Stephen Tignor | Longreads | August 2016 | 22 minutes (5,613 words)
Our latest Exclusive is a new story by Stephen Tignor, co-funded by Longreads Members and published in Racquet magazine’s premiere issue. Racquet is “a new quarterly tennis magazine that celebrates the art, ideas, style and culture that surround tennis” and we are excited to be able to feature them.
The fifth edition of the ESPY Awards, held in 1997 at Radio City Music Hall in New York, was a celebration of the African-American athlete. Michael Johnson won Best Male Athlete, Tiger Woods and Desmond Howard received honors, black celebrities were on hand to pay tribute to Jackie Robinson, and Ray Charles performed.
But the loudest ovation was reserved for Muhammad Ali. The former heavyweight champion was presented with the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage, which for more than two decades has been given to a recipient who “reflect[s] the spirit of Arthur Ashe, possessing strength in the face of adversity, courage in the face of peril, and the willingness to stand up for their beliefs no matter what the cost.”
It was the evening’s melancholy high point. The spirits of Ashe and Ali were alive in the room. Yet the voices of these two heroes of the 1960s and ’70s could no longer be heard. The tennis player had died four years earlier, at age 49, of complications from AIDS. The boxer was only 55, but Parkinson’s disease had muted this most verbal of athletes. The man who introduced Ali at the ESPYs, Sidney Poitier, spoke for many of his generation when he said, “The first thing I remember is his voice.” But on this night, Ali could muster just two words for the audience: “Thank you.”
It would be hard to imagine two people, let alone two sportsmen of the same era, whose personalities diverged as much as theirs did. Ashe was cautious and cerebral, Ali brash and outrageous. Ashe excelled in a genteel sport, Ali in a brutal one. Ali refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War; Ashe was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Ali joined the separatist Nation of Islam and befriended Malcolm X; Ashe dedicated his life to the cause of Martin Luther King and integration. If we think of Ali by his given name, Cassius Clay, even their surnames—Clay and Ashe—represent opposing states of matter.
Yet it was fitting that they should be honored together on a night of African-American celebration. During the same tumultuous period, they had proved what a powerful impact engaged athletes can have on the world. Ashe had once said of Ali, “He was largely responsible for it becoming an expected part of a black athlete’s responsibility to get involved.” Ashe was one of those who had followed Ali’s lead. Read more…
“The dateline is Elyria, Ohio, a city of 55,000 about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. You know this town, even if you have never been here. A place buffeted by time and the economy, a place where the expectations have been lowered, but not hopes for better days to come. A place where politicians, in this election year, say the American dream is still possible.”
“A bunch of songs later, after a run-through of the set-ending ‘Thunder Road,’ Springsteen hops off the stage, drapes a towel around his neck, and sits down in the folding chair next to me.“ ‘The top of the show, see, is a kind of welcoming, and you are getting everyone comfortable and challenging them at the same time,’ he says. ‘You’re setting out your themes. You’re getting them comfortable, because, remember, people haven’t seen this band. There are absences that are hanging there. That’s what we’re about right now, the communication between the living and the gone. Those currents even run through the dream world of pop music!’ ”
“On Feb. 17, 2000, Rae Carruth’s attorney filed an answer to Saundra Adams in Mecklenburg District Court. It was one of the more brazen counterclaims in the annals of U.S. jurisprudence: a demand for permanent custody of Chancellor Lee Adams. ‘The Defendant,’ the filing read, ‘is a fit and proper person to exercise care, custody and control of the minor child and it is in the best interest and welfare of the minor child that his care, custody and control be vested with the Defendant at the conclusion of the Defendant’s legal proceedings.’
“No, it wasn’t enough that Saundra Adams had to spend 28 days watching her only child die. Had to watch her grandson spend the first six weeks of his life in a tangle of wires and machines. Had to become a single mother again at age 42. Had to hide from reporters day and night. Had to worry about more than $400,000 in medical bills that her descendants had racked up while fighting for their lives. None of that was enough. Now she would have to draw from the little time and energy and money she had left and fight to keep the sole remaining heir to the Adams name away from the man who had wanted him dead.”
