“Football in America is closely associated with working-class communities, the ready-made tableau of small towns throughout the South or Midwest where collective esteem rises or falls according to how the local team did. This isn’t always how it works elsewhere. In England, for example, there remain pockets of middle-class NFL fans who turned to the sport after the hooliganism of the 1980s left them alienated from soccer. In rural China, the NFL’s flag football initiatives have helped democratize the playground; nobody grows up playing the sport, so there’s no natural hierarchy. They can all — boys and girls — be awful and then learn together. But in cities like Beijing or Shanghai, football seems to represent the cosmopolitan or exotic — it’s the distinction associated with being into something others just don’t understand.”
[GLAAD’s 2013 “Outstanding Newspaper Article” Winner] How Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe became “football’s most aggressive straight ally to the gay rights movement”:
“Kluwe says he doesn’t see the issue of gay marriage as political. His philosophy on the subject goes back to the Golden Rule, and he believes an amendment that would constitutionally criminalize same-sex marriage amounts to institutionalized segregation.
“‘You see all these arguments against gay marriage, and they all kind of logically boil down to: “It makes me feel icky,”‘ says Kluwe. ‘That’s not a valid logical argument! Like, tell me that gay people getting married is going to cause someone to steal your garage door opener, or it’s going to cause your dog to poop in your front yard. I can argue against that!'”
[Not single-page] Anthony Wayne Smith, a former defensive end for the L.A./Oakland Raiders, has been linked to the murders of four men:
“Soon after retiring from football, Anthony invested in at least one shady business—an online medical-billing scam that was later investigated by the FTC—and started spending more and more time with gangbangers and thugs. ‘He was bringing the edge around, and I didn’t like it,’ Bryan says. When he asked Anthony why, Anthony told him, ‘These guys care about me. They’re genuine dudes.’
“‘I couldn’t understand it,’ Bryan says. ‘You’re married to a lawyer. You’re living in Playa del Rey. Why would you be involved with these kinds of people?’ He began to back away, unhappily, because he felt like now he was abandoning Anthony, too. Dwayne Simon didn’t like Anthony’s new friends, either. ‘That’s when I stopped hanging around,’ he says. ‘That’s when he started to change. He got that scowl, that ugly look.'”
A 29-year-old combat veteran returns home, then decides to try to walk on as a kicker for Wyoming:
“Noble took a job for his uncle’s hay-brokerage company, throwing bales from trucks into the barn lofts of thoroughbred horse farms, sometimes 720 of them a day. He told the stories of walking dusty streets and climbing mountains in Afghanistan, of recognizing Coke bottles full of sand with wires sticking out as IEDs. Stories of the other men of 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, of air strikes and snipers, being on a squad searching for a month for a high-target member of al-Qaeda. Stories of friends getting wounded, and killed. He went to the bowling alley with his old buddies, and patrons stopped to talk to him, and he was feted with free meals and drinks, and when he went to a high school football game, he would be announced, then stand on the bleachers and turn around and wave and feel the applause turn to him instead of the field. The first few months were as though he were home on leave, as though he were still a hero, and then the novelty of his presence wore off, and everything went back to the way it had been before he left.
“He got bored, and he got angry. It felt as if there was nothing for him, as if he were still in high school, hanging out with his old friends, who hadn’t changed, and who, as time passed, treated him as though he hadn’t either. He went to bars and listened to arguments and complaints about problems that were petty compared with what he had seen. He did not want to be home anymore. ‘I’m not the type of guy who goes out to look at the stars and wonder about things,’ he says, but one night a few months after he came home, he did just that.”
Loving alternative music, but feeling like an outsider:
“One day in gym class, sitting on the bleachers adjacent to the football field, the popular kids in class came to sit next to me as we waited for everyone to suit up. Among hushed whispers, one of them turned around and asked me who my favorite musicians were. I rattled off Nirvana, the Ramones, and a host of third-tier grunge bands whose names I’m now far too embarrassed to mention publicly. (I’m fairly sure I also talked about how much I wanted to move to Seattle because of grunge; how I actually ended up here was by happenstance.) My intrepid interviewer smiled and mouthed ‘I told you so’ to his friends, who reacted with a small eruption of snide giggles.
