Search Results for: basketball

Benoit Paire, Tennis Solitaire

Thessaly La Force | Racquet and Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,353 words)

This story is produced in partnership with Racquet magazine and appears in issue no. 8.

“Hey guys,” reads the email that has just popped up in my inbox, “Benoit is a little hungry so can we meet at Samurai Mama around the corner from Eclectic Collectibles first?” I’m in Williamsburg; it’s a Sunday afternoon in August, the weekend before the start of the US Open. I am supposed to be shopping with the professional French tennis player Benoit Paire, age 29, currently ranked 52 in the world by the ATP. He is interested in showing me who he really is—off the court, no tennis talk—and we have agreed to meet at a vintage taxidermy boutique because Paire, when not traveling around the world for work 10 months out of the year, has an apartment in Geneva he still needs to decorate. Read more…

When Black Male Singers Were Sex Symbols

Philadelphia International Records / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ericka Blount Danois | Longreads | January 2019 | 23 minutes (4,688 words)

 

Driving through blinding rain from Baltimore to Philadelphia recently to see the documentary If You Don’t Know Me By Now, about the life of R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass, I was reminded how one of my first encounters with Teddy was as a life-size cardboard cutout of him my mother kept in our living room. Dressed in an Italian silk suit, he became part of my family as my parents and sister passed him daily on our way out the door to school.

I had already admired Teddy when I would browse my father’s extensive record collection as a kid and stare at the covers. Both the Jackson Five’s Third Album and The Teenagers Featuring Frankie Lymon album covers made me wish I had been born just a little bit sooner so I could meet Frankie Lymon or a young Michael Jackson. I thought Marvin Gaye was handsome, but when I saw Teddy Pendergrass’s album Teddy, I said to myself: One day I will marry a man that looks just like that. I don’t know what made Teddy future marriage material and not just a childhood crush. Maybe it was the handsome face and the masculine beard that looked like it tasted like Hershey’s Kisses. Maybe it was the aloof look and the symphony of gold chains on his chest, surrounded by a silk scarf and shirt. Or that North Philly, rough-and-rugged, raspy, commanding baritone voice. Or the way he talked trash on the album’s interludes. Or the half church, half sexual ecstasy shouts and ad-libs, sometimes full-on sermons and conversations mixed with singing. His weellls, ooohwaaahs, and yessssahs all got you to the point that, when he said with conviction “close the door!” on the cut of the same name, you nearly jumped up to slam it shut. He was the kind of man whose steak you made sure was hot when he came home as you handed him his pipe and slippers. Somehow I knew he was the whole package, a man’s man in a time when this is what it meant to be a man. And I wasn’t wrong.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2018: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2018. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

Home Field Disadvantage

Team USA and Canada face off during the super round of the Women's Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Kelsey McKinney | Longreads | November 2018 | 24 minutes (6,164 words)

The moment the members of Team USA disembarked their plane in Orlando, their fears were realized. This was the first Women’s Baseball World Cup ever played on United States soil, and they expected to be ignored.

At the last World Cup, played in 2016 in South Korea, Team USA didn’t make it to the final round of the only competition they ever play in. But at least in Korea they had been acknowledged. More than that, they’d felt important and beloved, barraged by reporters’ questions at every turn and hounded by fans: fans holding handmade signs with sparkling lettering, fans who knew their names and numbers, fans who sent love notes down to the dugout in the middle of their games.

For every day of the past two years each woman had trained, practiced, and dreamed about playing baseball. According to USA Baseball, the members of the U.S. women’s national baseball team are among the top 20 players in the country, but here at home, almost no one knows they exist.

“Everywhere we travel [in the States] we are in our USA jumpsuits and matching stuff, and everyone just thinks we’re the soccer team,” Marti Sementelli, a pitcher for Team USA, said before the tournament. “Everyone on our team is worried about what the atmosphere at the World Cup will be like.”

They were the hosts, after all, to 11 teams of women just like them, women who fought their way into a sport that constantly tried to push them out. As talented as any professional, they’d asked for time off work and school to play. They deserved a crowd. But they knew better than to expect one. No games sold out, and only two had more than 600 people in attendance.

Everyone on our team is worried about what the atmosphere at the World Cup will be like.

The World Cup took place over 10 days of oppressively muggy, late August Florida heat about an hour southeast of Orlando. Viera, Florida, is a sleepy, suburban town built on a swamp, where preteens drive around in golf carts. This is where the best women’s baseball in the world was played — not in Orlando or Miami, but in a town even people from Florida have never heard of.  

Team USA hadn’t won the gold since 2006, and had flopped in 2016, but this was home territory. Despite a lifetime of roadblocks, Team USA knew they were good enough to beat all the odds. Win gold here, several players hoped before the tournament began, and maybe — finally — Americans might pay attention, might notice how hard they are working for so little.

The USA women’s baseball team prepare to face Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Before Team USA played Team Japan, the defending, five-time World Champions, on the first night of the tournament’s second round, a five-year-old girl threw a ball back and forth with her father just outside the stadium. She wore a glove, and he caught her lobs with his bare hands. She said she wanted to play baseball. Her father said “hell yeah,” he’d let her play. “If she wants to fight for it, I’ll fight with her.” But to play baseball as a woman in America, you have to be willing to fight your entire life, because at every phase, you’re set up to fail.  

The Women’s Baseball World Cup is a relatively new tournament. Inaugurated in 2004, it takes place every two years. In the first week, 12 teams compete in groups and the top half of each group moves on to the Super Round. Every team in the Super Round plays the others once, and those standings determine which teams go to the gold medal and bronze medal games. This year, Japan, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Chinese Taipei, and Team USA made the Super Round. Ranked third coming into the tournament, Team USA hoped to medal after a disappointing performance in 2016.


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But they were at a disadvantage compared to teams like Japan and Canada, who practice together more than a month a year. The members of Team USA meet each other at tryouts, and train for five days together before the 10-day series. Returning players remember each other from past years, and a few weekends a year some former players fly to a common location to work together. But self-funded trainings aren’t officially organized, they’re the product of ambition and frustration.

It’s no wonder when Team USA played Japan on the first night of the Super Round, they made a couple mental errors: a ball not thrown on a steal, a miscommunication at second base. They are a team in uniform, but not in time spent on the diamond. They haven’t been given the time or resources to become a team the way Japan has.

In 2009, Kenichi Kakutani, a wealthy Japanese business owner, invested heavily in women’s baseball in Japan after watching a baseball tournament for high school girls. He formed what would eventually be called the Japanese Women’s Baseball League (JWBL), a tiny, four-team league that has made Team Japan an absolutely dominant force, taking gold at every WBWC in the past decade. Because more than 25 private high schools in Japan had women’s baseball teams, the talent was there to fuel the league, and the league itself encouraged more private high schools to start teams.

At first, it can seem easy to be a girl on the big diamond in the United States. Malaika Underwood, who has been on Team USA for more than a decade, grew up in San Diego playing tee-ball with kids in her neighborhood. Her team, the Brown Bears, had girls and boys on it, at least for a little while. Through tee-ball, machine-pitch, coach-pitch, even kid-pitch, no one questioned that Underwood was a baseball player; she was great.

“About age twelve or thirteen, D-Day came,” she says. “I had to decide whether I was going to try and play baseball in high school, or switch to softball.” Many people pressured her to switch, to try and hit the bigger, yellow softball thrown underhand on a smaller field. “They weren’t doing it with any malintent; they wanted to support me,” she says. “But at the same time, softball was a totally different sport. No disrespect to softball, but I didn’t want to play that.”

Federal courts have ruled under Title IX that baseball and softball are separate sports and that girls cannot be excluded from baseball teams just because a softball team exists at the same school. Softball is played on a smaller field, with a different ball, and different rules. In softball, runners cannot take a lead off bases. With a runner firmly on base, an infielder has to change her entire job, watch the pitcher for a throw-over, watch the runner for a steal, maybe even change her positioning. Without lead offs, there are far fewer steals, no balks, and far less nuance. “People come up to me and tell me on a daily basis that I should switch to softball,” Sementelli says. “You have to be the only girl on the team, or you have to switch to softball. It takes a lot for a little girl to fight to play on the big field.”

No disrespect to softball, but I didn’t want to play that.

Many girls do leave baseball for softball, often because there doesn’t seem to be any other choice. Unlike women’s basketball or women’s soccer, there aren’t national leagues for women’s baseball in the United States at any level: not Little League, not in high school, not in college, and not professionally. There are very few teams for girls to play baseball on together. Former player Justine Siegal runs an organization called Baseball for All, which coordinates tournaments and programs for girls to play. Sunrise, Florida, has a girl’s travel baseball team. Washington, D.C., has a team of all girls that plays in a boys’ league. Major League Baseball introduced a Trailblazers series in 2017, which offers competitive play and coaching for about 100 girls under age 13. “We believe these were necessary steps to send a message to our larger baseball audience that softball isn’t the only option for girls and women to play our game.” Tony Reagins, who is the executive vice president of baseball and softball development for Major League Baseball, wrote via email.

According to data gathered by Baseball for All, approximately 100,000 girls play baseball at the junior level making up about 2 percent of total players. Girls are playing baseball, or at least they want to. The problem isn’t demand; it’s supply. There are only a handful of opportunities for girls to play in the United States.

“The Trailblazers series is a great start,” Jennifer Ring, professor of political science at the University of Nevada and author of Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball, says. “[MLB] needs to make it known publicly that they want girls to play baseball. Not to play baseball in the major leagues, but to play professionally. I think if MLB really developed girls Little Leagues and youth leagues and added their brand to various tournaments throughout the country, it would take off.”

