The lasers are already fixed on the side of Madison’s car.

She revs her engine, sending plumes of white smoke swirling around her tires. A couple dozen faces look up at her from behind a row of overturned tires. You see this?

To Madison’s left, Deputy John Littrell of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department raises his eyebrows at Madison from inside his Crown Victoria.

But Madison is staring ahead at a quarter-mile of straight, smooth asphalt. She’s got one foot on the gas and the other on her brake, her engine whining as she runs through her worries this evening: her tune-up earlier this week, how the wind keeps dropping off suddenly and wilting the flag she’s been watching in her mirror.

Before the light even turns green, she floors it.

There’s a half-beat as the BMW takes in Madison’s command, and then all at once she flies forward. Deputy Littrell tears after her and goes Code 3: lights flashing and siren wailing. Full pursuit. On the radio, she can hear them saying her name: Madison Nirenstein, Redwood High School, 2004 BMW 330Ci. Her engine does the work for her now, the automatic transmission shifting through the gears. She steals a look at the speedometer: 50, 60, 70, 80 miles per hour now and climbing fast, blue lights glinting on her dash.

Don’t push too much, she thinks. Keep an eye on the Crown Vic. Hold the wheel steady. Stay ahead. Don’t get caught. Top the cop.

On Wednesday nights from April to August, any teenager with a high school ID, a driver’s license, and 15 bucks for registration can come to Sonoma Raceway for a chance to race a uniformed police officer in a squad car down the quarter-mile strip.

Between races, the officers wander amongst them, offering tips on safe driving, warning of the dangers of alcohol, and — especially — just talking cars.

Madison shoots past the finish line just ahead of Deputy Littrell. The announcer calls it out:

Madison Nirenstein, winner!

My first day at the track, I pull into a line of cars at the gate: spectators signing in as drivers hand over a list of next of kin and waive away their right to sue should a tire blow out, or the transmission fry, or the wheels not quite catch and the wall come suddenly looming. I catch the occupants of the car in line next to me looking at my rental — a 2014 Corolla; white, safe, totally adequate — and feel suddenly unprepared. It’s a warm day; everyone’s windows are down, engines groaning and tires screeching from somewhere beyond the gate. Their car is full in the way that only a car of very young people can be: somehow more elbows, more half-full Gatorade bottles, more skinned knees and dibs for the next song than one sedan could possibly hold.

“You gonna drift that thing?” one boy calls. Five expectant faces. The oldest looks barely old enough to drive.

Can you drift a Corolla? I wonder. A moot question, maybe: I, certainly, cannot drift a Corolla. (I will learn soon that yes, you can drift a Corolla: the Corolla AE86, in fact, is a mainstay of the drift circuit, something I am confident Budget neither advertises nor condones.)

I mutter something about being there to watch. Heads cock and I think I hear snickering. I try to slide further into my sensible Corolla seat. Can they see through my sunglasses? Do I have more sunglasses I can put on?

“Nah, she’s gonna drag!” They cheer and drive off. I follow, slowly, sensibly.

Sonoma is a strange place for a racetrack. The Raceway sits at the gateway to California’s Wine Country in what’s called the Carneros region, a fertile pocket at the base of Napa Valley where cool bay winds sweep through vineyards scattered along the golden hills. It’s the nexus of some of the wealthiest counties in the country — Sonoma, Napa, Marin — and straddles the first real road in California’s history: the Camino Real, built by Spanish missionaries in the 1700s.

A few miles up the road from the drag strip’s starting line, you can get a glass of one of the finest pinot noirs in North America. On race days, tourists from San Francisco bobble out of Town Cars and crinkle their noses on tasting room verandas: What’s that sound?

The track, a 2.52-mile road course wrapped around a quarter-mile drag strip that can pack in 100,000 fans on its busiest days, opened in 1968 and for many years was known as Sears Point for the spit of land it lies on. It’s one of only a handful of NASCAR tracks west of the Mississippi, hosting the Sprint Cup Series every summer on two miles of looping asphalt that played host to Dale Earnhardt’s lone road-course victory in 1995. The rest of the year, the track offers just about everything you can do with a motor and a road: Motocross, Indycar, and National Hot Rod Association events, among others.

For 21 years, Kevin McKinnie has shepherded teenagers and police officers to Sonoma Raceway to race one another down the drag strip. He spent the better part of 30 years as a patrol officer with the nearby Santa Rosa Police Department. One day, he tagged along with a friend to the track and noticed a pack of high school kids waiting for their turn to race.

“And I thought, ‘Wow, what’s a better way to get with these kids and drop that negativity that they have towards law enforcement?’” says McKinnie. “Because the only time that they really meet a policeman is when the red light’s in the mirror. So I thought ‘Man, wouldn’t this be something if we could bring police cars over here and drag race against them?’”

He convinced his department and got the raceway to sign on. They called it Top the Cops.

‘Man, wouldn’t this be something if we could bring police cars over here and drag race against them?’

Since 1994, hundreds of Bay Area teenagers have raced cops down the quarter-mile. Four or five of them have gone on to jobs in law enforcement. From the very start, the plaudits have been universal: a great program; a chance for kids to learn and have fun and for cops to out themselves as something less than bogeymen.

But in recent years, attendance has declined. With the roars and occasional metallic thumps of the racetrack’s other driving attraction, the Sonoma Drift, hammering along in the distance, one can’t help but sense that something has changed.

In 1973, a young filmmaker by the name of George Lucas released his second feature-length production, American Graffiti. It was set in Modesto, California, 1962, but filmed largely in Marin County, with much of the action taking place along a thinly disguised Fourth Street in San Rafael, just 15 miles south of Sonoma Raceway.

American Graffiti follows a group of friends on one long, final night as they celebrate the end of high school and contemplate their futures. It offers a very particular image of America: of suburbia, of the early 1960s, of what it once meant to be a teenager. It’s a world where high school kids had little to do but cruise down Main — or Fourth — Street in their cars, and where cops had little to do but bust them for it (or at least try to). There are a few real crimes in American Graffiti: theft, trespassing, myriad traffic offenses. At one point, a man sprints out of the local liquor store with the shopkeeper in hot pursuit amidst a blaze of gunfire. But the only times the cops appear are to hound the teens rumbling along in their muscle cars. When real crimes do occur, no one even bothers to call the authorities: they’re too busy staring down the kids on the strip.

American Graffiti was meant as a love letter to things past, but in Marin County, it still rang true. After its release, its visions of purring Thunderbirds and Impalas inspired such a craze among local teens emulating the movie that San Rafael had to put up a sign forbidding U-turns at one end of Fourth Street to stop kids from cruising their cars up and down all day long.

At Top the Cops, the organizers seem intent on preserving something of that culture: the kids, the cars, the friendly, if a little bit stern, cops. But it seems that all these things have changed.

Are these the last days of Top the Cops?

The teens line up in the pit. They’re juniors and seniors, mostly, at high schools around the Bay Area, wealthy enclaves like Pacifica, Calistoga, Orinda, and Mill Valley.

Next to them, the cops form a line: a Crown Vic, a few Tauruses. There’s one of those new Interceptors they’ve been rolling out, 288 horsepower, zero to 60 in as little as 5 seconds, capable of scorching through the quarter-mile in under 15 seconds if they’re willing to push it. The officers get out and mill about; the kids prop their hoods open, shooting squirrelly looks at each other’s engines, the bolts on a silver Mustang’s V8 glittering in the late afternoon sun.

Officer Robert Marin, Fairfield PD, holds court with a trio of kids. Marin is a big guy, buoyantly cheerful with a tidy mustache. “Did you know,” he asks, “that when a car hits a pedestrian, they go flying out of their shoes? Your knees bend and you slip right out of your boots.”

“So if you see a pair of shoes on the ground,” says Marin, maybe a little too enthusiastically, “you know that’s right where a person got hit.”

Zac Machek, a senior at Northgate High School, has heard this one before. “Everything inside you is going the same speed as your car,” he says.

“That’s right!” agrees Marin, merrily.

There are two big events at Sonoma Raceway on Wednesday nights during the warmer months of the year: the drag and the drift. Drifting, which the track touts as “SIDEWAYS CARS. SCREECHING TIRES. MAD SKILLS,” is the more recent innovation of the two. It involves the deliberate loss of rear wheel control, enabling drivers with the right combination of speed, accuracy, fearlessness, and disdain for the longevity of their tires, paint jobs, and mortal souls to send their cars skidding sideways at high speeds, perpendicular to their tires, two or more cars traveling the same course at the same time, not racing, but earning style points. It has only recently gained credibility in American motorsport circles; Sonoma added it to the Wednesday lineup just five years ago.

The Sonoma Drift makes its home on the west side of the grounds in a parking lot that’s enclosed with concrete barriers for the occasion, a jubilant crowd pressed shoulder to shoulder and leaning against a second fence a buffer zone beyond. On a recent afternoon, one car smacked into another and knocked half its rear bumper off. The driver waggled his finger at the offending party and zoomed off, dragging the bumper like matrimonial tin cans behind him. Another car’s tire exploded suddenly and the crowd whooped. Cars screeched in crazed circles around one another: shooting sideways around cones, through cones, bass thrumming, coming within inches of the concrete barricades, within centimeters of one another, maybe tapping each other ever so lightly, as lightly as 2,400 flying pounds of metal can, flags and pole-mounted GoPros and whole aerated mounds of tires stretching out behind them. It’s mayhem.

The Wednesday Night Drag program takes place on 1,320 feet of smooth asphalt to the east, below the main grandstand, which on these nights is empty. Most weeks, as many as 200 drivers turn up in 200 gleaming cars, and they race 400 or 600 or 800 times till they’ve shaken themselves into hierarchies of velocity and control. The few spectators — mostly friends of those behind the wheel and erstwhile drivers who will lapse morosely into long descriptions of what exactly has kept their car in the shop this week with little provocation — hang around the starting line in twos and threes, arms crossed. The drivers start to arrive in the middle of the afternoon, lining up according to racing class: motorcycles and hot rods towed in on trailers on one side, street-legal sports cars in the middle, and, at the very far end of the pit, a couple lines of high school kids flanked on one side by black and white patrol cars.

In many of the towns in the North Bay, it often seems like it’s still 1962, and that cops don’t have a whole lot more to do than break up parties and bust kids for missing curfew. In Marin County, when a particularly effective and correspondingly loathed officer retired a few years ago, he appeared in the local paper proudly leering over a water cooler jug — one of three, he boasted — filled with cigarette lighters he had confiscated from teenagers over the years. When I was in high school, he terrorized my classmates with his enthusiastic — and, we thought, preposterously unfair — enforcement of the rule of law, nabbing kids for drinking at school dances and hiding out near our school’s unsubtly designated pot hangout. He did not give second chances.

“I have kids come back all the time and thank me for arresting them,” he said on his retirement. “It’s just very gratifying.”

I asked a friend recently if he could remember what that officer’s nickname was. “Officer Asshat?” he asked.

Forty miles away, 10th grader Christian Fick is staring at the clock. He’s waiting for the bell when it rings in seventh period and he hurries to his car, a Subaru WRX, cherry red. He drops his sister, a freshman, off at home and grabs a couple friends, whoever doesn’t have too much homework, and they climb into the backseat and slide over his racing helmet. You only need to wear a helmet if you break 14 seconds on the quarter-mile. It’s a stretch for the WRX, but he’s done it before.

They stop for gas, Christian keeping his finger on the handle and watching the numbers scroll by. He only wants a third of a tank, just enough to get him to the racetrack and then launch him through a half-dozen blistering passes down the quarter-mile. Every extra ounce could cost him a millisecond.

Christian works at a pizza place — nothing fancy, but not Round Table, either, and it pays him enough to cover gas and, occasionally, new parts. He used to work as a detailer at a shop in Emeryville: washing, waxing, interior, engine clean. He did it all, saving up till he could afford a third of the WRX. His parents helped with the rest.

He’s trophied twice this season, winning a mounted gold-plated Pontiac GTO that he keeps on a shelf next to five trophies from when he used to do tae kwon do. During his last run against a cop, Christian stopped to take a selfie at the starting line: a uniformed deputy offering up a peace sign from his Sonoma County Sheriff SUV in the background, Christian beaming from inside his Subaru.

Christian didn’t tell his parents when he started racing. They found out later, once he’d won a couple times. Now, they’re tacitly okay with it — his dad even came down once and raced his own car, an old British MG that was the first car Christian ever really loved.

In 2015, there are still a lot of good reasons to top the cops. They are that Dylan’s buddy got busted at the second light on Lucas Valley Road last month, going so fast they impounded his car. That the cops made a surprise visit to Winter Formal and wouldn’t let Wyatt in because he’d been drinking, so the whole senior class award show he was supposed to lead had to be rescheduled and everybody just went home. That when Nick got busted for a DUI, they wouldn’t stop to let him pee, so he pissed himself right there in the patrol car’s backseat and had to sit in his own mess all night long in jail. That Colin was released with a cordial farewell and no charges after a night in San Francisco’s lockup, to show him what happens to kids who talk back.

They are that Marin County picked up a pair of Humvees and a cache of assault rifles courtesy of the Department of Defense and that Napa police acquired a $733,000 mine-resistant vehicle, just in case. They are that taxpayers want to pay for body cameras, that we even know what body cameras are. They are that it’s not a given anymore that every member of law enforcement is Officer Friendly; that he’ll remember to reach for his Taser instead of his gun. They are Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and that 15-year-old girl in the pink and yellow bikini who was taken down at a pool party.

As you walk around Sonoma Raceway’s racing pit, older drivers admiring one another’s gear and getting ready to launch, there’s a chorus of sighs as they look over the idling Crown Vics: Wish they’d had that when I was growing up. A round of nods. Got my fair share of tickets back then, they agree. Every time a kid pulls up to the starting line next to a cop: Get ‘em.

Officer Marin of the Fairfield Police grew up racing, but he never got the chance to face off against a cop. If he had — oh, boy. “That would have been the best thing since Swiss cheese,” he says.

The track offers advantages to the open road, he says. It’s clear, safe. “There’s no cats,” he adds.

In Fairfield, Marin rides a motorcycle on the traffic beat. At the racetrack, he drives the traffic division’s Crown Vic, “DUI Enforcement Unit” painted in looping script along its sides. They know him out here: “They see us and they go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the DUI car, so that’s Officer Marin,’” he says.

I ask Marin what he thinks the motivation is for the teens. “I think the biggest draw is they get to race a police officer. And if they win, they get the bragging rights: ‘I whooped him!’” he says.

Ask the kids and, well — it’s good to race out here and avoid the tickets. It’s fun, too. But for Top the Cops’ teens, there’s often little more reason than that the cops are in the other lane.

“As many times as I can get down to the track, I’d like to,” says Jake Mercieca, a senior at Sonoma Valley High. As to whether there’s an extra thrill to beating a cop, he shrugs. They’re pretty good, he says, and their cars are faster than some of the restored Chevys he’s been bringing out to race. But he’s here more for the competition, the same as any other car out there: “When you’re in a competitive sport, it’s fun to try and beat them.”

After the cops finish their heats against the kids, they sometimes loop back for a victory lap or a congratulatory handshake. Mostly, they just roll off the track and head back toward the freeway. The kids linger to race one another head on — no cops here, now — and elect a high school winner for the night. “Now the fun begins,” someone says as the last squad car patiently blinks its turn signal and turns off the track one evening.

Christian concedes that lately, police officers maybe haven’t gotten the best press. “It’s showing that the police have a cool side to them,” he says of Top the Cops. “It shows that there are a lot of cool cops out there also.”

A crowd has gathered at the spectator barrier to watch as Jake takes his fourth victory over the cops this season, this one over Novato PD’s Amy Yardley. Jake’s been coming to the track as long as he can remember; his cousin PJ used to race NASCAR and his grandpa and uncle were car buffs long before he was born. This season, Jake’s undefeated against the cops, and on this day wins with a stripped-down ‘82 Camaro that he pulled out of a field two years ago. The transmission’s gauges are gone so he takes the Camaro through the gears manually, feeling his way through the shifts by sound.

As the lights in Jake’s lane flash to show his victory, Yardley’s siren howling into the distance, an older man rocks back on his heels. He raced the cops when he was younger, he says. They lost.

“Here?” I ask.

He smiles, baring a dozen crooked orange teeth. “On the freeway road.”

The crowd watching Jake is small: just a few dozen people, many of them friends or relatives. Between passes, teenage spectators cluster around their friends’ cars, heads down so as not to make eye contact with any unnecessary adults, till someone procures a can of dip and disburses careful pinches. The racers and spectators are overwhelmingly white, and many of those leaning most eagerly toward the starting line look to be in their 50s and 60s and in little need of outreach.

McKinnie started Top the Cops in part to reduce illegal street racing. Give the kids a safe place to do it and the chance to stick it to a cop, the thinking goes, and they won’t seek it out in the streets.

Top the Cops is also an opportunity to generate some good PR with the teens and with the community at large, McKinnie explains: show them they’re human, that they’re not just trying to get them in trouble, and let the other, older drivers see them making nice with the youngsters. “We’re trying to make this a positive thing, and it’s worked that way,” he says. “When we first started, we had to go over and recruit the kids. Now they come on their own.”

Before each race, the kids are given Top the Cops T-shirts — courtesy of the racetrack — while McKinnie rushes around with a camera, taking pictures of the teens and the officers they’re about to race. One reaches into his breast pocket for a business card and instead pulls out a collectible law enforcement trading card that shows him standing in front of his patrol car, beaming.

In recent years, Top the Cops’ attendance has tapered off. There’s always been some turnover: kids graduate and leave the program; younger students get their licenses and start turning up.

But this time it feels different.

Some of the law enforcement agencies have withdrawn their school resource officers from local high schools in the wake of budget cuts, losing in the process what had been for many departments their main point of contact with driving-age teenagers.

One recent Wednesday afternoon, only two teens turned up at the Drag. Adults were recruited to race against the remaining officers so they could still compete. Officer Dario Giomi of the Petaluma Police Department ended up losing to a man with a full gray beard. As he waited behind a 1970 Chevy pickup for his turn to race, Giomi held up his commemorative photo of the two of them shaking hands: Giomi baby-faced beneath the silver-pointed badge on his baseball cap; his competitor heavily tattooed and twice his age. This one might not go up in the break room.

“Three years ago, we didn’t have enough cops,” Yardley says. “And now, every week’s different — but you know, three years ago, we never had enough cops. There would be two to five of us out here and there would be seven to 10 high schoolers.”

Sometimes, the cops are scarcer still. At another recent Drag, just one officer showed up, losing a single pass to Jake and then leaving. It’s understandable. The officers volunteer to come to the track and for many, like Giomi, it comes on what would otherwise be a day off.

And it might be that street racing as a teenage pursuit has subsided somewhat, giving way to other forms of car exhibitionism. “Now it’s kind of gone to that sideshow thing,” says McKinnie. In recent years, loosely organized — and usually illegal — meets have popped up across the East Bay, most notably in Oakland. Drivers race, do donuts, bounce in place on elaborate hydraulic systems. They drift.

“But those aren’t high school kids doing it in the East Bay,” says McKinnie. “Those are older adults in their 20s and 30s doing that. But the actual drag racing — I don’t think you see that too much anymore.”

Still, as long as there are teens and as long as there are open roads, there will be races. And as long as there are races, there will be tragedies. The first week of June, 60 miles north of Sonoma, two other teenagers, 16 and 17 years old in a 1998 Volkswagen Bug and a 2008 BMW 535i, were driving — fast — across a bridge while a 16-year-old girl named Angelica Contreras and some friends watched from the side.

In the days after the accident, the details trickled out. A race. An embankment. A loss of control. A collision.

They didn’t find Angelica’s body until the next morning.

On screen, drag racing means speed. It’s Danny Zuko and Leo Balmudo racing for pink slips in the dry culvert of the Los Angeles River, Natalie Wood flagging James Dean forward for a game of cliffside chicken. It’s Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and associates casually putting $1 million on a Rio de Janeiro quarter-mile in boosted police cars. Drag races mean pedals to the floor, custom levers that trigger superchargers or, depending on villainy, shoot oil or drop a cache of nails. It’s cutting in front of the other guy and speed at any cost.

Nitrous oxide, meet bracket racing.

At Sonoma Raceway, as at most amateur drag strips, drivers compete in a format called bracket racing. It favors not the fastest driver but the most precise, testing a driver’s ability to do two things: perfectly replicate a previous quarter-mile time and react as quickly as possible to the green light at the starting line. Cars are staggered based on their predicted times: if both of them ran perfectly, they’d reach the finish line at the same time.

Speed is a tool, not a goal, they say. In the second round of one of the adult classes one Wednesday, a ‘92 Honda Accord that looked, and seemingly behaved, pretty much like a ‘92 Honda Accord rolled up to the starting line next to a 1951 Ford Coupe, a rumbling scarlet beauty. The Accord dialed in with a 17.71-second estimated time — glacial by drag standards — and was most of the way down the track before the Coupe even got its green light. The Coupe roared, hitting 140 mph in its pursuit of the Honda. The Accord topped out at 77 mph, and, having almost exactly replicated its dial-in time, won.

Back in the pit, the cops line up to race.

When it comes to racing, the officers are, at least in theory, at a serious disadvantage. Their patrol cars rely on automatic transmissions, letting the cars shift themselves, and they cruise along on low-traction radial tires.

Officer Dario Giomi is driving a Charger that’s already 1-0 for the day, having carried through a short vehicle pursuit earlier in the afternoon. The Charger bears little resemblance to what you’d find at a dealership. Like other squad cars, it has additions specific to the department, few of which are well suited to racing: a heavy cage in the back; special alternators, brakes, and electronics to fuel the lights; extra batteries; a heavy-duty cooling system; an altered suspension.

But there are some benefits to squad cars. Cops can use their radar, for one, to get a more accurate reading of their acceleration than a speedometer provides. Racing slicks are preferable to road tires, but they’re expensive — beyond a policeman’s budget. So Kevin McKinnie, back when he was still in the force and racing on Wednesdays, explained the nature of the Top the Cops program to a local shop and ended up getting a pair for free. He’d get to the track early and head over to the shop, taking off his gun belt and jacking his patrol car up to swap the tires out. Give the boys in blue in a fighting chance.

And for all their vehicles’ disadvantages, the officers have dominated the 2015 season. Only Jake Mercieca has been able to beat them reliably.

Yet McKinnie worries a little about the future of Top the Cops.

In the 21 years it’s been running — including the 11 since he retired — he can’t remember ever missing a Top the Cops event. This year, he even delayed a knee replacement so it wouldn’t interfere with the season.

If all goes well, he’ll go right into surgery as soon as the season wraps up and the kids go back to school. He needs to be back on his feet by November so he can take care of his other project, Vets in ‘Vettes.

For years, McKinnie has worked with a local Corvette club to escort veterans through the Petaluma Veteran’s Day Parade. He started with World War II vets, but their numbers have grown scarce of late, so they’ve started to welcome in folks from Korea. Vets in ‘Vettes treats them to breakfast, sends them out to a photoshoot, and then loads them into a fleet of waiting Corvettes for the parade. The last few years, McKinnie’s gotten the Sonoma County Calendar Girls to dress up in World War II costumes — Red Cross, Rosie the Riveter, you name it — and ride in or march alongside the cars as they roll through town.

So he really needs that knee.

He’s not too worried about the kids: these things go in cycles. He glances over at a group of officers and teens and frowns: one of the officers has DUI goggles in his car, he says. You put them on and the world goes woozy; you see how unnavigable it all becomes.

“He should have those out now, actually,” McKinnie says, frowning.

Some old guy — some old guy— is bothering Madison. This is what they do. Give her tips. Say they’ll go easy on her. Like they don’t know that two-thirds of the way through the racing season, she leads the high school group with almost double the points of her closest competitor, Jake Mercieca.

Most nights this year, Madison has been the only girl racing in the high school class.

Often, the guys make the mistake of underestimating her. Not the guys she knows — they know better — but drivers who are new to the track. You know: random people. Old guys.

“It’ll be kind of small comments, but you’re like, huh. That’s interesting,” Madison says. “Like ‘Oh, let’s give the girl the bye run,’” — a solo pass, and effectively a skip past an elimination round — “and I’m like, ‘Nah, I don’t need the bye run, thank you.’”

“You can give it to him,” she says, gesturing around her. The deputy she’s set to race is talking to another officer a few feet away, but he takes no notice of this.

On the last weekend in July, the National Hot Rod Association comes to Sonoma and puts on a massive three-day event. Top the Cops comes in as a kind of halftime show, a dozen teens racing a dozen officers in front of 50,000 spectators. The cops are enthusiastically booed. The officers get it, they say: they’d be doing the same if they were out there.

Madison won’t make it, though. She’s good behind the wheel, but better in a saddle: she’ll compete instead at the world championships for horseback riding.

In America, car culture is changing. For decades, muscle cars have steadily lost ground to lighter, cheaper sports cars made overseas.

They’re infinitely more complicated beasts, and when something goes wrong, their teenage drivers are more likely to send them to the shop than to attempt to ferret out the problem themselves.

Drifting joined the Wednesday Night Drag program at Sonoma five years ago. “I think that’s got a lot more attention now than Top the Cops does,” says Officer Amy Yardley. “We did toy with the idea of, would they let us take a drift car out there? But it’s too dangerous. It would destroy the car.”

“It’s too bad,” she says, looking in the direction of the drifters’ screeching tires and cheering fans, “because that’s kind of the crowd. That used to be this crowd.”

Over at the drift, cars are spinning around turns, smoke filling the air. The crowd is noticeably younger and more diverse than its drag racing counterpart, and several times the size. Few faces look older than 25 and resemble, as far as jeering and probable Valhalla enthusiasm go, one of the less-regimented of the Mad Max gangs. There is the sense that the general approach to traffic tickets here is to crumple them on the ground.

In drifting, there are goals, if not quite rules. Points are awarded for proximity to other cars, to walls, to cones. In pairs, the rear car tries to stay as close as possible to the lead car, which does whatever it can to get away. Like a bullfighter, the greatest competitor gets the nearest to destruction and shows the least fear. If there are judges, though, they are nowhere to be seen.

In a recent interview, the manager of Sonoma Raceway’s drifting program told the San Francisco Chronicle, “A lot of motor sports are pretty cut and dry. To spectators they’re very boring.” It’s hard not to think of the drift’s sister event. Topping the cops just isn’t as exciting as it used to be.

Matt Aton is there with a friend, Kyle Dimick, leaning on the fence and watching a pair of Nissan 240SXes squeal by. Matt used to race his Mustang 5.0 in the Top the Cops program when he was in high school, and when I tell him I’m there to write about it, he’s alarmed: “Are they closing it?” he asks.

At his feet is a tiny bulldog puppy, all wags and kisses and the subject of, by my estimate, at least a dozen Instagram posts in as many minutes. “She’s fresh out!” Kyle exclaims, gripping the leash of a full-grown bulldog panting happily in a spiked collar, the dog’s chest so huge that its legs jut out at odd angles. He’s the pup’s grandfather, they say; their friend Ron is a breeder. Matt’s right leg ends in a silver prosthetic and as another string of cars barrels by, he has to shuffle around the puppy to watch the action. A driver slams into a wall and there’s a collective sigh: Aw, man. “Vallejo,” reads a tattoo on Matt’s arm.

He appreciates what Top the Cops does, and repeats the spiel as if from memory: “It’s good to keep the young kids on the track instead of on the street doing something illegal,” he says.

His Mustang is gone these days. He doesn’t race at all anymore, and today he’s not interested in watching the cops or any of the other drag races. He can see how kids might be more interested in the drift.

American Graffiti opens with the town’s undefeated drag racer, Paul Le Mat’s John Milner, lamenting the shrinking of the downtown strip.

“Ah, you know, I remember about five years ago, take you a couple hours and a tank full of gas just to make one circuit,” he says. “It was really something.”

Yet the characters spend the whole of the film on or around the strip, an entire universe contained in cruises and drag races and cherry Cokes at Mel’s Drive-In. The viewer is left to think: maybe John was wrong.

But as the credits roll, Lucas rips the illusion away. John and Toad soon meet their ends, we learn, in a drunk driving accident and Vietnam, while Ron Howard’s Steve, who decided not to go to college at the end of the movie, meets a fate even worse: he’s an insurance agent in Modesto. Only our protagonist, Richard Dreyfuss’s Curt Henderson, made off all right, as a writer in Canada. As it turns out, the strip was shrinking after all, even if Lucas let the boys spend a night pretending it was not.

There is no doubt that everyone at the Wednesday Night Drag is absolutely earnest: They want the very best for these kids, and for their relationships with law enforcement. But it’s not 1962 anymore. It’s not even 2014.

“You just can’t stay 17 forever,” Steve tells Curt.

The vineyards and sheep pastures of Sonoma can feel like the furthest place on Earth from Ferguson and Cleveland, or from any of the very many places where cops can do bad things and where bad things can happen to kids. And yet: even here at the Raceway, even with the commemorative T-shirts and the beer goggles, the selfies and the trading cards and the admonitions to stay safe, there is the sense that something has changed. It’s driving away fast, leaving everything behind, and it’s never, ever coming back.

July 11, 2015; Augusta, Georgia

On the second floor of the Augusta Museum of History, the touch of a button sends the sounds of this town’s most famous native son cascading past autographed headshots, family photos and a pearlescent sequined cape. "It’s a man’s world," the unmistakable voice wails. "Man made the cars to take us over the road."

Singer James Brown took audience members to places few others could, rousing them to their feet with a singular genius that ultimately transformed his industry. "And after man make everything … You know that man makes money. To buy from other man." Growing up in poverty, Brown the performer was so good and so prolific for so long, that in the end he became a brand unto himself — "the Godfather of Soul" — a global icon who so transcended a single musical genre that he practically created his very own.

On this day, only a few miles away, 16 and 17 year olds with similar ambitions gather. The young men wearing blue KD 35 backpacks know a basketball career leveraged correctly can be just as lucrative as one in music. But some also know the clock is already ticking.  The basketball stage is a young man’s world, and the opportunities to stand out and take a step forward are rare and must be taken advantage of when they appear.

Few command this stage like Malik Monk, a rising high school senior and consensus five-star recruit. If Malik and his half-brother Marcus are right and everything goes the way they believe it will and are planning for, he may one day become a player whose brand will be as identifiable and lucrative as that of The Godfather of Soul.

At 11:15 a.m., Monk wears large earphones, chin tilted down into a sinewy, 6′4 frame draped over a chair in a hotel hobby. An aficionado of Kevin Gates and Lil Herb, he is most certainly not listening to James Brown on this sweltering Saturday morning.

Monk’s long-term goal is to be an NBA superstar but, for now, he will have to settle for being the nation’s most exciting high school basketball player. The top-ranked shooting guard in the class of 2016 boasts an unprecedented mix of hops, court awareness, shooting range and flat-out flair. He could be college basketball’s most electrifying phenom in 2016-17. Already, insiders struggle for apt comparisons for his skill level and athleticism. They tend to compare him with high school versions of Derrick Rose or John Wall, and then quickly add that Monk shoots much better at his age than they did.

"There is no limit to what this kid can be," CBS Sports columnist Gary Parrish says. "If we looked up in seven years and he was one of the top 10 players in the NBA, that would not surprise me."

While Malik Monk sits in the middle of the Augusta Marriott lobby, he also stands squarely at the forefront of multiple and interlocking high-stakes games.

Of central concern to many college basketball fans is where he’ll play after finishing his senior year of high school in Bentonville, Arkansas. In August, after well over a year of anticipation in recruiting news circles, for the first time Monk will announce the list of schools from which he’ll choose. Monk already has scholarship offers from the likes of Kansas, North Carolina, Baylor, Florida State and Oregon, but the fans of Arkansas and Kentucky — two of the programs recruiting him the hardest — are most outspoken in their desire for him. The recruiting battle for Monk between Razorbacks head coach Mike Anderson and Wildcats head coach John Calipari has ramifications beyond the court. As Parrish points out, the battle for Malik involves one family with multiple and deep in-state ties versus this century’s most effective recruiter and is breathlessly played out in the media of both places.

The level of interest and line of questioning concerning that decision at times borders on the ludicrous. Earlier this summer, a recruiting reporter informed Malik that, according to the website 247Sports, he has a 71 percent chance of signing with Arkansas and a 29 percent chance of heading to Kentucky. As the camera rolled, she then asked him to comment on these metrics. Chuckling at the absurdity, he said it’s "50/50."

Yet the internal dynamics at play differ from the decisions facing most other high profile recruits and appear considerably more complicated and sophisticated. Malik’s older brother and advisor, Marcus, played for the Razorbacks between 2004 and 2009. More recently, he spent a year as a graduate assistant in the Hogs’ basketball program while earning a Master’s in Business Administration degree from the university’s Sam M. Walton College of Business. Malik also grew up across the street from Rashad "Ky" Madden, his cousin, a former four-star recruit and later a starting guard in the Razorback backcourt. Yet despite these ties and more, the Monks maintain Arkansas holds no upper hand in Malik’s recruitment.

There is, oddly, both more at stake here, and less. Malik’s decision may well turn out to be more important to the schools involved than it is to his own future, because at 17, Malik is already looking beyond that choice.  He is already preparing for the man’s world that may soon confront him.

On this Saturday, however, coaches from both Arkansas and Kentucky will be on hand to watch what most matters to Monk right now. He and his AAU team, the Arkansas Wings, are on the verge of being knocked out of the Peach Jam, the nation’s most prestigious and competitive basketball tournament for high schoolers. It’s part of Nike’s Elite Youth Basketball League, where in one game last year Malik scored a single-game high of 59 points, an EYBL record. "This is the best of the best," Malik says to a reporter from USA Today about the 2015 Peach Jam. "You’re going to get pushed every day so you have to bring it. If people aren’t prepared for it, I’m going to kill you."

Today’s game is a knockout contest for the Wings, if not for Malik personally. If they lose today against Team CP3, which features Harry Giles, a 6′10 rising senior from North Carolina already tabbed by many mock drafts as the No. 1 pick in the 2017 NBA Draft, they go home. But whether they win or lose will matter little to Malik’s future prospects. No matter what happens to the Wings, he is already certain to advance his career.

As he does so often, Marcus Monk hovers near his younger half-brother. Marcus is many things to Malik but on this morning, the 6′6 29-year-old is also a coach. After a night of scouring film of Team CP3, he begins, addressing Malik and the rest of the players as they also settle into the hotel lobby. Looking up from his handwritten notes, Marcus warns the Wings’ big men about the impending challenge of guarding Giles. "You’re gonna have to turn, chest him and box out."

"If you just turn, he’s gonna kill you."

The Wings’ assistant coach paces a bit, briefing the guards, and then wraps it: "We’re gonna make them work and we’re gonna make them play to what we wanna do. And then we’re gonna play tonight." Malik rises and he and his teammates stroll through the lobby doors toward waiting cars. Marcus and their mother, Jackie Monk, follow. Within minutes, they cross the river and a state border, heading for the tourney site in North Augusta, South Carolina.

Peach Jam; Riverview Park Activities Center

The Peach Jam is the last and crowning event of Nike’s EYBL, a five-year-old annual series of spring and summer events spread across five U.S. cities. Throughout the course of three days, from morning until night, 40 teams in two age categories (17-and-under and 16-and-under) play pool games on four courts. College referees call EYBL games following mostly NCAA rules and all courts are marked with college three-point lines. The sporting goods manufacturer’s sponsorship of Peach Jam is abundantly clear to the hordes of fans streaming into the Riverview Park Activities Center from the parking lots. Before they even reach the front door, they walk past more than 30 Nike swooshes, large ones marked on lawns, smalls ones on the walkway signs, medium ones hanging on the front of the check-in table and from banners above the center’s entrance.

Inside the Center, it’s famous faces galore, a who’s who of college basketball’s coaching elite. Here, by the racquetball courts, is Connecticut head coach Kevin Ollie, asking somebody for his phone number. Over there, slipping through a coaches’ entrance door on one of the four courts, is Wake Forest head coach Danny Manning, a backpack hanging off one shoulder. They are hardly alone. Nearly every big-time college head coach is in the building, as well as an untold number of assistants.

On this day, a massive crowd slowly congregates in the bleachers of a single court in the athletic complex for the marquee event. Roughly 100 coaches cram into chairs on one side of the walled-off space, eager to take advantage of a brief "live period" where they can see recruits compete up close. They can’t talk to them, though, thanks to fairly Byzantine NCAA rules regulating the where’s and when’s of this kind of thing. Near center court, backs to the score clock, Mike Anderson and Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski sit side by side.

Soon, Harry Giles saunters on to the court, looking every bit the "man child" recruitniks bill him to be. Giles, an agile, versatile and skilled frontcourt player, will almost certainly be hailed as a potential NBA franchise centerpiece in the mold of an Anthony Davis or Kevin Durant. He even wears a KD branded black T-shirt with a simple message: "EASY MONEY." Giles is the kind of player who, like Monk, has the potential to one day warrant the production of a Nike-branded line of his own, or perhaps even front a company bearing his name.

As tip off nears, photographers line up two-deep underneath the baskets. On the track concourse above the court, the octogenarians with their walking canes who were doing laps earlier in the morning are gone. Instead, a thick crowd pushes against the railing, its murmurs adding to the big-game atmosphere.

During warm-ups, Malik and Harry spot each other and meet at center court for two fist bumps. After playing in summer events like this for the last five years, they understand each other’s specific pressures and choices better than almost anybody else can. A decade from now, both players could play instrumental roles in the NBA’s continual global expansion and efforts to rival soccer as the world’s top sport.

Malik rarely smiles during Peach Jam games, but he does now.

This is the kind of stage he has been preparing for since he was simply known as Marcus’  scrawny, little brother.

June 26, 2015; Springdale, Arkansas

On the afternoon before the NBA Draft, in a warehouse gym off Interstate 49, Malik and Marcus sweat through two hours of intricate ball-handling drills and core-strengthening exercises. Last year, Marcus often drove the nearly 30 miles from his apartment in Fayetteville to Jackie’s apartment in Bentonville to pick Malik up and take him to the gym for training, but now that Malik has his driver’s license, they just meet at the gym.

Malik drove over in his white Chevy truck. A discarded "Don’t Buck Safety" camo hunting cap rests on the sideline near a container of gum and pile of his gear. Malik and Marcus grew up in the outdoors and Malik still likes to hunt. Any kind of game will do, so long as he’s traipsing through the woods. "I really just like shooting guns," he says. He has been so busy with summer school and training, though, that he’s only made it out to hunt once this summer. At this stage of his life, however, he is more the hunted than the hunter.

Malik and three younger teens gather on the court and watch video of drills Marcus displays on his cell phone. The court belongs to the 35-year-old Arkansas Wings organization, over which Marcus is executive director. He often trains Malik along with players on younger Wings teams. The group practices quick one-step crossovers known as "Hardaways" using six yellow cones. In another kind of crossover dribbling drill, some of the teens put neither sufficient shake nor bake into their moves and Marcus calls them out on it, urging them not to be so stiff. "Ya’ll gotta flow," he says, showing them how to move those hips.

As Marcus twirls and spins around another set of cones, his friend Nick Mason — a local sports radio host — yells from the sideline, "I see you dancing out there!"

"Hey, I just got rhythm," Marcus replies, a broad smile spreading across his face. "I’m 80 years old."

Bob Leverone/Sporting News via Getty Images

Marcus isn’t quite that old, but he is something of a living legend in these parts. He and Malik grew up with their mother in Lepanto, Arkansas, a town of less than 1,900 people about 45 minutes from Memphis. Malik’s father, Michael Scales, a carpenter, lived nearby. As a two-sport star in high school, Marcus dreamed of playing basketball and football in college and says the University of Arkansas gave him the best opportunity to do so. He got a shot at both, but found more success in football. He became an All-SEC wide receiver and still holds the Razorbacks’ single-season touchdown reception record with 11 in 2006.

After brief trials with the Bears, Giants and Panthers, knee injuries ultimately derailed his NFL dreams, but that experience, along with a two-year stint playing professional basketball in Europe, provided him with knowledge and experience that now benefits his younger brother and other Wings players. Marcus knows firsthand how fragile pro dreams can be, and he refrains from discussing Malik’s NBA future as a given. "I don’t think about the NBA, I don’t think about none of that. I’m just trying to take care of now — high school," he says. "You can’t skip steps." All the same, he knows the path. One step at a time, the Monks are laying down a foundation for Malik’s promising future, one with an end game that may lie far beyond the NBA. Here, the goal is not just a career, but an entire brand, a lifestyle, something that could continue past his playing days and perhaps even transcend sports.

A major stride that direction first took place two years ago when Malik and Jackie moved to the booming region of northwest Arkansas to live closer to Marcus. In many ways Malik, who refers to Marcus as his brother, considers Marcus to be like a father to him, someone who has long provided guidance and direction. And now Marcus, armed with an MBA and no small measure of insight into the world of big-time college and professional sports, is prepared to help his brother make it to the next level and beyond.

The move to Bentonville High School was about more than reuniting the two brothers. All three Monks agree that the school has provided Malik with a more rigorous education. Malik has about a 3.4 GPA, Jackie says, and will get ACT tutoring starting in September. But there is more to it than that. The Bentonville basketball program is well organized and well financed thanks to an influx of booster club funds and donations in large part generated by the fact Bentonville is home to the world headquarters of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. as well as hundreds of vendors working with the retail giant.

Altogether, the move to Bentonville is just one of the first steps to gain Malik’s admittance into a man’s world. While big stars of the last century like Magic, Bird and MJ had to wait until their professional bonafides were well-established before looking beyond their playing careers, and Kobe and LeBron were shown the way by basketball marketing guru Sonny Vaccaro and others, Malik and Marcus are at the forefront of an accelerating trend for players this century. They are executing their own plan, taking control of the process from the start. Whether they are aware of it or not, by focusing both on Malik’s game and building his image while he is still in high school, they represent an evolving trend.

Through his connections from the University of Arkansas and other basketball circles, Marcus provides Malik with outside, top-notch training opportunities in northwest Arkansas. One of Marcus’ friends — Kelly Lambert — is a former strength coach for the Razorbacks and Memphis Grizzlies. He has worked with Malik this summer to help him add muscle to get up to 190 pounds. After the drills, Marcus takes Malik through Scorpion stretches and starts him on balancing exercises while holding weights.

He may be in high school, but at times Malik already trains like a professional. Today, he wears a Chicago Bulls T-shirt, which proves prescient. Later that night, Chicago will draft his friend Bobby Portis with the No. 22 overall pick. Portis, the 2014-15 SEC Player of the Year as a Hog, has been publicly outspoken in recruitment of Malik on behalf of Arkansas. Malik has known Portis for years as a fellow member of the Wings, and he says they talk about twice a week. Portis, in fact, showed up last year with practically the entire Razorback basketball team at two of Malik’s high school games, and even at his draft announcement press conference said he hoped his college success showed more in-state high school stars like Malik they should stay home.

Malik says he didn’t know Bobby had mentioned him by name, on air, until a couple weeks later when he saw something about it on Twitter. He says he appreciated the respect but doesn’t put himself on that level yet. Still, he adds, "We’re both from Arkansas so I understand why he said it."

Kelly Kline/Getty Images

While balancing on one leg, Malik says that in private Bobby doesn’t try to sway him to Arkansas. "We don’t talk about school, really," he says. The topic of conversation is far more likely to be girls or music. Part of that is because Malik is still only 17 years old, but part of it may also be his upcoming college choice is a decision that will weigh more on the emotions of the fans of those big programs than it will on his own. To be an NBA superstar today means wanting a world stage, like LeBron, and not just that of a single school or city or state.

