Uncategorized

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.

by Eric Van Meter

Mile 976 is the flattest terrain we’ve biked so far, but I still feel like I’m pedaling through syrup. In every direction, I see miles-wide swaths of rice and soybeans and cotton. If these crops could leach water from the saturated air, irrigation would be unnecessary. But they can’t. They are needy plants that have domesticated the farmers here, wooing humans to feed and fertilize and water them in exchange for the promise of cash crops. Somewhere beneath what passes for landscape in Eastern Arkansas — literally flatter than a pancake, when compared at scale — the once mighty Ogalala Aquifer barely trickles, its living waters choked by the twin killers of energy and agriculture. The air along the road carries a chemical smell.

A few lengths in front of me, Starr reaches up to massage her injured shoulder. Of the seventeen college students who began this trip with me, she’s the only female biker left, and she is determined to last as least as long as the men. Beside her, Kris flexes his hands, still peeling from a nasty sunburn he got in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico along Miles 185-242. To protect them, he wore mule gloves while he rode for nearly a week.

“There,” he says.
He points down the long, straight road. Two miles beyond, just above the tops of century-old oaks, I can make out the ivory-colored water tower for Harrisburg, AR. On the other side of that tower will be the Food Giant, a local grocery store whose sign reads BEER – GUNS – AMMO. But we are in the market for less aggressive commodities — shade and air conditioning and fuel for the 12-year-old pickup that serves as our sag wagon. I check the display on my handlebars. 9:30 a.m. already. This last break will be mercilessly short. We need to make it home before noon, when the heat will be enough to warp the plastic shields on our helmets.

Greg, our lead rider, passes a green road sign on his right. He extends his arm to make sure we see it, then points forward with an imaginary sword to signal the charge.

Jonesboro 27.
“What’s our mile count?” Starr asks.
I chafe at the question, albeit silently. This is the longest and most complicated Bike Trip I’ve ever planned. I want it to be more than an accomplishment to the five who will finish the entire course. I want this trek to mean something, although I realize now is not the time to meditate on just what that might be. When your crotch feels like you’ve spent three weeks straddling a jackhammer, serenity is hard to come by.
I pour tepid water over my neck, trying to snap back to the reality of the road. I’ve managed to keep these riders safe across four states, and I don’t want to lose focus so close to home. I need to bring them back whole, if somewhat battered. We’re from a small town. I know their mothers.
“Mile count?” Starr says again.
I check the odometer for what feels like the millionth time today. “Nine-seven-eight.”
“So we’ll make a thousand?”
“Yes.”
“Sweet.”

In the distance, Greg sits up straight. He locks his fingers together over his helmet and coasts toward the water tower. His back is killing him, I know. Then again, all of us bear the marks of pilgrimage on our bodies. We have become well acquainted with that special kind of agony reserved for distance cyclists — that unremitting soreness, that cellular-level exhaustion.

As the appointed spiritual guide, I feel as though I should draw enlightenment from our misery. I should be able to offer a framework to the others so that our pain makes sense. Barring that, I should at least elevate the suffering so that it feels heroic. But despite three weeks of engaging the problem of pain, I am nowhere near an answer. All I can do is affirm what we feel. Life is suffering. This first Noble Truth of Buddhism is as frustrating as it is incontrovertible.
Still. We’re on the road, and have been for 23 days and nearly 1,000 miles. Long enough that we’re ready to be home. Not long enough to forget where we started.

Launch point: Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a much bigger city — population 556,495 — than we normally tackle on Bike Trip, but the city is an incidental rather than an objective. It matters only because it is the gateway to the desert.

“Circle up!” Dave barks.
Dave, my co-leader, is a bald and bearded vagabond with a gentle intensity that makes him part mom, part drill sergeant — and the undisputed soul of Bike Trip. Dave founded the tour 10 years ago with a simple concept: travel by bicycle from town to town, stopping every 40 miles or so to volunteer in the community and spend the night at a church affiliated with our religious tribe (Methodist). Serving our neighbors is at the core of Dave’s bike trip philosophy, which I find both noble and naïve. He doesn’t say out loud that college students on bicycles can save the world. But, deep down, he believes they can.
I have my doubts. Thirteen years of working as a religious professional has dented my belief in God and obliterated my faith in church. I came to Arkansas State University with a clear mandate from my bishop: GROW A BIG CHURCH. Get more students involved. Convince more people to support your work financially. Develop plans for a bigger, better facility to replace the Cold War-era building that your group currently inhabits.

From the start, however, I’ve been troubled by the picture of discipleship I read in my Bible as opposed to what my ecclesial superiors seem to want. Love and integrity and justice — these aren’t things that show up on year-end reports. Nor do they fit the church industry’s definition of success — butts, bucks, and buildings, as the saying goes. Yet they are at the heart of my understanding of what God desires from me, and they take an inordinate amount of time and energy to pursue. Left with the choice of whether to be faithful or successful, I’ve chosen the former. No one — including me — feels very good about that lately.
Dave understands my angst, at least to a point. He and I are the same age, with similar interests and credentials, and so he can empathize. But his convictions rest on more solid footing than mine — which explains why he has the real credibility with our riders. Dave is their Iron Man, their Captain America. They only believe in themselves so far as they believe in Dave.
He prays us out of our morning stupor, right up through to his sharp Amen!
“Let’s go!” he says.

At Mile 2, we have our first casualty.
Josh, who missed Bike Trip last year due to a broken collarbone, doesn’t notice a red light until too late. He locks down his front brakes and endo’s over the handlebars, cracking his left shoulder against the blacktop. We wave traffic into the other lane, get him to the side and wait on Dave, who is bringing up the rear — bird-dogging, he calls it. Josh tries to move his arm and cries out in pain. A second later, he bends over to vomit. When he stands back up, he is pale and wobbly. Dave sits him up on a rock, makes him follow his finger with his eyes. He lifts Josh’s wrist. Presses here and there. A few seconds later, he pronounces judgment.

“He’s done.”
Dave and I glance at one another, but we already know the plan. He will nurse Josh to the ER for X-rays. I’ll take Dave’s place in back of the pack. We ride on.

Another three miles and the remnant is out of the city, climbing up into the desert along Highway 333. It’s only a two-lane, but the shoulders are good, and most of the traffic is above us on I-40. To our left, South Sandia Peak rises in stark splendor. We’d love to ride to the top, but the clouds hang too low, and our lungs burn from the cold. Instead we settle on a break at a touristy shop in Tijeras. It’s a lesson in humility, and also in transience.

According to Christian tradition, St. Anthony is the Great is the Father of All Monks. He wasn’t the first ascetic to seek a deeper spirituality through the isolation and deprivation. He was, however, the first to take his search into the desert, which so willingly supplied the hardships he courted. This, coupled with legends of his personal piety, made Anthony the most venerated of the desert fathers.

Late in the third century, Anthony liquidated his personal wealth and moved into the Egyptian desert to live as a hermit. Legend says that he spent the better part of four decades in prayer and self-denial, worshiping God and facing temptations. Once, during a wave of persecution, he tried unsuccessfully to become a martyr. Deprived of a glorious death, Anthony retreated again to the desert. Disciples came to him, sometimes to bring provisions and sometimes to seek advice. When he sought greater solitude deeper in the wilderness, more people than ever flocked to his hermitage. Nine hundred years after his death, his bones were credited with healing pilgrims suffering from skin diseases.

I find his legacy both inspiring and suspicious.
Thanks to Athanasius of Alexandria — the Father of All Monks’ biggest and most influential fan — much has been made of Anthony’s righteous suffering. Like Job, the biblical hero persecuted for his virtue, Anthony made an enemy of the devil through his faithfulness to God. Though tempted by visions of lust and tortured by boredom, Anthony held firm. The frustrated devil beat Anthony to within inches of his life. His friends from a nearby village had to break down the door of the tomb in which he lived in order to carry Anthony to a place he might recover.
Compared with my fair-weather piety, Anthony truly was a saint.

Still, I can’t help but think that he — and every other saint, for that matter — gets too much credit. Surely those we have canonized aren’t the only ones to deny themselves in search of holiness. Surely others have emptied the resources of their bodies in quests for spiritual awakening, only to die for lack of anyone to rescue them. Mere effort rarely ends in veneration. For that, a would-be saint needs a reputation, along with adherents and admirers to do a bit of promotional work. Without Athanasius to write his biography, who would Anthony be? Just another lunatic in the desert. Just another sack of bones, picked clean and bleaching in the sun.

