Read Online The Best American Sports Writing 2011 by Jane Leavy - Free Book Online
Authors: Jane Leavy
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Then, out of the blue, he announces that surfing is the thing that "saved" him. "It's the best drug ever," he says, "and I'm lucky to have it."
I gently ask what it saved him from. He stares out the window and starts to yank his forelock. "I just ... see things different, from the back of my brain," he says. "Other people see 'em from the front, I guess. It's not good or bad, just how I am. Sort of makes it harder, though, you know?"
"How so?"
His free hand paws the side of his trunks, damp in the air-chilled room. "Well, I need people's help to get stuff done. Telling me where to go and what to say, and sometimes I don't like that, or I'm tired and don't want..."
The sentence just hangs there, whirring in space. I hold off, giving him room to work through the tangle of half-formed thoughts. Instead, he tugs his hair so hard that a clump comes off in his fingers. Panicked, I ask about the feeling he gets when he does something splendid on a wave. "I can't describe it," he says, slouching so low that he burrows into his chest. "Just pleasure, I guess. Where you want it over and over, and do anything to get it ... Are we almost done?"
"Just one more," I say, looking at a poster-size photo on the wall. In it, Marzo is stock-still on his board, raising his arms in benediction as a 20-foot wave hulks above him. In the undepicted instant after the photo was taken, he paddled coolly around the edge of the wave before it smashed him to bits on the rocks. "What do you think when you see that picture?" I ask.
He mashes his lower lip, but releases the hair he's wrapped around a clenched index finger. "I was stoked," he says. "That wave was
bombing,
and there was another, even bigger, right behind it."
What he doesn't add is that he had just returned from a nightmare trip and felt blessed to be home again. Marzo is a creature of waves, but of
these
waves, the rocky, shark-toothed waters of Maui that he knows by heart. Look at him now, out beyond the reef, doing tricks to raise his flagging spirits. In surf no bigger than a picket fence, he's positioned himself above the swell, skimming like a coin from crest to crest. Just as each dies, he spies a new section to carve his name upon, hurling his board up the short-sleeve face to ride the foam again. He's forgotten the guys watching from their pickup trucks, and the small crowd up here with our mouths agape, and the father he can't please, and the brother who cut him deadâall of that's gone now, carried away by the hunchbacked westerly waves. He'll surf until lunchtime, then come back after a nap, and if not for the tiger sharks that hunt these waters once the sun goes down, he might never get out of the bliss machine, which makes no claims, only grants them.
School of Fight: Learning to Brawl with the Hockey Goons of Tomorrow
Jake Bogoch
FROM DEADSPIN.COM
T OM BLOOMBERG DECIDED to teach me how to punch another kid unconscious on a hot summer day in rural Manitoba. He called this unsolicited lesson "the moves." I was 15. Tom, an oak trunk of a man who lived two doors down from my family's cottage, knew that I was entering a tough age for hockey players and decided I was ready.
Tom had done well in hockey. He'd earned himself a tryout for the St. Louis Blues. Now he sold real estate. We stood above Falcon Lake on his dock, sticky with freshly lacquered stain, and Tom began the lesson with a story about a fight he'd won. The morning after the brawl, he'd woken up with a throbbing hand and driven to a hospital. Tom attributed the pain to a broken bone in his hand; the X-ray found that in fact the pain originated in his knuckle, into which his opponent's tooth had interred itself.
Tom segued into hockey fighting's rules of engagement: 1. Never fight with your visor on. 2. Don't antagonize only to back down. 3. Star players have immunity. 4. Enforcers only battle other enforcers. 5. No trash talk if you can avoid it.
Last, Tom showed me how to tear off another guy's helmet and
I gently ask what it saved him from. He stares out the window and starts to yank his forelock. "I just ... see things different, from the back of my brain," he says. "Other people see 'em from the front, I guess. It's not good or bad, just how I am. Sort of makes it harder, though, you know?"
"How so?"
His free hand paws the side of his trunks, damp in the air-chilled room. "Well, I need people's help to get stuff done. Telling me where to go and what to say, and sometimes I don't like that, or I'm tired and don't want..."
The sentence just hangs there, whirring in space. I hold off, giving him room to work through the tangle of half-formed thoughts. Instead, he tugs his hair so hard that a clump comes off in his fingers. Panicked, I ask about the feeling he gets when he does something splendid on a wave. "I can't describe it," he says, slouching so low that he burrows into his chest. "Just pleasure, I guess. Where you want it over and over, and do anything to get it ... Are we almost done?"
"Just one more," I say, looking at a poster-size photo on the wall. In it, Marzo is stock-still on his board, raising his arms in benediction as a 20-foot wave hulks above him. In the undepicted instant after the photo was taken, he paddled coolly around the edge of the wave before it smashed him to bits on the rocks. "What do you think when you see that picture?" I ask.
He mashes his lower lip, but releases the hair he's wrapped around a clenched index finger. "I was stoked," he says. "That wave was
bombing,
and there was another, even bigger, right behind it."
What he doesn't add is that he had just returned from a nightmare trip and felt blessed to be home again. Marzo is a creature of waves, but of
these
waves, the rocky, shark-toothed waters of Maui that he knows by heart. Look at him now, out beyond the reef, doing tricks to raise his flagging spirits. In surf no bigger than a picket fence, he's positioned himself above the swell, skimming like a coin from crest to crest. Just as each dies, he spies a new section to carve his name upon, hurling his board up the short-sleeve face to ride the foam again. He's forgotten the guys watching from their pickup trucks, and the small crowd up here with our mouths agape, and the father he can't please, and the brother who cut him deadâall of that's gone now, carried away by the hunchbacked westerly waves. He'll surf until lunchtime, then come back after a nap, and if not for the tiger sharks that hunt these waters once the sun goes down, he might never get out of the bliss machine, which makes no claims, only grants them.
School of Fight: Learning to Brawl with the Hockey Goons of Tomorrow
Jake Bogoch
FROM DEADSPIN.COM
T OM BLOOMBERG DECIDED to teach me how to punch another kid unconscious on a hot summer day in rural Manitoba. He called this unsolicited lesson "the moves." I was 15. Tom, an oak trunk of a man who lived two doors down from my family's cottage, knew that I was entering a tough age for hockey players and decided I was ready.
Tom had done well in hockey. He'd earned himself a tryout for the St. Louis Blues. Now he sold real estate. We stood above Falcon Lake on his dock, sticky with freshly lacquered stain, and Tom began the lesson with a story about a fight he'd won. The morning after the brawl, he'd woken up with a throbbing hand and driven to a hospital. Tom attributed the pain to a broken bone in his hand; the X-ray found that in fact the pain originated in his knuckle, into which his opponent's tooth had interred itself.
Tom segued into hockey fighting's rules of engagement: 1. Never fight with your visor on. 2. Don't antagonize only to back down. 3. Star players have immunity. 4. Enforcers only battle other enforcers. 5. No trash talk if you can avoid it.
Last, Tom showed me how to tear off another guy's helmet and
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