After the workout, the Monks consider what to do next. Malik has a plane to catch the following morning to attend the Nike Basketball Academy in Santa Monica, California, where he will learn from the likes of LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant. The brothers are thinking they may be able to squeeze in a 6 p.m. pickup game at the Fayetteville Athletic Club. Marcus, however, discovers he has run out of clean socks.

"Hey, you got an extra pair of socks?" he asks his brother as they move toward the exit. "Yeah, but they probably stink," Malik replies.

"I’m good then."

They close the doors but will return often in the coming weeks as Marcus’ connections help sharpen Malik’s game at the gym. In addition to the drills, he has organized workouts and pickup games with pro players and former Razorbacks like Ronnie Brewer, Jr. (formerly of the Jazz, Bulls and Rockets), Courtney Fortson (Banvit in Turkey), Ky Madden (Grizzlies summer league) and Marshawn Powell (Treviso Basket in Italy), and current Hogs like Jimmy Whitt and the recently suspended Anton Beard and JaCorey Williams, the kind of competition neither high school nor AAU ball can provide.

Everyone — including Malik — understands any number of factors from injury to hubris to burnout could derail his superstardom dreams. And there’s always the possibility his game will stall far short of superstar status. At this level, nothing is guaranteed. All, the same, Fortson can’t help but gush.

"He’s a guaranteed pro," Fortson says of Malik. Fortson, who played for the Los Angeles Clippers, believes Malik has all the tools to succeed in the NBA, starting with a stable family. "The way Marcus handles him — that’s the biggest key. He lets him be a kid. A lot of high-profile players don’t have that. A lot of them have weight on their shoulders."

At this point, the 5’11 Fortson can occasionally dominate Malik when they guard each other, but Fortson says Malik will become much harder to defend as he gets stronger and tightens his dribble by staying closer to the ground.

Fortson can’t recall a player at any level with a similar combination of explosive leaping ability and an ability to glide while bumping defenders out of the way. "I really haven’t seen anybody who can jump like that."

Nor had many of the curious fans paying $5 for a pass to check out the first of the Wings’ five games at Peach Jam. When everybody playing is a college prospect, everybody wants to see who are the men among the boys.

Peach Jam; July 9, 2015, Game One

In their first game, the Wings weather a storm from Memphis-based Team Penny and their five-star big man P.J. Washington, a Texan now playing for Findley College Prep near Las Vegas. Malik hits only one of eight three-pointers, but otherwise plays well, finishing with 21 points in the 58-50 win.

Afterward, the Monks slap hands with the opposing coaches and players. One Team Penny assistant, Todd Day, is a former Razorbacks All-American and NBA veteran who knows both brothers. Day sometimes visits former teammates and coaches in Fayetteville and occasionally helps train Malik. He raves about Malik’s abilities, deeming him the best prep guard in the nation, even better than one of his own former Team Penny players — Dennis Smith, Jr., of Fayetteville, North Carolina, the top-rated point guard in the class of 2016.

Day knows the stakes. Growing up in Memphis, Day was also highly recruited but didn’t stay and play for his hometown Memphis Tigers or in-state Tennessee Volunteers. He chose to go out of state. At Arkansas, under head coach Nolan Richardson and then assistant Mike Anderson, Day led the program to a Final Four return and laid the foundation for a national championship two years after he entered the 1992 NBA Draft.

Asked if he has any advice for Malik, Day says "There’s always pressure to stay in state, but you just got to do what’s best for you."

If there is a mantra on which almost all modern star athletes can hang their mouthpieces, it’s "do what’s best for you." What does this actually mean, though? In the decades since basketball became a global phenomenon and rising stars have developed their own platforms, the meaning of "best" has accrued multiple new layers. For a player like Malik it may not have much to do with whose national letter of intent he signs. His wingspan is 6′6 but his reach already extends beyond the borders of college basketball — or may one day soon.

The emergence of social media allows stars who cultivate their own "brands" while still in school to see immediate returns once entering the pros. More social media followers, for instance, can eventually equal more money. This development coincides with rapidly expanding coverage of all NBA summer time events — from the draft to free agency to summer league — which has made the NBA nearly a year-round sport, and one where increasingly more emphasis is placed on individuals rather than on teams.

This trend has already reached college ball. Take D’Angelo Russell, the star Ohio State shooting guard who in April declared for the pros after one season. By the end of his freshman year, in some circles, interest in his draft position threatened to surpass interest in how far the Buckeyes would go in the NCAA tourney. More than 125,000 fans were already following his Twitter feed, double the number following @OhioStateHoops, Buckeyes basketball’s official Twitter account, a discrepancy that has only increased since the draft. Before playing in a regular season pro game, Russell is already prepared to cash in, through his own platform, in countless ways beyond his salary or a simple sneaker endorsement contract.

Malik’s Twitter handle, @AhmadMonk, pays homage to his middle name, yet already a raft of fake accounts using his name have sprung up, some of their owners likely hoping to cash in at some point in the future, others just creating mischief. And while some fans of high school and college sports may believe the creation of a personal brand for a player in high school indicates a self-obsessed prima donna, that’s not necessarily true. In the era of "one and dones," it’s simply smart business to practice a tactic that will provide a higher supplemental revenue stream as soon as possible after declaring for the pros.  Down the line, a head start in personal branding will help better leverage the myriad ways established and retired star athletes can profit off their own name through such things as branded clothing lines, restaurants, videos, etc. This ultimately means more money, yes, but it also means retaining cultural relevance and acquiring the ability to pursue personal charitable or social missions sometime in the future.

In addition to Twitter, Instagram and other types of social media, it’s especially vital stars tend to their own brands in the form of a website or YouTube channel while still in high school.That’s because that is the time of their careers they are more likely to own — or at least be allowed to republish — the pictures and videos of their on-court exploits. Once they join a college program, then most images of their viral highlights and dramatic moments will be controlled by others — their schools, their conferences, the NCAA or media outlets.

"The NCAA’s current rules severely restrict the ways in which the players can market themselves and license their name, image, and likeness — all to the benefit of the member schools and the NCAA," says Sathya Gosselin, a Hausfeld LLP attorney who has served as trial counsel in the landmark O’Bannon v. NCAA litigation. All the same, the sports information directors of NCAA basketball programs increasingly tend to promote their players’ social media channels and will, for example, tweet out mention of a player’s Twitter handle after that player makes a spectacular dunk. Those players who already have connected their social media accounts to an established asset in the form of a branded website ultimately stand to gain even more from this kind of promotion.

This is only a small part of a larger evolution which compels future stars like Malik to already think beyond college, and consider the extent to which their own business interests — and they almost always have business interests — influence what they want out of school, versus what they want in the pros and on top of that what they may want in retirement. In Malik’s case, the actual college he attends — whether a Grambling State or an Ohio State — likely will not affect his draft stock. Malik believes talent rises to the top and he doesn’t think a player’s NBA draft stock depends on where he plays in college. "If you’re putting up major numbers, somebody’s going to find out," he says. "It don’t matter where you’re at." While observers have griped the "one and done" approach "uses" the players, in Malik’s case this dynamic has the potential to work in reverse — if a brand is established in time.

Related

Malik Monk wants to be more than a mix-tape legend

As Todd Day noted, Malik will end up doing more for whatever school he chooses than vice versa. His significance goes beyond simply winning games or making a deep tourney run. While Malik is a well-rounded, fundamentally sound player, he is best known for YouTube-melting flourishes on passes, forceful drives through the lane and, especially, on dunks of every imaginable variety. On breakaway scoring opportunities, he often goes to the rim so strongly and so high, that he must turn his face away right after a dunk to avoid being hit by the ball at net level.

Were he to attend Arkansas, Malik would likely not only pack arenas with plays headlining SportsCenter, but he could help Arkansas attract future recruits for years afterwards. While he would be the face of the program and an immediate in-state legend, beyond that it is less clear what the program would do for him.

Kentucky presents a different situation. The Wildcats’ basketball fan base is one of the largest in the country, much bigger than Arkansas’. That could translate into more social media followers and potential customers down the line. While the choice of schools for the most elite recruits may not impact draft position, it could affect how quickly their brands emerge in the months after college and in the first years of their NBA careers.

Similarly, more Kentucky games are broadcast nationally than any other programs, and many Kentucky fans believe that exposure helps translate into better endorsements deals when Wildcats turn pro. So does UK coach John Calipari. As he writes in his 2014 book Players First: Coaching From the Inside Out, "I’ve had agents tell me they are able to get better shoe deals for our NBA players," he writes. "The shoe company doesn’t have to invent our players’ brand — or build up their Q score — because they already have one."

Kentucky has developed a relentless recruiting machine, regularly churning out the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class, in part because its coach openly pushes his best players to go pro after their mandated one year in college. Calipari has also perfected the art of turning a player’s NBA dreams into a team-first principle. "I really believe that most kids who play for me in Lexington go higher in the draft than if they played somewhere else — and especially, in the years we prosper as a team."

Malik, in fact, has already played with a couple former Arkansas Wings who have followed Calipari to Lexington. Two summers ago, it was Memphis’ Skal Labissiere, who will play for Kentucky in 2015-16 and already projects to be a top three pick in the 2016 NBA Draft. Before that, when Malik was in junior high, one of the top dogs in the Wings program was Little Rock native Archie Goodwin. In fall 2011, Goodwin famously cited his commitment to Kentucky over Arkansas as a "business decision" in line with his desire to be a "one-and-done." Goodwin was drafted late in the first round after his freshman year and will soon enter his third year with the Phoenix Suns. Malik may well follow a similar track.

Peach Jam; July 9, Game Two

The Wings are rocking their "visitors" navy blue, red and tan uniforms against the Philadelphia area-based Team Final. With 7:50 to go in the first half, up 20-14, Malik and teammate Ryan Pippens take a seat on the bench and Marcus fetches cups of Gatorade for both.

Photo courtesy Nicole Taylor/Position Sports

Early in the second half, the Wings build the lead to double digits and begin to separate. When Malik dribbles up the floor, his eyes constantly scan teammates and defenders beyond the man guarding him. Few defenders dare closely guard Malik in space, as his speed allows him to burst past them essentially at will. With 14 minutes left, Malik does just that, weaving into traffic and firing a pass around  6′9, 215-pound Dylan Painter to his teammate and friend Eric Curry.

Curry, a 6′8, 210-pound senior out of Little Rock, at first bobbles the missile on the baseline, then gains control and leaps up and flicks it into the basket for a 41-26 lead. His good hands and adroitness around the rim are reasons why he’s become the Wings’ second-most recruited player. Curry has offers from Virginia Commonwealth, SMU, Oklahoma State, Murray State, St. Louis, Western Kentucky and, more recently, Minnesota, Iowa State and Arkansas. Some of the offers may be both sincere — and calculated. Arkansas, SMU and Iowa State coaches are interested in Curry alone, but it cannot hurt that Malik and Curry hang out with each other a lot during Wings events.

Team Final closes the gap to 46-36, but just as its fans start whooping it up, Monk gets the ball, speeds down the sideline in a few bounds and rises up from 24 feet. Backpedaling, he doesn’t refrain from mouthing off a bit as the ball drops through the rim.

Of current NBA stars, it is Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook whom Monk most models his turbo-charged game after. While Monk is not as demonstrative as the fiery Westbrook, he also isn’t afraid to show his emotions.

Early in the second half, for instance, the Wings inbound the ball and on the other side of the court, Monk awaits on offense. He’s the only Wing on his corner of the court, but slowly Mitchell Smith of Van Buren, Arkansas, drifts over the paint to join him on that side. Malik doesn’t agree with the spacing, and shoos Smith back to the other side.

Smith pauses a beat, and Malik now takes his mouth guard out and shoos him again. Smith slightly shakes his head, grinning, and trots back across the paint.

Soon afterward, Malik heats up on the left block. Spinning over his left shoulder, he uses his 40-inch plus vertical to rise and knock down a fadeaway jumper so pure the nearly new nylon still vibrates 20 seconds later. He soon posts up near the same spot, backs the defender down, and from about 10 feet away, and turns over his right shoulder to swish a left-handed hook. Arkansas wraps up an 80-66 win, and Malik finishes with 31 points including a relatively ho-hum (by his standards) reverse double-pump dunk.

Peach Jam; July 10, Games Three and Four

Monk isn’t as sharp the next morning. D.C.-based Team Takeover surges to an early 22-15 lead as Malik gets into foul trouble.

Early in the second half, John Calipari appears in the corner of the room, holding what looks to be a cup of coffee. He’s just flown in from eyeing prospects at two other high-profile summer basketball tournaments, one presented by Adidas in the Indianapolis area and the other by Under Armour in Atlanta. On the other side of the court, SMU coach Larry Brown sits, chatting amiably with Villanova and Kansas coaches on either side of him. He, too, has made a run at Malik and even though he appears to be looking elsewhere, it never hurts to be seen.

Arkansas and Team Takeover trade scores throughout the second half. An ankle injury sidelines Lawson Korita, the Wings’ top sharpshooter, for the rest of the tourney but Arkansas spurts ahead on a Ryan Pippens’ three, making it 51-49 with 6 minutes to go. Then Takeover star V.J. King, a Top 100 recruit originally from Akron, Ohio, tries to get going by forcing the issue. The Louisville commit takes his man off the dribble but drives into a thicket of defenders, forcing up an errant shot. The lack of ball movement sets his burly, diminutive coach off. "Move the fucking ball!" Keith Stevens yells. "You’re fucking selfish!"

Malik hits two three pointers in the closing minutes, and the Wings look like they are gaining control, up 59-55 with 1:25 left in the game. But Takeover surges in the last minute and half and pulls away to win 62-59. King collects 12 points on 3-for-12 shooting, along with five rebounds. But he does go to the line 10 times, where he makes six shots. Monk, meanwhile, finishes the game with only 10 points on 4-for-13 shooting, with four rebounds and three assists. But he doesn’t go to the line even once.

After the game, children who have presumably seen some of Malik’s viral dunk mixtapes congregate around him to get pictures taken by his side. He smiles and patiently waits until the crowd of 10 or so dissipates. Then, it’s on to the interviews.

Although reserved by nature, Malik is already comfortable with the media thanks to his brother’s help. In some ways, Marcus serves as Malik’s publicist, buffering him from coaches and media who want to reach him while polishing his image to the outside world. Coaches and reporters alike learn Marcus is the first person to contact in the Monk family, and he will route them on to Jackie or Malik as necessary.

Drawing on his own experience in the limelight, Marcus coaches Malik on how to be more communicative and comfortable on screen. Ben Roberts of the Lexington Herald-Leader recalls that Marcus administered one impromptu lesson last summer at a Nike event when, just as the TV cameras started filming an interview with Malik, Marcus noticed he was chewing gum. Marcus asked to cut the interview short and told Malik he needed to remove the gum.

It is all part of the plan, another step on a path leading to far more television camera lights.  Marcus has also worked with Malik’s screen presence by already launching malikamonk.com. On the website and corresponding YouTube channel, MalikAMonk, the brothers have produced a three-part documentary-style series called "The Journey." In a series of short clips, Malik and Marcus discuss his high school basketball season, practice habits, his teammates, their upbringing in Lepanto and other topics. The camera follows Malik through his practice drills to show his dedication to the craft. All the time, Marcus emphasizes the process, not end goal, in their partnership. "I may try to help him build a platform," Marcus says, but it’s up to Malik to build his own brand through his own hard work and actions.

On this evening, national reporters along with Arkansas and Kentucky-based journalists search for updates and details about Malik’s recruiting. Malik is asked about how badly Calipari wants him. Apparently, pretty badly. He tells The Courier-Journal Calipari has told him he is a "top priority" for the Wildcats’ program. Malik is then asked about pressure from Arkansas fans to stay home. In public, strangers ask him if he will be a Razorback and teammates and friends like to kid him by throwing Hog calls his way. Malik isn’t flustered then, and he isn’t flustered now. "With the fans, there is a bunch of pressure but I’m not worried about it because I’m just going to pick where I’m comfortable going."

His brother sounds a similar note, insisting, as he has done repeatedly for two years now, that his deep Arkansas ties won’t influence what’s best for Malik. "I gave the school four years; they got four years from the Monk family already," Marcus Monk tells reporters with a smile. "So there’s no pressure on me. And I keep telling Malik there’s no pressure on him. I know he probably gets hit [by Hog fans] more than me."

Malik and Marcus steadfastly maintain their community’s strong passions won’t sway their decision-making, but Gary Parrish, the Memphis-based CBS Sports columnist, finds that hard to believe. "Can Malik Monk really leave home and endure what would be an intense backlash?," he wrote. "And can Marcus Monk, really let his brother leave the state when he A) played at Arkansas, B) previously worked with Arkansas, C) lives in Fayetteville, and D) now helps run the Arkansas Wings?"

These questions will not be answered until months from now, until after the high school basketball season ends next spring. Malik doesn’t plan to announce his decision until then. Regardless of his intentions, if everybody stays guessing, interest stays high.

Talking to reporters, Marcus stresses Malik must be "full-fledged selfish with his decision. So if Arkansas is a good fit, good. But if it’s Kentucky or any other school — if it’s Kansas or Oregon or Florida State or any of them — he just has to make a decision based solely on what makes him happy."

Whatever Malik’s ultimate destination, Marcus wants it known that is something he has not and will not manipulate. His job, as he sees it, is to be a sounding board who provides advice to Malik when he seeks it in the coming months. "My mother raised us to be independent, whatever he does and wherever he goes, he knows we’re here to support him. We’re not here to control his life or anything," he says. "He has to go off and be his own man … find his own identity and things like that."

Although Malik is hardly the only top recruit to be shepherded through the process by an older sibling, the Marcus-Malik dynamic is unique. Former NBA MVP Derrick Rose’s older brother Reggie was also his AAU coach in high school and played a similar role in his career. Yet according to Gary Parrish, "Reggie might deny it, but he controlled that whole [recruiting] deal and Derrick was always going to play with Calipari and that was done at a different level."

Marcus has already carved out his own strong identity through his Razorback glory days, by earning an MBA and playing professionally. Because of this, Parrish doesn’t believe Marcus needs to live vicariously through his little brother, as he believes Reggie has. "I like Reggie, but Reggie needed to cash in on Derrick. I don’t think Marcus needs to cash in on Malik."

At the end of their second day at Peach Jam, the Wings beat Ohio-based Mac Irvin to stand at three wins and one loss through their five-game pool play. In order to advance to the knockout stage, the Wings must finish in the top two of their pool. That’s why beating Team CP3 on Saturday morning is necessary. Yet unlike many of his teammates, how Malik actually performs in the Peach Jam is of little long-term consequence. Coaches like Calipari and Anderson want him to know they are there, but they long ago had seen enough of Malik to offer him  scholarships.

Peach Jam; July 11, Game Five

From the tip off, Giles and Malik are the focus.

Malik starts the game by bricking a straight-ahead three pointer, and Giles answers with a put back two-pointer and three-pointer of his own on the other side of the court. Team CP3 gets off to a roaring start, building a 17-5 lead and smothering the Wings, hampered by the loss of Korita, inside. Courtside, even Chris Paul himself gets into the act, leading a fake 3-2-1 chant in an attempt to get Pippens to shoot early on one possession.

Still, Malik’s skills are obvious. The Wings make a mini-surge after a scrum from which Malik emerges dribbling the ball while practically lying on his side. As he rises off the floor, a defender lunges for the ball, but Malik whips it around his back and darts forward down the sideline with a sprinter’s speed. After two long dribbles he bullets a pass to teammate Payton Willis, who misses a first shot but makes the second off a rebound.

The Wings close it to a 19-14 deficit, but everybody who guards Team CP3’s star point guard Alterique Gilbert, including Malik, has trouble keeping him from attacking the rim. Team CP3 at one point has a 2 to 10 advantage in fouls to complement its double-digit lead. During a timeout, Marcus slaps hands with Wings players as they silently exit the court. Malik doesn’t engage in any high fives as he sits, picks up a cup and glares ahead.

In the second half, as Calipari watches from the gym corner, Team CP3’s lead balloons to 21. Malik has hit 10 or more three-pointers in multiple games before, but in this tourney, he never quite detonates from the outside. His individual highlight comes after a dribble drive, swooping across the paint and practically falling sideways as he banks a one-handed runner over the outstretched hands of Giles.

Arkansas doesn’t get closer than 11 points the rest of the way. By the late second half, coaches are checking their phones and the official EYBL photographer is giving camera pointers to two toddlers seated alongside him. Malik’s game is slightly off, but he still finishes leading all scorers — including Harry Giles — with 21 points.

The Wings are officially out, but the players seem nonplussed as they join the masses to quickly exit, brushing shoulders with an incoming crowd ready to watch the game. Marcus and head coach Charles Baker tell the players they are proud of their effort and that they still have one more event as a team later in the month. They all stick around for a while to watch the 16U Wings play.

With five games in three days, there was little time for the brothers or anyone else on the team to do anything relaxing. Usually summer events provide a chance for the team as a group to go swimming or bowling or see a movie, but the Peach Jam is just too demanding. He might be 17, but Malik already keeps an adult’s schedule. Days after returning to Bentonville, Malik hops back onto a plane and flies to Chicago for the Nike Global Challenge, where he earns MVP honors. He then rejoins the Wings at The 8 tournament in Las Vegas and puts on another MVP-worthy performance..

Despite the schedule, or perhaps because of it, Marcus and Malik will see plenty of each other in the weeks and months ahead. Their dreams and plans are so interwoven it is difficult to imagine one without the other. Last fall Marcus and his friend Nick Mason, a former sports talk show host at Hog Sports Radio, formed the Monk Promotional & Management Group, LLC, a full-service marketing and advertising agency with expanding influence in the northwest Arkansas sports scene.

The two will soon launch a new sports talk show called The Raw Report that will cover high school recruiting, the statewide basketball scene and Razorback sports. The show should premiere sometime in August and Malik will announce a list of his top schools (which will include Arkansas, he’s said) on The Raw Report a few days or weeks after a press release is issued, Marcus says. Marcus adds it’s not yet determined how many schools will make the cut.

Mason adds he thinks another announcement paring the list down further will be made in the winter. It would, he adds, make sense for Malik to make his final announcement on the show in April.

Meanwhile, there’s still that last season of high school ball to get through. While Bentonville is a powerhouse in most sports, it hasn’t yet achieved a basketball breakthrough. Malik led it to the state semifinals in 2014 and the finals in 2015, but both times the Tigers lost to North Little Rock High. This year, Marcus and Mason have helped find nationally ranked opponents featuring elite recruits for Bentonville’s non-conference season.

With Malik as the centerpiece, the school will play numerous elite out-of-state schools. Bentonville’s program will also debut on national television by playing twice on an ESPN outlet. Furthermore, the school will host its own winter tournament featuring regional teams. Bentonville coach Jason McMahan is happy to oblige. "He’s part of a very good team but he’s the most significant part, the most attractive part to that, that which helps bring the excitement to help bring sell-out crowds and get us invited to these kinds of events that people will pay a lot of money to watch."

Much of this will likely be discussed on The Raw Report, but does Mason think Malik’s ultimate decision could affect the popularity of his new show? "That’s a real difficult question because obviously people might be so upset they might not support you, but you’ll just have to deal with it when it comes across the table."

As for Marcus, he looks forward to being by his brother’s side in the next year but he also knows his ability to truly understand Malik’s situation wanes with the increased scrutiny and attention his brother commands. "He’s going through things that I never went through … I know it has to be difficult, it’s not easy for these [elite recruit] kids — in general, it’s harder for them."

At this point, many of the next steps in the process — while so seemingly complicated from the outside — will boil down to a few conversations they planned to have after Malik returned home from Las Vegas on July 26. Beginning then, Marcus, Malik and Jackie planned to discuss what he does and doesn’t like about each school. After making the list, he can start planning official visits — he gets up to five in all — to different campuses and take the show on the road. When he does, fans and media will follow his every move. His Twitter following, his YouTube viewers and his website visitors will only grow.

Whatever happens, Marcus plans to be there whenever his brother needs him, just as it was before Malik played in any games at all, when he was a boy and not a man, and before anyone anywhere dared fathom him as a brand.

Malik’s world awaits.

The day before the end of the International Federation of American Football World Championship, it’s significantly easier to figure out who will be receiving the trophy than who will be presenting it.

It’s a foregone conclusion that Team USA will win American football’s version of FIFA’s World Cup, held in American football’s sleepy birthplace of Canton, Ohio. America remains the king of America’s most popular and most American sport. International football is growing abroad, but there are still many, many miles between the undrafted players representing the United States and the best players from every other country in the world. Even without fetching Peyton Manning to toss bombs to Calvin Johnson, Team USA has trounced its competition in each and every game.

Here, even Canton’s football-crazed populace isn’t interested. The crowds are small. The games are lopsided. Save the hint of corruption afoot, it bears little resemblance to FIFA’s quadrennial carnival.

The President of IFAF is supposed to hand over the hardware tomorrow, but it’s not really clear who that is. IFAF’s annual congress has just elected a president to succeed Tommy Wiking, who took a leave of absence after a failed, possibly corrupt bid to host this event in his home nation of Sweden. The congress officially voted in Finnish representative Roope Noronen, but a group of Wiking’s sympathizers stormed out of the meeting and hold their own congress, reinstating Wiking.

The players at this tournament have vastly different experiences with football. Some grew up with the game. Others spent years striving to gain access to it. Some received top-notch coaching while others learned from YouTube videos. Some looked forward to this event as the pinnacle of their football lives, and others didn’t know it existed until recent months, hoping to springboard into the rest of their careers. These players, their stories and their passion for football are what makes this event shine.

These athletes are not paid to play. In fact, many paid thousands of dollars to play in this empty stadium in this small city in a tournament run by squabbling bureaucrats. And when asked, almost everybody said that they’d do it again.

The idealized IFAF World Championship and the one that take place are quite different, and not just because Stockholm is somewhat prettier than Canton. This tournament was supposed to be played in the gleaming new Tele2 Arena in front of a Swedish crowd excited to see the sport’s biggest event ever in their homeland. Instead it is played in Fawcett Stadium, which normally hosts high school and Division II games.

When Sweden announced last December that it wouldn’t be able to host the tournament, America was the obvious alternative — unlike other countries, it has football fields and football things at the ready. Canton had previously hosted the 2009 U-19 championship, so it already had experience hosting an international football tournament.

12 teams were set to participate, a record for an international tournament, but with the late switch and heavy cost of sending 45 players overseas for weeks, the field dwindles to seven. Ex-host Sweden bowed out, as did Germany and Austria, Europe’s two best teams. Morocco was set to be the first African team ever in a World Championship, they back out as well. Canada backed out citing an inability to formulate a roster in the midst of CFL season.

Here in America it’s easy to access football. In fact, the game’s almost hard to avoid. It’s on our largest TV channels multiple days a week. Our high schools and colleges have teams, and football games are basically social obligations for students. Oh and hey — did you sign up for the office fantasy league yet?

In foreign countries, it’s harder. In Australia, a 14-hour time difference means QB Jared Stegman gets up at 3 a.m. Monday to watch Sunday’s NFL games, watches ‘til 9 — then goes to his full-time job as a schoolteacher:

“Mondays are rough at work,” says Stegman.

But watching football is relatively easy compared to playing. Most places across the globe, football is not a professional game. The players don’t get paid to play: they have to pay to purchase or rent equipment like helmets and pads.

“I try not to count,” says French linebacker Arnaud Vidallier, who spends hundreds of Euros a year to play for the Dauphins in Nice. (Yes, the English name for the team is “the Nice Dolphins.” No, it’s not pronounced that way, idiot.)

Some federations can fully finance the trip to Canton, others ask players to pay out of pocket. Australia’s players pay almost $6,000 American dollars for the trip. With few countries are willing to send teams to Australia to play, this is one of their only chances to play teams from outside their country.

“There’s a lot of credit card debt, savings, family holidays that they give up to play this game, ” says Australian coach John Leitjen. “That says something about how badly they want it, how badly they’re starving for it.”

Football players from overseas faced an uphill battle to access the sport they love. These players wheel in temporary goalposts and tape down sidelines on converted soccer and rugby fields. They trudge to their full-time jobs on injured legs. They do this in relative anonymity, and pay for it.

This tournament is their summit. Seemingly every team has a player retiring after this tournament. Japan’s Yasuo Wasisaka is 46 and he’s played in all five IFAF World Championships.

The reason this tournament exists, and should continue to exist, is for these players.

Photo: Ed Hall Jr./USA Football

Team USA takes the field before the gold medal game against Japan.

In other countries, the national team represents the top players from their nation’s limited football scene. Making the team serves as a mark of distinction, a sign that a player is the best of their nation’s best.

Not so with Team USA. NFL and Division I teams won’t release their players for international play, risking injury in a tournament that doesn’t benefit the team. So, USA Football searches for the best available players that remain professionally unsigned, players who will seize at the honor of wearing the red, white and blue, and players who need the opportunity to pick up game film to impress pro scouts.

Perhaps nobody matches that Venn diagram more precisely than Trent Steelman.

Steelman is the best football player in the recent history of the United States Military Academy. The Black Knights’ starting quarterback all four years, Steelman ran the triple option as well as anybody can, setting school records for rushing and overall touchdowns. The Ravens offered him a contract after the 2013 NFL Draft, but like all Army graduates, he had to fulfill an active military duty requirement. Steelman turned down them down, not knowing if he’d play competitive football again.

Two years later, Lt. Steelman was serving at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Ga., when he got a call from Army brass, asking if he still had pro dreams. He did. So they released him from active duty, transitioning him to a role in the Army Reserves. Now he could try to make the NFL.

But NFL teams don’t run the option. Steelman tried to cut it as a slot receiver but after an invite to the NFL’s combine for unsigned veteran players, nobody signed him.

Three months after the Army let him pursue his dream, Steelman got another call, this one from Team USA coach Dan Hawkins. Unlike foreign players who circle this tournament on their calendars years out, it was the first he’d heard of the IFAF tournament.

“I get to represent my country, playing the sport I love,” Steelman says. “It’s an opportunity I can’t pass up.”

In the cafeteria at Walsh University, although they speak different tongues, football players from across the globe share a common language: a passion for consuming vast amounts of buffet-style junk food.

Walsh, a Division II school in North Canton, serves as the staging ground for the tournament, a mini-Olympic village. Players converge on the student center for meals and take over the game room for ping-pong showdowns and pool in their downtime. But there isn’t a ton of down time.

Normally, a football player plays once a week. Here, players have to play every three days, with some teams playing four games in 10 days. There isn’t really another option. Making the tournament longer would mean more money spent to house the already cash-strapped 45-man teams.

Fewer games would eliminate any semblance of an actual winner being selected. Twelve games between seven teams already leads to an impossible-to-decipher jumble of games that somehow sends Mexico to the bronze medal game with an 0-2 record. After the tournament, I realize I never saw an official bracket and tried drawing one.

Playing so many games in such a short span of time puts a strain on everybody. Coaches ration snaps between first- and second-stringers to keep everybody fresh.

Players who suffer injuries that might typically only cost them a game miss the entire tournament. South Korea’s Ji-Woong Jo paid $2,000 to come to Canton in spite of the pleas of his pregnant wife back home in Busan, but he gets turf toe in his team’s first game. He is bound to a wheelchair until the day before South Korea’s final game.

“Now that I’ve been made into a cripple, I wonder if this was worth it,” Jo says.

Team USA uses some conventional recovery methods — ice baths, etc. — and some unconventional ones, like the “zen zone.”

“The zen room is my favorite part,” says former Dartmouth linebacker Matt Oh. “They turn the lights down and play soothing music. It’s almost like a spa.”

With so little time, the ability to adjust quickly is vital.

“I keep saying, ‘blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape,’” says Team USA coach Dan Hawkins, previously head coach at Colorado and Boise State. “Normally I’m a planner. You’d have minute-by-minute of every single day. At this thing, it’s not that way. From Day 1, you have to get out and start being functional.”

It rains almost the entire tournament, and nearby lightning shortens or cancels several practices, leaving teams to scramble for indoor practice options. One night, France is forced to reschedule so late that the cafeteria closes before the team can eat. They appear doomed until heroes triumphantly emerge with boxes of cafeteria pizza. No matter what country they come from, it is bad business policy to get between a football player and his food.

Photo: Ed Hall Jr./USA Football

Mexican linebacker Payeròn Valero Roberto Pablo lines up against France. The colorful scales on the helmet and the green scales on the jersey and pants represent the Aztec feathered serpent god Quetzelcoatl. On the jersey’s right shoulder is Aztec god of war Huitzilopochtli. On the left shoulder is god of rain Tlaloc, who brought thunder.

In Team USA’s first game, it thoroughly beats Mexico, winning 30-6. They allow no touchdowns, and outgain Mexico 408-87. It is the closest game Team USA plays in the tournament.

Japan, up next for the United States, is probably the second-best team here.

Football has been played in Japan for over 80 years, and there’s a well-established semi-professional league, the X-League. Shinzo Yamada, who played in the XFL with the name “SAMURAI” written on the back of his jersey, coaches X-League team IBM Big Blue. He points out that football has infiltrated Japanese society to the point that it’s the subject of a popular manga, “Eyeshield 21,” about a shy boy who becomes a star running back.

Against Japan, Team USA is again relentless, posting 580 yards of offense. Japan’s two touchdowns come off a trick play and in garbage time. Coach Hawkins, who compares Japan’s skill level to that of an FCS team, keeps asking his team to go for two, even when it isn’t really necessary: they convert to make the score 33-10 with eight minutes to go.

The very nature of the game of football dictates that this will not be a very competitive tournament. Almost every game is a blowout won by the team with more developed football infrastructure.

Think about how many resources are required just to play the most elementary version of 11-on-11 football. Football requires a lot of players — 22, probably more, if you want to compete without players getting exhausted. It requires a lot of equipment for all those players — pads, helmets, etc. It requires a slew of referees to properly officiate. It requires a field bookended by goalposts and hashed in yards, a particularly odd request in a world that primarily uses the metric system.

And perhaps most vitally, football requires a vast amount of expertise in performing specialized tasks. In basketball, every player needs to know how to dribble, pass and shoot. In soccer, every player with the exception of the goalkeeper needs to be well-versed in the same basic ball skills with their feet and head.

In football, there are about 10 different positional types with massively different job descriptions and technical skills. In America, players are able to receive position-specific coaching from a young age. Elsewhere?

“In Brazil, YouTube is our best coach,” says Roberto Spinelli, a quarterback-turned-filmmaker documenting the Brazilian team’s tournament. He notes that he changed his grip three times off of online videos.

America has multiple professional leagues. Japan doesn’t. America trounces Japan. But Japan’s semi-pro league is more advanced than Mexico’s college league, so Japan trounces Mexico 35-7. Mexico’s college league is way more advanced than France’s amateur league, so Mexico beats France 20-7.

France is a member of the advanced Western European football community, while Australia’s football scene is a few thousand players scattered across a continent. France crushes Australia 53-3. Australia has been playing the game for decades, while Brazil just started playing with pads in the past 10 years, so Australia wins 16-8. In South Korea, the sport is still primarily played at the club level at colleges. Australia shuts them out, 28-0.

“They have good speed, they’re good athletes,” says South Korea’s Seung-Jung Oh, who went to high school in the United States and played football at North Carolina Central, of his teammates. “But they are still working on learning how to play football and building football IQ.”

IFAF managing director Andy Fuller says part of his organization’s job is to show players that they can connect to football in less infrastructure-heavy versions of the sport, like flag football or beach football. But the 11-on-11 game will always be the one in which players strive to compete. And the gap between nations will remain large, perhaps permanently.

Photo: Ed Hall Jr./USA Football

Brazil’s fans, mainly wives and girlfriends of players, cheer on the team against South Korea.

Canton has football in its veins. The forerunner to the NFL was founded in a local car dealership in 1920, and although the Canton franchise of that league folded by 1926, this was enough reason to give the city the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

There are plentiful signs and banners celebrating the annual Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremony, the city’s annual party. The Dunkin’ Donuts in a strip mall across from my hotel has lovingly drawn the names and numbers of every new inductee, plus Vikings and Steelers helmets to commemorate their matchup in the preseason Hall of Fame game. There are multiple billboards advertising a speech by former NFL coach Tony Dungy at a local church coinciding with the induction.

And yet nobody seems to have any idea there’s a relatively large football tournament featuring players from across the globe. I hear one man at a bus stop trying to convince acquaintances to come to the championship game with free tickets he got. Other than that, nobody I encounter has any idea this is going on.

At the 2011 championship in Austria, the smallest listed attendance for a game was 1,500, with crowds as large as 20,000. In Canton, the gold-medal game between the USA and Japan — the most important game of the tournament, held on a gorgeous Saturday evening — has maybe 2,500 fans, including players on other teams who gathered to see the game.

During the Brazil-Australia game, I hand-count every fan in the 25,000 seat stadium: I get 112.

There are perhaps 15 or so Brazilians, but they cheer as loud as 50. Pamela, the wife of Heron Azevedo, wears a green-and-yellow jersey with both of their names on it. They chant in Portuguese, banging noisemakers:

“We’re saying ‘Go Defense! Ummm …’” An English teacher, Pamela pauses as she tries to come up with a literal translation for her Portuguese. ‘The next part is basically ‘Break everything!’”

Pamela met Heron when she started playing in a women’s football league on the beaches of Rio. He played in a nearby men’s league, and went over to help out her first day of practice. At first, Pamela thought she couldn’t afford to follow her husband for his tournament. Then she realized it wouldn’t be true to their football-founded marriage to stay at home.

Perhaps in another country, this would have been an event for the whole football community — and maybe a novelty for people unfamiliar with football, a way to introduce them to the sport. In Canton, it’s just another football thing. Nobody notices, and nobody has made any attempt to get anybody to notice.

Photo: Ed Hall Jr./USA Football

Former Texas Tech RB Sadale Foster runs for a touchdown for Team USA past the diving tackle attempt of French linebacker Baptiste Noir.

Team USA plays France for a spot in the gold medal game. The loser plays Mexico for the bronze. Beforehand, Mexican coach Raul Rivera Sanchez delivers an entire press conference repeatedly referring to France as his team’s next opponent.

At the end of the first quarter, Team USA leads 26-0. At halftime, it’s 54-0.

In the second half, Team USA is no longer scoring touchdowns against France because it wants to keep scoring touchdowns. They spend the second half trying to run the clock out.

They can’t. When Team USA calls a run play, its offensive line jolts France back, opening up huge holes for the running backs. The backs fly into open space, sprinting downfield. Some French defenders get juked, others manage to get an arm on an American only to be discarded like soggy clothing. Running just leads to more touchdowns.

France tries the pass in the hopes of cutting into the enormous deficit quickly. If they’re lucky, attempts are merely incomplete. America’s overpowering pass rush doesn’t need to blitz to sack the QB. They still do. American DB’s blanket French receivers, and when the under-duress French QB tosses the ball up, it sometimes gets intercepted.

USA ends up beating France 82-0, the biggest margin of victory in team history. They never punt or kick a field goal, scoring touchdowns on all 12 possessions until a 13th ends with the final whistle. They outgain France 334 to negative-26 on the ground.

Two days after the game, French national team director Olivier Moret is upset. Not with how his team played, but how people on the Internet responded to the scoreline.

“I read newspapers and comments on Facebook, and American people are laughing at us. It’s bad.” Moret says. “We came here because we love football. We want to show to everybody that we play football. And when we play against USA, we know that there’s a big difference in everything.”

While Olympic sports get big government funding, Moret’s football federation makes ends meet on its own. His team crowdsourced 25,000 Euros to make the journey to Canton. The players put their jobs on hold and show the world that people in France play football.

And they were met with derision.

“Why laugh? We know we’re a little country in football,” Moret says. “We don’t laugh when the U.S. plays the best teams in rugby and loses by more than 82 points.”

Team USA general manager Todd Bell argues that Team USA must participate in international competition for the sport’s sake.

“The sport is called American football,” Bell says. “If America isn’t leading, who will?”

For the foreign players, the opportunity to play the United States is the chance of a lifetime. They might not beat the United States — so far, the United States has won every game in the three tournaments it has participated in — but at least they got to play on the same field with a top-notch opponent.

“A lot of countries come in and say ‘we’re going to beat the United States.’ Do they believe it? Perhaps not,” says IFAF managing director Andy Fuller. “But if they continue to play and give opposing teams something to aspire to, maybe some day they will.”

Australian center James Gifford is an enormous fish in Australia’s small gridiron pond. His Sydney University Lions have won 12 straight league titles, including all 11 years Gifford has played. At one point, they won 99 straight games. In 2011, he played with the Australian team against the United States — and the Americans ran away with a 61-0 win. He’s used to winning, but left the loss with his head held high:

“Towards the end of the game, we’re losing by 60, I look the guy across from me in the eye,” Gifford says. “I tell him, ‘Don’t look at the scoreboard. You come at me with 100 percent of what you got. Because I’m going to try and stop you with 100 percent of what I’ve got.’”

Photo: Ed Hall Jr./USA Football

IFAF shares more than its initials with FIFA.

Under the reign of IFAF president Tommy Wiking, the 2015 IFAF World Championship was awarded to Wiking’s homeland of Sweden, where he was also president of the Swedish American Football Federation. However, it was not to be. Deadline payments to hotels were missed. The arena never received money. Just eight months before kickoff, Sweden announced it couldn’t host the games, leading to a scramble to Canton.

There is no official account of what happened besides “financial difficulties.” IFAF’s current president, Roope Noronen, merely says he “doesn’t know all the facts.” The few details we do have, chronicled at length by American Football International, make it seem like something fishy was afoot.

In summary: The Swedish football federation gave responsibility for staging the games to a company called Amfium. In addition to his roles as president of IFAF and the Swedish federation, Wiking was president of this company. He was also the person who arranged the company’s ownership.

The Swedish federation gave Amfium $350,000, but the company never provided any updates on its financial state from 2013 on, despite repeated calls for transparency. It failed to wrangle other sponsors to potentially finance the expense of hosting the games. Whatever money the company did have seems to evaporate, and if it acquired any other money, it didn’t go towards hosting the games.

The same week Sweden announced it wouldn’t host the games, Wiking took a leave of absence from IFAF and the Swedish federation, citing health reasons. Oh, and by the way, Wiking was arrested on charges of embezzlement in August 2014, for reasons not related to his American football entanglements.

What exactly went wrong? It’s unclear. All we know is that Wiking oversaw it.

When the IFAF congress opens the day before the championship game, things go awry. Quickly. “Before the meeting started, there was some commotion,” Noronen says. “Some people chose to walk out before the meeting started, which of course they have every right.”

American Football International reports that amongst other things, the departing members were upset that Wiking was not given a seat at the head of the table in spite of the fact that he never officially resigned.

The meeting proceeds, albeit without members from Germany, Austria and several other countries. A presidential election is held and Noronen, who was previously VP, is elected president.

However, unbeknownst to the people in the congress, the members who left the room hold their own congress in a different room. Somebody in the first room tweets the results of their elections from the IFAF official account, claiming that Wiking will remain president and Noronen had been kicked out:

The IFAF condemns the unsanctioned Twitter account on the official Facebook page:

IFAF shares a picture of 33 people in attendance at the congress and issues a press release about Noronen’s election, which includes the following:

Any reports that suggest different individuals were elected to IFAF positions through the rogue Twitter account ‘IFAFofficial’ are false. IFAF does not control that Twitter account.

…

The IFAF Executive Board noted the contribution of former President Tommy Wiking, who was among a number of delegates who chose not to attend the 2015 IFAF Congress, despite being present in Canton.

The other congress shares a picture of 25 attendees and issues a press release on the website of the European Federation of American Football, an organization which is technically defunct after the founding of IFAF Europe.