Playing baseball as a girl after puberty is even more difficult, because the game becomes entrenched in the school system. Underwood wrote letters to five high school baseball programs at magnet high schools she could attend with her baseball stats, and a single request: that she be given a fair chance to tryout for the team. Some coaches said no, the school had a softball team and she could play there; but a few schools said yes. Underwood went to the high school where she thought she’d have the best chance to play hardball. She played on the JV team her freshman and sophomore years, and her senior year started at second base on the varsity team.

“At ten years old, they tried to lie to keep me from playing in the league,” Ila Borders, a pitcher who was the first woman to win a game in a men’s professional baseball league, says. “I can tell you an instant where someone tried to keep me from playing every single year. When I was playing … I would have death threats.”

The USA women’s take batting practice ahead of their game against Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

By high school, most women still playing baseball are the only woman on their team. “Regardless of how much support you get, if you’re the only girl out there on the field, it’s pretty lonely,” Underwood says. “I had a supportive team and coaches all the way through high school, and it was still lonely.” According to a survey of high school athletics conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, almost half a million boys play baseball at the high school level. In the 2017–2018 school year, only 1,762 girls played baseball.

Puberty can also put girls at a disadvantage on teams and in leagues overwhelmingly populated by boys. “Growing up I was the fourth hitter and played shortstop, and now their testosterone has gone through the roof so I hit like seventh [or] eighth and play second,” Mia Valcke, who plays on Team Canada, says. “That’s the reality of being female in this sport. I’m still fighting and I’m competitive for sure, but it’s not the same.” When the only option is to play with boys, that isolation can kill a girl’s career.

Let’s say a young girl is willing to face all those battles and she wins. She plays varsity baseball in high school, loves the game. Maybe she even gets to attend the new Trailblazer series for women. “We have seen tremendous success in getting young men who have participated in our Breakthrough Series to play collegiately and so we wanted to apply the same approach for young women,” MLB’s Reagins says. There are no women’s baseball teams at any level of the American college system.

If a woman can reach the college level, she often can’t afford to fight her way onto a men’s team. Anna Kimbrell, a catcher for Team USA, played baseball through high school but switched to softball in college because she was offered a big scholarship to play. She returned to baseball after graduation. “You have to be pretty stubborn to refuse to play softball,” Ring says. “If you’re being rational and you want a college scholarship, it’s softball.”

Borders played baseball in college and describes it as “the toughest time in my life,” but also believes it taught her good instincts. “When girls switch over to play softball in college, they aren’t getting those four solid years of playing baseball,” she says. “Give me six collegiate teams in the U.S. and you can grow the sport, you can grow the talent right now.”

Underwood tried out for the national team for the first time in 2006. “I had no idea that this many girls and women played baseball,” she said when asked about her first tryout. She hadn’t played on a baseball team with another woman since Little League. That’s true for most of the women on Team USA. There are only 20 spots on the women’s national team. “One thing that hurts our team is we have these 16-year-olds that have so much potential [competing against] 28-year-old women who have trained and played college ball,” Veronica Alvarez, a coach for the 2018 Team USA and former player, says. “We lose them because they don’t make it at sixteen and then, because of the lack of opportunity, there’s nowhere else for them to go and play.”

For many ballplayers, the lack of funding keeps them from continuing their career. Borders played professional men’s baseball in independent leagues for three years. She had more than 50 innings, a 1.67 ERA, and a win: major league numbers. She could almost feel her name in blocky MLB uniform letters across her shoulder blades, but she was also poor. “I was homeless because I couldn’t afford rent. I couldn’t eat. I was sick and tired of it. I was tired of being broke,” Borders says. “Here I [was] doing all this really cool stuff, doing a lot of media, but they didn’t know that in the background I was dying.”

Give me six collegiate teams in the U.S. and you can grow the sport, you can grow the talent right now.

Borders did not play in this year’s World Cup because of a late injury, but doing so wouldn’t have earned her a paycheck anyway. None of the women on Team USA are paid to play. In fact, they lose money. They take vacation time from their jobs as firefighters and P.E. teachers, grad students and groundskeepers. Because there is no professional league for women in America, they have to earn paychecks from other jobs. Though most of Team USA’s baseball budget comes from MLB donations, it doesn’t go to the players. “We all make so many sacrifices to play,” Sementelli says. She notes that MLB players get paid millions of dollars to play baseball. “We would all play for a couple thousand dollars a month, just anything that would be some kind of income.”

No single entity is to blame for the century of decisions that have shut American women out of their own country’s pastime. But that also means that no one has to shoulder the responsibility to make this sport work for its players. The only institutions with the money and power to make a real, dramatic change in women’s baseball right now, though, are the WBSC and MLB.

By my count there were 42 people in the stands, not including press, to watch the Dominican Republic play Venezuela for the first game of the second day of the 2018 Super Round. It was 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, 90 degrees outside and almost 90 percent humidity. In the stands, Venezuela’s team chants ricocheted across sections of empty seats. The same was true for the 11 a.m. game, and again for three games on Thursday.

The Canadian women’s baseball team prepare for their game against Team USA during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Throughout the World Cup, the stadium remained  depressingly mostly empty. According to the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC), the total official attendance for all 50 games was 17,969. That puts the average attendance for each game at 359 people. The USSSA Space Coast stadium seats approximately 8,000 people.  I attended the 11 Super Round games, and counted fewer than 100 people at six of them. There were two billboards for the event off the highway nearby but no flyers in local bars or grocery stores. No one I spoke to over six days in the surrounding area had any idea the tournament was going on. Girls who do play baseball around the country, on travel teams and boys teams, cannot come to watch these games because they are held during the first weeks of school.

“There were 5,000 people in the stands [at the 2015 Pan-American Women’s Baseball Tournament held in Toronto]. So, I expected at least that many here,” Carol Sheldon, who played women’s baseball for more than 20 years and is in the online-only National Women’s Baseball Hall of Fame, says. Despite several sold-out games in its first and last year to include it, the Pan American Games dropped women’s baseball from their bill for 2019 because of a “lack of interest.” No one on Team USA understands why the game was dropped when it had sell-out crowds, and the Pan American Games did not return multiple requests for comment.

“Obviously, you want a bigger crowd. Ideally, you want every game to be sold out,” says DJ Wabick, a national program director for the host organization, the United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA), which is a sanctioning body for more than 85,000 baseball and softball teams in the country. USSSA provides rule guidelines and organizational support, but does not have power over the leagues. The WBSC sent the trophy on a tour of MLB stadiums to try to drum up attention. “We tried to share the stories of these players. That’s how you make a real connection with [the general public] and get them to care,” Wabick says.

Personal stories may help, but the same sort of yarns are told by announcers and PR offices in every sport to get fans to invest in individual players. But the sport sells itself. Baseball is a sport that people watch and love. The general public, everyone who cares about women’s baseball says, has no idea that women’s baseball exists.

Women’s baseball still has the diving catches, the home runs, and the bunts that make baseball a great sport, but it isn’t given the resources, financial or institutionally, to find fans.The infrastructure that pushes women out of baseball and into softball has also shaped the way the public thinks of the game. “It’s just ingrained in everybody’s head that when you think of a girl throwing a ball it’s a softball,” Sementelli says.“People just assume that we play softball even when I tell them that I throw overhand. It’s so frustrating.”

Fourteen current and former players at the Women’s World Cup told a version of the same anecdote. “I tell people all the time that I play for the USA women’s national baseball team,” Underwood says. “Ninety-five percent of the time they say ‘Oh, you mean softball?’”

That stereotype exists despite the fact that women have played baseball since the very beginning of its existence. Jennifer Ring argues in Stolen Bases that women played (and potentially even invented) an early ball-and-bat game called rounders that involved rocks being thrown at players to call them out. The first women’s professional team was the Dolly Vardens, one of two all-black women’s teams to play under the name in Philadelphia in the 1880s. Hall-of-famers Rogers Hornsby and Smoky Joe Wood received their first paychecks as professional players on teams with women. The full, 1908 version of the baseball anthem “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is about a girl named Nelly Kelly who loved baseball.

American women had been playing baseball in organized leagues for three decades before softball was created in the 1890s. Organized semi-pro women’s baseball leagues in the 1920s were successful across race, class, and geographical lines. Women’s colleges like Smith and Wellesley easily filled teams to play each other. Only when the game became worth money in the late 19th century were women pushed out of the sport.

Pitcher Michelle Cobb warms up ahead of Team USA’s game against Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Despite this deep history of women playing the game, though, the only reference point most Americans have for women in baseball is the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, which depicts the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 to 1954 and had more than 600 female players. By my count, about a dozen former AAGPBL players attended the World Cup in Viera, Florida. They love women’s baseball. A few refused formal interviews because, they said, they wouldn’t have very many nice things to say about how the tournament was being run.

The two most prominent former AAGPL players to attend were Maybelle Blair, who played for the Peoria Redwings, and Shirley Burkovich, who played for the Rockford Peaches, the team popularized in A League of Their Own. At 91 and 85 years old, respectively, they were by far the most popular people at the tournament. They were constantly giving out hugs and signatures, and sat behind home plate to watch almost every game of the Super Round. They came, Blair told me, because they “wouldn’t miss women playing baseball for the world. There’s nothing like it.” From her seat behind the plate, Blair joked that she was going to go out there and pitch, that maybe she ought to go down to the dugout and talk to a team that couldn’t seem to stop making mental errors.

Before the United States played Canada on the second night of the Super Round, Blair and Burkovich made their way down to the field. Surrounded by a huddle of beaming Team USA players, holding her cane made out of a baseball bat, Blair pointed her finger up in their faces. “I flew all the way out here from California to see you guys win,” she said. “And I haven’t seen it yet.” That night, Team USA beat Canada 5–1.