Dave gives us the rundown on Josh’s condition in the church kitchen. The two showers available to us are occupied with other bikers who braved the road to Tijeras. Greg, Starr, and I stand around the stove, trying to get warm.

“Grade 2 sprain. X-rays negative. No concussion,” Dave says with a sigh. “No biking for Josh for four to six weeks. He’ll have to move to support crew.”

Greg and Starr offer sympathetic groans. Support crew is to our bikers what disciples are to saints. Like the ancient monks who brought food and carried away excrement from cells, support crew does the menial tasks to allow the cyclists more time and energy for their own, loftier pursuits. They cook meals and fill water bottles and set up service projects and pack luggage. Viewed one way, they are unsung heroes. In another sense, they are just enablers.

Across the dining room, Josh is struggling to fill his air mattress with his one good arm. Miss Vicki, our support-crew captain and surrogate grandmother, stirs the spaghetti and pulls the first loaf of garlic bread from the oven. She hands out slices to those of us gathered by the stove. She fusses over our damp jerseys, warns that we’ll catch cold. Shakes her head in pity as she watches Josh.

“That poor boy,” she keeps saying.
Josh isn’t saying much of anything, except for the occasional whimper when he moves the shoulder the wrong way. He knows what’s in store for him — a seat on the van with a group he would not voluntarily hang out with in his free time. This year’s support crew includes a set of twins with some undefined developmental disability, who randomly break into show tunes during long silences; a 25-year-old student, still a junior, who has to be reminded to shower; two young women who are friendly and helpful, but who will be occupied trying to keep Miss Vicki awake in the sag wagon. None of these are natural kindreds to Josh.

For a disciple in training, however, it’s good practice. After all, these are the same kinds of people that Jesus was prone to spend his time with. According to the New Testament, he was notorious for eating with outcasts and touching lepers and conversing with the lame and the possessed as though they were valued human beings. His behavior caused a scandal in his day. It also left his disciples with a tough example to follow, and an inverse logic to adopt. Give if you want to receive. Empty yourself if you want to be filled. Embrace your weakness if you want to be strong.

Josh has his air mattress sufficiently inflated. He unrolls his sleeping bag and bites down on one corner. With his good hand, he pulls the zipper halfway down, then spreads it out over the mattress.

“He’ll be all right,” Dave says, even though none of us has asked.
We agree, offering quiet sympathies to one another on Josh’s behalf. We are sincere in our compassion, but not entirely honest. No one speaks aloud the darker feelings we all harbor.
Better him than me.

Three hours’ ride from Albuquerque, civilization ends. We have climbed onto the western edge of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain. This immense and desolate plateau receives only 14 inches of precipitation each year, thanks to the rain shadow cast by the Sierra Madre Oriental. To the west, we can still barely make out the Sandias at the lip of the horizon. In every other direction, a vast, empty swath opens, broken only by a last-chance town that claims 240 residents. It’s only functioning business — Willard Cantina and Café — is now all that separates us from the desert proper. When we pull to a stop outside it, all we hear is wind.
Inside, the cantina is empty except for a bartender and a waitress. We ask our standard question about refilling our water bottles and using the restrooms. Instead of the usual friendly welcomes and curious questions, however, we’re met with a long silence. Behind the bar are pictures of tattooed motorcyclists, clad in black leather trimmed with silver studs. A few of them look vaguely famous.

The bartender asks what he can get us.
Dave turns to the group. “Y’all hungry?”
A few of us nod. Finally, some of the guys get the hint.
“Oh, man!” they say. “I’m starving. Could we see a menu?”

The cyclists order soft drinks and appetizers — garlic bread and fried mushrooms and plates of nachos. I can already tell that we’re going to regret our gluttony the moment we get back on the bikes, but no matter. By adding a little cash to this bleak economy, Dave has diffused the tension. Everyone — cantina staff included — is in a better mood. Dave and I choose a table in back while our bikers enjoy the cool air in the bar.
“How do you suppose a place like this stays open?” I ask. “Surely the locals can’t sustain it.”
“Must be on some sort of motorcycle route.”
“We haven’t seen any motorcycles since Albuquerque.”
Dave shrugs, but doesn’t answer.

All at once, the walls feel like they’re closing in, the way they do when I’m alone in my office, where day after day I watch my career disintegrate. My best and most responsible students — Kris, Greg, Ashante, Starr, and a handful of others — will all graduate and move on in the coming months, and what will I have left? Bills the church can’t pay and a salary I might not be able to draw. A leaky, asbestos-filled building populated by oddballs and outcasts, people who routinely get pushed to the margins in classes and co-curricular events and social gatherings. I don’t blame them, though. Why risk losing the one place they feel safe by inviting dangerous newcomers to join them?

My bishop thinks I should fire my congregation.
“If you don’t have any leadership or any potential for leadership, your church will never grow,” he says. “Sometimes you have to prune the vine before you can expect a harvest.”

I argue with him that my tiny band of misfits is every bit as valuable in the eyes of God as the richest, handsomest church members in the richest, handsomest church in our district.
“I don’t think we can waste time with a plan that clearly is not working,” he answers.
Here in the cantina, when I should be enjoying the break and getting ready for the next ride, I’m thinking about that conversation. Worrying if my job is safe, and worse. Wondering if God feels about me the same way my bishop does.

We pay the check and mount up and push off with the sun at our backs. Willard’s remaining three blocks are nothing but crumbled adobe and burned out filling stations. It is the first of many ghost towns we will ride through in this desert, each one a monument to failure. Hollowed out buildings. Cemeteries without flowers. No one there to mark the shame of death.
When I google Willard Cantina and Café later this summer as I tell my story to a friend, I’ll discover that it is permanently closed.

Midway through his life, Anthony took up residence in an abandoned Roman fort further south along the Nile. For 20 years, he walled himself off from the outside world, neither leaving nor allowing anyone to enter his cell. He communicated only via a small crevice in the fort, through which he received provisions from and offered advice to his disciples. At times, packs of wild animals — lions and wolves and scorpions — appeared before him, snarling and drooling, ready to tear him apart. But St. Anthony recognized these beasts as nothing more than phantasms sent by the devil to plague him. He would deride them, saying that if they truly had any power, only one of them would be needed to tear him apart. At his laughter, the beasts disappeared.

We bikers are not so joyful through our torments. In the morning, we ride out into cold that sears our lungs. By noon, the sun scorches our skin. Trains blow their horns in greeting, scaring us nearly off our bikes. Double-trailer semis pass us at 90 mph, almost blowing us off the road with their wind shears. Our bodies ache — the bikers from exertion, support crews from being cramped up in the sag wagon. The dry air irritates our eyes and chaps our lips. When I blow my nose, I find the tissue filled with clots of dried blood.

It doesn’t help that our accommodations have grown more Spartan further into the desert. We sleep in tiny schoolhouses and one-room churches. Since none of them have proper showers, we take bird-baths in the restroom sinks. Our biking jerseys stiffen overnight. The inside of the sag wagon smells like mushrooms.
We ride on.

At a water break at Mile 176, a gust of wind blows the pickup door closed on Josh’s hand. He cries out loudly enough that we can hear him over the passing train. Thankfully, no bones are broken, although his knuckles will turn blue and yellow in the days to come.

I’ve come to respect Josh more and more since his injury at Mile 2. He doesn’t pity himself, at least not out loud. Instead, he soldiers on in his new, less glamorous role on support crew. He’s learned to spread peanut butter and make coolers full of sports drink with one hand. When the bikers pull over for a rest, he’s the first one out of the sag wagon, encouraging his friends to ride on. He might very well have the sweetest spirit among us, which, if we believe the stories of Job and St. Anthony, explains why he suffers the most.

The Buddhist understanding of suffering is more egalitarian than what I find in the stories of my own faith tradition. Christian legends speak of suffering as a refining fire, a test. Those who experience hardship should be thankful, because they have been deemed worthy of examination. The task of the saint is to hold fast against temptation and bear up under travails, following the example of Christ.

The Buddha, on the other hand, recognized suffering not as an imposition on would-be saints, but as a simple fact of human experience, woven into the fabric of an imperfect and impermanent world. The culprits of suffering are not devils intent on warping our souls. Rather, our own desires are to blame for the suffering we endure.