“After the autopsy, when the doctor found white blossoms of scar tissue on Wes Leonard’s heart, he guessed they had been secretly building there for several months. That would mean Wes’s heart was slowly breaking throughout the Fennville Blackhawks’ 2010—11 regular season, when he led them in scoring and the team won 20 games without a loss. It would mean his heart was already moving toward electrical meltdown in December, when he scored 26 on Decatur with that big left shoulder clearing a path to the hoop. It would mean his heart swelled and weakened all through January (25 against Hopkins, 33 against Martin) even as it pumped enough blood to fill at least 10 swimming pools.”
“The most infamous roster decision in high school basketball history came down 33 years ago on the edge of tobacco country, between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean, in an old town full of white wooden rocking chairs. The decision took physical form in two handwritten lists on a gymnasium door, simultaneously beautiful for the names they carried and crushing for the names they did not. A parade of fragile teenage boys passed by, stopping to read the lists, studying them like inscriptions in stone. Imagine these boys in the time of their sorting, their personal value distilled to a binary question, yes or no, and they breathe deeply, unseen storms gathering behind their ribs, below their hearts, in the hollows of fear and exhilaration.
“The chief decision-maker loved those boys, which made his choice all the harder. He gave them his time seven days a week, whether they needed shooting practice at six in the morning or a slice of his wife’s sweet-potato pie. His house was their house and his old green Ford Maverick was their car and his daughter was their baby sister, and he liked the arrangement. He was tall and slender, like the longleaf pines that covered Cape Fear, and when he smiled in pictures, his dark eyes were narrow, hazy, as if he’d just awakened from a pleasant dream. His nickname, Pop, evoked some withered old patriarch, but Clifton Herring was only 26, one of the youngest varsity coaches in North Carolina, more older brother than father to his boys, still a better player than most of them. They’d never seen a shooter so pure. One day during practice he made 78 straight free throws.”
There are no wide-open spaces in presidential life, only nooks and crannies, and the front of Air Force One is one of them. When he’s on his plane, small gaps of time sometimes open in his schedule, and there are fewer people around to leap in and consume them. In this case, Obama had just found himself with 30 free minutes.
“What you got for me?” He asked and plopped down in the chair beside his desk. His desk is designed to tilt down when the plane is on the ground so that it might be perfectly flat when the plane is nose up, in flight. It was now perfectly flat.“I want to play that game again,” I said. “Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president.”
“Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a ‘perfect series.’ More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track.
“Bill Fong’s run at perfection started as most of his nights do, with practice at around 5:30 pm. He bowls in four active leagues and he rolls at least 20 games a week, every week. That night, January 18, 2010, he wanted to focus on his timing.”
“There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. ‘Can you give us a list?’ the marketers asked.”
Best Obligatory Stories from David Grann and Chris Jones
“One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a woman. She was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that she carried, ‘She knows how to use it.’
“(Sargent Steve) Blake was parked near downtown Zanesville, sipping his coffee, when his radio crackled shortly after five o’clock, two hours into just another shift. ‘I had no idea that was going to be one of the worst calls of my life,’ he says. He flicked on his lights and sirens. Maybe ten minutes after five he was at the start of Thompson’s driveway, where the fence narrowed into a pipe gate, still locked in place. Deputy Jonathan Merry, an open-faced twenty-five-year-old, arrived only a minute or two after him. They stood at the bottom of the driveway and saw the bear, now circling down by the gate. The lion was farther up and to their right. Blake told Merry to go to the Kopchak house, the second house down the road, and take a statement from Dolores Kopchak. She might help them form a clearer picture of what they now faced, and clarity was important in a situation like this. He also told Merry that if the bear or the lion pushed its way through the fence, he should shoot it.
“Sam Kopchak could see across to the bottom of the driveway from the little window in the door to his tack room, tucked away in a corner of his barn. He saw the officers talking to each other and thought, They’re going to need more than two.”