Maybelle Blair, of the Rockford Peaches, gives the USA women’s baseball team a peptalk before facing the Canadian team during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Despite Burkovich and Blair’s popularity, and the excellent level of play on the field, women’s baseball still doesn’t get the media attention players feel they need to reach the next level. Every player past and present that I spoke with said that their number one concern for the future of the game is the lack of general awareness that they even exist. This year the Women’s Baseball World Cup made the SportsCenter Top 10 plays for the first time when Team USA second baseman Amanda “Red” Gianelloni snatched a smashed line drive out of the air and turned a hit into a double play. Before that play, the only time the tournament had been mentioned on the program was when a player was struck in the leg by a stray bullet during the 2010 Cup in Venezuela, a year Team USA won bronze. No plays from any medal games have ever been featured on SportsCenter.

All media loves when one woman plays baseball. As a child, Sementelli says, there were always reporters who wanted to talk to her, media on the sidelines of her Little League game. As soon as she got out of coach-pitch, her dad molded her into a pitcher. “I didn’t know any other girls playing,” she says. She went on CBS News and Jimmy Kimmel. “I say yes to every media outlet because I want people to know that there are women in this game.” She found a small college where she could play college baseball, and gave interviews there too. Alone, she’s been in the spotlight since 5 years old.

Borders’s story is even more extreme. She was covered so intensely and constantly by news outlets that the amount of media attention she received actually kept her from an opportunity to go to a MLB spring training camp. An MLB team wanted to give her a chance to tryout, but they didn’t want the cameras. Stories about women playing in men’s baseball leagues are constant. But when the women are successful together, the lights dim, the headlines fall away, and no one seems to care.

There’s no better example of this than Mo’ne Davis, who became the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series in 2014 despite baseball not even being her favorite sport. She received massive media attention, but few stories mentioned that other girls had played in the LLWS before her. “If one more person says ‘in a league of her own’ I’m going to lose it,” Borders says. “Women have played baseball forever. Girls are playing now.” On August 19, 2014, Mo’ne Davis was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. On September 1, about two weeks later, Team USA competed in the Women’s Baseball World Cup in Japan and won silver. They did not get any cover stories, or even national recognition.

This is despite the reality that women’s baseball is just as exciting, and often more engaging, than the men’s game. “Baseball is the perfect sport for women if you really understand the game,” Borders says. “We like technicality, and the game within the game.” Women’s baseball is faster than men’s both because they only play seven innings and pitchers don’t wield as much control over the pace of the game. The women’s game is less ego-driven, and more democratic. It’s not a game fixated on home runs and shutouts. “Women have to play the game much more technically correct,” Sheldon says. It is a game of sacrifice — the sacrifice bunt, the sacrifice fly. The focus is on team success instead of individual feats.

If one more person says ‘in a league of her own’ I’m going to lose it. Women have played baseball forever. Girls are playing now.

But it still has fireworks. Before the tournament, WBSC constructed a mesh fence inside the stadium to shorten the field’s depth. Instead of playing on the world tournament–size field set by WBSC’s own regulations (275 and 290 feet in left and right field, 400 in center), the World Cup was played on a field 325 feet in every direction. According to a spokesperson from the WBSC, the field size was shrunk to make sure that the tournament had home runs. It didn’t need to be. On August 25 versus Venezuela, Megan Baltzell hit a ball 363 feet over both right field fences. That ball went further than two home runs hit the same night in Major League Baseball ballparks.

On the last night of play before the medal games, Team USA played the Dominican Republic. There was nothing they could do to make the gold medal game after Canada’s afternoon loss to Chinese Taipei. But they came out, scored six runs in the first inning, and beat the Dominican Republic 8–1. As the teams shook hands, the on-field announcer came on the p.a. system. “We hope to see you tomorrow for one or both games,” he said. “Should be some great softball tomorrow.”

“We were all shaking hands with our mouths gaping open,” Sementelli says. “He watched seven innings of baseball and then said softball. That was something that stuck out really firmly. I don’t know if that’s something that will ever change.”

The USA women’s baseball team face Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

The day before the medal games the media room smelled like spray paint. In the middle of the room stood a wooden box a little more than four feet tall, the sides still shiny with black paint. Around it, a pile of small gauge PVC pipes was scattered. “There are posters going on these. Don’t worry,” A WBSC employee told me. The next morning, the posters — printed in a dulled out yellow and maroon — had been sloppily pasted onto the box, crinkled at the corners. The top paper had an X drawn on it. It needed to be replaced. This was the podium for the trophy.

The medal games took place on a Friday. At 1 p.m. Team USA played Canada for the bronze medal. At 6 p.m. Chinese Taipei played Japan for the title of World Champion.

The USA vs. Canada game started off mild. After four innings, USA was up 2–0. But Canada staged a comeback, scored three runs, and in the bottom of the 7th, the United States came back to tie. The game went to extra innings where (according to rules of the Women’s World Cup) each half-inning started with runners placed on second and third. Still, the game went ten innings before Canada clinched the bronze medal, winning 8–5.

This was baseball at its best: incredible defensive plays, starting pitchers being brought in as relievers, a true rivalry that goes back a decade. To watch it, you would have either had to travel an hour outside of Orlando on a Friday in August, or have known to visit the WBSC’s YouTube page. None of the games of the Women’s Baseball World Cup were televised in the United States.

“I wish people could see this,” Sementelli says. “I shouldn’t have to worry about this…Do you think Bryce Harper is worried about whether or not his game will be on TV?”

“We tried very hard to get the games on television,” says the USSSA’s Wabick. “That was the thing I wanted to accomplish most. I think there needed to probably be a little more runway to get it on TV, because by the time we were calling, TV schedules were already set.”

USSSA learned that they had won the bid for the 2018 World Cup in October 2017. Because of that, they had less than a year to coordinate when, where, and how the event could take place. The timeline, Wabick says, also made it difficult for him to get major advertisers to sign on, since they had to move so quickly. Because the host country and organization was decided so late, USSSA only had space for the two-week tournament in their schedule in late August. This timing has not been a problem in other countries where games have been located in cities and local populations value women’s baseball. “If we are fortunate enough to have another opportunity, we’d probably shift the dates.” Wabick says.

Do you think Bryce Harper is worried about whether or not his game will be on TV?

USSSA has a history of putting on good tournaments. The stadium had beautiful facilities. The players raved about getting to go to the Kennedy Space Center and being treated like professionals. But at the same time, no one seemed to know the tournament was happening despite the fact that the professional women’s softball team (the USSSA Pride), which normally plays in that stadium, average around 2,500 fans at each of their 25 home games every year. Only one shirt — a white shirt promoting the tournament with a smudged Canadian flag — was available to purchase. There was no merchandise available for any of the national teams: no hats, no jerseys, no rally towels.

(L-R) Buddy Brown, Owen Clarke, and Pierre Aubin support team Canada from he stands during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Team USA lost to Canada, a country where parents and coaches have only recently begun to build a Little League structure for all-girls baseball. After the game, none of the players were brought to the press room for the general press. “I leave it to their discretion,” the WBSC spokesperson said, mentioning that it was a tough loss and that he couldn’t make them do press because they weren’t professional athletes. “It was a very emotional loss,” the spokesperson said. One of the biggest criticisms of female athletes is that they are too emotional to play.

This gave Team USA the appearance of extremely poor losers, despite a more complex reality. Later, a player told me that they were scheduled so tightly they barely had time to do interviews after the game. They had 30 minutes from the minute their game ended to be on the bus back to their hotel — 30 minutes to eat, shower, say hi to loved ones, and maybe do media.

“It’s almost like sabotage,” Ring says when asked about whether the tournament could indeed increase awareness of the sport as everyone hoped. “They were set up for failure.”

I think we had the most talented team,” Coach Alvarez says. “I think our downfall is that we only get one week together before playing and then its game time. I wish that we had more time together.”

Losing a chance to medal, though, felt like more than just a personal loss for many players and fans of women’s baseball. It felt like a missed opportunity for the sport of women’s baseball overall. “The [United States medaling] would have been something that would have helped us get the United States sports people to go, OK. Let’s start girls baseball.’ Instead, of just having a tournament here or there for girls to come and play in,” Sheldon says.

Of the more than 25 people involved at all levels of women’s American baseball I spoke to, all agreed that the best thing that can be done for the sport is the creation of girls baseball leagues. They would love for something like what happened in Japan — a wealthy benefactor creating a small pro league — to happen in the States. But even if that were to happen there has to be a pipeline for women to reach that league. Right now there’s next to nothing.

As it relates to a women’s professional league, we have to ensure that a sustainable infrastructure is in place.” MLB’s Reagins says. In order to make this sort of investment a success, we need to make sure that what is put together will not only survive, but thrive. We don’t believe we are there yet, but who knows what could ultimately happen as women’s baseball gains more momentum.”

There is a village of people fighting for women’s baseball in America: the Rockford Peaches, the players, the parents of players, the fans. Former players are creating teams for girls and tournaments with their own money. “I have been involved as a player at every level, and I have never seen the amount of passion for this game as I did with the people I met in women’s baseball,” Wabick says. “If the right people get in the room, they can bring the right attention.”

I think our downfall is that we only get one week together before playing and then its game time. I wish that we had more time together.

But who are the right people? Currently, there are many proponents of the women’s game, but no real leadership. Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the Godfather series, was at the World Cup. He has consistently financially supported women’s baseball, pushing the Sonoma Stompers, a men’s professional team, to recruit and play women. There are no women on the Stompers roster at the moment, although two members of this year’s Team USA (Kelsie Whitmore and Stacy Piagno) played on the Stompers in the past. Coppola, though, is just one man. USSSA is a governing body, so while they could support girls Little Leagues financially and logistically, the organization doesn’t have the capability create them. USA Baseball could create a 14U — short for ages 14 and under — or a 20U team for women, but without WBSC tournaments (which exist at 23U, 18U, 15U, and 12U for men) there would be no one for them to play. According to WBSC spokesperson Oscar Lopez the “feasibility and rollout [of creating programs for girls are] under review” currently. There is no timeline for that decision to be made.

