Sports Journalism Thread

bijald0331

bijald0331

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So I've been reading some old pieces by Gary Smith of SI fame and thought NT S&T should have a sports journalism thread so people can read some of the great sports pieces and videos out there. Just post whatever you thought was interesting/good. Please do not post transactional articles. Nothing by Chris Broussard or Ric Bucher basically. That isn't sports journalism, per se. That's more sports reporting. Just for example, Simmons, Whitlock, a piece in NY Times magazine, Gary Smith. That's some of the stuff I like to read and hope others are looking for and read.


I'm talking about thought-provoking, insightful, and interesting columns, profiles, opinions, videos, etc.

I'll start off with one of my favorites. A Roger Federer profile by David Foster Wallace from 2006.

I know people aren't going to read every article in here. That's not the point. Let's just put together some great stuff out there so when people do want to read something, they can come in here and pick something out. It would save some people the search time. I hope.

I'll post something new at least once everyday.


Federer as Religious Experience

By DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Correction Appended
Spoiler [+]
Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?
 
So I've been reading some old pieces by Gary Smith of SI fame and thought NT S&T should have a sports journalism thread so people can read some of the great sports pieces and videos out there. Just post whatever you thought was interesting/good. Please do not post transactional articles. Nothing by Chris Broussard or Ric Bucher basically. That isn't sports journalism, per se. That's more sports reporting. Just for example, Simmons, Whitlock, a piece in NY Times magazine, Gary Smith. That's some of the stuff I like to read and hope others are looking for and read.


I'm talking about thought-provoking, insightful, and interesting columns, profiles, opinions, videos, etc.

I'll start off with one of my favorites. A Roger Federer profile by David Foster Wallace from 2006.

I know people aren't going to read every article in here. That's not the point. Let's just put together some great stuff out there so when people do want to read something, they can come in here and pick something out. It would save some people the search time. I hope.

I'll post something new at least once everyday.


Federer as Religious Experience

By DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Correction Appended
Spoiler [+]
Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?
 
December 23, 1996
The Chosen One
TIGER WOODS WAS RAISED TO BELIEVE THAT HIS DESTINY IS NOT ONLY TO BE THE GREATEST GOLFER EVER BUT ALSO TO CHANGE THE WORLD. WILL THE PRESSURES OF CELEBRITY GRIND HIM DOWN FIRST?
Gary Smith
Spoiler [+]
It was ordinary. It was oh so ordinary. It was a salad, a dinner roll, a steak, a half potato, a slice of cake, a clinking fork, a podium joke, a ballroom full of white-linen-tablecloth conversation. Then a thick man with tufts of white hair rose from the head table. His voice trembled and his eyes teared and his throat gulped down sobs between words, and everything ordinary was cast out of the room.

He said, "Please forgive me...but sometimes I get very emotional...when I talk about my son.... My heart...fills with so...much...joy...when I realize...that this young man...is going to be able...to help so many people.... He will transcend this game...and bring to the world...a humanitarianism...which has never been known before. The world will be a better place to live in...by virtue of his existence...and his presence.... I acknowledge only a small part in that...in that I know that I was personally selected by God himself...to nurture this young man...and bring him to the point where he can make his contribution to humanity.... This is my treasure.... Please accept it...and use it wisely.... Thank you."

Blinking tears, the man found himself inside the arms of his son and the applause of the people, all up on their feet.

In the history of American celebrity, no father has ever spoken this way. Too many dads have deserted or died before their offspring reached this realm, but mostly they have fallen mute, the father's vision exceeded by the child's, leaving the child to wander, lost, through the sad and silly wilderness of modern fame.

So let us stand amidst this audience at last month's Fred Haskins Award dinner to honor America's outstanding college golfer of 1996, and take note as Tiger and Earl Woods embrace, for a new manner of celebrity is taking form before our eyes. Regard the 64-year-old African-American father, arm upon the superstar's shoulder, right where the chip is so often found, declaring that this boy will do more good for the world than any man who ever walked it. Gaze at the 20-year-old son, with the blood of four races in his veins, not flinching an inch from the yoke of his father's prophecy but already beginning to scent the complications. The son who stormed from behind to win a record third straight U.S. Amateur last August, turned pro and rang up scores in the 60s in 21 of his first 27 rounds, winning two PGA Tour events as he doubled and tripled the usual crowds and dramatically changed their look and age.

Now turn. Turn and look at us, the audience, standing in anticipation of something different, something pure. Quiet. Just below the applause, or within it, can you hear the grinding? That's the relentless chewing mechanism of fame, girding to grind the purity and the promise to dust. Not the promise of talent, but the bigger promise, the father's promise, the one that stakes everything on the boy's not becoming separated from his own humanity and from all the humanity crowding around him.

It's a fitting moment, while he's up there at the head table with the audience on its feet, to anoint Eldrick (Tiger) Woods—the rare athlete to establish himself immediately as the dominant figure in his sport—as SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S 1996 Sportsman of the Year. And to pose a question: Who will win? The machine...or the youth who has just entered its maw?

Tiger Woods will win. He'll fulfill his father's vision because of his mind, one that grows more still, more willful, more efficient, the greater the pressure upon him grows.

The machine will win because it has no mind. It flattens even as it lifts, trivializes even as it exalts, spreads a man so wide and thin that he becomes margarine soon enough.

Tiger will win because of God's mind. Can't you see the pattern? Earl Woods asks. Can't you see the signs? "Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity," Earl says.


Sports history, Mr. Woods? Do you mean more than Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, more than Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe? "More than any of them because he's more charismatic, more educated, more prepared for this than anyone."

Anyone, Mr. Woods? Your son will have more impact than Nelson Mandela, more than Gandhi, more than Buddha?

"Yes, because he has a larger forum than any of them. Because he's playing a sport that's international. Because he's qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He's the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power."

Surely this is lunacy. Or are we just too myopic to see? One thing is certain: We are witnessing the first volley of an epic encounter, the machine at its mightiest confronting the individual groomed all his life to conquer it and turn it to his use. The youth who has been exposed to its power since he toddled onto The Mike Douglas Show at three, the set of That's Incredible! at five, the boy who has been steeled against the silky seduction to which so many before him have succumbed. The one who, by all appearances, brings more psychological balance, more sense of self, more consciousness of possibility to the battlefield than any of his predecessors.

This is war, so let's start with war. Remove the images of pretty putting greens from the movie screen standing near the ballroom's head table. Jungle is what's needed here, foliage up to a man's armpits, sweat trickling down his thighs, leeches crawling up them. Lieut. Col. Earl Woods, moving through the night with his rifle ready, wondering why a U.S. Army public information officer stationed in Brooklyn decided in his mid-30s that he belonged in the Green Berets and ended up doing two tours of duty in Vietnam. Wondering why his first marriage has died and why the three children from it have ended up without a dad around when it's dark like this and it's time for bed—just as Earl ended up as a boy after his own father died. Wondering why he keeps plotting ways to return to the line of fire—"creative soldiering," he calls it—to eyeball death once more. To learn once again about his dark and cold side, the side that enables Earl, as Tiger will remark years later, "to slit your throat and then sit down and eat his dinner."

Oh, yes, Earl is one hell of a cocktail. A little Chinese, a little Cherokee, a few shots of African-American; don't get finicky about measurements, we're making a vat here. Pour in some gruffness and a little intimidation, then some tenderness and some warmth and a few jiggers of old anger. Don't hold back on intelligence. And stoicism. Add lots of stoicism, and even more of responsibility—"the most responsible son of a +*!!% you've ever seen in your life" is how Earl himself puts it. Top it all with "a bucket of whiskey," which is what he has been known to order when he saunters into a bar and he's in the mood. Add a dash of hyperbole, maybe two, and to hell with the ice, just whir. This is one of those concoctions you're going to remember when morning comes.

Somewhere in there, until a good 15 years ago, there was one other ingredient, the existential Tabasco, the smoldering why? The Thai secretary in the U.S. Army office in Bangkok smelled it soon after she met Earl, in 1967. "He couldn't relax," says Kultida (Tida) Woods. "Searching for something, always searching, never satisfied. I think because both his parents died when he was young, and he didn't have Mom and Dad to make him warm. Sometimes he stayed awake till three or four in the morning, just thinking."

In a man so accustomed to exuding command and control, in a Green Beret lieutenant colonel, why? has a way of building up power like a river dammed. Why did the Viet-cong sniper bracket him that day (first bullet a few inches left of one ear, second bullet a few inches right of the other) but never fire the third bullet? Why did Earl's South Vietnamese combat buddy, Nguyen Phong—the one Earl nicknamed Tiger, and in whose memory he would nickname his son—stir one night just in time to awaken Earl and warn him not to budge because a viper was poised inches from his right eye? What about that road Earl's jeep rolled down one night, the same road on which two friends had just been mutilated, the road that took him through a village so silent and dark that his scalp tingled, and then, just beyond it...hell turned inside-out over his shoulder, the sky lighting up and all the huts he had just passed spewing Vietcong machine-gun and artillery fire? He never understands what is the purpose of Lieutenant Colonel Woods's surviving again and again. He never quite comprehends what is the point of his life, until....

Until the boy is born. He will get all the time that Earl was unable to devote to the three children from his first marriage. He will be the only child from Earl's second marriage, to the Thai woman he brought back to America, and right away there are signs. What other six-month-old, Earl asks, has the balance to stand in the palm of his father's hand and remain there even as Daddy strolls around the house? Was there another 11-month-old, ever, who could pick up a sawed-off club, imitate his father's golf swing so fluidly and drive the ball so wickedly into the nylon net across the garage? Another four-year-old who could be dropped off at the golf course at 9 a.m. on a Saturday and picked up at 5 p.m., pockets bulging with money he had won from disbelievers 10 and 20 years older, until Pop said, "Tiger, you can't do that"? Earl starts to get a glimmer. He is to be the father of the world's most gifted golfer.

But why? What for? Not long after Tiger's birth, when Earl has left the military to become a purchaser for McDonnell Douglas, he finds himself in a long discussion with a woman he knows. She senses the power pooling inside him, the friction. "You have so much to give," she tells him, "but you're not giving it. You haven't even scratched the surface of your potential." She suggests he try est, Erhard Seminars Training, an intensive self-discovery and self-actualizing technique, and it hits Earl hard, direct mortar fire to the heart. What he learns is that his overmuscular sense of responsibility for others has choked his potential.


"To the point," says Earl, "that I wouldn't even buy a handkerchief for myself. It went all the way back to the day my father died, when I was 11, and my mother put her arm around me after the funeral and said, 'You're the man of the house now.' I became the father that young, looking out for everyone else, and then she died two years later.

"What I learned through est was that by doing more for myself, I could do much more for others. Yes, be responsible, but love life, and give people the space to be in your life, and allow yourself room to give to others. That caring and sharing is what's most important, not being responsible for everyone else. Which is where Tiger comes in. What I learned led me to give so much time to Tiger, and to give him the space to be himself, and not to smother him with dos and don'ts. I took out the authority aspect and turned it into companionship. I made myself vulnerable as a parent. When you have to earn respect from your child, rather than demanding it because it's owed to you as the father, miracles happen. I realized that, through him, the giving could take a quantum leap. What I could do on a limited scale, he could do on a global scale."

At last, the river is un-dammed, and Earl's whole life makes sense. At last, he sees what he was searching for, a pattern. No more volunteering for missions—he has his. Not simply to be a great golfer's father. To be destiny's father. His son will change the world.

"What the hell had I been doing in public information in the Army, posted in Brooklyn?" he asks. "Why, of course, what greater training can there be than three years of dealing with the New York media to prepare me to teach Tiger the importance of public relations and how to handle the media?"

Father: Where were you born, Tiger?

Son, age three: I was born on December 30, 1975, in Long Beach, California.

Father: No, Tiger, only answer the question you were asked. It's important to prepare yourself for this. Try again.

Son: I was born in Long Beach, California.

Father: Good, Tiger, good.

The late leap into the Green Berets? "What the hell was that for?" Earl says. "Of course, to prepare me to teach Tiger mental toughness."


The three children by the first marriage? "Not just one boy the first time," says Earl, "but two, along with a girl, as if God was saying, 'I want this son of a +*!!% to really have previous training.' "

The Buddhist wife, the one who grew up in a boarding school after her parents separated when she was five, the girl who then vowed that her child would know nothing but love and attention? The one who will preach inner calm to Tiger simply by turning to him with that face—still awaiting its first wrinkle at 52? Whose eyes close when she speaks, so he can almost see her gathering and sifting the thoughts? The mother who will walk every hole and keep score for Tiger at children's tournaments, adding a stroke or two if his calm cracks? "Look at this stuff!" cries Earl. "Over and over you can see the plan being orchestrated by someone other than me because I'm not this damn good! I tried to get out of that combat assignment to Thailand. But Tida was meant to bring in the influence of the Orient, to introduce Tiger to Buddhism and inner peace, so he would have the best of two different worlds. And so he would have the knowledge that there were two people whose lives were totally committed to him."

What of the heart attack Earl suffered when Tiger was 10 and the retired lieutenant colonel felt himself floating down the gray tunnel toward the light before he was wrenched back? "To prepare me to teach Tiger that life is short," Earl says, "and to live each day to the maximum, and not worry about the future. There's only now. You must understand that time is just a linear measurement of successive increments of now. Anyplace you go on that line is now, and that's how you have to live it."

No need to wonder about the appearance of the perfect childhood coach, John Anselmo; the perfect sports psychologist, Jay Brunza; the perfect agent, Hughes Norton; the perfect attorney, John Merchant; and the perfect pro swing instructor, Butch Harmon. Or about the great tangle of fate that leads them all to Tiger at just the right junctures in his development. "Everything," says Earl, "right there when he needs it. Everything. There can't be this much coincidence in the world. This is a directed scenario, and none of us involved in the scenario has failed to accept the responsibility. This is all destined to be."

His wife ratifies this, in her own way. She takes the boy's astrological chart to a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles and to another in Bangkok and is told by monks at both places that the child has wondrous powers. "If he becomes a politician, he will be either a president or a prime minister," she is told. "If he enters the military, he will be a general."

Tida comes to a conclusion. "Tiger has Thai, African, Chinese, American Indian and European blood," she says. "He can hold everyone together. He is the Universal Child."

This is in the air the boy breathes for 20 years, and it becomes bone fact for him, marrow knowledge. When asked about it, he merely nods in acknowledgment of it, assents to it; of course he believes it's true. So failure, in the rare visits it pays him, is not failure. It's just life pausing to teach him a lesson he needs in order to go where he's inevitably going. And success, no matter how much sooner than expected it comes to the door, always finds him dressed and ready to welcome it. "Did you ever see yourself doing this so soon?" a commentator breathlessly asks him seconds after his first pro victory, on Oct. 6 in Las Vegas, trying to elicit wonder and awe on live TV. "Yeah," Tiger responds. "I kind of did." And sleep comes to him so easily: In the midst of conversation, in a car, in a plane, off he goes, into the slumber of the destined. "I don't see any of this as scary or a burden," Tiger says. "I see it as fortunate. I've always known where I wanted to go in life. I've never Jet anything deter me. This is my purpose. It will unfold."

No sports star in the history of American celebrity has spoken this way. Maybe, somehow, Tiger can win.

The machine will win. It must win because it too is destiny, five billion destinies leaning against one. There are ways to keep the hordes back, a media expert at Nike tells Tiger. Make broad gestures when you speak. Keep a club in your hands and take practice swings, or stand with one foot well out in front of the other, in almost a karate stance. That will give you room to breathe. Two weeks later, surrounded by a pen-wielding mob in La Quinta, Calif., in late November, just before the Skins Game, the instruction fails. Tiger survives, but his shirt and slacks are ruined, felt-tip-dotted to death.

The machine will win because it will wear the young man down, cloud his judgment, steal his sweetness, the way it does just before the Buick Challenge in Pine Mountain, Ga., at the end of September. It will make his eyes drop when the fans' gaze reaches for his, his voice growl at their clawing hands, his body sag onto a sofa after a practice round and then rise and walk across the room and suddenly stop in bewilderment. "I couldn't even remember what I'd just gotten off the couch for, two seconds before," he says. "I was like mashed potatoes. Total mush."


So he walks. Pulls out on the eve of the Buick Challenge, pulls out of the Fred Haskins Award dinner to honor him, and goes home. See, maybe Tiger can win. He can just turn his back on the machine and walk. Awards? Awards to Tiger are like echoes, voices bouncing off the walls, repeating what a truly confident man has already heard inside his own head. The Jack Nicklaus Award, the one Jack himself was supposed to present to Tiger live on ABC during the Memorial tournament last spring? Tiger would have blown it off if Wally Goodwin, his coach at Stanford during the two years he played there before turning pro, hadn't insisted that he show up.

The instant Tiger walks away from the Buick Challenge and the Haskins dinner, the hounds start yapping. See, that's why the machine will win. It's got all those damn heel-nippers. Little mutts on the PGA Tour resenting how swiftly the 20-year-old was ordained, how hastily he was invited to play practice rounds with Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, with Greg Norman and Ray Floyd and Nick Faldo and Fred Couples. And big dogs snapping too. Tom Kite quoted as saying, "I can't ever remember being tired when I was 20," and Peter Jacobsen quoted, "You can't compare Tiger to Nicklaus and Palmer anymore because they never [walked out]."

He rests for a week, stunned by the criticism—"I thought those people were my friends," he says. He never second-guesses his decision to turn pro, but he sees what he surrendered. "I miss college," he says. "I miss hanging out with my friends, getting in a little trouble. I have to be so guarded now. I miss sitting around drinking beer and talking half the night. There's no one my own age to hang out with anymore because almost everyone my age is in college. I'm a target for everybody now, and there's nothing I can do about it. My mother was right when she said that turning pro would take away my youth. But golfwise, there was nothing left for me in college."

He reemerges after the week's rest and rushes from four shots off the lead on the final day to win the Las Vegas Invitational in sudden death. The world's waiting for him again, this time with reinforcements. Letterman and Leno want him as a guest; GQ calls about a cover; Cosby, along with almost every other sitcom you can think of, offers to write an episode revolving around Tiger, if only he'll appear. Kids dress up as Tiger for Halloween—did anyone ever dress up as Arnie or Jack?—and Michael Jordan declares that his only hero on earth is Tiger Woods. Pepsi is dying to have him cut a commercial for one of its soft drinks aimed at Generation Xers; Nike and Titleist call in chits for the $40 million and $20 million contracts he signed; money managers are eager to know how he wants his millions invested; women walk onto the course during a practice round and ask for his hand in marriage; kids stampede over and under ropes and chase him from the 18th hole to the clubhouse; piles of phone messages, await him when he returns to his hotel room. "Why," Tiger asks, "do so many people want a piece of me?"

Because something deeper than conventional stardom is at work here, something so spontaneous and subconscious that words have trouble going there. It's a communal craving, a public aching for a superstar free of anger and arrogance and obsession with self. It's a hollow place that chimes each time Tiger and his parents strike the theme of father and mother and child love, each time Tiger stands at a press conference and declares, "They have raised me well, and I truly believe they have taught me to accept full responsibility for all aspects of my life." During the making of a Titleist commercial in November, a makeup woman is so moved listening to Earl describe his bond with Tiger that she decides to contact her long-estranged father. "See what I mean?" cries Earl. "Did you affect someone that way today? Did anyone else there? It's destiny, man. It's something bigger than me."

What makes it so vivid is context. The white canvas that the colors are being painted on—the moneyed, mature and almost minority-less world of golf—makes Tiger an emblem of youth overcoming age, have-not overcoming have, outsider overcoming insider, to the delight not only of the 18-year-olds in the gallery wearing nose rings and cornrows, but also—of all people—of the aging insider haves.

So Tiger finds himself, just a few weeks after turning pro at the end of August, trying to clutch a bolt of lightning with one hand and steer an all-at-once corporation—himself—-with the other, and before this he has never worked a day in his life. Never mowed a neighbor's lawn, never flung a folded newspaper, never stocked a grocery shelf; Mozarts just don't, you know. And he has to act as if none of this is new or vexing because he has this characteristic—perhaps from all those years of hanging out with his dad at tournaments, all those years of mixing with and mauling golfers five, 10, 20, 30 years older than he is—of never permitting himself to appear confused, surprised or just generally a little squirt. "His favorite expression," Earl says, "is, 'I knew that.' " Of course Pop, who is just as irreverent with Tiger as he is reverent, can say, "No, you didn't know that, you little s—." But Earl, who has always been the filter for Tiger, decides to take a few steps back during his son's first few months as a pro because he wishes to encourage Tiger's independence and because he is uncertain of his own role now that the International Management Group (IMG) is managing Tiger's career.