“ ‘The favor of your company is requested,’ read the invitation, ‘for the most local of harvest meals.’ I sent this to a healthy mix of 30 eaters both adventurous and particular, and set a date. On the menu: juleps made with the mint growing from my compost pile, coconut curry simmered with the mysterious squash that had taken over the backyard, dinosaur kale, cornbread, and the main event: a thick burgoo, featuring ‘heirloom tomato, tree nut, and alley-fattened wild caught game.’
“I didn’t expect nearly all of the invitees to accept, but evidently curiosity about urban squirrel’s viability as a protein source isn’t merely a weird, solitary obsession. A few days before the event I defrosted and cut up the legs and saddles, seared them off in a pot, and deglazed it with Madeira, a la James Beard. I sauteed diced bacon, onions, and garlic, added homemade chicken stock and the squirrel pieces, and braised them slowly.”
“Many times, I had to skip a question because I couldn’t figure out the answer, and then I got that paranoia that’s unique to someone taking a standardized test. I became fearful that I had failed to skip over the question on my answer sheet. So every five seconds, I’d double-check my sheet to make sure I didn’t fill out my answers in the wrong slots. One time I did this, and so I had to erase the answers and move them all forward. Only I had a shitty eraser, which failed to erase my mark and instead smeared the mark all over the rest of my sheet.”
Best story about a monkey that’s really about the role of government that’s really about nature’s place in the modern world that’s actually, maybe, really just about a monkey.
This is the story I’ve linked and forward more than any other this year. I just loved this damn funny, poignant narrative about a renegade macaque monkey on the loose in Tampa, the people trying to catch him, and the others who want to let him remain wild and free, if lonely, among the billboards and greenways of Tampa.
The citizenry of Tampa Bay was adamantly pro-monkey. People had long been abetting the animal, leaving fruit plates on their patios. A few people, one F.W.C. officer told me, called the agency’s monkey hot line to report that they’d seen the macaque several hours or even a couple of days earlier—offering totally useless intelligence, in other words, presumably just to stick their thumbs in the government’s eye. The Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay, as people called it, had very quickly become a celebrity.
I continue to be fascinated by the John McAfee train wreck. I’ve known the McAfee antivirus founder casually online for several years, and wrote about him when his compound was raided by the Belize Gang Suppression Unit this past Spring. But that was just the carrot top. My colleague Josh Davis spent the five months this year interviewing McAfee to file this amazing report on a millionaire gone South.
McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity, his light blue eyes sparkling. “This is a bullet, right?” he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia. “Let’s put the gun down,” I tell him. I’d come here to investigate why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I’m not so sure. But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. “Maybe what happened didn’t actually happen,” he says, staring hard at me. “Can I do a demonstration?” He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver and spins the cylinder. “This scares you, right?” he says. Then he puts the gun to his head. My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I admit. “We don’t have to do this.” “I know we don’t,” he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger.
I’m not sure what to say about this other than it’s a great read and BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCE!!!
Springsteen came to glory in the age of Letterman, but he is anti-ironical. Keith Richards works at seeming not to give a shit. He makes you wonder if it is harder to play the riffs for “Street Fighting Man” or to dangle a cigarette from his lips by a single thread of spit. Springsteen is the opposite. He is all about flagrant exertion. There always comes a moment in a Springsteen concert, as there always did with James Brown, when he plays out a dumb show of the conflict between exhaustion and the urge to go on. Brown enacted it by dropping to his knees, awash in sweat, unable to dance another step, yet shooing away his cape bearer, the aide who would enrobe him and hustle him offstage. Springsteen slumps against the mike stand, spent and still, then, regaining consciousness, shakes off the sweat—No! It can’t be!—and calls on the band for another verse, another song. He leaves the stage soaked, as if he had swum around the arena in his clothes while being chased by barracudas. “I want an extreme experience,” he says. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, “with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!”
Everyone has a fantasy about beating the house at a casino. (No? Just me? Okay, then.) And that’s because it basically never happens. Except to this guy. Don Johnson. (No. Not that Don Johnson.) Johnson beat not just one house, but three—The Tropicana, Ceaser’s and Borgata in Atlantic City, taking home $15 million from the blackjack tables in the process. Mark Bowden has the story of how he pulled it off.