The vast divide that exists between the resources being given to men’s baseball and those being given to women’s baseball are almost cartoonishly illustrated at the only level where both exist: the World Cup. The 2017 Men’s Baseball World Championship game was played in 2017 in Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, averaged just over 27,000 attendees per game, and aired on MLB Network in America. Championship hats were immediately handed out to Team USA when they won the gold. On an erected blue stage, the team of men stood behind a shining circular podium that held their trophy.

A year later in Viera, Team Japan hoisted their trophy above their head. A platform less than a foot off the ground had been constructed for them to stand on, and each player warily eyed it as she stepped up, as if worried it might collapse. It is the same platform used for WBSC  tournaments except for the men’s World Championship, which has a real stage, champion hats, and confetti. The announcers mispronounced even the names of the players on the Canadian team for their bronze medal. And the posters on the spray painted podium were starting to peel from the humidity.

Team USA celebrate a home run during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 against Canada in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Most of the women on 2018’s Team USA won’t get to play again until the next World Cup in 2020. Underwood, at 37, is still deciding whether or not she’ll keep playing. They will return to their lives and their real jobs. They will dream about playing on the diamond again and wake up disappointed. Each year, thousands of girls will switch over to softball, or quit playing the game entirely because no one has made a path for them to go forward.

“That’s the story of women’s baseball,” Underwood said. “We don’t get to play in the same facilities. We don’t get the same attention. We don’t get the same opportunities.”

***

Kelsey McKinney is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

***

Editor: Ethan Chiel
Photographer: Cassi Alexandra
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

From the Sidelines: A Reading List on the Need for Female Coaches

Arizona Cardinals training camp coach Dr. Jen Welter poses for photographers after being introduced, Tuesday, July 28, 2015, at the teams' training facility in Tempe, Ariz. Welter is believed to be the first female to hold a coaching position of any kind in the NFL and will be member of the Cardinals coaching staff throughout training camp and the preseason, working with inside linebackers. AP Photo/Matt York

After playing one season for the Dallas Cowboys and one for the New England Patriots, I huddled up for a third season with the rest of my flag football team wearing a uniform that simply read “NFL Flag.” The uniforms were relics of a world far from mine. I lived in Indonesia at the time; what I knew of football came from my dad wearing his Packers shirt around the house after work, where he discovered the scores of games played twelve hours and nine-thousand miles away from our dial-up computer.

As little as I knew about the NFL, my participation in flag football was never a question. I loved sports so much that I joined soccer, baseball, basketball, the swim team, and a running club where we ran at least five kilometers every Tuesday night. Because our school was so small, each team was co-ed. Athletes were known for their skills rather than separated by gender, which is a quality of those early years that I still treasure. Looking back, perhaps I idealized athletics, believing that sport could erase the expectations of gender placed upon me in other ways. On the field, I imagined myself not as a girl, but as a twirling blur of muscle and breath.

This illusion was punctured in a huddle during my third year of flag football. My coach that year was a man with a reputation for calling his sons “sissies” if they showed any sign of exhaustion on the field. He glanced around the gleaming faces of our team, signaling off starting positions. When he got to me and another girl, the only other on the team, he said “bench” to us both. I stood on the sidelines, cheering my team toward a touchdown, and waiting for the signal to tag in. There was an unspoken rule within our league that teams should be fair to both boys and girls by giving them equal playing time, and my coach gave a chance to the other girl, who was older, but quickly took her out again when he thought someone else could do better. When his son showed up to half-time sweaty and lagging, I thought I might have my chance, but he told him to “man up” and sent him back in. As the game stretched on and the lowering sun colored the sky a dusky blue, I remained sidelined. When I got home that night, I wept. I knew I was fast, knew I could hold my own — as I had for three years — against anyone in the league, and knew I cared enough about my teammates to run fake routes without a chance at the ball. But none of that was enough. To that coach, I was a girl. Someone who could watch the game, but not participate.

I won’t say that after that moment I began to negotiate gender and sport, but something in me shifted. I quit playing flag football after that season. Wondering if I would always be categorized as a “girl,” I pushed myself to the absolute brink of what was possible in every other sport I played, ensuring, for example, that when I crossed the finish line of the mile first, before all the boys, that I was acknowledged for my prowess and not my gender.

I competed in multiple sports for almost all of middle school and high school, and then went on to run for a Division I team. When I look back now, I’m amazed to realize I can count two female coaches across a lifetime, plus a handful of female assistant coaches. I’m not the only one to experience this inequality. The 2017 College Sport Racial & Gender Report Card, which assigns grades to sports based on a comprehensive evaluation of gender and race, notes that white men “dominated the head coaching ranks on men’s teams holding 86.5 percent, 87.8 percent, and 91.6 percent of all head coaching positions in Divisions I, II, and III, respectively.”

I’m not insinuating here that female coaches are superior to male coaches or vice versa, but I’m wondering where these discrepancies come from. Are the factors that lead to highly disproportionate numbers of white male coaches somehow related all the way back to childhood athletics, during which young female athletes are told that they belong on the bench? Or are there other factors at play? Female coaches are earning positions in sports previously coached only by men — Jen Welter became the NFL’s first female coach in 2015, and, in 2016, the Arizona Coyotes hired Dawn Braid as the first female coach in the NHL — but the fact that these titles are newsworthy indicates that we have a lot of work to do to diversify coaching staff not only by gender, but also by race.

1. College Athletics’ War on Women Coaches (Pat Griffin, March 8, 2015, Huffpost)

In 2015, Shannon Miller, who coached women’s ice hockey at the University of Minnesota Duluth, was notified by the university that her contract would not be renewed at the end of the season because of concerns that she was being paid too much for her work.

“Placed in the context of a disturbing trend in the diminishing number of women coaches and the treatment of the women in athletics over the last several years, this decision has more far reaching consequences for college women’s athletics.”

Pat Griffin summarizes a list of troubling action taken toward female coaches from 2007 to 2015 and argues that “the public rationale offered by athletic administrators for their decisions in each of these cases masks a deeper and more fundamental problem in college athletics: misogyny, sexism, and homophobia.”

2. An Open Letter About Female Coaches (Pau Gasol, May 11, 2018, The Players’ Tribune)

Pau Gasol of the San Antonio Spurs, in an open letter, not only successfully dismantles others’ arguments as to why Becky Hammon should not be head coach of an NBA team, but also urges the NBA — and fans of the NBA — to advocate and work toward a more inclusive league as a whole.

“Let’s recognize that one protest does not mean we have solved the problem of racial inequality in this country. One parade doesn’t mean we’re doing everything we can for the LGBTQ movement. And one coaching interview doesn’t mean we have solved the issue of gender diversity in our workplace.”

(Related: read Sidelined by Matthew J.X. Malady in Slate.)

3. American Running Needs More Female Coaches (Erin Strout, September 14, 2018, Outside)

By examining the sport of running as a focal point in this piece, Erin Strout illuminates the reasons why women are less likely to become coaches, interviews women in coaching positions to understand their challenges, and wonders about the future of women’s coaching and how more women in coaching positions could impact sport.

“Whether at the professional or collegiate level, Hogshead-Makar says that adding more female influence within the sport is crucial—not only to advance gender equity but also to provide a safer environment where athletes can thrive.”

(Related: read Reem Abulleil’s Why aren’t there more female coaches on tour? published by the Women’s Tennis Association.)

4. Where Are The Women? (Rachel Stark, Winter, 2017 NCAA Champion Magazine)

“In 1972, women coached more than 90 percent of collegiate women’s teams. Today, they coach fewer than half.”

In this 2017 piece for NCAA Champion Magazine, Rachel Stark investigates the effect that female coaches’ visible representation has on younger athletes who play sports, and also provides a number of resources such as “How to Support Young Coaches on the Rise,” “How to Strengthen Your Contacts,” and “How to Deepen the Candidate Pool” as a way to encourage more women to apply for coaching positions, and to open the conversation about gender, race, representation, and coaching within college sports.

(Related: read Number of Women Coaching in College Has Plummeted in Title IX Era by Jeré Longman published in The New York Times.)

5. The Field Where Men Still Call the Shots (Linda Flanagan, July 28, 2018, The Atlantic)

In this deeply researched essay, Linda Flanagan argues that a dearth of female role models in sport can negatively impact female athletes in several ways, such as leadership styles, lack of participation in sport, and an inability to visualize themselves as future coaches.

“According to a 2009 study by the sociologists Michael Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas, men typically coach, and women typically serve as “team moms”…In the researchers’ view, this imbalance stems from “institutional gender regimes” that divide the work between men and women based on traditional roles.”

6. The Rise of Women Coaching Men (Michael LoRé, April 26, 2018, culture trip)

When Natalie Randolph tells a man at the bar that she’s a former football player, he barrages her with questions.

“Wait, you played football? Did you wear pads? A helmet? Was it the Lingerie Football League? And you coached? So then, what’s a spread offense? Do you know the 3-technique?”

This instance, as Michael LoRé reports, is representative of the kind of frustrating and discriminatory reaction Randolph encounters frequently when she talks about her experiences as a woman of color who is both a football player and female coach of a male football team. And her story is not an anomaly. LoRé, using Randolph’s experiences as a thru-line throughout the piece, discusses the current state of coaching and weaves in stories from other female coaches.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness.

Falling for My Booty Call

Illustration by Cat Finnie

Sarah Kasbeer | Longreads | November 2018 | 15 minutes (3,867 words)

 

His brown eyes trailed over my body in an exaggerated way. If it had occurred at work, it could have been considered sexual harassment. But at the bar, and uninhibited, I felt the rush of being seen.

At 22, I was lonely and working in a restaurant. Nic was a server I had a crush on who’d hardly ever spoken to me until we bumped into each other on a random night off. He walked into a Chicago dive bar where I happened to be getting drunk with a friend. I approached him from behind to order myself another round.