Nobody notices it, but the inner calm is beginning to dissolve. Earl enters Tiger's hotel room during the Texas Open in mid-October to ask him about his schedule, and Tiger does something he has never done in his 20 years. He bites the old man's head off.

Earl blinks. "I understand how you must feel," he says.

"No, you don't," snaps Tiger.


"And I realized," Earl says later, "that I'd spent 20 years planning for this, but the one thing I didn't do was educate Tiger to be the boss of a corporation. There was just no vehicle for that, and I thought it would develop more slowly. I wasn't presumptuous enough to anticipate this. For the first time in his life, the training was behind the reality. I could see on his face that he was going through hell."

The kid is fluid, though. Just watch him walk. He's quick to flow into the new form, to fit the contour of necessity. A few hours after the outburst he's apologizing to his father and hugging him. A few days later he's giving Pop the O.K. to call a meeting of the key members of Tiger's new corporation and establish a system, Lieutenant Colonel Woods in command, chairing a 2½-hour teleconference with the team each week to sift through all the demands, weed out all the chaff and present Tiger five decisions to make instead of 500. A few days after that, the weight forklifted off his shoulders, at least temporarily, Tiger wins the Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic. And a few weeks later, at the Fred Haskins Award dinner, which has been rescheduled at his request, Tiger stands at the podium and says, "I should've attended the dinner [the first time]. I admit I was wrong, and I'm sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused. But I have learned from that, and I will never make that mistake again. I'm very honored to be part of this select group, and I'll always remember, for both good and bad, this Haskins Award; for what I did and what I learned, for the company I'm now in and I'll always be in. Thank you very much." The crowd surges to its feet, cheering once more.

See, maybe Tiger can win. He's got the touch. He's got the feel. He never writes down a word before he gives a speech. When he needs to remember a phone number, he doesn't search his memory or a little black book; he picks up a phone and watches what number his fingers go to. When he needs a 120-yard shot to go under an oak branch and over a pond, he doesn't visualize the shot, as most golfers would. He looks at the flag and pulls everything from the hole back, back, back...not back into his mind's eye, but into his hands and forearms and hips, so they'll do it by feel. Explain how he made that preposterous shot? He can't. Better you interview his knuckles and metacarpals.

"His handicap" says Earl, "is that he has such a powerful creative mind. His imagination is too vivid. If he uses visualization, the ball goes nuts. So we piped into his creative side even deeper, into his incredible sense of feel."

"I've learned to trust the subconscious," says Tiger. "My instincts have never lied to me."

The mother radiates this: the Eastern proclivity to let life happen, rather than the Western one to make it happen. The father comes to it in his own way, through fire. To kill a man, to conduct oneself calmly and efficiently when one's own death is imminent—a skill Earl learns in Green Berets psychological training and then again and again in jungles and rice paddies—one removes the conscious mind from the task and yields to the subconscious. "It's the more powerful of the two minds," Earl says. "It works faster than the conscious mind, yet it's patterned enough to handle routine tasks over and over, like driving a car or making a putt. It knows what to do.

"Allow yourself the freedom of emotion and feeling. Don't try to control them and trap them. Acknowledge them and become the beneficiary of them. Let it all outflow."

Let it all because it's all there: The stability, almost freakish for a close-of-the-millennium California child—same two parents, same house all his 20 years, same best friends, one since second grade, one since eighth. The kid, for god's sake, never once had a babysitter. The conditioning is there as well, the two years of psychological boot camp during which Earl dropped golf bags and pumped cart brakes during Tiger's backswings, jingled change and rolled balls across his line of vision to test his nerves, promising him at the outset that he only had to say "Enough" and Earl would cut off the blowtorch, but promising too that if Tiger graduated, no man he ever faced would be mentally stronger than he. "I am the toughest golfer mentally," Tiger says.

The bedrock is so wide that opposites can dance upon it: The cautious man can be instinctive, the careful man can be carefree. The bedrock is so wide that it has enticed Tiger into the habit of falling behind—as he did in the final matches of all three U.S. Junior Amateur and all three U.S. Amateur victories—knowing in his tissue and bones that danger will unleash his greatest power. "Allow success and fame to happen," the old man says. "Let the legend grow."

To hell with the Tao. The machine will win, it has to win, because it makes everything happen before a man knows it. Before he knows it, a veil descends over his eyes when another stranger approaches. Before he knows it, he's living in a walled community with an electronic gate and a security guard, where the children trick-or-treat in golf carts, a place like the one Tiger just moved into in Orlando to preserve some scrap of sanity. Each day there, even with all the best intentions, how can he help but be a little more removed from the world he's supposed to change, and from his truest self?


Which is...who? The poised, polite, opaque sage we see on TV? No, no, no; his friends hoot and haze him when they see that Tiger on the screen, and he can barely help grinning himself. The Tiger they know is perfectly 20, a fast-food freak who never remembers to ask if anyone else is hungry before he bolts to Taco Bell or McDonald's for the 10th time of the week. The one who loves riding roller coasters, spinning out golf carts and winning at cards no matter how often his father accuses him of "reckless eyeballing." The one who loves delivering the dirty joke, who owns a salty barracks tongue just a rank or two beneath his father's. The one who's flip, who's downright cocky. When a suit walks up to him before the Haskins Award dinner and says, "I think you're going to be the next great one, but those are mighty big shoes to fill," Tiger replies, "Got big feet."

A typical exchange between Tiger and his agent, Norton:

"Tiger, they want to know when you can do that interview."

"Tell them to kiss my %%!!"

"All right, and after that, what should I tell them?"

"Tell them to kiss my %%! again!"

"O.K., and after that...."

But it's a cockiness cut with humility, the paradox pounded into his skull by a father who in one breath speaks of his son with religious awe and in the next grunts, "You weren't s—then, Tiger. You ain't s—now. You ain't never gonna be s—."

"That's why I know I can handle all this," Tiger says, "no matter how big it gets. I grew up in the media's eye, but I was taught never to lose sight of where I came from. Athletes aren't as gentlemanly as they used to be. I don't like that change. I like the idea of being a role model. It's an honor. People took the time to help me as a kid, and they impacted my life. I want to do the same for kids."

So, if it's a clinic for children instead of an interview or an endorsement for adults, the cynic in Tiger gives way to the child who grew up immersed in his father's vision of an earth-altering compassion, the seven-year-old boy who watched scenes from the Ethiopian famine on the evening news, went right to his bedroom and returned with a $20 bill to contribute from his piggy bank. Last spring busloads of inner-city kids would arrive at golf courses where Tiger was playing for Stanford, spilling out to watch the Earl and Tiger show in wonder. Earl would talk about the dangers of drugs, then proclaim, "Here's Tiger Woods on drugs," and Tiger would stagger to the tee, topping the ball so it bounced crazily to the side. And then, presto, with a wave of his arms Earl would remove the drugs from Tiger's body, and his son would stride to the ball and launch a 330-yard rocket across the sky. Then Earl would talk about respect and trust and hard work and demonstrate what they can all lead to by standing 10 feet in front of his son, raising his arms and telling Tiger to smash the ball between them—and, whoosh, Tiger would part not only the old man's arms but his haircut too.


They've got plans, the two of them, big plans, for a Tiger Woods Foundation that will fund scholarships across the country, set up clinics and coaches and access to golf courses for inner-city children. "I throw those visions out there in front of him," Earl says, "and it's like reeling in a fish. He goes for the bait, takes it and away he goes. This is nothing new. It's been working this way for a long time."

"That's the difference," says Merchant, Tiger's attorney and a family friend. "Other athletes who have risen to this level just didn't have this kind of guidance. With a father and mother like Tiger's, he has to be real. It's such a rare quality in celebrities nowadays. There hasn't been a politician since John Kennedy whom people have wanted to touch. But watch Tiger. He has it. He actually listens to people when they stop him in an airport. He looks them in the eye. I can't ever envision Tiger Woods selling his autograph."

See, maybe Tiger can win.

Let's be honest. The machine will win because you can't work both sides of this street. The machine will win because you can't transcend wearing 16 Nike swooshes, you can't move human hearts while you're busy pushing sneakers. Gandhi didn't hawk golf balls, did he? Jackie Robinson was spared that fate because he came and went while Madison Avenue was still teething. Ali became a symbol instead of a logo because of boxing's disrepute and because of the attrition of cells in the basal ganglia of his brain. Who or what will save Tiger Woods?

Did someone say Buddha?

Every year near his birthday, Tiger goes with his mother to a Buddhist temple and makes a gift of rice, sugar and salt to the monks there who have renounced all material goods. A mother-of-pearl Buddha given to Tiger by his Thai grandfather watches over him while he sleeps, and a gold Buddha hangs from the chain on his neck. "I like Buddhism because it's a whole way of being and living," Tiger says. "It's based on discipline and respect and personal responsibility. I like Asian culture better than ours because of that. Asians are much more disciplined than we are. Look how well behaved their children are. It's how my mother raised me. You can question, but talk back? Never. In Thailand, once you've earned people's respect, you have it for life. Here it's, What have you done for me lately? So here you can never rest easy. In this country I have to be very careful. I'm easygoing, but I won't let you in completely. There, I'm Thai, and it feels very different. In many ways I consider that home.

"I believe in Buddhism. Not every aspect, but most of it. So I take bits and pieces. I don't believe that human beings can achieve ultimate enlightenment, because humans have flaws. I don't want to get rid of all my wants and desires. I can enjoy material things, but that doesn't mean I need them. It doesn't matter to me whether I live in a place like this"—the golf club in his hand makes a sweep of the Orlando villa—"or in a shack. I'd be fine in a shack, as long as I could play some golf. I'll do the commercials for Nike and for Titleist, but there won't be much more than that. I have no desire to be the king of endorsement money."

On the morning after he decides to turn pro, there's a knock on his hotel room door. It's Norton, bleary-eyed but exhilarated after a late-night round of negotiations with Nike. He explains to Tiger and Earl that the benchmark for contract endorsements in golf is Norman's reported $2½ million-a-year deal with Reebok. Then, gulping down hard on the yabba-dabba-doo rising up his throat, Norton announces Nike's offer: $40 million for five years, eight mil a year. "Over three times what Norman gets!" Norton exults.

Silence.

"Guys, do you realize this is more than Nike pays any athlete in salary, even Jordan?"


Silence.

"Finally," Norton says now, recalling that morning, "Tiger says, 'Mmmm-hmmm,' and I say, 'That's it? Mmmm-hmmm?' No 'Omigod.' No slapping five or 'Ya-hooo!' So I say, 'Let me go through this again, guys.' Finally Tiger says, 'Guess that's pretty amazing.' That's it. When I made the deal with Titleist a day later, I went back to them saying, 'I'm almost embarrassed to tell you this one. Titleist is offering a little more than $20 million over five years.' "

On the Monday morning after his first pro tournament, a week after the two megadeals, Tiger scans the tiny print on the sports page under Milwaukee Open money earnings and finds his name. Tiger Woods: $2,544. "That's my money," he exclaims. "I earned this!"

See, maybe Tiger can win.

How? How can he win when there are so many insects under so many rocks? Several more death threats arrive just before the Skins Game, prompting an increase in his plainclothes security force, which is already larger than anyone knows. His agent's first instinct is to trash every piece of hate mail delivered to IMG, but Tiger won't permit it. Every piece of racist filth must be saved and given to him. At Stanford he kept one letter taped to his wall. Fuel comes in the oddest forms.

The audience, in its hunger for goodness, swallows hard over the Nike ad that heralds Tiger's entrance into the professional ranks. The words that flash on the screen over images of Tiger—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?—ooze the very attitude from which many in the audience are seeking relief. The media backlash is swift: The Tiger Woods who used to tell the press, "The only time I think about race is when the media ask me"—whoa, what happened to him?

What happened to him was a steady accretion of experiences, also known as a life. What happened, just weeks before he was born, was a fusillade of limes and BBs rattling the Woods house in Cypress, Calif., one of the limes shattering the kitchen window, splashing glass all around the pregnant Tida, to welcome the middle-class subdivision's first non-Caucasian family.

What happened was a gang of older kids seizing Tiger on his first day of kindergarten, tying him to a tree, hurling rocks at him, calling him monkey and @*%+%#. And Tiger, at age five, telling no one what happened for several days, trying to absorb what this meant about himself and his world.

What happened was the Look, as Tiger and Earl came to call it, the uneasy, silent stare they received in countless country-club locker rooms and restaurants. "Something a white person could never understand," says Tiger, "unless he went to Africa and suddenly found himself in the middle of a tribe." What happened was Tiger's feeling pressured to leave a driving range just two years ago, not far from his family's California home, because a resident watching Tiger's drives rocket into the nearby protective netting reported that a black teenager was trying to bombard his house.

What happened was the cold shoulder Earl got when he took his tyke to play at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress—"a club," Earl says, "composed mostly of retired naval personnel who knew blacks only as cooks and servers, and along comes me, a retired lieutenant colonel outranking 99 percent of them, and I have the nerve to take up golf at 42 and immediately become a low handicap and beat them, and then I have the audacity to have this kid. Well, they had to do something. They took away Tiger's playing privileges twice, said he was too young, even though there were other kids too young who they let play. The second time it happened, I went up to the pro who had done it and made a bet. I said, 'If you'll spot my three-year-old just one stroke a hole, nine holes, playing off the same tees, and he beats you, will you certify him?' The pro started laughing and said, 'Sure.' Tiger beat him by two strokes, got certified, then the members went over the pro's head and kicked him out again. That's when we switched him to another course."


Beat them. That was his parents' solution for each banishment, each Look. Hold your tongue, hew to every rule and beat them. Tiger Woods is the son of the first black baseball player in the Big Seven, a catcher back in the early '50s, before the conference became the Big Eight. A man who had to leave his Kansas State teammates on road trips and travel miles to stay in motels for blacks; who had to go to the back door of restaurant kitchens to be fed while his teammates dined inside; who says, "This is the most racist society in the world—I know that." A man who learned neither to extinguish his anger nor spray it but to quietly convert it into animus, the determination to enter the system and overcome it by turning its own tools against it. A Green Berets explosives expert whose mind naturally ran that way, whose response, upon hearing Tiger rave about the security in his new walled community, was, "I could get in. I could blow up the clubhouse and be gone before they ever knew what hit them." A father who saw his son, from the beginning, as the one who would enter one of America's last Caucasian bastions, the PGA Tour, and overthrow it from within in a manner that would make it smile and ask for more. "Been planning that one for 20 years," says Earl. "See, you don't turn it into hatred. You turn it into something positive. So many athletes who reach the top now had things happen to them as children that created hostility, and they bring that hostility with them. But that hostility uses up energy. If you can do it without the chip on the shoulder, it frees up all that energy to create."

It's not until Stanford, where Tiger takes an African-American history course and stays up half the night in dormitories talking with people of every shade of skin, that his experiences begin to crystallize. "What I realized is that even though I'm mathematically Asian—if anything—if you have one drop of black blood in the United States, you're black," says Tiger. "And how important it is for this country to talk about this subject. It's not me to blow my horn, the way I come across in that Nike ad, or to say things quite that way. But I felt it was worth it because the message needed to be said. You can't say something like that in a polite way. Golf has shied away from this for too long. Some clubs have brought in tokens, but nothing has really changed. I hope what I'm doing can change that."

But don't overestimate race's proportion in the fuel that propels Tiger Woods. Don't look for traces of race in the astonishing rubble at his feet on the Sunday after he lost the Texas Open by two strokes and returned to his hotel room and snapped a putter in two with one violent lift of his knee. Then another putter. And another. And another and another—eight in all before his rage was spent and he was ready to begin considering the loss's philosophical lesson. "That volcano of competitive fire, that comes from me," says Earl. A volcano that's mostly an elite athlete's need to win, a need far more immediate than that of changing the world.

No, don't overestimate race, but don't overlook it, either. When Tiger is asked about racism, about the effect it has on him when he senses it in the air, he has a golf club in his hands. He takes the club by the neck, his eyes flashing hot and cold at once, and gives it a short upward thrust. He says, "It makes me want to stick it right up their +%@$@." Pause. "On the golf course."

The machine will win because there is so much of the old man's breath in the boy...and how long can the old man keep breathing? At 2 a.m., hours before the second round of the Tour Championship in Tulsa on Oct. 25, the phone rings in Tiger's hotel room. It's Mom. Pop's in an ambulance, on his way to a Tulsa hospital. He's just had his second heart attack.

The Tour Championship? The future of humanity? The hell with 'em. Tiger's at the old man's bedside in no time, awake most of the night. Tiger's out of contention in the Tour Championship by dinnertime, with a second-round 78, his worst till then as a pro. "There are things more important than golf," he says.

The old man survives—and sees the pattern at work, of course. He's got to throw away the cigarettes. He's got to quit ordering the cholesterol special for breakfast. "I've got to shape up now, God's telling me," Earl says, "or I won't be around for the last push, the last lesson." The one about how to ride the tsunami of runaway fame.

The machine will win because no matter how complicated it all seems now, it is simpler than it will ever be. The boy will marry one day, and the happiness of two people will lie in his hands. Children will follow, and it will become his job to protect three or four or five people from the molars of the machine. Imagine the din of the grinding in five, 10, 15 years, when the boy reaches his golfing prime.

The machine will win because the whole notion is so ludicrous to begin with, a kid clutching an eight-iron changing the course of humanity. No, of course not, there won't be thousands of people sitting in front of tanks because of Tiger Woods. He won't bring about the overthrow of a tyranny or spawn a religion that one day will number 300 million devotees.

But maybe Pop is onto something without quite seeing what it is. Maybe it has to do with timing: the appearance of his son when America is turning the corner to a century in which the country's faces of color will nearly equal those that are white. Maybe, every now and then, a man gets swallowed by the machine, but the machine is changed more than he is.


For when we swallow Tiger Woods, the yellow-black-red-white man, we swallow something much more significant than Jordan or Charles Barkley. We swallow hope in the American experiment, in the pell-mell jumbling of genes. We swallow the belief that the face of the future is not necessarily a bitter or bewildered face; that it might even, one day, be something like Tiger Woods's face: handsome and smiling and ready to kick all comers' +%@$@.

We see a woman, 50-*!* and Caucasian, well-coiffed and tailored—the woman we see at every country club—walk up to Tiger Woods before he receives the Haskins Award and say, "When I watch you taking on all those other players, Tiger, I feel like I'm watching my own son"...and we feel the quivering of the cosmic compass that occurs when human beings look into the eyes of someone of another color and see their own flesh and blood.
 
December 23, 1996
The Chosen One
TIGER WOODS WAS RAISED TO BELIEVE THAT HIS DESTINY IS NOT ONLY TO BE THE GREATEST GOLFER EVER BUT ALSO TO CHANGE THE WORLD. WILL THE PRESSURES OF CELEBRITY GRIND HIM DOWN FIRST?
Gary Smith
Spoiler [+]
It was ordinary. It was oh so ordinary. It was a salad, a dinner roll, a steak, a half potato, a slice of cake, a clinking fork, a podium joke, a ballroom full of white-linen-tablecloth conversation. Then a thick man with tufts of white hair rose from the head table. His voice trembled and his eyes teared and his throat gulped down sobs between words, and everything ordinary was cast out of the room.

He said, "Please forgive me...but sometimes I get very emotional...when I talk about my son.... My heart...fills with so...much...joy...when I realize...that this young man...is going to be able...to help so many people.... He will transcend this game...and bring to the world...a humanitarianism...which has never been known before. The world will be a better place to live in...by virtue of his existence...and his presence.... I acknowledge only a small part in that...in that I know that I was personally selected by God himself...to nurture this young man...and bring him to the point where he can make his contribution to humanity.... This is my treasure.... Please accept it...and use it wisely.... Thank you."

Blinking tears, the man found himself inside the arms of his son and the applause of the people, all up on their feet.

In the history of American celebrity, no father has ever spoken this way. Too many dads have deserted or died before their offspring reached this realm, but mostly they have fallen mute, the father's vision exceeded by the child's, leaving the child to wander, lost, through the sad and silly wilderness of modern fame.

So let us stand amidst this audience at last month's Fred Haskins Award dinner to honor America's outstanding college golfer of 1996, and take note as Tiger and Earl Woods embrace, for a new manner of celebrity is taking form before our eyes. Regard the 64-year-old African-American father, arm upon the superstar's shoulder, right where the chip is so often found, declaring that this boy will do more good for the world than any man who ever walked it. Gaze at the 20-year-old son, with the blood of four races in his veins, not flinching an inch from the yoke of his father's prophecy but already beginning to scent the complications. The son who stormed from behind to win a record third straight U.S. Amateur last August, turned pro and rang up scores in the 60s in 21 of his first 27 rounds, winning two PGA Tour events as he doubled and tripled the usual crowds and dramatically changed their look and age.

