If the Raiders Move to Vegas, The NFL Will Lose What’s Left of Its Soul

December 7, 2016 No Comments First appeared in VICE

First appeared in VICE

Picture this: On the second Sunday in October of 2020, the 3-2 Tennessee Titans are visiting the struggling 0-5 Las Vegas Raiders beneath the dome in Big Pharma Stadium. The roof is closed because it’s 129 degrees out—but hey, it’s a dry heat.

Derek Carr, the promising young Raiders quarterback who once famously said that he counted “faith” ahead of “family” and “football,” left the franchise after it decamped from Oakland to Sin City. Christians don’t ply their trade in Gomorrah. Amari Cooper and Khalil Mack, the team’s other stars from its last years in the Bay Area, also sought out new uniforms in new cities, largely because they wanted to play in front of, like, actual people.

Attendance on this day will be announced as 21,113—that’s season tickets sold, mostly by casinos doing favors for high spenders—but a CBS television camera, scanning the stands just before kickoff, reveals no more than a few thousand lost souls, clumped in random, distant patches, clinging to the inside of the huge, futuristic stadium like the last few lonely Rice Krispies stuck to the sides of a really big cereal bowl.

It didn’t have to be this way. A few years earlier in Oakland, Raiders general manager Reggie McKenzie finally had moved past former owner Al Davis’ increasingly bizzaro drafts to build a fun, legitimate team. The rabid fans in the Black Hole were rocking the south end of the aging Coliseum like never before, enjoying their own beer label and a salsa sponsor for their tailgate parties.

But by 2020, the bars around Jack London Square are half-empty, and the remaining costumed crazies are bitching into their brews. Meanwhile, the real black hole is in the National Football League’s heart: a dark void where its funkiest franchise used to be, before the league’s endless panting for infinite profit exiled the Raiders to a plastic-neon fantasyland, commissioner Roger Goodell’s supreme and final admission that it’s the corporate economy, stupid.

Today, as 2016 winds down, the franchise already seems halfway gone. Nevada lawmakers have approved a financing plan for a 65,000-seat, $1.9 billion domed stadium in Las Vegas, with $750 million of that coming from the public. An Oakland group is countering with a $1.3 billion stadium proposal of its own, putting up $200 million of taxpayer money. Team owner Mark Davis reportedly is “committed” to a move and plans to officially file for relocation in January, which can only happen if 24 of 32 NFL team owners approve.

Should that come to pass, mark my words: if the Raiders end up in the Nevada desert, then it will be game over for the franchise—and whatever remains of the league’s once-populist rebel soul.

I know, I know: NFL teams move semi-regularly. And as a rule, the impact of those moves on the big picture—the league’s image, heritage, and especially its ability to generate a profit—is negligible.

The Baltimore Colts’ flight from their proud port town to the bland Midwest felt pretty sleazy at the time, but Peyton Manning eventually erased Johnny Unitas’ ghost. Today, the Colts are Indianapolis’s team; meanwhile, Baltimore belongs to the Ravens, who once belonged to Cleveland, which used to be home to the itinerant Rams, who after an extended stay in St. Louis just bounced back to Los Angeles, which soon may be home to San Diego’s Chargers.

The wounds heal, and pretty quickly. But the Raiders feel different. If the franchise bolts—idiot prince failson Mark Davis seems all-in on the idea, whatever that’s worth—it will be heretical. A betrayal. Hell, it even figures to be bad business.

Turning your back on 50 years of a gloriously psycho, deeply committed fan base to cash in a few more chips in a comic book city of transient tourists? That’s a seismic shift, a move toward making the NFL more corporate, more vanilla, and more like an airport Starbucks kiosk, all at a time when a league obsessed with football deflation, PR puffery, and rulebook minutiae has never needed a silver-and-black outlaw vibe more.

The Raiders were badasses from the start. While the helmets of their original AFL rivals featured cartoon images of dancing dolphins, bucking broncos, and a slumping buffalo that looked as if it knew it was on its way to the slaughterhouse, Oakland’s logo was a crossed-swords pirate—beholden to no one, loved only by his crew, sailing by the autumn wind.

A little cheesy? Sure. But a corny mythos helped the NFL blow past baseball for pop-cultural dominance. Besides, the on-field Raiders played a beautifully brutal brand of football, perfect for a game forever steeped in violence. They were Gene Upshaw’s hardened-plaster forearm casts, clubbing opponents into submission; George Atkinson’s clothesline gonzo tackles; Phil Villapiano’s insistence that a play that didn’t end in blood—his or the other guy’s—wasn’t really a football play. They had a mojo that fit their era. They were Silver and Black and belonged to the city of the Black Panthers, back when Bobby Seale hung out at practice. They vibed black as much as white, in a sport and a league that too often sublimates the former for the latter.

Even after the Raiders moved to Los Angeles and then moved back again, they never really lost their swagger, because Raider Nation endures. But attempt to replant that in a theme park city, and the eye patches and crossed swords will become just another piece of kitsch, like the fake Eiffel Tower and the fake New York skyline and the fake breasts at Spearmint Rhino. Beneath its R-rated neon packaging, Las Vegas is basically a dry-heat retirement town, a place that vibes bland as hell. People there won’t appreciate the Raiders, not the way that Oakland has. Desert roots are pretty shallow.

Of course, if the franchise relocates, it won’t be about the fans. It will be about the stadium, full stop. NFL owners already are bitching about not wanting to put the Raiders in a small market. But if Nevada agrees to cover most of the costs of a new stadium, and Oakland balks at doing anything similar, does anyone doubt the league will rubber-stamp a move? To keep profits coming, money-mongering corporations need modern factories, and (surprise!) they’d rather not pay for them. Boeing won’t go into Wichita if Topeka is offering a bigger series of tax breaks.

Early last year, Goodell said that he wanted all of the NFL’s teams to stay in their current markets. He called it a “shared responsibility.” So much for that. The Rams have skipped towns, the Chargers are contemplating the same, and the Raiders appear to have one foot out the door. The only “sharing” the league has in mind is from public coffers to its owners’ pockets. And frankly, the city of Oakland has bigger priorities, better ways to spend taxpayer money.

That said, the NFL’s combined franchise value of $37 billion is larger than the GNP of 119 countries, including Nicaragua and Cambodia. Given that the Raiders are more or less a public trust, couldn’t—shouldn’t—the league make an exception and bear more of the cost? For just one time, couldn’t they refrain from attempting municipal blackmail?

If the New York Giants had threatened to leave Gotham because state and local city municipalities had decided they couldn’t afford to subsidize a new stadium in the Jersey swamps, would the NFL have let them decamp to a dome in San Antonio? Or would they have found a way to get MetLife Stadium built? If Pittsburgh hadn’t ponied up enough for Heinz Field, do you think Goodell would have kept the Steelers from moving to Hartford?

The league is on the verge of making a very big mistake, trading tradition and continuity for a short-term cash infusion. That’s right, short term. Business 101: people need to want what you’re selling. In cities where the NFL has taken profitable root, customers identify not only as football fans but also as citizens of that area. The Packers are Green Bay. Green Bay is the Packers.

When was the last time you met someone who was born in Las Vegas? Me neither. What’s the city’s sports tradition? A minor league baseball team, the Area 51s, that ranked No. 14 out of 16 teams in attendance last season, a full 3,000 fans per game behind the Albuquerque Isotopes. Vegas is getting a NHL team, just like warm-weather Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina—which rank No. 27, 28, and 29 in attendance in a 30-team league—but all that really tells you is that professional hockey would play in Oxford, Mississippi, if someone ponied up an expansion fee.

Clark County, Nevada, ranks No. 793 nationally in terms of per captia income, just north of $26,000 a year. That’s well below the Raiders’ current home of Alameda, California, which ranks No. 109 at over $36,000. Ten grand less per household means less money for local sponsorships, merchandise sales, parking fees, and all the other ways sports franchises stay in the black. Can Strip tourists make up the gap? Please. Sunday morning is a time for Uber-ing to McCarran Airport and getting the hell out of Dodge, not for tailgating under a blazing desert sun after a bottle-fueled night of bad decisions.

Even the league’s real source of income—the television money that accounts for two-thirds of its overall revenue—could be hurt by moving the Raiders to Vegas. In the long run, the NFL’s ability to land ever-bigger broadcast deals depends on its ability to deliver a primo product: games played by teams with tangible tradition and raucous rivalries, teams that inspire and demand emotional investment, teams that feature star players. Lame teams in lame towns that can only attract lame players are the exact opposite of this. Imperceptibly at first, and then all at once, they dilute the overall product. Or are the Jacksonville Jaguars secretly must-see TV?

Speaking of money, how do you fill a new Vegas stadium during the 40-something weeks a year the Raiders won’t be playing? The city already has a world-class convention center, sports arenas, places for concerts and major events. How many monster-truck races do you need?

“I actually thought the NFL had a vendetta against the Oakland Raiders,” George Atkinson once told me, reminiscing about the franchise’s old days, back when it seemed the league would do anything to keep Al Davis down. Of course, he was right. The powers-that-were hated Al, and hated it even more when he won Super Bowl rings.

That was then. Today, Al is gone, and his son, Mark, is more harmless doof than true heir to a rebel owner who was forever a thorn in the NFL’s side. But maybe, just maybe, the vendetta endures. It has to, doesn’t it? Why else would Goodell and company even consider letting the Raiders move, if not to finally destroy the team by erasing its heritage?

Football is Family. That’s the league’s new slogan. But allow the Raiders to end up in Las Vegas, and, well, as fucking if. The family was—and is—in Oakland, where Tooz and the Snake and Foo and Dr. Death and an army of crazies laid a foundation like no other. They’ll live on in the East Bay, no matter what. As for the franchise? Don’t count on it. What makes the NFL worth watching, worth caring about, isn’t rights deals and seat licenses and stadium leases. It’s echoes and memories; irrational, non-transferable passion. You can put a price on everything, except your soul.

 

The Champ At Rest: Muhammad Ali In His Later Years

June 6, 2016 No Comments First appeared in VICE

First appeared in VICE

One drizzly May afternoon 17 years ago, Muhammad Ali’s wife brought two large glasses of wheatgrass juice to his office on his 57-acre farm in southern Michigan. His private chef had prepared them. Lonnie Ali had Muhammad on a very strict diet at the time, which he was heartily dedicated to avoiding.

After we dutifully drank our drinks—mine tasted like liquid weeds—and handed back the empty glasses, Muhammad waited just long enough for his wife to return to the main house before saying, “Let’s get a cheeseburger.” It wasn’t a suggestion.

I followed him down the stairs to the garage, where a huge black Chevrolet Blazer sat with the keys in the ignition. At Ali’s direction, I drove us down an empty country two-lane highway into the village of Berrien Springs, through the one stoplight, and on to the local McDonald’s.

Ali dutifully stood in line. After we’d each ordered quarter-pounders with mustard and onions—no catsup—large fries, and strawberry milkshakes, the girl behind the counter refused to let Ali pay. Ali did not insist.

At our booth, he began to eat his cheeseburger really quickly, as if he hadn’t eaten a meal in 10,000 years. But then he slowed down, to enjoy the deliciously illicit feast. The expression on his face—which, eighteen years after his final fight, had acquired a little bloating—now gave him a not-unflattering Buddha caste.

At one point, an old man in the next booth, looking out the window, spoke without looking at us. “Summer comin’, champ.”

“Gonna get warm,” Ali answered.

“Gonna feel good,” said the man, and Ali nodded.

In the parking lot, a guy pushing a broom through puddles of water said, “You’re lucky you’re retired, champ,” and Ali nodded.

