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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Cost of These Dreams

  Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, Sonia, and their daughter, Wallace.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2019 by Wright Thompson

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  “Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building.” First published in ESPN The Magazine, February 2013. © 2013 by ESPN, Inc. • “The Last Days of Tony Harris.” First published on espn.com, January 2008. © 2008 by ESPN, Inc. • “Ghosts of Mississippi.” First published on espn.com, February 2010. © 2010 by ESPN, Inc. • “Shadow Boxing.” First published on espn.com, December 2009. © 2009 by ESPN, Inc. • “Here and Gone.” First published on espn.com, October 2012. © 2012 by ESPN, Inc. • “The Last Ride of Bear and Billy.” First published on espn.com, March 2012. © 2012 by ESPN, Inc. • “Urban Meyer Will Be Home for Dinner.” First published on espn.com, August 2012. © 2012 by ESPN, Inc. • “The Losses of Dan Gable.” First published in ESPN The Magazine, August 2013. © 2013 by ESPN, Inc. • “Beyond the Breach.” First published in ESPN The Magazine, August 2015. © 2015 by ESPN, Inc. • “The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived On.” First published in ESPN The Magazine, May 2015. © 2015 by ESPN, Inc. • “The Secret History of Tiger Woods.” First published in ESPN The Magazine, May 2016. © 2016 by ESPN, Inc. • “In Chicago, the Final Wait for a Cubs Win Mixes Joy and Sorrow.” First published in ESPN The Magazine, November 2016. © 2016 by ESPN, Inc. • “Pat Riley’s Final Test.” First published in ESPN The Magazine, April 2017. © 2017 by ESPN, Inc. • “Holy Ground.” First published on espn.com, 2007. © 2007 by ESPN, Inc.

  All essays reprinted with permission of ESPN.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Thompson, Wright, author.

  Title: The cost of these dreams : sports stories and other serious business /

  Wright Thompson.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018037816 (print) | LCCN 2018048087 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525505662 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133872 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505662 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Athletes—United States—Biography. | Coaches (Athletics)—United States—Biography. | Sports—Social aspects—United States. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Essays. | SPORTS & RECREATION / Football.

  Classification: LCC GV697.A1 (ebook) | LCC GV697.A1 T46 2019 (print) |DDC 796.0922 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037816

  Cover design: Christopher Brian King

  Cover photograph: Neil Leifer / Getty Images

  Version_2

  For Wallace, Sonia, and Mama

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building

  As he turns 50, MJ is wondering where there are any more asses to kick.

  The Last Days of Tony Harris

  What drove the former college basketball star to his death in the Brazilian jungle?

  Ghosts of Mississippi

  In 1962, the Ole Miss campus erupted in violence over integration and swelled with pride over a powerful football team.

  Shadow Boxing

  Muhammad Ali fought 50 men. Only one disappeared.

  Here and Gone

  The strange relationship between Lionel Messi and his hometown in Argentina.

  The Last Ride of Bear and Billy

  Thirty years after Coach Bryant’s last season at Alabama, the man who knew him best struggles to remember.

  Urban Meyer Will Be Home for Dinner

  A football coach tries to balance the kind of man he wants to be with the kind of man he is.

  The Losses of Dan Gable

  Wrestling’s most famous winner is taking on one final battle: To save his sport and all he’s ever been.

  Beyond the Breach

  A summer in search of saints, sinners, and lost souls in the New Orleans that Katrina left behind.

  The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived On

  Ted Williams’s ambitions shaped his legacy but wrecked his relationships. If his lone surviving child has her wish, the family’s cycle of suffering might at last be broken.

  The Secret History of Tiger Woods

  The death of his father set a battle raging inside the world’s greatest golfer. How he waged that war—through an obsession with the Navy SEALs—is the tale of how Tiger lost his way.

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

  A city has waited 108 years. Now it must wait one day more.

  Pat Riley’s Final Test

  This was the NBA legend’s most difficult season in 50 years. So why, after nine championships, doesn’t he just walk away? If only it were that easy.

  Holy Ground

  Walter Wright Thompson died before he could fulfill his dream of walking Augusta National during the Masters. His son took that walk for him.

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface

  My wife and I went to dinner last night at a supper club on Moon Lake. It was early summer, the cotton small and fragile in its rows. With the car windows rolled down, the air smelled like the river. The ruins of the casino Tennessee Williams wrote about still hovered in the shadows if you knew where and when to look. We’d come home to the Mississippi Delta to bring our new baby to visit her grandmama and to unwind for a few days. My hometown is an agricultural community named Clarksdale, at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49. If you know it at all, it’s as the home of the Delta blues, the droning, driving 12 bars of pain and joy that sprang from the surrounding plantations. Whenever I hear that music, it takes me home. I love driving through the Delta, which is as flat as Montana is tall, especially in the last hour of daylight. The sun hangs big and low and makes the fields and collapsed shacks and faded mansions glow a brilliant gold. All of it seems anointed or ready to be burned.