Now turn. Turn and look at us, the audience, standing in anticipation of something different, something pure. Quiet. Just below the applause, or within it, can you hear the grinding? That's the relentless chewing mechanism of fame, girding to grind the purity and the promise to dust. Not the promise of talent, but the bigger promise, the father's promise, the one that stakes everything on the boy's not becoming separated from his own humanity and from all the humanity crowding around him.

It's a fitting moment, while he's up there at the head table with the audience on its feet, to anoint Eldrick (Tiger) Woods—the rare athlete to establish himself immediately as the dominant figure in his sport—as SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S 1996 Sportsman of the Year. And to pose a question: Who will win? The machine...or the youth who has just entered its maw?

Tiger Woods will win. He'll fulfill his father's vision because of his mind, one that grows more still, more willful, more efficient, the greater the pressure upon him grows.

The machine will win because it has no mind. It flattens even as it lifts, trivializes even as it exalts, spreads a man so wide and thin that he becomes margarine soon enough.

Tiger will win because of God's mind. Can't you see the pattern? Earl Woods asks. Can't you see the signs? "Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity," Earl says.


Sports history, Mr. Woods? Do you mean more than Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, more than Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe? "More than any of them because he's more charismatic, more educated, more prepared for this than anyone."

Anyone, Mr. Woods? Your son will have more impact than Nelson Mandela, more than Gandhi, more than Buddha?

"Yes, because he has a larger forum than any of them. Because he's playing a sport that's international. Because he's qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He's the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power."

Surely this is lunacy. Or are we just too myopic to see? One thing is certain: We are witnessing the first volley of an epic encounter, the machine at its mightiest confronting the individual groomed all his life to conquer it and turn it to his use. The youth who has been exposed to its power since he toddled onto The Mike Douglas Show at three, the set of That's Incredible! at five, the boy who has been steeled against the silky seduction to which so many before him have succumbed. The one who, by all appearances, brings more psychological balance, more sense of self, more consciousness of possibility to the battlefield than any of his predecessors.

This is war, so let's start with war. Remove the images of pretty putting greens from the movie screen standing near the ballroom's head table. Jungle is what's needed here, foliage up to a man's armpits, sweat trickling down his thighs, leeches crawling up them. Lieut. Col. Earl Woods, moving through the night with his rifle ready, wondering why a U.S. Army public information officer stationed in Brooklyn decided in his mid-30s that he belonged in the Green Berets and ended up doing two tours of duty in Vietnam. Wondering why his first marriage has died and why the three children from it have ended up without a dad around when it's dark like this and it's time for bed—just as Earl ended up as a boy after his own father died. Wondering why he keeps plotting ways to return to the line of fire—"creative soldiering," he calls it—to eyeball death once more. To learn once again about his dark and cold side, the side that enables Earl, as Tiger will remark years later, "to slit your throat and then sit down and eat his dinner."

Oh, yes, Earl is one hell of a cocktail. A little Chinese, a little Cherokee, a few shots of African-American; don't get finicky about measurements, we're making a vat here. Pour in some gruffness and a little intimidation, then some tenderness and some warmth and a few jiggers of old anger. Don't hold back on intelligence. And stoicism. Add lots of stoicism, and even more of responsibility—"the most responsible son of a +*!!% you've ever seen in your life" is how Earl himself puts it. Top it all with "a bucket of whiskey," which is what he has been known to order when he saunters into a bar and he's in the mood. Add a dash of hyperbole, maybe two, and to hell with the ice, just whir. This is one of those concoctions you're going to remember when morning comes.

Somewhere in there, until a good 15 years ago, there was one other ingredient, the existential Tabasco, the smoldering why? The Thai secretary in the U.S. Army office in Bangkok smelled it soon after she met Earl, in 1967. "He couldn't relax," says Kultida (Tida) Woods. "Searching for something, always searching, never satisfied. I think because both his parents died when he was young, and he didn't have Mom and Dad to make him warm. Sometimes he stayed awake till three or four in the morning, just thinking."

In a man so accustomed to exuding command and control, in a Green Beret lieutenant colonel, why? has a way of building up power like a river dammed. Why did the Viet-cong sniper bracket him that day (first bullet a few inches left of one ear, second bullet a few inches right of the other) but never fire the third bullet? Why did Earl's South Vietnamese combat buddy, Nguyen Phong—the one Earl nicknamed Tiger, and in whose memory he would nickname his son—stir one night just in time to awaken Earl and warn him not to budge because a viper was poised inches from his right eye? What about that road Earl's jeep rolled down one night, the same road on which two friends had just been mutilated, the road that took him through a village so silent and dark that his scalp tingled, and then, just beyond it...hell turned inside-out over his shoulder, the sky lighting up and all the huts he had just passed spewing Vietcong machine-gun and artillery fire? He never understands what is the purpose of Lieutenant Colonel Woods's surviving again and again. He never quite comprehends what is the point of his life, until....

Until the boy is born. He will get all the time that Earl was unable to devote to the three children from his first marriage. He will be the only child from Earl's second marriage, to the Thai woman he brought back to America, and right away there are signs. What other six-month-old, Earl asks, has the balance to stand in the palm of his father's hand and remain there even as Daddy strolls around the house? Was there another 11-month-old, ever, who could pick up a sawed-off club, imitate his father's golf swing so fluidly and drive the ball so wickedly into the nylon net across the garage? Another four-year-old who could be dropped off at the golf course at 9 a.m. on a Saturday and picked up at 5 p.m., pockets bulging with money he had won from disbelievers 10 and 20 years older, until Pop said, "Tiger, you can't do that"? Earl starts to get a glimmer. He is to be the father of the world's most gifted golfer.

But why? What for? Not long after Tiger's birth, when Earl has left the military to become a purchaser for McDonnell Douglas, he finds himself in a long discussion with a woman he knows. She senses the power pooling inside him, the friction. "You have so much to give," she tells him, "but you're not giving it. You haven't even scratched the surface of your potential." She suggests he try est, Erhard Seminars Training, an intensive self-discovery and self-actualizing technique, and it hits Earl hard, direct mortar fire to the heart. What he learns is that his overmuscular sense of responsibility for others has choked his potential.


"To the point," says Earl, "that I wouldn't even buy a handkerchief for myself. It went all the way back to the day my father died, when I was 11, and my mother put her arm around me after the funeral and said, 'You're the man of the house now.' I became the father that young, looking out for everyone else, and then she died two years later.

"What I learned through est was that by doing more for myself, I could do much more for others. Yes, be responsible, but love life, and give people the space to be in your life, and allow yourself room to give to others. That caring and sharing is what's most important, not being responsible for everyone else. Which is where Tiger comes in. What I learned led me to give so much time to Tiger, and to give him the space to be himself, and not to smother him with dos and don'ts. I took out the authority aspect and turned it into companionship. I made myself vulnerable as a parent. When you have to earn respect from your child, rather than demanding it because it's owed to you as the father, miracles happen. I realized that, through him, the giving could take a quantum leap. What I could do on a limited scale, he could do on a global scale."

At last, the river is un-dammed, and Earl's whole life makes sense. At last, he sees what he was searching for, a pattern. No more volunteering for missions—he has his. Not simply to be a great golfer's father. To be destiny's father. His son will change the world.

"What the hell had I been doing in public information in the Army, posted in Brooklyn?" he asks. "Why, of course, what greater training can there be than three years of dealing with the New York media to prepare me to teach Tiger the importance of public relations and how to handle the media?"

Father: Where were you born, Tiger?

Son, age three: I was born on December 30, 1975, in Long Beach, California.

Father: No, Tiger, only answer the question you were asked. It's important to prepare yourself for this. Try again.

Son: I was born in Long Beach, California.

Father: Good, Tiger, good.

The late leap into the Green Berets? "What the hell was that for?" Earl says. "Of course, to prepare me to teach Tiger mental toughness."


The three children by the first marriage? "Not just one boy the first time," says Earl, "but two, along with a girl, as if God was saying, 'I want this son of a +*!!% to really have previous training.' "

The Buddhist wife, the one who grew up in a boarding school after her parents separated when she was five, the girl who then vowed that her child would know nothing but love and attention? The one who will preach inner calm to Tiger simply by turning to him with that face—still awaiting its first wrinkle at 52? Whose eyes close when she speaks, so he can almost see her gathering and sifting the thoughts? The mother who will walk every hole and keep score for Tiger at children's tournaments, adding a stroke or two if his calm cracks? "Look at this stuff!" cries Earl. "Over and over you can see the plan being orchestrated by someone other than me because I'm not this damn good! I tried to get out of that combat assignment to Thailand. But Tida was meant to bring in the influence of the Orient, to introduce Tiger to Buddhism and inner peace, so he would have the best of two different worlds. And so he would have the knowledge that there were two people whose lives were totally committed to him."

What of the heart attack Earl suffered when Tiger was 10 and the retired lieutenant colonel felt himself floating down the gray tunnel toward the light before he was wrenched back? "To prepare me to teach Tiger that life is short," Earl says, "and to live each day to the maximum, and not worry about the future. There's only now. You must understand that time is just a linear measurement of successive increments of now. Anyplace you go on that line is now, and that's how you have to live it."

No need to wonder about the appearance of the perfect childhood coach, John Anselmo; the perfect sports psychologist, Jay Brunza; the perfect agent, Hughes Norton; the perfect attorney, John Merchant; and the perfect pro swing instructor, Butch Harmon. Or about the great tangle of fate that leads them all to Tiger at just the right junctures in his development. "Everything," says Earl, "right there when he needs it. Everything. There can't be this much coincidence in the world. This is a directed scenario, and none of us involved in the scenario has failed to accept the responsibility. This is all destined to be."

His wife ratifies this, in her own way. She takes the boy's astrological chart to a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles and to another in Bangkok and is told by monks at both places that the child has wondrous powers. "If he becomes a politician, he will be either a president or a prime minister," she is told. "If he enters the military, he will be a general."

Tida comes to a conclusion. "Tiger has Thai, African, Chinese, American Indian and European blood," she says. "He can hold everyone together. He is the Universal Child."

This is in the air the boy breathes for 20 years, and it becomes bone fact for him, marrow knowledge. When asked about it, he merely nods in acknowledgment of it, assents to it; of course he believes it's true. So failure, in the rare visits it pays him, is not failure. It's just life pausing to teach him a lesson he needs in order to go where he's inevitably going. And success, no matter how much sooner than expected it comes to the door, always finds him dressed and ready to welcome it. "Did you ever see yourself doing this so soon?" a commentator breathlessly asks him seconds after his first pro victory, on Oct. 6 in Las Vegas, trying to elicit wonder and awe on live TV. "Yeah," Tiger responds. "I kind of did." And sleep comes to him so easily: In the midst of conversation, in a car, in a plane, off he goes, into the slumber of the destined. "I don't see any of this as scary or a burden," Tiger says. "I see it as fortunate. I've always known where I wanted to go in life. I've never Jet anything deter me. This is my purpose. It will unfold."

No sports star in the history of American celebrity has spoken this way. Maybe, somehow, Tiger can win.

The machine will win. It must win because it too is destiny, five billion destinies leaning against one. There are ways to keep the hordes back, a media expert at Nike tells Tiger. Make broad gestures when you speak. Keep a club in your hands and take practice swings, or stand with one foot well out in front of the other, in almost a karate stance. That will give you room to breathe. Two weeks later, surrounded by a pen-wielding mob in La Quinta, Calif., in late November, just before the Skins Game, the instruction fails. Tiger survives, but his shirt and slacks are ruined, felt-tip-dotted to death.

The machine will win because it will wear the young man down, cloud his judgment, steal his sweetness, the way it does just before the Buick Challenge in Pine Mountain, Ga., at the end of September. It will make his eyes drop when the fans' gaze reaches for his, his voice growl at their clawing hands, his body sag onto a sofa after a practice round and then rise and walk across the room and suddenly stop in bewilderment. "I couldn't even remember what I'd just gotten off the couch for, two seconds before," he says. "I was like mashed potatoes. Total mush."


So he walks. Pulls out on the eve of the Buick Challenge, pulls out of the Fred Haskins Award dinner to honor him, and goes home. See, maybe Tiger can win. He can just turn his back on the machine and walk. Awards? Awards to Tiger are like echoes, voices bouncing off the walls, repeating what a truly confident man has already heard inside his own head. The Jack Nicklaus Award, the one Jack himself was supposed to present to Tiger live on ABC during the Memorial tournament last spring? Tiger would have blown it off if Wally Goodwin, his coach at Stanford during the two years he played there before turning pro, hadn't insisted that he show up.

The instant Tiger walks away from the Buick Challenge and the Haskins dinner, the hounds start yapping. See, that's why the machine will win. It's got all those damn heel-nippers. Little mutts on the PGA Tour resenting how swiftly the 20-year-old was ordained, how hastily he was invited to play practice rounds with Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, with Greg Norman and Ray Floyd and Nick Faldo and Fred Couples. And big dogs snapping too. Tom Kite quoted as saying, "I can't ever remember being tired when I was 20," and Peter Jacobsen quoted, "You can't compare Tiger to Nicklaus and Palmer anymore because they never [walked out]."

He rests for a week, stunned by the criticism—"I thought those people were my friends," he says. He never second-guesses his decision to turn pro, but he sees what he surrendered. "I miss college," he says. "I miss hanging out with my friends, getting in a little trouble. I have to be so guarded now. I miss sitting around drinking beer and talking half the night. There's no one my own age to hang out with anymore because almost everyone my age is in college. I'm a target for everybody now, and there's nothing I can do about it. My mother was right when she said that turning pro would take away my youth. But golfwise, there was nothing left for me in college."

He reemerges after the week's rest and rushes from four shots off the lead on the final day to win the Las Vegas Invitational in sudden death. The world's waiting for him again, this time with reinforcements. Letterman and Leno want him as a guest; GQ calls about a cover; Cosby, along with almost every other sitcom you can think of, offers to write an episode revolving around Tiger, if only he'll appear. Kids dress up as Tiger for Halloween—did anyone ever dress up as Arnie or Jack?—and Michael Jordan declares that his only hero on earth is Tiger Woods. Pepsi is dying to have him cut a commercial for one of its soft drinks aimed at Generation Xers; Nike and Titleist call in chits for the $40 million and $20 million contracts he signed; money managers are eager to know how he wants his millions invested; women walk onto the course during a practice round and ask for his hand in marriage; kids stampede over and under ropes and chase him from the 18th hole to the clubhouse; piles of phone messages, await him when he returns to his hotel room. "Why," Tiger asks, "do so many people want a piece of me?"

Because something deeper than conventional stardom is at work here, something so spontaneous and subconscious that words have trouble going there. It's a communal craving, a public aching for a superstar free of anger and arrogance and obsession with self. It's a hollow place that chimes each time Tiger and his parents strike the theme of father and mother and child love, each time Tiger stands at a press conference and declares, "They have raised me well, and I truly believe they have taught me to accept full responsibility for all aspects of my life." During the making of a Titleist commercial in November, a makeup woman is so moved listening to Earl describe his bond with Tiger that she decides to contact her long-estranged father. "See what I mean?" cries Earl. "Did you affect someone that way today? Did anyone else there? It's destiny, man. It's something bigger than me."

What makes it so vivid is context. The white canvas that the colors are being painted on—the moneyed, mature and almost minority-less world of golf—makes Tiger an emblem of youth overcoming age, have-not overcoming have, outsider overcoming insider, to the delight not only of the 18-year-olds in the gallery wearing nose rings and cornrows, but also—of all people—of the aging insider haves.

So Tiger finds himself, just a few weeks after turning pro at the end of August, trying to clutch a bolt of lightning with one hand and steer an all-at-once corporation—himself—-with the other, and before this he has never worked a day in his life. Never mowed a neighbor's lawn, never flung a folded newspaper, never stocked a grocery shelf; Mozarts just don't, you know. And he has to act as if none of this is new or vexing because he has this characteristic—perhaps from all those years of hanging out with his dad at tournaments, all those years of mixing with and mauling golfers five, 10, 20, 30 years older than he is—of never permitting himself to appear confused, surprised or just generally a little squirt. "His favorite expression," Earl says, "is, 'I knew that.' " Of course Pop, who is just as irreverent with Tiger as he is reverent, can say, "No, you didn't know that, you little s—." But Earl, who has always been the filter for Tiger, decides to take a few steps back during his son's first few months as a pro because he wishes to encourage Tiger's independence and because he is uncertain of his own role now that the International Management Group (IMG) is managing Tiger's career.

Nobody notices it, but the inner calm is beginning to dissolve. Earl enters Tiger's hotel room during the Texas Open in mid-October to ask him about his schedule, and Tiger does something he has never done in his 20 years. He bites the old man's head off.

Earl blinks. "I understand how you must feel," he says.

"No, you don't," snaps Tiger.


"And I realized," Earl says later, "that I'd spent 20 years planning for this, but the one thing I didn't do was educate Tiger to be the boss of a corporation. There was just no vehicle for that, and I thought it would develop more slowly. I wasn't presumptuous enough to anticipate this. For the first time in his life, the training was behind the reality. I could see on his face that he was going through hell."

The kid is fluid, though. Just watch him walk. He's quick to flow into the new form, to fit the contour of necessity. A few hours after the outburst he's apologizing to his father and hugging him. A few days later he's giving Pop the O.K. to call a meeting of the key members of Tiger's new corporation and establish a system, Lieutenant Colonel Woods in command, chairing a 2½-hour teleconference with the team each week to sift through all the demands, weed out all the chaff and present Tiger five decisions to make instead of 500. A few days after that, the weight forklifted off his shoulders, at least temporarily, Tiger wins the Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic. And a few weeks later, at the Fred Haskins Award dinner, which has been rescheduled at his request, Tiger stands at the podium and says, "I should've attended the dinner [the first time]. I admit I was wrong, and I'm sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused. But I have learned from that, and I will never make that mistake again. I'm very honored to be part of this select group, and I'll always remember, for both good and bad, this Haskins Award; for what I did and what I learned, for the company I'm now in and I'll always be in. Thank you very much." The crowd surges to its feet, cheering once more.

See, maybe Tiger can win. He's got the touch. He's got the feel. He never writes down a word before he gives a speech. When he needs to remember a phone number, he doesn't search his memory or a little black book; he picks up a phone and watches what number his fingers go to. When he needs a 120-yard shot to go under an oak branch and over a pond, he doesn't visualize the shot, as most golfers would. He looks at the flag and pulls everything from the hole back, back, back...not back into his mind's eye, but into his hands and forearms and hips, so they'll do it by feel. Explain how he made that preposterous shot? He can't. Better you interview his knuckles and metacarpals.

"His handicap" says Earl, "is that he has such a powerful creative mind. His imagination is too vivid. If he uses visualization, the ball goes nuts. So we piped into his creative side even deeper, into his incredible sense of feel."

"I've learned to trust the subconscious," says Tiger. "My instincts have never lied to me."

The mother radiates this: the Eastern proclivity to let life happen, rather than the Western one to make it happen. The father comes to it in his own way, through fire. To kill a man, to conduct oneself calmly and efficiently when one's own death is imminent—a skill Earl learns in Green Berets psychological training and then again and again in jungles and rice paddies—one removes the conscious mind from the task and yields to the subconscious. "It's the more powerful of the two minds," Earl says. "It works faster than the conscious mind, yet it's patterned enough to handle routine tasks over and over, like driving a car or making a putt. It knows what to do.

"Allow yourself the freedom of emotion and feeling. Don't try to control them and trap them. Acknowledge them and become the beneficiary of them. Let it all outflow."

Let it all because it's all there: The stability, almost freakish for a close-of-the-millennium California child—same two parents, same house all his 20 years, same best friends, one since second grade, one since eighth. The kid, for god's sake, never once had a babysitter. The conditioning is there as well, the two years of psychological boot camp during which Earl dropped golf bags and pumped cart brakes during Tiger's backswings, jingled change and rolled balls across his line of vision to test his nerves, promising him at the outset that he only had to say "Enough" and Earl would cut off the blowtorch, but promising too that if Tiger graduated, no man he ever faced would be mentally stronger than he. "I am the toughest golfer mentally," Tiger says.

The bedrock is so wide that opposites can dance upon it: The cautious man can be instinctive, the careful man can be carefree. The bedrock is so wide that it has enticed Tiger into the habit of falling behind—as he did in the final matches of all three U.S. Junior Amateur and all three U.S. Amateur victories—knowing in his tissue and bones that danger will unleash his greatest power. "Allow success and fame to happen," the old man says. "Let the legend grow."