“Corona — with a lemon,” I said to the bartender. Somehow I’d gotten the impression that this was the sophisticated European way to drink cheap beer. I left a dollar and change on the bar before forcing my lemon wedge into the bottle, ready to make my move.

“Hi Nic,” I said to the half-moon formed by the adjustable snaps on the back of his hat. The half-moon turned. Nic set his Heineken down before slowly looking me up and down. He seemed to still be processing my identity.

Perhaps it was my off-duty attire that threw him. During shifts behind the restaurant bar, I was forced to wear black button-up shirts and dress pants, my shoulder-length hair in a ponytail. That evening, I had donned a dive-bar appropriate denim and pink tank top combo. My long bangs were swept to one side, my light hair down.

“Sa-rah,” he finally answered, his mouth widening into a smile. The slow, deliberate way he lingered over both syllables of my name made it seem as if he knew something about me that I didn’t, or at least not yet.

Instead of being offended by the once-over, I was awash in a familiar response: pleasure mixed with shame. Sexual objectification can trigger conflicting impulses. On the one hand, I wanted to be treated with respect. On the other hand, I wanted to be wanted. Getting laid was the easiest way to prove my desirability, even if the feeling only lasted a few fleeting hours.

Read more…

RomCon: Our Failure to See Black Romantic Comedies

Tyler Perry Studios‎, Homegrown Pictures Screen Gems, New Line Cinema, Sneak Preview Entertainment, FoxSearchlight, Universal Pictures

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,438 words)

When I think romcom, I think white — Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers — white women, white houses, white stories. But I was weaned on white culture. More striking is that Vanity Fair film critic K. Austin Collins, who had a “low-whiteness diet” growing up, thinks the same thing. So does The Undefeated culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald, who attended a predominantly black high school and remembers kids “losing their minds” over Love & Basketball. Yet the first thing that enters her mind when she thinks of romcoms is her favorite, Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s funny because even in my head the movies are segregated,” McDonald says. “I can list off a whole bunch of movies with majority black casts that of course are romcoms, I just didn’t necessarily think of them that way.”

Earlier this week Rebel Wilson, star of next year’s Isn’t it Romantic, was shamed into apologizing for claiming to be “the first ever plus-sized girl to be the star of a romantic comedy” and then blocking the black women on Twitter who reintroduced her to Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique. “To be part of a problem I was hoping I was helping makes it that much more embarrassing & hard to acknowledge,” she tweeted. No kidding. While both my boyfriend (white) and I (half-white) have seen a number of black romcoms, including Queen Latifah’s, we were ashamed to realize that we were as complicit in their erasure as Wilson — we likely would have forgotten them too. For this, Collins has understanding, if not sympathy. While he sides with Rebecca Theodore-Vachon — one of the first to call out Wilson — he also recognizes that the critic is occupying a space of lucidity independent of the white-washed culture that formed Wilson (and me and my whiter boyfriend): “It is true that it would take a mental adjustment for her to think of some of those movies as romcoms because no one advertised them as those things.” Read more…

West Across the Sea

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

 Sam Riches / Longreads / October 2018 / 17 minutes (4,328 words)

The first thing you need to know about Iceland is that sheep are everywhere. In the pastures, on top of the mountains, next to the highway. They graze freely and abundantly and peacefully, most of the time. An approaching vehicle can cause them to scatter — bells clanging frantically, fuzzy butts bouncing wildly — into the countryside, where the only predator to worry about, other than humans, is the delightfully cute but sometimes fatal arctic fox.

Icelandic sheep are hardy creatures. They are farmed mostly for their meat but also for their wool, which provides insulated, waterproof protection against Iceland’s damp weather. For centuries, sheep have been fundamental to Icelandic life — so perhaps it is not surprising that one of the most intriguing basketball prospects the country has ever produced was, just four and a half years ago, focused on a more traditional career: sheep farmer. Read more…

Raised by Hip-Hop

Alex J. Berliner/abimages) via AP Images

Juan Vidal | Rap Dad | Atria Books | September 2018 | 37 minutes (7,440 words)

 

Depending on your perspective, there was a time you might have considered me an outright goon. Not a goon to the level of Bishop from the movie Juice, but one with savage tendencies nonetheless. When I was eight, the school principal sent me home for wearing a shirt that read “No Code of Conduct” in bold, black script. Ma’s English was shaky then, so its meaning was missed by her. I can’t say I fully understood its message either, but you wouldn’t have known it by the way the shirt corresponded to my general posture.

I was drawn to the counterculture. Music and art and skateboarding made me want to live louder, turn my life up for the world. Often that meant exposing my ignorance in the process. Like the single time I sported denim backwards because Kris Kross made it seem fresh for a stint. It wasn’t, and I got clowned. When you’re young, it’s permissible to have these gaps in your logic, to act out and never bug over potential repercussions. Everything is about the moment, and how to squeeze more out of it for its own sake. One more swig of the Cuervo; a last hit of the blunt; a bike to jack because I need a ride home and that red Mongoose looks like it flies.

* * *

Weeks before my parents’ marriage officially dissolved, my father showed up with a gang of bullet holes in Ma’s Accord. That was it. There was no more hanging on to blind hope, or attempting to make excuses for his behavior. Ma knew it, everybody knew it. My grandfather could have killed the man, and maybe I would have forgiven him if he had.

After they split, my father shoved off to the motherland. By now he was on the run—from his enemies and from the law—and had to leave the United States permanently. Ma lost the house and we moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment in Fort Lauderdale. Our first day there, I was blown away by the large community pool and half-court basketball setup. What seemed like dozens of kids my age roamed freely about the complex, on BMX bikes and scooters. Many of them were first-generation Americans like me and my brothers. Their parents were from Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic. Some worked construction, others in restaurants or the night shift buffing floors at the local hospital. Our building sat just behind the school I was to attend for my last couple years of elementary. “Here we will build a home,” Ma said. “Just the four of us.” The next day Ma took the belt to my ass after she found out I’d sprayed shaving cream all over the exercise equipment in our new gym.

I realized that my first language was inextricable from who I was and how I should perceive my place in the world.

Now I had no choice but to share a room. To save space, Ma found a triple bunk bed on the cheap. I was on top, Alejandro in the middle, and Andres on the pull-out with the built-in drawers. Sometimes Andres slept in Ma’s room, like a sweet, protective boyfriend. He was just a few years old, but he made a ritual of checking the windows and making sure the doors were secured at night. Time passed and not much changed. The three of us boys still stayed up late sipping sugary drinks and feasting on questionable television. When my brothers fell asleep, I’d sneak out to the living room to watch Def Comedy Jam and Spic-O-Rama in the dark. I’d found a hero in John Leguizamo, whose rage and distrust of authority mirrored my own. While I generally loved my Latin culture—from our food to our music and celebrations—I wasn’t always self-assured enough to embrace certain aspects publicly. I hated to stand out when I was younger, unless it was for some commendable deed I’d performed. Nothing bugged me more than when Ma spoke Spanish in front of my boys, even though most of them came from Spanish-speaking homes, too. It wasn’t until I saw Leguizamo’s one-man show that I came to fully own my identity. I realized that my first language was inextricable from who I was and how I should perceive my place in the world. Anything less was self-hate.

Anyhow, me and my brothers never talked about our father. They were too young to comprehend everything I’d seen. As far as I knew, they were never brought along on dates with side pieces. They didn’t watch our father get blitzed in the kitchen or witness his longtime friends turn homicidal. These were my secrets to own and interpret however I chose.

* * *

Soon, Ma began taking on more hours at the nail salon. With my father ghost and contributing nothing monetarily or otherwise, the pressure to earn more money grew heavy. Her tips went to food and utilities, her meager paychecks to everything else. There were times she would mail the check for the car note or the phone bill and purposely leave off her signature. The check would get sent back a week later with a reminder to sign and return, which bought Ma extra time to get her paper together. She couldn’t afford to pay a sitter when she upped her hours, so Ma now had to take us to work with her two nights a week. She’d pick us up from school and drag us to the salon; a client would wait as Ma got us settled in the back. For the next four hours or so, we’d yell obscenities, get into fistfights, ruin homework, and make it almost impossible for Ma to work uninterrupted. One night, after he’d scribbled over someone’s class project in permanent marker, Andres bolted onto the main floor, blood dripping from his mouth. The women looked on, their eyes wide with shock. Ma lost her cool and time suddenly moved slower. Point is, we could be terrible then, and I recall many bloody nights and total pandemonium. “Where is their father?” I heard a bemused client ask once in a voice just above a whisper. Long gone, I thought. Long gone.

My father was born in 1953 in the town of Moniquirá, about ninety miles north of Bogotá. The second oldest of six children, he lived with the burden of birth order on his shoulders. He and his older brother, like many older siblings, were strongly urged to look after the others—and mandated to throw fists when necessary, at school, or the yard. Petty disagreements often came to blows, and their skin grew thicker by the grade. For them, everything came second to preserving their name. Had they let someone slide for disrespecting a Vidal, it might have been perceived as charity, and so they took no shorts. They would never know any other way.

Nestled in the province of Ricaurte in the department of Boyacá, Moniquirá is surrounded by rivers, hills, and coffee plants, its fertile lands producing many natural resources. Bocadillo, a Colombian confectionery made with guava pulp and panela and wrapped in leaf packaging, is among its most well-known exports. My father’s father worked in the fields until he moved the family to Bogotá in search of opportunity.