  We rode through the glow on the way to Moon Lake, out Friars Point Road toward U.S. Highway 1, which traces the Mississippi River. We drove past the once mighty King & Anderson plantation, broken up by inheritance and time and greed and cotton prices and estate taxes. About the only thing left of that world is the music. Every time anyone listens to the Delta blues, they hear the dreams and the cost.

  We’d come to Clarksdale because when I’m really tired or beaten down, there’s nothing like home to put me back together again. I’d been on a long run: our first baby born, trips to Japan, to Italy and India then Italy again, to Paris, London, and Manchester, plus crisscrossing the continental United States. I’d been on the road for months straight if I thought about it one way or for the past 20 years if I thought about it another. My wife, Sonia, is firmly in Camp Latter. When I first left my hometown, I was determined to see the world, all of it, and that’s what I’ve been lucky enough to do in my job, from dark pool halls in Argentina to a forward operating base in Iraq to a civil war in Kenya. That was my dream, and it cam
e true: I’ve been nearly everywhere people play and watch games, everywhere they look for freedom with a ball in their hands or at their feet, everywhere people invest complicated, tribal ideas of home and family in sporting events played by strangers. Sometimes the individual dispatches feel like exhaust fumes from an ongoing, overarching search. A hunger has long kept me out looking for the next thing, and the thing after that. But what was that hunger about? I figured that if there was anything this preface called for, it was some sort of self-examination of how this collection came to be and what there is to be learned from reading about sports.

  I wondered how to sum up stories that mean more to me than I can reasonably explain without embarrassment. As I talked about it with Sonia, she told me something I’d never heard her say before. She said she had often viewed herself as a corner man in a boxing ring. Her job in between my reporting trips was to calm me down and squirt water in my mouth and fix my cuts and bruises and get me in reasonably good enough shape to go back out and fight another round. To me, the title of this book—which comes from a Drive-By Truckers song—was a piece of connective tissue between the people and places I’ve written about. So often I crawl around in the lives of men and women who yearn for a different kind of self and future and pay a price for that yearning. But to Sonia, the title was about me.

  * * *

  —

  I remember the first time I read Gary Smith’s letter from the Pine Ridge Reservation, a parable about the power and limits of sports to provide an escape; and when I discovered Frank Deford’s profile of Bobby Knight, which was true when it ran and only got truer with the passing years; and what I understood about the importance of cutting through myths to find something real when I read Charles P. Pierce’s story on Tiger Woods. I learned about ambition, including my own, when I read Richard Ben Cramer’s masterpiece on Ted Williams, and in Gay Talese’s profile of Joe DiMaggio I found a reflection on the fleeting nature of fame and greatness—what relief it brings those who burned themselves chasing it, and what pain it can’t begin to touch. Those of us who write these kinds of sports stories, which feels like an ever-shrinking pool, are not after the symphony of a novel, or the jazz improv of a poem, but the hard, rough gut-punch of a blues riff.

  If this book has an organizing principle, then, it is this: The literary magazine sports story is a minor but vital form of uniquely American art. I get angry when people don’t learn the canon or hold the line on matters of ethics, ambition, and work. That’s what I owe those who came before and what I owe the version of myself who wanted so badly to be good at this. I never want to shortchange them, or me, or the form. Maybe that’s what Sonia meant when she described the cost of my obsession and her hope that I might learn something about myself from all the myopic, driven people I’ve written about for the past two decades.

  From Pat Riley we learn how far and fast a man will run to escape something in his past, and from Tiger Woods we learn the dangers of living both a private and public life at the same time, as one almost inevitably consumes the other. Over and over we learn the value of a selfless father and the dangers of a selfish one. From Michael Jordan we learn the benefits and toll of a man constructing himself into the perfect machine to manage the first 40 years of his life while creating a version of himself completely unsuited for the next 40. That’s a universal truth: The tools required to gain greatness often prevent someone from enjoying it. From Ted Williams and his family we see the multigenerational inheritance of pain and how Richard Ben Cramer’s profile documented the rock but not the lake or the ripples. We see Dan Gable use his pain as fuel, later finding it so hard-wired into his daily life that he struggled to put it down once its usefulness has expired. We see all these people, and maybe we steal a glimpse of ourselves.

  * * *

  —

  My love of this craft began at the University of Missouri, where a group of us debated and dreamed and wondered how the stories we loved came to exist. But the ideas that drove me to need a craft began much earlier, on the streets just outside the plateglass window where I found myself sitting the morning after Moon Lake, in the corner of a coffee shop on Yazoo Avenue in Clarksdale, four blocks from the house where I grew up.