At the heart of the Buddha’s teaching is the concept of dukkha — usually translated as “suffering,” but carrying connotations of some basic dissatisfaction, some inescapable lack. To be enlightened means to know and practice the Four Noble Truths. Life is marked by dukkha, filled with suffering and incapable of satisfying. And dukkha arises from our craving for and clinging to the impermanent, unsatisfying world in which we live. Only by the release of our own desiring can we overcome dukkha, a process which requires discipline, meditation, and self-denial along the Noble Eightfold path.

As we roll through the miles of desert, the Buddha’s teachings begin to make more sense. The endless land and sky, both of which seemed so beautiful 200 miles ago, now feel threatening and oppressive. I wish this trip were over, that I were back among crops and trees, downtowns and subdivisions. I long for climate control and television, for a setting in which I don’t feel personally responsible for the petty behaviors of my whiny, self-possessed group. To be honest, I also long to hide from my own whiny self-possession, which seems to be on display more and more as Bike Trip wears on.

I wonder what it would be like to accept life as it comes to me rather than to try to control it. To do my work and deposit my pay without regard to arbitrary definitions of success and failure, whether my colleague’s or my culture’s or my bishop’s or my own. To lack comfort and security, yet desire nothing.

To judge not, and thereby not be judged.

At Mile 242, we finally reach Portales, the home of one of our sister churches on the campus of Eastern New Mexico State University. For the first time since Albuquerque, we have plenty of floor space to spread out, and a big enough kitchen for Miss Vicki and the support crew to cook a proper meal. We have a TV and high-speed internet. And, of course, showers. Thanks to a few creature comforts and a scheduled day off on Sunday, all our petty rivalries are forgotten.

Just in time to split up.
This has been the plan from the beginning. Of our initial group of 17, a third need to get back to start summer jobs and internships. Another third have no plans in particular, but are not cut out to be away from home for more than a few days. Only five of us — me, Greg, Starr, Kris, and Ashante — will stay behind with the bikes, the pickup, and the sag trailer. From this point forward, we are our own support crew.

On Sunday morning, we all help load up the fifteen-passenger van and gather for the customary hugs and tears and farewells. I silently call the roll of those who are leaving us. Miss Vicki. Josh. The show-tune singing twins. The twenty-five-year-old junior, who today is wearing a shirt that reads “I is a kolludge stoodunt.” A half dozen others whose help and humor and contributions to Bike Trip I’ve taken for granted until this very moment.

After the obligatory prayer of parting, Dave pulls me aside.
“Well, guy,” he says. “Seven hundred miles to go. You ready for this?”
“Does it matter?” I answer.
Dave considers this a moment. Smiles. “The road is the road is the road, I guess. Ride on.”
He whoops a goodbye to the rest of the crew and climbs in the driver’s seat. Fifty yards and one right turn later, the van disappears behind the ENMU science hall. We are on our own.

The difference between loneliness and exile — between Anthony’s seclusion and Job’s exclusion — is choice. A monk chooses the wilderness. Embraces the empty space, the boredom and the despair. An exile, on the other hand, does not choose the exile, whether from ostracism or disease or failure. It is forced upon him or her.
A monk walks away. An exile is abandoned.

Later that night, Greg follows up on a brief conversation we’d had around Mile 230.
“So that thing I was telling you about?” he says. “I’m going to do it.”
“You mean changing your major?”
“No,” he says, annoyed that I’ve gotten it wrong. “I’m still graduating with the AT degree. But I’m not doing physical therapy school. I’m going to seminary.”
“Good call,” I say, and try to smile. Ever since his sophomore year, Greg has been wrestling with his future. I’ve seen this coming, although I’ve rarely heard him talk about it.
“Do you think it’s what I need to do?” he asks.
“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because you don’t seem real enthused.”
At that, my smile becomes genuine. I know I’m a terrible liar, and I know Greg has that special combination of perception and honesty that won’t abide falsehood to any degree.
“I do think it’s the right thing,” I say at last. “But it’s a hard road. Your parents aren’t going to like it.”
“They’ll get over it.”
“Seminary is expensive, and pastoral work gets tough. Lonely too.”
He pulls down the corners of his mouth, figuring on my words. “Well, I think if it’s what God wants me to do, God will make a way for it to happen.”
“Agreed.”
“And I’m pretty sure God wants me to do this.”
“Why so?”

He gives me his rationale, and it’s all typical Greg — methodical, logical, yet with a streak of mysticism that he can’t explain but doesn’t question. I won’t try to talk him out of it. At my core, I do think he’s right — that his life’s calling lies in the spiritual. And so what if it’s lonely and difficult? No one would ever embark on the most important human journeys — partnership, child-rearing, vocation, social justice, the search for enlightenment — if he or she knew beforehand the amount of frustration and suffering each would entail.

Besides, conversations like this remind me that, regardless of how anxiety and failure torment me, they are not the final word on my life or my work. They are phantasms, conjured and sustained by my desire for outward success. With a laugh, they will disappear.
For the first time in a long time, I fall asleep wrapped in something like faith.

The next day, our small crew arises with new energy. We will once again bike out into emptiness, only this time buoyed by the promise of a new state. At Mile 252, we’ll cross into Texas. It’s an arbitrary border, but it will feel like progress.

Kris’s hands are scorched from the last ride, but Dave has bequeathed him his work gloves to cover them, and we’ve picked up a fresh bottle of aloe on our shopping run. A day of rest has done Starr’s sore feet a world of good, and Ashante has enough caffeine in her cooler to keep her awake at the wheel of the sag wagon. Greg is in high spirits. He’s spoken his plan to the universe, and liked the way it sounded. He’s also called the woman he wants to marry and shared the news with her, and she is thrilled with his decision. For 100 yards, all seems right with the world.

And then we hit the goatheads.
Pastor Shane, my counterpart at ENMU, had warned us about these nasty dried thorns that collect along the shoulders of Highway. Although not a threat to vehicle tires, goatheads are hell on bicycles. In seven miles, we have six flats. When we get off the bikes to patch the inner tubes, the thorns lodge in the soles of our shoes. We have to stand on the asphalt and pick them out with pliers before we get back on the pedals.

Although it’s more of a risk, we decide to ride closer to the centerline, where passing cars have already picked up or blown away most of the thorns. For a while the strategy seems to be working. But at Mile 264, we hear the tell-tale hiss of spewing air. I check my own tires, and then glance at the riders in front of me. But Greg has already found the leak. His front tire is down to the rim. Before anyone else can speak, he dismounts. Flicks a goathead from the rubber. Picks up the bike and heaves it into the ditch. With hands raised to heaven, he then offers perhaps the most honest prayer I have ever heard.

“You have got to be shitting me!”
But no one is shitting us — not God, not the universe. This is how things go when you live as part of this world, when you occupy a body and move through time. Life is suffering. The real question is how to respond to that reality.
It’s absurd to think that we have come so far only to be derailed from our path by penny-sized thorns. Perhaps just as absurd to be upset about it. Might as well follow the example of saints. St. Anthony happily mocked his demonic tormenters. Statues of the Buddha often picture him smiling and sometimes laughing. It seems a reasonable strategy then — to pray and swear and, most important of all, laugh.

We reach the Food Giant at Mile 979, cross the parking lot and ditch the bikes and collapse in the grassy area along the north side of the parking lot. Too late, Greg warns of chiggers, but it’s too hot to get back up yet. We rest beneath the giant oaks, guzzle water and talk about our plans for the next few days—mostly involving couches and junk food and Netflix. Greg takes off his jersey and wrings out a tiny stream of sweat. We all laugh.

We are 600 miles past the best ride any of us can remember, Miles 292-370. A 20-mph tailwind pushed us across the eastern part of the Llano Estacado. At its edge, we dropped 1,000 feet in elevation in only seven miles, coasting to our highest speeds of the trip. That night in the shower, I discovered that the wind had blown my jersey up during the ride, searing the skin at my waistline with an angry red sunburn that the others think is hilarious.

The remaining miles have brought their share of adventures — rain and heat and swarms of gnats, hail and tornado warnings. We’ve slept on more floors and bathed in more sinks and eaten our weight in peanut butter and honey sandwiches. We’ve dodged armadillos and turtles, and bowed up against headwinds so strong that we had to pedal downhill. Once, in McAlester, Oklahoma, our church hosts threw a barbeque party for us, complete with a tamed bull for us to ride like a horse.