Bogotá in the 1950s could be described as idyllic, depending on whom you ask. People might speak of the extravagant parties and dances and the magic of youth. Perhaps they would tell of their long treks around lush valleys and their weekends spent at a relative’s finca up in the mountains. But between 1948 and 1958, hundreds of thousands were murdered in the partisan warfare that came to be known as “La Violencia.” Like my mother, who was raised to the south in Santiago de Cali, my father was bombarded by the daily reports of bloodshed around the country. Though censorship from the government did what it does, and though the threats against journalists and news organizations became heightened during that period, there was no way to ignore what was happening—the chatter in the streets, the paranoia of schoolteachers who had loved ones on the outskirts of the city. But violence has seen varying levels of intensity in Colombia. More than fifty thousand lost their lives in the Drug Wars of the 1980s, during the reign of Pablo Escobar, and in the guerrilla warfare of the 1990s.

* * *

For my father, with time and age came anger. And many of his experiences helped breed a deep distrust in the law. Though he may have been a merciless shield for his brothers and sisters, it didn’t compare to how frantically my father protected his mother. When he was seventeen, he served his first bid in jail following an altercation. One afternoon, when he and his mother were coming back from the market, a man in his thirties directed a sly comment at my grandmother. My father, barely out of high school, confronted the stranger and demanded he retract his words. When he did not concede, my father saw red and beat the man stupid in the street, nearly killing him. The police came and they put my father away for two months. They said he was crazy.

While my father sat in lockup with slabs of torn flesh under his fingernails, Ma, three years his junior, excelled at Colegio María Auxiliadora, a private Catholic school for girls in the Valle del Cauca. The middle child in a family of five children, she was beautiful and studious, tall and thin with big brown eyes. As a teen, my mother made grown men stop mid-conversation. But it hadn’t always been so. My mother was such an ugly baby that her parents, wonderful as they were, hid her for the first year of her life. When friends tried to make plans to visit, my grandparents would find a way to evade their requests. The baby is very sick; the baby is sleeping. Their list of excuses piled up until they finally deemed it safe to parade my mother around like they’d done the others. By the time anyone saw her outside of her immediate family, my mother was already walking and showing off teeth.

As the years went by, my father would demonstrate his contempt for superiors and the simple functions of responsibility. He was bright and warmhearted at the core, but he was also a menace. He scolded well-meaning administrators, defied every order. It seemed jail had changed him for the worse. Instead of accepting those months behind bars as a wake-up call, he dwelled on the sweet reward of exerting control over another’s body if they deserved it. He’d tasted the essence of supreme power, and he concluded that it was good.

* * *

Never mind the agony inflicted; never mind the emotional scars that poor bastard would have to endure long after his bandages were removed.

Never mind the violence that reminded onlookers of the civil war in which their country was entrenched.

Never mind that parents and their small children were made to gaze upon a madman who equated justice with suffering.

Never mind the warm sun and the breeze that earlier that day had signaled to all the makings of a perfect afternoon.

* * *

My father’s contempt for authority got passed down to me, like a piece of jewelry I didn’t ask for. In time, I made a sport out of testing the olds. Teachers, guidance counselors, school security guards. Most got the gas face from jump. I didn’t thrive on their instruction; I seldom trusted their judgment and I questioned their intentions at a fundamental level. Where this suspicion came from wasn’t always clear. But part of it, no doubt, came from witnessing plenty of scum take advantage of their high positions. They were the broken pieces to a power structure we did our best to resist. Basketball coaches were the occasional exception, but they weren’t immune to our contempt either. If they said to go right, I might still break left, through the legs and behind the back. My boy Carpio, in an organized city league game one summer, snuffed a kid clean in the jaw for scuffing his Spike Lee Jordans. He got ejected and had to sit out the next game. It would have been easy to defend Carpio’s right hook had the two not been teammates. Homeboy was a damn savage.

* * *

At Silver Lakes, I was a lost one on an uncertain path to middle adolescence. No purpose, no plans. The only things we chased were girls, ill beats, and cannabis, which we got for the low from the Haitians on 10th Court. We filled our days with violence and whatever mischief we could find. We lifted from convenience stores like I’d done as a kid and picked fights with derelicts from other blocks. We bled; we pounded the pavement. When the summer temperatures cooked us like carne asada, we took to the Boys Club, with our raps and our sticky weed. It wasn’t long before I started slanging. I reached out to Carpio, who was the plug, and asked him to help me get rich. He mapped out some territory, and soon I was flipping nickel and dime sacks by the racquetball courts. I listened to Onyx and scribbled lyrics of my own invention on scraps of loose leaf as I waited for the burnouts to show up with cash. Admittedly, I was a horrible drug dealer. Nobody taught me how to not be careless with money and I could never save up. It was all dollar slices, movie tickets, and cassette singles. My only real currency was my friends, who I’d have died for if it came down to it. Although we showed love and cherished our brotherhood, we never fully realized just how dependent we were on one another. We rolled in packs of threes or more, at the ready for anything. We organized cyphers, slap boxed outside the bodega. We spent hours unpacking the gems of that day’s Rap City, who wore what and who unleashed the phattest 16s. Together, we represented power in numbers. We were rappers, poets, skaters, dope pushers, misfits, and sneaker heads; all attention-starved. Our lives revolved around hip-hop and what the music had helped birth in us: an appetite for more, more, more. I grew up with a hunger so big I thought of nothing else. Hunger for food, yes, but mainly for significance. Hunger for meaning. I looked for signs in everything; the nugget of truth in the dirty joke, the broader message in the freestyle. When an older boy, bent on proving his grit, put a knife to my neck at a bowling alley, I wondered if there wasn’t something more at play. Was this yet another sign that I was destined for jail or an early grave? I was, after all, my father’s son.

I’m not sure why, but to this day I have a fear that I will someday end up in prison. I don’t break the law; I pay my taxes. And yet, there’s this nagging fear that prison—and I realize the absurdity of this fear—will simply happen to me, regardless of my attempts to live well and right.

Anyway. Hard as Ma tried, she couldn’t get through to me back when. I gleaned what I could from those not much older, those heroes who, though not fully formed, seemed to occupy thrones and preside over planets. No one then epitomized the contrarian spirit better than the rappers and skateboarders we idolized.

* * *

In the Eighties and Nineties, skateboarding and hip-hop were the most natural of marriages. In their own way, each provided a kind of escape from the world we saw crumbling around us. Fathers went missing and mothers strove to keep their homes intact. Us kids, we went Casper, too, only on four wheels. We were aimless but we were free. And freedom was our faces to the wind.

My first board was the Marty Jimenez Jinx deck with the bat design and hot pink grip tape. It was damn beautiful and, for a while at least, I guarded the thing with all of my might. That is, until I got lazy and thought I could leave it outside the front door overnight. Someone caught me slipping and the goods were his for the taking. Thinking back, I can respect it to a degree. As much as it angered me then, and forasmuch as I’d wanted to punish the culprit, I knew better than to slip like that. I didn’t even deserve it if it could be taken from me that easily.

Skateboarding and hip-hop are institutions that, at a point in their respective histories (they’ve since been more heavily commercialized), spoke directly to the rebel soul of youth culture. They questioned systems, they asked the why of things, they railed against popular opinion. They encouraged individuality and valued personal expression. For those who felt shunned by society or by their parents and needed an outlet, these institutions were there. Skaters were the rejected geniuses who made a playground of the earth around them. They manipulated surfaces to serve their own needs. Groups like Pharcyde, Freestyle Fellowship, and the Beastie Boys helped define an entire era of hip-hop. They provided the soundtrack to the streets. Concrete Jungle, a 2009 documentary by Eli Gesner, encapsulates how both art forms helped inform each other—and how each went on to influence the masses in ways no one could have imagined.

Skateboarding and hip-hop are institutions that, at a point in their respective histories, spoke directly to the rebel soul of youth culture.

The best track ever to center on skateboarding is Lupe Fiasco’s 2006 breakout “Kick, Push.” Essentially a love song, “Kick, Push” focuses on the oddballs who found their freedom in skating and in one another. It’s the classic scenario: boy meets girl, they hit it off, girl leads boy to secret skate spot, cops shut it down. But even though cops ruin almost everything, the single, and the video, brought Lupe’s distinct perspective to the forefront. “Kick, Push” instantly became an anthem, a rallying cry for skaters and a certain breed of rap head. But Lupe made it known early that he never wanted to be seen as a face for the sport. He wasn’t rap game Lance Mountain speaking for a subculture. For him, “Kick, Push” was about exploring the relationship between hip-hop and skate culture, and the sense of community they foster when the two coexist. Embracing the power of juxtaposition has always been at the root of Lupe’s oeuvre. But his star status has often seemed at odds with what he was taught to value as a boy growing up in Chicago.

In “Hurt Me Soul,” another number featured on his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe, born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, addresses some of this tension and the conflicted feelings he once had toward rap. Because he was taught to value women and girls, he took issue with some of the first records he was exposed to.

Now I ain’t trying to be the greatest

I used to hate hip-hop, yup, because the women degraded

As an artist, Lupe has always existed between two worlds: the sacred and the profane. “I grew up juxtaposed,” he once told Entertainment Weekly. “On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library.”

* * *

In my youth, I’d have related to this idea of juxtaposition, but somewhat in the reverse. Inside there was chaos and enmity. But outside, while there were side-eyes and stickup kids waiting to pull your card, there was also a world that felt beautiful and endless. There were other blocks in other cities in different states. And though I couldn’t touch them just yet, I took heart knowing they existed, and that someday I might set foot on them. Perhaps that small sense of hope sprung from lessons I was taught in Sunday school, the few times we attended. Though we didn’t grow up in what you might call a religious setting, Ma would tell you that ours was a Catholic home. Una casa Católica. She would make the sign of the cross over us before we set out for the world each day. But in ways, that’s where young Lupe’s path and mine would cease to converge. Lupe’s conviction calls back to his upbringing as a devout Muslim, and as the son of a Black Panther. Both of his parents saw to it that, no matter how harrowing the world was outside, there was always balance.