  So many of these stories are about understanding a real world hidden behind a facade. Some of them are about deciphering the codes and meaning of home. Some are about people who carry the place of their birth and its gravitational pull with them even as they run themselves out trying to escape. Some are about people who get the things they wanted and must make an accounting of what they exchanged for them. These deep lifelong interests of mine began in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

  The themes I’ve returned to again and again were first explored when I was a young man, trying to come to terms with the beauty and inequality of the place I called home. In Clarksdale, powerful ideas often relegated to philosophy classes or history books played out in real time day after day. As you grew up, you were taught either to ignore the dichotomy or to train yourself to always see it—to hunt for it—no matter what obstacles are erected to keep it hidden. Becoming a journalist was born from this desire to see things as they truly were and not as so many interested actors wanted them to appear. I understood that people protected themselves with the stories they told about themselves. That urge fascinated me. It still does. The most interesting place exists between how people see themselves and how other people do. That knowledge was born in Clarksdale. It’s funny when I look at the past two decades through that prism, sitting in a coffee shop across from the old offices of The Clarksdale Press Register, where I worked a long time ago.

  Four blocks toward Desoto Avenue is the building where my father’s law office was located; I spent hours there, using his office supplies to send off Sports Illustrateds to be signed by the famous athletes on the covers. His illness and death, and the hole that left inside me, has provided much of my ambition and fuel. You’ll find a lot of stories about fathers and sons in my work, much of which is no doubt a selfish attempt to use my job to help ask myself the same questions as the people I got paid to interview and profile. For years, I wanted to be successful enough for both of us, to raise up myself and him at the same time. Only since the birth of my daughter, Wallace, have I understood that I have taken exactly the wrong lesson from his death. All his life, I heard him talk about what he and my mother would do together, about the life they’d share, once his own personal race had been run. He died before those dreams were realized, and now I know that success means reaching your goals and enjoying them and that one without the other is empty and meaningless. Not long ago, I went to the funeral of the legendary sportswriter William Nack, and as his kids talked about how much they loved vacations with him, and how much he loved his family and enjoyed cooking big meals for all of them, I realized that his work was a means to an end and not the supreme and total end.

  I have made a career by exploring all the things that fascinated me as a boy. College students often ask me how to succeed in this business, and I’ve given a lot of different answers, some about craft and some about work ethic, but the real answer is that you must be curious and then stay that way. You must remain amazed at people and places and then forever push yourself to transmit that wonder in more and more powerful and accurate ways. My mom always thought this collection should be called Dispatches from a Worldview, which is super pompous but strikes me now as prescient. I grew up in a place unlike other places, with its own music and food and history, where grown-ups saw up and called it down, where people were capable of great kindness and great cruelty, sometimes the same person capable of both. I learned as many lessons working in the cotton fields for Cliff Heaton and Freddie Gordon as I did in classrooms. Everything good that’s happened to me in my work life springs from Mississippi, from the little town that still feels like home.

  * * *

  —

  Recently I got an email from Delta Airlines telling me that I�
��d passed a million miles flown on their airline. They meant it to be congratulatory, I’m sure. But it carried a warning, too, hints of the costs that Sonia articulated that night at Moon Lake. I’ve been reading a lot of Thomas Merton lately. It seems to me that the point of studying other people, whether through a sports story or a novel or a song or a movie, is to organize our thoughts and construct a framework that might help us better understand ourselves. At Moon Lake I made Sonia a promise that I would protect the curiosity and drive that created these stories, while trying to let slip the angst and insecurity and fierce ambition that so fueled me as a younger man.

  I’m hoping this preface serves not just as an introduction for a book but as a public vow that I will learn from the people I’ve written about. I promised that I would still follow the dreams that I’d dreamed since I was a boy but that I’d be vigilant about slipping off the path. My whole life is in this book—and yet none of it is. My little girl is 20 weeks old. My wife has put up with my travels and searching and loves me still. My friends understand what pulls me out on the road and what more and more pulls me home. There are stories to tell, and worlds to discover, and sunset roads to drive. My life will start tomorrow and then the tomorrow after that. Maybe some college student is reading this right now, hungry and ambitious and willing to pay whatever cost for his or her dreams. The sun is golden and hanging low. The fields stretch out on either side of the blacktop. Everywhere around me I see furrows and river bends and oxbows and lakes and marshes and swamps and white clapboard churches and beer joints and a hot mean sun, all timeless, weightless, airless—universal and infinite. I see a road that leads to the world and also back home again.

  Wright Thompson

  July 2018

  Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building