At this point, there are essentially two IFAFs: an official one headed by Noronen and an unsanctioned offshoot with several powerful members headed by Wiking. I overhear a group of referees joking about it over lunch, asking newcomers to their table “which IFAF are you in?”

Noronen sees the move as a feeble power grab:

“Knowing these characters for a long time, I’m not surprised.” Noronen says. “I see a problem with the fact that the other party chose to go outside and hold their own meeting without inviting everybody there. If they had the majority like they claimed, they should have just stayed in the meeting and voted that way.”

Personally, if I usurped power of a social media account from a sport’s governing body, I’d try to steer clear of that governing body’s championship game. Why emerge from the safety of Internet anonymity to a place where every person who could possibly get angry at you would be? The unidentified person running the IFAF account in exile does not follow my line of thinking, sending tweets from the bronze medal game with pictures revealing their location.

There are under 1,000 people in the 25,000 person stadium, so I walk over and sit in essentially the exact spot from where the tweeted pictures were taken. In the row behind me, two people are on their smartphones. One is a younger woman who fits the description of a former IFAF intern who had access to the Twitter account. The other is a middle-aged man with a European accent she addresses as “Tommy.” Even without private eye certification, I believe I have cracked the case and found IFAF’s rogue president and Twitterer.

She mentions people have made fun of the attendance the games have been getting, and says she’s been repeating to everyone the same quip — “I’m sure USA Football has been doing the best they could” — about the perceived lack of effort from USA Football. But before another tweet posts, they get up to walk around the stadium at halftime.

During halftime, the IFAF account tweets a different picture, from a different part of the stadium. I sprint over, and there are only three people in the area where the new photo was taken, including “Tommy” and the ex-intern. I consider this enough evidence to approach.

I ask if any of them is running the IFAF Twitter account. They look around, as if they’re confused, and eventually all say no. I ask if they’re sure. Nope! Have a nice day!

I figured somebody using a social media account to repeatedly tell the world that they are president of an organization they are not technically president of might be interested in sharing their side of their story. But instead, they prefer to hide in plain sight. A few hours later, the IFAF account tweets word-for-word the exact joke the ex-intern told earlier.

Photo: Ed Hall Jr./USA Football

American WR Trent Steelman breaks past the diving tackle of Japan’s Atsushi Fujita.

The next day in the championship game, Team USA once again takes it to Japan, running up a 31-0 lead in under 20 minutes of playing time. America wins 59-12, drubbing the second-best team in the tournament.

Steelman, who led the team in receiving in three games and in rushing in the fourth, wins tournament MVP. He’s shown he has the quickness and hands to play wide receiver, and chips in on special teams the way NFL teams will certainly ask him to. After two years serving his country instead of playing football, he smiles wide.

“It feels like home, man,” Steelman says, smiling. “This feels like home.”

Afterwards, Steelman says he has several private workouts scheduled with NFL teams. He celebrates the win with family, friends and teammates at a Canton sports bar. He never removes the gold medal from his neck.

Photo: Ed Hall Jr./USA Football

Brazilian WR Heron Azevedo (33) celebrates scoring a touchdown against South Korea with teammate Rodrigo Pons (9).

The tournament’s 12 games are decided by an average margin of victory of 33.25 points, with only two of the 12 decided by 20 or less points. Eleven of the games are won by the team with the higher pre-tournament seeding. The outlier? A win by last-seeded Brazil, playing in their first ever international tournament, as they shut out South Korea 28-0.

Azevedo, the guy whose wife led the Brazilian cheering section, has experienced most of the lifespan of football in his country. He started in an 11-on-11 tackle league on the beach in Rio, nobody wore pads, but the sand softened the blows.

“I remember thinking, ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if one day we could play on a real field?’” Azevedo said. “And then thinking, ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if we could play in pads?’ And then thinking, ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if we could have a national team?’ And then thinking, ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if we could play in a tournament?’”

Brazil did all that, and more. They beat South Korea, a country with a football history twice as long as Brazil’s. Noronen says early results show that Brazil had the largest viewership of the tournament.

But after a tournament-ending loss to Australia, WR Rodrigo “Vinny” Pons can’t reflect on all the incredible things Brazil has done. He’s openly weeping, revealing to the two or three members of the press what he just told his teammates.

“I told the guys this is my last game,” he says through tears. “I’m retiring. We care about each other in a way that friends don’t. We have to protect each other on the field. We have to make them better every day.”

Football is growing there and across the globe, and that growth will continue.

Football isn’t growing because IFAF has everything figured out. When everybody leaves Canton, there are still two IFAFs. Nobody knows when, or even if, the parties will reconcile.

It’s not growing because the NFL is investing billions in the international development of the game. While the NFL has gone to great lengths to ensure people from across the globe can watch its product, it has done relatively little to enable anybody from outside the U.S. playing the game.

International football is growing because of the undying fervor of players like Pons, players who have fought to play football in spite of everything. These players love football. And nobody has ever successfully stopped somebody from loving a thing they aren’t supposed to love.

I’m driving to a location I’ve sworn not to disclose.

As I swerve off the highway exit ramp, the sun breaks through the filtering haze of the lingering marine layer. It pitches my eyes into a deep shadow, a fitting tone for the deeply nefarious act I am about to participate in.

Slow-pitch softball batting practice.

While I’ve brought along my own bat — a hand-me-down green Mizuno Envy, made in China and approved for play by all the sanctioned softball leagues — mostly, I’ll be using those provided by my source, who wishes, hopes and prays to stay anonymous. See, my tipster — let’s call him “Deep Out” from this point forward — has been playing in amateur slow-pitch softball leagues and tournaments throughout California and the greater American Southwest for the past quarter-century. While his longevity gives him credibility, it’s his stash that makes him the person I most need to meet with.

Bats. Illegal bats. Seriously illegal, banned-in-softball-games-throughout-the-world bats.

My car is parked next to the field. Scores of schoolchildren bandy about, some offering heartfelt attempts to “tag” one another in the game of the same name, others waiting their turn for hot dogs and Slushies. For now, they are innocents, pure of heart, oblivious to the dark crevices that simmer just below the surface of adult interactions. But soon enough, they’ll know. Soon enough, they’ll be stained like the rest of us.

A car pulls into the lot, claiming the spot farthest from mine, facing the opposite direction. The windows aren’t tinted, yet the driver is, somehow, cast in silhouette. Everything, that is, except for his eyes. They glare back through his rearview, the dual mirrors acting as connective tissue for this initial bout of sizing-up. He closes his eyes, relaxes his shoulders, and exits the vehicle. I follow his lead.

We lock eyes. He nods. I do the same. He heaves a black duffel bag out of his popped trunk; I put my green bat on my shoulder. We walk onto the field.

“This one’s rolled,” Deep Out says, and removes a metallic rod from his bag and drops it near the plate. “This one’s shaved. This one’s end-loaded,” he drops a pair of bats and reaches for another. “This one’s shaved and end-loaded.” When he’s done, a quartet of bats lie near the batter’s box. He offers them up with a broad swipe of his hand, not unlike an arms dealer showcasing his wares on a motel room bed, signaling me that it’s time to pick my poison. I have come to see just how different a normal, legal bat swings compared to a “hot bat.”

My first swings are with the legal bat I own. They’re what I’m used to, with a sizable sweet spot that deadens the force but also allows for perfect control, ideal for my usual strategy of pushing the ball over the second baseman’s head. This sets a baseline for comparison. My subsequent swings are with D.O.’s bats, which have been turned illegal through various means by various technicians. Their sweet spots are wider, the swings more natural, the trauma they produce more blunt.

And after dozens of balls struck in this round of wicked BP, I assure you, guiltless reader, the modifications matter. In Seinfeld parlance, the difference between using an illegal bat and a legal one is real, and it is spectacular.

“It’s the dark side of softball,” D.O. says with a smirk. “If you’re in a softball league, I guarantee someone’s swinging a hot bat.”

After a months-long search into the use of “doctored” bats in amateur softball, D.O. is the only person willing to meet me in person. In fact, he’s one of the few people willing even to speak with me about their usage. This is the extremely paranoid world of “bat doctoring,” the dark and ridiculous subsection of one of our nation’s most tame neighborhood sports, where some players spend upwards of four figures and literally risk lives to hit a ball kinda far and maybe, just maybe … win a cheap plastic trophy or nearly-unwearable T-shirt at the end of the season.

“Ping!”

As long as there’s been competition, people have attempted to gain an advantage. Amateur softball, despite near-zero stakes and, let’s be honest, a reasonably low level of athletic skill needed to participate, is no different. But the morality of that depends on a consensus of what is fair, and what is not. That is to say, before cheating can take place, rules that clearly delineate acts that constitute cheating must be present.

Once, it was different. “It wasn’t so much cheating, as nobody knew the rules,” said Gregg “Sparky” Mann, a Michigan-based softball veteran who has played and managed since the ’60s. Back then, a lot of leagues played by their own rules, and there really weren’t very many of them.

At that point, softball had been around for decades. Organizations like the Amateur Softball Association (ASA) and United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA, colloquially abbreviated to “U-Trip”) nominally took the lead in terms of getting everyone on the same page as far as the basic rules, codifying a backyard game to make sure it was basically played the same way everywhere.

But there were still opportunities to cheat. As Sparky tells it, despite attempts to govern the sport, the ’60s were an era of clandestine, free-flowing DIY experiments to test the limits of softball’s honor code. Balls were sometimes kept in coolers to make them harder and, therefore, allow them to travel a little farther. After the microwave oven came into wide use in the 1970s, balls were soaked, thrown in, and baked from the inside-out, hardening them even further. One pitcher he knew of introduced himself to new batters by turning his back, removing flash paper from his pocket, inserting it into his glove, lighting it, and throwing his pitch. “All of a sudden, you have a flame coming out of his glove, and he’d have you for dinner,” recalled Sparky.

But those escapades were nothing compared to what they did to the “sticks.” Once upon a time, bats were all made of wood, and opportunities to get an edge limited. Softball bat barrels are thinner than hardball bats, 2 1/4” in diameter, 1/2” less than hardball bats of the era (once 2 ¾”, now 2 5/8”), and there just wasn’t much that could be done with them.

Then, in 1969, revolution. The bat manufacturer Easton released the first true aluminum bat, opening the floodgates for other companies to put their own versions on the market. The ball clearly rebounded off aluminum more quickly, and traveled farther; a subsequent examination into why pointed to the bat’s hollow construction, which caused the bat to compress, then spring back, “trampolining” the batted ball upon contact. Shortly thereafter, sports equipment Darwinism relegated wooden bats to the chipper.

With these new instruments, came new methods of subterfuge. “We’d put all kinds of crap inside of them,” said Sparky, anything to give them some kind of extra juice, to make the trampoline effect more pronounced: Tennis balls, rubber balls, various weights on the handle or towards the top of the bat. But it wasn’t until the introduction of titanium bats that the softball world took a dangerous turn.

Titanium is an element that, when alloyed with another metal like iron or aluminum, produces a substance that’s both incredibly tough and comparatively light, a combination with many benefits. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Soviet Union pioneered titanium’s use by utilizing it in military airplanes, submarines, and rockets aimed at the moon and America. In the early ’90s, that technology was brought onto another field of warfare, now used to produce rocket shots over the fence.

In 1993, Easton, once again, was the trendsetter with the introduction of their STI1 Titanium Typhoon. It was made from a sheet of 0.053-inch thick titanium, rolled into a tube and welded. That same year, Worth introduced the Titanium Ti51 bat — which, rumor has it, was developed five years earlier but kept under lock-and-key due to fears over how it would surely change the game; Easton’s release forced Worth’s hand — which included a 0.051-inch thick seamless titanium tube with an aluminum knob welded to the handle. Then Louisville Slugger got into the mix with their TPS Titanium bat, which used a specially designed endcap to plug into the barrel’s top. Each retailed between $500 and $800 — five or eight times the cost of a “normal,” off-the-shelf, department store aluminum softball bat.

Titanium changed the game. It allowed barrel walls to be thinner and still avoid denting. (One early way to disallow aluminum bats was to take a metal ring and run it over the bat, and if it caught on anything or revealed a dent, it was ushered off the field.) More importantly, it afforded batters the ability to produce ball exit speeds between 100 and 103 miles per hour, roughly 10 mph quicker than possible with most aluminum bats, which was already roughly 10 percent quicker than a wood bat.

The pitcher’s mound for amateur slow-pitch softball varies according to the field and age of players, but is generally between 40 and 50 feet from home. This means that after a ball is hit, assuming an exit  velocity of  between 78 and 102 mph, the pitcher has between 0.456 and 0.350 seconds to react to a batted ball. Adding exit velocity shaves precious micro-seconds off that time. That was what made titanium bats so dangerous. Softballs became missiles and pitchers became targets. And the dangers are real. Players have lost teeth, eyesight, motor function, IQ points and even their lives when struck by balls hit off hot bats.

In fact, the change was so drastic that Louisville Slugger printed this warning on the barrels of its TPS bats:

WARNING! Balls hit with this titanium bat may come off harder and quicker which may reduce reaction time for defensive players. Please warn everyone when using these titanium bats. Failure to alert could result in injury.

Most leagues responded to these new bats by banning the hell out of them. But enough still allowed their use — and enough pick-up games without stringent bat rules still took place at company picnics and in suburban backyards — that companies continued selling them, and tinkering with ways to further increase performance.

In 2001, Louisville Slugger’s Genesis, a composite bat, won first place for “Performance” at Florida’s Bat Wars, an annual series of events that allow bat and ball manufacturers to show off their latest innovations. The victory marked the first time that a composite took home the honor. Louisville Slugger tweaked the standard titanium design by utilizing a re-enforced carbon polymer that provided better durability, a better weight distribution, less “sting” on the hands, a wider and longer “sweet spot,” and an even more potent trampolining effect, spawning even more composites.

These bats offered a wide span of exit velocities. While many were in the relatively-comfortable-for-the-opposition mid-90s mph range, some — Miken’s Ultra and Easton’s Synergy, for starters — achieved exit velocities in excess of 105 mph. They were the “hottest sticks” ever produced, and leagues adjusted their rules accordingly.

They banned the hell out of them.

Both the ASA and USSSA disqualified these high performance bats and soon developed a laboratory-based testing procedure, only authorizing bats that peaked below a certain exit velocity for league-sanctioned play. (For ASA, that speed is 98 mph; for USSSA, it’s 103 mph.) Manufacturers responded to the restrictions by allowing buyers to return their old bats to be “dampened” — by, for example, cracking them open and sticking foam inside — in order to pass the new rules. Others simply developed lower-performance versions of their best-sellers.

And so, the sport entered a unique period, albeit one that’s common in just any other field, from lawn-mower racing to NASCAR, any sport where velocity is at a premium. Here we have firmly declared rules, wherein only bats below a certain performance threshold are allowed. And here’s a wide selection of easily accessed products that surpass that threshold. Add an increasing number of studies examining how these bats achieve such high levels of performance, and the proliferation of such information through the game-changer that is The Almighty Internet, and the result is some heavily disseminated ways to tweak legal bats above the allowed performance levels.

It’s the same old story, really, whether it’s drugs or guns or any other illicit product. If a market desires the product, there is profit to be made. To solve the inefficiency, the capitalist world often constructs a bridge to satisfy the consumer. And if that doesn’t happen legally, well, then a group of duplicitous ferrymen emerge, happy to cross the river and take a toll for their troubles.

The Bat Doctors were in.

“I need to know you are legit before I talk to you,” wrote the bat doctor. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

I’d been posting on a wide range of softball-related forums, responding to ads on Craigslist, asking my softball teammates for any “ins,” even cold-calling/texting online retailers, trying to track down just one ferryman who’d allow a glimpse into this secret world. One bat doctor forced me  to explain how speaking to me would benefit his company — which I attempted to do, with various explanations of the reach and breadth of SB Nation’s audience base — only to be thwarted by his legal representation. “I spoke with my attorney and he advised not to,” that particular bat doctor replied. “I’ll pass.”

But now, finally, after weeks of attempts and dozens of false starts, I finally had an in. But there was the issue of providing evidence of my veracity, to prove I wasn’t a softball narc.

I linked to a bunch of my stories. I sent a message from my Facebook account, which included my photo. I even changed my Twitter profile page to include not only my email address, but also my phone number and a brief message to my potential source. “Haha that works. Thanks!” he wrote back. I quickly changed my Twitter profile back.

I composed a slew of questions. How does this all work? Who orders these bats? How do the transactions go down? Do leagues ever actually check? I sent these warm-up queries, along with carefully constructed introduction highlighting my as-yet undefined moral position regarding the usage of doctored bats, bait to give him a platform on which to come to the defense of his dark art. The idea was that he’d look over them before we exchanged phone numbers and had a real conversation.

I waited for his response. And waited. And waited. A week later, I pinged him, hoping the interview simply slipped his mind.

“I have decided not to interview,” he coldly wrote back. “Sorry for time lost.”

The hesitancy, even paranoia that this bat doctor — and many others I contacted — displayed when I went digging is expected and understood. What, really, is the benefit of speaking to an outsider about this? There is, after all, not an insignificant amount of money in the business. For a sense of how much, one need only examine the story of Robert Russell — known as “Bobby Buggs” due to his off-the-field career as an entomologist — who made a killing as a bat doctor at the turn of the millennium.

According to a 2005 Wall Street Journal piece, Buggs didn’t like the pop he was getting out of his new $500 bat. So, he took off the bat’s endcap, poked around inside, brought the bat into his machine shop, and shaved down the inside of the barrel. When Buggs took the bat out for a few swings, he noticed that the ball went further; the loss of weight and even thinner wall provided both quicker bat speed and more powerful trampolining effect. “He was a Zen master on PSTs,” said Deep Out, referencing a specific style of aluminum bat produced by Worth. “He figured out how to shave them, and they were flat-out nasty sticks.” Buggs posted his findings on softball message boards, and soon was taking orders from players around the world.

A market was born.

“Shaving,” is merely one of the ways a bat can be doctored, and subsequent doctors expanded the possibilities. “Rolling” is, by far, the most common. The idea behind it is that a composite bat takes some usage — “500 hits” is a popular number, but surely an inexact and impure science — before the fibers and epoxy break down enough to allow the bat to be used to its full potential. To speed the process, bat doctors place the bat into a specially constructed machine that artificially pounds in those hits. Another method — “end-loading” — adds extra weight towards the top of the bat to increase torque, like swinging a hammer. “Painting,” meanwhile, is the most rarely used method, the equivalent of counterfeiting, taking a bat known to be illegal and masking the cover to make it look like a known legal bat. A quick and dirty method is simply printing the “ASA approved” stamp onto an illegal bat, since that’s what umps mostly look at when they’re checking bats prior to the game.

While Buggs is, now, long-retired from the world of bat doctoring — the WSJ story acted as a sort of career retrospective after Russell decided to “go legit” by becoming head of the appropriately named sporting goods company Evil Sports — there’s no shortage of bat doctors currently in business. “It’s mostly word of mouth,” said D.O. “In any big city, there’s 10, 20 guys that can shave.” That’s a lot of guys, hundreds, even thousands.

Not in a big city? No problem. Head to eBay and search for “juiced softball bats,” or the seemingly benign code name “home run softball bats.” Not in the mood to bid? No problem, there are any number of online-based retailers that, for a modest fee, allow players to send in their legal bats, have them juiced up, and sent back. (Although, the standard buyer beware that comes with any black market dealings apply: “There are some people that say ‘Screw it,’” said D.O. “They put one little mark in the endcap and say it’s shaved.”) They are also, as previously illustrated, extremely tight-lipped about the process.

But, persistence pays off: At the eleventh hour, a lone bat doctor agreed to speak with me.

He’s the president of a company called OutlawedBats.com. For $80, they’ll shave the bat down to, according to the site, “just about any weight you like within reason” and return the bat a few days later. For $25, they’ll even roll the bat for you. Or players can simply purchase a wide range of pre-juiced bats. The [sic’d] disclaimer at the end of every product description, red-fonted and underlined on the website, reads:

Once this work has been done use these bats only for EXHIBITIONS or HOMERUN DERBY’S. I am NOT RESPONSIBLE for anyone who chose’s to use these bats in sanctioned play. Perfect for the player playing in unrestricted associations.

The bold is not added on my behalf, but rather on the disclaimers themselves, making them not unlike the warnings on prescription drugs not to mix with alcohol - a neon sign to do just that.

“I make people sign waivers saying they’re not going to use it in sanctioned play,” the company’s founder, who wished to stay anonymous, told me. “It’s like tinting your front windows even though it’s illegal. The shop’s going to do it for you, and you’re going to pay for it.”

This particular bat doctor has been performing such duties for 14 years, and fulfills anywhere from 100 to 300 orders a month, from all over the country. California and New Jersey are his biggest markets, along with Texas. “I do bats for a lot of military, actually,” he said. “But about the dirtiest teams are cops.” Keep that in mind the next time your local PD enters a charity tournament. Those longballs don’t come from swinging nightsticks.

The work on each bat, he says, can take between 15 minutes to an hour, depending on his own experience with the type of bat. “Getting the cap off clean is the number one most important thing, because if it looks like it’s been pried off, you’re going to have problems down the road.” He’s particularly proud of his ability to hack into Worth’s Mutant bat. “It used to be undoable. I actually broke two of them figuring out how. But then I was one of the only ones who could do it, and it kind of pays for itself.”

As far as qualms regarding his profession, he figures that if he didn’t do it, someone else would. And, more to the point, all he’s really doing is leveling an already-corrupt playing field, one bat at a time. “Everybody does it. You’re at a disadvantage if you’re not using them,” the bat doctor said. “Once people hear about it, it’s on. I’d say over 50 percent of players, when it’s brought to their attention [that bat doctoring is possible], and they think other people are doing it, they do it as well.”

Leagues have tried to counter this new black market by doctoring the rules. “When our association discovered that bats could be altered and gain enhanced performance above our bat standard, stiffer penalties were instituted as a deterrent,” wrote Craig Cress, the president of ASA, in an email to me years ago when I first started examining this story. [Further attempts to interview Cress about this issue proved fruitless.] Depending on the league, the penalties run from a slap-on-the-wrist (the batter is out, the bat confiscated) to a punch-across-the-jaw (a year-long ban). However, due to the vast number of softball leagues in existence and the lack of communication between them, bans are essentially meaningless.

The ASA has also instituted the use of compression-testing machines at some tournaments, which supposedly make sure bats being used don’t exceed the authorized exit velocity threshold. But due to their cost, they are also not widely used, and even when they are, according to the bat doctor, they don’t really work. “In a national tournament, I brought six bats with me. Four were ‘done,’” he said. “Three of my shaved bats passed, and one of my stock bats did not pass. It’s a joke. They’re just used as a scare tactic.”

The most common protectors of bat sanctity are the equivalent to the cops on the beat, league umpires, who are given a list of which bats are legal and which are not. They follow the list, and check bats by reading the sticker on the barrel. But beyond that, well, you can’t realistically expect an umpire to judge, by feel alone, that a bat which should weigh 28 ounces is actually only 26 ounces, a clear sign of tinkering. And this assumes the umps know what they’re looking for. In one of my leagues, an umpire has taken to tapping his ring on the barrel and listening, as if he’s trying to crack a safe. However, not unlike your college major, while it looks important, it ultimately holds little significance.

So unless someone confiscates a bat, breaks it open, and examines the insides to see if any doctoring has taken place, there’s no way to know. “Then you run the risk of taking someone’s $300 bat and ruining it,” said the bat doctor. “If it was me personally, I wouldn’t let them take my bat. They’re not the cops,” he chuckles, before telling me that none of his customers have ever had their bats confiscated. Which essentially leaves it up to the players themselves to police themselves.

In the legendary and ethereal Book of Unwritten Baseball Rules, there lies a passage — with, certainly, plenty of footnotes and scribbles in the margin — detailing the retribution that a team can, if it chooses to do so, enact when the opposition is playing dirty. This includes actions like throwing at the team’s best hitter, throwing at the pitcher, or sliding into a base with one’s spikes aimed at the infielder’s unprotected legs. In the sport of slow-pitch softball, since you can’t hurt a batter with a pitch and there are too few plays that call for sliding (and metal spikes are banned in slow-pitch anyway), there is a modified version for avenging slights, both real and perceived. It is called “shooting middle.”

Essentially, this means the batter purposefully tries to hit the ball back at the pitcher. The reason for this is not necessarily because the pitcher is at fault for starting whatever silly meathead-driven round of anger that demands vengeance. Rather, it’s because the pitcher is in the unique position of being closest to the plate and, thusly, most in danger. “You’re trying to put it through somebody,” said D.O., of shooting middle. “They try not to do it in the higher divisions, because they know they can kill somebody.”

Many pitchers I’ve played with have taken to tossing pitches with the hesitancy of a greenhorn lobbing a hand grenade, immediately backpedaling to give them a few extra precious micro-seconds of reaction time.

It is, without a doubt, the most dangerous position in the game.

I’ve been hit in the face with a softball before. It was not fun. It was a two-hopper, not with the greatest velocity, but with either mysterious backspin or the unfortunate luck of striking an errant stone, or some combination thereof. My reactive mental calculation of where it was supposed to go (down near my shin) wasn’t even close (up and into my right eye socket). It left me with a bad headache, a month-long black eye serious enough that casual acquaintances refused to draw attention to it or risk getting locked into the troubling story of how it came to be, and internal breaks to my nasal passage. This frighteningly then hilariously allowed me to inflate an air bubble around my eye when I blew my nose, but without lasting serious damage. But it was also a ground ball. And I was playing third base.

This, then, is what makes the use of illegal softball bats so dangerous. Not necessarily players purposefully “shooting middle” as much as the fact that pitchers are in the direct line of danger. Someone who knows how to handle a softball bat isn’t the problem, as much as modestly skilled players who don’t know how to control their hot sticks. “Put a shaved stick in the hands of one of those muscle-heads, and it’s dangerous, man,” said D.O.

In part, this is why Steve Butler and Bob Woodward — two longtime softball players in Texas, the former a YouTube star in the softball world, with a channel boasting over a million views— released a pair of videos in 2010 that, ostensibly, show how to shave a bat.

The videos are slapstick mini-masterpieces for softball aficionados, with Butler and Woodward giving famed comedy duos through history a run for their money as a pair of buffoons — Butler the boisterous, over-the-top funny man; Woodward the perfectly droll, hyper-vocal straight man, filling in dead air with improvised lines — desperately trying to get into a bat to juice it up. Besides being hilarious, the videos respond to what they consider a real problem.

“We were trying to show how silly and stupid [cheaters] are acting,” said Woodward. (If you really want insight into just how silly/stupid they can be, check out the video’s “comments” section.) “It’s ruined the game for a lot of people. Why should I give my money when I know I don’t have a chance to win unless I want to pay $300 for a bat, another $150 to get it doctored, whatever the tournament entry fee is, and risk somebody getting hurt, possibly for life. All to win a T-shirt? [laughs] It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Woodward knows how dangerous a hot stick can be. Two years ago, a relative of his, Russell Templeton, was pitching in a game in the evocatively named Texas town of Gun Barrel City. Moments after delivering a pitch, the projectile was completely halted by an obstacle in its path, Templeton’s face. Tally up the injuries, subsequent surgeries, and lasting trauma from that lone moment on the field — 21 fractures to the right side of his face, a broken eye socket, broken nose, torn nasal cavity, broken cheek bone; two different facial reconstruction surgeries, including the rebuilding of his crushed sinus cavity; compromised vision, smell, taste, and a changed layout of his nasal passage, so that now he gets sick “every time the wind blows” — and it’s no wonder he gave up the game.

“We’re pretty sure it was a doctored bat,” said Woodward. “By the time the [league] director got there, because of all the commotion, the bat that was used disappeared. They never did find it.”

Woodward, in fact, has become a sort of one-man enforcer against illegal bats, slow pitch softball’s Charles Bronson. About a decade ago, he filed a series of lawsuits on behalf of the ASA and certain bat manufacturers against specific “bat doctors.” The genius legal gymnastics regarding what law was being broken by these doctors? Copyright infringement, since the designs and logos were on materials the companies did not sell and, thusly, would “produce widespread consumer confusion and deception” as well as “irreparable injury” to the leagues and manufacturers. “Because of [the lawsuits], they went underground,” said Woodward.

He also designed his own bat endcap that would, if used, solve the problem. It came in two pieces, and when you pressed a button, a window would open that allowed the inside of the bat to be seen, making it easy to tell if a bat had been tampered with.  However, the endcap was never authorized for use. “They said a two-piece endcap is dangerous and they would not allow it,” said Woodward. “Some of the things they come up with, I’m not sure how they determine what’s a danger and what’s not.”

Occasionally, players will protest a bat to an umpire, but that rarely happens. Rather, because of the inadequacy of rules and regulation, the self-policing generally comes down to eye-for-an-eye retribution. “A telltale sign is when you start seeing everyone use the same bat,” said D.O. “All those bats are sitting there, but there’s one bat being used. Then it’s, ‘You put yours away, we’ll put ours away.’”

So, then: How does this problem actually get fixed?

The desire to swing juiced bats is not going away. That’s because the desire to hit balls really high and really far is not going to ebb. Get ahold of one, through means legitimate or ill, and that’s all you want to do from then on out. Chicks dig the long ball, sure, but dudes dig them a whole lot more. Everybody wants to be Babe Ruth.

And hot bats do make a difference.

Back on that nameless, soiled field, where I took my round of disreputable BP, the balls shot off the dirty bats with the force of a cannon, the pinging sound masking the peril. On average, it allowed my hits to travel between 20 and 40 feet further. In addition, the bat’s sweet spot was extended, and the entire swing just felt smoother, as if I was expending half the usual energy to create the blasts.

A few times I struck the ball, accidentally, directly back towards my tipster, who was lobbing me pitches. Thankfully, he had the foresight to pitch from behind a protective net on the mound. Otherwise, this story would have made a side-trip to the hospital, where I’d surely have waited until darkness enveloped the sky to drive to the receiving entrance and push him out before flooring it and peeling away, distancing myself from this sleazy side of the sport I care deeply about.

D.O. tried to disarm the tension by joking about how I was “one of those guys who go middle,” a slight hint of worry forming in his eyes, before ducking back behind the net. I wasn’t worried at all, of course. I had the bat in my hand. This, frankly, is the kind of confidence these clubs instill upon those who wield them. If I wasn’t already dealing with all sorts of internalized guilt, most likely remnants from my Catholic upbringing, I’d totally consider dropping the $80 or so on a modified bat.

The only way to stop hot bats, then, is through actions by the leagues or manufacturers. Of course, expecting the latter to do something is like expecting Walmart to pay employees $20 an hour with full benefits out of the kindness of its heart. The reasons for negligence are obvious. Among the negative side effects of bat doctoring is that the bats’ lives are drastically shortened. At the same time, written into every manufacturer’s return policy is a voiding of the warranty if the bat is found to be modified. So, imagine your company is being asked to prevent something that (1) requires larger quantities of your product to be sold; (2) requires fewer quantities of your product to be given away for free. What incentive do you really have to do anything?

“They say they want to address the problem, but they really don’t need to,” said Woodward. “They’re making money off of it. They’re not going to do a whole lot to curb that activity.”

While multiple inquiries to multiple bat manufacturers through multiple methods of communication went unreturned, it should be noted that Easton, at the very least, made it look as if they’ve tried to put the kibosh on this. In 2009, they released the Synergy Reveal, which had a fiberglass laminate finish that, supposedly, would “delaminate or turn white when the performance of the bat exceeds 98 mph association standards.” However, said the owner of OutlawedBats.com: “You can still shave those. If you did it wrong, that’s when the bat delaminated. Or if you did it ghetto-style without a lathe. But there’s always going to be a way.”

Due to the ineffectiveness of the aforementioned exit velocity thresholds, leagues have tried to attack the “hot bat” issue by changing other aspects of the game. They’ve made balls softer, so they don’t travel as quickly. They’ve instituted home run limits, and in some leagues - shudder the thought - a ball hit over the fence becomes an out; it also leads to more attempts at line drives, which puts everyone in danger. But those changes, no matter their effectiveness — and, truly, they’re not — are reactive, not proactive. More to the point, if you’re looking for evidence of some vast conspiracy between leagues and bat manufacturers, it’s hard to overlook the fact that the solution to this problem is so stupidly simple.

“The only way to stop juiced bats in a league or tournament is tourney-supplied bats,” said D.O. That, or go back to the deadened exit velocities of plain old wood.

But that’s not going to happen. The bats are out there, manufacturers are making oodles of money off of them, and then using some of that money to sponsor tournaments. Hot bats are easy to disguise, nearly impossible to detect, and enough players are using them that they’re easy to justify. And so, that’s kind of that. The only defense against their usage, truly, is a personal decision by individual players to put in the work rather than take a shortcut.

“I hit off a tee or my pitching machine every day. There’s a lot of work that goes into it,” said Woodward. “Go work on your game. It’s not a difficult game.”

And the ultimate prize for that work? At the end of the long season, you won’t wince when you see that cheap plastic trophy on the mantle next to your wedding photos, or the nearly unwearable piece of cloth that somewhat resembles a T-shirt at the bottom of the laundry basket. Rather, you can look fondly upon those ridiculous knick-knacks with the pride of knowing you risked moderate injury, and actually put in the work, to play and excel at this silly game that, for whatever reason, is incredibly easy to love.

“Ping!”

THE MYSTERIOUS MR. MAUNG

My fixer wouldn’t email me. I wasn’t going to Myanmar without a fixer and this one already reeked of mystery. After one email asking about dates and times, he disappeared. He knew racist demagogue monks. He flew into a rage at a reporter because they asked him to drive, a task he felt was beneath him. He didn’t live in Yangon, the big city with bars and Westernisms and gastropubs and The Strand Hotel with a butler on each floor.

He lived in Mandalay, the dusty imperial capital Kipling invoked as the ideal of the Orient’s pleasures.

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea, There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me; For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the Temple-bells they say: "Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

Kipling had never been to Mandalay, by the way, making him even more full of shit than I already thought he was. He never had to go there and wouldn’t have to.

The night before my flight I checked my email and found nothing. I was going to Myanmar to watch the game of chinlone, the sort of unofficial/official national game. Mr. Maung might be there to meet me, or he might not. He might be selling jade to Chinese billionaires, funneling arms to Karin insurgents or fixing cellphone tower contracts deep in the jungles of Chin State over a table of rice wine, Johnny Walker Blue and a thousand cigarettes. He might be meeting with monks in a political strategy meeting or setting up a bed and breakfast in Katha so Orwell-philes could stare at the sagging remnants of the British colonial clubhouse there.

If he wasn’t doing all this, someone was. They were most likely doing it by the light of a flashlight or generator. Flying in from Seoul, I can trace the blasting lights of industrial eastern China, then clearly spot Ho Chi Minh City before a stretch of deep black nothing that is Laos, and then spot the blinking lights of Thailand. It’s easy to see when you cross into Burma. Everything goes piteously, completely dark.

Object: Myanmar

Or Burma. Or Myanmar. A country of 70 million people lodged in the long, geographically dramatic drain-sluice between India, China and Thailand who don’t really care which name you use unless they work for the government. (And even then, they will likely understand.) Dotted with ancient pagodas and temples, deeply Buddhist and diverse to the point of causing structural problems with how and who runs the country. Himalayan to the north, tropical to the south and with a lot of green, rice-paddy territory in between.

Occupied by the British in the late 19th century. They left hulking colonial buildings made of Manchester tiles and British steel in the middle of jungles, mountain forests and dusty tropical flatlands, and also brought over enough Indians and Nepalis to make a well-built samosa a pretty common teatime snack in Myanmar. Currently run by the military, now slightly less evil after 53 years of some of the most maniacally evil government on the planet. Possibly liberalizing since 2011, though doing so gradually and with no set plan besides holding elections this November. Those elections could be moved at any time, because of the part about there being no transparency or set plan.

Cursed with abundant, coveted and easily extracted natural resources and a set of shadowy oligarchs who "manage" them. Obsessed with betel nut, a carcinogenic stimulant chewed to attain a pleasant, fleeting high while staining the teeth red, dotting the sidewalks with orange-crimson splatter patterns and destroying the teeth, stomach and liver. Currently living on about three dollars a day, fond of EPL soccer and unsure of its new political freedoms even as they begin to freely and chaotically exercise them.

Wearing a traditional skirt worn by men and women known as a longyi. Somewhere between optimism and pessimism about the trajectory of their future. Holding a rattan ball 8.8 ounces in weight and five inches across. Asking you to kick it to them, and doing it very, very politely.

YANGON

"Is it Myanmar, or Burma?" The woman said I could call it what I liked. The word was still Burma in the Burmese language, but the country — under the management of a military junta for the better part of 50 years — became known as the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. That decision came suddenly in 1989, and without much discussion.

This is a pattern. The car I rode in was a right-drive taxi, poking along and over a bridge, and down the long industrial stretch outside Yangon. (Or Rangoon, until 1989 when the generals changed that, too.) Under British colonial rule until 1948, the country was a left-hand drive nation until General Ne Win decided Burma would become a right-hand drive country. This, along with handing the keys to Burma’s significant natural resources solely to the military and occasionally deciding to make up imaginary cities in the jungle, would help Burma move forward as a nation.

My driver handled it well. Driving in a right-hand drive car on left-hand drive roads isn’t really a problem until you have to make a turn, at which point you realize how insanely dangerous it is to make an obstructed turn with traffic while exposing your passengers to certain doom.

"This is why we call the front seat ‘the death seat,’" the woman said, cackling.

Sitting in the death seat, we drove out and away from Yangon. Downtown Yangon is every bit the time warp every single travel guide promises. Derelict British colonial buildings wobble next to featureless poured concrete Chinese crapbox apartment buildings. The gimpy old British telegraph building now has a giant cellphone tower perched precariously on one corner.

Generators sit out on the sidewalks, and roar to life during brownouts. The covered gutters double as sidewalks, often with disastrous consequences when the concrete panels break underfoot, or when someone misses one in the very dark, unlit streets at night and breaks an ankle. Strings with bags on the ends hang down from apartment balconies. When the power goes out, you pull the string to get someone’s attention if you need to see them, and get the apartment key out of the lowered bag if you need to get into the building.

Anything older than 20 years begins growing trees and vines out of it, or hosts them as they slowly engulf the building. No motorcycles are allowed after a possibly mythical assassination attempt on a general scared the old regime off the vehicle completely. The swarm of cars and the limited roads out of town mean pedestrians often make better time at rush hour. I know this, because I saw someone get to Shwedegon Temple walking before I got there in a cab.

My hosts drive me away from downtown, and across the broad brown stripe of the Yangon River over to Da Lat. The factories sit in a line: a hot sauce concern, a textiles sweatshop, another textiles sweatshop. Little houses made of rattan, bamboo poles, the universal blue utility tarp and bits of advertising banners bordered the long drainage ditch between the factories and the improvised houses. Most ran some kind of roadside business out of the front, with the proprietors sleeping in the back.

"That’s a tire repair shop. That is a betel nut stand. That is a car wash."

She points to the stagnant pools behind and under some of the houses, the same water the roadsiders bathed in and most likely shat into on a daily basis.

"You imagine? You want them to wash your car with that water?"

On the way back into town, I see two more things in an order they shouldn’t ever, ever be viewed in:

a.) Two shirtless Burmese men in longyis standing on the bottom crosspiece of a power pole, 20 feet off the ground and working on the wires with no visible safety equipment in the blazing sun. A crew of men and boys stared up at them, waiting for something very bad or very good to happen.

b.) A $4 million Bugatti Veyron parked in the driveway of jade baron and U.S. sanctions list member Tay Za, a car that can go 262 miles per hour with tires that cost $30,000 to change. (In France, where you have to send it to get them changed.)

She gave me a tub of mangoes to eat at the hotel. They were a lurid shade of orange, and smelled like every flower on the earth inhaled at once. I walked out into the street for dinner, and the humidity sat so thick in the air that it was hard to not get a sensation of floating down the road.

Before bed, I checked my email and my messages. My fixer, Mr. Maung, was nowhere in sight.

Object: A Ball Made of Woven Wood

It is a simple game that no one wins. The traditional game of Burma, chinlone involves keeping a woven rattan ball off the ground without using your hands. There is no set number of players. There may be as few as two, or as many as six or seven, but the aim is the same: keep the ball aloft, and do so in as stylish and skilled a manner as possible while doing it.

Watch some videos of it and it’s hard to see how Myanmar isn’t cranking out half the midfielders in international soccer. The ball is caught on the instep of the foot, and then flipped to the knee before a quick bounce to the opposite foot for a backheel to the next player. The ball is spun around the foot, or popped aloft with a strike resembling a scorpion kick. The best players play-fake nearly every shot, lunging with the right before popping the left foot around, or simply whipping the entire foot around the ball in flight before lofting it back into the air. The best moves take a second for the viewer to process.

When the ball hits the ground, play stops until someone restarts the game. There can be sets of rules for competitive chinlone. One variation works a lot like figure skating, with a mandatory set of elements each player must demonstrate. Another is played with a net, and works a lot like sepak tekraw, the Indonesian game that looks like volleyball played with the feet.

Most chinlone you’ll see is the basic round-robin kickfest with no set endpoint. If it sounds like hacky-sack, well, it should also sound like keepy-uppy, or jianzi, the Chinese variation with a shuttlecock, or any of the other games recognized as being the basis of what became, among other games, what we know as soccer. It is the coelacanth of kick-sports, a horseshoe crab on the move, an alligator of a game that has survived thousands of years of human history.

It is something you would normally have to see on a temple wall and animate in your head. In Myanmar, you just have to wait around until people get off work for the day, or hang out in front of the Yangon Fire Department until a game erupts out of nowhere.

NIGHT: YANGON

At night, even under a full moon, Yangon gets country-dark. Sidewalks roll and pitch and sometimes disappear completely. Missing gutter covers leave gaping, ankle-snapping booby traps waiting for drunken pedestrians to step into. Dogs roam confidently, even belligerently. The main streets are fine. Walk down a residential street, though, and you’re stepping off the map of illuminated humanity.

I’m walking with Chili, whose fault this all is. He’s an architect and standup comedian, a combination that means he has played standup shows in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. ("Not a great show, but not the worst.") He has been in Myanmar for two years because there is a lot of work to do here, and not just because the government decided to build an entire new capital city out of nothing a few years ago. There is a building boom, although one with arcane rules, requirements and the occasional deference to a lurking but still present authority. For example: No building in Yangon could be taller than Shwedagon Pagoda, but most building proposals have to also show the pagoda General Ne Win constructed nearby to stave off an almost certain turn in Buddhist hellfire and rebirth as an earthworm.

I tell him that there is still no sign of Mr. Maung. Chili said he’d come through. Maung could be an asshole, and difficult even by the standards of difficult, but he knew his shit when it came to fixing. I was worrying too much, and hey: there were Burmese rappers at the bar that night.

This bar that was definitely not open past 11 p.m. no matter what the clock said. The 11 p.m. closing time was the arbitrary time the police had set following the recent sexual assault of an American woman by a local. It says something very good and very bad about Yangon that it is often hard to find a place that doesn’t have a happy hour, and that the drinks are served in huge volume as a rule.

It also says something that from time to time, certain liquors and beers still randomly fail to show up in shipments, but the bars never run out of locally brewed Mandalay beer. It’s honestly not bad on a general curve, save for the very particular crowning headache it leaves if you drink more than four of them in a sitting. (I never consumed less than four in a sitting, and neither will you.) Chorizo for the tacos disappeared, and wines could become contraband, as valued as hard drugs in certain months. Somewhere in Yangon in a calendar year, there is a hushed meeting in an apartment between expats and a shadowy wine pusher, whispering, "Yo…I got that Shiraz, if you’re willing to pay."