Before Lupe’s father passed away in 2007, he extended just one charge to his son, which he spoke to Lupe’s sister Ayesha. In a conversation with Cornel West at Calvin College’s 2009 Festival of Faith & Music, Lupe shared this charge.

“Tell Wasalu to tell the truth,” his father said. And then he died.

The truth: it’s what my friends and I were searching for in our brazenness, and in our misplaced rage. It’s what our mothers wanted us to encounter before it was too late, before violence and bitterness grew in us like a virus. When Lupe talks about living on the fringes, and when he rhymes about the teens kicking and pushing in pursuit of something real, it all rings true inside me.

The truth: it’s what my friends and I were searching for in our brazenness, and in our misplaced rage.

For my father, though, the idea of truth, and what it means to be invigorated by it, existed merely in the abstract. From the time he was young, ducking bullets—both real and figurative—became the norm. And manipulation was his tool. My father bent reality like that supervillain Mad Jim Jaspers. You might say it was passed down from his own father, whose penchant for deception saw no end. He was a creature of the bottle. My grandfather started his days with a tinto at sunrise and slowly worked his way up to the harder stuff, which he slammed back periodically until sleep. He lied, verbally abused his wife, neglected his kids. He didn’t model truth to his sons and daughters, like my father didn’t model truth to me and my brothers.

As junior high progressed, our circle grew smaller. People began to drift, relocate to other districts. Some got shipped to their parents’ country as a form of rehabilitation. Ma always made threats, but I never believed she would follow through. You’ll never, I said, after I’d gotten bagged for doing graffiti not far from our house. Domingo was with me, but the cops let him go since it was me they’d caught with the spray can.

* * *

I always made low marks in school, beginning around the sixth grade. One excuse was that the majority of my instructors rarely made the material compelling enough to keep me engaged. Again, Ma spoke very little English during these years, so the help I got at home was limited. The same was true for many of my friends who lived in homes where English was the second language. Even as our folks prized education and admonished us about its value, this was just a fact of life. We were mostly on our own. Few of us got any extra aid in our studies, whether from parents who were too busy keeping us alive or tutors who charged by the hour. Having a tutor was a privilege that not many people I knew had.

Things at school got progressively worse. Ma was getting summoned for parent-teacher conferences every couple months. I was either fighting, flipping off teachers, or napping through their lessons. And even though my spelling and vocabulary skills were on point—Ma loved to brag about my way with words—she knew something had to be done. In the middle of my seventh-grade year, the assistant principal was called upon to intervene. It was usually just Ma and a crabby old woman with horn-rimmed glasses, but this time it was more grave. As soon as Ma walked into the room, she could tell something was different.

“Hello, Ms. Vidal. I’m Mr. Albert.”

“How are you? Yes.”

“Good, Ms. Vidal, but we’re concerned about Juan.”

“Yes, yes. I very concerned.”

“He just can’t seem to stay on top of his studies. He’s a smart boy, but he seems to be showing very little effort.”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“Ms. Vidal, have you heard of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?”

Ma freaked. You’d have thought Mr. Albert had told her I’d contracted some rare and incurable blood disease. Not to mention, Mr. Albert’s heavy Creole accent made matters seem all the worse.

“Oh my God! Is he sick?”

“No, no. Ms. Vidal, it’s OK. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is actually fairly common.”

“OK. OK. What do we do? Please tell me what do we do.”

“We, Juan’s teachers and I . . . well, we think he should be tested. This will help us determine next steps to ensure that your son succeeds academically going forward.”

ADHD cases climbed like mad in the late eighties and early 1990s. All across the country, rowdy teens were being tested routinely on the recommendation of agitated teachers and administrators. Doctors were diagnosing kids without blinking. Spacing out in class? Must be ADHD. Constant scrapping and undermining of those in command? It’s probably ADHD. Depressed? Sounds like ADHD to us. It was never the teachers and their lack of creativity that were the issue. According to them, it was the fault of the hormone-crazed students who believed they had better things to do than squeeze into a musky portable classroom and be fed half-truths.

A week after the conference, me and Ma sat in a cheerless doctor’s office waiting to be called in so I could take my Psychological Assessment. They asked Ma to come back in a few hours since the examination was going to take time to complete. The doctor hit me with mad questions out the gate, asking about everything from my relationship with my parents to my thoughts on life and my supposed inability to concentrate in Math. As he talked, I found myself trailing off, distracted by a number of things. To start, his mustache made him look like a square and sad sexual deviant. There were drab paintings on the walls—dolphins and badly drawn whales—and a candy bowl without any candy. Soon, I called bull on the whole thing.

“Juan, have you heard of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?”

“Have you heard of Wu-Tang?”

“Yes. Do you like Wu-Tang?”

This instantly bothered me.

Not anymore, I said.

“What else do you like?”

With that, I decided to probe and test his knowledge of Shaolin’s finest.

“Ah, doctor, you know, the usual: ‘Runnin’ up in gates, and doin’ hits for high stakes / Makin’ my way on fire escapes.’”

“Really? Can you tell me more about yourself?”

“‘I was a man with a dream with plans to make cream / Which failed; I went to jail at the age of fifteen.’ ”

He finally caught on.

“Oh, these are song lyrics?”

“You said you knew the Wu, right? Well, I’m quoting ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ and you don’t know what’s what.”

“My apologies, I don’t know what a Wu-Tang is. Juan, let’s talk about school.”

He’d already lost my respect, and I saw no reason to give anything else he said much credence. When Ma returned, I was in the hall, ready to jet. She went inside to settle things with the doctor, and when she came back out, she seemed irked. She handed the woman at the desk a check and scheduled another visit for the following week. The next meeting was more of the same. The doctor went on and on and I quoted Fat Joe and Queen Latifah. Eventually, he saw that he was getting nowhere with me. As we were leaving, he offered a sincere goodbye, probably confident that he would never see me again. I channeled Montoya Santana from the movie American Me.

I said: “You know, a long time ago, two best homeboys, two kids, were thrown into juvie. They were scared, and they thought they had to do something to prove themselves. And they did what they had to do. They thought they were doing it to gain respect for their people, to show the world that no one could take their class from them. No one had to take it from us, ese. Whatever we had . . . we gave it away. Take care of yourself, carnal.”

Ma elbowed me in the ribs and the man stared into me blankly.

On the way home, Ma explained that because her insurance didn’t cover the full amount of the doctor visits, she had to come out of pocket for $600. She barely had that in her bank account, she said, and the rent was due. I was regretful for having made a joke of the whole mess. “I did this for you,” she said. “But you know I can’t afford this.” She told me they’d prescribed some drug called Ritalin, which, according to them, would help me focus and fight off distractions. Ma told them she would be in touch, but she had no intention of giving me drugs. She’d researched it and heard stories about the side effects of the medication—vision problems, insomnia—and decided to hold back.

“I’m not going to give my baby any damn pills,” she said. After that declaration, I never heard another word about ADHD or pills again.

* * *

I made enemies in those days. I could be cold and sharp-tongued, but I told myself it was mostly for survival. After Ma and Joe—yes, that Joe—had been dating for some time, we all moved in together. Soon they decided to pull Joey out of private school and have him join me at Silver Lakes. Joey was whip smart and athletic, and the Puerto Rican dimes couldn’t get enough of his spikey blond hair. They’d point and gawk and he’d turn red. At first, people would refer to Joey as “Juan’s White Brother,” but that stopped once he flexed his quarterbacking skills on Field Day. One of the few white boys on the intramural team, Joey was beastly when he snapped back to pass. Nobody was nicer. Before long, he had a rep, and he’d sometimes get asked to things I knew nothing about. Though we were as tight as brothers could be, in time we ran with different crews.

Toward the middle of the school year, Joey got invited to a party he wanted to go to and asked me to roll. I had my reservations. Life had taught me to be selective about the places I went without proper backup. None of my boys were going, and a jam with an unfamiliar crowd, in my view, called for more support. At the same time, I didn’t want Joey to go alone. The day before the party, I still hadn’t made my decision. “Well?” Joey shot during dinner. Ma broke the silence, promising that if I went with him, she’d cop me some new gear for the occasion. That was the end of the matter. An hour later, I was at the mall getting laced with denim and a Georgetown Hoyas T-shirt and matching Starter hat. As we approached the mall’s exit across from the Chinese spot, I saw a familiar face grilling me hard; it was a short and stocky Filipino kid who went to my school but was one grade above. He was standing around with his swarm of eighth graders. When me and Ma got closer, suddenly they were all staring me down. I didn’t know why. I knew they weren’t going to initiate a scuffle then and there, but I was prepared, my fist cocked at my side. The hate in their eyes seemed strange and unwarranted. In the car, I racked my brain trying to recall if I’d flapped my gums at anyone different that week. Nothing stood out.

‘Juan, have you heard of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?’ ‘Have you heard of Wu-Tang?’

The party was at the clubhouse of a development called Heathgate. I knew the area well but I never had much reason to visit, not until now. Ma dropped us off and Joey and I made our way inside. My Hoyas fit was fire and I felt fresh and clean. The music was pumping; there were strobe lights, streamers, and tables with an assortment of fare and refreshments. Boys and girls played the wall with their cliques. I thought, This isn’t so bad. At the least, I got some new digs just for stepping up. The DJ played decent mixes, and soon I built up the courage to hit the dance floor. There were girls from wall to wall. Later, when I was cooling down by the spread of cold cuts and soda, I caught a few boys eyeing me. At first, I didn’t make much of it. I soon realized it was the same crew I’d seen the day before, outside the Panda Express. Then the Filipino kid came into focus and I was seized with regret. I knew this had been a bad idea. We needed to leave, and swiftly. I walked over to Joey, who was talking to the DJ, and told him it was time. “Trust me,” I said. “Just c’mon.” Joey knew this wasn’t a drill, and he followed my lead without hesitation. I didn’t want to seem frightened, so we moved toward the door casually. The kids noticed that we were jetting and they gathered like moths to the flame. Everyone else was grooving, not a gripe in the world. Me and Joey speed-walked down the street in the direction of a nearby shopping plaza. I turned around and saw the boys in pursuit. There were six of them. We didn’t run; they didn’t run.