To hell with the Tao. The machine will win, it has to win, because it makes everything happen before a man knows it. Before he knows it, a veil descends over his eyes when another stranger approaches. Before he knows it, he's living in a walled community with an electronic gate and a security guard, where the children trick-or-treat in golf carts, a place like the one Tiger just moved into in Orlando to preserve some scrap of sanity. Each day there, even with all the best intentions, how can he help but be a little more removed from the world he's supposed to change, and from his truest self?


Which is...who? The poised, polite, opaque sage we see on TV? No, no, no; his friends hoot and haze him when they see that Tiger on the screen, and he can barely help grinning himself. The Tiger they know is perfectly 20, a fast-food freak who never remembers to ask if anyone else is hungry before he bolts to Taco Bell or McDonald's for the 10th time of the week. The one who loves riding roller coasters, spinning out golf carts and winning at cards no matter how often his father accuses him of "reckless eyeballing." The one who loves delivering the dirty joke, who owns a salty barracks tongue just a rank or two beneath his father's. The one who's flip, who's downright cocky. When a suit walks up to him before the Haskins Award dinner and says, "I think you're going to be the next great one, but those are mighty big shoes to fill," Tiger replies, "Got big feet."

A typical exchange between Tiger and his agent, Norton:

"Tiger, they want to know when you can do that interview."

"Tell them to kiss my %%!!"

"All right, and after that, what should I tell them?"

"Tell them to kiss my %%! again!"

"O.K., and after that...."

But it's a cockiness cut with humility, the paradox pounded into his skull by a father who in one breath speaks of his son with religious awe and in the next grunts, "You weren't s—then, Tiger. You ain't s—now. You ain't never gonna be s—."

"That's why I know I can handle all this," Tiger says, "no matter how big it gets. I grew up in the media's eye, but I was taught never to lose sight of where I came from. Athletes aren't as gentlemanly as they used to be. I don't like that change. I like the idea of being a role model. It's an honor. People took the time to help me as a kid, and they impacted my life. I want to do the same for kids."

So, if it's a clinic for children instead of an interview or an endorsement for adults, the cynic in Tiger gives way to the child who grew up immersed in his father's vision of an earth-altering compassion, the seven-year-old boy who watched scenes from the Ethiopian famine on the evening news, went right to his bedroom and returned with a $20 bill to contribute from his piggy bank. Last spring busloads of inner-city kids would arrive at golf courses where Tiger was playing for Stanford, spilling out to watch the Earl and Tiger show in wonder. Earl would talk about the dangers of drugs, then proclaim, "Here's Tiger Woods on drugs," and Tiger would stagger to the tee, topping the ball so it bounced crazily to the side. And then, presto, with a wave of his arms Earl would remove the drugs from Tiger's body, and his son would stride to the ball and launch a 330-yard rocket across the sky. Then Earl would talk about respect and trust and hard work and demonstrate what they can all lead to by standing 10 feet in front of his son, raising his arms and telling Tiger to smash the ball between them—and, whoosh, Tiger would part not only the old man's arms but his haircut too.


They've got plans, the two of them, big plans, for a Tiger Woods Foundation that will fund scholarships across the country, set up clinics and coaches and access to golf courses for inner-city children. "I throw those visions out there in front of him," Earl says, "and it's like reeling in a fish. He goes for the bait, takes it and away he goes. This is nothing new. It's been working this way for a long time."

"That's the difference," says Merchant, Tiger's attorney and a family friend. "Other athletes who have risen to this level just didn't have this kind of guidance. With a father and mother like Tiger's, he has to be real. It's such a rare quality in celebrities nowadays. There hasn't been a politician since John Kennedy whom people have wanted to touch. But watch Tiger. He has it. He actually listens to people when they stop him in an airport. He looks them in the eye. I can't ever envision Tiger Woods selling his autograph."

See, maybe Tiger can win.

Let's be honest. The machine will win because you can't work both sides of this street. The machine will win because you can't transcend wearing 16 Nike swooshes, you can't move human hearts while you're busy pushing sneakers. Gandhi didn't hawk golf balls, did he? Jackie Robinson was spared that fate because he came and went while Madison Avenue was still teething. Ali became a symbol instead of a logo because of boxing's disrepute and because of the attrition of cells in the basal ganglia of his brain. Who or what will save Tiger Woods?

Did someone say Buddha?

Every year near his birthday, Tiger goes with his mother to a Buddhist temple and makes a gift of rice, sugar and salt to the monks there who have renounced all material goods. A mother-of-pearl Buddha given to Tiger by his Thai grandfather watches over him while he sleeps, and a gold Buddha hangs from the chain on his neck. "I like Buddhism because it's a whole way of being and living," Tiger says. "It's based on discipline and respect and personal responsibility. I like Asian culture better than ours because of that. Asians are much more disciplined than we are. Look how well behaved their children are. It's how my mother raised me. You can question, but talk back? Never. In Thailand, once you've earned people's respect, you have it for life. Here it's, What have you done for me lately? So here you can never rest easy. In this country I have to be very careful. I'm easygoing, but I won't let you in completely. There, I'm Thai, and it feels very different. In many ways I consider that home.

"I believe in Buddhism. Not every aspect, but most of it. So I take bits and pieces. I don't believe that human beings can achieve ultimate enlightenment, because humans have flaws. I don't want to get rid of all my wants and desires. I can enjoy material things, but that doesn't mean I need them. It doesn't matter to me whether I live in a place like this"—the golf club in his hand makes a sweep of the Orlando villa—"or in a shack. I'd be fine in a shack, as long as I could play some golf. I'll do the commercials for Nike and for Titleist, but there won't be much more than that. I have no desire to be the king of endorsement money."

On the morning after he decides to turn pro, there's a knock on his hotel room door. It's Norton, bleary-eyed but exhilarated after a late-night round of negotiations with Nike. He explains to Tiger and Earl that the benchmark for contract endorsements in golf is Norman's reported $2½ million-a-year deal with Reebok. Then, gulping down hard on the yabba-dabba-doo rising up his throat, Norton announces Nike's offer: $40 million for five years, eight mil a year. "Over three times what Norman gets!" Norton exults.

Silence.

"Guys, do you realize this is more than Nike pays any athlete in salary, even Jordan?"


Silence.

"Finally," Norton says now, recalling that morning, "Tiger says, 'Mmmm-hmmm,' and I say, 'That's it? Mmmm-hmmm?' No 'Omigod.' No slapping five or 'Ya-hooo!' So I say, 'Let me go through this again, guys.' Finally Tiger says, 'Guess that's pretty amazing.' That's it. When I made the deal with Titleist a day later, I went back to them saying, 'I'm almost embarrassed to tell you this one. Titleist is offering a little more than $20 million over five years.' "

On the Monday morning after his first pro tournament, a week after the two megadeals, Tiger scans the tiny print on the sports page under Milwaukee Open money earnings and finds his name. Tiger Woods: $2,544. "That's my money," he exclaims. "I earned this!"

See, maybe Tiger can win.

How? How can he win when there are so many insects under so many rocks? Several more death threats arrive just before the Skins Game, prompting an increase in his plainclothes security force, which is already larger than anyone knows. His agent's first instinct is to trash every piece of hate mail delivered to IMG, but Tiger won't permit it. Every piece of racist filth must be saved and given to him. At Stanford he kept one letter taped to his wall. Fuel comes in the oddest forms.

The audience, in its hunger for goodness, swallows hard over the Nike ad that heralds Tiger's entrance into the professional ranks. The words that flash on the screen over images of Tiger—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?—ooze the very attitude from which many in the audience are seeking relief. The media backlash is swift: The Tiger Woods who used to tell the press, "The only time I think about race is when the media ask me"—whoa, what happened to him?

What happened to him was a steady accretion of experiences, also known as a life. What happened, just weeks before he was born, was a fusillade of limes and BBs rattling the Woods house in Cypress, Calif., one of the limes shattering the kitchen window, splashing glass all around the pregnant Tida, to welcome the middle-class subdivision's first non-Caucasian family.

What happened was a gang of older kids seizing Tiger on his first day of kindergarten, tying him to a tree, hurling rocks at him, calling him monkey and @*%+%#. And Tiger, at age five, telling no one what happened for several days, trying to absorb what this meant about himself and his world.

What happened was the Look, as Tiger and Earl came to call it, the uneasy, silent stare they received in countless country-club locker rooms and restaurants. "Something a white person could never understand," says Tiger, "unless he went to Africa and suddenly found himself in the middle of a tribe." What happened was Tiger's feeling pressured to leave a driving range just two years ago, not far from his family's California home, because a resident watching Tiger's drives rocket into the nearby protective netting reported that a black teenager was trying to bombard his house.

What happened was the cold shoulder Earl got when he took his tyke to play at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress—"a club," Earl says, "composed mostly of retired naval personnel who knew blacks only as cooks and servers, and along comes me, a retired lieutenant colonel outranking 99 percent of them, and I have the nerve to take up golf at 42 and immediately become a low handicap and beat them, and then I have the audacity to have this kid. Well, they had to do something. They took away Tiger's playing privileges twice, said he was too young, even though there were other kids too young who they let play. The second time it happened, I went up to the pro who had done it and made a bet. I said, 'If you'll spot my three-year-old just one stroke a hole, nine holes, playing off the same tees, and he beats you, will you certify him?' The pro started laughing and said, 'Sure.' Tiger beat him by two strokes, got certified, then the members went over the pro's head and kicked him out again. That's when we switched him to another course."


Beat them. That was his parents' solution for each banishment, each Look. Hold your tongue, hew to every rule and beat them. Tiger Woods is the son of the first black baseball player in the Big Seven, a catcher back in the early '50s, before the conference became the Big Eight. A man who had to leave his Kansas State teammates on road trips and travel miles to stay in motels for blacks; who had to go to the back door of restaurant kitchens to be fed while his teammates dined inside; who says, "This is the most racist society in the world—I know that." A man who learned neither to extinguish his anger nor spray it but to quietly convert it into animus, the determination to enter the system and overcome it by turning its own tools against it. A Green Berets explosives expert whose mind naturally ran that way, whose response, upon hearing Tiger rave about the security in his new walled community, was, "I could get in. I could blow up the clubhouse and be gone before they ever knew what hit them." A father who saw his son, from the beginning, as the one who would enter one of America's last Caucasian bastions, the PGA Tour, and overthrow it from within in a manner that would make it smile and ask for more. "Been planning that one for 20 years," says Earl. "See, you don't turn it into hatred. You turn it into something positive. So many athletes who reach the top now had things happen to them as children that created hostility, and they bring that hostility with them. But that hostility uses up energy. If you can do it without the chip on the shoulder, it frees up all that energy to create."

It's not until Stanford, where Tiger takes an African-American history course and stays up half the night in dormitories talking with people of every shade of skin, that his experiences begin to crystallize. "What I realized is that even though I'm mathematically Asian—if anything—if you have one drop of black blood in the United States, you're black," says Tiger. "And how important it is for this country to talk about this subject. It's not me to blow my horn, the way I come across in that Nike ad, or to say things quite that way. But I felt it was worth it because the message needed to be said. You can't say something like that in a polite way. Golf has shied away from this for too long. Some clubs have brought in tokens, but nothing has really changed. I hope what I'm doing can change that."

But don't overestimate race's proportion in the fuel that propels Tiger Woods. Don't look for traces of race in the astonishing rubble at his feet on the Sunday after he lost the Texas Open by two strokes and returned to his hotel room and snapped a putter in two with one violent lift of his knee. Then another putter. And another. And another and another—eight in all before his rage was spent and he was ready to begin considering the loss's philosophical lesson. "That volcano of competitive fire, that comes from me," says Earl. A volcano that's mostly an elite athlete's need to win, a need far more immediate than that of changing the world.

No, don't overestimate race, but don't overlook it, either. When Tiger is asked about racism, about the effect it has on him when he senses it in the air, he has a golf club in his hands. He takes the club by the neck, his eyes flashing hot and cold at once, and gives it a short upward thrust. He says, "It makes me want to stick it right up their +%@$@." Pause. "On the golf course."

The machine will win because there is so much of the old man's breath in the boy...and how long can the old man keep breathing? At 2 a.m., hours before the second round of the Tour Championship in Tulsa on Oct. 25, the phone rings in Tiger's hotel room. It's Mom. Pop's in an ambulance, on his way to a Tulsa hospital. He's just had his second heart attack.

The Tour Championship? The future of humanity? The hell with 'em. Tiger's at the old man's bedside in no time, awake most of the night. Tiger's out of contention in the Tour Championship by dinnertime, with a second-round 78, his worst till then as a pro. "There are things more important than golf," he says.

The old man survives—and sees the pattern at work, of course. He's got to throw away the cigarettes. He's got to quit ordering the cholesterol special for breakfast. "I've got to shape up now, God's telling me," Earl says, "or I won't be around for the last push, the last lesson." The one about how to ride the tsunami of runaway fame.

The machine will win because no matter how complicated it all seems now, it is simpler than it will ever be. The boy will marry one day, and the happiness of two people will lie in his hands. Children will follow, and it will become his job to protect three or four or five people from the molars of the machine. Imagine the din of the grinding in five, 10, 15 years, when the boy reaches his golfing prime.

The machine will win because the whole notion is so ludicrous to begin with, a kid clutching an eight-iron changing the course of humanity. No, of course not, there won't be thousands of people sitting in front of tanks because of Tiger Woods. He won't bring about the overthrow of a tyranny or spawn a religion that one day will number 300 million devotees.

But maybe Pop is onto something without quite seeing what it is. Maybe it has to do with timing: the appearance of his son when America is turning the corner to a century in which the country's faces of color will nearly equal those that are white. Maybe, every now and then, a man gets swallowed by the machine, but the machine is changed more than he is.


For when we swallow Tiger Woods, the yellow-black-red-white man, we swallow something much more significant than Jordan or Charles Barkley. We swallow hope in the American experiment, in the pell-mell jumbling of genes. We swallow the belief that the face of the future is not necessarily a bitter or bewildered face; that it might even, one day, be something like Tiger Woods's face: handsome and smiling and ready to kick all comers' +%@$@.

We see a woman, 50-*!* and Caucasian, well-coiffed and tailored—the woman we see at every country club—walk up to Tiger Woods before he receives the Haskins Award and say, "When I watch you taking on all those other players, Tiger, I feel like I'm watching my own son"...and we feel the quivering of the cosmic compass that occurs when human beings look into the eyes of someone of another color and see their own flesh and blood.
 
Good thread and good pieces that I've read previously. Whenever I think of the quintessential sports-related piece/essay, I instinctively look "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" by the late, great John Updike about Ted Williams' last game. What the heck, I'll post it here in spirit of the thread.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, "You maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it . . ."

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters—but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment—and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose—appeared the very day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):

Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's], has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non-winning record is proof enough of that.

There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.

Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, "W'ms, lf" was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell "blooper" pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers' dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back—back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift—the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles—a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.

After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him—a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, "There's the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking—and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you're not sure.") The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.

The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. "I feel terrible," he confessed, "but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park." He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the "leg hits" that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.

In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched ("rested," Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said.) Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1953 Williams' shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars—Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline—served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy—in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer—gave him a civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome and heartening pair.

Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn't come through he would be benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, then the number 500, then Mel Ott's total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers.

In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as "the greatest hitter who ever lived." Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if—the least excusable "if"—we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson—another unlucky natural—rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Some day, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men—taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders—who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists—typical Boston College levity.

The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams' head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.

A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words "pride" and "champion" as his text. It began, "Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California . . ." and ended, "I don't think we'll ever see another like him." Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check.

Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into "In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the maestros of the keyboard up there . . ." He glanced up at the press rows suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters, incidentally, reported the phrase as "knights of the keyboard," but I heard it as "maestros" and prefer it that way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. ". . . And they were terrible things," Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. "I'd like to forget them, but I can't." He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, "I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life." The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, "Ted, you can play anywhere you like." Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate. The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired—the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began.

Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. "Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,'' the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine—flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles—all these points, often observed by caricaturists, were visible in the flesh.

One of the collegiate voices behind me said, "He looks old, doesn't he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . ."

"Yeah," the other voice said, "but he looks like an old hawk, doesn't he?"

With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout "Steal home! Go, go!" Williams' speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.

"Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?" one of the boys behind me said.

"It's cold," the other explained. "He doesn't play well when it's cold. He likes heat. He's a hedonist."

The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line—along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game—and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams' recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons.

Whenever Williams appeared at the plate—pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity—it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized—and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts—really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big "380" painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, "I didn't think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't good.")

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

One of the scholasticists behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it." This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.
 
Good thread and good pieces that I've read previously. Whenever I think of the quintessential sports-related piece/essay, I instinctively look "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" by the late, great John Updike about Ted Williams' last game. What the heck, I'll post it here in spirit of the thread.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, "You maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it . . ."

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters—but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment—and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose—appeared the very day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):

Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's], has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non-winning record is proof enough of that.

There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.

Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, "W'ms, lf" was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell "blooper" pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers' dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back—back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift—the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles—a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.

After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him—a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, "There's the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking—and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you're not sure.") The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.

The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. "I feel terrible," he confessed, "but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park." He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the "leg hits" that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.

In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched ("rested," Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said.) Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1953 Williams' shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars—Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline—served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy—in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer—gave him a civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome and heartening pair.

Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn't come through he would be benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, then the number 500, then Mel Ott's total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers.

In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as "the greatest hitter who ever lived." Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if—the least excusable "if"—we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson—another unlucky natural—rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Some day, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men—taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders—who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists—typical Boston College levity.

The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams' head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.

A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words "pride" and "champion" as his text. It began, "Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California . . ." and ended, "I don't think we'll ever see another like him." Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check.

Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into "In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the maestros of the keyboard up there . . ." He glanced up at the press rows suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters, incidentally, reported the phrase as "knights of the keyboard," but I heard it as "maestros" and prefer it that way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. ". . . And they were terrible things," Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. "I'd like to forget them, but I can't." He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, "I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life." The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, "Ted, you can play anywhere you like." Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate. The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired—the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began.

Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. "Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,'' the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine—flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles—all these points, often observed by caricaturists, were visible in the flesh.

One of the collegiate voices behind me said, "He looks old, doesn't he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . ."

"Yeah," the other voice said, "but he looks like an old hawk, doesn't he?"

With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout "Steal home! Go, go!" Williams' speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.

"Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?" one of the boys behind me said.

"It's cold," the other explained. "He doesn't play well when it's cold. He likes heat. He's a hedonist."

The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line—along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game—and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams' recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons.

Whenever Williams appeared at the plate—pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity—it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized—and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts—really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big "380" painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, "I didn't think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't good.")

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

One of the scholasticists behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it." This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.
 
June 26, 1995
One Tough Bird
Roy Jones Jr., the best boxer pound for pound, was raised under the rules of cockfighting: win or die
Gary Smith

Spoiler [+]
Even with the three-inch steel spur running through his skull, the Rooster did not forget the secret. Even with the blood fever making the dogs yip and the men close in howling, "It's over! He's dead!" Even with the teenager's nervous fingers trying to yank the metal from the rooster's brain, with the talons of the other rooster at its throat. Even then....

The boy's heart was beating its way up his throat, but he couldn't show his fear or sorrow for his bird. The boy's father would smell it and carve it to shreds, for one thing, and for another, the boy was 17 and planning to go to the Olympics to fight the best fighters in the world. The triumphant rooster flapped wildly, the blade on one foot ripping the air while the other foot tried madly to extract its blade from the limp bird's head. The teenager held his breath and tried again to disentangle the roosters without getting slashed.

He could see that the men were right; the spur had entered near one ear and come out near the other. But a shock went through the boy's palms as he finally worked the blade loose: Crazy's heart was still pulsing! "He's alive!" the boy called.

"Blow on him!" his father shouted. "Keep him warm!"

The boy blew up and down Crazy's spine and then set him on his feet. Hallelujah, the damn rooster was still itching to fight; the men stared in disbelief. Crazy struck and pulled back, feinting, inviting his enemy in, remembering what most dead cocks hadn't learned: the importance of distance, the significance of space. The other bird lunged, exposed himself...and suddenly was dead, and the boy was whooping, hugging Crazy to his chest.

By the end of this story the boy will be a man, and there'll be fighting roosters everywhere, hundreds of them in cages all over his land. By the end he'll be known as the best boxer, pound for pound, in the world, 28-0 with 24 knockouts, the super middleweight champion whom some will call the best boxer since Sugar Ray. Not Leonard. Robinson. "Forget Leonard," WBC light heavyweight champion Mike McCallum will say. "This boy is faster than Leonard. He hits harder, and he can knock you out when he's going backwards. You'll see."

If you, the reader, are asking yourself, Roy Jones Jr.? The best fighter in the world? Why have I barely heard of him?...well, that too, by the end of the story, you will see. You'll know, like the rooster, all you need to know about distance.

