the whole bit. As in practice last month, it’s just a backdrop against blank cement designed give off a sense of intimacy. The interviewer has been waiting longer than I have been standing out here. He has makeup on and looks like a middle-aged TV guy is supposed to look. I wonder if he writes his own questions and whether he cares about basketball. The interview is quick and just like what you see on TV. There are no retakes. And the interview isn’t long enough to be edited down to anything but what it is. For once, TV and reality seem to be the same thing, and I find this weirdly disappointing. Now Rambis comes to us, about ten feet from the TV station. No one has any important questions. It’d be kind of awkward, but everyone is too relaxed for there to be any discomfort. Maybe because it’s the end of the season, maybe because everyone’s been through this so many times. It’s just a routine for them, for Rambis. No one cares what anyone says. Finally, someone asks a question. Someone makes a joke that isn’t funny (it has to do with the fact Rambis studied psychology in college and should therefore know how to “handle” Anthony Randolph, who has recently joined the team via trade). They can’t be Rambis, so they want to impress him by knowing his college major. I feel sad. Even in the NBA, adult life is much sadder than you imagine as a kid.

PR guy sees me now with the media but not sticking a mic in Rambis’s face, and asks how I’m doing. After Rambis, they’ll open up the locker room and we can hang out in there and “try to catch Luke.” That sounds good. Inside the locker room, Pekovich lounges in the chair in front of his locker, a cross chained around his neck. He’s got the night off thanks to an injury and is in good spirits. The only player in the room, he’s getting all the media’s attention, which he keeps by doing funny accented impersonations from gangster movies. The cross on his necklace is worth way more money than I make in a year. Other players walk through periodically. There’s a big excitement when Kevin Love appears. He’s returning tonight from a groin injury. The media loves Love. His excellent season is the one thing the team has going for it. But he doesn’t stay long, returning to a back room where we’re not allowed.

The locker room is rich with detritus of NBA life. Goals and strategy for the game are written on white boards on either side of a central TV left running game footage, even though no one is watching. The stuff written down is the same stuff the commentators repeat will repeat for the television audience. It’s full of NBA orthodoxy: who to foul to stop the clock (Kurt Thomas), who not to foul (Rose), reminders to control Rose, play physical, and avoid turnovers. The lockers are open faced, so I can everyone’s stuff. All players have various team paraphernalia hanging, lots of shoes, so many pairs of shoes, iPods stuffed on shelves, a small safe in each unit, street clothes strewn about. Several pairs of boxer shorts at the feet of the lockers. How must this be for them, having us in here, in their space looking at the underwear they wore to the arena? There are between five and twelve of us at any time. I remain because I have nothing to do but talk to Luke. Others have nothing to do at all. Most likely nothing that occurs in this room will impact their stories about tonight. So, they wander and wait. I ask one of the media veterans if he knows what’s in the back rooms besides not us. He says they can get treatment, or hot tub or ice bath, or just watch TV and wait for the game. So we’re all just waiting. Not quite enough to do to fill up the time.

Anthony Tolliver comes in, sits, no one says anything to him. I decide I should get some quotes about Luke. I sit down on the stool next to him. No sooner do I do this than I start fearing that the player whose stool I’ve taken will emerge from the back room and I’ll feel like an asshole for invading his space. But Tolliver is warm and inviting when I ask if I can ask some questions about Luke. The story I’m writing has officially become about how Luke’s religion shapes his approach to the game. I tell Tolliver that Luke says he’s in the NBA to “spread the Word.” Does this create conflict with teammates who don’t share his perspective, I wonder. No, everyone is real accepting, he says. Tolliver, it turns out, is fairly close with Luke. “I share Luke’s faith. Other players respect that about us even if they don’t agree with us.” “Luke’s not an outspoken guy, but he goes out of his comfort zone to be more vocal.” There’s a chapel going now (that’s where Luke is, and where Tolliver just came from) that’s open to players from both teams. This is apparently league standard: guys on opposing teams praying together before the game. Can you imagine Kobe in one of these chapels? Me neither. Why do I compare everyone to Kobe? Because he and L.A. seem so far from here in so many ways? And to think the Lakers used to play in Minneapolis.