“Who are those guys?” Joey asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Why are they following us?”

“I have no idea.”

While I didn’t know much, it was clear that their intent was to stomp me out.

By the time we reached the plaza, we’d lost them. We snaked into a department store and disappeared through the back, where we climbed a wall that led into an adjacent neighborhood. When it was safe, we called Ma from a pay phone and she scooped us up. We never mentioned it again, and I never made the same mistake twice. Trouble seemed to always find me, even when I wasn’t looking for it. Sometimes I came out unscathed, and other times I wasn’t so lucky. But there was always a lesson; I just had to trust the voice in my head.

* * *

by eighth grade, Domingo, Tomás, and I had become inseparable. Tomás would boost liquor from his mom’s boyfriend and we’d hop on the bus for God knows where. The local bus was a gift for that season of our youth. As a practical measure, sure, but also as a window into human behavior. I saw it all on the number 52: violence, intercourse, every drug imaginable. Most people kept to their books or tunes, but others were far less reserved, mumbling to themselves or feuding with their lovers. The occasional brawl landed a little too close for comfort, but it was all telling. And while I stupidly got lost on a few occasions—I took the bus alone from time to time—I always had my Walkman. I learned to appreciate Dr. Dre’s Chronic for the masterpiece it is while adrift in the middle of downtown Miami.

The cyphers we’d hold in the back row are some of my fondest memories of riding public transit as a teenager. It went like this: Domingo would kick the beatbox and Tomás and I would take turns coming off the top or reciting lines we’d penned earlier. We’d wax poetic about each other’s mom, bust on a stranger’s off-brand shoes, and go into long tangents about how our skill was superior. I tapped into something valuable on those rides. For the first time in my life I came to see my voice as a kind of weapon, the most effective instrument at my disposal. I used it to dazzle my small audience with epic roasts and wisecracks about whatever came to mind. It was a remarkable thing to learn, even as I couldn’t fully know the doors it would open later.

* * *

The last summer before high school would begin, Domingo perfected his blunt rolling technique and Tomás got a job stocking shelves at Publix. I filled entire notebooks with lyrics and got away with more than I could hope to remember. Before I was fifteen, I’d been jumped twice and arrested three times; petty theft and vandalism. After that final arrest, the one for tagging, Ma’s patience was spent. She drove to the station in tears. The night before, she’d found a nickel bag in my wallet, so this was the start of my ending. She’d made a decision in her mind, another thing I wouldn’t know until later. On our way back home from the station, Ma told me the arresting officer, something Gugliotta, had said I was a good for nothing little spic and was headed nowhere. Naturally, Ma told him off. She’d defended me in principle, but I knew things had to change. I knew that if the officer, who supposedly represented some idea of honor and morality, felt this way, I should take heed. A month later, Ma came upon an article in the Sun-Sentinel. The same officer, Gugliotta, had been charged with two counts of burglary. Cops ain’t worth a damn, I thought to myself.

We were blazed on some North Lauderdale bud when Domingo said, “Look.” He took to the coffee table, corn chips snapping under his feet. Some of our boys were in third period by now and we laughed, pitied them in their lockdown. It was the year Black Sunday dropped and the Hill was showing out. “I Wanna Get High” rattled trunks all across a scorching Miami and shook our core type heavy. Compulsive truants, we’d ditched class that day to sing their praises, B-Real and Sen Dog’s raps emanating from our bodies like a spell.

“Look,” Domingo said, standing on his mother’s furniture. “It’s no secret that you’re all in need of something meaningful to believe in. I mean, really believe in,” he said. “It goes like this around these parts. You got it all. You’d think, what with your sunny beaches, your platinum and endless gold, your drive-thrus and stocked mini-marts, you’d be satisfied. Wrong. All this and you’ve fallen to boredom, toking all day and yearning for something lasting; a well-paved road,” he said, “a narrow path. More sex, more noise. Less of you people, though. You damn degenerates with your fast and random ways. As your leader, I’ve come to understand this,” Domingo said, “that perhaps we’ve been going about this all wrong. Forgive me,” he said. “What might be necessary is a fresh cause. A thing without the pitfalls of institutional belief,” said the ex-churchboy. “You know what I’m talking about. What we need, I’ve come to accept, is a new religion. Yes, gentlemen, lend an ear. One with better music, see, more beats; more electric guitar, maybe, more oboe. One for which our devotion might be better understood, shared by every heathen with a heartbeat. See what I’m getting at? Let’s shake things up. I’m hinting at a place. Some place where you would not be scorned when politely requesting a second fix of that delicious communion bread. Sound good to you fools? I’m talking merchandising efforts that dazzle, campaigns that tug at the core. We for something raw and revolutionary, something for us, who are far from prophets but evangelists of a new day. Talk to me. I’m preaching up in here and I think you love it.” We said, “Chill,” but he didn’t let up. “You love it.”

For the first time in my life I came to see my voice as a kind of weapon, the most effective instrument at my disposal.

“We bear witness, we picket,” he said. “We stumble into crowded supermarkets, high as all hell. High on life, we make eyes with fly strangers, the hope in our faces burning bright. Up, down, and around the block, winning lost souls in some holy dance. It’s bigger than man’s stupid reasoning, trumps pop psychology with the flick of a verse. It’s the brand of sainthood you’ve always desired and didn’t know it. Am I right? I’m bringing it right now and you love it. I know you do. Talk to me. You want a movement? Well, here it is. It’s time to stand for more than your inebriated self. Think about it. Find yourself immersed in something great, the sort of thing that might pull a poem out of you, maybe even a good one, with meter, like iambic or something. This thing we’ll fight for, this magnificent monster of a movement complete with mad bumper stickers and quality tracts, anointed handkerchiefs and ink pens; this thing with more grape juice concentrate; this thing that offers what no gang ever could, not ever; this with no name as of yet, more on that later, but a soul and heart that supersedes definition and encompasses belonging. Friendship and camaraderie,” Domingo said. “Cookouts and sing-songs. This thing, this bloody beautiful thing we build, could be undeniably, unequivocally, the jam.” I laughed my head off, Tomás made the sign of the cross. Domingo bowed and ran for the toilet. This is the kind of foolishness you spew when you’re dumb high and a poet.

* * *

When I think of my old crew, I also think of Odd Future. Led by Tyler, the Creator, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All is a kaleidoscope of talent, wits, and defiant disorder. Since first making a name for themselves as teenagers in 2007, they have remained outliers, a few dozen in-your-face skate rats with little regard for rules, pop tradition, or anything formulaic. They have been protested against and attacked incessantly for their lyrics, which frequently make references to murder, sex, and drug abuse. Tyler, Earl Sweatshirt, and a few others in the collective have come to represent disruption as a calling card. They are young and rich and free, they “skate hard and thrash black hoodies.” They won’t be tamed or bent against their will. They are skaters through and through. The ways in which they’ve challenged authority, especially on their early records, and in interviews, is on par with so many of the youth I know who came of age in challenging circumstances. They can be terrifying for those who don’t understand them, but affirming for those of us who do.

Odd Future more or less disbanded after members gained notoriety and started to branch out as single entities. But the same criticisms have followed Tyler and Earl, specifically, years into their successful solo careers. Neither has shied away from including violent and gruesome subject matter on their albums. As is often the case with these things, there is far more to unpack than what can possibly be understood at the surface. Both rappers, in fact, have attributed much of their anger and disillusionment to the void left by their absent fathers. The pain of abandonment is something the rappers still carry, however explicitly, as they have settled into adulthood. Much of their material explores these frustrations candidly, their deft and cutting verses serving as portals into the broader epidemic that is fatherlessness in America. But this is what ultimately powered the creative spirit of Odd Future when they started. “It made for good music when we were angsty teens,” Earl told the Los Angeles Times. “Daddy problems are tight when you’re trying to make angsty music.”

For them, it was about confronting personal demons while also creating something that resonated on the level of art. It becomes increasingly clear that, had OF members not gravitated to the counterculture early on, there might have been nothing else to help light their paths. In these art forms, they found a kind of refuge, a vehicle for their aggression. But this is the reality of millions of youth everywhere, not just rap stars or skaters raised in fractured homes. Every day boys and girls are left to make it work, to try and build their lives with pieces that don’t fit neatly together. This is why fathers on a whole have such positional power. Everything a father does matters. Their words, and their silences, are universes unto themselves.

To let Earl tell it on “Chum”:

It’s probably been twelve years since my father left,

left me fatherless

And I just used to say I hate him in dishonest jest

The counterculture took the place of a father I could no longer touch. Since things like school and religion couldn’t get through to me, I was being trained up outside of organized institutions. What I gravitated to were these movements that not only felt redeeming, but also freeing. They were almost everything I needed.

***

Excerpted from Rap Dad: A Story of Family and the Subculture That Shaped a Generation by Juan Vidal. Copyright © 2018 by Juan Vidal. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Living with Dolly Parton

Mark Humphrey / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Wilkerson | Longreads | October 2018 | 43 minutes (7,851 words)

Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home.

For years, I found solace in “Wildflowers,” written by Parton and performed with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on their record Trio. The song’s instrumentation is spare, with the tinny chords of the autoharp and Ronstadt and Harris’s harmonies. In a near warble, Dolly sang of a “rambling rose” who didn’t “regret the path” she chose.

I moved away from home in ways more profound than the physical leaving, and it sometimes caused me to feel the pain of committing a betrayal. My grandmother Laverne warned me: “Don’t forget where you come from.”

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