The Best American Sports Writing 2014 Read Free Page B

yourself.
    That’s what happened to me when I came across David Merrill’s wonderful story “The One-Legged Wrestler Who Conquered His Sport, Then Left It Behind” and Amanda Hess’s “You Can Only Hope to Contain Them,” her so-smart (and superbly titled) piece on, arguably, the most important breakthrough in athletic equipment of our lifetime: the sports bra. I felt the shock; the spark crackled between my life and two worlds I knew nothing about. I’d never imagined what it would be like to kneel on a mat with one leg and hope I could somehow burst up and around and take down someone with all limbs attached. Deep-diving into that experience through Merrill’s reporting made me think that maybe, you know, scuffing myself up on a brick wall to learn parkour wasn’t much to whine about after all. And wow! To reach the peak of collegiate wrestling despite that handicap and then suddenly walk away because . . . well, dig in for yourself and find out.
    Likewise with breasts. I didn’t know Amanda Hess’s writing before coming across this piece, but I’m on high alert from now on. What remains with you after you’ve read it isn’t even her light-touch storytelling and ability to pull up just the right tales to bring her point to life, but the gratitude you feel whenever someone opens your eyes so that you see things differently from then on. When I finished reading the stories nominated for this year’s collection, I was so blown away I went online to announce, “I’ll stack
Best American Sports Writing 2014
against any
Best American
anything of any year.” I’d never known I could feel sympathy for such devils as Don King, a criminal cage fighter, and bull sharks. Until Don Van Natta Jr. unearthed secrets from a generation ago, I had no idea that Bobby Riggs loved Billie Jean King. Truly loved her.
    Did you? Well, strap in. You have no idea what you’re about to discover.
    C HRISTOPHER M C D OUGALL

PAUL SOLOTAROFF WITH RON BORGES
The Gangster in the Huddle
    FROM ROLLING STONE
    Â 
    T HE FIRST TEXT pinged him around nine that Sunday night:
I’m coming to grab that tonight, you gon b around? I need dat and we could step for a little again.
For Odin Lloyd, this was bang-up news, proof that his luck had turned around. Aaron Hernandez, the Pro Bowl tight end of the New England Patriots, was coming by later to scoop him up for another five-star debauch, just 36 hours after he’d taken Lloyd out for the wildest ride of his life. All night Friday, they’d kicked it at Rumor, popping bottles and pulling models up the steps of the VIP section of the Boston theater district’s hottest club. “Shit was crazy,” Lloyd told friends the next day at his niece’s dance recital. “The girls were off the chain. We smoked that super-duper and Aaron dropped 10 G’s like it was nothing. We kept rolling past dawn at his big-ass mansion, then he tossed me the keys to his Suburban.”
    Big doings for a semipro football player and underemployed landscape helper, though there too fortune smiled on Lloyd, 27. He’d just gotten word that he’d have shifts all week, his first steady hours in some time. And now he was about to burn it down again with Hernandez, the $40 million man with the restless streak and a bottomless taste for chronic. The problem, Lloyd said, was it didn’t end there with Hernandez and his how-high crew: “Them boys is into way worse shit than herb.”
    How much worse? About as bad as it gets, say longtime family friends. In exclusive conversations with
Rolling Stone
, those friends, who insisted they not be named, say Hernandez was using the maniacal drug angel dust, had fallen in with a crew of gangsters and convinced himself that his life was in danger, carrying a gun wherever he went. Sources close to the tight end add that throughout the spring, when players are expected to be