To get there we'll have to travel way out into nowhere, deep into the pine and oak and cornfields 25 miles north of Pensacola, Fla. It's not a place for a fight story—can you name three American champions in the last half century who came from forest and dirt? Boxing is the heart's cry for personal space; everywhere out here there's space. You can't smell desperation here. You won't find any boxing gyms.

Look closer. Smell again. It's 1979. Down by the washed-out creek bed, in the clearing in the woods behind the little cinder block house on Barth Road, there are pigs, dogs, roosters, a bull, a horse...and a homemade ring. There's a barrel of a man with a dagger tattooed on his arm and a long piece of PVC pipe in his fist. There's a skinny 10-year-old boy. Always remember this: Nothing ever comes from nowhere.

The boy was five when this started. Big Roy on his knees, cuffing and slapping at Little Roy, taunting him: "What's wrong? Gettin' tired? Told you you were too little. Told you you weren't quick enough. Oh, here we go. You cryin' again? Little girlie-girlie cryin' again?" Yes, Little Roy was crying again, crying rage and frustration at how easily his father dominated him. He would promise his mother every day not to fight Big Roy that night, but then his mind would start imagining new and surprising angles of attack, shocking and unprecedented punches, and by eight o'clock that night, fresh from his bath, he would be flailing and sobbing in his pj's again. It wasn't fair. He had to get close and risk, but his father didn't.


Now he's 10, with a fight coming up next week on Pensacola Beach against a 14-year-old who's 16 pounds heavier. Nothing new. Big Roy's always throwing him in over his head, daring him to be a man, preparing him for the cruel sport that he, not Big Roy, has chosen. Didn't Big Roy give him a shotgun at Christmas when he was six, have him driving a tractor when he was seven? "Thought I'd pass out cold when I saw that," the boy's mother, Carol, says. Once when the two Roys were fishing, wading in surf up to Little Roy's chest, Big Roy shouted, "Sharks! Two of 'em!" and the boy dropped his rod and went thrashing for land. "What are you doin'?" the father demanded. "Where's your rod?" Trembling, the boy pointed toward the water. "Go get it," Big Roy said.

"But...."

"Now!"

In crept Little Roy, certain he was about to be devoured for a fishing rod. Oh, he couldn't swim? A year later, when the boy was eight, Big Roy heaved him into the Gulf of Mexico, water two feet over his head—that'd learn him. He thrust Little Roy onto a horse, then a bull. "Ride 'em," he said. The child, at first, couldn't quite cover his panic. "You're too much like your mother," Big Roy would grumble when Little Roy ran into her arms. "You'll never do nothin' if you're scared."

Eventually he learned to protect himself. When his father slept he would tie to a fence a horse that others wouldn't ride, and he would conquer it alone. "After a while I didn't care about gettin' hurt or dyin' anymore," he says. "I was in pain all day, every day, I was so scared of my father. He'd pull up in his truck and start lookin' for something I'd done wrong. There was no escape, no excuse, no way out of nothin'. Every day it was the same: school, homework, farmwork, trainin'. Gettin' hurt or dyin' might've been better than the life I was livin'. So I turned into a daredevil. I'd do anything. Didn't make much difference. Used to think about killin' myself anyway."

The 10-year-old boy feels so alone. Some children are too intimidated by his father to come around but most just live too far away. He makes his alliances with animals. With the dogs that snarl at everyone else. With the bull that he has learned to ride. With the Shetland pony, Coco, that he has taught to rear up, just like the Lone Ranger's Silver. With the goat that followed him onto the school bus in second grade. With the blue-feathered gamecock his father will soon give him. He's always on to the next thing, the little boy, with a restlessness that the open country and the brutal sun can't leach from him. When the train rumbles through the trees not far from his home, Little Roy dreams of leaping onto it and letting it take him...where? Somewhere far from the cinder block house where his father will be returning soon from another day's work as an aircraft electrician at Pensacola Naval Air Station. Somewhere the belt and the switch, the PVC pipe and the extension cord can't reach. "The whippin's didn't last that long," Little Roy's younger half brother, Corey, says. "Maybe 20 minutes."

Big Roy's a monster, right? Look closer. Smell again. Soon Big Roy will be inviting kids from all over into his makeshift gym. Kids with no playgrounds, no direction, no fathers. Kids from trouble. Soon Big Roy will make sure a ******ed boy named Chris gets his turn on the bag and in the ring, will make certain no one insults or bullies him—it's the same impulse that earned Big Roy the Bronze Star in Vietnam for rushing through a veil of bullets to save an ambushed mate. "You could give your two-week-old baby to that man, go on vacation and not think twice," says Doris Grant, an old family friend. "Big Roy'd take care of it." Soon he'll be wolfing down dinner, training the boys from 5 p.m. till 10 or 11, doing the farmwork till midnight, rising at five to go to work again. Soon his paycheck will be vanishing, gone to buy the kids boxing shoes and speed bags and vitamins. Soon he'll be working extra jobs on weekends to finance the kids' trips to tournaments in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia. Soon he'll be selling the tractor and the hogs so he'll have more time and money for the kids. Going to the dog track with his last two bucks, praying he can turn it into $50 or $60 so they can box on Saturday in Biloxi. His vacations will be a dozen kids jammed into a van, a dozen bologna sandwiches crammed into a bag, creeping home 10 miles under the speed limit so the gas tank doesn't go dry, relying on a piece of wire to hold the door closed so the kids don't all tumble out. He'll be poring over their report cards, patting their heads for A's and B's, cooking crabs and oysters for them on Friday evenings. "Seemed closer to the other kids," says Little Roy, "than he was to me." He'll be selling the farm, moving into Pensacola—giving up his biggest prize, giving up distance. He'll be running the Escambia County Boys Club boxing program in an abandoned building, rigging wires to the power lines outside to pirate electricity, herding everyone to the H&O Cafe a few blocks away when the boys need water and a toilet. Asking folks all over, asking his own sister, for contributions to keep this crazy, cobbled crusade alive.

That's the hardest thing of all for Big Roy. Asking. Needing. How many years has he gone without seeing a doctor? You're only hurt if you think you're hurt, he keeps telling his boxers and his five children. How many days did he let that pain in his right side go before he staggered into his father's house in Pensacola 14 years ago and sagged to his knees, moaning, "Just tired," waiting for someone to force him into a car and take him to a hospital before his appendix burst?

There's only one cure for needing: distance. Needing ate you up when you were one of 12 children growing up in a small house under a hard old man like Tippy Jones; needing could possess you, suck your lifeblood away, so move away from it. Where did Big Roy go the day they buried his mother? Four hundred seventy miles away, to Tampa, with one of his boxers. Where did he go at 17, after Tippy challenged him to fight and Big Roy swung a two-by-four at him, then flung it aside and ran rather than swing at his own blood again? To the Job Corps, to Indiana, then to pick fruit on farms all over the West and down to Mexico to box. To fight in small arenas for a few hundred bucks, in barrooms for a twenty, trying to work what was left of the needing out of his blood.

Where did Big Roy go when his father died? Oh, he nearly crumbled that time. He walked toward the funeral home, heart pounding with memories of Tippy stepping over the bodies of his children asleep on the floor each dawn, going off to work in construction all day and then cutting lawns till after dark. Memories of father words nearly identical to the ones Big Roy uses with his son: "I thought you were a man." Big Roy blinked at the mourners trying to ease him inside the funeral home...and somehow, at the last moment, saved himself. He remained outside. Nearly burned up with fever the next day, but nobody saw him cry.


O.K., so he made mistakes now and then, got too close to beer, to women, to fists. So he fathered that second son out of wedlock, seven years after Little Roy was born. His firstborn son would remedy all that. Big Roy would make sure of it. His firstborn would be champion of the world one day...from a distance.

Happy? You're ready for a happy moment? Happy's when Big Roy lumbers into the house after another 14-hour workday, sees Little Roy and his sister Tiffany wriggling around to some R&B and snorts, "You kids don't know how to dance," and then starts doing the Funky Chicken and the Shovel around the room. Really happy? "You never saw Big Roy happier than when he was at a cockfight," says Wilfred Grant, a friend from north of Pensacola. "Happy like a little kid openin' his presents on Christmas mornin'." Happy like a man who's in a place that proves what he always suspected about life, a man in the pit where all complexity vanishes and every male bird has but one choice: conquer or die.

Little Roy can't help it; he gets swept up in it too. He's in a war for survival, just like the birds, and he's looking everywhere for clues. What makes the blue-gray rooster do what he does that day at the cockfight in Prairieville, La.? What makes him stagger—all but comatose, being pecked and slashed to pieces—to the pit wall, use it like a crutch to hold himself upright and somehow end up killing his opponent at the end of a two-hour war? There's a lesson his father never taught him. Everything can be a survival skill. Even leaning.

Little Roy goes out in his yard and studies the birds that Big Roy collects. The way the male bitties have to scurry out of the way of their fathers from the day they're born, the way fathers and sons must be placed in separate cages by the time the offspring reach six months so they don't kill one another. It soothes him. Maybe there's nothing so wrong with the way he's growing up. Maybe it's just how God makes fathers and sons.

He's 15 now, wearing shoes his feet are about to come through. He's learning the game. He won't ask his father for new shoes. He's riding home from three fights in Mississippi, feeling the way roosters who make it out of the pit must feel. Just beat a kid in a high school gym in Ocean Springs, tattooed another at the Air Force base in Biloxi and then polished off one for the road at a golf course in Gulfport—all in one day. His soul emerges in the ring; he struts and preens the way the great fighting roosters do. He has already won the National Junior Olympics title at 119 pounds. Slick? It's like Jackie Holley, a woman who also trained under Big Roy, says: "Snot and okra had nothin' on Little Roy when it come to slick." His career is so different from the old man's. The boy's opponents barely touch him. He'll be rocked only once, during an amateur fight against Frankie Liles, but won't go down.

Now it's late, and the other boxers in the van are asleep. The boy hasn't seen or felt any love, can't read it in the way Big Roy's hands get so worried before his son fights, the way they keep double-and triple-checking pockets for tape, scissors, cigarettes. Now's the only time Big Roy will let it squeak out. "Fought good today," he says. That's it. He'll tell his friends and the people he asks for donations that the kid's going to be a world champion, but that's it for the boy.

Tomorrow Little Roy will be back under the 95� sky and his father's glare, pistoning out the push-ups, skipping rope for up to an hour, sparring eight rounds with no break, fresh partners coming at him every three minutes. Running circles round and round Big Roy's sawed-off broomstick, one finger on its tip, until he's drunk-dizzy, then coming out jabbing, feinting, moving, readying himself for the day when he's staggered by a punch. Bobbing and weaving under the two long crossed boards that bristle with nails to let him know when he makes a mistake. Holding a brick in each hand, arms straight out, for three minutes, four, five.... Doing wind sprints under the interstate that runs through Pensacola on concrete pillars, his father nipping at his heels with the PVC pipe, stinging the backs of his thighs whenever he slows, screaming, "Wanna be a participant—or a kingpin?"

"Kingpin!"

"Then what's wrong with you?"

What is love, anyway? If a man's life has convinced him that the world is a cockfight, then it's love to turn his son into the most powerful *+%@ of all, isn't it? Isn't it? "He'd slap Little Roy, punch him, scream at him," says Nelson Fountain, another of Big Roy's boxers. "You'd never know it was his own son."


"Wasn't the ideal way to raise a kid," says Little Roy's mother, Carol. "But I can't say it was bad." Can't say because there was so much closeness in Carol that it balanced Big Roy's distance. "Any other boy," says Tiffany, "would've run away." One thing holds Little Roy to the fire. He senses that it's baking something hard and lasting. He knows that if he runs, he'll be an average man. Average like the opponents wilting in front of him just when he's beginning to feel that terrifying surge come through his arms and wrists. "I prayed to God, just don't let me be average," he says. "Let me be great at something." Because? "Because I knew if I was average, he'd dominate me all my life."

So he doesn't run away. He doesn't argue. He just carries a switchblade. A switchblade and a dread, growing each day as he draws nearer to manhood, that he's going to have to use the blade against his father. "He'd keep screamin' in my face in front of people, tryin' to pick a fight with me, just to prove he could still beat me," says Little Roy. "But I wasn't gonna fight him. I had too much respect to fight him. I'd just kill him. Or he'd kill me. That's the fear I had in my heart."

Here's his chance. The shadow's gone. Little Roy's in a dorm in Seoul, Korea, a million miles from his father's house. No Big Roy in his corner. No Big Roy in the gym. Can't even hear Big Roy hollering from the stands when Little Roy enters the ring in the 1988 Summer Olympics.

"Finally in my own world, by myself, like any other man," Little Roy says. It's an amphetamine, this freedom. He can't sit still. Can't sit with his teammates in the chow room, can't sit with them in the TV room, can't ride the bus with them to functions. It seems strange to the others, especially since, at 19, he's the youngest member of the team. "Where's Roy?" they keep asking. He's hurrying to the gym to do what his father wouldn't let him do before fights: play hoops. He's talking to girls. He's doing roadwork two or three times a day, dashing into the boxing gym at 11 p.m. to squeeze in extra workouts—because he has chosen to. He senses what's at stake. To win a boxing gold medal, you must be a man. Your own man.

He makes a new friend, an assistant coach on the U.S. team named Alton Merkerson. Smart as hell, a Vietnam vet, with the oddest notion Little Roy's ever heard from a boxing trainer. Having noticed that Roy doesn't turn over his fist as he's finishing his left hook—the classic way a hook is delivered—Merkerson doesn't try to change Roy's punch. Instead he suggests that Roy consider adding the turned-over hook to his arsenal. No ultimatums. No PVC pipes. A "democratic" trainer, Merk calls himself. Roy files it away. That's two people he can turn to if he ever gathers the guts for the showdown with his father. There'll be Coach Merk to train him...and Stanley Levin, the affectionate, curly-haired Pensacola lawyer whose money and sweat have helped keep the Boys Club boxing program alive, to help Little Roy financially and to hug him like a father.... He catches himself. No time for daydreaming now. There's business to be done.

He's awesome in the preliminary rounds. "You're different from the other American boxers," a member of the U.S. women's basketball team tells him. "They all look like they're in a war. You don't get hit. It's like you're floating in and out." There, but not there—just what his teammates have noticed about him outside the ring. During meetings they notice something else. Even though he's the youngest, the kid from the sticks, it's as if he's the oldest. As if he has been through a furnace even hotter than the ghetto fighters have. They start turning to him for advice. Little Roy becomes the leader.

In his second bout he devastates a Czechoslovakian fighter, scoring two standing eight counts, winning a 5-0 decision. The U.S. boxers spill out of the locker room to greet friends and relatives. There's Big Roy. "You're not throwin' enough punches!" he shouts at his son. Little Roy wants to crawl down a hole.

"He's been too quiet, there hasn't been any ionization," Big Roy tells a reporter. "You touch him, you don't get that spark coming off. I'm going to get him some electricity."

It's humming through Little Roy—it's just not Big Roy's juice. He cruises to the final, where he's brilliant once more. He takes apart South Korea's Park Si Hun, scores a standing eight count, out punches Park 86 to 32...and loses the gold-medal decision 3-2. What? It's incomprehensible. The judges who voted against him will be banned from officiating international amateur matches for two years, 50 Korean monks will come to Roy to express their shame, and he'll be voted the outstanding boxer of the Games—but the decision stands. Little Roy's chance is gone. Big Roy consoles his son. Sympathy is power too.

By the end of this story Little Roy will have taken a dozen young men under his wing, kids from all over, kids from trouble, just as his father had done before him. He and his company, Square Ring, will have bought an old house in Pensacola and converted it into a clubhouse, with a gym and a billiards room and a big kitchen and with bedrooms upstairs to lodge boxers. It'll be his dad's dream, what he hammered and nailed and begged for all those years, but his dad won't be there.


By the end there'll be a 26-year-old champion going out into the Pensacola community relentlessly, appearing almost compulsively at charily events, high school banquets and grade school classrooms, reaching outward, perhaps, for what he cannot grasp close by.

There are virtually no good stories to tell in the history of boxing fathers and sons. There are the stories of Joe and Marvis Frazier, of Bill and Buster Douglas, of Bob and Tony Tucker. Stories of the Howard Davises, of the Tony Ayalas and of the Bob Czyzes, Srs. and Jrs. Tales of recklessness and overcaution, of jail terms and shattered promise. A great fighter is a man alone on a path. He must feel that he is the maker, not the made. He must feel that he fathered himself.

They begin arriving soon after Little Roy returns from Korea, offering themselves to take Big Roy's place. Leonard and his lawyer, Mike Trainer. Butch Lewis, Lou Duva and Emanuel Steward. Little Roy stares at the scar on his forearm from a childhood whipping, closes his eyes, draws a deep breath. He's ready to sign with Steward—a contract calling for $300,000, a car, a house and a horse for Roy Jr.; $60,000 for Roy Sr.; and a $25,000 trust fund for educating Roy's siblings—and then he goes to his mother. Carol knows what this will do to her husband. "Your father got you this far," she says. "Give him a chance." How can Little Roy say no? He remains beneath his father's thumb.

Big Roy's got a plan. He's not going to do this with city cats, with insiders, with boxing big shots—some of whom are the very same guys who threw him to the wolves for a few pieces of silver when he was a boxer 15 years before. He's going to take the country road. He's going to hit the jackpot without ever entering the casino. Square Ring Inc. is formed. Levin, the local lawyer, will arrange for the fight sites, handle the ticket sales and line up the undercards. His brother Fred, one of America's top trial attorneys in earnings, will negotiate with the sharks and help bankroll the operation till the big money rolls in. But Big Roy will call all the shots: Who Little Roy will fight, when, where and how, and what'll be served at the postfight party. He'll decide where Little Roy will live—in a trailer right next to Big Roy. Rather than risk a showdown, Little Roy won't even attend Square Ring meetings.

There's one immediate problem. Nobody in Square Ring has ever walked in the snake-infested swamp of big-time professional boxing. Big Roy looks around for a consultant, someone who knows the inside—but from the outside. He hires Harold Smith, a former boxing promoter fresh from five years in prison for embezzling $21.3 million from Wells Fargo Bank.

The arrangement goes smoothly for the first four fights. Two are nationally televised, NBC playing the story of the cheated Olympian like a Stradivarius. Little Roy TKO's all four opponents. People call him the next Sugar Ray Leonard. No outsider knows about the day he comes to the gym coughing, so feverish he's hot to touch, and Big Roy growls, "He's sparrin'. Glove him up!" No outsider sees Little Roy take out his anguish on three straight partners, pounding the third one to the floor, waiting for him to rise and continuing to pummel him even after Big Roy shouts, "Stop! That's enough!" No outsider hears Little Roy hiss, "Get him out of here if you want me to stop." No outsider sees him walk silently out of the ring and out of the gym as his father pulls the dazed sparring partner away.

What everyone sees is Roy's star quality, the way he shimmies into the ring wearing shiny costumes, leaps onto the ropes and pumps his fists. The way he dances around his opponents, watching, waiting for their vulnerability. The way they begin to stalk him, thinking they know his kind, and then are stunned to find themselves being hit with left hooks that no dancer should be throwing. Punches arriving from improbable angles, in preposterous sequences, blurring even in slomo: four left hooks in a row; no, that's five; or is it six? What are his hands doing down by his hips, why's he leading with hooks instead of jabs? Doesn't he know those things can get a boxer killed? But no, he's so blindingly quick, he gets away with murder—and commits it at the same time.

It's clear what Big Roy needs to do, and everyone tells him so. He needs to align with a big-name promoter like Bob Arum or Don King, needs to take fights in big cities, needs to fight better opponents to put the boy on track for a title fight. Whoops. That's the wrong word. Each time Big Roy hears need, his eyes cloud, and he takes another step back.

"Everybody expects us to keep going forward, but we're tricking them," he tells Fred Levin. "We're pulling back." Maybe it's because the son's about to eclipse the father. Maybe the father truly believes that lame and celebrity, if they come too young, will weaken his son. Maybe he can't bear risking the chance that one day he will find himself sitting in the corner, helpless, watching another man bludgeon his child's head. And maybe it's that word, that wrong word everyone keeps using. This is real life; it's probably all of those maybes together.

Suddenly, the man who chucked his son into the Gulf of Mexico won't let him near a puddle. Little Roy's next 11 fights, from the autumn of 1989 through the late summer of '91, last an average of 2� rounds. Ten of them are in Pensacola, and all draw fewer than 2,500 fans. One opponent, Derwin Richards, turns out to be an impostor named Tony Waddles. Another opponent, Ricky Stackhouse, has lost five of his last 10 fights and is under medical suspension in New York. Then comes Lester Yarbrough, loser of seven of his previous 10.