But two years ago, Johnson says, the casinos started getting desperate. With their table-game revenues tanking and the number of whales diminishing, casino marketers began to compete more aggressively for the big spenders. After all, one high But two years ago, Johnson says, the casinos started getting desperate. With their table-game revenues tanking and the number of whales diminishing, casino marketers began to compete more aggressively for the big spenders. After all, one high roller who has a bad night can determine whether a casino’s table games finish a month in the red or in the black. Inside the casinos, this heightened the natural tension between the marketers, who are always pushing to sweeten the discounts, and the gaming managers, who want to maximize the house’s statistical edge. But month after month of declining revenues strengthened the marketers’ position. By late 2010, the discounts at some of the strapped Atlantic City casinos began creeping upward, as high as 20 percent.
I’m aware of the disconnect of a well-off, culturally elite, Left coast-dwelling, white guy picking a “best” story about race relations in modern America. So let me say, in a year when Trayvon Martin was needlessly shot dead and when race was an oft-used political poison during the election, this was the story (along with Kiese Laymon’s “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America”) that made me pause and think about race. “Fear of a Black President” is a brutal and depressing read and yet also a vital one. It’s also story that I think will stand the test of time. Ta-Nehisi Coates essay will be one that we look back on, in years to come, to understand where we were as a culture in 2012. And finally from a purely stylistic point, I found the deft touch with which he lands the closing paragraphs, after such a sprawling essay, both inspiring and intimidating. If only I could write so well.
In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.
A rock icon at age 62. A look inside Bruce Springsteen’s life, at home and in preparation for another tour, following the losses of bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici:
For the next hour and a half, the band plays through a set that alternates tales of economic pain with party-time escape. While the band plays the jolly opening riff of ‘Waiting on a Sunny Day,’ Springsteen practices striding around the stage, beckoning the imaginary hordes everywhere in the arena to sing along. There is a swagger in his stride. He is the rare man of sixty-two who is not shy about showing his ass—an ass finely sausaged into a pair of alarmingly tight black jeans—to twenty thousand paying customers. ‘Go, Jakie!’ he cries, and brings Jake Clemons downstage to solo. He practically has to kick him into the spotlight.
A bunch of songs later, after a run-through of the set-ending ‘Thunder Road,’ Springsteen hops off the stage, drapes a towel around his neck, and sits down in the folding chair next to me.
‘The top of the show, see, is a kind of welcoming, and you are getting everyone comfortable and challenging them at the same time,’ he says. ‘You’re setting out your themes. You’re getting them comfortable, because, remember, people haven’t seen this band. There are absences that are hanging there. That’s what we’re about right now, the communication between the living and the gone. Those currents even run through the dream world of pop music!’
Has political parody in Russia turned Vladimir Putin into a national joke?
Putin, who says that he does not use the internet, seemed unaware that much of the fear that he generated in his first decade in power has evaporated in the past year. Provoked by allegedly falsified results in the December Duma elections, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest against Putin’s decision to stand for a third presidential term in the election of 4th March. (He purported to stand aside in 2008 in taking the role of Prime Minister.) If he had been more connected with Russia’s fast-growing online culture, he would have known that by comparing the protestors’ white ribbons to condoms (as he did in the same phone-in), and metaphorically inviting his opponents to come to him to be hypnotised, suffocated and consumed, he was only offering himself up to the ridicule of the satirists who have played such a large role in the nation’s sudden political change of mood.
I’ve always been fascinated with religion, Russia, and missing persons stories so these five nonfiction pieces really captured my attention this year. The fallout from The New Yorker‘s Scientology piece turned out to be as compelling as the essay itself—and I had to put The New Yorker on here twice because the recent piece on Vladimir Putin is spectacular and continually evolving. Paul Collins’ piece on missing Barbara Follett was utterly haunting and Paul is a master of uncovering long-hidden mysteries. Everyone should check out all of his work, and I’m sure many have after reading that piece. And really, for the other two, who can turn away from secret cults and dead bodies found on beaches? Not me.