The bar is relatively new, but the building is not. In 1987, on the advice of his astrologers, the dictator Ne Win declared a new currency based on the number nine, with major large bills withdrawn from the monetary system completely. Ne Win wiped out a huge chunk of Burmese savings overnight, and housed the presses for the new money in what was now the spot where I sat chugging two-for-one Mandalay beers.

The manager pleaded gently with the rappers, including Kiki, who is to Yangon what Kendrick Lamar is to Compton. Chili yelled across the bar at them:

"I’M IN LOVE WITH THE COCOOOOOOOOO"

Without giggling or pausing, they all smiled and hollered back: "I GOT IT FOR THE LOWWWWWW LOWWWWWW—"

We leave to get a drink at the Shangri-La, since hotels are exempt from curfews, and because jetlag has destroyed any sense of time or space I might have. Expats drink here, but so do the locals, in addition to smoking and chewing betel nut. There aren’t many residential exteriors in certain neighborhoods without a Mandalay Rum or Myanmar Beer banner. (Myanmar Beer is owned in part by the Myanmar military’s business arm.)

Since 2011, a wave of economic liberalization welcomed more foreign capital into Myanmar than at any point since colonialism. The Sule Shangri-La, owned and run by a Hong Kong-based conglomerate, is a case in point. The bar has streaming wireless, wood paneling and blasting air-conditioning. Its lobby hosts a stream of rotating expats, NGO-looking types, obvious international businessmen of ill repute and the occasional backpacker rolling in for a night or two of air conditioning, steady internet and the indulgence of a $22 breakfast with real bacon. It is not Myanmar at all.

"This," I point around us, "is a lie."

Chili nods. "I know. That’s why I like it here."

The next morning, the day before I’m supposed to go to Mandalay, I checked my email. Mr. Maung was silent, meaning I was here in the spot I didn’t want to be in: let loose in the Farthest of Easts, now dependent on a mysterious local with the most shadowy connections to the most shadowy and foreign of powers.

I was to meet Mr. Maung in Mandalay. And with every second he did not let me know he was alive, he became more and more the cliched exotic mystery I did not want Burma, or these people, or chinlone, to be. I did not want to imagine Mr. Maung driving by me in Tay Za’s Bugatti Veyron, laughing and shooting a middle finger in the sky as they passed me on the way to a $3000 a night chalet nestled in the Himalayan foothills. (Which Tay Za really has.) I did not want to imagine him brokering a teak deal under the light of the full moon in Taunggyi, or shuttling Chinese military VIPs around Lashio as they shopped for rubies and diamonds for their wives and mistresses. I didn’t want that but that was where I was.

I walk around the corner to see the new KFC on day one, the first American fast food restaurant in the country. It looks like a bank run in a country where fried chicken is used as currency, with lines out the door and gawkers stopping to take pictures with their cellphones. Just down the street, squatting on the sidewalk, two old men in longyis played chess with a battered set of pieces on the sidewalk.

OBJECT: GENERAL NE WIN

Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

He’s dead now, so let’s talk about Ne Win. Burma has had many, many, many horrendous leaders. The last King of Burma, Thibaw, started his reign by having rivals in his predecessor’s court slaughtered. The women were strangled. The men were sewn into velvet bags and then beaten with paddles, and their bodies trampled into trenches by elephants. He later tossed the British out of his palace in Mandalay for refusing to take their shoes off, and they returned with an army. (That last part isn’t the worst call; I cannot imagine the filth on a colonial British soldier’s boot in Burma in the 19th century.)

Ne Win, though. Ne Win ruled Burma formally from 1962 to 1988, but dominated the country politically for much longer than that behind the scenes. (Some think he was behind the assassination of Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father and the first leader of independent Burma, in 1947.) He dragged the country into isolation, putting up "the Bamboo Curtain," nationalizing private industry and placing it in the hands of the military, and creating a prison state where dissent was met unapologetically and openly with bullets, truncheons, imprisonment, and disappearances.

Ne Win was also insane. It is hard to parse out just what may be real and what may be rumor about Ne Win and his devotion to astrology, numerology, and superstition. There is no line between what Ne Win definitely did, and what it’s said he did. When confronted with the implausible as a reality, everything then becomes equally probable. With Ne Win, every story is totally possible.

For instance: to prevent assassination attempts, he would stomp on a piece of bloody meat while firing into a mirror. Other times, he was advised to prepare for future bloodshed by standing in a vat of pig’s blood. He rode a wooden horse on a military plane as it circled his birthplace; if he visited a town, he ordered all stray dogs in that town to be slaughtered, as dogs were considered bad luck, especially those with crooked tails. He stepped backwards onto bridges.

Ne Win might have switched the nation from left-hand driving to right-hand driving because an astrologer told him the country had drifted too far to the left. He might have bathed in dolphin’s blood in an effort to stay young. He definitely did this. These are the same sentence. There are all the same insane sentences.

The madness spread to his protegés. His eventual successor, Than Shwe,started moving the capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw in 2005 at exactly 6:37 a.m., taking a convoy of trucks, files, employees, and everything but the old buildings with them. Prior to construction starting in 2002, Naypyidaw was uninhabited scrubland. It’s now a largely empty capital with broad, carless interstates flowing into and out of it. When Top Gear visited the country, the cast played soccer in the middle of one of them—safely, and without interruption.

The government blockaded foreign aid from reaching the areas of the country nearly destroyed by Cyclone Nargis in 2008, imprisoned a huge chunk of its own population over the course of over fifty years of rule, and as recently as 2007 fired on its own people in street demonstrations. Myanmar’s per capita income dropped by an estimated 66% under military rule. Ne Win died under house arrest in December of 2002, confined after his son was allegedly caught plotting a coup. The reaction around Myanmar, per State Department cables, was summed up in one word: "Finally."

A VISIT TO THE MUSEUM OF DRUG ERADICATION; A MYSTERIOUS EMAIL ARRIVES

There’s nothing but weeds and a dry fountain in the yard of the Myanmar Drug Elimination Museum in Yangon. There is one car waiting in the drive — it’s clearly a family member or friend of someone who works here, and not another tourist. The museum closes at 5 p.m. It is 4:30 p.m., and all the lights are already off.

The building itself is the ugliest shitpile of brutalist architecture I have ever seen, like a cinder block someone haphazardly blasted holes into with a screwdriver. The museum was built in 2001, but the doomed green tin roof is already showing red streaks of rust. It gives the impression of something designed to fall down halfway in 20 years, and then stand half-ruined for another three centuries.

The clerk laughs when I say I want to see it. He actually shakes his head, takes my money, and hands me a ticket and yells back into its depths. A few female voices reply in annoyed Burmese.

The lights come on, but the cancerous fluorescence only makes things worse. The museum is three floors of dusty, moldering dioramas detailing the Burmese government’s tireless efforts to subdue the drug trade with titles like "SHAN STATE MOBILIZATION PLAN #5" with sad little villages spread around miniature hillsides. Photos of generals and other military types engaged in sincere, anti-narcotic discussions with locals surround the displays. Some of the officers’ portraits line the walls adjacent to each display. Blank spots on the wall mark a general who, unfortunately, may not have taken the anti-drug agenda of the Burmese government as seriously as he should have.

Real drugs labeled "hallucinogens" and "narcotics" sit in insecure boxes on the wall. If you did not know what heroin looked like and were interested in learning, the Drug Elimination Museum could go a long way towards helping you correctly spot the real thing on the street. You might be able to take the stuff on the wall, actually, and with it a pretty good knowledge of the precursors one needs to make methamphetamine. There’s a whole display on that, too, labeled clearly: "NO PRECURSORS."

There is no one near me, as the staff have given up completely for the day, and will shut the door and run the minute I finish. Collapse and die in a corner, and your corpse might not be found for weeks.

I reach the third floor — the clear payoff floor, with Reefer Madness dioramas of youth in decline, paintings of skeletons gesturing dramatically over wasted mannequin junkies, and a multimedia children’s section where none of the A/V equipment works. There is standing water in the corners. A godlike rat pounding around the ceiling is the only sound in the place besides my footsteps.

I am the only person in the place, and the only visitor for the day.

Myanmar built the museum as a gesture to the international community. Look, we are so serious about combatting drugs that we have built this Chinese-designed crime against architecture and filled it with featureless dioramas, it says. In 2014 the second largest supplier of heroin and opium in the world was Myanmar, with methamphetamine making a roaring start in the polls in third place.

Go to the North, and it’s allegedly possible to ask the locals to go camping. The campsite is usually a village where you get opium. From there, it’s up to you where it goes, though that seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for something you can get wholesale from any number of known cultivation sites where the local military and police have been politely bought off by growers.

If nothing else works, finds someone who works at the North Korean embassy. Diplomats are forced to sell methamphetamine by the DPRK, with $300,000 a month in sales per person as their quota. They smuggle it into the country in diplomatic pouches.

I read about an exhibit where a plastic skeleton hand jumps out of a wall to grab you, but by the time I got to the first floor the women were mostly gone, and the guy behind the counter looked to be on the verge of a casual but very serious breakdown. I left.

The next morning, while throwing everything into a backpack and running for the airport, I checked my email one last time. There, sandwiched between two work emails, was a terse unread message.

Dear Spencer, Look forward to seeing you on 2nd July. Warmest regards, Maung

And under the name, a phone number.

Maung was real. He was waiting in Mandalay, presumably only after cleaning up at the tables of a Cambodian casino, evading bandits on his exit and using his winnings to found a new telecom company to bring 4G cellphone service to the Golden Triangle. He would, in his precious spare time, tell me about chinlone.

MANDALAY, THE OKLAHOMA CITY OF MYANMAR

Mandalay. Kipling never went here, but he never went to Oklahoma City, either, so he wouldn’t understand it when you say the two have the same weather in the summer. There’s a hot wind that kind of blows everything sideways. The humidity clings like a fart in a poorly air-conditioned elevator. The sun is right there, all the time, three inches from your eyeballs. It is super-religious, and dotted with huge buildings devoted to that religiosity.

I’m staying at the Hotel Amazing Mandalay, which will be known from this point forward as THE HOTEL AMAZING. THE HOTEL AMAZING has passable stuttering wi-fi, a breakfast with omelets, rooms with high ceilings and satellite television backed up by a generator to level out the hiccups of the Burmese power grid. Sure, the Chinese are damming up rivers to generate hydroelectric power, but not for Burma. Rolling blackouts are the norm.

I get into THE HOTEL AMAZING in the early afternoon and call Mr. Maung. Or: I hand my room key, which is the size of an iPhone, to the bellboy, who then hands it to the manager, who then takes the number and dials it for me, and then begins the conversation in Burmese for me. Which is fine — the general attitude towards you the further you get away from Yangon is that you have no idea what you are doing, and need several layers of assistance at all times, which I do.

A voice on the other end.

"Mr. Hall. Welcome…

[a dramatic pause way, way longer than it probably was in real life]

"…to Mandalay."

Mr. Maung said he would be there at 4 p.m., a promising indicator that he was a.) real, and b.) that I’d actually get to see the thing I came here for, and not waste time, 16,000 miles worth of air travel, and all those pills I got over-the-counter at the pharmacy in Yangon that you can’t get in the United States. I went back to my hotel room to watch Batman Begins with Burmese subtitles on Sky Net, which is the actual name of the satellite TV service in Myanmar.

When 4 p.m rolled around, I listened to the polite beeps outside from the traffic on 78th street. Horns in Myanmar aren’t alerts, but work instead like a little "pardon me," letting you know that, "hey, I’m here on your right, and passing," or maybe "hello small child, wandering haphazardly into the street, be advised that me and my two-stroke engine farm cart are plowing toward you at a safe but still dangerous speed, and you should move." When I lived in Taiwan, drivers accelerated into brick walls, hit the brake when they meant gas, and occasionally crashed giant chemical trucks at warp speed into toll booths resulting in apocalyptic hell fire. In Myanmar no one can really go fast enough in traffic to cause much trouble. The little "scuse me" honks and glacially slow merging takes care of the rest. It’s very disordered, but it seems to work well enough and get no one hurt. It’s just different, like the different perception of time Mr. Maung and I have. Be more Burmese about this, I say. You’re here. Be here, man.

It’s 4:30 p.m. Batman is now Batman and Wayne Manor has burned to the ground and there is no Mr. Maung. I make myself busy by dropping off my laundry, walking around the block, and then taking my second or third shower of the day. I’ve lost track, to be honest, but it can’t be a bad thing given the two to three shirt a day pace I’m keeping here. Maybe something important came up, and he had to take care of it immediately. A district official has been kidnapped by the Karin rebels, and he must negotiate for his release; a crony billionaire has spied an especially fetching marble Buddha on the streets, and must have several tons of stone transported to his home on the lake in Yangon immediately. I decide to finish Burmese Days.

At 5 p.m., Mr. Maung answers the phone. He apologizes but he had a meeting with a local district official that ran late. Oh, my god, he really did have to put out a political fire with a mysterious upperling, I think. That’s fine, I say, let’s just start again tomorrow and reboot and then this will all work. We’ll go watch chinlone and this will all work. How about 9 a.m.? Yes, 9 a.m. "See you then," he says with the voice I am definitely not going to say sounds over the phone precisely like a feared international hit man of infinite and terrifying renown.

I get a taxi to dinner at a Shan restaurant. It’s a buffet. The owner points at the food and bellows out the meats to me. "CHICKEN!" "FISH. THIS IS FISH." I nod, but he seems unconvinced. CHICKEN. I ate alone off of one of those universal Indian subcontinental tin thali trays while the kids working as bus boys in the restaurant nervously watched me eat. I thought about how everything looks 10 times more dismal under fluorescent lights.

I spent the rest of the night finishing up Burmese Days at THE HOTEL AMAZING. Orwell based so much of it on his own experiences in the Burmese Colonial Police that his publisher feared a libel suit. The protagonist, Flory, aka "Morge Gorgewell," understands colonialism for what it really is, and despises it despite being so much a part of it that he has lost the ability to live anywhere else.

It has spectacularly accurate descriptions of Myanmar’s weather, flora and fauna and several Burmese customs and mannerisms. Otherwise, it’s kind of flat, shrill and two-dimensional in the way a first novel usually is. It ends with Flory shooting his dog, and then, in turn, himself. Don’t read this right before you go to bed, and especially not if you’ve taken Doxycycline.

I had dreams of people playing tennis in the jungle, in British club whites, in shimmering heat, with a dead man laying on the court in full view of everyone, his brains spilled on the grass with flies everywhere and no one paying attention. Then I was running through a jungle clearing for what felt like hours, and when I stopped there was a Lexus on the road, and I knocked on the window. The glass rolled down. A general was in the passenger seat, and was playing a game on his phone, and wouldn’t look at me no matter how loud I yelled.

OBJECT: THE WASO CHINLONE FESTIVAL

Chinlone doesn’t ever really end. You just pause it, and resume later. The Waso Chinlone Festival, for instance, has 30 teams a day. Not total: in one day. Each team gets 30 minutes to display their skills. With 30 teams a day, starting at 9 a.m. and going until midnight, that’s 15 hoursof straight chinlone, set over a lunar month.

The Burmese do this kind of marathon entertainment all the time. They do not, as a culture, like brevity in their diversions. Traditional Burmese operas — sprawling vaudeville extravaganzas of puppetry, traditional music and theater — start at 5 p.m. and often last for two days straight. The youth don’t want to stay for the whole thing, so they squeeze rock bands into the schedule now and then, too.

But even by this scale, the Waso Chinlone Festival is something else entirely. The Wimbledon match between Isner and Mahut lasted 11 hours, and spanned two days. Andy Bowen and Jack Burke boxed for seven hours and 19 minutes. It might take someone 72 hours to complete the 136 mile Badwater Marathon through Death Valley, while the Dakar Rally stretches over two weeks.

These are all singular events with much, much different parameters, yet consider that if one were to sit down and watch the entirety of the Waso Chinlone Festival, that bleary, hallucinating soul would acquire a fierce betel nut habit and also end up seeing 450 hours of straight chinlone. Cut every NFL game down to only live snaps, and you would run out of footage just before the beginning of the Waso Chinlone Festival’s third day. Their eyes would gleam with the madness of pure Burman geometry; their ears, totally destroyed by a solid month of clanging traditional music, would bleed at the reedy croak of the Burmese oboe, the hne.

The Waso Chinlone Festival might the longest sporting event in the world, and the only equipment required for it is a woven rattan ball five inches in diameter. The betel nut and five piece Burmese band are optional, but preferred.

"I AM NOT MR. MAUNG"

The next morning the phone by my bed rang.

"The man is here."

I walked into the lobby. Maung was sitting in a chair, and rose to meet me. He wore a darkly patterned longyi, a light short-sleeved button down shirt, and sandals. He smiled, nodded, and walked over apologetically.

"Mr. Spencer, it’s nice to meet you."

"Mr. Maung, it’s nice to meet you, too."

He smiled again.

"Mr. Spencer, I am not Mr. Maung."

A note: if this misdirection seems out of order, it shouldn’t. There’s all kinds of misdirections going on here. Consider Tay Za, who may be a real life Bond villain, or at least a prominent secondary figure and key plot rung on the way up to the head of SPECTRE. He may, or may not be, related by marriage to the insane Ne Win. (He denies it.) His net worth may be just over a billion dollars, or less, or much, much more, depending who you talk to, or depending on what month it is, or depending on who’s asking. If it is someone from the United States government, he is worth much, much less than people believe.

Tay Za made his initial fortune in timber extraction. Tay Za moved into jade later, shoveling as much of the greenish, nearly translucent stone into the Chinese market as they could take. Huge blocks of it sit along the driveway of his villa in Yangon, because…well, because fuck you, world. Tay Za is rich enough that he can leave giant cubes of unrefined jade just laying around like lawn sculptures. The mines in northern Burma around the town of Hpakant, meanwhile, are an environmental disaster.

He owns an airline, multiple hotels, a soccer team and a bank, and is personally sanctioned by the European Union. He bought arms from Russia for the Burmese government, announced the discovery of uranium in 2014, and survived a helicopter crash on a barren Himalayan mountainside by huddling under a rocky outcropping for three days until help arrived. He is described as a generous boss to his employees, and hired Burma’s first female pilot for his airline. Despite the Bond villain trappings and a reputation for partying, he is also one of the most giving charitable donors in the country through the Htoo Foundation.

He is the most prominent — willfully so — of the crony capitalists closely associated with the regime that kept Burma’s neck under its bootsoles, going as far as brokering arms deals with Russia for the Myanmar government. Yet, when Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San and democracy advocate placed under house arrest for over 20 years, was initially on the run, she hid in different homes around Yangon to avoid the military. Tay Za’s claim that his family’s house was one of them is unsubstantiated. His offer of free domestic flights for life for the democracy leader, though, is completely legitimate, and accepted by Aung San Suu Kyi in 2013.

They live not far from each other in Yangon.

ALLEGEDLY HERE

The man standing in the lobby is not Mr. Maung.

This man’s name is Htoo. He has been dispatched to serve as my translator and chinlone procurer. Mr. Maung is somewhere else, doing the kinds of things I want him to be doing as the abstract shadow figure I want him to be in my imagination. He texted Htoo from an ultralight surveying betel nut fields to get me, or at least that’s what I will believe. He landed, congratulated himself on his delegation and management skills, and jumped into a waiting Toyota Hilux to attend an important pye somewhere in the Kachin hills. There would definitely not be an opium baron there.

"I hope you don’t mind a motorcycle."

Htoo is not Mr. Maung, and this is not really a motorcycle, either. This is a 75cc scooter, the kind with bizarre English names like "HAPPY, THE SCOOTER" or "URBAN, A MIGHTY WAINSCOT".* It’s the kind of scooter my huge American ass almost broke when, in a moment of confusion the day before, I told a motocabbie to take me to Mandalay Hill. He read this as "up" Mandalay Hill. A third of the way up the bike just stopped, and I had to beg the man to stop and let me off before he and the bike both died of exhaustion.

*I made that one up, but just barely.

They move on flat land well enough, though. With the exception of the Hill, Mandalay is pancake flat, and Htoo (who weirdly insisted I be "safe" and wear "a helmet") ripped off into traffic, nudging along with little pardon-me beeps. Turning left across traffic usually means carving your own turn lane, rather than following one static arc across an intersection. Htoo cuts one about two feet into a busy intersection, weaving mid-path around a slow moving bus. In another, he dive-bombs wide and deep through a cluster of fart-engined scooters. The path clears at the last second; Htoo, like a quarterback throwing into coverage, saw it the whole time.

He does this all with 200 pounds of overfed American crushing the shocks over his back wheel.

We speed past the various faceless pixellated heads of Buddhas on Marble Street and hang a sharp right into the temple complex. To one side, there’s a weedy park shaggy from the rainy season. There are a few guys laying under trees in the manner of the Universal Guy In Parks Who Probably Does Drugs. The Maha Muni Temple is ahead, where you can pay about three bucks for a thin sheet of gold to apply to their ever blingier Buddha. His calves are huge and luminescently gilded. Monks in crimson robes, mostly young and with shaved heads and wary expressions, shuffle in and out of the gates.

There is an octagonal building to the right. Htoo parks his scooter, gives an attendant 100 kyat or so. Tiers of concrete bleachers surround an oval about 15 feet wide. Sponsor banners festoon the rafters and the support poles. They are for a sports drink called "SPONSOR," which is not a typo.

A half-capacity crowd sits on the concrete, chewing betel nut and politely spitting into plastic sandwich bags to avoid staining the floor. Some are obviously city guys with fresh shirts and bigger, shinier cellphones they ogle. Some are younger, rougher-looking Burmese kids, wearing longyis matched with a lot of horrorcore t-shirts Juicy J wore in 1998. There are a few old guys in button-downs, smoking green cheroots and occasionally nodding with expressions of deep but subtle approval.

A traditional Burmese band is playing, cordoned off from the rest of the stands by an ornate wooden screen to make their own bandstand. They play a looped riff of gonging, squealing, hammering beats and hne riffs with no real set beginning or end, and at earsplitting volumes. The hne playing over the xylophone of gongs and drums is sonic battery, like Ornette Coleman playing a 45-minute solo over the sounds of a crashing bar fight between Tibetan monks.

Htoo points to the seats directly in front of them.

"We will not sit there."

In the ring, five men are circling counter-clockwise at an unhurried pace. They wear what look like blue soccer kits. Some wear a simple canvas shoe, while others play barefoot. An announcer seated in what looks like a miniature lifeguard’s chair narrates in blared, rapid-fire Burmese over an ancient PA system. He is smoking, and has a focused but dead serious expression like an air traffic controller guiding in a plane with an engine fire.

A rattan ball floats in neat parabolas between the players, sometimes off a hip, sometimes off a knee, and mostly off feet. They scorpion kick passes to each other, curling the leg fully up and over their back. They lob passes off the instep of their foot, or off the side, or fake one way and then whip their foot around the ball in a 360 before soft-pedaling a punt to a teammate.

The announcer crackles over the PA: "MANDALA!"

No one looks like an athlete, or at least a steady kind of athlete. There’s one guy who is clearly a dad, another who might be an older runner-type, a guy who looks like a realtor. There is one man who has grandchildren, and in two minutes executes no fewer than four moves that would snap an average human being’s hamstring, ACL, achilles or all three. When the ball gets kicked into the audience or dropped, the player groans and smiles, and they pick up the ball and start again. When they pull off feather delicate pieces of sorcery, the audience claps and goes "OHHHHHHH" with approval.

At the end of 30 minutes a bell rings, and the team takes a bow and exits the ring. One of them ducks behind a partition, and emerges in a fresh business shirt and with a giant fresh betel nut in his mouth. The band takes what seems to be a much, much shorter break than they should need after playing 25 minutes, and I sit there with the blasted and giddy expression of someone who has no idea what they just watched.

Htoo points to the sign hanging above the SPONSOR signs in curlicued Burmese.

"That says: ‘This is the 87th Waso Chinlone festival.’"

THE PROSAIC, BORING DETAILS AND YES, THE EXOTIC AND ETHEREAL EXPERIENCE OF WATCHING CHINLONE

There are gritty, practical and decidedly non-metaphysical details first. They will be explained where most explicable things in Myanmar get explained — at the table of a teashop a chinlone’s throw out of the arena. There is a low table, some foot-high red and blue plastic stools and teacups sitting in a bucket of mystery water. An older guy takes a cup from it and pours me some tea and I drink it because I am too polite to refuse, and too stupid to remember that this is the rainy season, and that standing water is a bad, bad thing for intestinal health in these conditions.

Much of this is explained to me by Burmese men, old guys in longyis with betel-stained teeth. They go from stone-faced to animated the minute Mr. Htoo mentions chinlone. At one point, three or four men speak in hurried Burmese at once, gesturing to various and highly specific points on their feet and legs to show precisely where the chinlone strike in question must be made. Once we start talking chinlone, tea appears, along with some peanuts and a few inscrutable snack foods. Someone offers me a cheroot. I decline politely, making a gesture somewhere between "I do not smoke" and "I have demons that occupy my lungs rent-free." No one seems offended, and the chinlone dads barrel right through the social misstep and through an explanation of the proceedings, including asking me if I know the other foreigners who know about chinlone.

One man grabs my arm very seriously. "Do you know…Greg?" He most likely means Greg Hamilton, the Canadian chinlone acolyte and documentarian, but in the heat and the static of the moment I assume he means … Greg, any Greg whatsoever. I nod, as I know at least three of them, and also do not want to ruin my hosts’ day by not knowing their prized Greg.

He seems relieved. "Good. We like him. He likes chinlone."

The Waso Chinlone festival starts at the beginning of the Burmese lunar month of Waso, corresponding roughly with July. It accepts an $1,800 entrance fee from somewhere around 900 teams total. There is no limit to the number of time an individual may enter on multiple teams, and no set minimum or maximum to the number of players on a team, though the small space of the ring sets a kind of natural limit. More than five people playing at once greatly increases the possibility of someone getting kicked hard in the face. There is solo chinlone, but it is reserved for women.

The entrance fees go to the Maha Muni Temple. Teams win nothing, and do not compete against each other. No one wins, and no one loses, though teams do have an incentive to show out their best chinlone here. Mandalay is to chinlone what Rucker Park is to street ball, and the Waso Chinlone Festival in particular is a showcase where teams can get noticed. Get noticed, and you can get expenses paid plus a small sum (something like 30,000 Burmese kyat, or around 30 bucks) to play on the temple festival circuit and get paid for something most players here do for free. In a country where most people live on three bucks a day, that is not an insubstantial sum.

The band gets paid, and there’s some contribution from SPONSOR. Otherwise, all of this is done for nothing. There’s not even a way to gamble on chinlone, at least not one that doesn’t involve some secret spiritual mathematics. Teams play for 30 minutes each, with an unaccompanied warmup period, and then with the band blasting away behind them. The music tries to push the tempo of the game, or slow it down, or sometimes roars along over the action on some mission completely tangential to the game. Players do rotate in and out, with the younger musicians taking shifts on the drums.

Most learn from family, or from friends in town. There are teachers, but few if any take any pay. The 89-year-oldcompeting in the 2015 festival taught his grandson, who played for the national selection for the 2013 Southeast Asian Games. That instruction teaches the 200 or 300 major moves in chinlone — a number no one seems to be too intent on clarifying. The moves range from basic ("side kick, front kick") to the more elaborate and metaphysical ("Riding the horse," for example, where a player brings their heel behind and around one leg for a strike that looks a lot like someone spurring horse.)

The players mostly come in from around Mandalay, but some make the trip from Yangon, or even from the far north of Kachin. The Kachin team I watched was representative of a lot of what you’ll see on a chinlone team. There’s one younger player, usually just out of high school, a few middle-aged guys and usually one or maybe even two men who the spectator might worry about until they start moving like people 20 years their junior. There were university students, and there was a local jade baron. There were stringy high schoolers, and a guy on the Kachin team who could have played forward on Myanmar’s rugby team.

Chinlone has no set body type or age. Roll a ball out in a town, and everyone from the grandmother in a headscarf to the cabbie sleeping in his car might play. Unless someone is in a wheelchair or limited by a recent amputation, you have no idea what a chinlone player looks like or doesn’t — and even then it could be a stretch to count the amputee out, provided he’s good with his headers.

On Aug. 1, the festival ends, the lunar calendar rolls from the month of Waso into the month of Waguang, and the band goes home to sleep for a year.

OBJECT: A GAME AGAINST GRAVITY

Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images

Burma doesn’t have much of a sporting culture, at least not in comparison to its neighbors. It’s not the poverty: India, another former colonial nation with serious poverty, obsesses over cricket, has a pretty substantial soccer problem and goes various levels of apeshit over kabbadi, chess and field hockey. To the east, muay thai is so popular that towns grind to a halt during big fights, and soccer and golf take up serious headspace in the national consciousness. The upstairs neighbors in China are hardcore converts to the NBA, and will occasionally fight you over a game of table tennis.

Since the advent of satellite TV — brought to you by local satellite provider and our eventual world ruler SKY NET — soccer has taken off, but that remains a relatively recent phenomenon even counting the British colonial introduction of the sport. (Not so recent that most young men’s scooter seats don’t have Manchester United or Chelsea logos emblazoned on them, but still.) Other than the native kickboxing form, lethwei, chinlone stands as the most popular and specifically Burmese national game.

In 1962, the term "Orwellian" came home to Burma in one of the most complete and sunless takeovers of the public space in human history. The military metastasized and invaded every single major organ of the public body, banning all political parties other than itself, erasing the free press, closing the borders, nationalizing industries and reacting with a sense of overkill that would be comical if it didn’t involve real people on the wrong end of high-powered explosives and guns.

From the start, their reactions were literal, blunt and hamhandedly overpowered. When students at Yangon University protested against the military’s power grab on July 7, 1962, the regime responded by blowing up the entire student union. When the ’88 demonstrations started, Ne Win resigned, and then simultaneously warned "When the army shoots, it shoots to hit." That’s the leader of the country openly threatening to gun down demonstrators in the street — which, in fact, they did in appalling numbers. The wounded were taken to Yangon General Hospital. The military, in response, fired directly into the hospital.

The world grew small and spare. And when things grow small and spare, things die. At least the Soviets (and later, the Chinese) sponsored brutal Olympic sports programs to show the world the manifest supremacy of their way of life. Burma’s generals didn’t even have that much imagination, commitment or concern for what the rest of the world might have thought in the first place. Burma’s bustling cinema, the biggest in postwar Southeast Asia, shriveled to nothing. Sports, in the modern sense of teams, leagues and the attendant froth of media, networks and rabid fanbases, were stillborn.

The one game that could survive was chinlone. Why? It would be theoretically convenient to say it was a moment of silent resistance so simple not even the police and the Tatmadaw (the regime’s name for the army) could erase it. That would be too doctrinaire, though; the last thing most chinlone players talk about is thinking. The 43-year-old mother I watched kicking rings around men 20 years her junior said herself that the only thing she was thinking about was the next move, and how to make it as good as she could. Otherwise, she was as blank as the game’s script itself, completely absorbed in the game.

Another could be that under the Sauron’s eye of the regime, chinlone was too small to consider a threat, and too uniquely Burmese to consign as treason. It required little in the way of resources, an important point in a place where even now, under an increasingly free free-market economy, the daily wage barely covers the cost of rice and cooking oil for a family. It had been around forever, and never attracted crowds of the size that might be suspicious to a regime so paranoid it banned "ballroom dancing, horse racing, gambling and beauty pageants."

In fact, before the Ne Win years blotted out the sun completely, the nation’s early nation-builders embraced chinlone, and even tried to codify its moves into something like a canon. In the effort to define Burma’s identity, chinlone emerged as something distinctly Burmese, with Burmese claims on the sport’s soul going back to the 13th century and beyond. The early postcolonial governments went as far as building chinlone courts on school grounds as part of a national identity.

There’s another theory: Chinlone might have been too simple to die, even under the worst circumstances imaginable. It is Burma’s own devoted and special sporting tardigrade, the creature that could survive being shot into the cold space of the world’s most sustained horrible dictatorship, and be brought back to earth with no ill effect. It is perfectly adapted for survival here, right down to the metaphorical parallels you don’t want to make but do: that Burma’s own game is the beautiful one that no one wins, and one that works beautifully when people work together, and disastrously when they do not. It looks simple, and then reveals a stubborn complexity.

That complexity lives under the pressure of gravity and the player’s limited reflexes, with circumstances so fluid that improvisation is not an option, but is the only option. That improvisation lives only in the physical knowledge passed down through practice and survival, of 200 or 300 moves passed down from hand to hand across centuries. A chinlone player in the throes of a run burns in the fire of gravity and superior odds and will lose, but that’s not the point. That’s never, ever the point.

There one more theory: Chinloneis just a game, floating randomly from one point in history to the next.

SELECTION TEAM

It’s a little before 6:30 p.m. in Mandalay. The heat starts to break a little bit, just a degree or two, making it just a little less hateful than it might otherwise be out in the sun. There are stages to watching chinlone, and I have gone through all four by this point:

Zero to five minutes: Disorientation. Why’s this band playing? JESUS THAT BAND IS LOUD. They’re going to play the whole time, aren’t they? This is just circular vegan cruelty-free hacky sack. Oh, god, I came all this way to watch vegan hacky sack. Is that man 80?Am I about to watch a man die, because it is 90 degrees in here, and a man could die from standing up too quickly. Please don’t let me watch a man die playing vegan hacky sack in a country on the other side of the world.

Five minutes to 20 minutes: Clarity and mild interest. OK, there’s something else here. This seems difficult in an entertaining way. This is something I cannot do, ever, but that’s OK because that man just bounced a ball off his ass and onto his head and then over to his friend, who then jump-kick-dribbled it 47 times in a row without apparent effort. This is neat. I have officially decided on this being neat.

20 minutes to 45 minutes: Boredom. Wait, they’re serious about this not stopping for a month. Dead serious. Religiously serious, even. I’ve seen that kick before, and that one. Oh, god, that fear is back: that I’ve come all this way for nothing, and that vegan hacky sack was all this way, and that hne player has the lungs of an abalone diver, doesn’t he? As in he will never, ever stop playing, and will follow me back to the HOTEL AMAZING, and will climb in bed with me as I Skype with my family in America, all the while ruining our conversation by playing the whole time and giving me an enthusiastic thumbs-up while doing it.

45 minutes and beyond to an unspecified point in time not found by this research: Jacked into the abstract neural net of the universe itself. Colors have become three-dimensional; mild heatstroke has rendered time irrelevant. Shapes begin tracing their own geometries through space. Players begin speaking a physical language superior to barking primitive words; when taking the ball for extended turns in the center, they speak only to gravity and gravity’s manager, making absurd requests of the universe in rapid-fire succession, having them granted and then immediately reloading the docket with a whole new stack of impossibilities. Your ass goes numb, possibly from sitting on a concrete seat for seven hours, but maybe for spiritual reasons, too.

People have by this hour quietly filled the stands, bringing their kids, with their faces still daubed with traces of thanaka, wearing baseball caps emblazoned with the names of their primary schools, sitting in their dads’ laps and happily chewing on candy. There are, believe it or not, a few people there from the morning shift. An older man next to me nudges my shoulder and points. Watch.

The selection team begins. They wear gold and red kits save for the woman, who wears shorts and a high-collared mandarin top in an ornate pink print pattern, and the one guy in a green Myanmar national jersey. He is tall, and built like an underfed American football safety, an obvious utility athlete prototype who could play anything he liked. He starts in the middle. The other national selection member is less obvious, a dark kid who looks like he could almost be Tamil. He has the big legs of a frequent chinlone player, but little else hinting at athleticism. He parries around the edge, waiting for his turn.

The big guy in green opens with a reel of baffling juggles, striking the ball upwards with the top of his foot and spinning a 360 between each strike, coming full circle at the exact instant the ball falls back to his foot. He does nine or 10 of these in a row before losing control, watching his teammates save an errant shot, and then starting again on a whole new run.

For a moment, no one clearly takes the point, and the ball is volleyed around the circle off hips, knees, heels, and in a dire moment, a forehead until the second selection member takes over and moves to the center of the circle. He playfully refuses the ball, booting easily handled passes back to teammates with insanely difficult twisting kicks where his body faces full right, but the leg is torqued nearly backwards. His juggling is obviously different to watch, a series of passes from foot to foot, then from foot to foot between the legs, then a transfer of the ball through the legs and back to a whipping backheel somehow brought around in time to keep the run alive.

A third teammate, a skinny college-aged kid with blonde highlights, rotates in, catching the ball on his forehead, balancing it, and then seamlessly dropping it to his ankle, where he cradles it before popping it to his knee, and then his other knee, and then dropping again to drag his leg beneath him and kick with his opposite foot up, and then back to his head. If it’s hard to visualize it should be. Mr. Htoo clarifies each move’s specifics after they happen, since my eyes misses much of what’s happening. Sometimes only the applause lets you know that something, a legitimate, sleight-of-foot something, has happened.

The crowd’s tenor changes. The music speeds up, and the teenage kids working the rhythm section start wailing the hell out of their drums. There’s more applause than usual, more open "OHHHHS," more strangled chatter from the guy with the Burmese oboe. The girl takes her turn, cradling the ball in the crook of her ankle between her foot and shin, then juggles out to the big dude in the green selection jersey. The music rages up to a point where it sounds less like a Burmese orchestra, and more like a Burmese orchestra playing while their bus races downhill in a mountainside bus crash.

The kid in green starts speeding up, passing the ball between his feet in figure-eights, and then in other shapes the eye can’t really keep up with after a few turns. He is absurdly light on his feet, spinning in between each strike with his head craned a full 70 degrees up to track the ball in flight. His teammates circle, periodically spotting the ball back to him while he solos, but mostly they sneak glances at his moves while keeping an eye on the ball, and on keeping the run alive.

Finally, the kid gets tired of his own ability to break off the same dazzling trick 20 times in a row, squats and attempts a wild catch of the ball between his knees. He was probably going to try and boot the ball up with his feet pressed together at the soles, or something like that, but he misses, and the chinlone lands and rolls lazily out of the ring. The crowd applauds the daring. It’s one thing to keep a ball in the air for 30 minutes straight. It’s another to drop it because you were trying to do something dazzling, even if the consequences in the end mean inevitable failure.

And then they pick the ball up and start again until the bell rings, and the crowd applauds.

Burmese street merchants sell monk-related memorabilia, including something that looks a lot like trading cards for monks. U Wirathu is represented well, and easy to spot. He has a downturned mouth, big, super-serious eyes with thick eyebrows, and if you understand Burmese, is the one arguing that Islam is "a mad dog" and calling the UN’s envoy to Myanmar a "bitch" and a "whore."

He’s also been one of the big advocates for the government’s attempts to push the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in the southeastern state of Rakhine, out of the country. The government had already clamped down on the citizenship status and rights of the Rohingya, but U Wirathu and the "969" movement amped up the unrest in the newly liberalized political environment after 2011. In 2012, riots erupted over an alleged gang rape in Rakhine State, with over 90,000 ending up displaced by the fighting. Many believed U Wirathu and the 969 movement contributed to that violence, and made a bad situation much, much worse than it already was.

The idea of a monk associating himself with violence at all is odd to an outsider. It should be, but consider how odd the moment is: a country that, in 2011, suddenly found itself ever so slightly adrift on a puddle of freedom it had never known, and then out a bit to something like a shallow pond of freedom, and ever further out to depths unknown to almost anyone living in the country. The boot of the military is still there, sure, but now Myanmar functions like an open and ugly oligarchy. Some of them happen to wear military fatigues. Some of them, on the political side at least, wear saffron robes of the monastery.

Walking the cordoned-off bit of Myanmar you are allowed to see it is really, really easy to get overly excited about the country’s prospects. The people clearly love all the new things even a smidgen of freedom affords them, right down to the cellphones the young stay glued to constantly. They love being able to watch Premier League soccer whenever they want, and being able to travel outside their village, even if only to Yangon or Mandalay or Bagan or wherever the night bus will take them.

There’s all that, and then there’s the creeping sense of how wrong this could all go, too. There’s always been a question of how much of a country it actually is, or how much the government really controls at any given moment. A different Karin rebel group might start up a flash-war at any given moment in the east. In the North, where there is definitely not opium being produced, and definitely not trucks full of jade being smuggled tax-free into China, you can’t even travel much without permits. There was a shadowy border conflict with Chinese-backed rebels in the northeast as recently as February 2015. Sometimes bombs go off randomly, and sometimes those bombs reach Yangon.

There is also the wild card of the clergy in a heavily Buddhist country, a clergy with no central authority figure and a lot of disagreement on how to function politically. Monks fearlessly threw themselves into anti-government protests against the military regime in the past. Some of them also endorse pushing Muslims into the sea to the south, and were influential in getting a New Zealand bar manager a two and a half year sentence of hard labor for using a Buddha image in a Facebook post. There are allegedly stickers in English reading "The Brothers Are Watching" up in certain parts of Yangon favored by foreigners. No one I talked to could personally vouch for their existence, though.

And in the face of that, the reaction is generally one of silence. Not even Aung San Suu Kyi, the most powerful non-military figure in the country, has come to the Rohingya’s defense. There are elections in November, and even though she is constitutionally barred from holding the Presidency, she plans to lead her party’s attempts to win seats in parliament. She has said that the issue should be handled "carefully." In the meantime, there are boats full of Muslims headed to wherever they can go: Malaysia, Indonesia and beyond.

It could go so well, or it could go so, so badly. The ingredients for either are all here. Myanmar could run unchained into a headlong rush for prosperity, or devour itself and run to any number of new demagogueries and tyrannies. Alternately, it could take an even more ambiguous path. Myanmar might just crank along at half-wattage, living in a state of a persistent and bejeweled rolling blackout. It might keep poking the issue of national identity, claiming a game like chinlone with one hand as something surely Burmese, and openly swatting "outsiders" like the Rohingya out of the country with the other. When the Indians and Chinese were told to leave, it wasn’t subtle, either. They found out they weren’t going to be part of the future when bricks flew through the windshields of their cars.

When the lights are on, you can see the luxury cars sitting in the driveways of Yangon, and the occasional hydroelectric-powered palace, and the long tentacles of Chinese capital stringing road and new railways through the jungle. When the lights are off, you only hear the dogs in the streets, or the puttering of generators cranking to life in the dark for those who can afford them. That is another way this could go. Even with the threats of violent-minded monks and an economy threatening to throw everyone in charge clear off the saddle, nothing much at all happening is always an option. Nothing much has happened before here.

OBJECT: THE U BEIN BRIDGE

Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Htoo and I watched a few more teams that night, but none of them approach the selection team’s brilliance. We left, and rode on the back of his scooter again, flying through half-lit streets and past the walls of the Imperial Palace. A giant sign at one gate read: TATMADAW AND THE PEOPLE COOPERATE AND CRUSH ALL THOSE HARMING THE UNION.

I told Htoo to go back and tell Mr. Maung I didn’t need him the next day. I wanted to get out of Mandalay, and away from the dust and the half-carved Buddhas. I’d seen enough chinlone, or thought I had seen enough. I still honestly can’t say whether watching five minutes of the game or five days’ would be enough. It was hard to say you’d even seen it, or that it was even you seeing it. Something kind of terrifying happened if you watched enough chinlone: there was nothing, a perfect blankness between annihilation and calm.

I wasn’t alone. Players confessed to feeling nothing, if anything when they played. They could see a horizon that ended at the next move, the next kick, the next pass. Some of them couldn’t even see that far, or at least did not have what they called a conscious grip on what was happening to them. One of the national selection team members said he didn’t even think when he played, not even about the next move. He smiled through red-stained teeth, spat, and said he just focused on his breathing and the ball. Chinlone didn’t explain anything about Myanmar.