A simple life being lived by a simple man. He was in heaven.

On the drive back, Ali checked his reflection in the mirror in the back of the passenger’s visor, because if Lonnie found out we’d gone to McDonald’s, there would be hell to pay. I didn’t think she was wise to us. But on my next visit to Berrien Springs, she told me she’d fired the chef. She suspected that he’d been letting Ali sneak food that was bad for him. I always figured we must have left a French fry on the floor of the Blazer.

On that visit, as we talked, Ali methodically ate three pieces of raspberry pastry at a table in his office. Over the course of our time together—on and off over about eight months, when I hung with him in a half-dozen cities and visited the farm another half-dozen times, at one point writing about Ali for GQ—I came to know him as a man who did only what he wanted to do. He seldom worked out in his private ring. On the road, he really liked to eat: Chicken and cheeseburgers, cake and Coke, pastries and more cake. Just green liquids? The only green thing he liked were the rolling lawns of his farm.

Ali loved his farm. On one visit, I drove the two of us in a golf cart around the verdant grounds and along the bank of the St. Joseph’s River, which ran through his 57 acres. That day, the farm was so quiet that we could hear the ripple of the river water lapping against his bank.

“Nice view,” he said. “No traffic. No people. All grass.”

By then, Ali was not the Ali of convenient legend, thriving on the heady oxygen of outsized fame and narcissism. In this later incarnation, he savored the silence he’d earned after a lifetime of squawking. He was at peace sitting at an outdoor table and watching an ant scurry at his feet. Or reading his Qur’an.

On the farm I could ask him anything, and he’d answer without thinking.

One day, on the riverbank, I asked him, “Are you happy?”

“Um-hmm,” he nodded, without having to think about it.

The flood of Ali obituaries written over the last few days by so many legendary writers have been stunning in their eloquence, which is surely a testament to the way he changed the way the world thought of African-Americans and Muslims and boxers and sport and poetry and America and fill in your own blank here.

Certainly one of Ali’s more famous explanations for refusing induction—”You want to send me to jail? Go ahead. I’ve been in jail for 400 years. I could be there for four or five more, but I ain’t goin’ no 10,000 miles to help kill murder and kill other poor people”—remains as eloquent and persuasive a manifesto as anyone uttered back in those roiling days.

But in almost universally paying attention to the first act of his life, suggesting that he’d peaked when he was still wearing boxing gloves, many of those same obituaries and summations have given woefully short shrift to the Ali’s last triumph: the two decades when we decided we didn’t need to know him other than as an object of pity—two decades in which Ali was not only surviving, but thriving as the man he wanted to be.

When a great athlete and statesman becomes “diminished,” and “weak,” as one eulogist incorrectly characterized his later years, we instinctively look away. Judging from some of the remembrances, Ali would seem to have stopped existing as a human soon after he tremblingly lit an Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996, when we all gasped … and then cast him loose from our collective cultural net.

This is not to suggest that in the first half of his life Ali wasn’t a monumental narrator on the American stage, driving, in no small way, some of the country’s most important discourse. It’s just that my time by his side—when there seemed to be no one else by his side but friends and family—made me realize that his ability to not only outgrow our/his manufacturing of his image back in the day, but also keep growing as a man, should be a significant part of his legacy.

If legacy is about a man’s life, not just his legend, then the last two decades of Muhammad Ali’s life should count for a whole lot more than they seem to be counting.

Ali was not “diminished” and “weak.” Physically, yes, but the physical, as he knew as well as anyone, is irrelevant in defining a lifetime. People whom we call “afflicted,” as if they are now lesser beings, do not pity themselves. They resent the words that we use to categorize them, because those words diminish who they are.

In a weird way, we must have grown close during that stretch of time, because he’d hug me when I’d return to the farm, and so I came to know him well enough to know the man never wanted our pity. That would be about us. He was doing fine, thank you. Better than.

“All my work made me what I am now,” he told me one day, answering a letter from Fresno, or Scotland, or Libya; his trips to the post office to send off all the answered mail, were highlights of his days. What he was now was a man of good deeds. Not long before I got to know him, a Roman Catholic nun had written from a village in Liberia, asking if he could send something for the village children. He sent himself.

“Everything I did,” he told me, “has made me what I am today. What I am now, I accomplished all of it.” I think he sensed that what he was, on that day, as alive as he’d ever been. He was not “disabled,” any more than you and I are “able.” His eyes said so. Whether he was asking me questions—he was endlessly curious—or watching me Velcro his gloves for him in his private gym, his eyes spoke. And he did speak out loud—when he had something to say.

Most of the time, it was something funny. One day, I said, “Muhammad, we need something profound. Seriously. Tell me the wisest thing you know.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. A second later, he opened them, leaned forward and suggested something wonderfully obscene.

And, of course, even then, he was hardly devoid of ego. He still loved doing magic tricks and telling jokes out in the real world, which he visited regularly enough to affirm his status as an icon. But the preening side, the foolish pride of the boxer who stayed in the ring way too long—none of that was apparent in the man I came to know.

The first time I showed up at the farm, at Lonnie’s behest, Ali asked me, “What you goin’ to write?”

A book,” I said.

“About what?”

About you.

“What’s there to say about me?” he asked.

He wasn’t completely kidding. By then, he pretty much figured that everything that had been said about him and written about him had long ago been said and long ago been written. What was left to say? He certainly didn’t need any more forums to move us. He just had to appear.

In a marbled conference room on Capitol Hill, at a hearing called for by John McCain about the state of the boxing business, Ali didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The looks on the faces of the lawmakers said it all. At a dinner table in Las Vegas—at the head table—it was not Mike Tyson, the day after he’d beaten Francois Botha, who commanded the room, it was Ali. Joe Paterno didn’t suddenly halt his jog across the field at Louisville Stadium one Saturday afternoon before a game against the Cardinals because Ali had shouted out to him; Paterno spotted Ali out of the corner of his eye and completely lost his pre-game mindset, walking over to kneel on one knee, risking staining the right knee of his khakis, to shake Ali’s hand.

Everywhere we went, people would part to let him pass, shouting his name. He’d shake their hands sometimes, or throw a few punches into the air—yes, he could still do that. On our travels, Ali wasn’t a king or a prophet anymore—or, more accurately, a man we’d ordained as a king and a prophet, which, as a beautiful young man, he went along with. Who wouldn’t?

No, he was just Muhammad Ali, with a farm full of beautiful flowers.

Only once in all our time together did he mention the name of his condition. In a discussion of his many opponents, he said, “Now I’m fighting Parkinson’s.”

“Please fight hard,” I said. “The world needs you.”

“The world don’t need me,” he immediately answered. “Besides, I could die tomorrow. Kings die. Presidents die. Millionaires die. I’ll die.”

Then he said, “You know what they’ll say when I die?”

What?’

“The nigger died,” he said. Then he laughed as loudly as I ever heard him laugh.

He was pretty much wrong on that one. He would surely have enjoyed all the words and encomiums of the last few days. But he probably wouldn’t have read them all before picking up the Qur’an again, and reaching for an eclair.

A man at rest, doing the work. Let that be a legacy, too.

Muhammad Ali in Excelsis

June 4, 2016 No Comments First Appeared In GQ

First appeared in GQ

On the table in front of him sit a copy of the holy Koran and a plate holding three frosted raspberry coffee cakes, and when he leans forward on the couch and reaches out it is not for enlightenment. It is for a piece of pastry. With his right hand wobbling just this side of uncontrollably, he guides it, slow inch by slow inch, toward the mouth that once yapped without stopping but that now, largely mute, chews slowly, as the eyes stare straight ahead, seeing nothing; only the patter of a cold rain splashing the leaves of the trees outside the window mars the silence. Flecks of frosting tumble in slow motion to light on his belly, which gently swells beneath a black sweater. I am sitting next to him. Close enough to see the tiny scar on his eyelid that looks like a birthmark. Close enough to hear him chew. Close enough to taste the cake as he tastes it. The look on his face is the fat and happy near smile topping the fat and happy body of all the renderings of Buddha you’ve ever seen. It is an expression of bemusement and contentment and wonder at the beauty to be found in the simplest things.

As I watch him eat, I have never been more sure of a man’s inner contentment. Except maybe when he eats the second piece.

It’s not supposed to be Buddha. It’s supposed to be Allah, because it is Allah who has ruled his life since even before Liston, and Allah who controls it now more than ever before. The contents of his briefcase say so. He is carrying the briefcase as he enters the room, so still even in walking that he does not disturb the air around him. He opens the briefcase to reveal hundreds of well-thumbed sheets of paper filled with typewritten words. It is the briefcase a man would carry if he were to knock on your screen door to convert you to his faith, and on this day, dressed in black, shoulders slumping toward his paunch, gray sprinkling his temples, he looks like such a man.

He shuffles through the papers, finds one, hands it to me.

“First Chronicles 19:18,” I read aloud while he listens. “‘Then the Syrians fled before Israel. David killed 7,000 charioteers and 40,000 foot soldiers of the Syrians.’ Second Samuel 10:18: ‘Then the Syrians fled before Israel, and David killed 700 charioteers and 40,000 horsemen of the Syrians.’ Was it 700 or 7,000? Was it foot soldiers or horsemen?”

“The Bible has contradictions,” he says to me, the voice sandpapered raw by the disease. “Not in there,” he says, nodding at the Koran. His briefcase also holds a black-and-white photograph of three boxers—Ali, Joe Louis, and Sugar Ray Robinson; it looks like a snapshot from the turn of the century—but most of the case’s contents are there to do Allah’s work.

It’s easiest for him to talk about Allah, although it is not easy for him to talk, because the muscles of his face don’t work as well as they once did. His wife, Lonnie, has asked if I want her to sit with us so she can tell me what he is saying. Lonnie is a strong woman who walks through a room like a beautiful storm approaching. But right now I ask her if Ali and I can be alone and if she could close the door, which she does, leaving the two of us in silence in a small room in the suite of offices on Ali’s southern Michigan farm. The farm used to belong to AI Capone’s bookmaker. A workman doing renovations recently dug some bullets out of the floorboards from back in the days when people were shooting one another here. Now it’s just about the quietest place on earth.

After he hands me several more tracts, I tell him I’m pretty much a nonbeliever, and at this his eyebrows arch up and the words come quickly.

“Do you believe that phone made itself?”

No, I say.

“Do you believe the chair made itself?”

No.

“Do you believe the table made itself?”

No.

“Do you believe the sun made itself?”

No.

“The Supreme Being made it.”

The Bible’s inconsistencies don’t persuade me, nor do the sermons. It’s when he levitates that I start to come around. Well, not when he levitates—when he pretends to. His levitation trick is like his handkerchief-in-the-fake-thumb trick or the trick where he rubs his fingers together behind your ear and what you hear sounds like a cricket. He’s been playing pranks since he was a kid, to complement his verbal trickery, but now his pranks are the currency with which he communicates.

It’s when he’s pretending to levitate that I figure out what’s happening with Ali now, and it sounds an awful lot like something involving divine intervention. At the very least, it sounds like the sort of parable that ought to be typed up and carried around in the briefcase of someone trying to convert you.

“For decades,” it would read, “Allah had Muhammad Ali doing Allah’s work. Ali was the most remarkable young black man the nation had ever seen, unafraid to take on the mightiest of the white man’s institutions, speaking out, yes, for the black man, but even more for Allah, in a fashion that Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad never could have.