Here at the Food Giant, we think back on these adventures. In 25 miles, our loved ones will ask for our stories. We won’t know where to start.
Even this close to home, however, the desert has not left my thoughts. Better said, my thoughts have not left the desert. They continue to cycle through our sufferings, to pick through the pieces of my broken career, looking for a way to make peace with it all. I am not so righteous as Anthony. Neither am I so resigned to the human condition as Buddha. I’m just a guy on a bike, searching for whatever truth I can catch up to.

One of which is this: I cannot change the weather nor the road conditions. I can choose to submit to their rules, or I can choose to die trying. While the latter may seem heroic, it’s death all the same.

The people among whom I live are determined that it should not be so. My culture’s mission is to control and subdue the natural world, to exploit its resources in the ironic quest to wall out the context of our existence. And if the seas turn toxic and species die out and aquifers run dry as the deserts expand? If light shows and praise bands gather thousands of congregants, yet leave our souls withered and fruitless? This we cannot consider. The fear of personal failure — economic and otherwise — is too strong for us to waste precious time contemplating how warped our definitions of success might be, or how high the price to meet them.

If nothing else, our trek through the desert has reminded us that the American church’s obsession with our status in the marketplace is merely one of St. Anthony’s beasts — a snarling phantasm with no power beyond what we give it. We are not born for this. It is programmed into us. Rather, we are born into mystery, and our spirits long to come out of hiding — to humbly assent to being part of a dangerous yet magnificent world.

As we ride into Jonesboro, traffic zooms around us. Lines of cars on the way to meetings and dental appointments and kids’ soccer games. Digital clocks warning drivers that they are late or soon to be late. Anxious men and women tucked into cushioned seats, cooled by air conditioning systems as they listen to their digital playlists, sequestered from road and from weather.
On our bicycles, we are getting broiled. The sun blisters our already leathered necks. Sweat covers us head to toe, drips from our helmets and stings our eyes. As the clock tower of the university comes into view, the odometer on my bike crosses 1,000 miles.
We ride on.

Eric Van Meter is a teacher and writer from Mitchell, South Dakota, as well as an avid cyclist. His nonfiction has appeared in Ministry Matters and Tales from the South.

Lessons

by Todd Davis

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

—James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”

Little ditty about Jack and Diane
Two American kids growin’ up in the heartland
Jackie’s gonna be a football star
Diane debutante backseat of Jackie’s car

—John Cougar Mellencamp, “Jack & Diane”

 

By the end of July, the practice field is burned a fragile yellow. A month from now, as cleats bite the earth, great clouds of dust will rise around us, turning our skin a beautiful shade of brown and leaving our airways coated, our snot a viscous black that shoots from our noses as we try to catch our breath between sprints.

Each evening, all summer long, we lift weights in the gym, staring at each others arms and chests, dancing the line of agility drills the coaches lay out for us in intricately taped patterns in the parking lot.

We’re still just boys, anywhere between 15 and 18 — a span of years that seems to move at glacial rates as we sit in the classroom or pine over the girl we have a crush on. What we wish for most is to grow up as fast as we can, so we try to talk like the men we’ve heard playing pickup basketball or heading into the garage to drink beer with their buddies and tinker with a car. The words don’t feel right at first, but we get used to them, calling each other hateful names with a smile, pussy and faggot and shithead, laughing as we tell our best friend to try not to be such an asshole.

In this haze of profanity and grunts, we also dream of putting on pads and helmets, of running onto the game field showered by the cheers of the faceless fans who sit more than 80 feet in the air on broad planking, field lights burning a halo around the track that rings the emerald turf, which was watered and fertilized throughout the summer at great cost.

We’ve been taught that this is the arena where a boy might prove he’s one step closer to manhood. All that it takes is a willingness to hit another boy as hard as you can, or to get up after being hit, even if your bones hurt, even if your head spins.

To most of us it seems worth it. We fantasize about seeing our names on Saturday morning in the local papers; or hearing a coach call out to the team during the weekend film session that someone’s got real balls, that they know how to get low and deliver when the game’s on the line; or, better yet, that a father or uncle or grandfather will buy a round at the bar for the guys from the neighborhood who watch the Notre Dame-Michigan game and talk about how their boy did his job right last night, how their high school team won, and for the next six days how that will make a difference working the line at the factory.

The soundtrack that plays endlessly in the locker-room is Nazereth’s “Hair of the Dog.” Testosterone-fueled teenagers strumming air guitars with our shirts off or sleeves cut away at the shoulders to proudly display the biceps and triceps we’ve worked so hard to define in the weight room. The first hint of mustaches and beards ring our mouths and darken our chins as we crank the volume and sing along with the ragged refrain, which is all about meanness, all about feeling like no pain or fear can make us back down, make us cave in: “Now you’re messing with a, a sonofabitch, now you’re messing with a sonofabitch.”

Being tough, feeling tough, acting as if nothing can truly hurt you, is part of the game, part of growing up in a place where manhood includes the ability to hurt another man. The metaphors our coaches use are militant in their devotion to the idea that football is a battle, that violence is an inevitable part of living, that we need to learn how to mete it out, as well as to endure it when it visits us.

We’re told countless times we’re going to war on the football field. We must be loyal to one another. We must be disciplined. The boy next to us depends on our mastering the assigned task, and we take pride in on our ability to do the duty we’ve been ordered to do.

Our defensive secondary coach tells us “it’s kill or be killed.” The offensive linemen battle “in the trenches,” and we have to be sharp as we “march down field,” conquering our enemy’s territory. We “blitz” on defense, commanded to “search and destroy.” Oddly enough, given the conservative nature of our town, even evolution makes a metaphoric appearance when our head coach let’s us know “it’s survival of the fittest” on that chalk-lined pitch.

During the summer months, some of the guys work on farms, necks and arms tanned, torsos white as the clouds on the western horizon; others carry cinder blocks and wheel wheelbarrows full of cement or bricks over planks of wood that span ditches at construction sites — forearms aching, hands difficult to open at day’s end. The lucky ones, whose parents are divorced and work different shifts, get to fish most of the day, drinking grape Nehi and eating a bag of chips along the banks of the Elkhart River because there’s no one around to tell them any different. They don’t catch much, mostly carp or catfish, but every now and then they reel in a smallmouth bass and we have to hear about it for the next month.

The upperclassmen drive to practice. Usually their aunt’s or grandmother’s car. But some of them have their own cars, and we wonder where they get the money to buy them. A Chevy LeMans or a Pontiac Trans-Am, jacked up, with mufflers that make it sound like thunder from a long way off. Eight-track tapes blare from the open windows as they burn rubber across the parking lot. Most of the vehicles are beaters. Old pickups or sedans, whose suspensions are shot. Still, a car is a car, and we envy the guys who don’t have to wait for their moms to pick them up.

The Midwest is a place of extremes: the very rich and the very poor, fertile farmland and industrial parks, fundamentalist Christians and pacifistic Mennonites, all coexisting in some of the hottest summers and the coldest winters the lower 48 can serve up.

When we start two-a-day practices in August, the temperatures are in the 90s. Some days even get to 100. By the time the season ends in late October or early November — depending on how deep we go in the playoffs — we might be competing in snow, temperatures hovering around 25 and the ground frozen the color of cement.

At practice two lines form with tackling dummies placed parallel on the ground, eight feet apart. We’re instructed to lie down on our backs, helmet to helmet, and when the whistle blows, to jump to our feet and tackle the boy across from us who has the ball. At the end of the drill, both players should be on the ground if the defender has done his job correctly.

From an early age we’ve been taught to bend our knees, to focus on the midsection of the runner and to drive our shoulder through that center point, wrapping our arms and lifting in one motion, pounding the opponent into the turf. When we do it right, we’re congratulated. When we do it wrong — runner escaping — we’re punished with grassers, an exercise in which you run in place until the whistle blows, then throw yourself chest first to the ground, bouncing back to your running position as quickly as you can.

Throughout the season we hurl the husks of our bruised frames into each other — or as the poet James Wright describes it, “gallop terribly against each other’s bodies” — again and again, as we rotate through the various drills. There’s an order to the barely controlled chaos, and we’re asked to channel the ferocity that wells up in our chests as we prepare to deliver yet another blow to our opponent, who, of course, is also our teammate.

