The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (18 page)

He fell in with his wife's ex-sister-in-law. She, too, was throwed off, serious bipolar, but his love for her made him feel like a superhero, capable of anything. The reality of it, though, is when you mix drugs and alcohol and mental illness you get what happened next, which was one day Tad and the ex-sister-in-law are riding down the road, and she slams on the brakes and goes, "Get the fuck out of my car." Not a word was said. The radio wasn't on or anything.

Tad said, "What's going on, baby?"

"I know what you were thinking. I heard you. Get the fuck out of my car." And she pulls out a steak knife she kept under the seat. So Tad got out and walked home in his flip-flops, ten or fifteen miles.

Tad moved into a trailer with an old welder buddy of his. The trailer was plagued by wasps, and Tad spent a run of days crying and smacking wasps with his bare hands. Then he checked into the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission, but the problem there was they mixed recovery with God, so you had a lot of people getting jailhouse religion, which was all shit, a fucking lie.

Still, he saw a future there, and was glad to find work sorting clothes at a Salvation Army donation center, where a perk of the job was first pick of the garments that came down the line. One day, Tad found a throwback Dallas Cowboys jersey in the heap, a jersey so desirable that other shelter residents hated him for having it. His ex-wife even heard about that excellent jersey he'd found, which was how his children got exposed to a rumor that Tad had been stealing clothes from the homeless. So he quit the rescue mission. Just walked out and left that jersey there.

Then Tad moved in with his brother, but he had no job and no food and no cigarettes, and when he met a man who wanted to pay 20 dollars for Tad to drive him to the Red River party boats and bring his truck back, Tad agreed. But that old boy went and got drunk and hopped up on methadone, and when he got off the party boat he got it in his head that someone had stolen his truck. The truck's owner called the police, and Tad did ten months in the Caddo Parish lockup for unauthorized use of a vehicle, plus another four at a penal farm for a hot check his wife wrote back in '92.

Jail was not too bad for Tad. He made people laugh, and he was popular because of that. He got in only four fights in 14 months, and one of those was just some psych case whose door was popped open by mistake one morning and he came down to breakfast and for no reason hit Tad with a pillowcase full of AAA batteries.

When he had served his time, they released him. After a while he got back into the meth scene, cooking out in the country near Shreveport, sometimes going to Dallas twice a day to make runs. But later he caught a lift to Austin and got into case management, where if you want to hold a bed in the shelter you have to do 10 jobs a week. You set goals: get an ID, a birth certificate, write a ré- sumé. It was at the Arch, a homeless shelter in Austin, that Tad found out about Street Soccer. He's gotten to go to Washington and now Australia, and it's given him an excuse not to fuck up. His case manager also got him the set of fake teeth and a studio apartment.

The limelight has been good for him. It's given him much confidence, and he can now handle himself in an interview without stammering. But is he maybe going to go out to Barton Springs one day and smoke the fuck out of some weed? Who's to say? But Street Soccer has Tad believing in himself, believing that anything is possible.

But what, I ask Tad Christie, does he imagine will become of him once the limelight goes away?

"I don't think it will go away" is his answer. "For me, I think it'll just get brighter."

 

As the week wears on, Diego's mood worsens. He shrieks at the coaches. He receives so many yellow cards as to rule out America's chances for the sportsmanship medal. He criticizes his teammates, though Diego is one of the only players who has yet to score a goal. On day five, he announces that he has quit the team.

Near the end of the tournament, he puts his arm around my shoulders and says, "You've been very nice to me, and I appreciate it. But you better write good about me, or I will kick your motherfucking ass."

 

Thanks to late-night beer jags among the U.S. athletes, coaching staff, and media complement the previous evening, the team is tardy in assembling for its final match of the tournament, versus Greece. Oscar Granberry—a willowy fellow from St. Louis who 30 seconds into our first conversation told me he was a member of the mile-high club—to the astonishment of all has been holed up in a luxury hotel with a newfound ladyfriend. He misses the final game entirely. After serial abasements to the coaching staff, Diego Viveros is permitted to rescind his resignation and join the team for the game.