“But the older the disciple grew, the more he began to lose fights to people like Trevor Berbick. And the more he began to lose fights, the more he threatened to fall into the black hole wherein reside all the great athletes who tried to hang on too long. Allah knew that the closer Muhammad Ali got to the ultimate indignity of punch-drunkdom, the less use he was for Allah as an emissary on earth. Yes, a million faithful would line the airport runway in Malaysia, and he could move the masses in Syria and in Algeria and in Turkey, but it wasn’t working in America, where the enemy lived.

“So Allah hit upon a plan. Where Ali’s voice once moved mountains, Allah struck him mute. Where Ali’s swift fists once rained upon opponents with the precision of a surgeon, Allah struck them with terrible tremors so that they struggled to hold a piece of cake. Where Ali once had more physical vibrancy than any athlete the world had ever known—a face like a thousand different masks, a dancer’s body, all of it always in motion—Allah wrapped him in an invisible cloak of paralysis, and he had to labor to move any muscles at all.

“And this is how Allah made sure that Muhammad Ali would be doing his work again. Tenfold. For in infirmity, Ali came to mean much more than he ever had before.”

“I can levitate,” he says, and he tries to get up from the couch, but he cannot. The couch is too deep, and he is growing heavier; he will be Buddha-like in girth at some point soon. I reach out to help him, but he dismisses me with a gesture of his left hand; the closed fist that sits rocking back and forth at his side opens slightly and motions me away. He speaks with his hands now, even though they are constantly trembling and not much good to him. It has taken me a full hour in his presence to begin to recognize the nuances in his shaking fingers, and it has taken me equally long to understand the nuances of his facial expressions, from the eyebrows shooting straight up in true surprise to the rare half smile to the flat, expressionless expressions that are differentiated by the degree to which the eyes and the eyelids move.

All the gyrations and the mugging and the shouting have been distilled into a thimbleful of expressions, but it is a bottomless thimble. So when with a single slight crook of an index finger he tells me not to help him, it’s as if a healthy person had slapped my hand away. Then he tries again, rocks against the back of the couch and vaults himself up. He walks over to a corner of the room, where he turns away and, with his back to me, slowly rises off his feet.

His body appears to levitate—his left foot is off the ground. I cannot see his right foot. Maybe he is levitating. This sounds absurd, but it would make more sense if you were in the room with him and could feel the otherworldliness his utter stillness and oddly detached gaze now impart. In the lasting silences between long questions and short answers and magic tricks, as he stares straight ahead, I begin to feel a mounting sense of disorientation. It’s as if the room is growing smaller or he is growing bigger, as if the space is too little to hold whatever he is becoming now. It’s as if Euclidean rules are being bent.

I’d expected the disease to have robbed him of the vitality that once exploded from him. I’d expected the disease to represent the ultimate cruel triumph of the world that had always wanted the black boy from Louisville, Kentucky, to shut the hell up.

But up close, I am discovering that his affliction has taken nothing away, none of the energy, none of the wit, none of the pride; it has only bound all of it, captured and constricted it, with the entirely unexpected result that, as an aeon of geologic forces can compress a large vein of coal into a very small diamond, whatever was the essence of Muhammad Ali is now somehow magnified. He is at last what he always pretended to be but never was: the Greatest. For it must be axiomatic that if someone calls himself the Greatest, as Ali did for years, he cannot possibly be; the Greatest would never have to label himself as such. Only when he was forced to stop proclaiming his greatness did it become possible.

Never has he been more mortal—struck dumb and slow, crumbs spilling down his shirt—and never have we deemed him more godly.

On

the afternoon prior to the kickoff of the Louisville-Penn State football game at Cardinal Stadium on the Kentucky fairgrounds, he was sitting alone in a golf cart behind the grandstand next to the locker room, waiting to be driven to midfield for a pregame ceremony. Suddenly, a few feet away, there stood Joe Paterno leading his team out of the visiting locker room door, dozens of huge, young Pennsylvania mountain men lined up snorting behind the little man in khakis and a sweater and thick glasses, stamping their feet behind Paterno, his energy bubbling out of his body—a game to play!—oblivious to anything else, even to the dozens of folks who had turned around in the top two rows of the bleachers to look down at the man in the golf cart just a few yards away from the football team, oblivious even to the several hundred more fans who had quietly filed out of those bleachers to form a line on each side of the golf cart, like sidewalk crowds at a parade.

Standing directly behind the golf cart, I saw the world as he must always see it, looking straight ahead, looking out through the tunnel of his illness: people crowding to be in his field of vision, chanting his name, some smiling, some shouting, some staring with mouths agape.

Joe Paterno, something of a god himself, saw none of it; he was minutes from the kickoff. When an official signaled for him to enter the stadium, he began to jog, the general leading his infantry, past the golf cart, glancing over his shoulder—and then he stopped. The Penn State players behind him ran into one another like confused cattle. Now shaken from his reverie, stunned, Paterno walked over to the golf cart and crouched and shook the hand of the champ. Then he rose and led his team onto the field.

The golf cart followed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” rang the public address voice, “at the 50 yard line, please welcome the heavyweight champion—” But the announcer didn’t get to finish his sentence; the swell of the roar blotted out the words. Forty thousand people were on their feet singing his name in a two-syllable mantra. Finally, he waved—a quick flip of his right hand—and the cart wheeled around, the beery bleachers still chanting “A-LI!” as the cart disappeared behind them.

In the first half, I sat next to him in the front row of the stadium. We could not watch the football game because we’d been seated behind the Louisville bench and the players blocked our view. Even if Ali could have seen the field, he could not have followed the game, because his head does not move back and forth quickly. So he sat there looking pretty much straight ahead while people such as the former governor of Kentucky came and sat on his other side and called him champ. We did not speak at all. I spent the half handing him peanuts. He would take each one out of its shell and deliberately raise it to his mouth and chew until finally, with a motion of his right hand, he signaled that he didn’t want any more, and he reached out for his soda, which sat on top of the concrete wall in front of him, and very carefully guided the cup to his mouth. The liquid in the cup roiled like a sea, but none of it spilled.

In the limousine back to town, he did not speak, either, except to say, as he threw a left jab and looked out the window, “Gonna make a comeback. Exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Twenty million dollars. Champion of the world at 55.” It was the only time I heard him voluntarily refer to the man he had once been, but it was enough to confirm what I had suspected—that if he were not hindered by disease, he would indeed be trying to make a comeback at the age of 55, and he would be humiliated and pummeled. Frazier tried; Holmes tried. Tyson will try. And while Muhammad Ali was smarter and better than any of them, he is still a boxer.

When the limousine pulled up at his mother-in-law’s house in the suburbs of Louisville to disgorge its passengers—Ali; his best friend, Howard Bingham; his attorney Ron DiNicola; another attorney; and me—l was surprised to see that they all walked quickly up the driveway, leaving him behind to take baby steps up the asphalt toward the house. No one who’s around him a lot treats him as if he’s infirm, because they know he isn’t.

“Oh yeah, he’s all there; he gets it all,” Bingham told me, a little wearily and a little impatiently, as if he were surprised I had to ask.

Then Ali’s wife came out and saw him.

“There he is,” she said softly and went to his side.

That night 11,000 people filled Freedom Hall at the fairgrounds to see an entertainment-extravaganza tribute to Muhammad Ali, starring Natalie Cole and Jeff Foxworthy. After the gospel choir sang, a boxing ring was wheeled to the front of the stage and a series of embarrassing boxing exhibitions ensued, including one in which former heavyweight champion Jimmy Ellis faced Louisville basketball coach Denny Crum and took a dive as an expressionless Ali watched from a mezzanine seat.

Then a 13-year-old-boy bounced into the ring—a thin kid with gloves as big as his head, his face, nearly in shadow, framed in the padding of the protective headgear. But I could see the eyes and the mouth; they were the features of a boxer before a fight. It turned out he was the youth boxing champion of South Carolina, and he was going to fight Muhammad Ali. I do not think that the youth boxing champion of South Carolina had the slightest idea of the significance of the man who was going to join him in the ring.

I glanced at a man seated next to me, and the look he cast back mirrored the anxiety in my eyes. Then someone raised the ropes for Ali, and as he slowly ducked to climb into the ring the applause swelled, but it was a worried ovation. The bell rang, and the kid charged, fists flying out like misdirected darts; he wanted to kill the old fool. But before anyone could wince, Ali was dancing to one side and then dancing back the other way—not the Ali of 1965, but not a cripple either: It was the dance of an overweight former athlete who was perfectly healthy. The kid could not land a punch.

Then, as the cheers of relief started to rise, he did the Ali shuffle. I’d forgotten about the Ali shuffle. This was not the shuffle of 1966 but the shuffle of an overweight former athlete in perfect health. Ali did not do one dance and one shuffle. He kept it up for a full minute.

Finally, he reached down and grabbed the kid in a bear hug and smiled the best smile he could, although it was just a wink of a smile, and that was the end of it.

When I found him a few minutes later in a room behind the stage, dining on fried chicken, he did not resemble the man in the boxing ring, except for the face. He was surrounded by friends and family, and women—one was fetching him a piece of cake. There was an inordinate number of women in the room, watching him avail himself of the post-event spread, making sure he got enough to eat, wearing expressions that seemed quite maternal. They were not the expressions I’d seen on the women at the black-tie banquet the night before. After Louisville’s high society had grazed its way through a two-hour open-bar cocktail party, Ali had slowly made his way to the dais, and I saw on the faces of the pearled women with low-cut gowns and bustiered girls in impossibly high heels the distinct expression I’ve come to recognize as the one women wear when they’re looking at a man they want.

The boxing match was the last official event of Muhammad Ali’s weekend, but the last unofficial event took place at midnight in the bar at the Seelbach Hotel. It is a historic place, often cited in those stories about great old bars in the great Old South. Natalie Cole and her band were lounging at the bar. I was with one of Ali’s counsel and her boyfriend when Howard Bingham, sloe-eyed and cool, slid a chair up to our table and ordered a beer. Bingham, a photographer, has been by Ali’s side from the beginning, and he is the only one who never left it.

I waited until Howard was halfway through his beer before I asked him what had happened at Freedom Hall that evening.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

The dancing, I said. The shuffling.

“Oh yeah, he can do that; he does that sometimes.”

He can? Then why doesn’t he do it more often?

Bingham had no immediate answer. He was not looking at me or at anything when a moment later he took his right arm and started to windmill it, like an old Ali punch. Then he stopped, and the hand wrapped around the mug of beer.

“Sometimes,” Bingham said, “I just want to…” But he did not finish the sentence. He said something else: “He could be 100 percent better.”

And he could. If he spent more time in boxing rings. It turns out that only when Muhammad Ali is in a boxing ring can he, or does he choose to, turn back the clock. It’s only a boxing ring, fittingly enough, that moves him to movement. Perhaps he believes that if some of us are now finding divine inspiration in his metaphysical majesty, his real power will always derive from his ability to outwit, outpunch, and overpower everyone else.

What Parkinson’s disease does is make you brittle. Ali’s version of the disease is a slow one, but it’s making him brittle nonetheless. The way to fight being brittle—to keep the disease at bay—is to work at being limber. And the only time he feels like working at being limber—at fighting the disease—is when he’s in an environment where he’s always been accustomed to fighting.

“He won’t exercise in a regular gym or do the Nautilus or a StairMaster; he will not do it,” says Lonnie. Her voice is exasperated, because she is exasperated. “I have bought him state-of-the-art equipment. He won’t use it. He says it’s for sissies. That’s why I’m building him a gym on the farm, with a ring and mirrors and a heavy bag. Because that’s what he knows. And that’s how he wants to do it.