The boxing world scoffs. Big Roy flares: "Boys don't win world championships. Men do.... He's not ready. You don't give a kid $2 million and the prestige of a world title. Otherwise you end up with a Mike Tyson.... If I'm gonna be blackballed for lookin' after my son, well then, go ahead. Call me Tar Baby!" And gradually the boxing world loses interest. "An invisible fighter," ABC boxing commentator Alex Wallau calls Little Roy.

Little Roy's scared. His career is three years old and already fading. He calls Merkerson and repeats what he says every four or five months: "Remember, Coach Merk, don't tie yourself up. I might need you." Finally he gets a fight with a name fighter in a name city: Jorge Vaca in January 1992 in New York. He annihilates Vaca in the first round. He watches his father rubbing elbows with the half-dozen Pensacola buddies whose airfares he has paid with Little Roy's earnings and doling out $500 to each of them to enjoy the Big Apple for an extra day. Who knows, maybe Big Roy's taking less of a cut than other managers—but if he would just explain the decisions to Little Roy, just give his son some voice....

The tension grows. One night a dog attacks a couple of Little Roy's gamecocks outside his trailer. He and friends fire shots to scare off the dog, and Big Roy, uneasy with the gunshots, shouts over that if there's any more shooting, shots will be coming back. Suddenly the son and the father are screaming, threatening to turn their guns on each other, and Carol's begging Little Roy to go back to his trailer and stop this madness.

During training, the air between the two men sizzles, two decades coming to the skin and lying there like sweat. It's hot that day in June 1992. The Rottweiler, the one that Little Roy has borrowed from a friend for breeding, ducks under Roy's trailer and stares out, panting. Big Roy has never seen the Rottweiler before, and what he doesn't know makes him uneasy. "If he growls at me," he has warned Corey, "I'll kill him."

Little Roy's out in his Jeep with friends. Here comes his sister, eight-year-old Catandrea, running toward his door. The flapping legs and arms startle the dog. He bolts from under the trailer and leaps at the little girl. His teeth rip into her arm. Big Roy hears her scream, grabs his shotgun and comes out on the run.

There's Corey, tearing the dog away, lashing it to a tree. There's Carol, scooping Catandrea into a car, rushing off to a hospital. Big Roy looks at the dog on the leash and lifts the shotgun. He squeezes the trigger three times, then walks away. He returns a few minutes later with a Glock 9-mm pistol. Two more bullets go into the dog's head.

It doesn't take long for the news to find Little Roy: that his sister's safe, with a dozen stitches. That his friend's Rottweiler has been killed—not in the act of attacking Catandrea, when Little Roy, too, might have shot it, but afterward, on a leash. And it runs through him: This is it. This stands for everything. This is it.

He's in the passenger seat of his Jeep, a friend driving, as they roll up in front of the trailer. They stare at the dead dog. A 9-mm Beretta lies in Little Roy's lap. Two sentences lie in his head: I'd rather be dead than take this anymore. I'd rather be in prison.

His father, in his own car, rolls up alongside the Jeep. He says nothing about Catandrea. "I killed your dog," he says. It hangs there in the air, so matter-of-fact, so loaded with challenge. Little Roy cradles the gun. A moment passes. "Let's go," he finally tells his friend.

Distance is seldom the bent of the great knockout punchers. Their nature draws them nearer and nearer to that which prickles their fear and temper, their confusion and lust, as if sensing that they cannot wreak havoc without ingesting it first. So they keep wading in—outside the ring as surely as inside it—sacrificing perspective for destruction until the price grows too steep. You could look that up.


What are we to make of Roy Jones Jr. then? Here we have an aberration, a knockout puncher who virtually never gets hit, a fighter who devastates from afar. One whose refuge, when the pressure upon him builds, isn't the city fighter's refuge; one who won't touch alcohol, drugs or cigarettes ever, or a woman for three weeks before a fight. One who won't go into the water with the boxing sharks, won't buy a house that's not in the woods, won't go near anything he doesn't know, won't forget to leave space between him and the other man inside the ring, just like his father always did outside of it. Because a fistfight is not unlike a relationship: If you can hold back, it's the other person who must extend and expose himself.

It turns out he was right, all those years as a kid when he daydreamed of suicide and carried the switchblade: Something had to die to release him from his father. Who could've guessed it would be a dog? And so it happens, finally. At age 23, Roy turns his father's weapon upon his father. He moves out of the trailer next to his parents' house and into Stanley Levin's place and starts planning to purchase a house on eight acres. He calls Merkerson and asks him to be his new trainer. "Told you I'd need you one day, Coach Merk," he says. That's the difference between Little Roy and his father. He's so fiercely independent that he can barely stand to be massaged, but he understands that it's O.K. every now and then, with a trustworthy person, to need.

For five straight days Roy arrives at the gym to work out before his father trains his other boxers. For five straight days—even though the Levin brothers, not Big Roy, are paying the rent on the gym—he finds a new lock on the door and chops it off with bolt cutters. As he listens to his feet and the jump rope tapping the floor in the empty gym, he feels a sadness and an absolute certainty: There's no turning back.

The sharks sniff the blood. Promoters and managers besiege Roy and Stanley Levin with calls, offering cash and condos and cars, all singing the same verse: "The only way you'll make it to the world title is with someone who's established. Otherwise they'll freeze you out." King comes to Pensacola three times, telling Roy he needs to link arms with a brother and bust out of these backwoods, ride the same limo to stardom that other boxing prodigies do. Roy shakes his head no. He is too much his father. He won't give up the distance.

This is no fool's rebellion, no conflagration of all his father's values. He's decisive—clearly he has been mulling the course he would take during all those silent years. He's happier, more playful, too. He sticks pillows under blankets in his hotel room the week before a fight to convince Merk he's napping and then slips off to play basketball and titters about his coup for days. "Lettin' out the kid in me," Roy says, "that I hardly ever could as a kid."

But he knows what he has lost, too. It's a security he always took into the ring: the little boy's belief that if he made a mistake and got hurt, badly hurt, nothing terrible would happen; his father would save him. But losing that is what it takes to be a champion, he decides. Being that one step closer to the edge.

In his first match without his father, he TKO's Glenn Thomas in the eighth round. Big Roy refuses to attend the fight. The silence between the two men hardens. The stakes are clear but never spoken: If the son stumbles—if fame or money undoes him, if he loses a fight—the father is proved right. Little Roy's not a man. He's still a boy.

Eleven months after the split, Little Roy decisions Bernard Hopkins to win the vacant International Boxing Federation world middleweight title. But who is Bernard Hopkins? It's not enough to prove his father wrong, not enough to appease critics who sneer at his opponents and wonder why he has never fought a champion. It's going to take a true rite of passage, a definitive test of manhood. Not Thulane Malinga, Ferm�n Chirino or Daniel Garc�a, whom Roy dispatches in quick succession. Not top IBF middleweight contender Thomas Tate, whom Roy savages with an astonishing flying left hook in the second round. It's going to take a fistfight with the man who's undefeated in 46 bouts, the super middleweight champion who wins by intimidation, the one acclaimed by many as the best fighter, pound for pound, on earth. It's going to take James Toney.

It finally happens in November 1994. " Roy Jones," HBO commentator Larry Merchant declares just before the fight in Las Vegas, "has avoided all the toughest opponents. We don't know if he's a superstar or a fraud." A few minutes later they start knowing. Over and over Roy strikes and vanishes. Toney's a man locked inside the large house of his own body, hearing a rapping at the back door, running there but finding no one. Then a ferocious banging at the kitchen window, rushing there—nothing. Then a pounding at the bathroom window, spinning over there—nothing. Now it's the front door; now it's the dormer window in the attic. Who's there? No one, nothing. Toney gropes, he reaches, he lunges. He goes down in the third round, gets up and gets tagged again and again. Little Roy smashes the boxing axiom, the inverse between damage and distance.

Ross Greenburg, executive producer of HBO Sports, turns to his broadcasting team of Merchant, Jim Lampley and Gil Clancy, blinking in disbelief after Jones has won by a margin so overwhelming that The Ring magazine will call it the most dominant big-fight performance in 20 years. "Listen, guys," Greenburg says, "we were there for Leonard and Hagler and Hearns and Dur�n in their prime. I think Roy Jones gets in a ring and beats them all. I've never seen that kind of punching power and speed in one man. I can't imagine what it would take to beat Roy Jones."


"Look how this rooster walks in his cage," Little Roy says. He's pointing to one of his 400 roosters and chickens as it strides back and forth inside its cage. "See that? It's his cage. He owns it. It's his world. Every other male has to respect that. I spent all my life in my dad's cage. I could never be 100 percent of who I am until I left it. But because of him, nothing bothers me. I'll never face anything stronger and harder than what I already have.

"I'd rather you kill me than lose my title. Just like these roosters. It's a very lonesome feeling. Your wife may leave you in this world. Your kids may leave you. Even your parents may leave you. I know what my roosters feel. All you really have is yourself." A man with that understanding, and with Little Roy's gifts, could own the cage for a long time. He's never out of shape. He still plays several hours of basketball a day, whether he's in training or not. He ran three miles the morning after the Toney fight. At midnight on each New Year's Eve he's dripping sweat in the gym, re-proving his dedication to himself. What would it take to undo such a man? Every great boxer is a tightly wound ball of compulsion and circumstance, always with that one dangling thread, if one peers closely enough, that can bring the whole thing apart. Where is that thread in a man for whom every bout now isn't simply a prizefight but an ongoing war for selfhood, another trial to play out before the eyes of the judge watching his television at home, looking for every %%%+!? Could it be that the only thing that would undo Roy Jones Jr. now would be...his father's hug?

He was signed by HBO recently to what could be the largest TV deal of any nonheavyweight in history, under which he will fight sVinny Pazienza in Atlantic City on June 24. But who's on the horizon to test his greatness, to do what Leonard and Dur�n, Hearns and Hagler did for each other, to make him a household name? Except...unless....

"You know where this is heading, don't you?" says Fred Levin. " Tyson."

Roy shrugs. "I could beat him," he says. "I couldn't beat a large heavyweight like Riddick Bowe, but Tyson's only five-eleven. I could reach him. I could carry 185 pounds. I want to do something no one thinks I can do. That's what a champion does. A warrior is someone who'll fight to the dying end—that's what my father is. But a champion is someone who'll find a way to adapt to any situation and win. That's what I am.

"I wouldn't fight Tyson for the celebrity of it. I don't need that. They can shine the light so bright on your face, you can't even see what you're standin' on, and then one day the light goes off and you look down and see you were standin' on nothin'. Sure, I'll do some showboatin' in the ring—I'm the only true performer in the ring today. But not outside of it. People assume every boxer wants to live the fast life. That's an escape, not a life. I want a person-to-person life."

And so he keeps conceding distance to Big Roy in hopes that they can once more be father and son, if not trainer and boxer. He salutes Big Roy on TV after virtually every match, but still his father won't attend a fight. He gave Big Roy an $8,000 diamond-studded championship ring on Christmas Eve 1994, which Big Roy accepted but keeps in the house. At the urging of a friend, Little Roy agreed to call his dad and wish him a happy Father's Day last year, but what he got in return was "Thank you" and click. Each time Little Roy visits his parents' house, Big Roy suddenly remembers something he forgot to do in the barn or becomes obsessed by the ticks on one of his puppies' fur.

Everyone keeps telling Big Roy that he needs to make peace with his son. "Once you break the plate at my table," Big Roy tells them, "you can never eat there again." He won't discuss his son with reporters. "Just write whatever Roy says," he tells them. "Write whatever you want." Only to his three daughters will he let down his guard. "I love my son," he tells them. "I gave my life to him."

And then one day, on his mother's birthday in April 1995, Little Roy tries again. He has just purchased a new house on 81 acres of forest, and he can't help it: He wants to show it to his dad. He parks in front of the garage where his father still trains boxers. He glances warily at Big Roy. "Like to show you my new place," he says.

"Busy," grunts Big Roy.


"How 'bout tomorrow?"

"Busy then too."

"What about next week? The week after?"

"Gonna be real busy. Maybe sometime after that."

"After that? Who knows if I'll be around after that?"

"Tough cookies," says his father.

The son returns to his farm, his roosters. "That's it," he says. "Deep in my heart, I'll always love him. But I won't ever talk to him again." He holds a gamecock near his cheek, then sets it back in its cage and walks toward the woods...precisely the man Big Roy Jones always intended to raise.
 
June 26, 1995
One Tough Bird
Roy Jones Jr., the best boxer pound for pound, was raised under the rules of cockfighting: win or die
Gary Smith

Spoiler [+]
Even with the three-inch steel spur running through his skull, the Rooster did not forget the secret. Even with the blood fever making the dogs yip and the men close in howling, "It's over! He's dead!" Even with the teenager's nervous fingers trying to yank the metal from the rooster's brain, with the talons of the other rooster at its throat. Even then....

The boy's heart was beating its way up his throat, but he couldn't show his fear or sorrow for his bird. The boy's father would smell it and carve it to shreds, for one thing, and for another, the boy was 17 and planning to go to the Olympics to fight the best fighters in the world. The triumphant rooster flapped wildly, the blade on one foot ripping the air while the other foot tried madly to extract its blade from the limp bird's head. The teenager held his breath and tried again to disentangle the roosters without getting slashed.

He could see that the men were right; the spur had entered near one ear and come out near the other. But a shock went through the boy's palms as he finally worked the blade loose: Crazy's heart was still pulsing! "He's alive!" the boy called.

"Blow on him!" his father shouted. "Keep him warm!"

The boy blew up and down Crazy's spine and then set him on his feet. Hallelujah, the damn rooster was still itching to fight; the men stared in disbelief. Crazy struck and pulled back, feinting, inviting his enemy in, remembering what most dead cocks hadn't learned: the importance of distance, the significance of space. The other bird lunged, exposed himself...and suddenly was dead, and the boy was whooping, hugging Crazy to his chest.

By the end of this story the boy will be a man, and there'll be fighting roosters everywhere, hundreds of them in cages all over his land. By the end he'll be known as the best boxer, pound for pound, in the world, 28-0 with 24 knockouts, the super middleweight champion whom some will call the best boxer since Sugar Ray. Not Leonard. Robinson. "Forget Leonard," WBC light heavyweight champion Mike McCallum will say. "This boy is faster than Leonard. He hits harder, and he can knock you out when he's going backwards. You'll see."

If you, the reader, are asking yourself, Roy Jones Jr.? The best fighter in the world? Why have I barely heard of him?...well, that too, by the end of the story, you will see. You'll know, like the rooster, all you need to know about distance.

To get there we'll have to travel way out into nowhere, deep into the pine and oak and cornfields 25 miles north of Pensacola, Fla. It's not a place for a fight story—can you name three American champions in the last half century who came from forest and dirt? Boxing is the heart's cry for personal space; everywhere out here there's space. You can't smell desperation here. You won't find any boxing gyms.

Look closer. Smell again. It's 1979. Down by the washed-out creek bed, in the clearing in the woods behind the little cinder block house on Barth Road, there are pigs, dogs, roosters, a bull, a horse...and a homemade ring. There's a barrel of a man with a dagger tattooed on his arm and a long piece of PVC pipe in his fist. There's a skinny 10-year-old boy. Always remember this: Nothing ever comes from nowhere.

The boy was five when this started. Big Roy on his knees, cuffing and slapping at Little Roy, taunting him: "What's wrong? Gettin' tired? Told you you were too little. Told you you weren't quick enough. Oh, here we go. You cryin' again? Little girlie-girlie cryin' again?" Yes, Little Roy was crying again, crying rage and frustration at how easily his father dominated him. He would promise his mother every day not to fight Big Roy that night, but then his mind would start imagining new and surprising angles of attack, shocking and unprecedented punches, and by eight o'clock that night, fresh from his bath, he would be flailing and sobbing in his pj's again. It wasn't fair. He had to get close and risk, but his father didn't.


Now he's 10, with a fight coming up next week on Pensacola Beach against a 14-year-old who's 16 pounds heavier. Nothing new. Big Roy's always throwing him in over his head, daring him to be a man, preparing him for the cruel sport that he, not Big Roy, has chosen. Didn't Big Roy give him a shotgun at Christmas when he was six, have him driving a tractor when he was seven? "Thought I'd pass out cold when I saw that," the boy's mother, Carol, says. Once when the two Roys were fishing, wading in surf up to Little Roy's chest, Big Roy shouted, "Sharks! Two of 'em!" and the boy dropped his rod and went thrashing for land. "What are you doin'?" the father demanded. "Where's your rod?" Trembling, the boy pointed toward the water. "Go get it," Big Roy said.

"But...."

"Now!"

In crept Little Roy, certain he was about to be devoured for a fishing rod. Oh, he couldn't swim? A year later, when the boy was eight, Big Roy heaved him into the Gulf of Mexico, water two feet over his head—that'd learn him. He thrust Little Roy onto a horse, then a bull. "Ride 'em," he said. The child, at first, couldn't quite cover his panic. "You're too much like your mother," Big Roy would grumble when Little Roy ran into her arms. "You'll never do nothin' if you're scared."

Eventually he learned to protect himself. When his father slept he would tie to a fence a horse that others wouldn't ride, and he would conquer it alone. "After a while I didn't care about gettin' hurt or dyin' anymore," he says. "I was in pain all day, every day, I was so scared of my father. He'd pull up in his truck and start lookin' for something I'd done wrong. There was no escape, no excuse, no way out of nothin'. Every day it was the same: school, homework, farmwork, trainin'. Gettin' hurt or dyin' might've been better than the life I was livin'. So I turned into a daredevil. I'd do anything. Didn't make much difference. Used to think about killin' myself anyway."

The 10-year-old boy feels so alone. Some children are too intimidated by his father to come around but most just live too far away. He makes his alliances with animals. With the dogs that snarl at everyone else. With the bull that he has learned to ride. With the Shetland pony, Coco, that he has taught to rear up, just like the Lone Ranger's Silver. With the goat that followed him onto the school bus in second grade. With the blue-feathered gamecock his father will soon give him. He's always on to the next thing, the little boy, with a restlessness that the open country and the brutal sun can't leach from him. When the train rumbles through the trees not far from his home, Little Roy dreams of leaping onto it and letting it take him...where? Somewhere far from the cinder block house where his father will be returning soon from another day's work as an aircraft electrician at Pensacola Naval Air Station. Somewhere the belt and the switch, the PVC pipe and the extension cord can't reach. "The whippin's didn't last that long," Little Roy's younger half brother, Corey, says. "Maybe 20 minutes."

Big Roy's a monster, right? Look closer. Smell again. Soon Big Roy will be inviting kids from all over into his makeshift gym. Kids with no playgrounds, no direction, no fathers. Kids from trouble. Soon Big Roy will make sure a ******ed boy named Chris gets his turn on the bag and in the ring, will make certain no one insults or bullies him—it's the same impulse that earned Big Roy the Bronze Star in Vietnam for rushing through a veil of bullets to save an ambushed mate. "You could give your two-week-old baby to that man, go on vacation and not think twice," says Doris Grant, an old family friend. "Big Roy'd take care of it." Soon he'll be wolfing down dinner, training the boys from 5 p.m. till 10 or 11, doing the farmwork till midnight, rising at five to go to work again. Soon his paycheck will be vanishing, gone to buy the kids boxing shoes and speed bags and vitamins. Soon he'll be working extra jobs on weekends to finance the kids' trips to tournaments in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia. Soon he'll be selling the tractor and the hogs so he'll have more time and money for the kids. Going to the dog track with his last two bucks, praying he can turn it into $50 or $60 so they can box on Saturday in Biloxi. His vacations will be a dozen kids jammed into a van, a dozen bologna sandwiches crammed into a bag, creeping home 10 miles under the speed limit so the gas tank doesn't go dry, relying on a piece of wire to hold the door closed so the kids don't all tumble out. He'll be poring over their report cards, patting their heads for A's and B's, cooking crabs and oysters for them on Friday evenings. "Seemed closer to the other kids," says Little Roy, "than he was to me." He'll be selling the farm, moving into Pensacola—giving up his biggest prize, giving up distance. He'll be running the Escambia County Boys Club boxing program in an abandoned building, rigging wires to the power lines outside to pirate electricity, herding everyone to the H&O Cafe a few blocks away when the boys need water and a toilet. Asking folks all over, asking his own sister, for contributions to keep this crazy, cobbled crusade alive.

That's the hardest thing of all for Big Roy. Asking. Needing. How many years has he gone without seeing a doctor? You're only hurt if you think you're hurt, he keeps telling his boxers and his five children. How many days did he let that pain in his right side go before he staggered into his father's house in Pensacola 14 years ago and sagged to his knees, moaning, "Just tired," waiting for someone to force him into a car and take him to a hospital before his appendix burst?