“When I listened to rock music as a kid, it often felt like I was sneaking past the guards of racial barriers and into a cool party I wasn’t invited to. But I didn’t want to feel that way. I just wanted to enjoy the music just like everybody else.”
In Texas, football is everything—even among 12-year-olds:
“‘Celdon is the best eleven-year-old football player in America,’ Ronnie Braxton, his trainer, told me. ‘In America.’ Celdon isn’t the first youth football player to inspire that kind of claim. But when he hit the pile, his powerful legs churning furiously as he wormed his way through the defenders, the assessment seemed indisputable. As the referees pulled everyone off the pile and found Celdon lying in the end zone, his teammates began hopping up and down, and one of the grandmas in the stands rang a cowbell, and the Hawks cheerleaders—yes, the Hawks have cheerleaders—shook their metallic red-and-black pompoms, and the sound system that Coach Engel had rigged up with two car batteries and an ice chest began pumping out triumphal music, and I abandoned journalistic objectivity to throw my arms in the air and cheer until my throat hurt. How does it feel to watch a running back from the best preteen football team in the most football-mad city in Texas exert his will? It’s so beast.”
I work in sports media and read and think about sports A LOT. So the task of boiling the year in sportswriting down to some kind of best-of list is daunting indeed, and I won’t do it. Nor am I going to name my favorite sportswriter or piece of sportswriting in general, because I’m sure to overlook someone or something and probably offend my employer (USA Today Sports Media Group!), and I’m unwilling to do that.
But I will tell you my favorite athlete in 2012 was Robert Griffin III, who is suddenly playing quarterback at an extraterrestrial level for my favorite team, the Redskins. Of all the words spilled over RGIII’s emergence, none struck a chord in me like those in Charles P. Pierce’s piece for Grantland, “The Head and the Heart.” It touches on the phenomenon of this young athlete, the burden of great expectations met by even greater talent and the horrific brain injures caused by pro football. The last line will linger for a long, long time.
My favorite team in 2012 was the Orioles. The longtime doormat of Major League Baseball’s AL East, they somehow pieced together a playoff run for the ages, banding together like grown-up Bad News Bears before falling to the mighty Yankees in October. Before all of that, though, Tom Scocca wrote “‘Motherfuckin’ Shit! Take Your Ass Home!’ Or, Why the Baltimore Orioles Matter” for Deadspin, predicting it all, sort of. I thought then that it was a beautiful sentiment wonderfully expressed but also kind of sad to hold out for a team so hopeless. I was wrong, though, because anything can happen, and eventually does.
Chris Jones is a writer for Esquire and ESPN and the winner of two National Magazine Awards.
Favorite new writer discovery of 2012
I’m always scared of making lists like this, because a year is a long time, and I read a lot, and invariably I’ll forget writers and pieces that I liked very much. But this category is easy for me: Michael J. Mooney. He wrote back-to-back stories for D Magazine this summer that are so different but the same in that they both knocked me on my ass. First he wrote about a brutal rape in “When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back.” (It is a difficult read, but the ending is more than worth it.) And then he wrote the most amazing bowling story ever in “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever.” Plus, he’s a straight-up good dude. Love this guy so much.
Best election story
I’m going to seem like a homer here, but I don’t care: Charlie Pierce did journalism on Esquire.com during this entire election cycle that bordered on heroic—and I don’t use that word lightly. In its ideas, in its language, in its sheer volume, his account of this election, taken as a whole, is humbling and inspiring at the same time. Start with the end, “The Greatness of Barack Obama is Our Great Project” and go back from there.
Best personal blog post/essay
I’m going to pick two stories here, both sports stories. Writers hate hearing athletes say, “You never played the game,” but it’s hard to deny that former athletes understand the games they played better than most of us do. Just the other day, The Classical posted a meditation by former basketball player Flinder Boyd about Ricky Rubio, “The Ricky Rubio Experience.” I’m not sure I can say why, exactly, but I was really moved by this story. Some of The Classical guys can be snide little shits, far too Internet cool, but Boyd wrote with real heart here. I love this story.