“Sometimes Muhammad, unfortunately, might use this illness. Don’t get me wrong, but Muhammad knows when to turn it on and off. And sometimes I think he does it deliberately. Turns it off. He’s a master manipulator; I’m not going to kid you. He will look more fragile than he actually is. Why he does it, I don’t know.”

Perhaps I do. Perhaps if I were being worshiped by flocks of followers, my every whim attended to, and all I could see from behind the smoked glass was legions shouting my name and feeding me cake, well, I would have stopped trying to get better a long time ago, too. Especially if the crowds were finally affirming what I’d been saying for 40 years: that in me you see a god.

“I began to suspect that he was a special vessel that might be ordained for special things,” a writer named Mort Sharnik once said of Cassius Clay as the writer tried to come to grips with the essence of this strange new champion.”Esse est percipi,” an eighteenth century bishop named George Berkeley said many years earlier as he tried to figure out what it meant to exist, to be. After a lifetime of considering the notion, Berkeley decided that to be is to be perceived. And so it must be now with Muhammad Ali. If he is a vessel, it is not only his own self that fills it; it is filled up by all of us, filled with whatever it is we need to find in him. He is what we perceive him to be.

What we see in him is purely an individual matter. It might be something in the eyes, which seem particularly expressive because everything else on the face has shutdown—a sense in his eyes of not only the playful jester but also the kind and compassionate man whose clowning and belittling of opponents often obscured the goodness of the soul within. It might be forgiveness: of him, for adopting a racist religion or acting like a self-centered showman at so many people’s expense—like the cruelty he showered on Joe Frazier (“See how ignorant you are?”); or forgiveness of ourselves, for not realizing how special he was beneath the bluster and the lunacy. For not sensing what we had in our midst.

It might be reverence for the physical embodiment of the greatest man ever to fight, and for the greatest athlete we’ve ever known: The title of heavyweight champion, before its devaluation, was a kingly title. And no one has ever ruled the sport as gracefully, or as magically—although his crowning triumph, his victory over Frazier in their third fight, in Manila, was the most brutally beautiful heavyweight championship fight in history, a battle won not with wits but with soul. If the disease came on while he was fighting—if it was not inherited, as his wife insists—then this is the fight during which it must have taken root.

It might be simple awe at the survival of a man who had the balls to stand up to white America and risk its wrath when most of us would have shut up and joined the damned army. In 1967 to be a young black man from Kentucky who refused induction—one year before Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis, three years after three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi—was to be made of a singular fabric.

And it might be pity, although if it’s pity, he neither merits it nor wants it. When l ask him, after he levitates, if we should feel sorry for him, he says, “No,” and slumps hack against the couch in a manner that l recognize as meaning he will have more to say on the matter in a moment. This happens only three times in our two hours in that room: There are three questions he wants to answer slowly, not reflexively. This is not to say that some of his quick answers aren’t honest ones. When I ask if he misses boxing and he quickly answers, “No”; when l ask if he’d want his son to be a boxer and he quickly says, “No”; when l ask, “Are you a happy man?” and he quickly answers, “Um-hmm.” But three times when l ask him questions, he slumps back on the couch and closes his eyes, then opens them and speaks.

Sometimes he gets only the first three or four words out and then has to stop and try again before uttering a complete thought—like a car turning over several times before catching on a cold morning.

 So when l ask if we should feel sorry for him, he says, “No,” and then a few moments later he says, “Everything… everything… everything has a purpose.”

Another time I ask if he’d change anything in his life. After several seconds, he says, “I wouldn’t change nothin’. It all turned out to be good.”

The third time, l ask how he wants history to remember him. This is the one he takes the most time to think about. He closes his eyes and slumps against the back of the couch for what seems to be a very long time. Then he opens his eyes, leans forward, and says in quick bursts of words, “I want people to say, ‘He fought for his rights. Fought for my people. Most famous black man in the world. Strong believer in God.’”

I have a million more questions, but he is tired, and I am not going to get the answers I want. When I ask what lessons he has learned on his long and troublesome journey—when I lean in and, in tones drenched with meaning, ask him what we should know—he says, “Do a lot of running; eat the right foods.”

And when I tell him l think that it was the third Frazier fight, not the Foreman fight, that was his best, he looks at me and rasps, “You’re not as dumb as you look,” which makes me laugh in delight—how sharp he is—until I remember that this is exactly what he said to the Beatles when he met them in Miami Beach in 1964.

We shake hands—it’s a soft handshake but not a sickly one; it’s like a gentleman’s handshake—and he picks up the briefcase and rises to walk down the hall to say goodbye to his wife, who is working in another room, before he walks over to the main house. I take a tour of the rest of the office suite. One room’s windows overlook an expanse of emerald green grass bordering a river, and stacked against the wall beneath the windows are 13 translucent plastic cartons with the words PROPERTY OF THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE printed on the sides. Each is overflowing with letters and envelopes. Perhaps a thousand pieces of mail.

“A week’s worth,” says a woman whose job is to open them and answer them: the well-wishers, the autograph requesters, the charity seekers. Most of Ali’s life is given over to good works now. Last fall a Roman Catholic nun who cares for Liberian children at a missionary center in the Ivory Coast wrote Ali to ask for his help.The next month, she was surprised to see him there in person, giving out food.

In another room sits a woman who presides over the memorabilia being packed up to be shipped to the nascent Ali museum in Louisville: the autographed Golden Gloves, the photograph of Ali standing over Liston’s prone body in Lewiston, shouting at his defeated foe. Glass trophies and engraved plaques line walls, huddle atop tables, rest on floors—too many to examine any particular honor; the cumulative effect of the glittery clutter says enough.

My tour has taken 10 or 15 minutes, and as I turn down the hallway toward the door that will take me outside, I see that Ali is standing exactly where l saw him last; he hasn’t moved an inch. He is standing in a doorway looking at his wife, who is sitting in front of a computer wearing a telephone headset. She is a woman with discernible soft and humorous sides, but she is also a no-nonsense person, and right now she is talking to a lawyer in tones as authoritative and sure as those of a general commanding troop placement from a bunker, discussing some award Ali will be receiving in New York next month; she is running the business of Muhammad Ali.

He leans down to whisper something in my ear. By now l know not to expect anything profound.

“I like my office,” he says, and I nod, understanding instantly what he means. That he likes standing and watching people testify to his power and his goodness. That he likes all these tangible testaments to how important he has become. Also, I think he likes the women.

He escorts me down the stairs, out the door, and we stand for a moment beneath the outstretched arms of the giant elms. This is where I leave him, surveying his kingdom. As l walk to my car, he is still standing there, and as I drive away down the long, winding driveway toward the iron gates, I have no doubt that as soon as I’m out of sight he will turn around and go back upstairs to eat the last piece of coffee cake.

Ken Stabler, CTE, and Football’s Irreconcilable Violence

February 5, 2016 No Comments First appeared in VICE

First appeared in VICE

For just about all of his life, Ken Stabler ran into things. Sometimes, on football fields, he ran into other athletes. Sometimes, off the playing field, the collisions were more metaphoric; growing up, Snake made a habit of running into trouble for the sake of rebellion, whatever its causes.

This is for sure: in the course of a very-lived lifetime, Stabler did a lot of things that, on the surface, left those watching his near-perfect athleticism wondering why he seemingly wanted to sabotage success. He was christened a three-sport wonder (football, basketball, baseball), a sure thing, but he did a lot of colliding that made no sense.

In high school, kicking out the lights on the top of a police car? Getting kicked off the team? Where’s the sense in that? In college, butting heads with Bear Bryant and getting tossed off the team? Quitting the Raiders in the early days because they weren’t giving you enough cred?

A whole lot of collisions visited the late Oakland Raider quarterback, who is commanding news today both as a potential (and long-overdue) Hall of Fame inductee and as the latest high-profile victim of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease widely thought to be brought on by experiencing a whole lot of violent jolts to the brain.

So why does Stabler’s recently released diagnosis of CTE feel so heavy, perhaps heavier than those of NFL immortal Junior Seau or New York Giants icon Frank Gifford?

Maybe it’s because the wild-wired Stabler stood for football as we have always understood it, a sport built on dangerous, thrilling, unnecessary risk—and in light of all these deteriorating ex-NFL brains, we’re growing panicked and confused about how to reconcile the game we love with the sacrifices it demands.

Or maybe it’s because Stabler stood for the last era in the league where unabashed violence was the norm—at least, in the AFC of the 1970s, when Oakland and Kansas City and Pittsburgh loved mauling each other on a regular basis, then decrying the other’s dirtiness, all the while knowing that all were complicit in this game within The Game, in which it was understood by everyone that, on any given Sunday, “Whoever’s standing at the end, wins.”

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because in this Sunday’s Super Bowl, another charismatic and confident and self-assured quarterback will, as Stabler always did, put his head into play during the ultimate game, with little regard for the risk.

Like the Snake, Cam Newton passes and runs from the gut, and the heart. He plies his trade because it brings him joy. But with Stabler’s diagnosis—at the time of his death from cancer last year, his brain, we now know, qualified as Stage 3 of 4 on the CTE scale of brain-worn-ness—we can hardly pretend to ignore what the news about Newton might be down the road.

It’s coincidence that the Stabler report emerged now, but coincidence doesn’t make this moment any less teachable. We now have enough data, from the first collision to the latest CTE diagnosis, to know that it’s time for the game to decide what it wants to be—and for us, its fans and providers and enablers, to decide what we want from the game.

More than any team, the Raiders of the 1970s emblemized what professional football’s athletes and fans have always loved about this sport: the brutal beauty, and an acknowledgment that the game’s inherent and glorious physicality will always border on felony. Today, the NFL’s marketers can glorify Odell Beckham Jr.’s ballet all they want, but it’s still the sight and the sound of a tight end bowling through two defenders, or of a nose tackle bulling the guard straight back into the quarterback’s face, or of a barreling running back standing a linebacker on his head, that make many of us rise to our feet.

There was an added appeal to Ken Stabler’s Badasses, the team that won more games than any other in the decade. They didn’t just play over the edge; they defied decorum at every turn, with owner/GM/dictator Al Davis never missing a chance to rub the league’s face in his team’s delirious defiance of football convention.

The pro game began as lunch-pail league back in the 1930s and 1940s, a black sheep of a sport that flew in the face of the dominant, pristine college game. Under Stabler, the 70s Raiders were the last NFL team to really revel in the role of the workingman.

Off the field, Snake’s Raiders were little boys having the time of their lives. They rode motorcycles through bars. They rode horses to practice. They brought streakers to practice and strippers to the annual August air-hockey tournament.

They smoked weed in the closet of a suite in their training-camp motel after lying to their wives and girlfriends about the date when training camp began, so they could show up and hang with their buddies for a few extra days. For Stabler, training camp was always a wonderfully adolescent time, between picking up women in various local taverns by posing as a swashbuckling, fantastical crop-dusting pilot—why the hell not?—and collecting panties of women he’d shared time with back in Suite 147 at the El Rancho Tropicana motel. Fullback Pete Banaszak once told me he had a vivid memory of one pair draped on a lampshade: “Mesh.”

But the real Raiders rebellion, the one that insisted on violence as a necessary way of life in the NFL, came on the field of the Oakland-Alameda County-Coliseum, where Stabler’s troops won their weekly war games. For those hypnotized watching that second game from the Left Coast every Sunday, the sun still bathing the California grass when the East was already dark and cold—much to the despair of the league’s officers—Ken’s team played, to borrow from the poet Mike Tyson, “with murderous intent.”

The brutality has a point: to intimidate quivering opponents into basically giving up before the second half, something linebacker Phil Villapiano once assured me was a not uncommon occurrence. Less common, but documented, were at least two times when an opposing team’s fans met the Oakland team bus and, not at all kiddingly, requested that the Raiders not hurt their players that afternoon.