There's only one cure for needing: distance. Needing ate you up when you were one of 12 children growing up in a small house under a hard old man like Tippy Jones; needing could possess you, suck your lifeblood away, so move away from it. Where did Big Roy go the day they buried his mother? Four hundred seventy miles away, to Tampa, with one of his boxers. Where did he go at 17, after Tippy challenged him to fight and Big Roy swung a two-by-four at him, then flung it aside and ran rather than swing at his own blood again? To the Job Corps, to Indiana, then to pick fruit on farms all over the West and down to Mexico to box. To fight in small arenas for a few hundred bucks, in barrooms for a twenty, trying to work what was left of the needing out of his blood.

Where did Big Roy go when his father died? Oh, he nearly crumbled that time. He walked toward the funeral home, heart pounding with memories of Tippy stepping over the bodies of his children asleep on the floor each dawn, going off to work in construction all day and then cutting lawns till after dark. Memories of father words nearly identical to the ones Big Roy uses with his son: "I thought you were a man." Big Roy blinked at the mourners trying to ease him inside the funeral home...and somehow, at the last moment, saved himself. He remained outside. Nearly burned up with fever the next day, but nobody saw him cry.


O.K., so he made mistakes now and then, got too close to beer, to women, to fists. So he fathered that second son out of wedlock, seven years after Little Roy was born. His firstborn son would remedy all that. Big Roy would make sure of it. His firstborn would be champion of the world one day...from a distance.

Happy? You're ready for a happy moment? Happy's when Big Roy lumbers into the house after another 14-hour workday, sees Little Roy and his sister Tiffany wriggling around to some R&B and snorts, "You kids don't know how to dance," and then starts doing the Funky Chicken and the Shovel around the room. Really happy? "You never saw Big Roy happier than when he was at a cockfight," says Wilfred Grant, a friend from north of Pensacola. "Happy like a little kid openin' his presents on Christmas mornin'." Happy like a man who's in a place that proves what he always suspected about life, a man in the pit where all complexity vanishes and every male bird has but one choice: conquer or die.

Little Roy can't help it; he gets swept up in it too. He's in a war for survival, just like the birds, and he's looking everywhere for clues. What makes the blue-gray rooster do what he does that day at the cockfight in Prairieville, La.? What makes him stagger—all but comatose, being pecked and slashed to pieces—to the pit wall, use it like a crutch to hold himself upright and somehow end up killing his opponent at the end of a two-hour war? There's a lesson his father never taught him. Everything can be a survival skill. Even leaning.

Little Roy goes out in his yard and studies the birds that Big Roy collects. The way the male bitties have to scurry out of the way of their fathers from the day they're born, the way fathers and sons must be placed in separate cages by the time the offspring reach six months so they don't kill one another. It soothes him. Maybe there's nothing so wrong with the way he's growing up. Maybe it's just how God makes fathers and sons.

He's 15 now, wearing shoes his feet are about to come through. He's learning the game. He won't ask his father for new shoes. He's riding home from three fights in Mississippi, feeling the way roosters who make it out of the pit must feel. Just beat a kid in a high school gym in Ocean Springs, tattooed another at the Air Force base in Biloxi and then polished off one for the road at a golf course in Gulfport—all in one day. His soul emerges in the ring; he struts and preens the way the great fighting roosters do. He has already won the National Junior Olympics title at 119 pounds. Slick? It's like Jackie Holley, a woman who also trained under Big Roy, says: "Snot and okra had nothin' on Little Roy when it come to slick." His career is so different from the old man's. The boy's opponents barely touch him. He'll be rocked only once, during an amateur fight against Frankie Liles, but won't go down.

Now it's late, and the other boxers in the van are asleep. The boy hasn't seen or felt any love, can't read it in the way Big Roy's hands get so worried before his son fights, the way they keep double-and triple-checking pockets for tape, scissors, cigarettes. Now's the only time Big Roy will let it squeak out. "Fought good today," he says. That's it. He'll tell his friends and the people he asks for donations that the kid's going to be a world champion, but that's it for the boy.

Tomorrow Little Roy will be back under the 95� sky and his father's glare, pistoning out the push-ups, skipping rope for up to an hour, sparring eight rounds with no break, fresh partners coming at him every three minutes. Running circles round and round Big Roy's sawed-off broomstick, one finger on its tip, until he's drunk-dizzy, then coming out jabbing, feinting, moving, readying himself for the day when he's staggered by a punch. Bobbing and weaving under the two long crossed boards that bristle with nails to let him know when he makes a mistake. Holding a brick in each hand, arms straight out, for three minutes, four, five.... Doing wind sprints under the interstate that runs through Pensacola on concrete pillars, his father nipping at his heels with the PVC pipe, stinging the backs of his thighs whenever he slows, screaming, "Wanna be a participant—or a kingpin?"

"Kingpin!"

"Then what's wrong with you?"

What is love, anyway? If a man's life has convinced him that the world is a cockfight, then it's love to turn his son into the most powerful *+%@ of all, isn't it? Isn't it? "He'd slap Little Roy, punch him, scream at him," says Nelson Fountain, another of Big Roy's boxers. "You'd never know it was his own son."


"Wasn't the ideal way to raise a kid," says Little Roy's mother, Carol. "But I can't say it was bad." Can't say because there was so much closeness in Carol that it balanced Big Roy's distance. "Any other boy," says Tiffany, "would've run away." One thing holds Little Roy to the fire. He senses that it's baking something hard and lasting. He knows that if he runs, he'll be an average man. Average like the opponents wilting in front of him just when he's beginning to feel that terrifying surge come through his arms and wrists. "I prayed to God, just don't let me be average," he says. "Let me be great at something." Because? "Because I knew if I was average, he'd dominate me all my life."

So he doesn't run away. He doesn't argue. He just carries a switchblade. A switchblade and a dread, growing each day as he draws nearer to manhood, that he's going to have to use the blade against his father. "He'd keep screamin' in my face in front of people, tryin' to pick a fight with me, just to prove he could still beat me," says Little Roy. "But I wasn't gonna fight him. I had too much respect to fight him. I'd just kill him. Or he'd kill me. That's the fear I had in my heart."

Here's his chance. The shadow's gone. Little Roy's in a dorm in Seoul, Korea, a million miles from his father's house. No Big Roy in his corner. No Big Roy in the gym. Can't even hear Big Roy hollering from the stands when Little Roy enters the ring in the 1988 Summer Olympics.

"Finally in my own world, by myself, like any other man," Little Roy says. It's an amphetamine, this freedom. He can't sit still. Can't sit with his teammates in the chow room, can't sit with them in the TV room, can't ride the bus with them to functions. It seems strange to the others, especially since, at 19, he's the youngest member of the team. "Where's Roy?" they keep asking. He's hurrying to the gym to do what his father wouldn't let him do before fights: play hoops. He's talking to girls. He's doing roadwork two or three times a day, dashing into the boxing gym at 11 p.m. to squeeze in extra workouts—because he has chosen to. He senses what's at stake. To win a boxing gold medal, you must be a man. Your own man.

He makes a new friend, an assistant coach on the U.S. team named Alton Merkerson. Smart as hell, a Vietnam vet, with the oddest notion Little Roy's ever heard from a boxing trainer. Having noticed that Roy doesn't turn over his fist as he's finishing his left hook—the classic way a hook is delivered—Merkerson doesn't try to change Roy's punch. Instead he suggests that Roy consider adding the turned-over hook to his arsenal. No ultimatums. No PVC pipes. A "democratic" trainer, Merk calls himself. Roy files it away. That's two people he can turn to if he ever gathers the guts for the showdown with his father. There'll be Coach Merk to train him...and Stanley Levin, the affectionate, curly-haired Pensacola lawyer whose money and sweat have helped keep the Boys Club boxing program alive, to help Little Roy financially and to hug him like a father.... He catches himself. No time for daydreaming now. There's business to be done.

He's awesome in the preliminary rounds. "You're different from the other American boxers," a member of the U.S. women's basketball team tells him. "They all look like they're in a war. You don't get hit. It's like you're floating in and out." There, but not there—just what his teammates have noticed about him outside the ring. During meetings they notice something else. Even though he's the youngest, the kid from the sticks, it's as if he's the oldest. As if he has been through a furnace even hotter than the ghetto fighters have. They start turning to him for advice. Little Roy becomes the leader.

In his second bout he devastates a Czechoslovakian fighter, scoring two standing eight counts, winning a 5-0 decision. The U.S. boxers spill out of the locker room to greet friends and relatives. There's Big Roy. "You're not throwin' enough punches!" he shouts at his son. Little Roy wants to crawl down a hole.

"He's been too quiet, there hasn't been any ionization," Big Roy tells a reporter. "You touch him, you don't get that spark coming off. I'm going to get him some electricity."

It's humming through Little Roy—it's just not Big Roy's juice. He cruises to the final, where he's brilliant once more. He takes apart South Korea's Park Si Hun, scores a standing eight count, out punches Park 86 to 32...and loses the gold-medal decision 3-2. What? It's incomprehensible. The judges who voted against him will be banned from officiating international amateur matches for two years, 50 Korean monks will come to Roy to express their shame, and he'll be voted the outstanding boxer of the Games—but the decision stands. Little Roy's chance is gone. Big Roy consoles his son. Sympathy is power too.

By the end of this story Little Roy will have taken a dozen young men under his wing, kids from all over, kids from trouble, just as his father had done before him. He and his company, Square Ring, will have bought an old house in Pensacola and converted it into a clubhouse, with a gym and a billiards room and a big kitchen and with bedrooms upstairs to lodge boxers. It'll be his dad's dream, what he hammered and nailed and begged for all those years, but his dad won't be there.


By the end there'll be a 26-year-old champion going out into the Pensacola community relentlessly, appearing almost compulsively at charily events, high school banquets and grade school classrooms, reaching outward, perhaps, for what he cannot grasp close by.

There are virtually no good stories to tell in the history of boxing fathers and sons. There are the stories of Joe and Marvis Frazier, of Bill and Buster Douglas, of Bob and Tony Tucker. Stories of the Howard Davises, of the Tony Ayalas and of the Bob Czyzes, Srs. and Jrs. Tales of recklessness and overcaution, of jail terms and shattered promise. A great fighter is a man alone on a path. He must feel that he is the maker, not the made. He must feel that he fathered himself.

They begin arriving soon after Little Roy returns from Korea, offering themselves to take Big Roy's place. Leonard and his lawyer, Mike Trainer. Butch Lewis, Lou Duva and Emanuel Steward. Little Roy stares at the scar on his forearm from a childhood whipping, closes his eyes, draws a deep breath. He's ready to sign with Steward—a contract calling for $300,000, a car, a house and a horse for Roy Jr.; $60,000 for Roy Sr.; and a $25,000 trust fund for educating Roy's siblings—and then he goes to his mother. Carol knows what this will do to her husband. "Your father got you this far," she says. "Give him a chance." How can Little Roy say no? He remains beneath his father's thumb.

Big Roy's got a plan. He's not going to do this with city cats, with insiders, with boxing big shots—some of whom are the very same guys who threw him to the wolves for a few pieces of silver when he was a boxer 15 years before. He's going to take the country road. He's going to hit the jackpot without ever entering the casino. Square Ring Inc. is formed. Levin, the local lawyer, will arrange for the fight sites, handle the ticket sales and line up the undercards. His brother Fred, one of America's top trial attorneys in earnings, will negotiate with the sharks and help bankroll the operation till the big money rolls in. But Big Roy will call all the shots: Who Little Roy will fight, when, where and how, and what'll be served at the postfight party. He'll decide where Little Roy will live—in a trailer right next to Big Roy. Rather than risk a showdown, Little Roy won't even attend Square Ring meetings.

There's one immediate problem. Nobody in Square Ring has ever walked in the snake-infested swamp of big-time professional boxing. Big Roy looks around for a consultant, someone who knows the inside—but from the outside. He hires Harold Smith, a former boxing promoter fresh from five years in prison for embezzling $21.3 million from Wells Fargo Bank.

The arrangement goes smoothly for the first four fights. Two are nationally televised, NBC playing the story of the cheated Olympian like a Stradivarius. Little Roy TKO's all four opponents. People call him the next Sugar Ray Leonard. No outsider knows about the day he comes to the gym coughing, so feverish he's hot to touch, and Big Roy growls, "He's sparrin'. Glove him up!" No outsider sees Little Roy take out his anguish on three straight partners, pounding the third one to the floor, waiting for him to rise and continuing to pummel him even after Big Roy shouts, "Stop! That's enough!" No outsider hears Little Roy hiss, "Get him out of here if you want me to stop." No outsider sees him walk silently out of the ring and out of the gym as his father pulls the dazed sparring partner away.

What everyone sees is Roy's star quality, the way he shimmies into the ring wearing shiny costumes, leaps onto the ropes and pumps his fists. The way he dances around his opponents, watching, waiting for their vulnerability. The way they begin to stalk him, thinking they know his kind, and then are stunned to find themselves being hit with left hooks that no dancer should be throwing. Punches arriving from improbable angles, in preposterous sequences, blurring even in slomo: four left hooks in a row; no, that's five; or is it six? What are his hands doing down by his hips, why's he leading with hooks instead of jabs? Doesn't he know those things can get a boxer killed? But no, he's so blindingly quick, he gets away with murder—and commits it at the same time.

It's clear what Big Roy needs to do, and everyone tells him so. He needs to align with a big-name promoter like Bob Arum or Don King, needs to take fights in big cities, needs to fight better opponents to put the boy on track for a title fight. Whoops. That's the wrong word. Each time Big Roy hears need, his eyes cloud, and he takes another step back.

"Everybody expects us to keep going forward, but we're tricking them," he tells Fred Levin. "We're pulling back." Maybe it's because the son's about to eclipse the father. Maybe the father truly believes that lame and celebrity, if they come too young, will weaken his son. Maybe he can't bear risking the chance that one day he will find himself sitting in the corner, helpless, watching another man bludgeon his child's head. And maybe it's that word, that wrong word everyone keeps using. This is real life; it's probably all of those maybes together.

Suddenly, the man who chucked his son into the Gulf of Mexico won't let him near a puddle. Little Roy's next 11 fights, from the autumn of 1989 through the late summer of '91, last an average of 2� rounds. Ten of them are in Pensacola, and all draw fewer than 2,500 fans. One opponent, Derwin Richards, turns out to be an impostor named Tony Waddles. Another opponent, Ricky Stackhouse, has lost five of his last 10 fights and is under medical suspension in New York. Then comes Lester Yarbrough, loser of seven of his previous 10.


The boxing world scoffs. Big Roy flares: "Boys don't win world championships. Men do.... He's not ready. You don't give a kid $2 million and the prestige of a world title. Otherwise you end up with a Mike Tyson.... If I'm gonna be blackballed for lookin' after my son, well then, go ahead. Call me Tar Baby!" And gradually the boxing world loses interest. "An invisible fighter," ABC boxing commentator Alex Wallau calls Little Roy.

Little Roy's scared. His career is three years old and already fading. He calls Merkerson and repeats what he says every four or five months: "Remember, Coach Merk, don't tie yourself up. I might need you." Finally he gets a fight with a name fighter in a name city: Jorge Vaca in January 1992 in New York. He annihilates Vaca in the first round. He watches his father rubbing elbows with the half-dozen Pensacola buddies whose airfares he has paid with Little Roy's earnings and doling out $500 to each of them to enjoy the Big Apple for an extra day. Who knows, maybe Big Roy's taking less of a cut than other managers—but if he would just explain the decisions to Little Roy, just give his son some voice....

The tension grows. One night a dog attacks a couple of Little Roy's gamecocks outside his trailer. He and friends fire shots to scare off the dog, and Big Roy, uneasy with the gunshots, shouts over that if there's any more shooting, shots will be coming back. Suddenly the son and the father are screaming, threatening to turn their guns on each other, and Carol's begging Little Roy to go back to his trailer and stop this madness.

During training, the air between the two men sizzles, two decades coming to the skin and lying there like sweat. It's hot that day in June 1992. The Rottweiler, the one that Little Roy has borrowed from a friend for breeding, ducks under Roy's trailer and stares out, panting. Big Roy has never seen the Rottweiler before, and what he doesn't know makes him uneasy. "If he growls at me," he has warned Corey, "I'll kill him."

Little Roy's out in his Jeep with friends. Here comes his sister, eight-year-old Catandrea, running toward his door. The flapping legs and arms startle the dog. He bolts from under the trailer and leaps at the little girl. His teeth rip into her arm. Big Roy hears her scream, grabs his shotgun and comes out on the run.

There's Corey, tearing the dog away, lashing it to a tree. There's Carol, scooping Catandrea into a car, rushing off to a hospital. Big Roy looks at the dog on the leash and lifts the shotgun. He squeezes the trigger three times, then walks away. He returns a few minutes later with a Glock 9-mm pistol. Two more bullets go into the dog's head.

It doesn't take long for the news to find Little Roy: that his sister's safe, with a dozen stitches. That his friend's Rottweiler has been killed—not in the act of attacking Catandrea, when Little Roy, too, might have shot it, but afterward, on a leash. And it runs through him: This is it. This stands for everything. This is it.

He's in the passenger seat of his Jeep, a friend driving, as they roll up in front of the trailer. They stare at the dead dog. A 9-mm Beretta lies in Little Roy's lap. Two sentences lie in his head: I'd rather be dead than take this anymore. I'd rather be in prison.

His father, in his own car, rolls up alongside the Jeep. He says nothing about Catandrea. "I killed your dog," he says. It hangs there in the air, so matter-of-fact, so loaded with challenge. Little Roy cradles the gun. A moment passes. "Let's go," he finally tells his friend.

Distance is seldom the bent of the great knockout punchers. Their nature draws them nearer and nearer to that which prickles their fear and temper, their confusion and lust, as if sensing that they cannot wreak havoc without ingesting it first. So they keep wading in—outside the ring as surely as inside it—sacrificing perspective for destruction until the price grows too steep. You could look that up.


What are we to make of Roy Jones Jr. then? Here we have an aberration, a knockout puncher who virtually never gets hit, a fighter who devastates from afar. One whose refuge, when the pressure upon him builds, isn't the city fighter's refuge; one who won't touch alcohol, drugs or cigarettes ever, or a woman for three weeks before a fight. One who won't go into the water with the boxing sharks, won't buy a house that's not in the woods, won't go near anything he doesn't know, won't forget to leave space between him and the other man inside the ring, just like his father always did outside of it. Because a fistfight is not unlike a relationship: If you can hold back, it's the other person who must extend and expose himself.

It turns out he was right, all those years as a kid when he daydreamed of suicide and carried the switchblade: Something had to die to release him from his father. Who could've guessed it would be a dog? And so it happens, finally. At age 23, Roy turns his father's weapon upon his father. He moves out of the trailer next to his parents' house and into Stanley Levin's place and starts planning to purchase a house on eight acres. He calls Merkerson and asks him to be his new trainer. "Told you I'd need you one day, Coach Merk," he says. That's the difference between Little Roy and his father. He's so fiercely independent that he can barely stand to be massaged, but he understands that it's O.K. every now and then, with a trustworthy person, to need.

For five straight days Roy arrives at the gym to work out before his father trains his other boxers. For five straight days—even though the Levin brothers, not Big Roy, are paying the rent on the gym—he finds a new lock on the door and chops it off with bolt cutters. As he listens to his feet and the jump rope tapping the floor in the empty gym, he feels a sadness and an absolute certainty: There's no turning back.

The sharks sniff the blood. Promoters and managers besiege Roy and Stanley Levin with calls, offering cash and condos and cars, all singing the same verse: "The only way you'll make it to the world title is with someone who's established. Otherwise they'll freeze you out." King comes to Pensacola three times, telling Roy he needs to link arms with a brother and bust out of these backwoods, ride the same limo to stardom that other boxing prodigies do. Roy shakes his head no. He is too much his father. He won't give up the distance.

This is no fool's rebellion, no conflagration of all his father's values. He's decisive—clearly he has been mulling the course he would take during all those silent years. He's happier, more playful, too. He sticks pillows under blankets in his hotel room the week before a fight to convince Merk he's napping and then slips off to play basketball and titters about his coup for days. "Lettin' out the kid in me," Roy says, "that I hardly ever could as a kid."

But he knows what he has lost, too. It's a security he always took into the ring: the little boy's belief that if he made a mistake and got hurt, badly hurt, nothing terrible would happen; his father would save him. But losing that is what it takes to be a champion, he decides. Being that one step closer to the edge.

In his first match without his father, he TKO's Glenn Thomas in the eighth round. Big Roy refuses to attend the fight. The silence between the two men hardens. The stakes are clear but never spoken: If the son stumbles—if fame or money undoes him, if he loses a fight—the father is proved right. Little Roy's not a man. He's still a boy.