I find my seat in the press box just off the court’s corner, between the basket and the Timberwolves bench. I’m in the second press row, closest I’ve been to a game. The team has failed to note the name of the magazine I’m writing for and has put only “alumni magazine.” There’s a Belgian guy in the seat next to me. His job is to cover the U.S. (!) for his native paper. He was on the Gulf Coast for the BP oil spill, went to L.A. for this, New York for that. Now he’s in Minnesota to cover the NBA. (!?) Explanation: by scheduling chance, the Wolves face the Bulls, Celtics, and Heat this week, so this guy can cover three playoff favorites from one city. To my left is a loud guy who you can tell lives for this. He’s quick to tell me his situation: he volunteers to do this as a favor for his buddy who has a radio program. He comes to all the games, asks a few questions, rubs elbows, and gets to be close to the action. He knows everyone in the section, greeting all the reporters, calling out to team officials. Just before tipoff, he charms the team doctor into throwing us cough drops, which he has a whole bucket of. It’s not clear why he has so many cough drops. The players don’t have coughs, but they keep sucking down the medicine.

The game starts. There are more fans than there were at the Sacramento game, but it’s still far from full. The main thing I notice sitting so close is how physical the NBA game is, and what an asset it is to have guys with muscles like Rose and Carlos Boozer. Rose, Chicago’s point guard and Luke’s matchup, is stunning from up close, driving hard to the basket and absorbing all sorts of contact. He’s the most athletic guy on the floor, and often ends up on the floor after a collision. It’s a marvel to watch him, and I wonder how long his body will hold up under the stress he puts on it. I pity Luke, who really has no chance, physically.

A fat man comes over and kicks the loud radio guy out of his seat. Radio guy is jovial about this. He took the fat man’s seat because someone else was in his own seat and he knew the fat man would skip the first quarter. Radio guy goes off to investigate his assigned seat. Fat guy carries a plate full of fried food and doesn’t seem overly interested in the game. I try to ask him about Luke. He doesn’t seem much interested in Luke. He likes Rose a lot but can’t remember Jaokim Noah’s name. He simultaneously gives the impression of having been around forever and knowing everything and being old school and knowing nothing about new stuff (which is not worth knowing about). A guy in front of us is happy to see the fat guy. They share jokes throughout the game, scope the stadium for attractive women. A number of big-boobed women seem to walk laps around the court showing off their big boobs and dyed hair. After one such woman passes, the man in front turns to the fat man and says, “Friday. Miami. Insane!” Implication being: these boobs, just the start. A tall, goofy white teenager is friends with the fat man (who is black). He comes over to tell the fat man he got Rose’s autograph on a jersey. Fat man says show me. Goofy white kid leaves, returns with jersey. Fat man is impressed. They talk about pros and cons of selling the jersey on eBay. They decide not to sell. The kid never sells. He has forty or fifty autographed jerseys at home. The kid walks around for a while, shows a few others his jersey, then disappears down the stadium tunnel, never once looking over at the game not fifteen feet away, where Rose is showing exactly why his jersey is so valuable. Not that I’m watching the game all that much. The game is boring. The Wolves are bad, the Bulls are good. That’s all anyone’s story tomorrow needs to say. Luke has a bad game and gets in zero fights.

Back to media room after game, guys wait for Rambis to come in and say, “That was a tough loss. Their________ was just too much for our ______________.” Who cares? I go out to the tunnel to wait for the locker room to be opened again. The cheerleaders have already changed clothes and are leaving. They are tiny, petite. Some of them are quite pretty from up close. Some are not. They want to get out of the stadium ASAP, but they also want you to know they’re important and glamorous. They all wear impossibly high heels, most have skirts to show their skinny sculpted legs. Some are casually dressed, some in designer-ish clothes, all made up, all pulling suitcases that weigh as much as they do.

In the locker room, Martell Webster is in black boxer-briefs lying on the ground stretching with a rubber band. He’s played well tonight. His body takes up most of the middle part of the floor, arms and legs spreading tendril-like. And here the reporter is confronted with body. A big black body, very muscular, mostly naked. Most of the basketball bodies are big, and most are black. This one is big, black, and in our faces. The reporters in the room are mostly small, white, and dorky (one is small, black, and dorky). The dorky guys are circumnavigating Webster, jealous of the big strong guys, trying to figure just how much staring they can do with accidentally doing something gay.