Not that some of Stabler’s Raiders didn’t revel in their acts, or live to dole out physical harm; they considered themselves football players. Safety Jack Tatum was so wired into punishing any adversary that head coach John Madden routinely had to tell him not to hurt his own teammates in practice. (For the record: Tatum was trying to avoid hitting Darryl Stingley, whom he left a quadriplegic, on the play in question, but he hunted heads as much as anyone else.) The other safety of the most triumphant Raider team of the time, George Atkinson, fully earned his title as the Assassin. Guard Gene Upshaw used to tape a pad onto his forearm, then illegally soak the club in hot water, then lead sweeps with forearm shivers that could knock a linebacker out.

And yet! During their glory years, some of the Raiders’ most resonant blows were even legal. Consider this astounding stat: every year of Ken Stabler’s decade as the Raiders’ leader, his leading rusher was a fullback, as in Bludgeonball. For his most productive running backs, running the ball didn’t mean rushing as dancing; it was football as in let’s joust with our heads. Week in and week out, Oakland won by hitting harder, on all sides of the ball.

Of course, Snake didn’t deal out much violence himself. As a scrambler who seldom slid, he absorbed it. And his willingness to take punishment—combined with his stature as a team leader—helped sanction the brutality. The Raiders played for Ken, and Ken played hard—with no indecision, and no regrets.

“I enjoyed being me. I enjoyed being me, whatever that was,” he told me five years ago, during a series of conversations during which he revealed no signs of dementia or confusion—and was more than willing to parse the characterization of his lifetime being marked by “wildness.”

“I don’t know if I was wilder than most, but I do know there has to be a fire,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s wildness, but there has to be something inside you that makes the fire burn harder than others.”

Last July, after living years with a failing memory and worries about his cognitive state, minutes before he died, Stabler’s last words to his partner Kim Bush, it’s been reported, were “I’m tired.”

At whatever cost, at whatever price, the fire had burned out.

So what is it that football wants to be going forward? And what do we want from it?

Played as it was originally intended to be played, played as the game that captured a culture—and culminates in Sunday’s annual ecstatic and trillion-dollar ceremony of worship—professional football will continue to exact its toll on each and every athlete who chooses to assume the risk of brain damage, all to stoke their own internal fires. Entertaining us in a way that no other sport seems able, the NFL can continue on its current course, and claim quantum clusters of the brains of the people who play it.

Or, played in a different and presumably safer fashion—in which football players are no longer bred as early as junior high school for maximum power and strength; and the game’s rules are continually tweaked to enable athleticism and punish brute force; and fewer people play the sport for shorter periods of time, to reduce the cumulative and compounding damage to the human brain—football will come to resemble the highly athletic ballet that’s the Pro Bowl. An elaborate game of touch football. This will exact much less of a toll on its performers, but more of a toll, of course, on the game.

Stabler, no doubt, would have argued for playing the sport that defined him the same way he lived his life: with reckless abandon, colliding with anything that tried to shackle him or change his personality.

I have no idea what Cam Newton will do. As a human being, I’d like to think that he will make the sensible choice: take the money and the trophies, and run. Retire Monday morning. Preserve his brain cells.

But as a fan of the man and of football, I wouldn’t mind if he stuck around for a while, which, of course, he’s going to do. He’s got too much of the Snake in him to listen to the science. He seems to know how the game is supposed to be played.

Yogi

September 23, 2015 No Comments First appeared in VICE

First appeared in VICE

When I rang Yogi Berra’s doorbell in New Jersey the morning after George Steinbrenner fired him as New York Yankees manager sixteen games into the 1985 season—the single most distasteful act that the Donald Trump of baseball owners ever inflicted on his team—I wasn’t just a writer looking for a story. I was a fan looking for a way to let Yogi, or his wife, or his kid, or his dog, know that, on behalf of all of us who’d grown up pinstriped, we felt as if Steinbrenner had committed a capital-punishment felony. That, to the long-memoried faithful, the carpetbagging shipbuilder might as well have held up a Yankee jersey in a ceremony on the mound and hacked out the “NY” with a dull knife.

I hadn’t really expected anything to come of my cold-call visit to the suburbs, but Carmen Berra, Yogi’s wife, answered the door, and politely listened as I stumbled through my pitch: I worked for the Miami Herald, in their New York bureau, but had grown up in New York and done a lot of time in the old Yankee Stadium upper deck when average attendance was 11,000 and Joe Pepitone was our only hope, and on this day I felt really badly for her husband and for her and did she want to talk about it?

She did. She welcomed me into her living room, made coffee, and then talked, passionately, at length, about how hurt Yogi had been at the firing, and how he’d felt betrayed (“A bad start will not affect Yogi’s status,” Steinbrenner had said in February). She talked about how angry she was. About how un-Yankee-ish a thing it was to do. But also about how the Berras would easily get on with their lives, and not let one man get in the way of their happiness (they’d ultimately be married 66 years, until her death last year).

When I turned in my story, my editor asked if any other writers had been at the house. I said no, and when he wondered why not, I said something about how none of them had been a little kid who watched Yogi hit a home run on TV to left-center field, beneath the words Buy DiNoto’s Bread painted in yellow atop a field of red, white, and green on the back of a yellow-brick apartment building on Gerard Avenue, just south of the 4 train platform beyond the bleachers.

The bakery sign disappeared in the late 80s, one of the last reminders of a different time. Now Yogi has also vanished, but only physically. The Yogi whose quiet, self-effacing grace forever rendered all the chaos around him moot will remain with us, a totem of Yankeedom for as long as there are pinstripes. The relentless, tacky machinations of the family in charge—the Roman Empire re-Stadium, the bottomless checkbook—will never compare to the Yogi-ethos of the team: baseball for baseball’s sake, no more, no less. In his passing, Yogi grows even more in stature. Some things change, but others do not.

Berra’s feats as a player—three times an American League MVP in the 1950s!—have been largely forgotten, but only because after he played, at least for New Yorkers, his diminutive self grew larger and larger than life, a beacon amid the eternal midnight of Billy Martin’s multiple tenures. Also lost to history has been Berra’s unquantifiable contribution to the Yankees’ championship teams as a stand-in for the common man amid a crowd of heroic-slash-tragic figures, from Joe DiMaggio to Mickey Mantle to Roger Maris—an odd little workaday guy with an odd gait, odd ears, and a smile that was never, ever forced for the cameras. When Berra was hawking Yoo-Hoo, he looked as if he really drank the stuff.

After his 19-year playing career came to an end, Berra went on to manage the Yankees (to a World Series) and the Mets (to a World Series), yet he never vibed Importance. The dude just liked life, and it was obvious that what you saw, whether it was as a player or a manager, was the real guy, which, traditionally, wasn’t a vibe you usually got from guys in pinstripes. Even his reputation as a master of malapropisms, which spawned books and television appearances—”When you come to a fork in the road, take it”—was clearly a side-goof. He enjoyed it, we enjoyed it, but it was a guest appearance in a show not of his own making.

No, this man had a deceptive gravitas, and in the Bronx, when he came back to manage in 1984, that selfless sensibility was sorely needed. By then, Steinbrenner had already sullied the brand in too many ways for too many years, from the ugly habit of signing men who’d beaten him in seasons before (Tiant, Gullett, Tommy John) to the unholy allegiance with the toxic Martin (“Ear-less Man Cut Up in Alley Behind Topless Bar”), to his slurring of his own players (Dave Winfield: “Mr. May”).

Which is why, when Berra returned to the dugout in 1984, we were fools to think that a measure of sanity had been restored. The Yankees went 87-75, good for third place. The next April, after three straight losses in Chicago, Berra was gone. The team was 6-10. Did Berra bitch? Nope. He didn’t have to. The sadistic senselessness of the bloodletting spoke volumes. With his departure, in a way, Yogi, as an ambassador for what’s good about the game, had arrived.

It took Steinbrenner 14 years to apologize and get Yogi back into the fold, with a Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium on July 18, 1999. If there’s one ultimate piece of evidence in the Yogi Berra file, one seemingly mystical moment that speaks to the cosmic meaning of a delightfully non-cosmic man, it’s the extraordinary events of that day.

While George unsurprisingly made the proceedings all about himself—”DiMaggio told me I had to get him back”—Yogi was just Yogi: entering the stadium sitting up in a vintage T-Bird convertible, wearing a coat and tie and grinning the gap-toothed grin, then throwing a ceremonial first pitch (in coat and tie) to Don Larsen, whose perfect game he’d caught in the 1958 Series.

Berra then watched the Yankee starter that day, David Cone, throw a perfect game.

Every so often, the wheels align in surprising fashion. That on that day, they aligned to celebrate the eternal bond between Yogi, the Yankees, the fans, and DiNoto’s Bakery? Well, it seemed like a very cool thing. An affirmation, really, as unlikely as Carmen Berra inviting me in for coffee: that one man, by intentionally living his life as humbly as possible, can emerge the most meaningful hero of all.

Frank Gifford Was a Hell of a Football Player

August 10, 2015 No Comments First appeared in VICE

First appeared in VICE

There’s no real point in remembering Frank Gifford as anything but a very good football player whose talent wasn’t merely quantifiable, although the career numbers were impressive enough. There was an intangible feel to the things he did on a football field. Sometimes he ran with a kind of slippery grace, sometimes with a deceptive languidness, almost like a dancer—always looking for a sliver of light, then cutting upfield to gain six yards, or sixteen, like a slow-motion-white-guy Barry Sanders.

Gifford’s career featured no miraculous 80-yard scampers from his running-back days or one-handed catches from his later years as a receiver. His expertise was measured, for the most part, in his ability to produce, play in and play out, at a high enough level to ensure that his team would always be one of the best in the league.

That’s what we should remember today, with his death at 84: the years when he owned his town, both on the field and off it. In the afternoons, he plied the Yankee Stadium turf with enough distinction to earn an MVP trophy, a championship ring, eight Pro Bowl selections and a first-ballot Hall of Fame induction.

In the evenings? He and his buddy Charley Conerly would regularly cut a stylish swath through the high-profile clubs of midtown Manhattan, usually ending up at Toots Shor’s, the palace of New York nightlife, to mingle with the likes of Hemingway, or DiMaggio, or a mobster, or a Supreme Court Justice. In the mid to late fifties, when professional football was trying to make the big leap from one-step-above-pro-wrestling status to High Athletic Entertainment worthy of Madison Avenue consideration, Gifford was more than willing to step into the spotlight wherever it inevitably found him. He lent his bold-faced name to the society columns at a time when the city had nearly a dozen newspapers. All of this is what we should be remembering today: the echo of his glistening image from a half-century ago.

What would be the point of dwelling on what happened after he left the playing field, no longer Frank Gifford the Great but Frank Gifford the Mortal, Frank Gifford the Lesser, the name receding ingloriously into football history? What would be the point? The burdens carried by a good man victimized by the fleeting flash of the star-making machinery are hardly news.

Make no mistake: he wasn’t any less noble in his post-playing years for his inability to be Gifford the Great. In the two years we spent together writing a book in 2007-08, I came to know a man at peace with who he was, and with what he’d accomplished in a well-lived lifetime. He was proudest, I think, that, throughout his life, he’d always done the work that was asked of him.

Yes, he was still ever looking for an elusive last sip of the heroic ambrosia, the distinct high of being immortal. Who wouldn’t? But that fame-feel was not to be relived. The aura of the star athlete is made of artifice, not of substance: whenever he looks back to try and recapture the glow, there’s seldom anything to grab onto.