He plays with desperate zeal, steaming hard for every loose ball, confounding his opponents with mad jammings and leggy flutter-ings. At last, in the second half, Diego traps the ball downfield, with an open channel to the goal. He takes a nervous, faltering shot, lofting the ball straight into the keeper's hands. Diego claps his hands to his head and lows with anguish. On the sidelines, his teammates guffaw uncharitably. Chris Murray, whose relationship with Diego has so deteriorated that they very nearly came to blows a few days back, emits a snort. "Good," he says.

But for all the rearguard glee at Diego's failure, it seems to me that his troubled stint with the team might have been a kind of victory. Thanks to cash outlays from Street Soccer USA, Diego's working papers are in order, and he's moved up from homelessness to his rented room in Washington Heights. He managed to nibble only the sweet side of the deal—the expenses-paid trip to Australia; the cossetings from Chris, Lawrence Cann, and me—while spitting out the bitter end, the proviso that he transform himself into the proud public symbol of something he despises. And his unsettling oscillations between friendliness and pugnacity would cure me of my mercenary plan to auction his story to Hollywood, even of the idea to try to recover his outstanding debt of 50 bucks.

Back on the pitch, thanks to a botched Greek penalty shot, Team USA secures 29th place with a 3–2 win. Medals are draped about the necks of both teams. Snapping shutters chirr beneath the din of the PA system, blaring strains of David Bowie: "We can be heroes, just for one day."

His special lady on his arm, Oscar Granberry arrives well after the final whistle and seems genuinely sorry to have overslept the game. "Man, I was
trying
to get my shit together," he laments. "I can't believe I fucked that up."

"Well, was it worth it?"

He cuts an amorous eye at his friend, a Spanish woman in her forties who looks uncannily like Benjamin Franklin. "
Hell
yes," he says in a low, sensual growl. (Three months hence, incidentally, Oscar will return to Melbourne to marry his Spanish friend. "Who says we don't change lives?" Lawrence Cann will say of the union.)

Strolling back along the Yarra, Tad Christie handles the trophy, a silver plate fixed with a plaque reading
HOMELESS WORLD
cup 29TH
PLACE.
"It's not even etched on there—it's just mirrored plastic with this thing glued on it," Tad says, plucking at the plaque with his thumbnail. "What a cheap-ass fucking trophy. Well, it's all right. They spent a lot of cash on all this other shit." He makes a sweeping gesture, taking in media vans, the Ren-faire skyline of the deluxe players' pavilion, the crowd of hundreds filing in to watch the Cup final.

 

A brutal, predawn departure for the airport the following morning. The team and entourage, groggy and fragrant from post-tournament celebrations, settles like a heap of spaniels on the terminal's terrazzo floor, napping until boarding time. All except, of course, Diego, skulking at the duty-free. He hasn't uttered a syllable all morning, and I imagine he'll maintain his sour silence for the journey's 16-hour duration.

But shortly after takeoff, Diego's voice rises in the cabin: "We're gonna have a fucking problem!" He is yelling not at his teammates or acquaintances, for a change, but at a perfect stranger in the seat behind his. "I'm serious, you don't know me. We'll have a fucking problem here."

The trouble is that, during takeoff, Diego reclined his seat into the airspace of perhaps the only other passenger on the plane with as ready an appetite for asperity as Diego himself, and the man gave a quick hard fist-jab to Diego's headrest.

"He hit my fucking seat," exclaims Diego as the flight attendants swarm. "What, I'm not allowed to put my seat back?"

"Not during takeoff, you aren't," replies the antagonist, an Australian, early fifties, with head of wiry brindle hair, his upper lip hoisted in a ratlike expression of alert malignity.

Lawrence Cann, a man generally unruffled by roosterish theatrics, turns in his seat, his brow knitted with concern. "Uh-oh," he says. "This could get bad."