Htoo took me back to the hotel that night on the back of his motorcycle. The city hummed half-lit and full of traffic and the wind blew through my hair. For a minute or two I wasn’t there. You are there one moment, thinking about the swaying weight of your body on the bike, and the ebbing and rising tide of traffic around you, the hot wind getting slightly tepid in the night, and whether your passport had fallen out of your pocket.

Then something shifts and you disappear. Maybe you notice your breathing, or the lean of a guy in a doorway, or the sickly blue-green tinge of a fluorescent light flickering out of a restaurant, and you evaporate into something else, a passenger without will or volition. Your mind drifts and suddenly other things carry you along, push you from one point to the next, and all you can do is put your face into the wind and hope you see the next turn coming, or at least stop caring if it doesn’t. There’s not much of a you to worry about it, anyway, just nerves and flesh flying along on the back of a two-wheeled farting land-skiff processing light waves and noting the ones and zeroes of the world.

I woke up the next morning and hired a car and went out seven miles from Mandalay to the U Bein Bridge, the world’s longest teak span. There are no handrails, and no safety measures. It is 163 years old, three-quarters of a mile long, and made of the scraps of a royal palace in Inwa destroyed by an earthquake. Royal palaces in Myanmar have an elaborate and consistent history of being destroyed in grandiose fashion.

The boards sag as you step on them. When the wind kicks up and the water moves with it, the bridge kind of breathes a little as you walk on it. I walked the full length of the bridge and back. There are pilings completely unattached to the lake bed, simply floating in place with the rest of the bridge’s superstructure. A family offered to take pictures and print them for passing tourists at the covered rest stops on the bridge. The setup is simple, but effective: a battered laser printer, a camera, a few cords and all of it connected to a live car battery.

The greatest prize the brain offers, you’re told, is consciousness, the ability to say "I am here, and in control of X." Yet the happiest moments in any game come when the brain turns off to its lowest setting, when you take the mind, fold it into a little paper boat, and set it off into an ocean of dark matter and unconscious reflex and Brownian motion. The highest functions of the gigantic human brain are happily trashed daily by kicking a ball, or simply putting the body in motion and daring the slow-footed mind to keep up with it.

Yet halfway across the bridge, staring at the boats on the water, something sneaks up on me. I’m suspended in the air, 20 feet over the lake, blowing ever so slightly back and forth on the thinnest of improvised frameworks. It’s a sensation somewhere between falling and flying.

It terrifies me how good that felt.

The hallucinations started out small, subtle flickers of light at the edges of my vision. “Lightning!” I’d think, and then turn my head to see a cloudless sky. They took firmer shape as the hours passed, acquiring form and color — bright, imagined graffiti tagging the empty rocks of the cliffs that hemmed the river in on both sides of me, or a line of kayaks in rainbow colors spread across the water ahead. Blinking didn’t banish them; even knowing they weren’t real didn’t chase them away. Most often, the visions were logical extensions of my circumstances: Every tree stump on shore became a bear or a moose. Every dead tree floating downriver became a rival boat, a fellow racer to chase down.

The Yukon River Quest is the world’s longest annual canoe and kayak race. It runs each year from Whitehorse, the small capital city of Canada’s Yukon Territory, north for 445 miles (715 km) down the wide, fast-moving Yukon River to tiny, historic Dawson City. Whitehorse sits just above the 60th parallel; by the time they reach Dawson City, boats have crossed the 64th,traversing the territory from just above the British Columbia border almost to Alaska, following the track so many prospectors took in the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. Racers can enter in solo or tandem canoes, solo or tandem kayaks, or in giant voyageur canoes, which hold anywhere from six to 10 people — even more if you can squeeze them in. Teams have a maximum of 84 hours — three and a half days — to make it to Dawson City before the cut-off time for official finishers, and they dash downstream without pausing to sleep or to cook a proper meal. They strap CamelBaks loaded with water and electrolyte powder to their backs, pop caffeine pills and painkillers every few hours, and try not to count the ways in which they’ve begun to blister and chafe. And no: for most teams, there are no bathroom breaks. You do what you can from inside your moving boat.

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

My team was No. 47, a group of eight 20- and 30-something women from Whitehorse. Our captain, Carmen, had put out a call on Facebook for potential racers, and each of us had found our way onto the team through friends or friends of friends. We’d dubbed ourselves the Tough Birches and trained together for seven weeks leading up to the race, hitting the water two or three times a week. Our boat was a large, aging rental, heavily patched from past journeys. We named her Jenny Who’s Been Around the Block.

We’d also given ourselves nicknames intended to convey our fierceness, our toughness, our readiness — or at least those attributes we hoped we would exhibit. Syd, an avid hunter, was registered for the race as Sydney “The Slayer” Van Loon. Vanessa, our designated sternswoman, was Vanessa “Roundhouse Kick” Norris. I’d signed up, aspirationally, under the name Eva “Hellbent” Holland, and I hoped I’d be able to live up to its promise.

In the nearly six years that I had been living and writing in the Yukon, covering endurance, adventure, and extreme sports events had become my specialty. But I’d always been on the sidelines, with a notebook and a camera, living vicariously through the athletes I interviewed. I had never entered a serious competition myself. (A less-than-serious competition? That, I had done.) This past spring, I’d signed up to paddle the River Quest because I wanted to experience the world I so often wrote about. I wanted to see the midnight sun set, and then rise again, on an empty stretch of wild river. I wanted to know what it felt like to hallucinate from exhaustion. I wanted to push my body to a point where I didn’t recognize it anymore. Most of all, I wanted to know: Could I do it? Could I make it all the way to Dawson City? Or would I cry and scream and beg to be allowed to quit partway?

When we left Whitehorse at noon on a hot, sunny Wednesday, armed with water and protein shakes and snacks and rain gear and sunscreen and emergency survival supplies and an arsenal of sing-along songs to carry us down the river, I truly didn’t know what the answer would be.

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

The start of the race was a blur: a hurried, five-second countdown after the official speeches ran long; a 400-meter dash, in a crush of more than 150 racers, from the grass of a city park down to our boats lined up along a gravel bar; and then we were off, stabbing our paddles into the water, flowing with the crowd of boats out into the main current, jockeying for position as the hundreds of spectators that filled the riverbank cheered and cheered. Soon enough the excitement faded and we settled into a rhythm — Carmen, our team captain up in the front of the boat, had a small battery-powered digital metronome, and she set our pace at 60 paddle strokes per minute, a pace we would keep, more or less, for most of the next two and a half days.

Jenny Who’s Been Around the Block had six seats, hard fiberglass benches that we’d padded with yoga-type mats, and there were eight of us to fill them. Carmen was in the bow, with a narrow bench to herself, and a second Carmen alone behind her. Then came Anna and Syd, on a wide middle bench, and Jacqueline and me behind them. Cristi, alone in the second-to-last seat, and Vanessa, in the stern, rounded out the lineup. The plan was to switch sides every fifteen minutes; those who sat alone would just scooch over to the far gunnels, and those of us sharing a bench would execute an awkward simultaneous climb-over/under maneuver to make the transition. Our seating arrangements had been set according to our weight and, in the case of the bow and stern, according to that paddler’s specific role — setting the pace, or steering the ship. Jacqueline, by coincidence, was my closest friend in the boat, and we had joked that sharing a canoe bench for 50 or 60 hours was likely to make or break the relationship.

We had three and a half hours of easy, familiar river, paddling with the current, before we would hit the first major obstacle of the race: Lake Laberge, the lake whose “marge,” or shoreline, was immortalized in Robert Service’s classic poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”:

Laberge is 32 miles (50 km) long, big and deep and cold, and even mild wind and weather can whip it up into a nightmare for paddlers in an open boat. Three-foot, four-foot swells are not unusual — six feet is not unheard of. Waves and a significant headwind could burn us out early, even if we didn’t wind up swimming.

But when we passed the rotted pilings of an ancient Mountie outpost at the point where the river met the lake, there was good news waiting for us: the lake was calm, almost glassy, and the sun that had followed us from Whitehorse, pushing the temperature to nearly 80 degrees (27 C), still shone. We fell in with a pack of other boats — a pair of foreign-sounding female kayakers, and all three of the solo canoeists in the race, including Bryan Allemang, a friend of Syd’s who’d flown in from across the country to race, and whom we’d invited to draft off Jenny whenever he liked.

Hours passed. The low, spruce-thick hills that lined both shores were each indistinguishable from the next, but at some point we passed the lake’s halfway mark, the furthest we’d ever paddled in training — and we still felt strong. We gained on, and passed, two of our rival voyageur boats, and then were passed by smaller boats in return. Instead of turning on us, Laberge only seemed to get calmer; the sun hung frozen above the horizon in the endless sub-Arctic evening. Finally, at 10:15 p.m., we reached the end of the lake. There was a checkpoint there, where racers were required to holler their boat number to a shorebound volunteer with a clipboard — stopping was optional. But we’d agreed in advance on a rest, in case the lake was ugly and we needed to regroup, so we turned Jenny’s bow into the shallows and levered ourselves out of our seats for a 15-minute break. We’d been paddling for more than 10 hours.

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

We stretched our arms and legs, gulped some soup, changed out of our light, hot-weather clothes into warmer overnight gear, and passed around a tube of diaper rash cream to soothe the rawness that was already spreading across our butt cheeks. I felt better than I’d expected, or hoped: my arms and shoulders were sore, but in a well-used way, not in an imminent-injury way. I’d avoided sunburn on the lake, and apart from that rawness I had no complaints — a good sign, with easily 50 hours to go. Soon, refreshed, we got back underway, paddling through a narrow, winding section of river as the sun finally dropped below the horizon, the moon rose behind us, and the long twilight took hold.

Midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m. It doesn’t get truly dark in the Yukon in late June — merely dim. We sipped water, ate boiled bite-sized baby potatoes and cheese and crackers and energy balls and gummi worms. We peeled away our long johns and squatted over empty plastic buckets to pee, and then emptied the buckets over the side of the boat into the waiting river. We paddled, and paddled and paddled some more.

We occupied our minds with an hours-long game of “Fuck, Marry, Kill” — you know the one. Someone names three people, and everyone has to decide which of them, hypothetically, they’d like to sleep with, wed, or murder. But there were few real-life people that all eight of us knew, and just a handful of local acquaintances. Celebrities were a stretch too — not everyone in the boat was a pop-culture junkie. So we soon fell back on fairy tales, cartoon characters, superheroes and mythical beasts, and the half-dark night was filled with the sound of our giggles.

“Beast from Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, or Robin Hood as a fox?”

“Beast as a beast or Beast as a dude?”

“Beast as a beast.”

“I guess… I’d fuck Aladdin?”

“Marry Robin Hood, fuck the Beast, kill Aladdin.”

“Agreed.”

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

When we’d left the checkpoint, Bryan Allemang was just a few minutes behind us in his little solo canoe. But either we powered ahead, or he fell back, and by dawn he’d lost all track of us. He paddled into a dense morning fog, hoping that we were just ahead.

On the sandy riverbank, a tandem canoe team, “Strokes of Genius,” was stopped for a rest. They had paddled from Laberge straight through the night, without pausing to change out of the light, sweaty clothes they’d worn on the hot lake crossing that day. By the early morning hours, a chill had set in — they were worried about hypothermia, and beached themselves to recover. Hypothermia and hyperthermia, or heat stroke, are common causes of trouble for racers — sometimes paddlers risk both in the same long day. Dehydration and over-hydration stalk the race too, as do repetitive stress injuries, like tendonitis (and repetitive emotional stress injuries, a risk of being in a boat with the same people for 50 hours). Less common, fortunately, are actual river disasters, boats overturned and racers unable to swim to shore. No one has ever died during the Yukon River Quest (although the river has claimed its share of lives at other times), but there have been a few close calls, and each year sees at least a rescue or two. Often, it’s other paddlers who get there first, before the motorized safety boats, which patrol the course, arrive on scene.

The pair had seen us go by maybe a half hour earlier, and soon they heard, rather than saw, Bryan when he passed. “Tough Birches!” He hollered through the fog, filling the emptiness with his voice after a night alone on the dark river. “Has anyone seen the Tough Birches?”

“They went by about a half hour ago!” Strokes of Genius answered through the murk. Bryan paddled on, expecting, hoping, to see us around each new bend in the river.

The sun broke the horizon again around 4:30 a.m., a red disc burning through the cold haze. We were still many hours from the village of Carmacks, a checkpoint just shy of the race’s halfway point where we would take a mandatory — and much-needed — seven-hour rest. As the day brightened, I started to fade. My head nodded forward of its own volition, my eyes slid shut, my chin landed on the top of my lifejacket, and without realizing it I fell asleep mid-paddle stroke. Jacqueline, sitting next to me, had to keep nudging me awake with an elbow or a quick word, so I wouldn’t lose my paddle in the river. We carried some spares, but they were regular canoe paddles — not expensive, lightweight, fiberglass racing paddles like the one in my hands.

The nausea and the stomach pains came next, their source unknown. My body voicing its objections to the ordeal, maybe? I spent the early morning, when I wasn’t nodding off, swallowing back the urge to vomit. I had that sick, spinning feeling that you get when you lie in bed with a bad hangover, knowing that you probably need to make a run for the toilet but lying still, so still, afraid to move.

Then my left wrist flared with pain. I’d gotten tendonitis in my right wrist during training — a result of following through too far for a marathon stroke, then flicking my wrist at the end of each stroke the way I would on a short recreational paddle — but a physiotherapist had eased the worst of it over the course of three pre-race visits, and she’d given me advice on managing it throughout the race. It was taped up and tolerably sore, but now my good wrist was on fire. My strokes got weaker. I was falling apart.

Was this it, then? We were maybe five, six hours from Carmacks. I could make it that far, but feeling this bad, there was no way I could last another day and a half from there, I knew.

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

The Yukon River Quest is a younger sibling of the Yukon Quest, the famous 1,000-mile dogsled race that runs from Whitehorse to Dawson City, often shadowing the river, and then crosses over into Alaska to eventually finish in Fairbanks. But while Yukon Quest mushers are allowed to drop off sick or injured dogs at checkpoints, and carry on with their race, I couldn’t be discarded like a dog. In the River Quest, one paddler dropping out means the entire team is eliminated. They’re welcome to keep going anyway, if they can — and the voyageur canoes often do — but crossing the line in Dawson won’t make them official finishers.

A couple of hours passed while I sank into exhausted misery. If anyone else was suffering the same way, I was too far gone to notice — I was alone in my own head. If I couldn’t carry on, I knew, my team faced a choice: drop me, and scratch from the race, or carry my sorry ass all the way to Dawson. Neither option helped my nausea. The river twisted and turned, turned and twisted — it was hard to imagine that we were actually progressing. I paddled half-heartedly, trying to hold my wrist rigid, occasionally glancing over the side, wondering if I should just give in and try to empty my angry stomach into the river.

Then, maybe around 10 a.m., something strange happened: as the day warmed up, my tiredness lifted. I stopped nodding off, and the mist coating my brain seemed to thin. Jacqueline fed me some crackers from her food stash, and I sipped from a bottle of ginger ale I’d brought just in case. At her suggestion, I filled a small drybag with icy river water, put my paddle down for 20 minutes, and stuck my left arm into the bag up to the elbow. It came out numb, and after I’d warmed it up, slowly, with gentle stretching, the fire in my tendons had dampened down to an ache. I picked up my paddle again and rejoined the team, suddenly feeling invincible.

This was the River Quest’s first lesson for me. I had always envisioned endurance events as a battle of attrition between the athlete’s rising tide of misery and the race’s remaining miles. I had imagined that it was a matter of waiting it out, suffering through until the end — hoping that your tolerance for that suffering outlasted your time on the course. I had never, ever imagined that it would be possible to just … feel better — at least, not without a good night’s sleep in a real bed. I hadn’t expected to rally.

As we closed in on Carmacks, I started joking and laughing again. I stopped worrying about whether I would make it all the way to Dawson. Now that I understood my body’s secret — that misery was only temporary, even if I couldn’t really do much to actively alleviate it — I knew that I could get there.

“Okay, okay, I’ve got one. Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster, and Ogopogo.”

“Which one’s Ogopogo?”

“It’s like the Loch Ness monster but in a lake somewhere in BC. The Kootenays?”

“Nah, in Lake Okanagan.”

“Right, right.”

We made it to Carmacks at 2:17 p.m. on Thursday. With our 15-minute break at the end of Laberge factored in, we’d been paddling for a total of 26 hours, averaging maybe six, seven miles per hour. At 60 strokes per minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 26 hours so far — we’d cleared 90,000 paddle strokes. And our arms knew it.

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

Carmacks is a mid-sized village — up here, that’s about 500 people — spread across both shores of the Yukon River, home to the Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation. By road, it’s about two hours north of Whitehorse on the North Klondike Highway, the route to Dawson City. The village supports two gas stations and a hotel with a restaurant and a bar — a hub, by Yukon standards. It’s also home to a private campground, the Coal Mine, and that’s where all the River Quest action took place.

We paddled up to a dock below the campground, where Jenny’s bow and stern ropes were seized by lifejacket-wearing volunteers — the current was fast here, and they needed to be ready in case they were dragged into the river by our momentum. Then we were helped one by one out of the boat, swaying drunkenly up the dock as we walked for the first time in 16 hours, giddy and laughing at our own incapacitation.

Our support crew — two teammates’ boyfriends and a friend — was waiting for us in the campground. Kaori, a River Quest veteran who’d nearly joined our team, had driven her RV up from Whitehorse. The whole support crew had been there since morning, pitching tents and prepping food, stringing lines between trees for our wet clothes, organizing our resupply bags. We staggered up to find a picnic table laden with buttered bread, scones, cookies, watermelon, orange slices, orange juice, water, coffee, soup, rice, and a slow cooker filled with savory shredded chicken. My morning nausea was forgotten. I ate and ate until it hurt.

After I’d had my fill, I took a five-minute shower in the campground’s communal bathrooms, crawled into the pajamas I’d packed in my Carmacks resupply bag, and laid down on a bed in Kaori’s RV with an ice pack resting between my two sore wrists. I was too wired to really sleep, but I dozed in the warm stuffy air for an hour or two, the sounds of other teams arriving and leaving the campground checkpoint drifting in through the windows. Out of the 57 teams that had started the race — single and tandem canoes, single and tandem kayaks, and the big voyageurs — we were sitting in 28th place.

I woke up in the early evening — we were due out of the checkpoint at 9:17 p.m. — and discovered another River Quest miracle: I felt fine. Good, even. I flexed, lifted my arms above my head, flexed again. I should have needed to sleep for three days after paddling for 26 hours, I thought, but instead I felt rested and ready for more. I’d never plumbed the depths of my body’s capacity for recovery and healing like this before, and I was amazed by what it was capable of.

“I feel like a million bucks!” I said to Jacqueline, giddy as we packed up our gear. We pushed off on schedule, and passed under the blue-painted highway bridge as we left Carmacks behind us. We wouldn’t see another town or village until Dawson City, still a day and a half away. Our next mandatory rest stop, Kirkman Creek, was also the site of a gold-mining family’s homestead. We would be there in roughly 20 hours.

By the time the last boat left Carmacks, the field had narrowed from 57 to 46 teams. One solo kayaker from New Zealand had dropped out of the race at the end of Lake Laberge, on Wednesday night, with a wrist injury. Male kayaker Wolfram Schleicher — whose paddling partner was Germany’s eight-time Olympic kayaking gold medalist, Birgit Fischer — bowed out Thursday morning with a kidney stone. Two of the solo canoeists we’d paddled with across Lake Laberge exited the race, too — the first at Big Salmon, an early morning checkpoint, and the second at Carmacks Thursday afternoon, leaving our pal Bryan as the only paddler in his class, and a guaranteed winner … if he finished. An Irish canoe duo, the Celtic Warriors, arrived in Carmacks an hour past the cutoff time late Thursday evening, and were eliminated.

As is so often the case in extreme adventure and endurance races, it was pretty clear early on who had a chance to win and who did not. The goal for most Yukon River Quest teams wasn’t to win the damn thing anymore: it was simply to finish.

“My butt… does not feel awesome right now.”

“Yeah, I need some butt cream for sure.”

“I think I just need a new ass.”

After Lake Laberge, the next-most-feared obstacle on the Yukon River Quest is Five Finger Rapids, a wide curtain of standing waves divided into several channels by a handful of rock monoliths rising out of the river. It’s been notorious since the Gold Rush, when authorities eventually dynamited a channel below the surface to allow the wood-fueled sternwheelers that plied the river to push through. Modern-day recreational paddlers have drowned there, too. Most River Quest boats make it through unscathed, but the race organizers station motorized safety boats at the bottom of the white water anyway, and every now and then they have to stage a rescue of a capsized canoe and its evicted occupants. As long as competitors don’t accept outside assistance, or hit their SPOT device to trigger a search and rescue, they can keep going after taking a swim.

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

We weren’t too worried about tipping: Jenny was big and stable, and Vanessa, in the stern, had studied video of past races and knew which line to take. Still, our nerves and anticipation grew as we approached the rapids, two and a half hours north of Carmacks. The sun set as we paddled closer, and Carmen, up in front, reminded the group to stay quiet and be ready to respond to Vanessa’s commands. We picked up our force and tempo as we got nearer and nearer — the moon, high above us, lit our way.

“Paddle harder!” Vanessa called out as she steered us to the right channel, and we all dug in. Then we were in it, burying our paddle blades in the unpredictable waves that rose up beside us and then fell away again, losing our synchronization as we all just tried to find water within reach. If anyone said anything, I don’t remember hearing it — I only remember leaning out my side of the boat, staring at the water, trying to jab my paddle in at the right moment to help us move forward. I was vaguely aware of a safety boat in the calm water ahead of us, a photographer on board snapping away, another shooter crouched on the rocks above us. One big wave came over the bow and splashed Carmen, and then, after seconds that felt like minutes, we were through, the river settling down around us again. Carmen’s boat had capsized when she’d paddled the River Quest two years ago, and she’d been anxious to avoid another swim — in the bow, she broke the silence with a scream of relief and exultation.

It was midnight. We paddled on downstream, adrenalin fading, replaced by a quieter satisfaction. Nothing, it seemed, could stop us now.

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

By 2 a.m., the half-dark sky was lightening again, and we could see a haze of forest fire smoke ahead. There was a major wildfire burning near the next checkpoint, Fort Selkirk — a historic trading post from the days when the river was the Yukon’s only highway, a longtime native gathering place that had eventually become a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost, a thriving community, and then a ghost town — and we would be drifting right by it.

By 4 a.m., we were paddling towards a tall mushroom cloud of smoke from the Selkirk fire. By 6 a.m., we were in it — the world turned grey-brown, and the sun, when it rose, was invisible. Our lungs seemed unaffected, so far, but I was fading again, fighting my eyelids as they tried to go with gravity. At the same time, my legs were wide awake, agitated and antsy. They quivered with the need for action to match the effort I was demanding from my arms, shoulders, and core. I was suddenly desperate to stretch my legs, to do some squats or lunges, to walk or run. For a brief, incoherent moment, I felt certain I could breeze through a marathon if someone would only let me out of the boat.

“What did you think you signed up for?” Vanessa asked me from the back of the boat when I complained aloud. I thought about her question, although I sensed she’d meant it rhetorically. Whatever vision I’d had of what the race would be like, I couldn’t remember it anymore.

Smoky morning rolled into smoky afternoon. We heard occasional thunder in the distance. We donned our rain gear in time for a light drizzle to start falling. We played leapfrog with a pair of tandem kayakers, passing them in the maze of islands and channels before being passed again in return. We were in Klondike gold-mining country now — miners still worked the creeks that tumbled into the river on either side of us, as they had for over a century, and Syd, a geologist, knew the name of every one. We peered through the rain as she pointed out Coffee Creek, home to the Kaminak project — the gold strike that had kicked off a second Yukon gold rush a few years earlier.

We arrived at Kirkman Creek just after 5 p.m., in a steady rain. We would observe a three-hour mandatory rest here before tackling the final stretch of river. The homesteaders who owned the place served us soup and sandwiches, and then we rolled out sleeping bags under a large tarp, in a crowd of sleeping paddlers who’d gotten there ahead of us. I closed my eyes as the rain pounded on the plastic above me, and unlike in Carmacks, I slept soundly.

“I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead

I just need some place where I can lay my head

“Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?”

He just grinned and shook my hand, “no” was all he said.”

We left Kirkman just past 8 p.m., a few minutes after our permitted departure time, hollering thank-yous to the volunteers over our shoulders as we moved into the current. The rain kept falling, and falling. It would be at least 10 more hours until we reached Dawson City, and my frayed mind had latched onto one certainty: I was afraid of the long, cold, wet night ahead. “Afraid” might not even be the right word — it was a dread, sitting heavy in my gut. It was the moment of fear right before you flinch, that voice in your head that says, “This is a terrible idea. Save yourself.”

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

In the last few years I’ve managed to get heat stroke twice, and hypothermia once — that, coupled with the death of a friend from heatstroke, has left me paranoid about my body’s core temperature the way some people are irrationally, fixatedly afraid of bears, or sharks, or lightning strikes. “You’ll be fine,” someone in the boat told me as I shivered in my rain gear, vainly trying to remember everything I’d been taught in a hunter education course about how to identify the advancing stages of hypothermia — shivering, clumsiness, nausea, fatigue, confusion, just about everything I had already experienced and then some. “I know,” I said. But I didn’t know, not really. I couldn’t drum up any confidence, any certainty.

I added layers until nothing more would fit under my Gore-Tex coat and pants. I changed wet gloves for dry ones, pulled on a wool toque with ear flaps underneath my hood. The rain soaked through everything. I tried to remember to eat and drink, knowing that keeping my body fueled was the surest way to keep it warm. I stood up in the boat when I could, shaking my arms and legs to bring the life back into them. I wondered why everyone else didn’t seem to be shivering the way I was.

Around 2 a.m., we reached 60 Mile, the last checkpoint before Dawson City. There was nothing much to it: a couple of volunteers on a sandy shore, keeping a fire burning through the night. We paused long enough for everyone to hop out and change into fresh clothes if they needed to — I put on my last dry long johns, my last dry socks, borrowed a dry top layer from Carmen to wear under my damp fleece and Gore-Tex. I did jumping jacks by the fire until it was time to begin the final push to Dawson City.

I’d like to say that those last four, five hours on the river were magical, triumphant — that I transcended my pain and exhaustion and finished the race brimming with new self-knowledge. But from everything I can piece together in my exhausted half-memories, they were miserable. The rain never let up, and a headwind came and went. Complicated navigational demands — we passed through a maze of braided channels, with hidden rocks and sandbars lurking everywhere — kept a low-intensity current of anxiety running through the boat. Moods soured, and our patience with each other wore thin. To pass the time and keep our minds occupied with something other than our own pain, Jacqueline and I sang every song we could dredge up the lyrics to, until the others got tired of our broken, half-remembered verses and choruses and, with impressive politeness, asked us to stop. Syd, second from the bow, and Vanessa and Cristi, our steering and navigational tag team, were as relentless and unflagging as they had been since we started. But the rest of us were dragging, and took turns pausing to rest a sore muscle or stretch out a stiff one.

I was nodding off again. All I wanted in the world was a 20-minute nap — 10 minutes, even! But I knew stopping to rest would mean letting my body cool down, and would only prolong the race for all of us. Still, my eyes kept sliding shut.

“Dig deep, Eva,” Vanessa said from behind me.

“I just can’t stop falling asleep,” I said blearily. “It’s not a muscle thing.”

“I know it’s not a muscle thing,” she answered. “It’s a soul thing.”

That prickled me awake. Half under my breath, I muttered, “Well that’s pretty fucking condescending.” By now, my emotions were stretched thin and brittle: I was abruptly, violently angry, but I was also mortified, and both feelings were amplified, distorted by my exhaustion — they banged and crashed around inside me like I was a teenager going through puberty again. I didn’t want to be the one dragging my ass towards the finish line while the others soldiered on, I thought. I didn’t want to be a liability. My biggest fear, before the race, hadn’t been for exhaustion or cold or pain — it had been a fear of failing to contribute my share of paddle power, of not being tough enough, of letting the team down. And now it seemed to be coming true.

The confusing thing was, even as I struggled, I was amazed at myself and how far I’d come. Including our 10 hours of mandatory stoppage time, we’d been on the river for more than 60 hours now, and covered nearly 450 miles. In that time, I’d slept maybe a total of two, three hours. And here I was, still paddling, still more or less coherent — if strangely fragile, and a little fuzzy around the edges — and feeling like I could keep going until the finish. I wasn’t as strong and as tough as Vanessa or Syd, true, but I was so much stronger than I had known myself to be.

Apart from my pursuit of a writing career, I had never been truly relentless about anything in my life — “hellbent” was not a word that had ever been used to describe me. I wasn’t someone who racked up personal bests in races, who was driven to compete against myself or to measure and prove myself against others. A whitewater paddling instructor had once asked me, after I declined the opportunity to solo a rapid I didn’t feel ready for, whether I would feel badly about myself later if I didn’t try it. And I could tell her, honestly, that I wouldn’t. I’m just not built that way. So, yeah, I was impressed with myself and my performance in this race. I was proud.

Twice more, in those final couple of hours, I went to put my paddle down for a quick stretch or a rest and heard Vanessa urge me from behind to keep going, frustration and — it seemed to me — contempt thick in her voice. As we neared Dawson City, I seesawed between pride and excitement, anger and humiliation and shame. Why was I being singled out for reprimands? The others around me were taking breaks, too. We were all limping to the finish line.

I sank deep into my own head. Had I done something to offend her? Or was my effort really so sub-par, so genuinely worthy of disgust? Insecurity crept up my throat, choking me, then was shoved back down again by resentment. My thoughts moved slowly, congealing. I didn’t trust my own reactions, anymore — nothing really made sense.

DeAgostini/Getty Images

Maybe she thought she was being encouraging, and didn’t notice her tone? Or maybe she actually was speaking kindly, encouragingly, and the contempt I heard was a new kind of hallucination, a product of my own fears? Maybe, in her own barred cell of exhaustion, she couldn’t stop herself from calling me out anymore than I could stop myself from nodding off as I paddled? Maybe some careless word I’d said to a teammate was tormenting them too, at this same moment, in this same way?

I tried to hang on to the pride I felt in my own accomplishment, tried to ignore the flickers of disappointment and sadness as I realized that in this boat full of women I admired so much, some of them might not be admiring me in return. I hoped that later, when I’d rested, when I wasn’t quite such a volatile mess, I would be proud of myself, and them, in a more pure, undiluted way.

But for now, as the final hour of the race wound down, my feelings were more complicated. I don’t want to speak for everyone else in the boat that long morning, but I suspect that if we’d all been asked to play “Fuck, Marry, Kill” one more time, only this time with our teammates as the fodder, it would have been a bloodbath.

Somewhere far ahead of us, the first teams had reached Dawson City on Friday evening, while we were still snoozing under a tarp in rainy Kirkman Creek. As our long damp night wore on, I had no energy to worry about who had won the fucking thing, and when. But if you must know: A pair of male tandem kayakers, team Time to GO!, finished first, in 44 hours 51 minutes and 7 seconds (not including the ten hours of required rest), with a pair of veteran male canoeists coming in 40 minutes later. Another pair of kayaking men crossed next, and in fourth place was the first voyageur canoe, the all-female Team 3-2-1-Go, who we hadn’t had a sniff of since they barged past us at the start in Whitehorse. They beat out the first solo male kayaker by just 13 seconds, leaving him to settle for fifth place.

Meanwhile, somewhere behind us as we struggled along, two more teams had dropped out of the race in its final hours. And Mick Dawson, one of four British ex-military solo kayakers racing to raise money and awareness for veterans with PTSD, had executed the year’s lone racer-on-racer rescue of another competitor, who’d overturned his boat. Dawson would eventually finish in 40th place on Saturday night, and earn the River Quest’s “Spirit of the Yukon” award.

Dawson City appeared on the right riverbank out of a long, gray, murky dawn. It was not yet 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and the walking path along the top of the embankment that fronted downtown, protecting it from spring floods, was abandoned as we swept downstream towards the finish line. The dike hid most of the town from us: we couldn’t yet see the bright-painted wooden facades of the century-old buildings, the boardwalks lining the dusty dirt streets. We couldn’t see Diamond Tooth Gertie’s gambling hall, where the can-can girls still danced each night, or the old brothel, Bombay Peggy’s, turned genteel boutique inn. Two lone figures stood on shore: Joe, Syd’s boyfriend, who’d fed us in Carmacks, and Matt, Jacqueline’s partner, who would drive many of us home to Whitehorse in his van. They’d been waiting for us all through the long rainy night — they pulled their hands out of their pockets and clapped as we neared the shore, a welcoming party of two.

We climbed out of the boat, soaked and shivering, and left Jenny in Joe’s care while Matt drove us to the hotel. In my room, I stripped off all my sopping wet layers and stepped into the shower. It was over. My muscles were sore, my wrists were swollen, my brain was foggy, my butt cheeks were welted, and my emotions were a raw tangle.

But I had my answer: I could do it, and I had done it, and I can say that now and know that it is true. I had paddled a canoe 445 miles in just under 58 hours, through an unpeopled wilderness that tens of thousands of gold-seekers had passed through 120 years before, risking their lives and their life savings on a gamble or a whim. I hadn’t always been my most graceful, indomitable self, but I had done it.

As the hot water washed over me, I closed my eyes and swayed to the remembered rhythm of a canoe moving down the river.

Joel Krahn Photography/joelkrahn.com

_______

Of the 57 boats that began the 2015 Yukon River Quest, only 44 completed the race. The Tough Birches finished in 25th place, with an official time — not counting the 10 hours of required rest — of 57 hours, 42 minutes and 5 seconds. Bryan Allemang was the lone solo canoeist to complete the race, in a time of 62 hours, 13 minutes and 36 seconds.

Tor

Pierre-Emile Højbjerg splits Bayern defenders, then shows remarkable patience for a 19-year-old. He and his forward, barrel-chested Paraguayan Raul Bobadilla, have broken open on a 2-on-1 of sorts: them vs. embattled Bayern central defender Dante. In basketball, a 2-on-1 should almost always result in two points, but in soccer, you still have to beat the keeper, too. Bayern happens to have the best keeper in the world. Pass to Bobadilla too early and Manuel Neuer, with his 6’4" frame and what seems like a 13-foot wingspan, might swallow up the threat.

With Højbjerg running the break, however, this is of little concern. He keeps dribbling long enough to force Neuer to narrow in on his shooting ability. Then he threads the ball between Dante’s legs, and Bobadilla pokes it into the goal with his heel, a shot not even Neuer can stop. FC Augsburg, 1-0, 71st minute.

Augsburg will hold onto the lead, completing a memorable upset and sending the full, vocal Augsburg section in the corner of Bayern’s Allianz Arena into a frenzy. They will celebrate long after the final whistle sounds, and they will sing, with police escort, in the U-Bahn back to Munich’s central train station.

FC Augsburg fans will forever remember this match, both because it increased their team’s chances of finishing with a high spot in the standings (weeks later, they clinched a spot in a European competition for the first time), and because it’s Bayern. You always remember beating Bayern.

The joke’s on them, though, and everybody else in the Bundesliga. Bayern won the league almost two weeks prior, and they own Højbjerg. He is only with Augsburg on loan, and he is Bayern’s when they want him.

You may beat Bayern Munich today, but you never beat them tomorrow. They are the surest thing in sports.

Bayern’s May form was as poor as it has been in a very long time, but they still won the Bundesliga title, reached the Champions League semifinals for the fourth consecutive year and ‘only’ reached the DFB-Pokal (German Cup) semifinals before losing in a shootout.

The New York Yankees have won 27 World Series championships since 1923; Bayern has won 24 Bundesliga titles since 1969. Fifty years ago, they weren’t even the most significant team in Munich.

Bayern are a young dynasty, one too cognizant of a less glorious past to ever ease off the throttle. They are the best and worst thing for the Bundesliga. The Bundesliga makes its Fox Sports debut on August 14, giving an American audience a chance to watch the vertical, offense-minded league week to week. German teams go for points, a mindset that leads to both aggressive offense and, as a German trademark, the most potent counter-attacks you’ll see.

Without Bayern, there is no Fox Sports deal. Wolfsburg might be one of the most entertaining teams on the planet, but Fox executives didn’t say, "We must have Wolfsburg!" They wanted Bayern.

At the same time, you’re less likely to watch if you already know the outcome. Die Roten have won the last three league titles. They swallow up challengers, taking their best players and, occasionally, their managers. Though not necessarily the case in the present tense, their playing style has at times been more about trophies than aesthetics. Their presence is so heavy that they almost never find a manager who is either willing or able to last more than two and a half years on the job.

Bayern is, like the city in which it resides, everything at once. A conservative monolith with an eye out for new trends. A lucky bastard who needs less luck than everybody else. A tyrant with a deft social conscience. A Porsche and a safe, reliable Volkswagen. A snake and a snake charmer.

Bayern Munich is the supreme ruler of what might be the deepest soccer league in the world. This is how to Bayern.

Dusel

1.Know your history

With a Ribéry wrecking shop in midfield, a winger curls in a lovely ball to a Schweinsteiger, who heads the ball into the visitor’s net. That’s not the first time that’s ever happened in Munich. But this time it’s happening in a pretty old venue.

The night before Augsburg’s visit, another first-team German squad is in town. FC Memmingen is visiting Grünwalder Stadion for a fourth-division tilt against Bayern II. Memmingen are in line for a mid-table finish, but Bayern II is smoking hot; the juniors have gone eight matches without a loss, which is impressive considering the injury-depleted senior team has been pulling up prospects. Würzburger Kickers are still on their way toward winning the league and a spot in the promotion playoff, but Bayern’s juniors have made the race a lot closer than it seemed it would be.

The stadium at Grünwalder Straße is a relic, a concrete box, the type you see throughout lower-level English soccer, too. The sections are more like cattle pens, and on the west end, there’s a manual scoreboard with the old-school watch face for a clock. Because of terracing built in when both Bayern and 1860 München moved elsewhere, you can’t actually see the scoreboard from press row, which is basically a row of seats in the top of the South stands.

Bayern II, the reserve team, is like a Double-A baseball team: a mix of prospects, not-likely-to-be-prospects and career reserves. A lot of Bayern’s most exciting prospects are in the equivalent of high-A ball: the Under-19 team. "They’re buying a lot of young German talent," Phillip Quinn of SB Nation’s Bavarian Football Works tells me. "And I don’t know what they’re going to do with them. They don’t seem really willing to put them with the reserves, which is interesting to me because one of their stated goals has been to get the reserves promoted into the third division. They hired Erik ten Hag to coach Bayern II; he had just earned promotion to the Eredivisie with Go Ahead Eagles, and instead of coaching in [Holland’s top division], he said ‘No, I’ll just go coach in the German fourth division instead.’ Really weird to me."

Though it is a mostly 23-and-under team, Bastian Schweinsteiger’s older brother, 33-year old Tobias, is the captain and requisite father figure. First-team winger Franck Ribéry’s younger brother Steven is playing midfield. After the game, elementary-aged Bayern youth yell "RIBÉRY!!" and "SCHWEINI!!" to them, hoping for an autograph. If you’re Bayern, you’re a hero to somebody, even if you’re not the highest-ranking Bayern in your own family.

A few minutes into the game, after his charges have started slowly, Schweinsteiger is clapping and exhorting as a captain should. It evidently works. Memmingen almost takes the lead in the second minute, thwarted only by a nice save from keeper Leopold Zingerle. In the 18th minute, however, the match suddenly and permanently changes. Winger Herbert Paul curls in a cross for Schweinsteiger, who sends a header into the net.

In the stands, two drunks do exactly what you or I would do: exaggeratedly celebrate as if the goal won the Champions League.

In the 40th minute, it’s all over. Bayern left back Patrick Puchegger uncorks a why-the-hell-not bomb from far outside of the box, and when the stunned Memmingen goalkeeper realizes it’s actually on target, it’s too late to do anything about it. Nikola Jelisic, a solid-looking 20-year-old prospect to my eyes, crosses to Schweinsteiger for a third goal in the 56th minute, and Bayern II cruises.

It is a thoughtless result considering what Memmingen, a town of 40,000 people about 115 kilometers west of Munich, has already given Bayern through the years. Bayern Hall of Famer Franz Roth was born there, as were current Bayern first-teamers Holger Badstuber (signed by Bayern at 13) and Mario Götze (signed from Borussia Dortmund at 20). But such is life. The Memmingen fans who came probably knew what they were getting themselves into.

The 1,500 or so in attendance get what they paid not very much for: a happy, casual Friday night, accompanied by cigarettes (legal in open air), a brat or two, and a beer or three, watching guys in Bayern jerseys — some with familiar names — running around and winning in gorgeous spring weather.

For fans a bit longer in the tooth, however, there is nothing casual about the setting. If you are older than about 55, there’s a decent chance that the first Bayern match you watched, the first time you laid eyes on Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller and company, took place in this very venue. This is the stadium Bayern was sharing with 1860 München when Beckenbauer was still a youth player figuring out who he wanted to sign with, and this was the stadium in which he played his first Bayern home game.

2.Take full advantage of every good break

Marcus Brandt/Bongarts/Getty Images

My wife and I lived less than a block away from each other in Oklahoma, when she was starting college and I was finishing up high school. We didn’t meet until seven years later, when my grad school roommate tried to hit on her at a happy hour in Missouri, got rebuffed, then said "Hey Connelly, this girl’s from Oklahoma, too!" I was chatting with a friend, probably about sports, and my roommate broke the ice with my future wife for me.

So much of our lives is dictated by simple, random, silly occurrences, hopefully (but not always) of the good kind. We control everything we can in life — education, jobs, relationships — and we try to follow a path and put ourselves in position to succeed, and then complete randomness throws its weight.

Bayern has done as effective a job as any club in the history of team sports when it comes to solidifying gains and maximizing good fortune; there is no denying this. But perhaps the most important, most purely fortunate moment in Bayern’s now-illustrious history had almost nothing to do with them at all. At this point, it is part of soccer lore: Beckenbauer — future World Cup champion as both a player and coach, one of the greatest soccer players of all time in any era — chose Bayern Munich and began Bayern’s dynasty, because a junior-league player slapped him.

It’s a simple story, really: Boy grows up a fan of a big-city team nearby. Boy turns into a star youth player. Boy plays an Under-14 tournament game against his favorite club’s youth team. Boy gets into a scrap with an opposing player. They bump each other and play physically all game. Late in the match, the boy goes in a little late with a little hard tackle. The opposing player jumps up and slaps him in the face. Boy decides he’s going to play for the other team in town.

As Uli Hesse put it in Tor! The Story of German Football, nobody knows who the junior player was, "which is perhaps for the best, because his loss of self-control has had such far-reaching effects that the wrongdoer would certainly still be shunned by a great portion of the football world if we knew who he was." But young Beckenbauer, long a fan of Munich’s working-class 1860 München squad, decided he couldn’t play for any club that allowed such thuggery. So he signed with Bayern in 1959 and convinced his friends to do the same.

It was the ultimate domino effect, and it didn’t stop with the youth class of Beckenbauer, Müller and goalkeeper Sepp Maier, all of whom would go on to become champions and Bayern Hall of Famers. Beckenbauer had a good relationship with Udo Lattek, assistant coach for the German national team, and he convinced Lattek to coach Bayern in the late-1960s when Branko Zebec left. Lattek had connections with high-level German juniors like Paul Breitner and Uli Hoeness and convinced them to come to Bayern instead of 1860, which had received verbal pledges from both. Breitner and Hoeness both became Bayern greats; Hoeness became the club’s general manager and eventually its president.