Frank Gifford was son of an itinerant oil-field driller in Southern California. By his own reckoning, he lived in 37 different Western towns as he grew up. Beaten-down Bakersfield, California, was the principal home base; in another town, a childhood Christmas morning featured a basket of food left by the local church on the doorstep. Such were the family straits.

When his football talent landed him at USC, his looks and his skills began to write a new script. On a Trojan road trip to New York, to play Army at Yankee Stadium, his glamorous and worldly girlfriend knew which ropes to show her wide-eyed companion. They stayed at the Waldorf. The night before the game, they saw Guys and Dolls on Broadway, and, on Maxine’s advice, he made his first stop at Toots’s watering hole. They were married a month later.

When he was drafted to play for a team with New York in its name, it seemed ordained. The couple moved into the grand Concourse Plaza Hotel, up the hill from the Stadium: “The business and social center of the Bronx,” Conerly’s wife, Perian, told me, with fond remembrance. A dozen of the Giants and their families lived in the hotel (the staff would store each family’s silverware in the offseason), in an era when the Bronx was innocent enough for Perian and Charley to open their suite after games so that fans could drink bourbons with the men they idolized, before Gifford and Conerly hit the subway downtown for a night on the circuit: P. J. Clarke’s, 21, Mike Manuche’s, and Toots’s place.

Gifford earned the celebrity with his feats on the field, even if the stats weren’t overwhelming. He had that rare ability—a star’s ability—to make the difference on any given Sunday, with a clutch reception or a key first down. In 1956, his third year, he led the team in rushing and receiving, and when the Giants won the title, 47-7, over the Bears, he’d officially arrived. The endorsements rolled in. The Giants rolled on.

The 1958 championship game against the Colts was a sloppy but thrilling overtime affair that allowed West Coast viewers, Midwest viewers, living-room late-comers all over the country, to turn on their sets and stumble upon a football game that should have been over. “The Greatest Game Ever Played” it wasn’t, but it was a tipping point. The nation took notice. Frank fumbled the ball away twice in that game, which led to a Giants loss. History has forgotten the turnovers. Frank never did.

Gifford’s final act as an athlete was a triumphant one. In a game against the Eagles on a cold afternoon at the Stadium in 1960, a hit from a rowdy linebacker named Chuck Bednarik knocked him off his feet. Slipping on the frozen turf, his head slammed into the ground. He was carried off the field unconscious; teammates feared he was dead. He missed the entire next year—and then, in best Hollywood style, rose from the ashes, returned to the team as a wide receiver, and made the Pro Bowl again.

After his retirement, Gifford segued into local television, and then, still handsome and still possessed of a measure of fame, into the national spotlight as the play-by-play man on Monday Night Football, where he had the misfortune to sit between two larger-than-life characters, the imperiously oleaginous Howard Cosell and the cowboy cartoon Don Meredith. Gifford was never very good at play-by-play; out of his uniform, away from Toots’s, he had little charisma. In later years on MNF, as a color man, he was pretty black and white.

And then, the bottoming out: his tryst with a flight attendant in a midtown hotel in 1997 went public when the woman sold tape of the event to a tabloid. The last vestige of glory fell away; gods don’t get duped. Kathie Lee, his third wife, whom he had married in 1986, ripped him a new one on national TV. That she stood by him and ultimately forgave him did little to erase the stain. When ABC finally yanked him from the MNF booth at the end of the season, relegating him to pregame stuff, the end of his broadcast career was near. As Meredith used to sing when a game got out of hand, “Turn out the lights—the party’s over.”

Some years ago, at a dinner party where Gifford and his wife were seated at the same table as my wife and I, the woman to my right asked me, “What does Kathie Lee Gifford’s husband do?”

By then, after a few lunches with the man through the years, I knew him well enough that I could have answered, “He’s a dad. Used to be a god. Thinks a lot about when he used to be a god. Kind of wishes he still were. But sort of relieved not to be now. The mantel never fit him very well. We just wanted it to. Until we didn’t. Mostly, he’s just a guy.”

I didn’t say that. I said, “He used to be a hell of a football player.”

The Magic Moment

March 8, 2012 No Comments First Appeared In GQ

First Appeared in GQ

Talk to anybody of a certain age and he can tell you exactly where he was when he heard the news that Magic Johnson was HIV-positive. The oral history that follows is the result of interviews with various former Lakers players, coaches, and management, as well as reporters and others who were closest to the events at the time—and with Magic himself, who, fifteen years after his “death sentence,” is still healthy, still flashing the famous smile, and still treating the responsibility that comes with being HIV-positive as “a badge of honor.”

Steve Springer (reporter, Los Angeles Times): Before voice mail, they had those little paper message memos at the hotel when you checked in on the road. You’d have the little slot behind the front desk for your room key. Magic’s slot would be bulging with messages. Sometimes there must have been a hundred memos. “Linda,” with a phone number. “Darlene,” with a phone number. Magic would hand them out to other players: “Here, you take ten. Here, you take ten.”

Cathleen Karp (former producer, KTLA): We were all in situations where we were on the road and an athlete would go by with someone who wasn’t his wife. But Magic was still single. [Johnson married his college girlfriend, Cookie, in September 1991.] Think about the time period here. It was a different world. There wasn’t anything, if he wanted it, he couldn’t have. And he was living in L.A., for God’s sake. Whatever he wanted to do, he could do it.

Jack Haley (teammate, Los Angeles Lakers): When we entered the preseason, Magic was larger than life. He was in a great mood; everything was going well. We were on a plane to Utah, playing cards, all having a great time. Then we go to the game, and there’s no Magic. As the days went by, we all assumed it was a contract holdout or he was trying to force a trade. No one knew. [James] Worthy, [Byron] Scott, A. C. [Green]—no one had a clue.

Lon Rosen (Johnson’s agent): Two weeks before the press conference, I was called and told he failed a life-insurance test. I thought maybe he had a heart ailment, like Hank Gathers. The Lakers called and said something’s weird. Earvin didn’t know. It didn’t enter his mind. When he went into [Lakers physician] Mickey Mellman’s office, he didn’t know what was going on. By now I thought he had either cancer, heart trouble, or HIV.

Mike Dunleavy (then head coach, Los Angeles Lakers): We get to Utah for the exhibition game, and I get a call from [assistant general manager] Mitch Kupchak: “Hey, Earvin has to come back to Los Angeles to go to the doctor.” I said, “If he’s got a cold or something, that’s really dumb.” Kupchak goes, “Mike, that ain’t it at all, man. Mike, I’m scared to death.” The initial things that went through my mind were cancer and AIDS. He’d had to take a life-insurance exam twice. There were red flags going up all over the place.

Rosen: I was with him in the doctor’s office when they told him. The doctor said, “You’re going to die.” I was sitting right next to him. It was the most surreal experience of my life. I didn’t know much about this disease. They gave him a death sentence: You have HIV, and you can’t play basketball anymore. You’re done. When he walked out, he said, “I guess I got a couple of years left. I guess I have to do what I have to do.” But then he said, “I don’t believe him. Forget it. I’m not going to die. I’m going to live my life.”

Magic: It was just devastation. I just slammed down. It was just&disbelief. It was like a daze. I had to really get myself together. It took a little doing.

Rosen: There was a two-day period between when he learned and when we told the world. We went to dinner. I think I was more shocked than he was.

Magic (from My Life, published in 1992): During dinner, the waiter handed me a note from the people at the next table. They were planning an AIDS fund-raiser. Would I be available to speak? It was spooky to get that note. And that’s when the whole thing started to hit me.

Dunleavy: At some point, Lon came to my house and told me. When I asked about the likelihood of how long he was going to live, nobody said more than two or three years. Before the announcement, I remember sitting with Kupchak, a very close friend of mine. He said, “This is going to be like when Kennedy was shot. People are going to remember where they were on November 7.” We had practice at Loyola Marymount, and I got a call. None of our players knew at the time. I said, “Guys, look, no showers, nothing. Get yourself down to the Forum right now. Don’t stop, don’t talk.”

A. C. Green (teammate): We thought we were just going there for practice. Then we were told we had a mandatory team meeting. Strange, but not way out of the ordinary. Then we start seeing some of the upper management come in. Okay, I’m thinking, something is going on. Then Magic came in and announced it to us for the first time. We were like, “This is a joke, right?”

Haley: It was one of the most unbelievable things I’ve ever seen. Magic walked in and stood there and told us he’d contracted the AIDS virus. All these grown men were crying and upset and freaking out. Magic stands there the entire time, his voice never cracks, he has this smile on his face. He is stronger than anyone I’ve ever seen.

Magic: I felt like I had to step up and be a leader—even deciding to go public with it. My wife was struggling with that decision. In the locker room, I thought, “I must step up. They’re used to seeing me step up as a leader. No matter what the situation, I have to be Earvin. That’s who I am.” That’s how I deal with things. I’m a calm person. I embrace challenges. This was another challenge in my life.

Magic (in the Forum Club, November 7, 1991): Because of the HIV virus that I have attained, I will have to retire from the Lakers today. I do not have the AIDS disease. I plan on going on living for a long time, bugging you guys like I always have, so you’ll see me around. I plan on being with the Lakers and the league for a while and going on with my life. I guess I now get to enjoy some of the other sides of living that I’ve missed. I will now become a spokesman for HIV. I want people to realize that they can practice safe sex. Sometimes you’re a little naive about it and you think it could never happen to you. It has happened. But I’m going to deal with it. Sometimes we think only gay people can get it, or it’s not going to happen to me. Here I am, saying it can happen to everybody. Even me, Magic Johnson.

Jerry Buss (Lakers owner): My feeling when he announced it was that he was saying, “I’m about to die,” and that was so unacceptable and heavy to me. As I walked out of the press conference, I remember my knees going weak. I started to fall down. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar grabbed me. Otherwise, I would have collapsed. He put his arms under mine and took me into the press box and got me to sit down.

Jerry West (then Lakers general manager): It was one of the most devastating days of my life, and not because he was leaving as a basketball player. Let me tell you something: People who are truly great, they’re not going to weep. They face adversity a lot different than other people. That was a difficult day for him. It was a day he could have lived without, in terms of having to go up there and be subjected to questions about his lifestyle. You hear all kinds of things said about him—that’s what bothered me most.

Mike Downey (former Los Angeles Times reporter): ESPN’s Shelley Smith was with Sports Illustrated at the time. She said, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like driving home yet.” We crossed the street to a hotel by the Hollywood Park racetrack, sat in the bar, and ordered a stiff drink. We sat there for more than an hour, trying to come to grips with it. That’s the kind of effect Magic Johnson had on some of us. And believe me, the number of athletes who have affected me this way I could count on one finger.

Magic: The dark side was, I was more worried about Cookie and the baby. We’d been together since college and finally got married, and to have this come into our lives and then to have to wait a week for the results—man, what a weight off my shoulders that she and the baby were okay. If it had been a different outcome, that’s when I would have been wearing it on my face. I would have been a different person.

Jim Brown (former NFL running back, community activist): The most important thing was that Magic faced up. I remember the attitude he had. I admired that he faced up to it right away so there wouldn’t be any lingering b.s. He and his wife dealt with it in a very beautiful way. Anyone who is sensitive should realize Cookie was a greater hero than he was. She had to be a great lady to deal with that situation with such dignity.

Ronald Johnson (associate ecutive director, Gay Men’s Health Crisis): What was most startling was for a public figure to make the infection known. That was a shock. And there was the hope, if not the expectation, that this would increase awareness of AIDS within the African-American community. There was still an enormous amount of denial about HIV/AIDS in the black community. We did feel this might cut through that, particularly since, in the case of Magic, you had a person who was not publicly identified as a drug user or known to be gay or bisexual.