Our coaches are craftsmen at these labors and we are apprentices. We put in our time at the blocking sled, or running routes, or exploding from our stance to have the football shoved into our cradled arms. My favorite is a special-team’s drill that tries to simulate a punt or kick-off return. Two boys are stationed about 30 yards apart on what would be the 30 yard line and another is about 45 yards downfield, waiting for the ball to come sailing. The minute the ball is kicked the two defenders sprint toward the boy who hopes to maintain enough concentration to catch the ball and then somehow elude the two would-be tacklers. Speed and blind courage are rewarded if you take the proper angle, if you don’t go for the runner’s fake. It’s the collision with the ball carrier that rocks both players with a force that obliterates that civilized space we have to occupy most of the day as we sit in our desks and listen to our teachers talk about the pillars of democracy or the transitive property.

I like this drill for many reasons. None of them very good. I still want to hit some of the kids who in junior high called me and my friends every homophobic slur in the book. I want to teach some of the jerks on the team who won’t hit anyone as big as they are not to pick on little kids in practice. I want to embrace the myth that I can wield my body like a righteous weapon, taking care of the small business that God seems to overlook or ignore. My only rule: never make a dirty hit. And the punt drill provides me ample time to build up a good head of steam and level some folks who I believe need leveling.

In the heat, every 30 minutes we’re allowed to drink like cattle from a community watering hole — hoses connected to a basin with spigots that shoot beautiful fountains at the sky and make a mud trough below. This is before the age of Gatorade, and we drink as much water as our bellies will hold, hoping to stave off a cramp in our calf or quad, hoping we won’t get hit in the gut and throw up the precious fluid.

We jog back to our stations to begin what are called monkey rolls, once again throwing ourselves onto the grass, this time in a juggling pattern, wearing away feeble roots with our bodies, hardening the earth beneath our feet. This exercise demands an odd precision, a degree of teamwork and playfulness, braiding our motions, one over the other, three players rolling, then popping back to their feet, only to roll over the body of another player in an endless loop, until the coach shows mercy and blows his whistle or one of the players pukes.

Football’s lessons are fairly easy to learn, mainly that the sport is about hitting something, hitting someone, over and over. Learning to take a hit requires that you accept pain, that you allow it to crawl up your nerve endings as you speak to it, telling it that you know with time it will disappear or become a dull ache that as the season progresses is more like a numbness. Learning to deliver a hit requires you to focus on the rules of the game, to believe that the game justifies brutality, that violence on the field is somehow different from violence off the field. Very early you learn that it’s a disgrace not to be able to do both of these essential tasks — taking a hit and delivering a hit. For many of us these lessons are hard to keep straight, and that barely constrained violence floods our daily lives, manifested as fights in the bathroom at school, fights at parties on Friday and Saturday night, fights at home with our brothers and fathers.

A few weeks into the season, on a Monday when we need to go hard to prepare for the next team we play, our head coach calls us together before the start of practice. We can tell something’s wrong before he opens his mouth. His voice is hoarse and breaks every few words.  One of our teammates, a boy who never gets to play and who we often make fun of, is dead. He was hanging out with some neighborhood kids on Saturday afternoon, digging holes in large mounds of sandy soil near a construction site, and the tunnel he crawled into collapsed, suffocating him before the kids could get help or dig him out by themselves. On Thursday, we’re let out of school to go to mass at the Catholic church uptown and then to the funeral parlor. Some of the players bring vodka and whiskey in their cars because they think they’re supposed to drown their sorrows but really just want another excuse to drink. As we go by the open casket, our tears are mostly about guilt at our treatment of a boy who wasn’t as tough as the rest of us.

A few days later, on Friday night during a crucial point in the game, the defensive coach calls a stunt on third down. I’m supposed to dive for the hole between the guard and tackle, our middle linebacker coming around my right side to try to make it through the space between their tackle and tight-end. When the ball is snapped, I slice left and shed the tackle’s glancing block; the guard doesn’t even see me, which means I’m quickly into the backfield with only the fullback between me and the quarterback. It’s a pass play, and I get low to shuck the fullback who’s trying to buy time for his team. The quarterback sees me coming and starts to scramble right, but I’ve left the fullback on the ground with a forearm blow and sprint toward the quarterback. He wants to get rid of the ball to a receiver downfield but our secondary covers his targets. He pumps, hoping for a receiver to change his route and go long or curl back to the flat, but by this time it’s too late.

I’ve arrived, thrusting my arms back, driving my legs forward into the hit, putting my shoulder pad beneath his shoulder pad and surging into the blow. His head snaps back with a dull thud on the ground. The result is a sack and a quarterback who can’t get up. The crowd screams its approval and my teammates slap me on the back, on the butt, on the helmet. The band strikes up our fight song. The referees blow their whistles and signal the timekeeper to stop the clock. The training staff for the other team runs onto the field to attend to the quarterback. They open a leather box with handles and pull out smelling salts, waving them beneath the quarterback’s nose, as if he’s a head chef and must approve of the seasoning. After a few moments, he’s helped to his feet, and we clap for him, showing we’re good sports. He doesn’t return to the game because he has a concussion. I continue to play, but I can’t help worrying about him. After the game, coaches, players, and fans congratulate me for “sticking it to him.” Everyone loves a good hit, the kind you can hear in the stands.

Not all violence is treated with equal respect. There’s a code. If you’re going to fight somebody, you let them know it, you call them out. A sucker punch is a coward’s path. You fight fairly, if you’re going to fight. However, more than one dad offers this piece of advice: It’s best if you get the first punch in; it makes your opponent less likely to want the fight to last.

Before each game we take a knee in the locker-room and pray. I try my best to believe in the prayer our coach mumbles, but mostly I feel hot, uncomfortable. What does God have to do with the way I hit the boy across from me, how I execute my pursuit angle so I can get to the ball carrier, place my shoulder in his gut, drive him to the ground, and maybe make him cough up the ball? I don’t want anyone to get hurt, but I want to hit the player across from me as hard as I can so he backs down the rest of the game. I want to cause a fumble. I want to do something to help us win.

I go to Bible study with a couple of brothers who are Mennonite. Their family owns a farm on County Road 13, and I help them when it’s haying time, tossing the square bales onto the wagon in the field, later stacking them in the mow. They’re in the high school band and march at halftime of the football games. At Bible study we talk about Jesus’ commandment to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies. We make fun of the ridiculous mascots for the area high schools — “Redskins” and “Pilgrims” and “Minutemen” — knowing these names say a lot about where we live. But I doubt if any of my Mennonite friends understand what it’s like to be on the field, and I’m embarrassed of what the game does to me, or, more likely, what I allow the game to do to me, what I crave most in the game. I’m trying to figure it out myself. It’s a sport after all. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong with the fact that I like how anger wells up in me when I’m hit and how it helps me to hit harder the next play.

Every season at homecoming, coach invites a former player to give us a pep talk. This year it’s a guy who graduated a couple of years before and plays Division I football at Ball State. His first year at college he started on defense, but tonight he’s using crutches to get around because he has a cast that starts at his hip and ends at his toes. He hobbles to the front of the room, shoulders and arms flexing with each step as he shoves the crutches forward. Nobody says a word. We’re not sure what to expect. This is the same guy we feared when we had to practice against him. He was strong and fast and could deliver a lick you felt a week later. His face is pinched, not like he’s tasted something sour but like he’s trying to solve a math problem, trying to figure out how he ended up here, in this condition. When he opens his mouth, his voice is too loud and he overcompensates so we can’t hear his next few words.

I try to concentrate on what he’s saying, but I keep coming back to his eyes. They’re red-rimmed and go in and out of focus. He’s crying, wiping his nose with his shirtsleeve, shouting at us in fragments. The gist of it is that we never know when the next play will be our last. He swears at us. Well, not exactly at us, at the whole damn situation, the absurdity of it. He begs us to give it everything we have on every single play. The speech is full of clichés, the kind you hear in sport’s movies, in postgame interviews. But the veins in his forearms and one on the side of his neck rise against his skin as he squeezes the foam crutch handles and swings his head to glare at us. He finally breaks down, and coach puts his arms around his heaving shoulders, whispers something in his ear, then tells us to get out on the field and make this guy proud of us. We leave the locker room with screams and hoots and a range of expletives that hint at the anxiety we feel. None of us wants to end up in a cast, trying to walk with crutches.

The last game of the season ends in a blowout. We win and most of the starters spend the fourth quarter on the sidelines, watching the second and third team run-up the score. I keep looking at the sky. It’s dark and has been since long before the game began. This is early November and you can see your breath. A full moon hangs directly between the field-goal posts. You can’t see the stars because of the field lights, but I know they swirl in great numbers above our heads.

