The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (51 page)

He's a 19-year-old who stands up during team meetings at Virginia so that he won't fall asleep, but not because he's sluggish or disengaged. You see, he's attempting to do something that's nearly impossible at a college in the United States today. He's trying to be a student, an athlete,
and
a human being. He's trying to live in full harmony.

Lotsa luck, kid! See you around!

Wait. That's him again, darting through a frigid rain and dripping into UVA's Alderman Library. His eyes fix on a student whose head has sagged onto a table amid the laptops, books, and coffee cups. “That's one of the hunger strikers,” murmurs a classmate. “He's two days in. They're doing it for the Living Wage Campaign.”

Full Harmony stares in puzzlement. He has attended Living Wage rallies on campus, has friends in the crusade. He knows what's at stake for the thousands of campus workers barely scraping by, many on incomes at or near minimum wage. He knows the scrapers too: the old black dudes who scrape the snow and dog crap off this gorgeous green playground for the mind that Thomas Jefferson wrought nearly two centuries ago, the women who scrape the gravy and mayo off the plates in the dining-hall kitchens. Full Harmony's not another one of those students who cross campus with their eyes locked on their smartphones. He sings out greetings to total strangers, popping the bubble wrap around his school's elite matriculants, slicing at the distance between the students and the townies who serve them, perplexing all who've yet to perceive what he and they share. So how—besides the fact that he's a student-ATHLETE, one of 444,000 young American men and women who annually turn over their lives because they wish to play a college sport—has he missed hearing about this hunger strike?

He flashes a text to one of the Living Wage campaigners, a classmate named Hallie Clark:
I didn't know y'all were hunger striking
.

We sure are
, she replies.

A thought and a nervous tickle run through him: he needs to join them. He needs to stop eating and watch the muscles on his five-ten, 207-pound body begin melting away so that Mama Kathy, the woman he hugs when she swipes his ID card at the dining hall, and Miss Mary, the lady he always chats with at the convenience-store cash register in the basement of Newcomb Hall, and all of their coworkers can . . . But,
c'mon
. He's busy rehabbing the surgically repaired ligament in his left ankle, the one that wiped out most of his second season, so he'll be ready when spring ball starts in a few weeks . . . and besides, imagine what his coaches would say . . . and
really
, sports and social justice, they just don't mix anymore. Who in the last 40 years, in the wave after wave of American student-ATHLETES—not to mention the 4,100 young men on the rosters of the four mainstream professional sports each year—has made a stand like this?

Good. He can't hear that bitter cackle in the distance. It's one of the old, gray warriors from the front lines of the 1960s and early '70s who'd be willing to bet what this kid's going to decide. It's John Carlos, the bronze medalist in the '68 Olympic 200 meters, who raised his black-gloved fist on the medal stand to bring attention to racism in the United States and brought all hell down upon his head. “Athletes today?” he cries. “They don't know history! They don't want to come out of their box and risk people taking away their lollipops!”

Full Harmony whips out his cell phone again. Coach can't say no if Coach doesn't know.
Count me in
, he types.

Eat your last meal
, Hallie replies.

 

Full Harmony's last meal: a double burger, chicken nuggets, french fries, and a chocolate chip cookie, to the din of a pounding rain in his girlfriend's car in a McDonald's parking lot at 10:30
P.M
. on a Sunday in February. Gone in four and a half minutes—he's never been one for ceremony. He balls up the wrappers, his excitement rising as the grease settles. He's your crème-de-la-crème college student, carrying a 3.43 GPA in one of his university's most selective and challenging majors, Political and Social Thought, while doing volunteer work at a Charlottesville Boys & Girls Club, mentoring Charlottesville teenagers in the Collegiate 100 Society, teaching English as a second language to a refugee from Burundi in UVA's Visas program, raising funds for the homeless as part of his fraternity's untiring community service, and, oh yeah, playing on an ACC football team. Doing
this
, though—true activism for a greater cause—is what he dreamed college would be back when he signed up for it, but he has barely seen a trace of it in his three years on campus.