The second is by one of my most favorite friends, Kevin Van Valkenburg of ESPN. He wrote about the death of a semi-pro football player in a story called “Games of chance.” Kevin played college football at the University of Montana, and he writes beautifully about the pull of the game as well as the charge that comes from hitting and with being hit. Sometimes the first person interrupts; here it informs.
Best crime story
I see the great David Grann has already picked this one, but I’ll echo his pick, because it was that good: Pamela Colloff’s “The Innocent Man” for Texas Monthly is an epic, immersive, amazing story. And full credit to the gang down in Austin for committing so completely to longform journalism. That this story even exists makes me hopeful about so many things.
The story that made me feel the most awesome about just about everything
I’ve always been an optimist about writing, or at least I’ve always tried to be an optimist about writing, and 2012, for me, has been filled with reasons for optimism (like Pamela Colloff’s story above, which is really a multi-layered testament to the power of belief). Yes, this business remains in flux, and yes, many good writers continue to put more love into their writing than their writing returns to them. But I still feel like we live in a golden age, filled with possibility. One of the stories that most made me feel that way—both because of the story itself, and because of its subject—was “How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big-Budget Flick” by Jason Fagone in Wired. The title describes the tale exactly, and it’s just as improbable and fun and crazy as it sounds. I feel like this story sums up the modern writing business as well as any: There’s still plenty of lightning out there, and there are still lots of bottles, and every now and then, someone still catches one with the other.
Undying hope from a city’s football fans—and a fear that their team will soon disappear:
“For Bills partisans, white, black, or anything else, the greatest fear is not that the team will lose a game or suffer another demoralizing season. A far more distressing concern is that the team will follow industry and investment and generations of young Buffalonians before it and abandon the region for good. Ralph Wilson, who founded the Buffalo Bills in 1959, still owns the team. He’s 94. For a few of those years it seemed one of his daughters, the NFL’s first female scout, was being groomed to replace him, but she died of cancer in 2009, at the age of 61. Wilson has refused to announce a plan of succession or to comment further on the team’s future without him. Upon his death, his heirs appear ready to sell the Bills to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, fans exist in a suspended state of disbelief and existential terror. They are sure one moment that Mr. Wilson must have a backroom deal set up to keep the team in Buffalo, a city he’d stuck with for the past half-century, even if often at a distance from his mansion in Michigan. But the next instant they can’t figure why he’d then let them suffer. The old man had done all right for himself in Buffalo, paying just $25,000 for a team currently worth about $800 million, while Erie County has covered the costs of stadium renovations. Yet now he seems ready to allow Toronto, with its armada of newly built glass and steel towers, to pirate away their team. Since 2008, the Bills have been playing one ‘home’ game a season in Toronto, which for many in Buffalo feels like an unwanted trial separation. Maybe more threatening is Los Angeles, with its mega-market revenues and media, which is angling to lure not just one NFL franchise but two. When Bills management negotiated a lease extension on its current property, they signed up for only a year. Hardly the long-term commitment of a Bills fan’s dreams.”
A young man’s memories of quitting the football team:
“The boy remembers walking the hallway toward his office, telling himself not to give in. He sat face-to-face with Coach, Bear Bryant’s picture hanging nearby on the office wall. Are you sure you want to spend your senior year in the bleachers? Coach said. Full of teenage arrogance, the boy said he wouldn’t be attending any games. He said he had watched from the sideline for two seasons and had his fill.
“Coach, always slow to speak, leaned back in his chair and warned him. He warned him that not that season, but in a decade or so, he would come to regret his decision and that once made, it could not be undone.
“The boy laughed. A grown man, said the boy, has no business thinking of games he did or did not play in high school. Coach said all right and the boy left. He never called him ‘Coach’ again. Not because he walked away from football, but because that summer the coach married his mother.
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