By the middle of the fourth quarter the seniors on the team are crying and hugging each other, saying how we’ll never forget this game, this season, these past four years. We’ve all listened to John Cougar’s “Jack and Diane” too many times, and we believe it when he tells us “life goes on long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.”

I’ve decided to play basketball in college, ignoring the much better offers to play college football. I hope this means I’ll be saying goodbye to the anger that stirs inside me, the good feeling violence sometimes provides. One of my classmates who is in choir with me — one of the guys I think I’m defending when I plow someone in a tackling drill in practice — will die of AIDS two years from now. Another will make it a few more years before stepping in front of a train, taking his own life. Most of us will drift into a job, not unlike the jobs our fathers have, and we’ll begin to embellish our days playing football, making them mean more than they do, trying to pretend we learned our lessons well.

 

This essay was originally published in Center for Mennonite Writing Journal in 2014.

.

Todd Davis is the author of five full-length collections of poetry — Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe — as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited the anthology Making Poems. His writing has won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Sycamore Review, West Branch, and Poetry Daily. He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

Mob Hit at the Ark Ramp

Towson, Maryland, June 1986

One morning the summer of my fifteenth year, skateboarding alone
at the halfpipe in Timmy Tadder’s back yard, I began to see cop cars
pass by. And cop vans. And more cop cars. County and state police
and unmarked cars and one ambulance driving slowly like a hearse.

I was sure they were looking for me. They had me dead to rights
on the deck, full pads on, sweat dripping from my helmet, shirt
soaked through, Agent Orange blasting from Tim’s boom box.
Maybe it was the punk rock, the all-day back-and-forth roar of
polyurethane wheels on plywood, the grating sound of metal
on concrete pool coping that sent the neighbors dialing. I froze.

But they kept driving past the halfpipe to the end of the cul-de-sac.
I stopped counting cars at twenty and went back to my agenda
of nailing ollies to fakie and boosting my backside airs.

Still, I thought, a bored, observant cop might detour into Timmy’s
driveway and take my board because he could, but the procession
of Crown Victoria Interceptors rolled past, disinterested. Later
in the afternoon, the ambulance rolled slowly back up the road,
escorted by a police car, emergency lights dark, sirens silent.

That night, the news said the body of a man who lived at the end of
Timmy’s road had been found on the horse trail in the nearby woods
with a hole in the back of his head. Executed. His wife had heard men’s
voices in their garage before he left for an early round of golf, assumed
they were his friends. They never found out who killed him, or why.

And I had gotten away with another session on the Tadders’ halfpipe,
my airs a bit higher, still a month from landing my first ollie to fakie,
the cops none the wiser of the ongoing crime being committed in plain
sight on an otherwise quiet and safe suburban street, where everyone
was friendly and worked hard. Where that kind of thing never happened.

Matt Hohner holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His work has been shortlisted for the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, taken both third and first prizes in the Maryland Writers Association Poetry Prize, and won the Oberon Prize for Poetry. Hohner once won a poetry slam held on Whidbey Island, Washington over the phone from Baltimore, Maryland. His work has appeared in numerous publications nationally and internationally. He has collaborated with local visual artists for the light ekphrastic, and Dutch musician / composer Brechtje for an original composition using his poem “How to Unpack a Bomb Vest,” performed by the band VONK in The Netherlands in March 2018. Hohner has held a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, which was made possible by a grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. He is the author of the book Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House, 2018). An editor of Loch Raven Review, Hohner lives in Baltimore.

When it rained,
we had class
in the gym

where, at center court,
there would be equipment
from bygone eras.

Relics of our fathers,
or our fathers’ fathers’
physical education

from simpler times
when hula hoops
and pogo sticks
were roller rink crazes,

from back when
our ancestors
square danced
in barns to crackling
records which spun
like rings around
the planets.

They grew up playing
boring games called
World War
and Great Depression,

that smelled so old
and musky to us
back then.

 

Ed Wade expatriated to Hanoi, Vietnam in 2012. There, he plays for the Hanoi Dragons Rugby Union Football Club and the Hanoi Dinhers (pronounced ‘Dingers’) softball team. He writes and lectures for the Professional Communications Department at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. His work has appeared in Aethlon: The  Journal of Sport Literature, The Broken Plate, and Ajar, where his poems were  published in English and Vietnamese. Currently, he is compiling poems for a chapbook tentatively titled Chopsticks.

by Michael Conlon

Before I take my second step from the concrete dugout to the grass, I catch myself, look toward home, then deliver the code.

“Blue?”

The iron bars that protect his face turn in my direction. I stretch my right hand horizontally above my raised left hand, make the sign of the “T,” then wait. After checking to see that all motion has ceased on the field, he thrusts both arms toward the darkening sky, and declares for all to hear — “Time!”

I know him as Bob, a local C.P.A., married with no kids, a friendly sort if I catch him standing behind the stands, spitting out sunflower seed shells, waiting his turn to assert domain over 18 boys — 10 and 11-year-old boys — and their parents. Because of the latter, I address him on the field by his widely accepted, yet unofficial title and outfit color, “Blue.” This reassures our own and the opposing parents that I would never attempt a personal association, nor ask for personal favoritism from such an error-prone, unfairly-biased individual.  He grins my request for a time out, knowing either I can’t count or haven’t memorized section 3-3-7 of the Little League rulebook.

“It’s your third visit,” he chimes, assuring me that I won’t be required to remove my pitcher, Roger, from the game.

I sidle up to the foul line, much like Archie Graham toes the gravel in Field of Dreams, and wait for Roger to slouch over from the pitching mound. For some reason, the higher powers in Little League, sometime between when I last played and first decided to manage, had decided that an adult crossing onto the field of play was either an unacceptable time-consuming process or an invitation for the whole team to join in a discussion of whose fault the last play was. In any case, I have made the adjustment, in fact have become a master of the 15-second pep talk (we’re talking 10 and 11-year-old attention span here).  The key, as Earl Weaver or Walter Mathau might tell you, is 1) anticipate the problem, then 2) solve it before it occurs.

For example, my first visit of the inning took place after a bunt “home run” by their diminutive second baseman. Like a pinball, the baseball seemed to have picked up momentum with every hand it touched, traveling first from the trusty fingers of my third baseman, Steady Eddie, ten feet in front of home plate over Juan’s glove at first base and into the foul territory down the right field line. Hughie, now disengaged from a detailed analysis of a dandelion by a cacophony of shouts and fingers pointing from the field and stands, located the elusive white, threaded cowhide, picked it up, and launched it high above second baseman Joey and shortstop Brooks, finally dribbling into the leftfield foul territory. As the batter’s little legs staggered around third, Marky reached the hot potato and sent it flying home, intended for A.J.’s pounding catcher’s mitt, yet lodging with a twang into the chain link fence 20 feet above and behind home plate.

Roger tried to convince me that his current supporting defensive cast was incapable of catching anything else for the rest of their given time on this earth (My translation.  His version was “They all suck.”). I reassured him that it wasn’t his fault, that they were trying their best, and at least there were no base runners to worry about.  I walked back to the dugout as three dads yelled out to Roger conflicting suggestions as to how he might more effectively contort various parts of his anatomy before releasing the next pitch for greater accuracy.

My second visit of the inning was prompted by Roger’s walking the next three batters, then thunking the fourth in the helmet (a boy named “Tito Tito Tito” judging from the piercing screams from his mother in the snack bar).  I made my way to the edge of the field amidst the boos of opposing parents while two dads (apparently a paramedic — “Don’t move, don’t move,” and a lawyer — “Stay down. Stay down”) tended to the stricken victim now writhing in Oscar-worthy pain amidst his spotlight in the diamond dirt.  I encouraged my slack-jawed young hurler with my collection of can’t-miss platitudes — “It’s not your fault, Roger, accidents happen. The rest of the batters will be scared to death of you. Don’t aim it — just throw it. We’re only down by eight, it’s only the second inning. I’ll buy you some Big Chew if you can get one more out.”

However, Roger only cheered up when, Lazarus-like, Tito arose from the dust and bounded toward first base, his legendary status at tomorrow’s school lunch tables assured.  On my way back to the dugout, A.J. walked over, covered his mouth with his mitt to avoid detection by lip-readers on the other side, and whispered, “Should I change the signs my dad’s been flashing me to give to Roger?” Considering that Roger had only one pitch, I said “Sure.”