Tolliver is wrapped up in a towel and has giant bags of ice taped to his knees. Other guys are wearing nothing but towels or underwear. They all make casual effort to cover their genitals, but that’s about all there is for privacy. Anthony Randolph has a particularly hard time keeping his towel in place. I wait for Luke and play my own internal games with how much staring is appropriate. With nothing to do but wait, it’s hard not to ogle these athletic bodies, which are the bodies all of us non-athletes wish were ours. I think of David Shields writing in Black Planet about having sex with his wife and imagining that he was Gary Payton having sex with his wife. I imagine being Martell Webster and stretching out in my underwear after playing basketball and having a bunch of strangers watch me do it. I feel that lack of privacy and feel deeply conflicted about my place in it. I’m curious, but he’s a guy who would be better off right now if I did not exist. I think about being friendly and talking to him, telling him I was at the game where he scored twenty-four points in a quarter when he was with the Blazers. This will be my opening to tell him I’m from Portland and ask if he misses the Pacific Northwest as much as I do. We will become great friends, and if I ever see him with his shirt off again it will be because we’re swimming together somewhere and I’ll have my shirt off too. Two guys, peers, hanging out at a Minnesota lake. None of this professional gawking. But, no, I don’t approach. I see assistant coach Reggie Theus fully clothed and go ask him about Luke. I know I won’t use it in my story, but I want to talk to someone from my childhood. He describes Luke as “mature” and “a quiet leader on the team. We need his consistency.” He gives me a fist bump and heads to the coach’s room.

When Luke eventually arrives from the showers, he makes eye contact with me and signals me over to his locker. He says, “How’s it going?” I say, “Alright,” eliding so much. “Tough game. How’s it going with you?” “Alright,” eliding so much. He’d rather go home to his family. I’d rather go home to mine (maybe it’d be different if they’d won?). But I have a few factual questions I need answered: What’s the name of this? Where was that? Et cetera. He picks up a pair of crumpled boxers and pulls them on under his towel, which he then drops to the floor. Besides me and Randolph, he’s probably the skinniest person in the room. He dresses quickly. By the time he answers a couple questions he’s fully clothed. This part of his job must be awful. I know how pissed I can be after I lose a pickup game. He just got blown out in front of thousands of people and now has to answer my questions about where he went to church as a kid while he puts on his underwear.

We’re both relieved when I say “that’s all I need. Thanks.” We shake hands and exit quickly.

Scott F. Parker is the author of A Way Home: Oregon Essays and Running After Prefontaine: A Memoir, among other books. His writing about running has appeared previously in Sport Literate as well as online in Runner’s World and Running Times and in the recent book Hood to Coast Memories. He teaches writing at Montana State University and runs when he can in the cow pastures outside Bozeman.

1^ He later became the “fan” who threw the lob from the stands for Freddy Jones in the ’04 NBA dunk contest about whom Kenny Smith said, “He needs to be the point guard for some team.”

by Rob Greene

When I was six Larry Holmes was my favorite
before he took an aging Ali down,
punching Ali and punching Ali
while telling the ref to stop the fight
similar to the time my overworked airman father
punched me in the face
when I went over to hug him goodnight
while he was busying himself in between
swing shifts by taping his vinyl records
until one skipped a beat
when I opened the stereo cabinet glass.

Those were the good days, the days
when I took his best punch and got up without crying
just like Ali took Holmes’s best.
That summer I made a kite during a short stint
in the Scouts, a paper kite with my drawing
of Larry Holmes and my dad on the back facing skyward
in repentance to the Alaskan sun.

Rob Greene is the editor of Raleigh Review and he is a doctoral candidate and postgraduate researcher with University of Birmingham [United Kingdom] as well as an assistant professor at Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has a recent poem in the Berlin based annual Herzattacke, and others in Poem of the Week, Open Minds Quarterly, Great River Review, and WLA: War, Literature & the Arts. Greene relocated 46 times prior to moving to Raleigh close to two decades ago.

by Randy Steinberg

Let me begin where most stories do: in the past. My maternal grandmother was both an accomplished golfer and a skilled pianist — club champion on the links and proficient tickler of the ivories at home.

She bequeathed me a love of golf at an early age. Along with my grandfather, they played snowbird in their retirement years, migrating between Cape Cod and South Florida. I forged my swing bi-annually: in the summers beneath and betwixt the sandy pines of the Cape, and, in the winters, palms replaced pines in various locations around Miami and Boca. An interest in the piano took far longer to inherit, but it too began, I realize now, in those same days.

One of my fondest childhood memories is searching for golf balls with my grandfather in the woods of Cape Cod. In Florida, where the tree line was thin, one didn’t have the opportunity to ball hawk, but in 1980s Cape Cod, before the housing boom, there was plenty of thick forest — beneath those same sandy pines — in which the errant shots of golfers were to be reclaimed.

My grandparents lived on the sixth hole of the New Seabury club’s inland course, and in the evenings, when the course was in repose, my grandfather and I would steal into the dusk to gather the lost hopes and shattered dreams of the high handicapper.