At 9:00
A.M
. the next morning he enters the anthropology building, Brooks Hall, and joins the gaunt gang of protesters. Perhaps he's naive. Perhaps they are too. Nobody, especially Full Harmony, regards him as anything more than Hunger Striker Number 13 . . . except for one woman. Emily Filler's a UVA grad student and an adjunct instructor at nearby University of Mary Washington who's serving as the Living Wage Campaign's publicist during the strike, and when Hallie casually mentions Full Harmony's extracurricular activity to her, she
knows
at once: a handsome, high-cheekboned, square-jawed, ever-smiling,
humble football player
hunger-striking against his university administration's wage policy for thousands of mostly African American campus workers.
Yahtzee!

She calls Frankie Jupiter, reporter for CBS affiliate WCAV, and by the time the hunger strikers have gathered on the steps of the Rotunda for their daily noon rally, Jupiter's got a camera rolling and a microphone under Full Harmony's jaw. Capturing his vow that he won't eat until UVA, the biggest employer in town, does what 17 of the other 22 elite universities considered to be its peers have done and agrees to pay its service-sector workers a “living wage.” That's a sum that the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, calculating the cost of living on a city-by-city basis, has determined for Charlottesville to be $13 an hour, which is anywhere from $2.35 to $5.75 more than the starting wage for UVA service workers.

Full Harmony finishes the interview, hoists a sign—
WORKERS ARE PEOPLE TOO!
—and becomes the loudest chanter of all:
One! Two! Three! Four! No one should be working poor! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! UVA! Living wage!

A hundred students, a handful of them his friends, stop and gawk, then hurry away. Damn. Full Harmony, empty stomach, watches them all head off to lunch.

 

He awakens on day two to a discovery: nothing's harder to ignore than a hollow belly. Get up, he tells himself. Get moving. He crosses campus and slips into the football trainer's room, bracing for the tap on the shoulder and the nod toward the coaches' offices. He begins banging out his hour and a half of rehab work: underwater treadmill, calf raises, balancing exercises, stretches, crunching towels and picking up marbles with his toes, cold and hot whirlpools. It hits him halfway through: he's operating a Maserati on an empty tank. He drags himself into the locker room, pouring his last few volts into that high-beam smile, the everything's-hunky-dory look, just in case. The football facility's crawling with assistant coaches and athletic department staffers. Either they still don't know . . .

. . . or just don't care. Yeah, maybe he can get away with this because of the scarlet
W
he wears.
Walk-on
. He's accustomed to feeling like a penny in a gold mine, dressing over here in Walk-On Corner, aka the Hood. Because in the Hood you don't get your own locker, sharing one with another walk-on, and you're not even just a number—you share that with someone far above you on the depth chart—and you're not allowed to take out your frustration on the starters or the second-stringers in practice because
We gotta get them to the game, son! Just wrap 'em up and keep 'em vertical!
And still Full Harmony loves it, approaching every practice as if it's the ACC championship game in front of 73,675 screamers, bent on being a weekday superstar.

He has found himself on the field for only a handful of kickoffs in the second halves of games that the Cavaliers have salted away . . . but his teammates, they know Joe-Joe. That's what they call him, because no one named Wonman or even Joseph—that's the name his nonfootball friends call him—could possibly be as hyper and happy, as earsplitting and ever-ready as Joe-Joe. Quickest on the scout team to suss out the first-stringers' offense and call out the appropriate defense, to call aside Cavaliers wide receivers and warn them about what they're tipping off, to clap and bellow, “Give that boy a scholarship!” when one of his fellow scout-teamers makes a play.

He exits the locker room and surveys the facilities where football players pump their iron, do their cardio, eat their meals, and attend their study halls, all far from the rest of the student body. He gazes at the two state-of-the-art synthetic practice fields, with a third one, a $13 million indoor facility, about to get green-lighted by the school's trustees, the Board of Visitors, because, well, what if it rains? Green-lighted at a budget meeting during this very hunger strike, even as administrators are insisting to the strikers that budget constraints prevent them from paying a living wage! That's like food to Joseph. It fills his empty tank with fury.