So here I stand, a third time at the foul line.  It isn’t A.J.’s missing the next pitch which bounced off Bob’s…er…Blue’s ankle, allowing one run to score.  It isn’t A.J.’s return throw over Roger’s head into centerfield, allowing the second run in.  It isn’t even Brooks checking out the scoreboard to see if we have qualified to forfeit the game via the 10-run mercy rule while a groundball trickles between his feet, sending Lazarus home. No, it is something much worse, something that even most big-league managers (besides Tom Hanks) are not equipped to deal with.  Roger is crying.

When I first encountered this little league phenomena where peer pressure and unrealistic parental expectations collide with innate human immaturity, usually resulting from a strike out, error, or misplaced mitt, I tried the direct approach with the player—”Hey, come on now, what’s the matter, what’s the big deal?  We’re having fun, aren’t we?” The stricken looks on the victims’ faces set me straight–this was Armageddon, the end of the world, the black hole from which no traveler returns, and I might as well be calling for reinforcements at Little Big Horn as far as they were concerned.

After some thought, I prepared for the next outburst of moisture with a classically proven formula — comic relief. If Osric or the Porter could deflect the audience from the homicidal tragedies of Hamlet or Macbeth, surely, I could transport a young boy from depths of despair. Upon the next tragic miscue, I chimed in —”Hey, who died? What, you lose a leg or something? They run out of pizza at the snack bar?”— but this attempt produced no comic relief, just more sobbing tears.  As the season progressed, I even tried comparative commiseration —”Hey, this isn’t half as bad as the last time you cried, is it?”  Unfortunately, a 10-year old’s memory is selective and short.

So, I tell A.J. to go over to the screen and talk over some strategy with his dad, get down on one knee (staying in foul territory, of course) and look up at the glistening cheeks and red eyes of my martyred hurler.  With Knute Rockne on one shoulder and Mother Theresa on the other, I wait for those sad eyes to rise and meet mine, then offer —”You know, Roger, I think that maybe we should let Billy finish pitching the inning…”

Without a word, Roger storms back to the mound, fires three bullets past their clean-up hitter, and is back in the dugout spitting sunflower seed shells into upturned batting helmets before you can say “Snips and snails, and puppy dogs’ tails.”

I guess there is some lesson here about the law of supply and demand, or survival of the fittest. But I don’t have time to figure it out. Luis can’t find his second batting glove, Eddie’s mother has arrived to take him to a birthday pool party, and Brooks is beginning to do the bathroom dance, so I have to scour the depths of my equipment bag and find his emergency card to see who can legally escort him to the john. Ah, the heck with it.

“Blue?”

Michael Conlon is a retired high school English teacher and softball coach from Southern California, who lasted one year coaching his son’s Little League team. The kids were great. Endless tryouts and drafting, searching for and squatting on potential practice fields pockmarked with holes where “stay down on the ball” risked a potential trip to the plastic surgeon, and explaining playing time, batting orders, and strategy to parents dampened his enthusiasm for the national pastime. He wondered if it was always like this. From the end of Field of Dreams II — “Hey, Dad, you want to coach?”

by M.C.K. Carter

I ran yesterday — four miles. Late in the day, my route took me almost straight west. I ran past fields, fall-plowed too wet. Mounds of heaved dirt chewed up with corn stalks. Flat acres of soybean ground, level as a floor. Low in the sky, the sun had pulled cloud trails together like scarves of orange and rose. My smooth black leggings and the red-violet swash of my shoes contrasted against the sagging, settled asphalt.

The last thing the world needs is another essay on growing old. Seriously, again? What do I think I can add?

Two years ago, I read Mark Jacobson’s essay, “65,” which began by recounting the ages he considered “old” at different years of his youth: 37, 42, 52, and finally, 65.

At every stage of my life, I have stretched time out like a rubber band for an extra 10 years. I married at 30 and had my first child (our son) at 33. Started my doctorate at 40, then taught elementary art for three years, had our daughter when I was 44, and finished my dissertation at 47 — barely in time. It’s an odd chronology — like slides out of order in the carousel. But there they are: two children, a doctorate, a marriage. A whole life out of time, and out of sequence.

But it never bothered me. In the movie, Orlando, Tilda Swinton remains ageless and proceeds serenely through time, adroitly switching genders and partners with every century. I’d look at my face in the mirror. The idea of this self — a constant — looking out through eyes that work because a heart beats enough, seems plausible. Yep, still there.

Last year I turned 60.

And then, people started dying. Prince, David Bowie, and Alan Rickman — 59, 69, and 70, respectively. For the first time, the thought came: how much time do I have left? David Bowie is gone now forever — not a piece of performance art or a concept album to be revealed next week. Prince looked eternally 19.

If I die at 70, like Bowie and Rickman, I have 10 years.

Lucia Berlin, short story writer. Published 77 short stories. Died at 68.

Make the most of it, whispers the fairy godmother.

***

But more than my age led up to this running on the county roads.

First: my daughter is now 17. I did the math. When she’s my age, I’ll be 104, if I’m still alive. I’ve watched my in-laws and my own parents age. The slowing down starts about now, in the mid-sixties. The consequences of ignoring the body’s yellow warning lights (not red yet) begin to show. And it’s just easier to do less. For example, our family doctor told my dad when he was 63, his blood sugar was a bit high and he wanted to put him on a diet to bring it down. Dad’s-oh-so-Chicago reply: Bullshit.

My dad can hardly walk now. He despises his walker, a folding aluminum cliché. If he falls, my mother calls “the big house” (their name for it) and two burly men are sent to their duplex. They hoist him up and check for damages. If he’s lucky and he didn’t hit anything on the way down requiring stitches, my parents will thank them cheerfully, gratefully, all the while Dad muttering, Jesus Christ, getting old is a bitch, this is a helluva thing, goddamnmit, thanks guys, Jesus Christ am I bleeding somewhere? Shit. Barb get me band-aid, hell no I’m fine. Vertical posture re-attained, the reason he fell is forgotten and fades away. The convenient amnesia of an alpha-male. So, while he hates he can’t stand up on his own, hates the walker, hates this whole goddamn business of getting old — he hates exercising even more. The one thing that would help.

It is easy to see this from a distance, the tiny complexities and entanglements not quite visible. But I consider him a cautionary tale.

Second. My depression. In the parlance of our time I’m supposed to say: I live with depression. Which gives it a companion-like aura. Someone described it like wearing a lead vest. For myself, it’s like the lead covered my head and shoulders, pulling me into a stupor, like moving through slowly hardening concrete.

I ran in high school to lose weight — which never worked. And in college, it was an easy way to pass the required gym classes. I was a graphic designer in my twenties. I lived downtown in a renovated Victorian mansion and felt very smart and urban. But, learning on the job, I made some mistakes costing our department money. I began to fantasize driving my car off the interstate embankments.

My high school on the west side of town had a cross-country track that ran around and about through the neighboring fields like a Celtic knot overlaid on the acres of grass. Two or three times a week, I’d drive out there and run and run and run. It worked like drug and the effect lasted for about the next two days. It wasn’t like running away — it was running away. My super-power.

I remembered how that felt.

It took me six months to work up to these four miles. I started very slowly, setting my iPhone to time the laps. Run for two minutes, walk for a minute. Repeat eight times.

Whatever the chart said, it took me longer to get there. Our family doctor had cautioned me: after the age of 45, it takes twice as long (or more) to build muscle mass. So, I didn’t push it. I accepted whatever I could do, and just kept on. I noticed that after the walking bits, running again was much easier. As much as it felt like I was running with cinderblocks for feet, if I walked for a bit, and then started up again, those first glorious minutes were ease and grace. And afterwards, my skin radiated, capillaries pulsing.

My shoes were three years old and an ache under the ball of my foot began appearing at the end of every run. By October, I decided I needed a new pair of shoes.

I took a list of the top four women’s running shoes to our sports store. Narrowed my eyes at the Nike swashes all over the windows, on the shoes posed in the small windows facing the mall, and on the t-shirts draped from the walls above the racks.

I read my list to the smiling young woman at the counter. Yes, they had three of the four and a newer model of the number one shoe.

Self-consciously, I ran around the store wearing each pair. The first shoe was the best. It was soft, and yet my whole foot felt supported. The second, its new updated version, had a firmer ride. The other two were good, but no comparison to the first pair.

I felt elated. I was not going gently into this good night. This new commitment needed to be affirmed. I asked for and was shown two pairs of leggings and a new running bra.