Haley: The day Magic announced it, the Lakers came to us and said, “If anyone wants an AIDS test right away, we’ll give it to you.” Only a couple of guys did it. I was one who went to have it done. The team educated us about it.

Lou Adler (record producer and holder of a courtside seat, next to Jack Nicholson, since 1973): I was in my office when I found out. The phone started to ring like a telethon. I remember being so confused. Confusion, ignorance of HIV and how Magic could get it—all those emotions. And I think that’s what went through the minds of the players who wouldn’t play against him. They got very scared and reactive in that way. No one knew what to do.

Rosen: There were people whispering he was gay. I’m telling you, he went into the gay community and gave speeches. He was offended. He’d say, “I’m trying to help gay people, straight people, and they’re whispering.” That bothered Earvin. He was trying to educate people. There was an activist, Larry Kramer, who was on a couple of shows and ripped into Earvin. I wanted to beat the shit out of him. I said to him, “This guy is very famous. He’s trying to help people.” The thing that disturbed Earvin the most was certain people who were close to him in his life whispering behind his back. He was so pissed off.

Kevin Willis (then member of the Atlanta Hawks): I remember guys on our team—man, their habits changed. Mine changed. When he opened his mouth, people took heed. When that hit, it was, “Whoa, pull back your horses, man. We can’t keep going in this manner.” God has a way of seeing us all in certain ways. We have certain causes to affect, certain ways to change other lives. And I think He said, “Hey, I want you to be my person to get to this society, to shed light on this problem.”

Green: A lot of people sort of did a self-evaluation. They heard what happened, as far as his sexual behavior, and they understood why he retired. A lot of guys wanted to make sure they weren’t going to be that next one. I remember a report that condom sales rose to an all-time high in the next few months.

Brown: It definitely changed the condom situation. After that, it didn’t matter who you were, or how pretty the girl was, or how much money you made—anyone who didn’t use a condom was looked upon as some kind of outlaw.

Dennis Rodman (then member of the Detroit Pistons): I don’t think it changed everyone’s perspective, sexually speaking. It didn’t change me. With or without a condom, you’re not going to change your habits. But this alarm went off: “We gotta start putting condoms in our bags and make sure we’re using them.”

In November 1991, Johnson founded the Magic Johnson Foundation, dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention and health care in inner-city communities. That same month, President George H. W. Bush invited Johnson to serve on the National Commission on AIDS. Johnson accepted, then traveled to Washington and handed Bush a letter criticizing his commitment to fighting AIDS and asking him to step it up. Nine months later, the bipartisan commission issued a statement saying that the administration had failed to live up to its promises. On September 25, 1992, Johnson resigned, saying, “Mr. President, I cannot in good conscience continue to serve on a commission whose important work is so utterly ignored by your administration.”

Rosen: This was a basketball player saying to George Bush, “Go fuck yourself.” Bush put him on this commission, and he quit. Earvin said to me, “I went to two meetings and realized nothing was happening. I can use my time better.”

Adler: A lot of people would have been quiet and stayed, in order not to cause any kind of commotion as far as walking away from Bush, but he’s not that kind of guy. I think he looks for people to do the same thing, react the same way he reacts. And tell it like it is, tell it straight. When they weren’t doing that, he walked.

Buss: At the time, they were telling him, “Avoid crowds, avoid stress,” but he would fly all over the world. There was no fear in him. He thought he would beat it, and that was it.

In February 1992, after being away from the league for three months, Johnson played in the NBA All-Star Game, scoring twenty-five points and winning the MVP award.

Willis: Magic stole the show. He got the MVP, and he earned it. He played exceptionally well. Hit a huge shot at the end of the half. It wasn’t a fluke. Believe me, the other guys were playing hard—they all wanted to be the MVP, too.

Magic: I had something to prove. I had to prove I could still play at a high level with HIV. I had to do this living with HIV. I had to be Magic and prove it to people. It was a wonderful day that helped all the negativity that was out there go away.

In the summer of 1992, Johnson played with the Dream Team in the Olympics. On September 29, having shown no effects of the virus, Johnson held a press conference to announce he’d return to the Lakers.

Green: I was happily surprised he was going to come back. You knew some players were hesitant. If it went through sweat glands—all that. I wasn’t concerned about it. I wasn’t worried about being in harm’s way. It was fun. I enjoyed playing against him in practice when I had the opportunity.

Dunleavy: I thought, How can he do the things he does and be so healthy? Is it possible he doesn’t have it? Or could he just be doing this so someone will find a cure?

Buss: He was always in fabulous physical condition, and he had not dissipated whatsoever. I think his conditioning contributed a great deal to his success. But on the comeback, I had mid emotions. I didn’t want him to come back and fail. I’d rather have seen him not come back. Basketball is a very tough game. Every once in a while there were flashes, and you’d see him do something he used to. But overall, it was not Earvin. It was sad for me.

On October 30, Johnson received a scratch during an exhibition game.

Gary Vitti (Lakers trainer, from his description of the incident in the Los Angeles Times on December 10, 1992): I was sitting on the bench, and Sean Higgins said to me, “I just saw Magic get hit, and I think he’s cut.” So a few moments later, when play was stopped, I told [referee] Eddie Rush. He sprinted over and examined him. Magic examined himself. Neither of them saw it; that’s how small a wound it was. The first dead ball, I had him show me his arms. There was a little fingernail cut, but hey, the guy’s HIV-positive. I got a six-inch swab and swabbed the area. Then I gave him a four-by-four bandage and had him put it on. I thought about using gloves, but then I thought it was sending our players a mid message. We’re telling them it’s safe to play with him, and then when he gets a fingernail cut, I’m using gloves?

Haley: What I remember was the absolute terror on the faces of the people in the crowd. The people within the immediate area of Magic. They assumed he could infect them from twenty, thirty rows away. That’s what I remember—looking at the crowd and the hush and the terror that went through the arena. It was devastating, because I knew what basketball meant to Magic. This was the most energetic guy, the greatest people person, who embraces his fans. Now, all of a sudden, people are not shaking his hand? This had to be one of the most difficult things for him. Never in all the years have I even seen a twitch of self-pity. Never have I seen him unhappy. Except maybe just that one second in that game when the fans freaked out. Then I could see the disappointment in his eyes.

Magic: Everything was going good. But to hear the hush go over the crowd& So I said, “No. I can’t do it now. People aren’t ready yet. People are not educated yet.” I didn’t want to hurt the game I’d helped build up. So I went away. I knew I had to educate them even more. I was able to do that at first. I was pretty happy with my performance. I wanted to prove I could play with HIV against guys at a high level.

Karl Malone (then member of the Utah Jazz, before a preseason game in October 1992): They can’t tell you that you’re not at risk, and you can’t tell me there’s one guy in the NBA who hasn’t thought about it. Just because he came back doesn’t mean nothing to me. I’m no fan, no cheerleader. It may be good for basketball, but you have to look far beyond that. You have a lot of young men who have a long life ahead of them. The Dream Team was a concept everybody loved. But now we’re back to reality.

Dunleavy: What Malone said was just ignorance.

Magic: I couldn’t take that out on Malone. That’s the past for both of us. One thing about me is I never live in the past. Life’s too short for that. You shake hands. Life goes on.

Karp: They say money doesn’t buy health. I have heard about transfusions, that he had a couple of them. I have no idea.

Magic: For a long time, it was going around I was cured. I had to let people know: I’m not cured. The medicine has kept the HIV asleep in my body. Another rumor was I was on some magical drugs. No. The same twenty-six drugs are available to everyone else as to me. I take care of myself. I work out every day. I try to get my rest. The main thing is, I’m in a good frame of mind. I’m okay with living with HIV. A lot of people freak out. I’m okay with it.

West: I believe the reason he’s still bigger than life is the way he’s handled this. Athletes’ fame is always fleeting, but he is going to be recognized not only for his incredible basketball playing but for the way he handled this adversity.

Ronald Johnson: He has made a difference. It did not cut through the denial as much as we had hoped it would, but it did make a dent. There continues to be significant opposition within the African-American community about going on drugs. Too many people die needlessly and prematurely because they refuse to take the medications. But his very public sharing of the fact that he’s on medications and is doing well helps to counter that. What still needs to be done? I wouldn’t put the onus on Magic, but one of the key issues, particularly in the African-American community, is people finding out that they are positive late in the disease. If I were advising Mr. Johnson—and I don’t want to begrudge him all that he’s done—but if he could get his fellow celebrities to speak out more, that would be very, very good.

Magic: The biggest fear we have in the minority community is the fear of what others think. We’ve got a fear that if they find out in the church, people might not want you to come to church. Fear of what the neighbors will say. So we don’t really pass on information. When I first announced, there was only one drug. Now there are twenty-six. People shouldn’t be afraid to be tested. Early detection and all those combinations of drugs, it can really prolong your life. I had so much I wanted to do and accomplish, and in fifteen years I’ve been doing it. For the first five years, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was hoping the medicine was going to work, but you just don’t know. In those years, it was always, “You okay? You okay? You okay?” everywhere I went. Now I don’t get that. Now I get “You’re doing great in business.” No one checks anymore. Things are going great. I wear this as a badge of honor. I don’t run away from it. I know that God has chosen me to make a difference in the world. So far, so good. Not only with HIV but with everything else I’m doing. I feel like I’m going to be here for a long time.

How to Quick Smoking in One Easy Blog

April 11, 2011 No Comments Peter Richmond

I knew I’d really quit smoking when I stopped counting the days at 100, by which time everyone’s eyes were starting to glaze over as I kept blathering about my triumphal coup, the way my own eyes always start looking for a way out when people start telling me about their babies. Besides: it was so easy I started to feel ashamed about it, like I was some kind of fraud for not having to go to support groups or buy electric cigarettes or take up weed instead. Somehow I’d gone from lighting up first thing in the morning and last thing at night to not even remembering what it felt like to want a cigarette — in the space of four months.

Today, the only time I even think of cigarettes is when I’m near someone smoking one, and then I edge away from the smoke, like all those people who used to edge away from me, flashing looks-to-kill. Me, I just smile at the smokers: It’s cool. Been there, done that. Will likely do it again some day. Just not now.

I really wish I could tell you how I did it. If I knew how I did it, I could offer some sort of lesson plan to share with others, and give seminars and charge lots of money: “You, too, can take power over your life!!! Listen to my five-step plan to clean lungs and a clean heart! A four-hour seminar for the life-saving price of $150 a ticket! Plus free copies of all my remaindered books!” But that would be a snake-oil deal. Because – from where I stand, happily free of ashes on the laptop keyboard and coats that smell like furnaces — only two steps are required: 1) You circle a date on the calendar: Quitting Day. 2) Then when you reach it, you quit. Seriously.
That’s what I did. And to be honest, I haven’t the slightest clue how I could smoke like a madman for eight years (two packs at the end) and then give them up without so much as a second thought. I guess my lungs said, “Enough,” and apparently my brain obeyed.

Yes, I chewed the gum for three weeks, until the supply ran out, at which point I wondered if I really _needed_ the very expensive gum, which I didn’t. After having no smoking withdrawal, I had no gum withdrawal. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the gum was psychological, because the smoking was psychological, too – for me, anyway.