Because Beckenbauer got slapped in the face, TSV 1860 München, Munich’s original representative when the Bundesliga was formed, went from landing maybe three to five of the best players in German history to landing zero. Their trajectory went from hopeful to sad. They won the DFB-Pokal in 1964, finished as runners up in the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1965, won the Bundesliga in 1966 … got relegated in 1970 … yo-yo’d between the top two divisions of German football for much of the next three decades … got relegated for the final time in 2004, and spent the last decade in the second division. Their 16th-place, second-division finish in 2014-15 meant that they were forced to go to a playoff with Holstein Kiel to avoid third-division ignominy, and they survived by the skin of their teeth. Their future at the Allianz Arena is in jeopardy — they could at some point in the future find themselves headed back to Grünwalder Straße.

Though Beckenbauer was the catalyst, Hoeness’ impact on the club has been almost as important. When Bayern began to flounder a bit in the late-1970s, as an aging Beckenbauer was plying his trade with Pelé in the NASL, Bayern called on a star-crossed striker to save the day. At just 27 years old, Hoeness was forced to retire from active soccer because of injury, but Bayern made him what is basically their general manager. And despite money issues and a lack of star power, Hoeness’ thrifty acquisitions kept Bayern winning at a high level throughout the 1980s.

Call it whatever you like — it bears mentioning that Bayern-Dusel has its own Wikipedia entry, though every big winner in sports has been called lucky by a frustrated rival — but the monster that is Bayern Munich was built on two separate but equally important pillars: good fortune and the ability to capitalize on it. Players who fell into their lap and were developed far beyond what anybody could have considered their potential. Late-game free kicks or lucky bounces that were sent into the net for championships.

Depending on where you set the bar, the timing has been missing a bit of late. Twenty years from now, the macro version of Bayern’s last two years will tell a pretty happy tale: two Bundesliga titles, a DFB-Pokal win, two Champions League semifinal appearances. But Bayern ran away with the Bundesliga to such a degree in 2013-14 that the Reds took their foot off the gas, lost their timing and got smoked by Real Madrid in said semifinals. This past season, a wave of injuries left Bayern without its top two wingers (Arjen Robben and Ribéry), star left back David Alaba and other big-name players (Javi Martinez, to name one) who were kicking off weeks or months of injury-related rust when it was time to play Barcelona. That Bayern only lost by a 5-3 cumulative score was impressive considering their losses, but it was a sign that even Bayern needs a little bit of good fortune to win trophies. Don’t we all?

Geographie

3.Throw a good party

We all show off our scars, even if we don’t have as many as others. Bayern fans have theirs, as do Alabama football fans or Duke basketball fans. Losing to Chelsea at home in a shootout in the 2012 Champions League finals was awful. Losing to Manchester United because of two stoppage-time goals in the 1999 final was even worse. But there hasn’t been enough pain to create callouses, the kind that prevent us from believing in miracles. And in each of those two miserable instances, the team won Europe within two years.

In the first leg of the 2015 Champions League semifinals between Bayern and Barcelona, disaster struck die Roten. Barcelona broke a scoreless tie in the 78th minute, then scored again almost instantly. And with Bayern pressing to try to make up a goal in the final minutes, Barcelona scored one more time on a breakaway.

To catch up because of the road goals tie-breaker, Bayern needs to either win the second leg by a 3-0 margin or win by four or more at home. Against what is probably the best team in the world. Fans in the stadium before the game look determined, however, and they have at least a little bit of evidence on their side: in the quarterfinals, Bayern fell behind 3-1 on the road against Porto in the first leg, then scored five goals in 25 minutes en route to an easy 6-1 win at Allianz in the second.

For the purposes of both belief and a friendly clock, Bayern needs an early goal, and everybody in the building knows it. And with just six minutes passed, they get it. After some solid early threats, Bayern earns a corner and defender Medhi Benatia — an unexpected, unmarked target — heads the ball past the right arm of a lunging Marc-Andre ter Stegen. The fans facing the goal in the deep recesses of Allianz Arena’s upper deck get a straight-away view of the score, perhaps even knowing it is in a split second before everybody else. And their celebration is as if their team had just taken the lead.

This is chaotic. The largest stadiums aren’t guaranteed to give you the best atmosphere — just ask anybody who’s attended a Michigan home game recently — but the strange bubble that is the Allianz Arena floats off of the ground. The Marienplatz, the default home to all title celebrations, was packed with both Bayern and Barcelona fans just hours earlier. Almost completely vacant now, the roofs of the bars in the surrounding area will still go shooting into the sky.

Even this neutral observer, when-in-Roming it with a Bayern shirt on in the upper reaches of the Allianz, starts to believe. This comeback is happening.

It doesn’t, of course. Bayern’s defense springs a leak just eight minutes later against the scariest set of offensive players in the world. Neymar to Messi to Suarez to Neymar past Neuer. Instead of needing two goals to tie, Bayern now needs four goals to win. Because of the level of outright belief in the crowd, this is as much of a stomach punch as you’ll ever witness in a game with 75 minutes remaining. The poor kid a row in front of me collapses into his seat, head in hands, for a couple of minutes.

But this crowd shouldn’t have believed such a comeback was possible in the first place. That they did was created by both history and geography.

4.Location, location, location

"Munichen" means "by the monks," and Munich’s mere existence feels blessed by a higher order. It has survived typhus and siege and the birth of the Nazi party, and it rebuilt and moved toward thriving each time. It has seduced the conservative and the progressive, the religious and the agnostic. It boasts tradition and progress. It has won over Lenin, Hitler and generations of Americans who hate Lenin and Hitler.

Both Bayern and Munich wear you down until you admit that you’re impressed.

Bayern’s four league titles between 1969 and 1974 were just the lucky consequences of having Beckenbauer (and some friends) fall into their lap? Fine, but they also won seven between 1980 and 1990 and eight between 1997 and 2008 and four between 2009 and 2015 and they won five European championships and 16 DFB-Pokal titles since 1966 and they have no debt and — "Okay, fine, they’re brilliant."

It’s the same with the city itself. Even if the Marienplatz and Glockenspiel don’t do much for you, and even if you decide that all old churches look the same, you’ll find something that knocks you backwards. The Odeonsplatz, maybe. The Englischer Garten. The lions and the hoss of a knight that stand watch at the Feldherrnhalle. And what about the BMW museum? And if you don’t love bratwurst or weisswurst, the local specialty, then there’s every other type of wurst you could want, as well. (My favorite: currywurst.) If sausage isn’t your thing, then the Italian restaurants are incredible; Italy’s not far away, after all. The handmade gnocchi at Bei Raffaele north of old town, complete with the seltzer water and snobby waiters? Wunderbar.

Munich could easily be boring. The crime rate is low. The beer is exactly as good and available as you think it is. Wherever you want to go, there’s a U-Bahn station within a couple of blocks. Everybody speaks English better than you speak German; if you stumble over a German word or hesitate, they just switch to English for you, a move that is both polite and passive aggressive. It is as risk-free as a foreign city can be.

Part of that is the nature of Bavaria, generally considered the most laid back area of Germany. Part goes back to post-war occupation — the U.S. took this area and was infinitely less forbidding and vengeful than the Russians (who had just lost approximately 20 million of their citizens to World War II) and the French (who had a justifiable score to settle after being attacked by Germany twice in three decades).

But there are also some oddities — the protests (teacher’s unions, marijuana, meat), the strange, makeshift, well-maintained Michael Jackson shrine outside of a hotel he used to frequent. Munich is a city of convergence, a mix of tradition and progression, of lederhosen and high fashion, of buskers playing accordion music for older clientele in the morning and "Country Roads" for drunk Americans in the evening, of giant old St. Michael’s Church and the Urban Outfitters invading its personal space next door.

It is also a city of great size.

For clubs in almost every other German city, not even 50 years of success would create the level of attendance and revenue Bayern celebrates. Munich is the third-largest city in the country, behind only Berlin and Hamburg; the metropolitan region contains nearly six million people, more than Hamburg’s, and Berlin’s nearly complete lack of historical club success has made Munich the de facto German capital of the sport.

That has helped Bayern in a couple of obvious ways. First, it produces talent.

Of the nine Bayern Hall of Famers who starred for the team in the 1970s and 1980s, eight were born and/or discovered within 200 kilometers of Munich. Of the 12 Germans on Bayern’s 25-man roster last spring, five were acquired by Bayern before their 14th birthdays, and five more were born relatively close to the city. Local talent tends to be cheaper to acquire than talent from further away; you get in on kids when they are teenagers and cost far less than they would when they are 23-year-old stars. And you obviously don’t have to travel as far to scout them. That Bayern has money means they can afford to purchase high-priced performers, from both inside the country (Götze, Neuer) and out (Robben, Ribéry, Martinez, and most recently Arturo Vidal and Douglas Costa). But signing so many cheap, young, high-caliber players means they don’t have to run up debt to get the big guns.

A bigger area also produces more fans. It’s probably not a coincidence that the Yankees are based in New York and not North Dakota, and the Lakers have clearly benefited from their place in the country’s second-most significant (and most glamorous) city. If FC Augsburg were to have made all of the good decisions Bayern made through the years, they still wouldn’t have had the ticket and sponsorship revenue to keep all of the good players for as long. You can succeed while selling all of your good players, but it requires about three times as many good decisions.

Living in a city as large as Munich doesn’t guarantee success — just ask Hertha Berlin or Hamburg or, yes, 1860. But it offers more margin for error. And if you can make solid decisions in times of financial difficulty, like Hoeness and Bayern did in the 1980s, you can recover and thrive in far less time.

Dringlichkeit und Infrastruktur

5.Acknowledge sadness, pursue happiness.

There is a hill overlooking most of Munich’s Olympic park, and aside from the Olympiaturm — the space needle-type structure on the grounds — the view from the top of the hill might be the most comprehensive and expansive in Munich. Face north, and you’ve got the entire Olympic park in one panoramic shot. Glance to your northeast, and you can see Allianz Arena a few kilometers away. Turn to the southeast, and you’ve got all of old town Munich (which is to say all of what people know about Munich). Glance a little bit southwest, and you get a skyline reminder that the Alps aren’t far away.

German ingenuity: this hill is a Trümmerberg. Literal translation: rubble mountain. After acres of Munich were destroyed during World War II, the ruins were piled together here. A couple of decades later, layered over with green and trees, it became a beautiful visual centerpiece for the 1972 Summer Olympics.

Creating light from darkness is a German specialty. In this country, you are never far from something beautiful, and you are never far from a reminder of how things can go terribly wrong. This is the obvious case with Munich itself — from atop war rubble, only a few miles from the concentration camp in Dachau, you watch over gorgeous views from every angle.

This defined the Munich Olympics themselves; the theme of these Games was optimism and a forward-looking view, and the structures themselves, especially the strange tensiles that make Olympic Stadium so unique, were created with the future in mind. But the games are remembered mostly for darkness, for the kidnapping and eventual murder of Israeli athletes at the hands of terrorists.

(You might need a little bit of help from a map, but you can still find the Israeli athletic dorms at 31 Connollystraße. If you’re like me, you might try to take a picture of the quarters but falter and put the camera down. That the former athletic dorms are now functioning student housing, still a place of burgeoning life, is the ultimate in light from darkness.)

There is a tension, an urgency in post-war Germany to prove that the country is not what it once was. The country is measured and open, scarred and optimistic. It has become an economic leader within Europe; while the United States and Soviet Union/Russia spent most of the post-war years getting fat and angry, Germany got to work. It still has plenty of its own issues on the table. The low crime rates in Munich certainly aren’t indicative of those in the rest of the country, and there is still a tangible, literal divide between the former East and West Germanies. Plus, there has been a certain punitive, almost vindictive feel to Germany’s decisions regarding the recent economic crisis in Greece.

But the country remains in so many ways vigilant and cognizant of how others see it.

In 1954, a decade after the war ended, soccer gave German citizens a reason to feel good. West Germany entered the 1954 World Cup with humble expectations but started winning. They beat a seeded Turkey team twice in group play by a combined 11-3 margin. They beat a strong Yugoslavia team, 2-0, in the quarterfinals, then took down neighboring Austria, 6-1, to reach the finals. There, they faced a brilliant, heavily favored Hungary squad that had beaten them, 8-3, in group play. But after Hungary scored two goals in the first eight minutes and shifted into cruise control, West Germany battled back. They scored in the 10th and 18th minutes, and with Hungary reeling and confused by the stark challenge, Helmut Rahn scored in the 84th minute to give the Germans a stunning late win.

This was Germany’s Miracle on Ice, only better: hockey remains a low-major sport in America, far less popular than football, baseball or basketball. Soccer, on the other hand, is life for this and so many other countries.

Bliss emerged from guilt in 1954. The country has to some degree relied on the game to continue creating those opportunities in the 61 years since. Soccer has long been connected to the emotional well-being of this nation, and Bayern, a club whose Jewish president was exiled to Switzerland as both the sport and the Third Reich were gaining footing in the 1930s, appears to work with an urgency similar to that of country overall.

6.Keep an eye out for the latest trends

Sandra Behne/Bongarts/Getty Images

"The first one through the wall is going to get bloody." Chris Anderson, former youth goalkeeper in Germany and co-author of The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong, is discussing Bayern and change and the role Jürgen Klinsmann’s "failed" tenure at Bayern played in setting the table for the future.

Here’s what failure looks like at Bayern: When Klinsmann was released from his contract late in the 2008-09 season, not quite to the end of his first season in charge, he had won 25 contests and lost 10 with a goal differential of plus-46. In league play, he had 16 wins to seven losses, and Bayern were just three points out of first place when he was sacked. Die Roten had outscored Sporting CP, 12-1, in the Champions League’s first knockout round before falling by a cumulative 5-1 to eventual champion Barcelona (coached by Pep Guardiola) in the quarterfinals. Granted, there was a semi-early loss in the DFB-Pokal (4-2 at Bayer Leverkusen in the quarterfinals), but these results actually aren’t too shabby. And really, results weren’t at the heart of his dismissal.

"If you think about Germany as a country — conservatism vs. progressivism in the culture and within the regions of the country — Bayern and Bavaria," says Anderson, "it’s the South. It’s conservative. It was originally deeply Catholic. ‘We know what we’re doing, we do things a certain way, we don’t mess with it.’ And because it’s football, they’re probably even more conservative. They didn’t want to change too quickly. But they needed to change if they were going to keep pace with the other big European clubs."

Under their last three coaches — Giovanni Trapattoni, Ottmar Hitzfeld and Felix Magath — Bayern had won plenty. They had finished first or second in the Bundesliga 11 times in 13 years, and they had reached the Champions League finals twice, winning once. But European soccer was leaving the club behind. Since winning in 2001, Bayern hadn’t progressed beyond the Champions League quarterfinals and had four times failed to reach even that round. Even with the German national team beginning to thrive with a new generation of younger players (many of whom played for Bayern), the king of the Bundesliga wasn’t doing the same. So Bayern hired the coach of the German national team.

"I don’t think they set him up to fail," Anderson says. "But they knew it was risky. They also knew it was necessary. Klinsmann’s the kind of character who was willing to be the first one through the wall. He had sort of that American can-do spirit that he picked up in the United States, being married to an American. There’s that aspect. He had some funky ideas that weren’t necessarily right, but I think he questioned a lot of things. And that was uncomfortable for a lot of people within the club. He ‘failed,’ but I think what he did was change the culture of the club a little bit. I think things like video analysis and fitness were very big. He brought in American fitness ideas. Some of it took hold — obviously the video analysis part of it continues — but I think they’ve taken advantage of the kind of novelty that Klinsmann brought.

"Klinsmann is doing a similar type of thing for the United States now. He’s questioning everything. How is this structured? Why are we doing this? He’s pushing, pushing, pushing. He seems to like those challenges."

"In my field, every club has at least one match analyst," says Michael Niemeyer, Bayern’s Head of Match Analysis. "But at Bayern, in my department, we have eight people working for the first team." Niemeyer came to Boston in February to take part in the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and his work with not only Bayern, but also the DFB (German football association) and his role in Bayern’s partnership with data giant SAP have made him one of the more well-regarded game analysts in the sport.

"For technical scouting, we now have data for nearly every league in the world," Niemeyer tells me. And thanks to Niemeyer, SAP and others, the club has a better grasp than most on how to use it.

"I came with Klinsmann," Niemeyer tells me. "Klinsmann had a lot of good ideas. The match analysis department without him wouldn’t be there. He started a lot of good things at Bayern, but we were also very lucky to have Louis Van Gaal after Klinsmann. He is to me the godfather of match analysis. But it wasn’t just the matches — Arjen Robben, he came to us, he was injured a lot. But what Van Gaal did was, he used technology and monitored him and found out that Arjen was training too much. If the other players are training 30 minutes, he is training an hour." Robben suffered a couple of unlucky injuries in 2014-15, but before then he was enjoying perhaps the most sustained period of good health of his career.

"It was also fantastic to work with [Van Gaal’s successor] Jupp Heynckes — he took what Van Gaal had used in this area and took it to another level. And now Pep. What makes us successful in this regard is that we had the right coaches in the right order." Klinsmann was the instigator, destined not to hold the job very long. But his successors built on some of his good ideas. Bayern knew what it needed, whether the club wanted change or not.

7.If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em

Alexander Hassenstein/Bongarts/Getty Images

As noted in Tor!, the Daily Mail have called Bayern the parasites of football. About the club, famed former Dortmund manager Jürgen Klopp once said, "Bayern go about football in the same way that the Chinese go about industry: they look at what the others are doing, and then they copy it with other people and more money. And then they overtake you."

Part of having more money, better facilities, a grand history and a bigger city at your disposal is that you don’t ever have to worry about underdog tactics, about coming up with a way to beat the big boys. You can let others do the experimenting. Sure, you want to stay on the cutting edge when it comes to training, scouting, etc., but when it comes to winning tactics, you can afford to let others take the risks and figure out what works. And the others don’t have to like it.

Just about every Bundesliga challenger has had to deal with Bayern’s advances at some point, from up-and-comers like Nuremberg and Karlsruhe in the 1980s and early-1990s, to Werder Bremen in the mid-1990s (Bayern hired away 15-year Bremen coach Otto Rehhagel, and even though it seemed like a bad fit for the crusty, media-hating Rehhagel, it immediately put an end to Bremen’s success), to, most recently, Borussia Dortmund.

Klopp’s frenetic gegenpressing style found great success in the late stages of the last decade; BVB won the league in both 2011 and 2012, won the DFB-Pokal in 2012 and reached the Champions League finals in 2013, falling to Bayern because of an 89th-minute Robben goal.

As Dortmund began to pick up steam within the league, Bayern slowly absorbed them, first replicating the pressing style to some degree, then, in a fatal blow, purchasing two of Dortmund’s biggest stars: Götze in 2013 and Robert Lewandowski in 2014.

"Think about the clubs that are selling their players to Bayern," Anderson says. "They probably want to sell to Bayern. They want a customer, right? They can’t keep paying these guys, and these guys probably don’t want to stay at their club. So hey, please take him off our hands."

From a money perspective, this is likely correct. While a lot of players likely have release clauses in their contract — "if a bigger club offers X million Euros for me, you have to accept" — that’s not always the case. But Bayern seems willing to pay a solid, competitive price for your star, and you will probably need to sell him at some point.

This causes a strange incongruity in the perceptions game. The Bundesliga is on one hand the deepest, strongest league in Europe; on the other hand, many of the league’s best players get filtered to one dominant club. How can this be?

"I think [Bayern’s dominance] is totally fine, actually," Anderson says. "I don’t think there’s any research that would suggest that having a dominant team or two is unhealthy for attendance or anything else in the league. It drives interest. Whenever a team plays Bayern at home, they sell out. It’s like playing the Yankees. You want to see your team — the underdog — put one over on the big stars. It gives other clubs something to aspire to, in the sense that they think, hey, maybe one day I can do that.

"I’m not a Bayern fan, by the way. I hated Bayern when I was a kid. Of course I did! I grew up near Cologne, and my club was constantly yoyoing. It was one of those political clubs that could never put it together. So you had to hate Bayern! But it was still good that Bayern was in the league."

Still, the "parasite" label isn’t a particularly attractive one, and the club is attempting to move beyond it. In Pep Confidential, the inside, nearly full-access story of Pep Guardiola’s first season at Bayern (2013-14), author Martí Perarnau talks about what the hire of Guardiola meant for the club.

Bayern could boast a proud history, financial clout, innate self-confidence and a strong fan base. After a glorious run of successes, the future looked bright. They had built their excellence on the virtues that best represent the German character: endurance, unshakeable belief and an iron will. What they lacked was a playing philosophy.

Hoeness and Rummenigge were no longer interested in just winning titles, now they wanted a clear identity, an enduring hallmark which would establish their dominance once and for all. They wished that, in due course, the Bayern brand wouldn’t simply be related to effort, courage, power, and victory. They wanted more. In this quest, Pep was the chosen one.

Paul Breitner, another Bayern great, called it "stage three." After Klinsmann jolted Bayern awake, van Gaal (stage one) and Jupp Heynckes (stage two) had established a modern style based on possession, pressing and speed. Guardiola, a former European champion at Barcelona as both a player (1992) and manager (2009, 2011), was seen as the final step in Bayern’s evolution. He also represented something else.

"I think Germans have always been relatively provincial about the Bundesliga in terms of what it can do," Anderson says. "I think when Guardiola went to Bayern, that was a huge moment. I don’t think you can overstate how big a moment that was — the acknowledged best coach in the world didn’t go to Chelsea or Manchester City or anywhere else; he went to Bayern. There’s an undercurrent in German football that it’s local. Having a club that can attract this type of talent is good for the league." The effect could remain even if Guardiola, whose contract expires at the end of this season, indeed leaves for Manchester City next summer.

Schadenfreude

8.If your opponents are determined to fall apart, let ‘em

Adam Pretty/Bongarts/Getty Images

On Saturdays at Allianz Arena, when Bayern is playing at the same time as others in the Bundesliga, a T-Mobile ding sounds anytime there’s a goal in the league. You look up at the scoreboard and find out who scored and where.

While Bayern is trying to fend off Augsburg with 10 men, the crowd is informed that Eintracht Frankfurt is beating Hoffenheim by one, then two, then three. It is a strong Saturday for the club based in the fifth-largest city in Germany; there haven’t been a ton of those. The Eagles, die Adler, are currently just 10th in the league with 10 wins to 13 losses. They will finish ninth.

There are currently 15 clubs in Germany with a stadium capacity of at least 40,000, from Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park (80,667) to Werder Bremen’s Weserstadion (42,358). This is an imperfect measure, but it’s a decent way of reading into club size and potential. Of these 15 clubs, Bayern (75,000) finished first in the league, and a late charge brought Borussia Mönchengladbach (54,067) to third. But between 1977 and 2014, Gladbach had as many top-three finishes (two) as relegations, and the last two decades haven’t been particularly kind to the club.

Of the 13 other clubs on the big stadiums list, none finished in the Bundesliga’s top 5.

Germany has perhaps been the most consistently strong international team over the last four to five decades. The sport has become the personification of the German Efficiency™ and Pragmatism™, but while the Bundesliga always has quite a few strong teams, it cannot produce more than one league club that plays well for a few years in a row without a major hiccup.

Of course, parity makes things blurry. In a given year, only a few teams really stand out from the pack, good or bad. In 2014-15, the top four teams — Bayern, Wolfsburg, Gladbach, and Leverkusen — won 81 matches and lost just 23, while fifth-place Augsburg won 15 and lost 15. Eight of the 18 teams in the league were within three games of .500; in comparison, the English Premier League had just five of 20 teams in that range.

"You’re in a league where you can easily finish 14th one year and fourth the next," Anderson tells me. "With a very small budget, you can do really well. A few years ago [in 2011], Mainz finished fifth in the Bundesliga and played in the Europa League. I want to say they had a budget of less than 25 million Euros. That’s tiny. That’s a Championship [second-level] club in England. You don’t need support from corporations to play winning football.

"Now, you might if you want to sustain it year after year…"

Even with nearly NFL-level parity, Bayern still does what no other club can. Bayern and Gladbach emerged simultaneously as league powers in the late-1960s, and Gladbach actually won more titles in that decade (five) than Bayern did (four) during their respective decade-long runs. But life in a smaller city, with fewer resources, eventually did them in. And since Gladbach’s fade, countless contenders have come and gone, from 1. FC Köln to Werder Bremen to VfB Stuttgart to Schalke 04 to Bayer Leverkusen (derisively named Neverkusen because of the tendency of the club’s metaphorical ball hitting the goal post of reality late in a promising season) to Borussia Dortmund to Hamburg.

Oh, Hamburg.

9.Avoid drama

Stuart Franklin/Bongarts/Getty Images

Within Hamburg’s Imtech Arena ticks a clock that records the years, months, days, minutes and seconds that the club, the only team to never be demoted, has resided in the Bundesliga. As April was turning to May, it looked like time was literally about to run out. But wins over Augsburg and Mainz and a draw with Freiburg kept hope alive. And on the final day of the season, Ivica Olić and Slobodan Rajković each scored second-half goals to give the club a 2-0 win over Schalke. The result doomed Schalke to sixth place in the league, which forced them into a playoff to reach the Europa League a year after reaching the Champions League round of 16 and nearly taking down Real Madrid.

More importantly, it got Hamburg into a playoff. They would face Karlsruher SC, the third-place finisher in the second division, and thanks to two late goals and a penalty stop, they survived. The clock will tick for another year.

Hamburger SV became a power in the late-1970s, winning three league titles and, beginning in 1979, finishing either first or second for six consecutive years. Between January 1982 and January 1983, they either won or tied 36 consecutive league matches, a record unbeaten streak that was finally topped by (guess who?) Bayern in 2013. In 1983, they beat Juventus, 1-0, to win the European Cup (now the Champions League).

But since finishing fifth in 1991, die Rothosen (the Red Shorts) have managed only six top-five finishes in 24 seasons and have finished 15th or worse in three of the last four.

"It’s politics," Anderson says. "Hamburg is a great city, a wealthy city. They’ve got a beautiful stadium. But the people running the club are running against each other and working across purposes inside the club. And coming in there from the outside as a coach or GM or anyone else, it is very difficult to get anything done."

Because of Germany’s unique 50+1 ownership model — club members, and not corporations or outside investors, must hold a majority of voting rights — size alone does not benefit you. It could end up meaning more voices, more power plays, and more politics.

"Hamburg is the kind of club that would benefit if the rules were changed to allow corporate ownership," Anderson says, "or the kind of ownership that you have in the U.S. and Britain. Because then you could have structure. You would have an environment where you could manage things rationally, you could do very well. But it’s just politics. They’ve been fighting relegation virtually every year for the last five years. It’s crazy."

"I think the biggest issue with the Bundesliga right now is that certain clubs should be giants but aren’t," Quinn says. "Hertha Berlin … Hamburg … Stuttgart … Eintracht Frankfurt … they should be giant teams. If they’re good for even a couple of years the corporate sponsorships would pile up. But you just aren’t going to get it if there’s a fear you might be relegated.

"Hamburg is in my opinion the biggest catastrophe in the sport right now, not just in Germany. Getting relegated would be good for them because they need to clear out so much dead weight."

"As a Bayern supporter, you don’t want that [relegation] clock to keep ticking," says Bayern Central’s Susie Schaaf. "It’s just the most obnoxious thing in the world. But what Hamburg has done … it’s overpaying players, keeping older players. They haven’t kept a coach for longer than a season in 10 years. They’re just throwing bad money after worse money without any sort of coaching stability. They didn’t get relegated this year, but they’re going to get relegated soon.

"Their league nickname is the Dinosaurs. They’re the only team that’s been in the league for the entire existence of the Bundesliga. But if you come in 15th or 16th place every year, what’s the point, really?"

If Bayern are the Yankees of the late-1990s and early-2000s, Hamburg are the Yankees of the late-1980s, bloated, aging, and angry.

Again, your best and worst traits indeed emerge from the same source. So much of the German soccer populace is aghast at the workings of Red Bull Leipzig; the energy drink giant has not only purchased 49 percent of the club (all that the rules will allow) but has also limited much of the 51 percent club ownership to Red Bull employees. It is a legal cheat of sorts.

It doesn’t appear that in the current economy and environment, an East German club can thrive without corporate help to this level, but as RB Leipzig has climbed from Germany’s fifth division to the top half of the second — it’s only a matter of time until RBL reaches the Bundesliga; in fact, the club is a favorite to do so this year — protests against the club’s "franchise" workings have become larger and more frequent.

Still, German soccer’s populist spirit creates conflict and politics. In the nerd world, much was made of Hamburg hiring analytics guru Steven Houston a few years ago, but he left quickly upon finding the environment impossible. Perhaps he was lucky to get out so quickly.

Hertha Berlin, meanwhile, is at once easier and harder to explain. For the first quarter-century of the Bundesliga, Hertha was on an island. Berlin was both sliced up and surrounded by East Germany, and as the Bundesliga began to thrive and pick up more players from outside of the country, these players decided there were plenty of other clubs, with far more favorable geographic circumstances, to play for.

But that only explains so much. The club still plays in Berlin’s cavernous Olympic Stadium and boasts a larger population base, and greater sponsorship possibilities, than anybody. At this point, Bayern will always have more potential, but the same politics that felled Hamburg and other contenders have prevented Hertha from becoming a contender at all. Hertha was a pre-war power, winning the German Championship in 1930 and 1931 and finishing as runner-up four times before that. But the accomplishments in the last 50 years have been minimal considering the potential. They finished in the league’s top three four times between 1970 and 1978, spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in the second division, surged in the 2000s (top-six all but one year between 1999 and 2006), then collapsed and went into yo-yo mode: relegated in 2010, promoted in 2011, relegated in 2012, promoted in 2013, nearly relegated in 2015.

Bigger clubs are almost punished by the 50+1 model because of the potential for conflict. Only Bayern has figured out how to mostly avoid this conflict, but even they have had their moments.

Familie

10.Define your values and adhere to them, for better and for worse.

Alexander Hassenstein/Bongarts/Getty Images

Every family’s got the black-sheep cousin who tries to burn someone’s house down. Every family’s got the uncle who’s a little too smooth with the money. You may judge them for mistakes and legal troubles among other family members, and you may abhor the stain they put on your last name. But you probably still defend them outside of the family (or at least change the subject). And you might lend them money even if you don’t want to.

In the Bayern museum are listed 11 values to which the club strives to adhere: Responsibility, Role Model, Partnership, Innovation, Financial Responsibility, Joy, Tradition, Family, Self Confidence, Respect, Club. You can find examples of each of those in their history, but there is no question that, for better and for worse, they live Family.

First, there are the obvious ways. Beckenbauer twice served as caretaker manager for the club following other managers’ departures, and he served a long tenure as club president. Hoeness was Bayern’s general manager, then its president. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Bayern’s best offensive threat from the late-1970s through the mid-1980s, was once the club’s vice president and is now chairman of the board. This is the club’s holy trinity, and Bayern are forever lucky that their skills proved to go far beyond kicking a ball.

"There’s been a generation of Bayern players who progressed to become the senior executives of the clubs," Anderson says. "They’re smart guys who played together or played subsequent to each other, knew each other, moved through the club structure to become president, chairman, and whatever else. Beckenbauer, Hoeness, Rummenigge. These are the guys who provide real leadership, real continuity within a business culture that thrives on rationality, being progressive and forward looking, not spending money you don’t have — those are sort of the good Bavarian virtues. They’re the BMW of German football … or the Audi, if you need to mention the sponsor."

The family nature of the club goes beyond that, however. The sponsors rarely change — adidas has been on the Bayern jersey for more than 40 years and owns nine percent of the club (Audi owns another nine percent), and the big name on the shirt rarely changes either. While they probably aren’t the only club to attempt a family vibe, they do it better than almost anybody else. The "What is Bayern?" museum video features testimonials from one of the cleaning staff. And anybody who attended a Bayern basketball game in recent years likely saw familiar faces in the crowd.

"Hoeness used to go to all the basketball games," Quinn says. "They were putting so much money into basketball, too, which got them the Bundesliga championship [in 2014] and got them into the Euro League. He was going to all the games, and the Schweinsteigers, Tobias and Bastian, are big basketball fans, too. So they were going to the games, sitting courtside. Javi Martinez is a fan, and he goes, too.

"Old players come back to train, too. Willy Sagnol, who used to play for Bayern [from 2000-09], he’s Bordeaux’s manager now, but he’s in Munich for something, and he comes back, and you see him greeted with hugs.

"They did the same thing with Breno." Ah, Breno.

Breno Borges was at one point a star for São Paulo and the Brazillian U23 team. With just one season under his belt at São Paulo, however, the big clubs came knocking on the door. Real Madrid, Juventus, A.C. Milan, Bayern, and others were in pursuit of the 18-year-old. With a nudge from former Bayern great Giovane Elber, Borges signed with Bayern.

Borges would only play 21 times for the club. He was loaned out to Nürnberg for a while, and he suffered a knee injury in 2010. He wasn’t an all-time great, and when he was arrested in September 2011 for suspected arson after allegedly burning down his own villa, nobody would have thought twice if Bayern more or less disowned him. But they didn’t. Hoeness virulently defended him in public, and the club gave him an assistant job with Bayern II while he was on work release. (That ended when he was deported.)

Then there was Hoeness himself.

A passage in Uli Hesse’s Tor!, written more than a decade ago, turned out to be a little bit too prescient:

Hoeness always did things for a purpose, according to a plan, and for his own, private agenda. More often than not, that agenda centered around money. In early 1974, he said: ‘If we win this World Cup…’ What? We will be immortals? We will be among the greats of the game? No. ‘If we win this World Cup we are set up for life.’ Even Paul Breitner, no bright-eyed idealist himself, could only marvel at these particular talents of his friend. ‘Without him, I wouldn’t make a penny outside football,’ Breitner said. ‘It’s unbelievable how Uli Hoeness develops ideas if something can be made into a business.’

Hoeness has been a polarizing figure for 40 years. He spoke about money and business more than any player should, and his ability with money and cost-effective deals turned Bayern into a wins-over-style team in the 1980s. But his wheeling and dealing kept Bayern at or near the top of the table year after year as other clubs rose and fell. His ability as a general manager kept the trophies rolling in even as the first and second generations of Bayern stars came and went. And as he did with Breno, Hoeness became known for his strident, often defensive quotes regarding the club.

There was another side to Hoeness, however. He was the sole survivor of a 1982 plane crash that took the lives of close friends, and his heart began to show more over time. He did more to create an atmosphere of family and philanthropy than anybody else. As Müller battled alcoholism, Bayern and Hoeness convinced Müller to go to rehab and, in the early-1990s, hired him as an assistant for the junior team.

Bayern’s ability to win while working without debt, and to treat Bayern’s greats and failures as part of the same large family, comes more from Hoeness than anybody else. And he took steps to assure financial health for other clubs as well. Under Hoeness’ watch, Bayern agreed to countless friendlies in which the club played on the road against a tiny, financially strapped, lower-division club, sells the place out, and lets the club keep the revenues. They once gave bitter rival Borussia Dortmund a two-million Euro loan. And through Hoeness, Bayern pledged early support to the Magnus Hirschfeld National Foundation, designed to utilize "top-level functionaries of sport" to "make a mutual stand against homophobia."

This is the same Uli Hoeness, by the way, who went to jail for tax evasion in 2014. He admitted to evading nearly 30 million Euros in taxes and was sentenced to more than three years of prison. He resigned as club president (against the wishes of many in the club, mind you), but naturally, when granted work release in early 2015, Bayern hired him as an advisor. It’s the Bayern way. Family first, no matter what outsiders think.

11.Have a backup plan

Bayern practices what it preaches, but this isn’t always easy or helpful. What creates your best characteristics creates your worst, and when an outsider comes into the family, Bayern’s customs don’t always mesh without the seams showing.

Manager Pep Guardiola struggled for nearly two years, for instance, with the team doctor arrangement.

The enigmatic Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, who is either a medical genius or a total kook depending on who you ask, served as official team doctor for nearly 40 years. But he maintained his private practice downtown, which meant that he wasn’t always present during practices. This rubbed Guardiola the wrong way, and his sentiments toward Müller-Wohlfahrt grew toxic when Bayern suffered an absurd number of injuries during 2014-15. Bayern first-teamers missed nearly 300 games to injury this past season, and no matter how much Müller-Wolfahrt was or wasn’t responsible for that — lord knows player age had a part to play as well — a crack turned into a fissure, and Müller-Wohlfahrt resigned with public disgust after he felt he was being blamed for the loss to Porto in the first leg of the Champions League quarterfinals.

Family might make it hard to let go of players at the right time, too, even when you know better. "Bayern had a kind of thing where, once you turn 30, you don’t get more than a one-year deal," Schaaf told me. "But as Schweinsteiger and Philipp Lahm and Franck Ribéry and Arjen Robben got older … they were such crucial parts to Bayern’s recent success that the board decided they should stay around longer."

Indeed, both Bastian Schweinsteiger and Franck Ribéry have had brothers on the Bayern II squad. That tells you a little bit about the role of some of the junior teams, but it also feels redundant. The Schweinsteigers, the Ribérys and pretty much everybody else associated with Bayern Munich are surrounded by family members at all times.

In recent seasons, Schweinsteiger’s role basically became the club dad on the field. He yelled at guys to get into certain areas. He spotted a missed assignment and tried to fill the hole on the fly. He was almost an old-school sweeper. When Bayern needed help on defense, he was the one bringing the ball up the field next to Dante. When Bayern needed a goal at the end of the Augsburg match, he was sending headers at the keeper in the box.

He doesn’t do anything as well as he once did, mind you. The onetime German Footballer of the Year hit six digits on the odometer a while back, and injuries sent him frequently to the sidelines. He has played 40 club matches just once in the last four seasons, and he didn’t even make 30 in 2014-15. Like so many Bayern players this season, he missed time with injury, and whatever his fifth gear resembles at this point, he didn’t hit it.

Still, it was Schweini putting a fatherly arm around a frustrated Götze after the Augsburg match. And when Højbjerg subbed in against Bayern after halftime, it was Schweini riding the past and future Bayern first-teamer hard down the field, doing everything but putting the 19-year-old in a headlock to test his resolve.

That Højbjerg completely fended Schweinsteiger off in this exchange almost felt like a passing of the torch at the time. It became even more of one this summer. Schweinsteiger only recently turned 31, but as Rummenigge and other Bayern stars have done late in their respective careers, he elected for a change of scenery. Manchester United came calling, and both Bayern and Schweini accepted.

Still, considering his own coach-on-the-field tendencies and Bayern’s history, it would be a bit of an upset if Schweini weren’t training future Bayern players in some role when he retires. Team captain Philipp Lahm, too. Bayern stars do sometimes leave in the twilight of their careers. But they almost always come back.

Memories cloud decision-making sometimes. Age eventually took down the most recent Yankees dynasty, and it became clear this past season that Bayern must prepare for succession, even beyond Schweinsteiger. They signed the talented Costa from Shakhtar Donetsk this summer with Ribéry still battling injuries, and this older set of remaining Bayern stalwarts — Ribéry (32), Robben (31), Lahm (31), Xabi Alonso (33), Dante (31), Rafinha (29) — is aging quickly. Transitioning from old to new could quickly get awkward. How do you replace Ribéry, one of the club’s greatest players, if he’s not ready to be replaced?

Mia san mia

It is like Bayern was built from a box, a ‘Perfect Club’ Lego set; only, the instructions are simply organized and impossible to complete.

Bayern’s motto means, simply, we are who we are. There is "take it or leave it" intent here, but you could just as easily interpret this as, "You can’t be us."

Spend a week in Munich, and there are a few guarantees. You will walk 30 to 40 miles. You will get lost on the curvy side streets in city centre. You will eat well, and you will drink well. And you will learn very quickly how a single club can infiltrate the culture of a city and vice versa. Bayern is Munich; hell, Bayern is Germany: a rich spendthrift, a charitable but unforgiving economic power, and an undeniable success in modern times.

You don’t have to like Bayern, and lord knows much of Germany does not. But you cannot stop them from pushing forward and you cannot build a replica to keep up. If you’re reading this, you’re roadkill, and it’s too late. It’s already way, way too late.

Credits

• EditorsElena Bergeron,Satchel Price
• Design & DevelopmentGraham MacAree

Team Blog

Bavarian Football Works

Prologue: El Perdón

On Sept. 16, 2012, in Nimes, southern France, the Spanish bullfighter José Tomás fought six bulls in one afternoon. Although I was not there in person, it remains the most transcendently beautiful fight of the world’s most troubling sport that I have ever seen.  Over the course of nearly three hours, Tomás solidified his place in bullfighting history not just for the five bulls he killed, but for the one he saved, a behemoth named, ironically, Ungrateful. Peruvian Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa wrote of that day, “I have never seen a bullring so packed, and the people so overwhelmed.” El Mundo’s bullfighting critic, Vincente Azbala de la Serna, wrote, “Some of us wept at the sight of such excellence, of perfection. I write this with sunny tears, blinded by emotion.”

Banned by Tomás from being broadcast on television, there are, nevertheless, films of the performance that offer various keyholes into this forbidden garden, particularly the end, the pardon, images as striking and startling as anything I have seen.

With each pass, Tomás displays increasingly less cape to Ungrateful until he keeps it entirely concealed behind his back, urging death to charge, only to offer a few feet of cloth that billow gracefully in the air, carried by the force of the bull’s horns as Tomás pirouettes and spins the cape back into a curtain. The bull charges again and Tomás allows the animal’s momentum to wrap the cape around his torso. Tomás turns, then deliberately paces to a new location, choking one end of the cloth like a wet rag.

Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images

Without leaving the anchor of one slippered foot driven into a few grains of sand, Tomás’s eyes never leave the folds of his muleta as the bull makes several more passes. Only then does the matador notice the white handkerchiefs fluttering above him, shaking in the open air, the crowd’s petition to the bullfight’s president to pardon the animal based on his courage. This rarely happens in a matador’s entire career.

Ungrateful is, of course, ignorant to all of this, panting and bleeding away, glaring only at his nemesis. Tomás’s focus returns to the bull and his expression softens for an instant. Then he leaves the animal waiting in the center of the ring while he calmly paces over to the barrera and is handed his sword. He returns to the bull and holds his cape unfurled down his thigh, his other  leg back, then brings the handle of his sword against his cheek to sight the tip of the blade between Ungrateful’s shoulder blades, the kill zone about the size of a silver dollar. The roar of the crowd reaches a crescendo as Tomás stands with the bull in pristine silence.

Tomás remains perfectly still and poised, sword in hand until, suddenly, unexpectedly, he drops it to his side, out of view from the bull. Blood glistens and froths from where the bull has been pierced by the picador’s spear and the dangling banderillas. Tomás then lowers the cape like a shade, an invitation, until the bull obliges and follows it down the point of his horns, bowing his head, unknowingly exposing his most vulnerable area to the sword’s tip. Then, with a jerk of his wrist, Tomás releases the sword and gravity carries it to the ground.

With the same hand, he now reaches over to his cheek and sights the kill in mime as the bull prepares to embrace fate. Tomás tugs at the cape and then springs forward to lance the bull just as it ignites at the same moment toward him.

But this is Tomás. He sails over the horns and slaps the bull on the precise location where his death would have arrived. The bull quickly turns around, faces Tomás one last time, an apparition, before the man turns his back, strolls off, then turns and beckons the bull to exit the ring, summoning him from the light to the darkness, from death to the rest of his life.

Then Tomás walks away, back into the ring, alone amid the weeping and the cheers.