Hunter S. Thompson has a tendency to overshadow his subject matter, as if he invented the entire world in his own image, and this were a tenet of non-fiction. The dirty little secret of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that Las Vegas was, and is, pretty damn weird in its own right. It may have made Thompson, or at least his most famous work, as much as he made it. The Daily dispatches Zach Baron to Sin City, where he deftly balances archaeology and immersion. When it becomes impossible to separate the two, Baron just goes with it, exactly the kind of impulse that got Thompson into trouble in the first place—and made him something other than a mere egoist. (Part One, Part Two)
I’m not sure if Jon Mooallem’s cultural excavation of the high-five is a perfect piece of writing, but it pretty much epitomizes everything I think sports writing should do, or at least be allowed to do when the occasion demands it. This past week, David Remnick reviewed the new Howard Cosell biography. Before getting to Cosell, he made the case that sports are relevant because they overwhelm, overpower, and more or less preoccupy us. Sports make big noise; endless broadcast, commentary, and web opinion compel us to stick around indefinitely. It’s a grim vision of our relationship with games that, for many of us, are both a source of joy in themselves and anything but a closed system of stupid. Mooallem picks a fairly simple, if ubiquitous detail—one that connects the playing field to daily life, rather than forcing separation of imitation—and proceeds to chase down its origins, false leads and all. The high-five began in sports, but now belongs to us all. As it turns out, understanding the various creation myths behind it requires an acknowledgment that sports are never just what they seem. If sports envelope us, they do so as part of the big picture—not an alternative to it.
When a retrospective comes to New York, it’s time for the sharpest film writers to revisit old masters. This past summer, Robert Ryan got the treatment. I have a bad habit of vehemently disliking actors that any sane cinephile holds in high regard. I know them, I just can’t stand them. It always seems to be the ones who demand the deepest sympathy while unsettling audiences, anti-heroes whose heroism is a comfort to none. Ryan is one such outsider who invites no company, and Kent Jones’s piece—bloggy, to be sure, but vital and organized as any manicured feature—brought me that moment of conversion. The actor I couldn’t stand became an object of fascination; Jones acknowledges all that’s surface about Ryan, while honing in on a peculiar kind of pain that locates a leading man trapped inside the creep. As Jones observes, no one does alone like Robert Ryan. At that point, it’s no longer about our response, but his wooly brand of gravitas.
I originally saw this story on Frontline, which led me to ask Mark if I could include a television program on this list, since longform non-fiction television was itself a dying cult. Luckily, all Frontline stories double as ProPublica features, so on a technicality, I can slide it onto my list. “The American Behind India’s 9/11—And How the U.S. Botched Chances to Stop Him” isn’t quite the same without the solemn voiceover and grainy footage of eighties Philadelphia and military surveillance tapes. But the story of David Coleman Headley epitomizes the new narrative of terrorism. Instead of something shadowy and exotic, it’s full of plot twists and evasions that turn familiarity into something inherently sinister. Headley’s mother founded the Khyber Pass, one of Philly’s main indie venues by the time I got there in the mid-nineties. I had no idea that the name referred to mama Serrill Headley’s mysterious time in the region, or that for a time, her son—drug runner, future informant and jihadist—managed the place. “It could happen anywhere” is chilling, if contrived; “it has roots in your backyard”, this piece’s tacit refrain, is about the process of us becoming them, a delineation that really can’t comfort us for much longer.
I’m sure that half the known world included this David Grann banger on their list, but when making these picks, Grann is pretty much the five-hundred ton elephant in the room.
Putin had a kind word for Monson (“a real man”) and paid Yemelianenko the ultimate compliment of Russian masculinity, calling him a “nastoyashii Russki bogatyr”—a genuine Russian hero. As Putin spoke, and as the national audience watched, many in the crowd started to jeer and whistle. This had never happened to Putin before, not once in two four-year terms as President, not in three-plus years as Prime Minister. And yet now, having announced his intention to reassume the Presidency in March, possibly for another twelve years, he was experiencing an unmistakable tide of derision.
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