Eleven months after the split, Little Roy decisions Bernard Hopkins to win the vacant International Boxing Federation world middleweight title. But who is Bernard Hopkins? It's not enough to prove his father wrong, not enough to appease critics who sneer at his opponents and wonder why he has never fought a champion. It's going to take a true rite of passage, a definitive test of manhood. Not Thulane Malinga, Ferm�n Chirino or Daniel Garc�a, whom Roy dispatches in quick succession. Not top IBF middleweight contender Thomas Tate, whom Roy savages with an astonishing flying left hook in the second round. It's going to take a fistfight with the man who's undefeated in 46 bouts, the super middleweight champion who wins by intimidation, the one acclaimed by many as the best fighter, pound for pound, on earth. It's going to take James Toney.

It finally happens in November 1994. " Roy Jones," HBO commentator Larry Merchant declares just before the fight in Las Vegas, "has avoided all the toughest opponents. We don't know if he's a superstar or a fraud." A few minutes later they start knowing. Over and over Roy strikes and vanishes. Toney's a man locked inside the large house of his own body, hearing a rapping at the back door, running there but finding no one. Then a ferocious banging at the kitchen window, rushing there—nothing. Then a pounding at the bathroom window, spinning over there—nothing. Now it's the front door; now it's the dormer window in the attic. Who's there? No one, nothing. Toney gropes, he reaches, he lunges. He goes down in the third round, gets up and gets tagged again and again. Little Roy smashes the boxing axiom, the inverse between damage and distance.

Ross Greenburg, executive producer of HBO Sports, turns to his broadcasting team of Merchant, Jim Lampley and Gil Clancy, blinking in disbelief after Jones has won by a margin so overwhelming that The Ring magazine will call it the most dominant big-fight performance in 20 years. "Listen, guys," Greenburg says, "we were there for Leonard and Hagler and Hearns and Dur�n in their prime. I think Roy Jones gets in a ring and beats them all. I've never seen that kind of punching power and speed in one man. I can't imagine what it would take to beat Roy Jones."


"Look how this rooster walks in his cage," Little Roy says. He's pointing to one of his 400 roosters and chickens as it strides back and forth inside its cage. "See that? It's his cage. He owns it. It's his world. Every other male has to respect that. I spent all my life in my dad's cage. I could never be 100 percent of who I am until I left it. But because of him, nothing bothers me. I'll never face anything stronger and harder than what I already have.

"I'd rather you kill me than lose my title. Just like these roosters. It's a very lonesome feeling. Your wife may leave you in this world. Your kids may leave you. Even your parents may leave you. I know what my roosters feel. All you really have is yourself." A man with that understanding, and with Little Roy's gifts, could own the cage for a long time. He's never out of shape. He still plays several hours of basketball a day, whether he's in training or not. He ran three miles the morning after the Toney fight. At midnight on each New Year's Eve he's dripping sweat in the gym, re-proving his dedication to himself. What would it take to undo such a man? Every great boxer is a tightly wound ball of compulsion and circumstance, always with that one dangling thread, if one peers closely enough, that can bring the whole thing apart. Where is that thread in a man for whom every bout now isn't simply a prizefight but an ongoing war for selfhood, another trial to play out before the eyes of the judge watching his television at home, looking for every %%%+!? Could it be that the only thing that would undo Roy Jones Jr. now would be...his father's hug?

He was signed by HBO recently to what could be the largest TV deal of any nonheavyweight in history, under which he will fight sVinny Pazienza in Atlantic City on June 24. But who's on the horizon to test his greatness, to do what Leonard and Dur�n, Hearns and Hagler did for each other, to make him a household name? Except...unless....

"You know where this is heading, don't you?" says Fred Levin. " Tyson."

Roy shrugs. "I could beat him," he says. "I couldn't beat a large heavyweight like Riddick Bowe, but Tyson's only five-eleven. I could reach him. I could carry 185 pounds. I want to do something no one thinks I can do. That's what a champion does. A warrior is someone who'll fight to the dying end—that's what my father is. But a champion is someone who'll find a way to adapt to any situation and win. That's what I am.

"I wouldn't fight Tyson for the celebrity of it. I don't need that. They can shine the light so bright on your face, you can't even see what you're standin' on, and then one day the light goes off and you look down and see you were standin' on nothin'. Sure, I'll do some showboatin' in the ring—I'm the only true performer in the ring today. But not outside of it. People assume every boxer wants to live the fast life. That's an escape, not a life. I want a person-to-person life."

And so he keeps conceding distance to Big Roy in hopes that they can once more be father and son, if not trainer and boxer. He salutes Big Roy on TV after virtually every match, but still his father won't attend a fight. He gave Big Roy an $8,000 diamond-studded championship ring on Christmas Eve 1994, which Big Roy accepted but keeps in the house. At the urging of a friend, Little Roy agreed to call his dad and wish him a happy Father's Day last year, but what he got in return was "Thank you" and click. Each time Little Roy visits his parents' house, Big Roy suddenly remembers something he forgot to do in the barn or becomes obsessed by the ticks on one of his puppies' fur.

Everyone keeps telling Big Roy that he needs to make peace with his son. "Once you break the plate at my table," Big Roy tells them, "you can never eat there again." He won't discuss his son with reporters. "Just write whatever Roy says," he tells them. "Write whatever you want." Only to his three daughters will he let down his guard. "I love my son," he tells them. "I gave my life to him."

And then one day, on his mother's birthday in April 1995, Little Roy tries again. He has just purchased a new house on 81 acres of forest, and he can't help it: He wants to show it to his dad. He parks in front of the garage where his father still trains boxers. He glances warily at Big Roy. "Like to show you my new place," he says.

"Busy," grunts Big Roy.


"How 'bout tomorrow?"

"Busy then too."

"What about next week? The week after?"

"Gonna be real busy. Maybe sometime after that."

"After that? Who knows if I'll be around after that?"

"Tough cookies," says his father.

The son returns to his farm, his roosters. "That's it," he says. "Deep in my heart, I'll always love him. But I won't ever talk to him again." He holds a gamecock near his cheek, then sets it back in its cage and walks toward the woods...precisely the man Big Roy Jones always intended to raise.
 
I thought you were gone til the season starts.
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Originally Posted by hymen man

I thought you were gone til the season starts.
laugh.gif
Click to expand...


Yea, about that....


laugh.gif
smh.gif


Whatever. It was a stupid pronouncement and others have said "it's not that serious" and I agree. I mean, the positive to my "self-imposed suspension" for me was to be less dependent on sports, which I have been the past few weeks. If people don't want me here, I guess I'll begrudgingly go. I do like correcting stupid people so this forum is a haven for me, for better and for worse.
 
Originally Posted by hymen man

I thought you were gone til the season starts.
laugh.gif
Click to expand...


Yea, about that....


laugh.gif
smh.gif


Whatever. It was a stupid pronouncement and others have said "it's not that serious" and I agree. I mean, the positive to my "self-imposed suspension" for me was to be less dependent on sports, which I have been the past few weeks. If people don't want me here, I guess I'll begrudgingly go. I do like correcting stupid people so this forum is a haven for me, for better and for worse.
 
Putting it all in perspective. A great contrarian point-of-view to sports fandom


SPORTS NUT
Unsporting
Why I stopped being a sports fan.

By John Swansburg
Updated Monday, Jan. 4, 2010, at 4:18 PM ET

Spoiler [+]
Several months ago, I gave up sports. I hadn't planned to go cold turkey, so I didn't note the exact day I quit. One morning—it must have been in June—I picked up the paper and didn't feel like reading the sports section. So I didn't, that day or any day since. Around the same time, I stopped watching live sporting events on TV, catching highlights on ESPN, and checking for the latest sports news on the Web. I abandoned, midseason, two promising fantasy baseball teams in two very competitive leagues. Though I'd visited all but three of Major League Baseball's stadiums over the previous five seasons, I didn't attend a single ballgame in 2009. I haven't seen so much as a quarter of an NBA game this season. Somewhat to my surprise, I don't miss any of it.

At the most basic level, I stopped following sports because being a sports fan took too much time. In recent years, I had followed the Red Sox, the Boston Celtics, and to a lesser degree, the New England Patriots. During NASCAR's long February-to-November season, I also kept tabs on my favorite driver, the irascible Tony Stewart. There were thus few weeks in the calendar year when there wasn't a game to watch, a race to follow, or a hot-stove rumor to chase down. On an average weekend, I might devote three hours to a football game, another four to stock cars, and at least a couple of hours to ESPN.com, Deadspin, various newspaper sports sections, and a handful of fantasy advice sites. (Thank you, belatedly, Closer Watch Report.) Watching sports and consuming news about my favorite teams had come to occupy the majority of my leisure time.

Not all that long ago, the media diet of even the most dedicated fan was far less rich. Before cable, satellite, and the Web, you could follow the home team on local TV and radio; if you missed the game, you could read about it in the paper the next morning. To keep up with the rest of the sports world, you subscribed to Sports Illustrated or the Sporting News and watched whatever games made the network broadcasts. If you weren't interested in spending Sunday afternoon watching Sidney Moncrief's Bucks take on Mo Cheeks' 'Sixers, well, you could clean the garage.

Please don't mistake me for some fuddy-duddy who longs for the days of reading box scores by the wood-burning stove. One of my happiest sports memories is of listening to Anibal Sanchez's 2006 no-hitter on satellite radio while sending gloating text messages to other owners in my fantasy league. (I'd picked up Sanchez after reading about his minor league résumé on the Sons of Sam Horn message board.) But these new ways of following sports have made it easier for a casual fan to slip into Big Fan territory. There was a time when I'd catch a game here and there, watch SportsCenter a few nights a week, and really start paying attention come playoff time. I woke up one day not long ago (to a clock radio blaring WFAN) and found that I had a Google alert for "Kevin Garnett knee," a subscription to Baseball Prospectus, and a genuine interest in the Twitter updates of Juan Pablo Montoya.

For all the ways in which new media have changed how we follow our favorite teams, sports remain mired in the past in one basic way: You pretty much have to watch them live. Sure, you can record a Sunday afternoon football game and watch it the next day, but the final score is harder to avoid than the twist in last night's episode of Mad Men. Glimpse the back page of the local tabloid, and the game is spoiled. Even if your self-imposed media blackout does succeed, watching a day-old ballgame is like doing yesterday's crossword. It just doesn't have the same crackle. At the same time, other entertainment options are becoming easier to fit into my schedule. If I'm not in the mood for the TV shows I've DVR'd, I can always stream a movie on Netflix.

Of course, you don't need to watch every minute of every game to be a fan. My complaint with sports doesn't hinge on the inflexible hours. There's also the issue of return on my investment. The games are relentless, the experience of them too often ephemeral. I will recall to my dying day the game I attended between the Celtics and Trailblazers in March 1992. It was Larry Bird's last great performance—a 49-point clinic that included a simply absurd three to send the game into overtime. But such moments are, by definition, rare. For every historic game I've seen, there have been hundreds of uneventful ones I can tell you literally nothing about.

I'm not denying the pleasures of spending an afternoon shelling sunflower seeds and watching the Brewers take on the Pirates—on the contrary. My problem is more with the games that promise to be momentous and prove otherwise. Every week, there seems to be a game of the century—a playoff opener, a clash of rivals, a prodigal son returning home. As a sports fan in good standing, I'm obliged to watch. But too frequently, such games fail to deliver on the hype. Even if they are entertaining in the moment, I know that after the passage of a few months, I'll have trouble recalling the action. What happened in the NFC championship game last year? I watched, but I don't remember a single detail. What's the point of devoting all of my free time to something so fleeting?

Big wins for the home team are always memorable, particularly in the postseason. But for every euphoric victory, there are dozens of crushing defeats. Even given the dominance of Boston's teams this decade, I'm not sure I experienced more pleasure than anguish as a sports fan in the aughts. I was at Yankee Stadium in 2003 when Aaron Boone hit his walk-off to win Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. That defeat—to say nothing of being forced to ride home on a 4 train lousy with jubilant Yanks fans—threw me into a brooding funk that didn't clear for days. I didn't get those days back just because the Sox took the series the following year. The Celtics' 2008 playoff march ended in a 17th banner—but only after two full months of hard-fought series with Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, and Los Angeles, weeks in which I limped through my daily life, haggard from late-night nail-biters. Was it worth it?

Die-hard fans will say, Yes, absolutely. I understand that. I understand that there's no thrill of victory without the agony of defeat—Red Sox fans know this as well as anyone. I recognize what I'm missing out on by giving up sports. I have enjoyed, on many occasions, the spontaneous camaraderie with complete strangers that's engendered by common allegiance to a sports team. I have felt a swell of civic pride when my home team has won a championship. I appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a well-executed backdoor cut.

For those reasons, I may yet return to the fold. Maybe I just need a break. Maybe Boston's run of championships this decade has left me complacent. But for the time being, I'm content passing by the sports section in the morning and the sports bar at night. During this year's American League Division Series, I happened upon the ninth inning of Game 3 between the Red Sox and the Angels and watched as Jonathan Papelbon imploded, giving up the go-ahead run and the series. In previous years, the loss would have ruined my night, if not my week. I would have watched the morose postgame press conference, forced myself to read Shaughnessey's post-mortem, and tried to cheer myself up by logging in to ESPN Insider to read free-agent gossip. This time around, while I empathized with the crestfallen Fenway faithful, I felt a long way away from those die-hard fans. It was a liberating feeling, not to care. I went and read a book.

John Swansburg is Slate's culture editor. You can e-mail him at dvdextras@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter.
 
Putting it all in perspective. A great contrarian point-of-view to sports fandom


SPORTS NUT
Unsporting
Why I stopped being a sports fan.

By John Swansburg
Updated Monday, Jan. 4, 2010, at 4:18 PM ET

Spoiler [+]
Several months ago, I gave up sports. I hadn't planned to go cold turkey, so I didn't note the exact day I quit. One morning—it must have been in June—I picked up the paper and didn't feel like reading the sports section. So I didn't, that day or any day since. Around the same time, I stopped watching live sporting events on TV, catching highlights on ESPN, and checking for the latest sports news on the Web. I abandoned, midseason, two promising fantasy baseball teams in two very competitive leagues. Though I'd visited all but three of Major League Baseball's stadiums over the previous five seasons, I didn't attend a single ballgame in 2009. I haven't seen so much as a quarter of an NBA game this season. Somewhat to my surprise, I don't miss any of it.

At the most basic level, I stopped following sports because being a sports fan took too much time. In recent years, I had followed the Red Sox, the Boston Celtics, and to a lesser degree, the New England Patriots. During NASCAR's long February-to-November season, I also kept tabs on my favorite driver, the irascible Tony Stewart. There were thus few weeks in the calendar year when there wasn't a game to watch, a race to follow, or a hot-stove rumor to chase down. On an average weekend, I might devote three hours to a football game, another four to stock cars, and at least a couple of hours to ESPN.com, Deadspin, various newspaper sports sections, and a handful of fantasy advice sites. (Thank you, belatedly, Closer Watch Report.) Watching sports and consuming news about my favorite teams had come to occupy the majority of my leisure time.

Not all that long ago, the media diet of even the most dedicated fan was far less rich. Before cable, satellite, and the Web, you could follow the home team on local TV and radio; if you missed the game, you could read about it in the paper the next morning. To keep up with the rest of the sports world, you subscribed to Sports Illustrated or the Sporting News and watched whatever games made the network broadcasts. If you weren't interested in spending Sunday afternoon watching Sidney Moncrief's Bucks take on Mo Cheeks' 'Sixers, well, you could clean the garage.

Please don't mistake me for some fuddy-duddy who longs for the days of reading box scores by the wood-burning stove. One of my happiest sports memories is of listening to Anibal Sanchez's 2006 no-hitter on satellite radio while sending gloating text messages to other owners in my fantasy league. (I'd picked up Sanchez after reading about his minor league résumé on the Sons of Sam Horn message board.) But these new ways of following sports have made it easier for a casual fan to slip into Big Fan territory. There was a time when I'd catch a game here and there, watch SportsCenter a few nights a week, and really start paying attention come playoff time. I woke up one day not long ago (to a clock radio blaring WFAN) and found that I had a Google alert for "Kevin Garnett knee," a subscription to Baseball Prospectus, and a genuine interest in the Twitter updates of Juan Pablo Montoya.

For all the ways in which new media have changed how we follow our favorite teams, sports remain mired in the past in one basic way: You pretty much have to watch them live. Sure, you can record a Sunday afternoon football game and watch it the next day, but the final score is harder to avoid than the twist in last night's episode of Mad Men. Glimpse the back page of the local tabloid, and the game is spoiled. Even if your self-imposed media blackout does succeed, watching a day-old ballgame is like doing yesterday's crossword. It just doesn't have the same crackle. At the same time, other entertainment options are becoming easier to fit into my schedule. If I'm not in the mood for the TV shows I've DVR'd, I can always stream a movie on Netflix.

Of course, you don't need to watch every minute of every game to be a fan. My complaint with sports doesn't hinge on the inflexible hours. There's also the issue of return on my investment. The games are relentless, the experience of them too often ephemeral. I will recall to my dying day the game I attended between the Celtics and Trailblazers in March 1992. It was Larry Bird's last great performance—a 49-point clinic that included a simply absurd three to send the game into overtime. But such moments are, by definition, rare. For every historic game I've seen, there have been hundreds of uneventful ones I can tell you literally nothing about.

I'm not denying the pleasures of spending an afternoon shelling sunflower seeds and watching the Brewers take on the Pirates—on the contrary. My problem is more with the games that promise to be momentous and prove otherwise. Every week, there seems to be a game of the century—a playoff opener, a clash of rivals, a prodigal son returning home. As a sports fan in good standing, I'm obliged to watch. But too frequently, such games fail to deliver on the hype. Even if they are entertaining in the moment, I know that after the passage of a few months, I'll have trouble recalling the action. What happened in the NFC championship game last year? I watched, but I don't remember a single detail. What's the point of devoting all of my free time to something so fleeting?

Big wins for the home team are always memorable, particularly in the postseason. But for every euphoric victory, there are dozens of crushing defeats. Even given the dominance of Boston's teams this decade, I'm not sure I experienced more pleasure than anguish as a sports fan in the aughts. I was at Yankee Stadium in 2003 when Aaron Boone hit his walk-off to win Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. That defeat—to say nothing of being forced to ride home on a 4 train lousy with jubilant Yanks fans—threw me into a brooding funk that didn't clear for days. I didn't get those days back just because the Sox took the series the following year. The Celtics' 2008 playoff march ended in a 17th banner—but only after two full months of hard-fought series with Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, and Los Angeles, weeks in which I limped through my daily life, haggard from late-night nail-biters. Was it worth it?

Die-hard fans will say, Yes, absolutely. I understand that. I understand that there's no thrill of victory without the agony of defeat—Red Sox fans know this as well as anyone. I recognize what I'm missing out on by giving up sports. I have enjoyed, on many occasions, the spontaneous camaraderie with complete strangers that's engendered by common allegiance to a sports team. I have felt a swell of civic pride when my home team has won a championship. I appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a well-executed backdoor cut.

For those reasons, I may yet return to the fold. Maybe I just need a break. Maybe Boston's run of championships this decade has left me complacent. But for the time being, I'm content passing by the sports section in the morning and the sports bar at night. During this year's American League Division Series, I happened upon the ninth inning of Game 3 between the Red Sox and the Angels and watched as Jonathan Papelbon imploded, giving up the go-ahead run and the series. In previous years, the loss would have ruined my night, if not my week. I would have watched the morose postgame press conference, forced myself to read Shaughnessey's post-mortem, and tried to cheer myself up by logging in to ESPN Insider to read free-agent gossip. This time around, while I empathized with the crestfallen Fenway faithful, I felt a long way away from those die-hard fans. It was a liberating feeling, not to care. I went and read a book.

John Swansburg is Slate's culture editor. You can e-mail him at dvdextras@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter.
 
I hate Rick Reilly as much as anyone, but check out his piece on Bryant Gumbel for Sports Illustrated:

SI Article

Also check out Kornheiser's piece on Rick Barry.
 
I hate Rick Reilly as much as anyone, but check out his piece on Bryant Gumbel for Sports Illustrated:

SI Article

Also check out Kornheiser's piece on Rick Barry.
 
I hate Rick Reilly as much as anyone, but check out his piece on Bryant Gumbel for Sports Illustrated:

SI Article

Also check out Kornheiser's piece on Rick Barry.
 
I hate Rick Reilly as much as anyone, but check out his piece on Bryant Gumbel for Sports Illustrated:

SI Article

Also check out Kornheiser's piece on Rick Barry.
 
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