1. Ghosts in the Machinery

May 28, 1998, San Isidro Festival, Madrid

At the heart of bullfighting is an hourglass hemorrhaging sand. Everyone moves through time and then, at some point, we look around to find time moving through us. The matador must confront it every day, every second, and each moment of their working life, struggling in the past, present and future of a perversely insular world as death looms close enough to feel its breath on the cheek. Bullfighting is every bit as ghoulish and savage as its critics warn, but it is equally as powerful and moving as its supporters insist. Perhaps the most vexing aspect about it is that neither group is wrong, they are both telling the truth. At the heart of all romanticism is suffering.

In film or on stage, in reflecting life through art, an actor has a second take or another day with his or her performance if something goes wrong. Bullfighters are spies crossing into enemy lines. Any mistake, no matter how minor or trivial, is potentially fatal. All the chips of a human life are pushed in against a bull that has been nurtured to fruition like a fine Burgundy wine or Stradivarius violin — to be the finest specimen on earth — calibrated with immense precision toward aggression, courage and violence. Before a toro bravo enters the ring on his last day, by Spanish law, he has lived five years without ever having seen a man stand before him. In Greek myth, virgins were sacrificed to the Minotaur, in Spain, the tables are turned and the bull must confront this ritual as a virgin. He learns fast, but the bull has just 15 minutes to make sense of being shipwrecked into his fate inside a ring and ascertain this nightmarish setting is all for his demise. And the matador’s art form is to honor the condemned, which, inescapably, symbolically, is the fate of us all on this side of the earth, heaven above, and hell below.

Europa Press/Europa Press via Getty Images

Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

I saw my first bullfight in Spain at 18, half my life ago. Since then, I have witnessed perhaps 50 more. I have no arguments to defend how brutal and disturbing a ritual the corrida is. Like all tragedies, no matter the beauty created, there are no happy endings. If it is indeed an art form, bullfighting is the most disturbing I have ever witnessed. Yet, I must admit matadors, on rare occasions, have managed to use a piece of red cloth to draw back a curtain on the world and reveal more of what it means to live and die than any other art or experience I’ve encountered.

Does that offer this demented ceremony clemency? In my head — patently no. In my heart, there is a hung jury. If Spain is eagerly ready to be rid of its past, much of its past stubbornly refuses to be done with Spain.

I returned to Spain this summer for the first time in 11 years. I moved there for a year in 2004 and arrived just before the Atocha train station terrorist bombing that claimed 191 lives and injured 1,800. I lived only a few blocks from the station, not far from the Prado museum, home to many of the world’s greatest art treasures: Titian’s The Fall of Man, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Caravaggio, Velasquez, and Goya, my favorite artist. The horror of Atocha seemed straight out of Goya’s bleak imagination. I vividly remember the cellphones that had been blown out of the hands of victims still ringing, scattered all over what was left of the station after the explosion, as loved ones called out to ghosts. I took a train from Madrid to Seville with my shaken girlfriend and discovered in the papers another bomb had been discovered on the same tracks the day before I left.

The Ordóñez family is one of the two most famous bullfighting families in Spanish history. Ernest Hemingway once referred to Antonio Ordóñez as “not only the greatest bullfighter but the greatest artist I have ever known.” But of course, none of Ordóñez’s fights could ever be sold at auction or hung on the walls of the Prado. They lived and died in the hearts of a nation. Antonio’s father, Cayetano Ordóñez, known across Spain as Nino de la Palma, was the basis for Pedro Romero in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Antonio’s son, Francisco Rivera “Paquirri” died on Sept. 26, 1984, from injuries sustained in a bullring. His death touched off three days of official mourning across Spain, and his funeral became a chapter in Spanish folklore. People remember precisely where they were when Paquirri, on his deathbed, calmly informed the doctor where his injuries were before losing his life.

One of his two sons, also named Francisco Rivera, was 10 at the time of his father’s death. His mother, terrified that Fran, as the Spanish call him, would join the family business, sent him to a military academy in Indiana. Fran returned to Ronda soon after and pleaded with his grandfather to become a matador himself. Antonio, who had long since retired after being gored 34 times in 32 years’ worth of fighting bulls, joined his mother in begging him not to. When Fran insisted, Antonio refused to ever watch him fight, admitting during a 60 Minutes profile on Fran that he was, quite uncharacteristically given his status to the contrary, “too scared.”

Quim Llenas/Cover/Getty Images

Above: Legendary bullfighter Fran Ordóñez

Fran’s meteoric rise in bullfighting had not been seen since the days of his grandfather. Then, at age 24, already a top paid matador earning several million dollars a year, he became the first bullfighter to marry into Spanish royalty, wedding Eugenia, the 12^th Duchess of Montoro, and became even more famous. Before his divorce, 60 Minutes labeled him “Tom Cruise of the corrida.” Asked why he defied the wishes of his mother and grandfather to risk his life every afternoon in a bullring, he answered, “I dream about fighting bulls every night.”

“I don’t think a professional tennis player dreams about tennis every night,” the late 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon replied with a smile.

“A tennis player doesn’t play with his life normally.”

“If he has a bad day he’ll lose a match.”

“That’s it,” Fran grinned. “If I have a bad day, maybe I’ll lose my life.”

He had such a bad day last week, on Aug. 11, now aged 41, gored through the pubis. He is expected to survive, but never to return to the ring.

The capital of the bullfighting world is in Madrid. Starting on May 15, the San Isidro festival offers the greatest display of bullfighting in the world, taking place over 24 afternoons. When I first  cautiously approached the menacing grandeur of the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas bullring many years ago to buy a ticket for a corrida for the first time, apart from Fran’s story and what I’d read of his family in Hemingway, I knew nothing about the sport. I did not know any of the matadors listed on the schedule, or what made one superior to another. For guidance, in my broken Spanish I consulted a group of well-dressed, cigar-smoking men huddled in the shade outside the arena. On Sundays, Spaniards joke, men can wear the same suit for all three of the day’s traditional destinations: the Church, the whorehouse, and the bullfight.

I sheepishly asked the group about who among the matadors was worth seeing. They described their various qualities not in words but in mime, gestures of the hands, illustrating just how close each man allowed the horns to his heart.

When they finished, there was still one name left, one with a price tag as ridiculously expensive as that of Francisco Rivera Ordóñez.

“José Tomás?” I asked.

The group puffed on their cigars, eyeing me. Then they explained, this time in words, that bullfighting’s greatest genius was imposible de ver, unwatchable. His audience was so frightened by his performances they covered their eyes and no one could bear to look through their fingers. There was no margin, no space between man and bull.

I only had enough money to watch one matador, either Ordóñez or the 23-year-old Tomás. All the tickets had long since been sold, but after that description of his artistry and Spain’s strange devotion to it, I hunted down a scalper and with every last cent I paid to watch Tomás in the flesh.

Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty Images

The idea of any bloodlust toward animals repulses me. The most money I have ever spent in my life was to a veterinarian trying to save my dying, one-eared cat with a failing kidney. The only meat my grandfather in British Columbia could afford to feed his family with came from game he shot “in the bush.” But the concept of causing unnecessary suffering to animals, let alone trophy hunting them or ritualized torture and slaughter of bulls for the entertainment of a crowd, would have disgusted him. I assumed I would share in his feelings. What gnawed at me was how anyone could call something like this art.

But perhaps the bullring owes as much to an asylum as the coliseums of Rome. Like all the masters, José Tomás owned the arena before he even stepped foot on the sand. Nothing about this ordeal resembled sport. When the band played and Tomás arrived, the glare of the sun sparkling off his traje de luces, even the look on his face silenced the audience in a country that is rarely silent. His thousand-yard stare seemed to capture both his own mortality and the troubled history of his people. Time slowed down to match his perfect stillness and it gradually dawned on all of us, this conjuror, this Houdini of the corrida was performing no illusion or trick. There was nothing up his sleeve. All his magic resided in his heart, beating in perfect unison with the bull’s. He was a man on a wire floating calmly, miles above the void. More than any human being I have ever seen, he seemed completely untethered from the world, almost appearing in the process of committing suicide, slowly, deliberately, absent of panic or concern.

It is interesting how little people act at the most important moments in their lives, even confronting death. Usually there is no one to act for. We are not often allowed to witness the demise. But this corridor of intimacy between life and death had a crowd voyeuristically barnacled to it, eyes from every angle. Then, as a half-ton of fighting bull charged into the ring like an assassin’s bullet and eagerly zeroed in on the man standing alone with only a cape to defend himself, every gasp from the 25,000 watching seemed to rattle off Tomás’ soul like a wind chime. As the cape was gradually drawn and the bull pointed his horn toward Tomás’s heart before his rush, I watched a man play Russian roulette in his own cemetery with a bull, the hero of this tragedy Spain adores and despises in nearly equal measure.

In this fatal theater, José Tomás assumed the role of nature — by extension death— against an immaculately strong and healthy animal who had — by Spanish law — never before encountered conflict of any kind. The animal represented life and a fate sealed the day he was born. All sympathy flows toward him as it dawns in his awareness that this extended nightmare has been entirely calibrated for his execution.

So the dance began, sun and shadow, life and death, murder and suicide, art and crime. An existential hourglass flipped over and the bull had just 15 minutes to live. Any longer, and the fear is in that short time he will learn enough of man to kill every matador placed before him. Unlike captivity in a slaughterhouse awaiting a whirling blade to slit its neck, in the ring a bull retains the agency to act out his nature. And in his brief time with the bull, Tomás’s craft was in the decision to surrender to the bull, like a fallen idol in a Greek tragedy, or play the Shakespearean hero, resigned to fate.

I left the ring after Tomás had finished with his two bulls, both entirely revolted by bullfighting and completely convinced that in that half hour I had learned as much about Spain as if I had spent a lifetime examining the paintings in the Prado. But this might suggest the two could be separated. It cannot. Nearly all of Spain’s great artists draw from the same bloody well of inspiration.

2. The Capital of the World

“Spain is different!” claimed a popular and much despised 1960s tourist slogan. Today, perhaps, those differences have contributed in making Spain the world’s third most visited country. Wherever you first arrive in Madrid, one in four streets offer a decibel level that violates the World Health Organization limits on noise, posing a threat to health and sanity. The government makes things even worse pumping billions of Euros into the economy to ignite fiestas throughout the year, distracting the people from their economic plight — an unemployment rate of more than 20 percent, nearly 50 percent for the young — with an endless, whirling party. Spaniards smoke like chimneys, consume more cocaine than any people in Europe, and still manage to live longer than just about anyone on the continent. Follow any Madrid street and, with startling frequency, Spain’s history unfolds upside down.

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Plaza Mayor, the heart of the city, was just down the street from an apartment I rented and offered coffee and a newspaper at a café where blood once spilled from public executions and bullfights that took place not so long ago before a king and his subjects. With time to explore this land and her culture, Don Quixote, Velazquez’s Las Meninas, and the Alhambra Palace come at your heart like a love-letter stuffed inside a Molotov cocktail, a weapon first used during “Le Guerra,” the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, a war between the Fascists of Franco and the Republicans. It killed one in 30 Spanish men, sent 400,000 into exile, and left Spain under Franco’s heavy thumb for another 35 years.

According to many linguists and translators, the hardest word in the Spanish language to translate into our own is “duende.” Lorca explained it this way, “Duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought … duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet. Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation … everything that has black sounds in it, has duende … In all countries, death is an ending. It arrives and the curtain falls. Not in Spain. In Spain the curtain is raised.”

Back to bullfighting, one of Spain’s many black boxes, with a man alone in the center of a ring. Whatever of note happens will appear on the cultural pages rather than in the sports section the following day. Journalists cover the sport like theatre or opera critics, not sportswriters.

The modern style of bullfighting began with a cripple named Juan Belmonte, who many consider the finest bullfighter who ever lived. Until that time, the bullfight was little more than an entertainment, a circus show, a man chasing a bull around the ring. Then Belmonte chose suicide, facing the bull, standing absolutely still, motionless.

He was born in Seville in 1892, shy and insecure, with deformed legs that refused to allow him to run or jump, so he bluffed his way into the life of his dreams. He turned his handicap into a revolutionary new technique that irrevocably altered the art form.

He refused to be in orbit of death. Instead, he planted his feet and calmly allowed death to orbit him, allowing the bulls to come so close hairs would be stuck in his jacket. “I went to the ring,” he said, “like a mathematician going to the blackboard to prove a theorem.” At issue were death and its geometry.

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From 1914 until 1920, bullfighting’s Golden Age was fueled by a haunting duel between Belmonte and Joselito, the child prodigy, at 17 the youngest to receive the title of matador de toros. The rivalry of statues concluded on May 16, 1920, when Joselito was fatally gored in a small town outside Madrid. By 1925, Belmonte was on the cover of Time.He would continue fighting, on and off, for 10 more years, teased by his friends and critics that the only thing he failed to accomplish inside a bullring was his own death. “I’ll see what I can do,” Belmonte always replied.

Yet after 24 serious gorings and thousands of corridas, nothing in the ring killed Belmonte. He took that honor himself.

A year before, upon hearing of Ernest Hemingway’s suicide in Ketchum, Idaho (who had just acquired tickets for that year’s San Fermin festival in Pamplona), he is said to have replied, “Well done.” The following year, suffering from a grave heart condition and terminal lung cancer, a doctor informed him the brutalities of the bullring and hard living meant he could no longer ride his beloved horses, smoke, drink or fuck. He had his favorite horse brought to him, along with several cigars, two bottles of his favorite wine and two prostitutes from a Seville brothel. At the end of the day, he shot himself with a pistol and was buried in Seville, 20 yards from Joselito.

It was left to Manuel Laureano Rodríguez, better known as “Manolete” and Belmonte’s successor, to supply Spain’s romantic culture with what Belmonte could not.

He was 30 at the time of his death and had risen to prominence as the Spanish Civil War began. Shortly before a horn took his life inside the ring on Aug. 29, 1947, killed by a Miura bull, the most dangerous in the world, Manolete had been challenged to a mano a mano duel from Luis Miguel Dominguín, a matador eight years his junior, for dominance over the corrida.

After Manolete’s passing, Dominguín was unchallenged and retired six years later, at the peak of his fame, then became even more famous for bedding Frank Sinatra’s movie-star wife, Ava Gardner. Four years later, in 1958, he accepted Antonio Ordóñez’s challenge and returned to the ring to face Ordóñez in another mano a mano contest that saw both men repeatedly seriously gored in the process. Just before his decent into madness and finally suicide, Hemingway closely followed and wrote of this event in The Dangerous Summer.

Three months after I first saw José Tomás, the Spanish press was announcing him as not just Belmonte’s successor, but also the great Manolete, and Joselito’s, the latest — and perhaps the last — of the line.

3. Tourist Information

Ernest Hemingway was one of the more interesting people of the 20th century, but my affection for him lay in the fact he was a lot more interest-ed in the world around him. A Hemingway character never walks into a bar anywhere in the world without knowing the bartender and the ideal drink to order before expertly going off to do the most wonderful adventure wherever he happens to be. This is a useful kind of guy to know, but now every bar Hemingway ever drank at — in Paris, Pamplona, Key West, Venice, Havana — is resoundingly the worst place on earth to grab a drink both in cost and atmosphere. For that you can thank successive generations of his readers plundering Hemingway’s experience instead of living their own.

In December of 2000, my father got very sick and initially refused treatment. After he had a major operation, I borrowed a couple thousand dollars from my uncle and fled to Spain to see José Tomás face death. It was the dead of winter and I quickly discovered there are no bullfights in winter. This was a considerable setback to my plans of running away from the world.

The only room I could afford in Madrid near the Prado museum was in a pension that was being run as a brothel where transgender women worked. It was as cheerful an atmosphere as you might expect. We all shared the same bathroom. The girls called me “El Guapo” — Handsome— when they passed me in the hallways. They worked outside the gates of the Parque del Retiro while the Moroccans sold hash both inside and under the massive lion statues overlooking the pond with the rowboats. It was all very civilized. The Moroccan dealers even had business cards.

I stayed on a couple more months until my money ran out continuing my investigation of Tomás and bullfighting the best I could from the Prado museum, Madrid’s libraries, and the bars bullfighters and aficionados frequented. The previous year, Tomás had again been proclaimed the winner of the feria San Isidro in Madrid. The newspaper Cossio said of his performance that year, “No one can understand how a man is capable of such beauty.” Soon after that, José Tomás pulled his fights from television, explaining that his art lived and died only with each performance.

“We live in a very superficial age, full of lies,” Tomás lamented soon afterwards. “People say I’m revolutionizing the bullfight, but I’m not sure. I can only say that I try to do things the way I feel them. In the old-fashioned way, with a certain purity, as they’ve always been done in this world.”

Then he stopped talking to the press altogether. His myth swelled to new heights in his self-imposed media vacuum.

But the pressures and demands on him led to reclusiveness. He fought with growing irregularity until 2002, when, at 27, and at the zenith of his acclaim, like chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer, Tomás vanished from bullfighting, an act that seemed to scramble Spain’s DNA. He gave no explanation and aficionados could ascertain no motive.

He shacked up with a checkout girl from a local supermarket and disappeared with her to Estepona on the southern coast of Spain. He bided his time, joined a local soccer team, and kept mostly to himself. Paparazzi found little more than a man who liked to fish or chew large wads of bubble gum while walking his dog.

As the years passed, hope gave out that Spain’s most mysterious, iconoclastic matador would ever again ply his chilling trade.

Then, Tomás reached for his cape, donning the black winged cap and matching slippers, and strutted out of retirement and back into an open-air theater in 2007 as bullfighting’s resident savior. He announced only that “To live without fighting bulls is not to live at all.” Tickets to his return sold out within a day. Tomás allegedly was paid a million dollars to fight in Barcelona, more than any matador in history.

Another of Spain’s hourglasses flipped over, the counterpoint to joy greeting Tomás’s return. Before, questioning bullfighting as a cultural tradition had been taboo in Spain — to do so was to be seen as a traitor, unpatriotic. But during Tomás’ absence this all changed. The swelling anti-bullfight movement — virtually non-existent only 20 years before — rose up. Tomás became the iconic target and face of the moral outrage against a government-subsidized cultural tradition of slaughter and torture. He returned to a sport under existential threat, a paradox, both devil and savior.

In June of 2007 he made — according to the Spanish press — his “messianic” return to bullfighting in a very deliberate location: the Plaza de Toros Monumental in Barcelona. Catalonian support for bullfighting had long been dwindling, most bullrings nearly being put out of business. But with the return of Tomás, Barcelona’s largest stadium sold out for the first time in 20 years. Scalpers sold tickets for $4,000.

To counteract this enthusiasm for the “maestro’s” return, the largest anti-bullfighting protest in the history of Spain gathered to greet Tomás’s arrival. Five thousand protesters marched from the Rambla, in the city center, for nearly two miles over Joan Miro’s famous mosaic and under the tree-lined boulevard and Gaudi-sculpted lamps, past Barcelona’s most beautiful fountains, the opera house, and world famous flower and caged bird markets until they reached the bullring. Lorca described Las Ramblas, created in 1440, as “the only street in the world which I wish would never end.” The protesters carried with them 80,000 signatures to galvanize a parliamentary bill banning bullfighting and wailed at ticket holders entering the Plaza.

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Tomás’s performance that afternoon, dramatic, profound, and transcendent, ripe with duende, garnered three ears — the bullfight’s version of a trophy. It was as if even the bulls understood something that day, one after the other bending to his will, brushing his cape with their horns, plowing toward him again and again in valiant attempts to pick the pocket of his life. After they would stand in wonder as Tomás would turn his back and delicately wander away, both utterly exposed and serenely at peace with the grandeur of demise.

He was carried in triumph out of the ring on the shoulders by supporters, surrounded by a mob of roaring enthusiasts. Many left weeping.

After the fight, a headline read, “And the Myth Was Made Flesh.” El Pais called the performance, “a poetic and mysterious silence … a silence that makes you shudder, because it doesn’t shirk from the silence surrounding death.” The New York Times would write of Tomás, “His detractors complained he was just scaring people to death.”

“As Spain goes, so goes toreo,” is an old Spanish adage. With the recession of 2008 battering Spain, bullfighting, which had never been more popular or reviled in its history, began a precipitous decline in activity. On the 15th of June that year in Madrid, Tomás was gored three times and yet after each violation he calmly rose to his feet, covered in blood, and continued, allowing the bull even closer as his cape wrapped around his body or tossed gracefully in the air. After the fight, he immediately endured three operations. The Times reported that when an old matador was asked about Tomás’s performance he replied, “What is courage? It’s the spot where José Tomás stands.”

In 2008, Spain’s culture minister gave José Tomás that year’s prestigious Fine Arts medal. When they gave the same medal to Fran — Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, the well-connected, well-heeled heir to the Ordóñez dynasty, the following year, Tomás returned his in protest and created a scandal.

A year later, in 2010, Tomás, now aged 35, was nearly killed in the bullring of Aguascalientes, Mexico. A half-ton bull named Navegante drove its horn into his thigh and burst an artery that leaked nearly half the blood from his body. An announcement went out to the crowd begging for donations of his rare blood type. While in a coma, it took 18 bags of blood, each holding 200 milliliters, to keep him alive in the hospital. As Tomás fought for his life in Mexico, bullrings across Spain honored him with a minute of silence the following Sunday. After Tomás pulled through and regained consciousness, his only comment was, “Aguascalientes, I bathed your bullring with blood; and from your blood I filled my veins.”

In 2011 José Tomás returned to fight in Barcelona’s Monumental bullring one last time during the La Merced Festival, a rebellious emblem from Spain’s past challenging Spain’s future, the final corrida fought before Catalonia’s ban came into effect.

4. Pipe Dreams

June 28 2015, Madrid, Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas

Eighteen years after my first visit, I flew back to Madrid to see some amateur bullfights held at Las Ventas. José Tomás had refused to announce any fights in festivals across country this summer and was instead fighting in Mexico. I expect he will die or retire before I will ever have an opportunity to see him again. So instead, I planned a month of traveling across Spain to visit the cradle of modern bullfighting in Ronda, watch the new young matadors clutching for Tomás’s mantle in Madrid and Seville, and catch the tail end of San Fermín in Pamplona.

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Above: King Felipe VI of Spain

In the decade since I had last been back, a recession had battered Spain’s economy, leaving the country brittle. The intensifying referendum on the cruelty of bullfighting had intersected with international outrage over a spate of high profile animal cruelty stories. These ranged from Trump’s sons, The Donald Jr. and Eric-photographed in 2012 sawing off the tails of elephants, hanging 13-foot crocodiles by a noose off from branches, and clinging gleefully to the carcass of a slumped leopard, to Wells Tower’s searing 2014 GQ account of an elephant hunt, to more recent viral outrages,  such as the woman who posed with the giraffe she shot and called it a “very dangerous animal” and Walter Palmer, the dentist recently vilified for killing Cecil, a beloved Zimbabwe lion.

African wildlife, as usual, seemed of far more grave concern to the world than African or African-American people. So it is in Spain with the bulls. The county might be going down the drain, but the protests center around the corrida.

Despite the massive unemployment rate across the country, on the surface at least, Madrid had not changed much. The optics on the marginalization and disenfranchisement of the immigrant groups felt about the same. The prostitutes who still worked out in the open near the shopping district at the center of town in Puerta del Sol were still mostly Romanian and South American. Northern Africans still peddled knock-off goods to tourists on blankets wherever they could, one step ahead of the police, and supplied hash in the park. Pickpockets swarmed the arrival of tour buses. Bullfighting’s attendance, at record rates leading into the recession, had, like nearly all the industries, plummeted. As pressure mounted to ban the corrida across the country, King Felipe VI, a trophy hunter in Africa as well as passionate fan, had publicly stated Spain would leave the EU before renouncing bullfighting’s place in Spanish culture. His wife, on the other hand, loathed them and refused to attend anymore.

Tickets to see teenage novillero bullfighters at Las Ventas were cheap. Since they were trying to make a name for themselves in the Mecca of bullfighting, like young boxers with nothing to lose facing solid contenders on television, they often took ridiculous chances and gorings were common.

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They do not want to be José Tomás, not really. They cared about him less as an artist than as a destination. Like the poor young kids that once flooded gyms from every hopeless inner-city or dead-ass town in America, who dreamed only of a way out and the glory that came with a championship belt, the novilleros seek only money, modern celebrity with bottle service, and a trophy blond on each arms. The work, the sacrifice that brings value, the only thing that can even begin to justify such barbarism, whether beating a man or defeating a bull, is of secondary concern. They fight bulls now for the same reason a person buys a lottery ticket. It is the only way out of dying ordinary, and worth the price, despite the odds, to sacrifice their lives for a passing chance.

The evening I attended, with maybe a third of the 25,000-seat capacity of Ventas occupied —mainly by tourists armed to the gills with selfie-sticks — five horns got wet with matador blood.

I wanted to see the next generation of Spain’s bullfighters, naively pining for the next Tomás, but of course, he was not there anymore than Madison Square Garden has offered the next Ali in boxing, or any of Madrid’s galleries offered the next Goya.

A friend vacationing from his work at a mental hospital for the criminally insane flew over to join me at Las Ventas. In baking heat, we watched three youthful matadors face six bulls from barrera seats, the closest you can get to the sand and sharing the perspective of the matador. Not only was it my friend’s first corrida, but it was also the first for an attractive, vacationing Australian couple sitting next to us.

Before the fight even started, they looked on the verge of splitting up over the boyfriend’s insistence they would spend a light, fun afternoon watching six bulls endure the three acts of the corrida, being stabbed by men riding on blindfolded horses, followed by having hooked spears inserted and snagged in the their shoulders, and, finally, ritually slaughtered with a bent sword before being hitched to a cart and dragged off by mules, leaving a bloody smearing in the earth,  ready for a butcher to prepare tomorrow’s meat.

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“I’m only staying for one,” the woman warned. “One. I can’t believe you dragged me here. This is completely disgusting.”

“It’s not,” he pleaded, lighting up a Cohiba cigar, re-enacting his Hemingway wet dream. “Give it a chance.”

“They drug the bulls,” she countered, feverishly waving away his smoke from her face. “That’s the only way they can kill them. They drug them so they’re sluggish.”

The psychiatrist shot me a look and leaned over in his seat whispering, “They drug the bulls?”

I discreetly shook my head. No.

A man walked to the center of the ring with a sign informing the crowd of the bull’s name, age, his breeder, and his weight — 520 kilograms, more than 1,000 pounds.

“Listen,” she pled to her partner, “I know for a fact they pour acid on them before they go out to fight so they’re crazed and disoriented. Why would you want to see something like this?” Smoke from his cigar autographed the air.

The first teenage novillero knelt down 10 meters from the gate where the bull awaited entry. He laid his fuschia and canary-yellow cape over the side of one knee until the brass band exploded from the rafters and the bull crashed into the ring, then paused with confusion seeing all of us around him, a crowd of people for the first time and one standing before him. He quickly focused his rage onto the Justin Bieber-like smirk 10 meters away crying out, “Ay! Toro! Ay! Ay!”

The bull didn’t need much prodding. As he charged, from where I was sitting, the bull’s favorite horn was aimed straight at the kid’s mouth. The matador’s smirk vanished and his eyes bulged while he nervously hoisted and spread out his cape to one side, an ersatz Dracula clowning on Halloween. Toro Bravos, despite their size, are fiendishly fast animals, capable of bursts of nearly 40 mph, 10 mph faster than Usain Bolt.

A brutal dart, the horn pierced through the matador’s cape and missed taking off the kids’ ear, not to mention half his face, by millimeters. The kid’s helpers ran over to distract the bull while he reclaimed the torn cape from the sand and traded it for a replacement. The bull was so eager to get at someone he cruised around the ring until something from the crowd pissed him off.  He leapt and carried his half-ton of his rage over the wall. The ring veterinarian, the closest man to the bull behind the wall, scrambled for his life to get the hell away.

It took a minute for a handful of the matador helpers to lure the bull back into the ring with their capes.

Spain’s national symbol got back in the ring drooling and panting, suddenly pissing all over himself.

“Jesus,” the Australian woman moaned. “Look at how scarred the bull is! How many fights has he already had? This is disgusting.”

“Those aren’t scars, dear. It’s where his breeder branded him. They have a veterinarian at the arena who makes sure they’re in the peak of health before they fight.”

This is true. Ventas, along with most bullrings, also had some of the best surgeons in Spain on the premises in case the matadors are gored. That Sunday’s performance gave them plenty of work.

The bull returned to the ring as the two picadors marched out on blindfolded horses. As a spear pierced the bull’s shoulder, he nearly tossed both the horse and picador onto the sand. A banderillero took three flashy tries to place six banderillas, using an almost Kareem Abdul Jabbar-like sky-hook-style over one shoulder, and missed five.

When the amateur matador took the stage to complete the final act, the bull interrupted his procession of passes by tossing him in the air and piercing his thigh on the way down. He trampled the teenager under his hooves before the helpers ran in to save the matador and distract the bull. The teenager dusted himself off and after a few minutes battling his nerves rather than the bull with his cape, it was time for the final act, the coup de grace. But after three horrifically mucked-up attempts to kill that only buckled a sword off the animal’s spine and cartwheeled it to the sand, there was only blood frothing down the exhausted bull’s back and over both front legs.

The band kicked up a number to hurry things along as the matador distracted the bull with his cape. A helper snuck over like a crude assassin and jammed a dagger behind the bull’s head, and violently wriggling it until the spine was severed from the neck.

The bull finally toppled to the ground with the local crowd booing and some throwing garbage in protest. Most of the tourists didn’t seem to mind much, firing away with iPhones at the doomed spectacle and posting to their friends on Facebook or Instagram. As the bull was led away by mules, some sweepers ran over to rake away the trail of blood left in the sand.

The Australian girl finally persuaded her boyfriend to flee. The cigar hung limp in his hand as he followed her out.

5. Ronda

I took a fast train out of Atocha station toward Andalusia, the countryside rolling past like sheet music. Ronda had the oldest bullring in the country (built in 1785) and Spain’s two most famous bullfighting dynasties, the Ordóñez and Romero families both call Rondo home. Pedro Romero, the most famous torero of his clan, died in 1839 after killing a reported 5,600 bulls. His family was responsible for the introduction of the cape and modern sword used in the corrida, but Pedro is credited with transforming bullfighting into an art form. He was the first matador to get off his horse and fight on foot, transforming the combat from their origins of knight combat to pedestrian. Today Ronda only has bullfights once a year, fought in September during the “Feria Goyesca,” a festival Antonio Ordóñez founded. With some luck, I also wanted to locate the Ordóñez ranch, a notoriously private place where both Orson Welles and Antonio Ordóñez were buried inside a well.

Past olive groves forming an animal print of the landscape, eventually giving way to gleaming wheat fields and haystacks seemingly still wet from van Gogh’s brush and assembled with Cezanne’s eye, it is hard to imagine any city in the world ensnaring your heart with more force of raw beauty. Ronda, preening against the backdrop of the Serrania de Ronda mountains that frame the El Tajo gorge, which carries the Guadalevin River under the Puente Nuevo bridge, straddling a 100-meter chasm beneath. The scene steals your breath even before you encounter the town’s women strolling arm-in-arm under moonlight or spot falcons glazing clouds smudged against an Andalusian sunset above that heartbreaking 18^th century bridge that Donald Trump would turn into the bungee-jump capital of the world next to a Trump Casino and hotel.

I found an apartment down the hill from the town center and still had some time to visit the bullring and its bullfighting and duel museum (a legal means of resolving a dispute until the mid-19^th century), then sniff around local restaurants for clues about the location of the ranch.

The bullring, only a few blocks from the bridge, is the largest diameter ring of any in the world, framed by a building of ornate Arabic tiles and 136 pillars creating up 68 arches. As tourist families walked out into the open air of the ring’s center and readied selfie-sticks for a portrait, I sat down in the stands and wondered why elite matadors, despite earning comparable incomes to major American athletes, are basically unknown beyond Spanish borders, and why they don’t seem to care about international recognition. None of them seek to become brands — although an Ordóñez matador was currently moonlighting as an Armani model— and the most famous matador in the world refused to have any of his work televised.

I walked up the street toward the Hotel Catalonia Reina Victoria, Rilke’s stomping grounds. Before I got there, the romance of the town got to me and I was sidetracked by a couple girls in obscenely short shorts strolling toward the magic hour’s sky at the edge of the Alameda Del Tajo Park. I followed them into the park, which is divided into five wide promenades, separated by gardens and fountains, the main and widest promenade continuing under the shade of trees toward the edge of the gorge with balconies overlooking the view that tints off into different shades with the distance. Old men gathered near the fountain feeding birds while couples holding hands strolled by under street lamps discreetly glowing above. Three generations of women shared a bench giggling at a little boy chasing pigeons.

I had never been here before, but gradually it dawned on me that its features were familiar. The two girls turned off down another trail before the gorge but something pulled me toward the railing at its edge. When I looked over the 300-foot drop, I realized this place fit every coordinate of the location of Hemingway’s most searing description of the brutality of the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Based on true accounts, it concerns the execution of a cowardly fascist amateur bullfighter, Don Faustino Rivero, as he was sent through a gauntlet of men armed with flails and clubs, hands over his eyes, intent on driving him over the cliff and into oblivion.

“But he must have looked through his fingers,” Hemingway wrote, “because when they came to the edge of the cliff with him, he knelt again, throwing himself down and clutching the ground and holding to the grass, saying, ‘No. No. No. Please. NO. Please. No. No.’ Then the peasants who were with him and the others, the hard ones of the end of the line, squatted quickly behind him as he knelt, and gave him a rushing push and he was over the edge without ever having been beaten and you heard him crying loud and high as he fell.”

I walked over to the Pedro Romero restaurant and found a table under autographed posters of José Tomás and the Ordóñez family. I made friends with a warm old waiter, who later would reluctantly give me directions to the Ordóñez ranch. He was not fishing for a bigger tip, he just respected their privacy and waited until he knew the brothers, Fran and Cayetano, were off fighting together in another town.

“The Ordóñez’s own Ronda,” he explained. “They are sort of living history and they know it. Dealing with them I find quite strange. I have been at this restaurant since I was teenager and I knew their grandfather, and he introduced me to them early on and I saw them grow up in this town. Being an Ordóñez opens doors across Spain. Their granddad didn’t want them to fight but they both became toreros. Fran started off promising and cut off four ears in Seville. Then he got carried away with marrying into royalty and being a celebrity. His brother has proved the better fighter.”

“What about José Tomás?” I asked. “Do you know him?”

“The maestro?”

I smiled.

“He eats here when he passes through town. On his first visit many years ago, when he was presented in the Ronda ring, Antonio Ordóñez signed him up for four years after watching him just once. I asked him about it. He told me, ‘I’ve never done it for anybody else. He has immense valor.’”

He fights about as often as Halley’s comet.

“Demasiado sangre the critics say,” he laughed. “Too much blood. Not the bull’s of course. His. Have you ever seen him?”

“Only once,” I said. “My first bullfight a long time ago.”

The waiter smiled. “He was your gateway drug into the corrida. Somehow, he got even better. I’m amazed he’s survived as long as he has. He’s even more reckless since he had a child.”

The next morning, before it got hot, I followed the waiter’s directions and walked six miles along the side of the road in the outskirts of Ronda toward the Ordóñez property. It was no palace or mansion, just a humble estate residing next to a campsite and a modest café for thirsty motorists. I went over to have a look. Some landscaping workers were gathered behind the gate and eyed me with suspicion when I took some photos from across the road. Via the campsite, I circled back and went around to discover a trail that allowed me to see into the Ordóñez backyard, but I could not spot the famous well holding the ashes of Welles and his friend Ordóñez.

The next morning, I took a train to Seville to see one of the more promising amateur fighters in the country, a 16-year-old teen heartthrob nicknamed “Juanito,” who was fighting inside the baroque façade of the La Maestranza Plaza de Toros, immortalized in Bizet’s opera Carmen. The bullring rests on the Guadalquivir riverbank, the smell of orange blossoms floating over from the labyrinth of streets behind it, concealing all kinds of scenic treasures. Seville is by far the most sensuous destination in Spain, but after giving birth to Joselito and Belmonte, it is renowned for having some of the harshest bullfighting critics.

Yet Juanito won them over. He dazzled everyone in Seville’s buttery light, especially the hundreds of young women in attendance. They mobbed him outside the ring after showering him with hats and undergarments moments after he killed.

6. Pamplona

July 2015, Second-to-last-day of San Fermin Festival

The tradition of the running of the bulls of in Pamplona began in the early 14th century. Every morning, from July 7 until the 14, at 8 a.m., Spanish television features the running of the bulls on television. Each morning in Ronda and Seville, I religiously watched, on the lookout for a red, pinstriped jacket with a gaping hole above the side pocket from where a bull’s horn had pierced it on a previous run.

The jacket belonged to English author and journalist Alexander Fiske-Harrison. My Where’s Waldo routine had paid off twice during the first week of the festival, as I spotted Alexander twice in the tense crowd before the rocket burst and the gates swung open, unleashing six sets of horns down the cobblestone streets of Pamplona. He had written Into the Arena and co-written Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona with American Bill Hillman, who had gained international attention after being horribly gored by a 1,300-pound bull in Pamplona in 2014, only one month after the survival guide had been published. Since record keeping began in 1910, 15 people have been killed in Pamplona during the Festival, and about 100 are injured each year. Fiske-Harrison was a close friend of several prominent matadors and agreed to let me interview him and his inner circle at Pamplona.

We just hadn’t settled on a location.

“If you’re here,” Fiske-Harrison wrote me the day before I arrived, “meet me on the run — Santo Domingo — between half seven and eight. You know the jacket.”

Why exactly was it a given I would be running this insane thing? My heart sunk and my balls shriveled at the idea of meeting him there, and even worse, meeting him then. If your karma was iffy (optimistic appraisal in my case), a 1,300-pound Miura bull had every opportunity to savor the pleasure of killing you via a horn up your ass or a hoof on your heart. After all, he was already sentenced to meet his own death in a bullfight before 19,000 drunken maniacs at the arena later that afternoon.

I moped through the gathering crowd over to the church Fisk-Harrison had mentioned and there he was, cheerfully smoking a cigarette. After announcing he was hungover, he offered some pointers about “la curva” in the early stages of the 875-meter course, and the most dangerous area, the narrowed entrance of the ring, where pile-ups of collapsed people, a “montón,” were even more lethal. The six bulls usually covered the entire course in 2:30, averaging 20 mph, but today’s Miuras, he said, were especially fast (they ended up breaking the course record, clocked at 2:05 from gate to gate).

“Remember,” he added, “people are far more dangerous than the bulls. When people are terrified they grab and clench.”

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, who looks like a warm yet poetically tormented version of JFK Jr., registered my lack of optimism, lit up another cigarette and laughed his smoker’s laugh before winking and slapping me on the shoulder. I stood around waiting for the rocket to burst down the street while half-crazed, half-drunk, bemused Spaniards stretched their limbs, hyperventilating Americans with Go-Pros pressed record, Brits with St. George flags painted on their faces waved at the television cameras.

Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

Miguel Riopa/AFP/Getty Images

When the rocket finally burst, out of view but still close enough to feel the reverberations, I took full advantage of having been the starting running back for a Canadian Pee Wee football team that was unable to score a touchdown in two entire seasons of activity. The utter disregard for the concept of blocking was familiar, and fortunately, in this scenario we were all clawing and scratching our way in the same direction. Within seconds of picking up the pace along the course, people in front of me fell like the opening scenes of the D-Day invasion in Saving Private Ryan. Then, while running at full clip down a street with thousands of hysterical strangers all around, I stopped hearing the sound of men slipping or tripping and started hearing them being plowed down. This lights a fuse, equal parts awe and terror, as 3,000 kilos of muscle and horn close in. A flat scream drones as people brace to see six hulking versions of Jaws closing in. Like a windshield wiper ready to snap off, I kept looking ahead at falling assholes and checking my rearview until the Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder seemed to part the street of humanity.

The thing is, the bulls aren’t quite tall enough to see until they are on you. I was hugging the outside fence close enough tear my shirt with splinters when I looked back one last time and saw the wave of black and brown shoulders two arms lengths away. They soared past in a flash, brutally churning through the scarlet and white uniformed runners like a Louisville Slugger through a piñata. I tried to tally how many bulls had just run past me, but there was no way to count fear. Then, in a breath, we were at the entrance to the ring as collisions and slips and fall left people dropped all over the place. I hurdled over one in front of me and suddenly found myself in the bullring’s sand, surrounded by 19,000 people. The bulls and steers had already exited the other side. After 30 seconds, the ring, packed with runners, was mysteriously sealed off.

An announcer congratulated all the runners and I wondered if some hokey ceremony was about to start, if we were to receive T-shirts or key chains or something. Instead, a gate swung open at the opposite side of the ring and the crowd roared as a female cow, maybe a third the size of those we ran with, leapt into the ring with taped horns while opening bars from the theme song from Rocky blared over the loudspeakers.

Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

Before I could figure out what the fuck was going on, some demented lunatic ignited the crowd by performing a summersault over the bull’s horns while she galloped across the ring looking for people to toss or trample. We had five minutes with her, surging all directions, until she was ushered out. Then an even bigger female burst into the ring, this time to the A-Team theme song, followed by yet another larger animal and the music from Bay Watch. And finally, just before they let us go, rounding out the group, a nearly 700-pound female tore across the sand to The Knight Rider theme song, trying to dismantle anyone she could into a paraplegic. It was the most surreal 30 minutes of my life, booze and sand, blood and kitsch, the hourglass of a culture leaking and broken.

That night two of Spain’s most famous and acclaimed matadors, Julián López Escobar, “El Juli” and the eye-patch wearing Juan José Padilla, better known as “the Pirate,” after a horn that pierced his jaw and took his eye, fought in the arena. A BBC film editor met me to watch his first fight. Sam’s wife had just given birth to his first son and she was pregnant with their second child. That was why he had not run that morning.

We bought tickets through scalpers and arrived to our nosebleed seats just as six separate bands competed with the crowd’s roar and everyone rose to give Padilla’s entrance to the ring a standing ovation. Suddenly dozens of pirate flags were unveiled by the crowd and flapped majestically in the air. Padilla grinned from the side of his face he could still move after the goring.

I’ve seen enormous prizefights in front of the loudest crowds in America, and as a little boy I saw Michael Jackson live at the height of his Thriller fame, but I have never in my life heard a crowd muster anything comparable to the intensity of the roaring adulation Pamplona’s crowd offered to this matador. He casually strolled to the center of the ring, doffed his hat and held it aloft for a moment, then circled before the crowd in gratitude before tossing it in the sand and turning toward the gate where a 695-kilo bull awaited entry.

Padilla flopped onto his knees and draped his cape over one shoulder as he stared off at the bull with the only eye he had left. The gate burst open and Padilla, a father of two, remained kneeling until the bull lowered his horns. Only then did he whisk the cape off his shoulder, stand and swing it round behind his head. And so it began again…

After Padilla killed the bull, Sam left the arena and did not return. When I joined him at a bar in Pamplona’s main square after the fights were over, all he could do was shake his head.

“I’ll never forget today or what I saw,” he said. “But I never want to see that ever again.”

Ashland, Oregon 1993

What you are to be, you are now becoming, was posted in the locker room below the scattering of wooden grave markers bearing the names of vanquished opponents, the Japanese Rising Sun flag and the ‘89 and ‘91 state championship trophies. Out on the field, the 1993 Grizzlies grappled gently in T-shirts and shorts, their white helmets reflecting the early evening sun. Thursdays were walk-throughs. The players reached out for one another at three-quarter speed, and closed simulated tackles in a hug.