Thursday morning, I rolled out of bed. Grabbed the new leggings and unfurled them. The black spandex nylon sheathed my legs as I pulled them on, the curving silhouette of my calf against the rug. The widest part of the waistband spread firmly across the small of my back and the front curved slightly downward. In real life, my stomach rolls gently out. I had this stomach before I had my children and I have long accepted it as feature of my personal topography. But this amazing garment made it… not invisible, but somehow a more congruent curve to my body. The rounded belly on the Nike of Samothrace. In black lycra.

I’d only been out of bed 10 minutes.

The running bra came next. It had a swash. It was grey, snug, and hugged my breasts firmly to my ribcage.

Another look in the mirror. Me, but a faster-looking, hint-of-power me. A more-like-Scarlet-Johannsson me.

I had left the new shoes in their box. Now I set it on the bed, and lifted the lid. The tan tissue paper, translucent and crisp, crackled as I pulled it aside. The shoes lay nestled together. Deep red-violet glowed through the black mesh fabric of the uppers.

Radioactive. Glowing embers. Veiled power.

I pulled one out. The white sole layered with red-violet. It was light. Airborne.

The cushioning inside enveloped my feet as I put them on. The thick, soft laces were black, trimmed with white and knotted with a cushiony grip.

The last thing before leaving the house: I turned my cell phone to the U2 station. In a wave, music flooded my ears. The pulsing beat filled me, carried me. The air was cool, icing across my thighs, winding up the sleeves of my sweatshirt.

My stride found its rhythm and I turned onto the road. These are my legs. This is my heart pounding. My lungs breathing. The music plays on. I am utterly myself under this dome of sky.

Ten years is long enough I think. It’s plenty of time.

 

M.C.K. Carter lives near Alexandria, Indiana. She has an M.A. in creative writing from Ball State University, where she teaches Art Education and Art History. This is her second essay to be published in Sport Literate. Other essays have appeared The Atticus Review, and Juxtaprose Literary Magazine. She lives on a family farm with two Welsh Cobs.

 

 

Q&A with JD Scrimgeour

by William Meiners

JD Scrimgeour is finishing up his 21^st year of teaching at Salem State University. In a town best known as the site for one of America’s oldest of witch hunts, Scrimgeour has adapted a teaching style to better suit his students, published work in three genres (poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction), and provided a great deal of reflection on the games he’s played.

One poetic essay, “Living in the Outfield,” earned Scrimgeour the top prize in Creative Nonfiction’s “Writing About Baseball” contest. The essay, he says, poured out of him like a poem where he tried to avoid conventional sentiments. Hence the line in the first paragraph: “There are no fathers and sons in the outfield.” Except for maybe that short time when Ken Griffey and Ken Griffey Junior played together in Seattle.

William Meiners: In your award-winning book, Themes for English B: A Professor’s Education in and Out of Class, you talk a lot about race, about class, as well as how much you learn from your own students at Salem State. In general, how are students different now from 12 years ago?
JD Scrimgeour: I’m going to qualify this answer by saying that I wouldn’t trust it, since it has so much to do with where I am in my teaching career. Here goes: I continue to admire Salem State students for their pluck and endurance. Salem State students today do more of their homework than they used to; they seem to be more obedient (subservient?) than in years past. They also are ridiculously overworked and generally stressed and depressed.

The obedience might sound like a bad thing, but what a joy it is to have a class discussion when most of the students have done the reading! On the other hand, they also seem more obedient to their true overlords — their bosses at their crappy jobs who won’t give them a night off to see a play or poetry reading on campus.

Students have always worried about getting a job after they graduate from college, but now they are worrying about a job before they start. And, of course, they are working more than ever while trying to cram in as many courses as possible. They are feeling the squeeze that the middle-class is experiencing in the U.S.

I fear for our students, and for higher education. Yet I suspect desperate situations will lead to necessary action. I see sprouts of activism in students today. I find that heartening.

WM: There’s a nod to Langston Hughes with this book, beginning with the title and the essay, “Me and Langston,” which details some of your earliest attempts at poetry as a Columbia University student in the mid-1980s. How has your “relationship” with Hughes changed over the years?
JD: Our first loves often are inexplicable. We like the poets we like irrationally. Hughes’ sense of social justice is mine (though I suspect my blinders are different than his). He knows that there are both cruel systems and cruel people in the world, but, as he says in The Big Sea, “most people are generally good.” I feel that we have no choice but to believe that, too.

Hughes also mocks pretension, and celebrates our small failures, those weaknesses that make us human. He’s got a great little poem in the voice of a guy who plays the numbers (the underground lottery in Harlem). The guy swears that if he ever hits his number he’ll stop playing: “gonna salt every dime away…I ain’t gonna/play back a cent.” But then he adds, “(Of course I might/combinate a little/with my rent.)” I love this poem irrationally. Why? Because it shows us real human behavior without judgment, with warm humor. Or maybe it’s just because I can’t stick to a no-sugar diet.

I never was fond of Hughes’s overtly political or inspirational verse, which tends to get a lot of play, especially these days. Like James Baldwin said, Hughes kept stuff that “more disciplined” writers would have thrown away. Still, when he’s on, like in “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” well, I fall in love all over again.

WM: There’s a rhythm to basketball — from the particular game itself, to a player finding that zone where everything seems to go in the bucket. I know you’ve explored that through some of your poetry. Can talk about how your own basketball game may have influenced your poetry?
JD: I’m not sure it has that much. In the essay, “Announcing My Retirement,” I draw a few connections, but I also suggest there may be more differences than similarities.  Basketball is what I did to avoid writing poetry, to escape words.

WM: Sport Literate published what seems like more of a narrative poem, and you’ve obviously published fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. I’m curious about your approaches to each genre. Do you have a favorite? What do you find, if anything, limiting in one of the genres?
JD: I never planned to write in different genres. Very simply, I gravitate toward whatever makes it easy for me to write. There was a time when I was writing dramatic monologues because the voices I inhabited felt fresher and more human than the other poetry I’d been trying to write. And then suddenly they stopped, and, though I wanted to write more of them, I wasn’t able to, so I moved on to something else.

Poems come to me only occasionally, and then I dink around with them for a long time. Curiously, I need a longer stretch of time to write a poem than to write prose. I have to draft an entire poem (or a section of a long poem) in one sitting. I can use a spare 15 minutes to write two paragraphs of a short story or essay, but I can’t just “make progress” on a poem.

I find poetry has the most limitations, as well as the most possibilities. Poetry not only has a limited audience, but often I feel that poetry’s audience goes to the genre for different reasons than I do; they want flashes of scintillating language, density, and complexity. My own preferences and aims in poetry are more like those mentioned by Elizabeth Bishop in one of her letters: spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery.

I feel that the essay might be the best form to expand a reader’s aesthetic (and consciousness). There aren’t as many preconceived notions of the form, and so readers don’t have their guard up in the same way as they might with poetry or fiction.

But fiction? Recently fiction has been what has enabled me to write. I’m writing a collection of stories about youth baseball, based on years of coaching my sons in Little League. It has made me realize how much I came to know that environment, and how much I assumed. It’s a way to test out what I thought I knew about that world by pressing the buttons of class, race, and masculinity and seeing “how folks do.”

WM: “Spin Moves” explores your history with pickup basketball. It’s also the last essay in your book. What are the biggest life lessons you take away from the basketball court? I also read the essay on your “retirement.” What do you miss most about playing?
JD: I’ve learned that people care if you’re good, but they usually care more about whether you’re a good teammate, whether you’ll be in the right place or make the right pass or understand what’s needed in a particular situation. I try to be a good teammate.

I’ve never been in therapy. That’s probably because I played basketball. The nonstop pace cleansed my mind. I could focus only on the next moment on the court. I miss that tremendously, as now my head gets cluttered with Trump, and grading, and email. It seems that I can never empty it.

J.D. Scrimgeour is the author of the basketball memoir Spin Moves and Themes For English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. He’s also published three collections of poetry, The Last Miles, Territories, and Lifting the Turtle. His essay, “My Outfield,” won Creative Nonfiction’s “Writing About Baseball” contest. He runs the creative writing program at Salem State University. “Today, Late April” is part of a longer piece, “Forest River Park,” which is from of a collection in-progress of stories about baseball, Hit By Pitch. The title story appears in the most recent issue of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.

William Meiners is the editor-in-chief at Sport Literate.