As we’d come and go like nocturnal hunters from a den, notes from my grandmother’s piano would sweep up and down the sixth hole, which was a miracle of acoustics. The tee was raised, shooting down to a valley and then up again towards the green, a 350-yard ‘V.’ The home was situated just past the nadir of the hole, and musical notes flowed easily in both directions.

The mosquitos were alive and evening breezes rustled the forest, but rising above it all and onto the cooling grass of the rough, fairways, and greens, the music had little trouble heralding our departures — pockets empty — and beckoning us home, our pants and belt loops now sagging with foundlings.

For a very long time, my interest lay more in golf than piano. The irony was, for as long as I could remember, we had a piano in our home. Yet neither I nor anyone else in my family utilized it. My mother explained she kept it there so that when her mother visited it would be available for play, but for most of its existence the instrument — solemn, majestic and silent — gathered dust.

When I came to have a home of my own in 2010, my mother asked if I’d like the piano. I accepted, thinking it looked nice and that one day my children might learn. My two sons did not show much interest in it, and the piano continued to lie dormant until the winter of 2017-18, when I decided I needed a hobby once the golf courses closed. What would be a better choice than playing piano?

The presence of a piano in my life was ubiquitous, whether the notes floated through the Cape woods to charm me, or the instrument’s physical presence was an arm’s length away. The opportunity had been there; the songs had been played. But it took a long time to realize that piano and golf, for me, would be intertwined — a creeping destiny if you will.

***

Some people learn the piano to gain professional proficiency and to launch a career in music. Others love the challenge of setting a goal and achieving it, whether it be running a marathon or speaking a foreign language. A few think a complete life cannot be lived without competently playing an instrument. For me, there was one reason above all else (even more than having a pass time) to learn the piano: I wanted to play “The Masters.”

In truth, there is no song called “The Masters”; its real name is “Augusta,” composed by Dave Loggins (cousin to Kenny Loggins), and it’s a tribute to Augusta National Golf Course in Augusta, Georgia, where, since 1934, one of the premier golf tournaments in the world is played every April. This tournament is known as The Masters, and its theme song, which debuted in 1982, is most often heard on television before commercial breaks. It is instantly recognizable to golfers the world over. The TV version has a guitar accompaniment which can often overshadow the piano, but when one hears it played solely on the ivories it remains singular.

The moment I decided to take up the piano, I knew instantly which song I wanted to ‘master’ first. I promptly signed up for lessons, telling the instructor which song I wanted to play. He asked how much time I could devote to practice. Factoring in a job and young children, I ventured a guess of about 10 minutes per day. Though he did not say anything, his expression was similar to one I might offer a beginning golfer who asks, “How long will it be before I break 80?” Nevertheless, I began my lessons, and, with only a few exceptions, have been going once per week since I commenced instruction.

A new piano student can learn one or two things in a half hour piano lesson, but practice, like most anything else is imperative, and though I have been faithful to my pledge of 10 minutes each day, I understood early on why my piano teacher had his doubts about me playing “Augusta” any time soon. I foolishly thought when I began lessons in December of 2017, I might be able to play the song by early April 2018.

To see what I faced, I printed the sheet music for “Augusta” just a few weeks after my first lesson. To the eye of a seasoned piano player, “Augusta” is probably not a difficult song to learn, but to the novice piano player, The Masters theme is a dizzying array of flats and sharps, keys I don’t know how to play, and finger positions that beguile.

To play “Augusta” — or any advanced song — one has to keep both hands moving at the same time, frequently going in opposite directions or moving elsewhere on the keyboard while one hand continues steadily. Only by the first or second month of my lessons was I able to play simple tunes such as “Yankee Doodle” or “Row, Row Your Boat.” By month three and four, I was playing a passable “Happy Birthday” and “When the Saints Come Marching In.” I was glad for this progress, but these songs are nothing like “Augusta,” which requires a variety of skills I realized might take much longer to acquire.

April 2018 quickly became April 2019, but even that estimate might have been a stretch.

***

As with golf, playing the piano requires perfectly timed coordination to strike the right shot or, as it were, note. Piano instruction to the beginner can be highly confusing in the same manner golf lessons are to the neophyte. A new golfer might be told to hold his or her head still, bend the knees (but not too much), keep the left arm straight, don’t forget to swivel the hips, and finish with 90 percent of your weight on your front foot. And this is only a full swing. There are the dynamics and mechanics of putting, chipping, sand trap play, downhill and uphill lies, trying to move the ball right or left, and a number of other particulars a player must master to be competitive in the game.

As a long-time golfer, many of the fundamentals of the game are second nature to me, but with the piano I am the beginner, staring at a 420-yard par four with water on the right and woods on the left. I feel the psychic pain so many describe about golf, only now it is the piano and all its difficulty that tests my mental limits.