An electric silence falls over the cabin. Passengers crane necks and swivel eyes, eager for a glimpse of a thrown punch or the spectacle of an air-marshal rendition. But the flight attendants speak to Diego in cool and reasonable tones, behind which seems to lurk the threat of a tranq gun or chloroform rag. And Diego, sensing the grave unwisdom of initiating an in-flight brawl, sinks into his seat, scowling at the entertainment screen from the depths of his sweatshirt's hood.

Four hours later, descending to our layover in New Zealand, Diego, to the astonishment of his nearby coaches and teammates, turns in his seat and offers the hand of peace to the older man.

"Sir, I want to say I'm sorry," Diego says. "I was very rude to you. I apologize."

"No, no," the other man replies. "I am. Really."

As the plane taxis to the gate, the men trade companionable chitchat. So, what took Diego to Melbourne, asks the man with the rodent mouth.

"I am a professional soccer player. I was there for a tournament," Diego announces to the economy cabin. "We did very well. We came in third place."

"Did you like Melbourne, then?"

"I
loved
Melbourne," Diego says. "It was a great, great experience for me."

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

G
EORGE HUGUELY IS SAID
to have been a vicious drunk who menaced Yeardley Love, yet there has been no indication that any of his teammates said anything to police. Ben Roethlisberger seems to be a serial insulter of women, whose behavior is shielded by the off-duty cops he employs. And if the charges are true, Lawrence Taylor ignored the bruises on a 16-year-old girl's face as he had sex with her, never thinking to ask who beat her.

It's a bad stretch for women in the sports pages. After reading the news accounts and police reports, it's reasonable to ask: Should women fear athletes? Is there something in our sports culture that condones these assaults? It's a difficult, even upsetting question, because it risks demonizing scores of decent, guiltless men. But we've got to ask it, because something is going on here—there's a disturbing association, and surely we're just as obliged to address it as we are concussions.

"We can no longer dismiss these actions as representative of a few bad apples," says Jay Coakley, author of
Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies,
and a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado. "The evidence suggests that they are connected to particular group cultures that are in need of critical assessment."

What do we mean when we ask whether there was something in the lacrosse "culture" that led to the murder of Yeardley Love? The Latin root of the word
cultura
means "to grow." It means the attitudes, practices, and values that are implanted and nourished in a group or society.

There's a lot we still don't know about Huguely and his "brothers," but three attitudes and practices of at least some members of the Virginia lacrosse team seem obvious: physical swagger, heavy drinking, and fraternal silence.

In 2008, a drunken Huguely was so brutally combative with a female cop that she felt she had to Taser him. Last year, he assaulted a sleeping teammate who he believed had kissed Love, several former players say, and this year, he had other violent confrontations with Love herself, witnesses say.

We can argue about gaps in the system, but one constituency very likely knew about Huguely's behavior: his teammates and friends, the ones who watched him smash up windows and bottles and heard him rant about Love.

Why didn't they tackle him? Why didn't they turn him in?

Undoubtedly, many of the young men on the Virginia lacrosse team are fine human beings. I don't mean to question their decency. I don't mean to blame them.

But I do mean to ask those who knew of Huguely's behavior an important question. Why did they not treat Yeardley Love as their teammate too?

Where were
her
brothers?

Why was she not deserving of the same loyalty as George Huguely? She played lacrosse. She wore a Virginia uniform. She was equally a champion. And yet because she played on the women's team, she seems not to have been accorded the same protection that Huguely was.

That doesn't just break the heart. It shatters it into a thousand pieces.

The allegations against Huguely, Roethlisberger, and Taylor share something in common. In all of these cases, the alleged female victims were treated as undeserving of inclusion in the protected circle. They were "others" rather than insiders.

Sports Illustrated
's profile of Roethlisberger and the men who look after him is utterly damning. According to the magazine story, on the night that he allegedly accosted an overserved undergrad in a Milledgeville, Georgia, restroom, Roethlisberger held up a tray of tequila shots and hollered, "All my bitches, take some shots!" He exposed himself at the bar. He forced his hand up someone's skirt. Yet police sergeant Jerry Blash described the alleged victim as "this drunken bitch," and Roethlisberger's bodyguards apparently blocked off the area. Protecting Roethlisberger, being "in" with him, took precedence over ethics.