How has all this happened in the blink of the evolutionary eye? Twenty-five hundred years ago, the earliest of such athletic fields—gymnasia—were being built by the Greeks. Centers where philosophers strolled and teachers instructed young men in ethics, morals, science, math, and poetry, where the playing field was a grand courtyard surrounded by libraries and lecture halls and classrooms with the intent of fully harmonizing the development of body and mind. A lad couldn't run, jump, or hurl anything without learning how to question, how to think, how to see
connections
.

Somehow it has all become about separation, the promising athlete culled from the pack as early as nine or 10, placed with his select peers on travel teams, enthroned on an ever-rising pedestal through high school, isolated from the student body in college, fattened on the myth of his onliness by well-meaning coaches, parents, and fans, then pricked and prodded weekly for psychological advantage by those same coaches:
THEY don't think you're good enough! They don't respect you!
Us against them, you against the world, the cult of self-anointing the athlete as its Ultra Self . . . Is it any wonder in 2012 how many players, rather than join their teammates to hug and celebrate after catching a touchdown pass or nailing a game-winning three-pointer, strut
away
from them and glare?
Showed you I'm special! Showed you I'm better than all of them (and even all of “us”)!
Is it any wonder that from such soil, no such thing as a sportsman social activist has sprung since the days of Jim Brown, Bill Russell, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Bill Walton?

Tiger Woods took one step down that path, early in his career, in a Nike ad in which his words rolled on the screen—
There are still courses in the United States I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin. I've heard I'm not ready for you. Are you ready for me?
—and, in the wake of a backlash, stopped there. Labor activists who requested Michael Jordan's support in their quest to improve sweatshop conditions and reduce child-labor abuse in the production of Air Jordans in Southeast Asia got none. “Moral jellyfish,” Dave Meggyesy, a linebacker and antiwar activist with the St. Louis Cardinals in the '60s, labeled these athletes.

But scores of modern athletes, led by Woods and Jordan, create remarkable charity foundations, raise funds, and donate millions. Taken one step further—watered with an investment of time and heart nearly equal to the money—a miracle such as Andre Agassi's academy for at-risk children in Las Vegas has bloomed in the desert. But when it comes to social action that might step on toes, that might send a shiver down the spine of their publicists or their corporate sponsors, what have American athletes done? “The scared generation,” former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton calls them.

“They've put the dollar bill in front of the human race,” grouses Carlos. “That's why they stopped standing up.”

“They
have
to speak up,” insists Harry Edwards, a track and field and basketball star at San Jose State in the early '60s who went on to become a sociology professor there and at Cal. “They're the most visible expression of achievement and financial success in this country. Actors in Hollywood have always been very outspoken. Athletes have surpassed them as the number-one entertainers; they should be at least as outspoken. Those who set the table that today's athletes are dining at, they exercised that responsibility. Now you have to get past an athlete's corporate and personal advisers, and so he's got to think what's in the best interest of Buick and Nike and Starbucks and General Electric.”

Fascinating how many of the recent sportsmen who've taken stands didn't spring from our system or our soil: Canada's Steve Nash, flayed by players, coaches, and media for wearing a
NO WAR, SHOOT FOR PEACE
T-shirt on media day at the NBA's All-Star weekend in 2003, as the United States was girding to invade Iraq; Adonal Foyle of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, who founded Democracy Matters during his 12-year NBA career to educate young people on how money was strangling U.S. politics and to pressure politicians to change campaign-finance laws. The modern athlete who sacrificed by far the most for his cause—first his fortune, then his life—died here on Joseph's campus, and he, of course, was foreign-born too. Retired NBA center Manute Bol gave away virtually his entire $6 million in savings to build schools and hospitals in his native southern Sudan, then extended his stay there for a week in 2010 at the request of the president to oversee South Sudan's first independent elections even as a potentially deadly disease he'd contracted there, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, began devouring his flesh. He finally headed back to his family's home in Kansas, got off the transatlantic flight at Dulles Airport, and was rushed to UVA Medical Center, where he died in searing pain virtually next door to the building where Joseph took Early African History as a freshman. “That,” Joseph says, “blows my mind.”