A sheet of piano music has more marks and information than any golf scorecard will ever have. Making your notes flow through a ‘slur’ or striking any given key more crisply when ‘staccato’ is called for are easy in isolation, but to execute these directions in the midst of a piece that also includes a number of other directions and cues is a challenge of the highest order.

Yet I persist because I believe that playing “The Masters” theme will be my only chance to play The Masters.

***

As of this writing, I am 45 years old, and a decent golfer with an eight handicap. Given work and family demands, I don’t think I’ll be getting much better at the game. But even if I somehow managed to lower my handicap I’ll never compete in any big-time tournaments. It seems silly to state the obvious, but I’ll never come close to playing at Augusta National Golf Club in The Masters tournament itself, and barring the oddity of an invite to play Augusta by a member, the only way I’ll even get to see the course is by lottery.

What do I mean by this? For many golf events, one simply needs to buy a ticket to attend. Not so for The Masters, which issues coveted tournament tickets via lottery. Every year, I apply online, and, so far, every year, I have not been selected. But odds are I will one day get in via the lottery and thus be able to attend The Masters.

But let’s take this a step farther: attending the tournament and playing the course are two different things. A spectator views the course and all its intricacies from outside the ropes. A gallery member will never know what it feels like to cross the stony bridge over Rae’s Creek at the 12^th hole. A spectator can see and smell the azalea and dogwood that famously grace the course, but what would it be like to stand right next to it, and — pray it does not happen — have to hunt around in it should a poor shot find its cover? What would it be like to stroll up the 18^th fairway, the gallery staring back at you and the course challenging you to find the elevated green with a suitably spun ball that remains on the good side of the slope? A visitor could never perceive these sites and sensations. Only a player can.

And here is where a leap of faith or perhaps, better put, a flight of fancy, takes hold. If, one day, I can achieve a competent rendition of “Augusta,” it will be as if I am playing the course itself. Making that jump in transposition on the keyboard will be like playing Amen Corner (the nickname of holes 11, 12, and 13) without a bogey or much worse. Hitting the sharps and flats correctly — while not breaking tempo — will be akin to landing in the pine straw… and escaping with a low screamer to put myself in position for a try at an up and down par save. Just being able to get through the four-page piece without a flub will be like playing Augusta and breaking 100.

And dare I go further by saying that learning The Masters theme song will be a feat greater than actually playing the course, and playing it at par or better? Do I risk offending golf purists by declaring that if I play “Augusta” with competency I will transcend what any player has ever done? Even the greatest. Nicklaus. Palmer. Woods. Spieth. They’ve all won marvelous Masters’ victories, but have any of them made music? Have any of them played The Masters?

How can I make such a claim? The answer: music is alchemy, sublime if you will, and golf profane. This is not to say golf isn’t a special game for me. Of course, it is, but golf — or sport in general — as beautiful and entertaining (and frustrating) as it can be, is not the same as music.

One can play the game of golf with mastery and do things no one else can, which inspires awe, but, golf, even when played at the loftiest levels, does not create anything of a higher order. Two inert chemicals, if combined, evolve into something new — whether good or bad. Shine light through water and you get the prismatic magic of a rainbow. One musical note on its own is almost formless, but arrange several in a certain way and you transcend. As much as I love golf, I recognize there is no such analogy available that would make it more than the game it is.

But the composer or the performer of music takes individual sounds and fuses them to stir the ear and brain. Such will be my triumph over the greats of the game if I can play the song. They have mastered the base metal that is the course, but I will have taken pedestrian parts and made gold by mastering the song.

Perhaps I’m getting carried away with my aspirations. After all, we’re talking about playing a popular tune on the piano. Should I be making anything more of this? There might be the personal pride of acquiring a new skill and showing it off, if not for others than just myself, but is it ridiculous to believe learning “Augusta” is anywhere close to stepping into the shoes of the game’s immortals?

Whatever the answer, I keep the sheet music for “Augusta” perched upon my piano as a reminder of my goal, and I often think back to those days on Cape Cod, in the woods. The golf course. The piano. The evening breezes. A song and that creeping destiny closer to being fulfilled.

Randy Steinberg has a master’s degree in film/screenwriting from Boston University. He taught screenwriting at BU from 1999-2010. Since 2011, he has reviewed films, television shows, DVDs, and books for Blast Magazine.com. He is currently developing a feature-film script with a New York City production company. This is his third Sport Literate essay. He lives in the Greater Boston area.