But now I think that this might be the case for…well…everyone. I truly suspect that the only thing that keeps us addicted to smoking is our belief in how hard it is to quit. We’re completely convinced that the drug has us in its vice-like grip – when, in fact, we’re applying the shackles ourselves. It’s we who are gripping the cigarette, and we who can simply drop it and walk away. You just gotta want it bad enough. On top of which, if you live where I do, two packs a day costs $18, which means I’ve saved $2700, which is more than I’ve paid for most of my cars.

Listen: if I can do it, trust me: anyone can do it. I am nothing if not a man of addictions. If I’m not within a ten-minute drive to a coffee shop – a caffeine emporium, not a Dunkin whatever — I can’t function. Can’t write a word. Can’t even converse in the morning with the chickens. Must have the coffee. (For a book I was writing, I once spent two weeks on a remote South Pacific island whose water was dangerous to drink; hence, no coffee. I mainlined Coke from dawn til dusk for the caffeine rush.)

And don’t even think of asking me to give up potato chips, the New York Giants or the Mirth chardonnay from my wife’s wine store in Millerton. Which leads to the two most often-asked questions. 1) “Isn’t it really hard when you’re drinking?” For some reason, no — not at all. In fact, wine is one of the many things that tastes better. And, 2) “Isn’t it hard when your wife still smokes?” Not at all – it gives me a valuable superiority points in a marriage where I’m way behind in the daily score.

Yes, I know: nicotine, like crystal meth and Facebook, is apparently physically addictive. The science says so. And yes, the nicotine of my Marlboros had increased by more than ten percent since I’d started up again eight years ago. But the only after-effect of quitting for me was the appearance of a few extra pounds (which sort of feel, oddly, good – symbols of a return to health). No withdrawals. No fingernail chewing. I’ve heard that quitting heroin is easier than quitting Marlboro Lights. But where did I hear that? From another smoker, a few years ago, and my guess is that this urban myth was being passed around among smokers so that we could justify our inability to quit.

So: Did I quit because of strong self-discipline? Please. I have all the drive and ambition of Julie Christie settling into her smiling opium-den stupor at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. As a rule, if I set a goal for myself (meet the deadline.,.pay the taxes…change the oil) it’s a guarantee that I’ll blow it – and try to weasel my way out of it, with middling success.

Did I quit because all those gruesome public-service commercials on cable between innings of the Yankee games finally wore me down? Nope; those weren’t photographs of my tar-pocked lungs. Did I heed the warning of the doctor who told me that half of all deaths are smoking-related? Nope; if I didn’t die of smoking, hell, I’d die of something else. (Cue the old Shoe comic strip where the boss says to cigar-smoking Shoe: “Those things are going to take years off your life.” Shoe’s response: “Well, they probably weren’t going to be very good years anyway.”)

Did I finally start to listen to the friends who voiced their concerns about my habit, out of genuine kindness? Nope. It all fell on deaf ears.

The truth is, when you finally don’t want to smoke, the only voice that can get through is yours. Which is why when I was standing in line at the convenience store a few minutes ago – to buy Dots – I remained silent when the guy in front of me said to the clerk, “anything menthol, 100s, and cheap.”

I could have said, “Hey, you can quit.” But I didn’t have to. I figure some day I’ll see him in the front row of the seminar – the 15-second seminar, where I come out on stage, point to my brain, say, “You don’t know your own strength,” and exit, stage right, back to the green room, where I open a fresh bag of barbecue chips and pour myself another glass of Mirth.

History repeats the old conceits

January 20, 2011 No Comments Peter Richmond

You have to love it: a brash, loose-cannon, Us-Against-Everybody-Else franchise struts and barks its way through the playoffs, following the lead of a verbose, defiant rotund head coach with an X-rated vocabulary — and a distinctly aberrant behavioral quirk. They topple the favored establishment teams, and gloat over the corpses. They’re people, not drones.

True, they flashed a few less-than-admirable qualities over the season. Their regard for the opposite sex is somewhere between Neanderthal and Andrew Dice Clay. One of their stars arrived from another team with a legal rap sheet that covers all the bases. Another star blew twice the legal limit as the sun rose — on a practice day.

They were near the top of the league in penalties – and on top of it in distractions. They not only bent the rules, but brazenly broke them.

But what’s better, in an increasingly corporate-commercial league than a bad-boy team that still marches to the cocky beat of its own drummer – a team that could give a bleep about what everyone else thinks, as it aims for the Super Bowl? A team you either love or hate, with no in-between?

Man, do I miss the 1976 Oakland Raiders.

But since John Madden’s outlaw Super-Bowl-winning silver-and-black are all grandfathers now, I’m going to root for the rebellious, hilarious, weird-ass Jets: a beacon of refreshing chaos in a league so tightly wrapped that you can get fined for wearing the wrong sock, and defensive backs have to file in advance for permission to cover receivers. Today, as the old Raider tight end Raymond Chester told me, “players are independent contractors. They are each mini-sports corporations.”

But every now and then – far too infrequently – the NFL, despite its determination to homogenize its entertainment product, produces a team of winning renegades who seem to muscle their way to the top by the sheer weight of their irreverence. A team whose innocent-outlaw vibe gives a collective nod to their fist-flying mercenary ancestors. The Ryan Express is a direct descendant of the Ken Stabler Badasses. And the game is better for it.

Now, to be clear: I don’t endorse Santonio Holmes’ checkered past, from weed possession to charges of domestic abuse to suspensions for banned substances; his Raider predecessor in the category of all-around bad-boy, the defensive end John Matuszak, never actually tried to hurt anyone, except himself — despite shooting his guns into restaurant ceilings and out of car windows, and ingesting a myriad of substances. Nor am I condoning Braylon Edwards’ September DUI arrest at 5 a.m.; The old Raiders’ drinking habits never actually resulted in an arrest — just a few shattered plate-glass windows, a few bar-top stripteases, a Harley being driven through a restaurant and a fullback betting he could dive into a shot glass (and losing the bet, though he did hit the glass.)

The Jets’ sexist treatment of a comely Mexican TV reporter, and Brett Favre’s alleged sexts to a massage therapist? Way over the line. When the Raiders mistreated women, they always did it with the woman’s consent. When topless queen Carol Doda used her ample endowments to stop the puck at the annual air-hockey tournament, she was honored to have been asked. When linebacker Phil Villapiano asked a local girl to interrupt Raider practice by circling the field dressed in nothing but socks and sneakers, she was adequately compensated. True, Pat Toomay married a bartendress to one of her customers, even though he wasn’t legally a minister of anything…but hey, the team paid for their honeymoon in Tahoe.

Of course, Jet strength coach Sal Alosi tripping a Dolphin special-teams guy was clearly a felony, but, in a clear echo of the old Raider ideology, it was the act of a man willing to do anything to win…like Gene Upshaw wrapping his forearms in tape and pads, getting pregame approval by the officials, then returning to the locker room to soak them in hot water, so they’d harden into casts. Or Fred Biletnikoff using so much Stickum on his hands that his trainer had to hold Freddy’s halftime cigarettes as he puffed on them. Or George Atkinson and Jack Tatum doing everything short of laying landmines to keep receivers out of their territory.

Rex Ryan’s apparent foot fetish? A tad stranger than Madden’s fear of flying, born of his intense claustrophobia – a neurosis that made every Raider road-trip flight an adventure, whether Pinky was being sponged off by a stewardess or was swearing at the pilot. But both represent a refreshing slice of the bizarre in a fraternity of interchangeables. And at least Ryan has a sex life, when most of his peers spend their nights on a fold-out office couch after dissecting the opponent’s kickoff-return schemes until 3:30 a.m.

Of course, he also has something else: a refreshingly uncensored mouth. Ryan’s verbal madness (“This one is me against Manning! This is me against Belichick! This is me against Hu Jintao!”) clearly has a method: it takes the spotlight off the players who don’t want it…and empowers those who do want it, like Bart Scott, to say wonderful things like “The Patriots defense couldn’t stop a nosebleed.”

In truth the Raiders didn’t verbally bait or boast. They let their image precede them – and teams feared for their lives before the opening kickoff. Ryan’s Jets cultivated their wooly image by letting the Hard Knocks cameras into the locker room. Now, more often than not, when a team lets HBO into training camp, the ensuing season is disastrous. These Jets have gone farther than any Hard Knocks team: the exposure fueled their fire and honed their NFL black-sheep profile…as if it needed honing. (You think the league likes having a head coach with a foot fetish? An owner who questioned the legitimacy of the coin flip that gave the Giants the first game in the new stadium? A cornerback who has trouble remembering all of his kids’ names?)

Ryan’s true bond with Madden (who finished his coaching career with a better winning percentage than Lombardi’s) is his trust in his players to be men, and do their jobs on the field, and then give them enough rope not to hang themselves, but be themselves.

Like the Raiders, these Jets are fueled by their faith that the organization has their back — not to mention the certainty that they’ll make the playoffs. Under Madden, the Raiders made the playoffs eight of ten years. Ryan is two for two. And I’m guessing that, after this week, his next headline quote will be either, “This is me against Halas!” or “This is me against Lombardi!”

Anonymous Sources

December 1, 2010 No Comments Peter Richmond

“According to a lawyer in baseball briefed on the negotiations, the Yankees have made Jeter a three-year, $45 million offer… The lawyer spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his access to sensitive information.”– New York Times

NEW YORK – As the discussions between New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter and the team grow increasingly contentious, several sources close to the situation are maintaining that, despite a recent fall-off in productivity, Jeter should be paid everything he is asking for.
“I just can’t picture him in another uniform.” said a String Theory physicist from the University of Chicago, who requested anonymity because he was speaking from a parallel universe in which neither time nor space are prequisites for existence. “Then, given these 11 dimensions, I can’t really picture anything.”
“He would certainly have been an all-star in any of our own sports, if we’d had any,” said a former priest from his ziggurat in the Sumerian city-state of Uruk by means of cuneiform, 5,000 years ago, who stamped his words in reeds from the banks of the Tigris river on condition of anonymity because his king, Gilgamesh, might exile him to the kingdom of Sargon of Akkad. “He certainly has god-like qualities.”
“I saw him in a diner last season, and he tipped generously,” said a Yankee fan friend of mine in Montclair, N.J, on the condition of anonymity because he doesn’t really know anything about anything, and doesn’t want this known. “He was eating an egg-white omelet with spinach, and when I asked him to sign my napkin, he was quick to oblige, I offered to send him a signed copy of my biography of Moose Skowron, but he politely declined.”
“Dude’s worth every penny,” said a clerk at the Duane Reade drugstore on East 13th Street, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was under the influence of methamphetamines he’d manufactured using over-the-counter ingredients in the store, and couldn’t remember his own name, and, thought that Jeter was a rhythm guitarist for the current incarnation of the Steve Miller Band. “The man can still play a wicked slide.”
“I’d pay him everything he’s asking for, and then some,” said a general manager of a team in the Japanese Professional League, who texted on the condition of anonymity because he was in the bathtub at the Swissotel Nankai Osaka, and was afraid that his mistress would come in and see that he was texting on the IPad she’d just given him, because if it fell into the bathtub, it would short out.
“I’ve always admired how he stayed out of trouble, and was always ready to play, even in the increasingly unpredictable Northeast weather conditions,” said a meteorologist at a midwestern NBC affiliate who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his superiors had forbidden him to speak about the effects of global warming.
“Would they have given FDR what he was asking for, even if, entering his fourth term, his performance had fallen off?” said a Yankee shortstop and captain, who spoke on conditions of anonymity because he was integrally involved in the negotiations, and unauthorized to speak, lest it compromise his negotiating position. “I think so.”
“I have no comment at this point,” said Yankee general manager Brian Cashman, on the condition of anonymity because the conversation was supposed to be off the record, but I decided it wasn’t.