The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

Preface

It seems to me that the point of studying other people, whether through a sports story or a novel or a song or a movie, is to organize our thoughts and construct a framework that might help us better understand ourselves.

Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building

He sees himself not as a gifted athlete but as someone who refused to lose.

Ghosts of Mississippi

II. Reconstruction

October 1, 1962

He has never thought about segregation before. Not really. Never broken it down to its essentials: his people keeping another group of people from being free, by laws, by social order, and by violence.

Shadow Boxing

II. The World Where No One Exists

Overtown 101

A story is what makes us real.

Lessons of the Street

I learn about the people searching with me. In the beginning, I wondered why there were doing it. Ai thought about that a lot, especially when I left them in Overtown every day to go back to my fancy hotel, and finally I understood: As long as they help me look, they are a part of my world and not of his. As long as they help, they exist to me.

Here and Gone

Other places seem to chase the ball, while Messie movies in concert with it, full speed to full stop.

Drawing Blood From a Stone

It was like drawing blood from a stone trying to find out what was going on inside.

Witnesses

He lived in a bubble of fame. It had been this way for years; he’d gone from being alone to always surrounded, which are sort of the same thing.

Closing In

I saw a video of Messi playing soccer here with his young nieces and nephews, dodging and feinting, moving the tiny ball with his feet, the kids unable to take it away. The look on his face is the same as when he plays in front of millions of fans. There’s something innocent about him with a ball. His friends laugh about how Messi seems somehow less than himself without one.

There are videos, taken on shaky cell phone cameras, of him waiting in line for his own luggage at baggage claim, or walking toward the taxi line, followed by fans. He makes millions of dollars a year and waits for luggage and usually flies commercial, and you get the sense that it isn’t because he is trying to stay humble but rather because he doesn’t know any better. He seems to sleepwalk until a ball is at his feet. Then he comes alive.

A Construction Project

I read an interview not long ago with Bruce Springsteen where he said he spent years driving past the house where he grew up, night after night, and a psychologist told him he was trying to go back in time to change the things that happened in that house.

The Last Ride of Bear and Billy

The price for memories is regret, and somewhere in the middle of all this, Billy considers how he spent his life. Nobody ever has a plan. A man looks up and he’s 76 years old, with memories he can’t touch and not much else.

“What I do today is very important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.”

Urban Meyer Will Be Home For Dinner

II.

Two years after he cried with his father, Urban Meyer stood on the field with his second national championship team, the 2008 Gators, singing the fight song. After the last line, he rushed into the tunnel and locked himself in the coaches’ locker room. He began calling recruits as his assistants pounded on the door, asking if everything was OK.

“Building takes passion and energy,”” Meyer says. “maintenance is awful. It’s nothing but fatigue. Once you reach the top, maintaining that beast is awful.”

Beyond the Breach

I. The 10-Year Flood

“What everbody lost,” he says, “was the stuff in the back of their closets, and shoe boxes full of old photographs. You know, your letters from your uncle who served in Vietnam, or the awards you won when you were a child. There are people in this town who don’t have photographs of their grandparents. It wasn’t about couches and TVs and automobiles and Sheetrock. It was about your history being taken away from you. You don’t have photographs, the images, the words, the awards, report cards, letters, mostly letters. Diaries. Imagine how much unpublished music was destroyed in that storm.”

“The most important four-letter word in the English language is not ‘love.’ It is ‘home.’ Home, where senses are filled with the comforting.”

III. The Downside of Building Back Up

Mardi Gras made the city $4.3 million in 1986 and $21.6 million in 2000. In 2014, direct spending for Mardi Gras totaled $164 million.

The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived On

In letters home, she described being adrift, telling her dad she felt “like a lost athlete looking for a sport.”

The only thing left is a frayed set of Ted’s beloved Encyclopedia Britannica, which he bought after retiring, spending hours scouring them for the knowledge he felt ashamed not to have.

The Secret History of Tiger Woods

II.

Marshall got his golf clubs at one point and asked Tiger to sign his TaylorMade bag. Tiger refused, sheepishly, saying he couldn’t sign a competing brand. So Marshall challenged him to a driving contest for the signature. Both Marshall and Brown confirmed what happened next: Tiger grinned and agreed. Some other guys gathered around a raised area overlooking the shooting range. Marshall went first and hit a solid drive, around 260 or 270 yards. Tiger looked at him and teed up a ball, gripping the TaylorMade Driver.

Then he got down on his knees.

He swung the club like a baseball bat and crushed one out past Marshall’s drive. Tiger started laughing and then all the SEALs started laughing, and eventually Marshall was laughing too.

“Well, I can just shoot you now and you can die,” Marshall joked, “or you can run and die tired.”

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, we grow up like our daddy after all,” says Paul Fregia, the first director of the Tiger Woods foundation. “In some respects, he became what he loathed about his father.”

People who meet him for 30 seconds love him, and people who spend several hours with him think he’s aloof and weird, while people who hang around him long enough to know him end up both loving him and being oddly protective. His truest self is shy, awkward, and basically well-intentioned, as unsuited for life in public as he is suited for hitting a ball.

One of his favorite workouts was the ladder, or PT pyramid, a popular Navy SEAL exercise: one pull-up, two push-ups, three sit-ups, then two, four, six, up to 10, 20, 30 and back down again.

Consider Tiger Woods once more, tabloids snapping grainy long-distance photos, his marriage suddenly in danger and with it the normalcy he lacked everywhere else, his body taking a terrible beating from SEAL training and aggressive weight lifting, a year after losing his father, adrift and yet still dominating all the other golfers in the world. They never were his greatest opponent, which was and always will be a combination of himself and all those expectations he never could control.

In Chicago, the Final Wait for a Cubs Win Mixes Joy and Sorrow

“The bad news is my mom passed away. The good news is there is another angel in the outfield.”

Vocabulary

• Genuflect - to bend the knee
• Omerta - code of silence