Each evening a cool, naïve breeze blew through town, one that suited twilight practice. It ran up East Main Street through the plaza, billowing the newly-hung Shakespeare Festival flags among the town’s green and yellow plum trees. It blew through the players’ Honda Civics and 4-wheel drives where cassettes of Eazy E and Metallica and Cypress Hill lay on the ratty passenger seats. And it twitched the pink ticker tape atop the goal posts. The Ashland Grizzlies were ranked no. 1 in the state, and according to a USA Today pre-season poll, No. 6 in the West. No Oregon team had ever had such expectations.

Photo: Alexander Black

Twenty years later, fullback Kacy Curtis, would stand up in the middle of an interview to pour out half a beer, rinse the bottle, dry it with a towel, and then, with nothing else to take his mind off the conversation, open another. “Eight carries?” he said, standing at the sink. “The leading rusher touches the ball eight times?”

“You smell the grass? You hear the crowd — visualize it.” Jowly O-line coach Russ Cooley scanned the boys proudly through his thick glasses. To end Thursday practice, they took a knee and bowed their heads in prayer, their hot faces freed from their helmets. Apart from the handful who were born in Ashland, they’d moved from Homer or Chicago or Coronado Island, in the first or third or ninth grade, reared in trailers or at friends’ houses or in homes with hot tubs, the sons of teachers and attorneys and single mothers who had chosen to go back-to-the-land in a small town: population 15,000, liberal and rural, five crowded elementary schools.

“Gaston, I see you in the backfield with your helmet in the quarterback’s chest — smell the blood.”

“Curtis, they can’t bring you down tonight — smell the blood!”

Players clenched their jaws when Cooley spoke their name. They didn’t want for encouragement in Ashland, but they’d never experienced such discipline before.

Coach Cooley had already decided who would lead them out. He carried a fresh-made wooden cross, painted white and dipped blood red at the tip. On it was the name of week four’s opponent: South Medford.

“I want all of you to look up at the scoreboard now. Visualize it. See the lights. See fourth quarter. See: 45-0. You see that?” He let them wait in the silent breeze, listening to themselves swallow.

He almost whispered. “Steinman, lead ‘em out.”

In the first three weeks, Ashland had outscored its opponents, including the bruising, sixth-ranked Roseburg Indians, 105-14. Everyone looked like a star. Senior Ethan Titus returned the season opening kickoff 85 yards, untouched, carrying the ball like a torch 20 yards out of the end zone. Beastman Darren Gaston broke the Eagle Point punter’s leg on a blocked punt. And returning first-team All-State slotback David Boekenoogen racked up five touchdowns on 361 smooth-to-the-outside all-purpose yards. “I saw what I wanted to see,” head coach Jim Nagel had told reporters.

1,160 total yards to 476 — and the starters hadn’t played a single down in a fourth quarter.

“Expect Ashland in a blowout” Ashland’s Daily Tidings newspaper predicted over South Medford.

Above: Jeremy Steinman's senior photo

The quiet on the practice field doubled as the players followed their quarterback, jogging with the white grave marker along the sideline. Jeremy Steinman couldn’t ignore how strange and spiritual this moment felt performed in broad daylight: A procession of young men in single file bearing a cross, as the aging janitor drug a trashcan out of the gymnasium doors, and stopped to watch.

Steinman was a complicated star: His tall, golden boy frame and River Phoenix hair was hard not to look at. He was a gregarious kid, a lazy valedictorian, but with something behind his eyes when people laughed at his jokes. He gauged the world around him, which is what made him a good quarterback — that he could simultaneously play and analyze the game — but was also what kept him from being a great quarterback: he was never fully in his body, never purely instinctual.

The significance of carrying the cross was not lost on him. South was the last team to defeat Ashland two years before, at home, when they blocked a punt in the waning moments of the game. Since then, Ashland had compiled 15 straight Southern Oregon Conference wins and one state championship.

They fanned out across the 50-yard line on either side of Steinman, who held the cross up aloft by two hands. He rose an inch or two, straightening himself like a spear, and when he charged, screaming with his teammates towards the end zone to plant the stake in the grass, all the questions from alumnae and boosters and radio commentators  - about so many first-year starters and so many two-way players, and about a quarterback controversy — seemed to have been answered.

Week 4, October 1Ashland vs South Medford

But the following night the players’ girlfriends with bear paws painted on their cheeks, would barely hear the pep band as they rested their chins on the bleacher railing. A 14-11 halftime deficit sat on the scoreboard, and South wasn’t even ranked. Before the half, a key Steinman interception and disastrous 38-yard South Medford touchdown run had brought a handful of the Ashland crowd to their feet, but only to squint across the chilly field at the blue mob of visiting Medford fans who pointed back, jeering them.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

After, on KRDV-TV’s 11 o’clock news, Friday Night Football analyst Joe Brett reported, “To Ashland’s credit — it’s the first time they’ve been tested, it’s the first time they’ve been behind all year, and they responded like champions.”

Early in the third quarter Kacy Curtis, the wrestler-turned-fullback who liked to seek out safeties to run over, sprinted to the sideline and stood on his tiptoes, watching the action as trainers re-taped his injured wrist. He wasn’t going to be left out. They were going to control the ball. They were going to grind and Curtis was their grinder. He charged back onto the field before they’d made the last cut in his tape, to batter his way to 222 yards and two decisive second-half touchdowns.

Postgame was the first time he’d seen his hot breathless face reflected in a television camera. He had grown up in his older brother’s shadow, out near the highway in a trailer with their mom. Now his neck was broad and red patches flared under his pale blue eyes. “The line got the big guys out of the way,” he grinned. “I just ran over the little guys.”

In the locker room, Coach Cooley waited atop a chair with the bloody cross. Ninety-three other crosses decorated the ceiling. This was the shrine; no one else on campus was allowed in. When Cooley held South’s cross up, the boys, some bare chested and stocking footed in their grass-stained pants, bucked and shoved one another to encircle him. “Nail it! Nail it! Nail it! Nail it!”

* * *

The season had started five years earlier, in eighth grade, at the door of the small gym, the boys’ faces soft and scared.

Head Coach Jim Nagel was already like a God. He’d coached Division I at New Mexico State and San Jose State, and would go on to win two national championships, the first as quarterback coach at Division III Linfield College and the second at Southern Oregon University, an NAIA school. “You could tell,” Steinman recalls, “it was just like a bright light came off Nagel. He wanted to come down to the middle school and say, “This is serious, we just won the state championship, and we’re giving you the chance to do something special.’”

That was the buy-in. Conditioning and weight training and film study year round. Straight edge during the season.

Photo: Alexander Black

Third row center in the team photo — a band of seven sober men in white Polos and red Ashland Football caps stand with their hands crossed in front of their waists. At their center is Nagel, broad-shouldered with a Protestant brawler’s face, keen narrow eyes and often a nick on his nose. The 56 players surrounding him are not better than their individual talents because of his college-level offense; they are a powerhouse because of their ultimate faith in his guidance.

Nagel credits his coaching staff over his own growing legend. They were teachers who were present all day, all week, building unity, erasing individualism, there to chaperone the boys in the frosty parking lot outside the weight room at 6:30 a.m., there when the notebooks came out after class bells rang. They ate with their devotees during lunch-hour film study. When Gaston or Curtis was grab-assing in the quad, a coach would whistle, holding a class door open for them. Football, 10 hours a day, six days a week. They rested only on Sunday, while Nagel studied game tapes in his den, a tapestry of The Prayer of St. Francis on the wall in his living room.

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

Where there is sadness, joy.

At home, the boys were told they could do anything.

“Sky’s the limit,” Nathan Holtey says.

“Not to imply they encouraged greatness,” Kacy Curtis remembers. “They just told us we could do as we pleased.”

The summer before the 1993 season, Steinman’s girlfriend, Katie Brandy, peered through a skylight, mildly disgusted by the drunk boys in the kitchen carving “Ts” into their shoulders with a razor blade. TOGA was an inner circle of the football team, comprised of 10 of the 14 starters, named after John Belushi’s call to party in Animal House. Big Jeremy Reed was crying, his chubby shoulder spilling blood through his hand, as Curtis slapped him hard on the back, hugging him.

Steinman sat shaking his head at the offer to be next. “No fucking way I’d ever do that,” he laughed.

But he could appreciate it. They were smart; Ashland High School had the highest SAT average in the state and among the players were a valedictorian (Steinman) and several National Honor Society members. Preppy kids whose liberal parents were surprised at how preppy they were. Former players like Nathan Gaston introduced them to NWA and Pantera, and when he banged 500 pounds down on the squat rack and flexed his biceps for them and sang, I’m Eazy E / I got bitches galore / You might have bitches / But I got more, they understood that he was also going to Cornell in the fall.

That was the early ’90s: There was something wholesome to growing up in a small town, something they took for granted. So they flipped the bird when pictures were taken, or split two fingers around their tongue. That was definitely wholesome, they agreed, using the word as a kind of private slang, its meaning known only to each other.

The dawn air dragging their hair across their foreheads as they drove hung-over to the weight room next morning was wholesome.

Two-a-days were wholesome.

The vomiting was wholesome.

Opie Heyerman was truly wholesome, swinging her tan legs on the tailgate of linebacker CG Fredrickson’s truck, knowing he would emerge from the locker room smelling of soap, his mouth warm.

Their nicknames were wholesome. The Slanks and the Lards. Monsieur Fur because fullback Kacy Curtis had grown pubic hair before anyone else, and Monsieur Non-Fur because Steinman hadn’t. Boosh, because no matter who grew what when, defensive back, Todd Coffey grew more. Tumbleweed, because CG Fredrickson was short and round and prowled the field low with his arms out making him look even lower. David Boekenoogen and Micah Wolf would soon be The-Name-You-Love-to-Say and The Wolfman, but those would come from sports broadcasters on the local news.

They were part of a team. They were winning. That was wholesome.

Week 6, October 15Ashland, 36 Crater, 0

By 1993, TOGA’s senior year, Nagel says, “It felt like we’d gotten to a point where we had a pretty big bull’s eye on our back.” Ashland football had reached three of the last four state championship games, winning two. Still, he shrugged off the USA Today poll. “Rankings are based on people’s outside perceptions of how good you are.” The coaching staff knew what the 1993 team lacked: size and depth. They were fielding 10 two-way starters to the three or four of conference rivals South and North Medford and Grants Pass, and a crucial element of their previous success was missing: From 1989 through 1992, Ashland quarterbacks Bert Peterson, Kevin Greene, Chris Chambers and Chad Guthrie (brother of Kansas City Royal pitcher Jeremy Guthrie) succeeded each other one after another as first team All-State. Under Nagel, the Grizzlies were a quarterback-centric team that ran up the score through complicated read progressions that could be changed at the line of scrimmage, designed to dissect you through short passes underneath, or embarrass you long.

“I wasn’t that kind of quarterback,” Steinman admits.

“I was fascinated by the removable pads in our pants,” he says of his first memories of organized football. “Everything about them was weird and exciting. I felt like there was something oddly sexual about them. They had smooth lumps on them, irregular shapes that were supposed to connect to our body parts. I often had a very hard time figuring out which sphere was supposed to fit into which pocket.”

As senior year approached, the game had become no less abstract to him. In the muggy heat of preseason three-a-days he was slow-footed, nervous in the pocket, chopping his feet into the ground. Coaches thought the habit would disappear, but local sportswriters coined him Happy Feet— and later derided him, “Jeremy Steinman will not go down as one of the top quarterbacks in the history of Ashland High football.” He was a porcelain-skinned late bloomer, he had long thin limbs, and when he scrambled with his shoulders hunched forward, he ran tentatively on his toes like a weasel, stopping and starting.

“There was a buzz that got back to me,” he recalls. The rumor during summer conditioning was that his friends were being tried out for his spot. Jeremy stood in the hostile sun not knowing whether to take his helmet off as he watched his center, Nathan Holtey, throw the ball. As wide out Todd Coffey threw the ball. Tight end Jason Robustelli. It was embarrassing; he felt sure the other teams enjoyed thinking Ashland wasn’t certain it had a quarterback who could play.

“But also, I remember thinking: ‘I sorta understand.’ I mean, I felt scared, but the quarterbacks before me were the kinda guys who would throw a long ball to a receiver just because it’s exciting.”

“I never felt confident that I could just drop the ball anywhere on the field.”

There was also history. Ashland always fielded a senior quarterback. And when Jeremy was born, his father Terry, a bush pilot who split time between Ashland and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, had turned the boy’s hands and feet over in his own, and proclaimed that someday he would be a quarterback.

Now, senior year, those same hands had a rash of white blisters he hid from the coaching staff. He kept them under the table at dinner. A doctor ascribed them to stress, without having been told that Jeremy was also having nightmares about forgetting his helmet or rib protectors, or that he had woken one night to find himself standing in bed, chopping his feet on the mattress.

At his player meeting with Coach Nagel before the first game of the season he tried not to look at the framed photographs of “The Kick” that had won Ashland the 1989 championship, or clippings of Coach Nagel hoisted up on the shoulders of the ‘91 team. He tried to hold the coach’s gaze, straightening his back, nodding when he was spoken to, but he knew he didn’t have the coach’s full confidence. Still, he said what he thought was expected of him. “My goal is to win the state championship,” he said. “And befirst team All State.”

A year after the season he would take a leave from college, struggling with acute anxiety.

Week 7, October 22Ashland vs Grants Pass

11 O’clock News, Channel 12:

ANCHOR CAM JOHNSON:“Unfortunately, due to a lack of interest we have no football to tell you about tonight.”

SPORTSCASTER JIM HOBBS: Holy cow — everybody just -

CAM JOHNSON: We’re just kidding.

JIM HOBBS: Something not to joke about. Homecoming night for Ashland tonight, playing host to undefeated Grants Pass — you would have thought Garth Brooks was there, the size of that crowd.

An hour before the game, Steinman and Curtis jogged out of the narrow tunnel, tentative on their cleats as they stepped over the rope fencing. Everything was heightened on game days. It was like Catholic mass. Bright lights and darkness. They came out to toss the ball, a little self-consciously, their multiple shadows cast on the crisp green field. They squatted and jumped, pulling their knees up to loosen their home reds. The scoreboard twinkled 0-0 but the stands sat empty, awaiting the town.

Throw and catch, throw and catch.

The ritual was for Steinman. He blew in his hands as his best friend jogged the ball back after each toss. Throw and catch. Throw and catch. Ease his nerves. Get him to forget about the strange feel of the sharp dry ball in his blistered hands. Get him to fall into the rhythm of dropping back, chopping his feet, the ball at his chest. Get him used to the sound he made throwing in shoulder pads. To believe in the tight spiral up into the stadium lights.

Throw and catch. Throw and catch.

The cover of the game’s program featured matching photographs of Steinman and Grants Pass quarterback Matt Smith, taken from below so each quarterback posed iconic, the ball tucked to his chest.

“SOC SHOOTOUT,” it read.

Steinman was trying to get the headline out of his mind during their pregame ritual. Smith was 6’4, 212 pounds. By the end of the season, he would be named Defensive Player of the year in the state of Oregon, and go on to be drafted in the first round by the Kansas City Royals as a pitcher and first baseman. Ashland defensive coordinator Stan Gida, who had played for the San Francisco 49ers, called Smith one of the best high school athletes he’d seen in 20 years.

Meanwhile, in the Daily Tidings that week, Nagel was tepid. “[Steinman’s] lead us to an undefeated season and hasn’t hurt us. We hope he continues to improve.” Steinman and Curtis wound down their ritual. Large wet blisters were appearing on his feet now, so he rocked back and forth in his cleats, getting accustomed to the pain.

Game time came quickly. The visitors’ stands glowed white with Cavemen sweatshirts and white with the gloved hands of the pep band’s conductor, the shiny flutes and wagging trombones sizzling under the lights. Six thousand people loud.

But the shootout the program promised bogged down into a defensive struggle more fitting of the chilly October night. Nobody was getting anything going. Ashland would finish the night with 150 fewer yards than average. But from the start Matt Smith and the Cavemen saw what they would see all night: Grizzly defenders in their backfield.

Coach Gida roved the sideline shouting and clapping players on the helmets as they came off, gassed, pushing them back in for another blitz. Ashland was bringing six on most plays, knocking Smith down, forcing the southpaw to scramble into bad decisions. “We watched the videos,” defensive lineman Michael Douglas said, “and he panicked under pressure.” Smith topped out in Double-A, then played linebacker at Oregon.

Justin Anderson snagged the first of four Grizzly interceptions on the Cavemen 10-yard line, returning it to the 1. One play later, Curtis plunged through to score the first points of the game.

The crowd breathed. If it was going to be a stilted defensive evening, at least they had points on the board.

Above: Kacy Curtis (#44) celebrating with Boekenoogen (#2) after the first touchdown against Grants Pass

In the second quarter Ashland went up 14-0 on a 3-yard swing pass from Steinman to Boekenoogen, which loosened the mood for good. Boekenoogen glided to a halt in front of the student section and gave a smooth little shoulder shake, a hurdy gurdy that sent shivers through his girlfriend, Heather Adams, screaming in the stands.

He wasn’t physically overpowering. He was a Marcus Allen-type of back, deceptive and smooth, high narrow hips, his handsome face the exact diameter as his neck. He even took those signature delicate Allen steps when he slowed in the end zone.

“Well, we gotta block somebody, and we gotta move the ball more than an inch, or we don’t have a chance,” an angry Grants Pass head coach Tom Blanchard spit at the reporter on his way to the halftime locker room. “And we will. It’ll be our second half here.”

But scrambling throughout the second half, desperate, Smith wheeled and threw his fourth and final interception, watching from the ground as Todd Coffey’s cleats kicked up the white chalk lines for a touchdown.

21-6. Game over. Shootout won.

Channel 10 Friday Night Football analyst Joe Brett:

“Jeremy Steinman, a big point coming into this one — this is the third game Steinman has been up against a quarterback supposedly outmatched, well he outplayed Matt Smith tonight quite convincingly — like he did [First- Team All-State, Eric] Jenson and Matt Berry earlier this year.”

Week 8, October 29, Ashland42 Klamath Union, 6

Coach Nagel gave the team a reprieve Saturday morning for their Homecoming performance. Instead of the sprints that often dogged them even after solid outings, Coach Kitchell jogged them out onto the city streets like a living banner of Ashland football. Their close-cropped hair glistened in the sun and several peeled off their T-shirts and jumped to swat at the low-hanging branches overhead. They trotted down the sidewalk on East Main Street, parting around townswomen who drew their bags up close to their bodies, past the fire station, past the greystoned library. Cars at stoplights didn’t move on green, to let the corps pass. Downtown, the shopkeepers had taped GO GRIZZ! posters to their doors. One even hung in the plate glass window of the gleaming white Marc Antony Hotel, the only building in town over three stories tall.

One of the thrills growing up in Ashland was to park your bicycle against the imperial façade of the hotel, avert your eyes on the elevator from the wealthy out-of-town guests, and get off at the top floor. The window at the end of the dim hallway reverberated with light. Kacy Curtis would lean his forehead against the plate glass, teetering over the street nine stories below.

Their parents were believers. They’d moved their young families to Ashland from somewhere else they hadn’t believed in. In Ashland, their children pedaled around unaccompanied on hand-me-down bikes. They stood naked in the front yards holding hoses while their mothers leaned in the doorway gossiping on new cordless phones. They were starting to understand what wholesome was.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

When Sarah Algermissen, the most beautiful girl in school, shaved her head and started taking college courses as a freshman, they understood she was bored by them. When they stayed in the car at certain friends’ houses, they understood their parents dealt drugs. At others, it meant dad was a cop. When they stole weed from their parents’ dressers and found Polaroids, they understood that some of their parents were sleeping together. And when, at certain people’s dinner tables, they bowed their head, they understood they were Mormon or Catholic, but they didn’t know what that meant for their friendships beyond the playing season.

It was not unheard of in Ashland for a parent-teacher conference to end with the three adults naked in the family hot tub. Just as it was not uncommon to carpool with other families to the Medford Airport and wave miniature American flags as Ronald Reagan spoke into a microphone about his War on Drugs.

Ashland was the place where you “faked it ‘til you made it.” A place where hippies were becoming entrepreneurial. Along with Humbolt and Mendocino counties, Jackson County made up the third point of the Golden Triangle of 1990s marijuana production. In the Pacific Northwest, simultaneously rural, and western, and working class, there was a two-year wait list for season tickets for high school football. That’s what was so Shakespearian about the crowds in the grandstand Friday nights: They were shouting with spittle at the corners of their mouths for a game they had dismissed as coarse and brutal until their sons bought in.

Southern Oregon Conference Championship

Week 9, November 5Ashland vs North Medford

Medford shared the Rogue Valley floor with Ashland but sat broad and flat and stifling, 13 miles out in the exposed sun. Population 55,000, it was home to the only mall in the area, the massive air-conditioned Rogue Valley Mall, where Ashland players went to visit Foot Locker, and walk backwards in their letterman jackets, watching unfamiliar girls. Medford had two high schools, North and South. And it had Chuck E. Cheese and Chuckwagon Buffet and Fred Meyer, where you could stock up on groceries and generic clothes and firearms and electronics.

Ashland students in line for the restroom during North Medford games glanced at the ambulance that sat on the practice field during games, and studied the out-of-town teenagers hanging around the track in black sweatshirts. They would only look away to see through the bleachers, to a shoving match on the field.

North Medford had entered the state top 10 in October. The dark horse, with a loss to Grants Pass on their record. But by the SOC Championship game the Black Tornado had climbed to No. 7, and Coach Nagel thought they were the best team Ashland would encounter in the state, a wear-you-down team who hadn’t yet come to understand how easily they could wear you down.

Coach Kitchell ushered his Kamikazes, his elite group of hitters and yardage studs and weight-room junkies, into the darkened film room at 7:05 p.m. Ticketholders were already lined up outside the gates when the players returned from the pregame steak dinner in their shirts and ties and fresh hair cuts. “Let’s have a win tonight, boys,” the restaurant owner said to them, raising his glass, “or next year you get chopped liver.” Now the crowd was 8,000 strong, and in the bunker-like locker room some of the players squinted up at the trampling footsteps echoing through the ceiling.

The Kamikazes, in their pristine red home uniforms, took a knee on the concrete and held hands, united by the black wristbands they wore. They bowed their heads.

They heard Kitchell slide a samurai sword from its sheath. It sounded like glass being cut. “It’s a choice to be a champion,” Kitchell intoned. “Everyone walks through their life and wants to be successful. But there’s a choice to be an exceptional person, and that’s what this is about. You’ve made this choice.”

His footsteps passed among them.

“I will fly to the ball,” he said solemnly.

“I will fly to the ball, I will fly to the ball, I will fly to the ball,” the boys repeated.

“I will make my reads.”

“I will make my reads, I will make my reads, I will make my reads.”

“We love and care for each other.”

“We love and care for each other, we love and care for each other, we love and care for each other.”

“Tora’s on three.”

“Tora! Tora! Tora!”

They had two minutes in the locker room. A banner had been brought out onto the field for them to run through, so the crowd was up now. The energy rose to a thrum that the boys tried not to think about. They adjusted the towel they dried their hands on. They closed their lockers. They swallowed ibuprofen in dry mouths.

As they came into the tunnel, they heard:

WHAT ABOUT!

WHAT ABOUT!

WHAT ABOUT OUR COLOR SHOUT!

The high school boys in the stands pumped their fists:

Red!

Red!

Red!

Red!

And the girls, with their hands on their hips, wiggled their asses back and forth:

White white white white white white white!

Running out of the tunnel everything narrowed through their facemasks. Bill Gabriel, the public announcer, called out in his echo-y barnyard voice, “Your Ash-laaaaaaaaand Grizzlies!”

Steinman lingered in the middle of the pack, jogging out with the sophomores, trying to stay levelheaded.

“That part’s almost more intoxicating than the game. The lights. The pageantry.”

He liked to look up from the bright 50-yard line and see Gabriel in the booth. It was impossible for Steinman to have a relationship with the crowd; he couldn’t even find his parents in it, but he knew his dad’s expectations were up there, he’d flown in from Prudhoe Bay for the game and would fly out that same night. But Gabriel, Jeremy’s pony-tailed social studies teacher, was clear and recognizable, and in some way Gabriel’s singularity made Steinman aware of his own role: warming up for the pleasure of the crowd, the latest leader of Ashland Football.

“Total disregard for my body, Sir!” The special teams clapped out.

Everything went silent before the first soft steps of the kicker, gliding towards the ball -

“We felt that if North ever realized they could just grind us, we’d be in trouble,” Coach Nagel says of the coaching staff’s private concerns. “Our kids believed that when they went out on the field on Friday they were supposed to win. But the coaches — we used to sometimes go back into the office and look at each other, and Kitchell’s line was ‘Smoke and mirrors, Coach. Smoke and mirrors.’”

Steinman threw an interception on a broken screenplay on Ashland’s first series. Nerves, Coach Kitchell assured him on the sidelines — a sequence or two to warm up, we’re at home— even as North Medford scored their first touchdown.

When Kitchell relayed the hand signals to Steinman on the next possession, a rhythm started to develop. Curtis hit a 1-trap through a gaping hole. Curtis again on a 2-base, just over the right guard’s hip for 12 yards, punishing three different defensive backs before being tripped up. From North’s 1-yard line, Curtis wormed his way in for his first of two touchdowns of the half.

Ashland led throughout until two fourth-quarter Black Tornado touchdowns put North up 33-30. The last, a 1-yard cannonball up the middle, made Coach Kitchell turn and look up at Nagel in the press box: North was grinding.

The standing-room-only Ashland crowd bundled in their coats and red stocking caps, glanced at the scoreboard: Ashland ball, 3:24 remaining.

On the first play from scrimmage, Curtis caught a short pass from Steinman out of the backfield for a rambling 26-yard gain.

At the North 23-yard line with 2:04 remaining, Ashland gained 5 yards on a Curtis run. But following a North timeout Steinman was sacked for a 4-yard loss, barely holding onto the football.

The Grizzlies followed the sack with a Curtis 6-yard gain on third down, but Ashland was 3 yards short of the first on the North Medford 16-yard line. Coach Nagel considered bringing in the field goal unit to play for the tie, but opted to go for it. On fourth down Curtis ran for an apparent first down, but the Grizzlies were called for a penalty. The ball was marched back to the Medford 20-yard line, a tough fourth-and-7, only 58 seconds on the clock.

David Boekenoogen’s little brother ran onto the field with water bottles.

The players squeezed streams onto the backs of their heads. They looked as far away as players on television. Their tall silhouettes steamed in the lights, save for the few hoggies who peeled their helmets off and took a knee. Kitchell was out amongst them in his red jacket.

He flipped his headset up to talk with Jeremy. For the play Nagel wanted, Steinman would have to wait in the pocket. He would have to throw high to the outside. He would have to believe in his ability to drop the ball anywhere on the field.

“How do you feel about a 90 Z post/corner?” Kitchell asked.

Today Steinman says, “It was the first question they’d ever asked me. I’d never been asked for input.” But he didn’t have to answer — Kitchell had turned away from the uncertainty in Jeremy’s eyes.

“He’s not comfortable with that,” Kitchell said into his headset.

Steinman’s scared eyes followed his coach’s back. At least he’d been honest.

They would run a 91. A bread and butter play — the most basic of the 5-step drops. Steinman could throw a line drive. A short pass. To a player he could see.

As the coaches jogged off the field, the crowd came to its feet, calling to the boys. Shouting in those bleachers, Ashland was a football town. A last water bottle was tossed towards the sidelines and a boy scampered out to retrieve it. The cheerleaders clapped their pom-poms, shook them fizzing in the lights, and then fell silent.

Fourth-and-7.

Jeremy came under center. The Black Tornado linebackers bounced back and forth in front of him. Todd Coffey, the weakside receiver, had felt sure of the call clapping out of the huddle — they could run a 91 in their sleep. Then, as he jogged to the line, he realized the ball would be thrown to him. He tried to set up, like any other play, blinking at the grass in front of him.

“Quarterback Jeremy Steinman, who seemed to disappear from the Ashland offense on a night when both Boekenoogen and Kacy Curtis rushed for more than 100 yards, made perhaps the biggest play.”

- Medford Mail Tribune

“I curled around and threw, but it was tipped,” Steinman says. “By Brian Miller, who was North’sfirst-team All-State defensive lineman. He tipped it with his big mitten glove, but it’s not a hard tip. He just lifts it a little. All it does is take away a little velocity.”

So the ball hovers fat and wobbling in the lights. Everybody in the stands comes up on their toes, raising their chins.

“And Todd has to come back for it. He catches the ball on his knees and there’s just silence. There’s like 8,000 people in the stadium, and it’s silent. And he looks over — you can watch it on the film — he looks over, and there’s the first down marker at 7 yards [from the line of scrimmage], and he’s at 8 yards — first down.

“Next play,” Steinman says, “the fake I made to Boekenoogen, we do the actual play and he goes 11 yards around end and dives into the safety at the goal line — touchdown! It’s just — Eruption. My sister was on the field. I’m hugging my sister on the field seconds later. It was totally inappropriate behavior on everybody’s part. It was pandemonium.”

State Championships

Rounds 1-3Ashland 42, Sandy 15Ashland 28,  Beaverton 17Ashland 42,  Pendleton 18

“Monsieur Fur,” Jeremy mused, floating on his back in Justin Anderson’s hot tub, “do you admit there’s something kinda gross about the helmets?”

Kacy turned his mouth down, shrugging. His ear had been stitched closed in the locker room the week before.

“The way some of the little pads inside are square,” Jeremy went on.  “And some are tubular, and they’re kinda — lewd?”

Kacy smiled. “I admit.”

This was the banter three games into the playoffs. Jeremy had engineered an undefeated 12-0 record late into November. They were accustomed to seeing themselves on TV now. A bus driver had asked Jeremy for his autograph on the street after they crushed Sandy 42-15 in the first round to give Coach Nagel his 100^th career win. They then ousted Beaverton in a foggy, battering game. And Jeremy had his best game of the season against Pendleton, dissecting the Buckaroos from a no-huddle shotgun to go 15-for-20 for 262 yards and two touchdowns. When they were reprimanded for flashing a “T” for TOGA in the end zone, it was a slap on the wrist. “We had become family,” Holtey said of the playoffs.

They’d slept against each other on long bus rides. They’d shared hotel rooms, brushing their teeth in their underwear. They’d lay in the dark admitting that they spent more time in the weight room when Brie Jackson was doing lunges in those little Griz shorts. And they’d laughed one late night gathered in Reed’s hotel room, revealing their secret masturbation practices. One included a Ziploc bag warmed in a microwave, topped off with a pantomime of the player doing it with the warm baggie between the mattress and box spring. Fairly wholesome, they laughed. Boys, in peak physical condition in their socks. Straight edge during the season. Dear with their mothers, who’d begun wearing their sons’ letterman’s jackets. And as dusk came earlier in the evening, and along East Main Street, Christmas lights and gingerbread houses twinkled in shop windows they listened to fewer of their hardcore anthems. They brought pillows to sleepovers and lay on their backs singing along to The Jackson Five’s Christmas album.

“There was a purity to the friendships that made us feel that there was a manifest destiny, a sort of spiritual destiny, about the championship,” Jeremy says. When they learned that leading rusher Kacy Curtis’ wrist had been broken since week two, this became even more true. Doctors would have to re-break it after the season — his mother was proud of his decision to play through it. They held out the unspoken hope that his playing would get him into college. Several players remember looking at his taped wrist as they stood in the locker room waiting to go out onto the field.

“The teams are so dedicated to the year-round training that it takes,” reported Joe Brett on Friday Night Football. “Ashland set the standard when Jim Nagel brought that program up. It’s his 100^th win in 11 years — it took the Grizzlies almost 40 years to get their first 100 wins in the school’s history. Ashland has set the standard, North Medford has answered the challenge, Grants Pass is right there too. I know they finished second and third, but North, I think, is the better team right now.”

Oregon State Semifinal

Week 13, December 4Ashland vs Centennial

Nothing worked in the first half of the semifinal against second-ranked Centennial. It was a day game, which made it feel all the more like a bad practice. Jeremy couldn’t get it out of his mind how similar the game felt to the first game of the season against Eagle Point.

“They both made it clear how little I had to do with the victories or losses of the program,” Jeremy says. “Eagle Point was surreal because I’d never started at quarterback on the varsity team. And everything I did landed in a touchdown. Centennial felt the same way. I did the exact same thing as every game prior, and I ended up landing gently on the carpet each play.”

Ball control, was the word running up and down the Centennial sideline midway through the third quarter. They had taken their opening series of the second half 76 yards on five commanding plays to open up a 20-6 lead. Now they needed a stop. Now they needed to gear down. Control the ball, control the game. Coaches had said all week — Hold Ashland to 25 points and we win.

“The first half was the worst half of football we’ve ever played,” Boekenoogen said into the Channel 10 camera post-game. “The second half was the best.”

The Grizzlies scored on five straight possessions to take a commanding 42-20 lead. Curtis started the rally with a 24-yard touchdown run. Then The-Name-You-Love-to-Say scored on three straight drives. First, on a punishing 2-yard plunge into two defenders, Boek held the ball aloft from the bottom of the pile, knowing they’d tied the score. His next two touchdowns, 4- and 32-yard passes from Steinman, left the Centennial coaches to roll their playbooks up in their hands. They looked up at the bittersweet scoreboard; it had been a great season for the seniors, they’d been undefeated, but Ashland was playing its second string now.

“We’ve been behind before, we’ve been in front before — but the bottom line is, we know how to win.” Coach Nagel smiled into the camera, pleased, in his customary Ashland Football cap and turtleneck and red jacket.

Behind him the Griz roamed, holding their helmets aloft. On to the state championship game for the fourth time in five years.

Oregon State Championship

Week 14, December 11Ashland vs North Medford

At halftime of the Oregon State Championship game Ashland led 18-7.

“Did we?” Micah Wolf says.

“I couldn’t say,” Boekenoogen says.

“Maybe — that sounds right,” Curtis says.

“I don’t remember.”

Jeremy Steinman’s response: “Eighteen to seven? Wow — you know a lot about this.”

There are so many layers of knowledge to a story that is 20 years old. For example: the players remember being the superior team, quicker, better coached, they had beaten North in their previous meeting; the coaches remember their anxiety that if North ever realized they could simply grind Ashland down, there was little they could do.

Both are correct.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

The week leading up to the championship game the Grizzlies practiced indoors on the cement floor of Ashland’s National Guard Armory. An American flag and a State of Oregon flag hung in the rain out front. Several players were sick, while a handful of others let their mouth guards hang out, their noses stuffed. The coaches marched off the hash marks in long strides, kneeling to tape the yard lines. The University of Oregon Ducks’ Autzen Stadium, where the championship game was scheduled, was turf; they weren’t hitting at this point in the season; practicing in the controlled atmosphere of the armory seemed a good decision.

“Looking back, I don’t know if I’d do it again,” Coach Nagel concedes. On the wall was a framed Army Reservist flag with a Latin inscription that several players found themselves wondering at its translation.

The coaching staff had introduced a new offensive scheme, which brought the Grizzly offense to the line of scrimmage in a Robust formation. They’d never done this. Three backs in the backfield, including tight end, Jason Robustelli.

When Jeremy came under center, Robustelli went in motion, or Boekenoogen went in motion, and the remaining backs shifted into an I or a single-back formation. Or they ended up in trips, with three wideouts on one side. Or they ran the shotgun. Every play, a new complexity. Less freedom to audible. And the chemistry, as Jeremy calls it, was different as well. Robustelli, who had been strongside all year, was now paired with Coffey on the weakside.

Throughout the season, Boekenoogen was more a slotback, or he ran to the outside. Kacy Curtis was their running game. Now he would block up the middle as The-Name-You-Loved-to-Say plunged in behind him.

“They were things that were pretty foreign to our offense,” Steinman recalls. “There was a play called Arrow with four receivers all doing deep routes, and I didn’t quite have a sense of what was going on. But I’d never been failed by this program.”

The new offensive scheme was also an honor, Jeremy says with some resignation. It was a compliment to him. He was dominant throughout the playoffs. Nine touchdowns in four games. After the filthy Beaverton game, Andy Hauck — the first of Ashland’s heralded quarterbacks, who Steinman idolized in seventh grade — made a beeline for Jeremy in the locker room. Steinman had stayed in the pocket in the fog, and gone to his third receiver to sustain the winning drive. “Hauck came up to me afterwards and said a lot of quarterbacks wouldn’t have been that patient. That it took a lot of guts. And I remember thinking it was a big deal, cause I didn’t know Hauck, but I had watched him as a kid, so it was pretty powerful to have him saying that, about me.”

But in the narrow armory hanger the players felt they couldn’t simulate what would happen on the field. Safety Todd Coffey says he couldn’t back pedal at the snap of the ball. There simply wasn’t room, so he stood in place. The players couldn’t hear one coach from another. Kitchell resorted to holding up a manila folder with the play written on it.

“We were sort of looking at each other,” Steinman says. “It had gotten too complicated. I didn’t know how to make simple plays happen.”

“I’m pulling too fast,” guard Darin Gaston complained to the coaches about one play. “I’m gonna knock the ball out.”

But the coaches clapped them back into formation. Their smiles seemed to forgive the players of their worries. They spent the week doing walk-throughs. Thursday night repeated again and again. Simulating a hand off. Simulating a pitch. When Steinman dropped back in the pocket he emphasized each step, nodding deliberately at each read progression, waiting for the receivers, who jog-walked through their routes. “There’s a speed to the game that we got out of,” Todd Coffey says.

The sense of being outside of time did not change when they departed two days early from school, when they spent three hours on the bus to Eugene staring out the window with their Walkman headphones on, when they wandered through the swirly paisley carpeted hotel hallways, or went in street clothes to have a walk around Autzen Stadium, where a sex scene in Animal House was filmed. Kacy and Darin ran out to midfield to re-enact the tryst, Kacy laying his head on Darin’s chest, batting his eyes up at him, “You know, I’m only 13,” he giggled.

On Ashland’s first series of the championship game, Gaston pulled and knocked the ball out of Steinman’s hands.

Jogging back to the sideline Jeremy blew in his chapped hands to keep warm. It was sleeting, an uncomfortable day for quarterbacks in long sleeve turtlenecks. When the Grizzlies stormed the field through the banner and cheerleaders, the paper had stuck to them in long wet flaps. The pomp of the introductions and coin toss were bleak in the mostly empty stadium, where a large high school crowd looked thin.

“Everything was strange at Autzen,” Jeremy says. “We looked small and slow on the turf.”

Just as the early interception had resulted in a quick North Medford touchdown in the SOC championship game, the fumble did now.

North Medford 7, Ashland 0

It was only the fifth time the Grizzlies had trailed in the season, but there was no rush, no panic. Steinman jogged out from the sideline, fastening his chinstrap.

Cobwebs. Boekenoogen went halfway down in his stance before looking around confused in the new Robust formation. Steinman was flushed from the pocket and missed a wide-open receiver. They ran trips. And Curtis was stuffed at the line of scrimmage.

But Boekenoogen also hit his long stride up the middle for a 12-yard gain.

Steinman connected with Wolf.

Almost too easily, Curtis took a pitch around the left end for a 38-yard touchdown, bouncing around the end zone on one stiff leg and then the other, his arms punched down at his side like a WWF fighter.

Seven plays, 81 yards.

Boekenoogen’s extra point was blocked, North held a 7-6 lead.

Like Ashland, the Black Tornado had new looks for the Grizzly defense. They lined up three wideouts in a ladder formation to one side. They tried a reverse. Ran the option. But Ashland’s defensive core of Michael Douglas, Darin Gaston and CG Fredrickson scorched the running lanes, making solo tackles, or, when North’s Kerry Curtis spun from one tackler, the Grizzlies were there in numbers.

“I see you having one helluva fucking game today, Fredrickson,” Gida had said, walking among the stretching players before the game. “I don’t see anybody over there who can handle you, Douglas.”

After Ashland smothered the North running attack deep in their own territory, Ethan Titus put the Grizzlies up 12-7 on a 49-yard punt return. But it was the third touchdown that looked like championship football. Hard-nosed. Ugly. They were struggling with the complications of the new offense — Steinman fumbled from shotgun, and another time, unsure of who to hand off to, he fell to the turf as the Tornado closed in. But they could go back to the fundamentals. To muscle memory, formed over the five years since they faced Coach Nagel in the small gym. Ashland was known for an ever-evolving West Coast offense, but they were, at bottom, a worker team. Worked harder and smarter and longer than any other team in the state.

Each time Steinman and Co. broke from the huddle, the O-line put their black fingerless gloves on the turf intent on forcing their will upon North for 3 or 4 or 5 yards. Curtis up the middle for 4. Boekenoogen for 5. Steinman on a quarterback sneak for the first down. Twice Jeremy went over the top for first downs. And then on the goal line, on a third quarterback sneak, Steinman disappeared from the television cameras — touchdown.

18-7. The three missed point-after conversions nagged at them, but they were in charge.

In the locker room at halftime, Tornado head coach Rod Rumney decided to use double tight ends and run the ball at Ashland.

“We knew what they were doing,” Todd Coffey says. “The O-line was substituting. Two tight ends. They were going to wear us down.”

Up 18-13, Ashland drove into North territory, but Steinman continued to have trouble with pulling linemen, tripping over them as he handed off or pitched the ball. Late in the third, he rolled to his right as the pocket collapsed, stopping to chop his feet, before lobbing a pass that drifted downfield, nose up. The play was Arrow, three long routes that had confused him during the armory practices. But when the play signal had come in from the sideline, he hadn’t been asked how he felt about it.

Four plays later, North took the lead as Kerry Curtis burned the Grizzly defense around the right side, for a 34-yard touchdown. Twelve red and black balloons ascended without much ceremony into the sleety air, but the message was clear: North had taken control.

Trailing 21-18, Ashland rallied, driving to the Medford 4-yard line two plays into the fourth quarter. On fourth-and-2, Nagel opted to go for it.

In the huddle, Kacy Curtis sought out Steinman’s eyes more and more. In the teams’ previous meeting, Curtis rushed for 158 yards and four TDs on 15 carries. He was the leading rusher in the SOC — he would, on this day, average 10 yards per run. But he would only carry the ball eight times. Instead, he would watch for Boekenoogen’s legs to pass from where he contorted himself against some linebacker.

Again, on fourth down, the call went to Boekenoogen. The-Name-You-Love-to-Say took the handoff over an opening on the left side. Smooth like Marcus Allen, he approached the line with his lead hand on Curtis’ back, delicately choosing his spot. He sifted through, gaining the first down, but out of nowhere the ball appeared, bouncing dark brown and free behind the surging white Grizzly line.

It was Boekenoogen’s first fumble of the season.

“It felt like all the things that could have gone wrong during the season were starting to go wrong all at once,” Micah Wolf says.

The Black Tornado were no longer fielding even a single wideout. Starting from their own end zone, they came to the line like a black and red clot. O’Neill came under center. Several of Ashland’s D-line shuffled on their battered hands like primates, shifting into the running lanes. If they could hold North deep in their own half, they could get the ball back. There was 10:35 on the game clock. They trailed by three.

Ashland mustered a stop on the North 47-yard line. Fourth down, the Tornado was 1 yard shy of a first. But they lined up as if to go for it. A man went in motion, O’Neill gave a hard count, and Ashland’s Brett Summers jumped offsides.

It took North Medford 14 plays to cover the 93 yards. Ashland’s D-line was gassed, the running backs were reaching safety Todd Coffey with greater and greater regularity. Douglas’ kneepads flopped as he chased the ball carrier lamely into the end zone.

But defenses open up at the end of games. Their zones sit back, protecting from the big play.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

Nine points in four minutes felt desperate, but Steinman remembers feeling comfortable for the first time in the game. He sprinted out with a classic Ashland play call. A bread and butter play. A fundamentals play.

Standing over center, he surveyed the defensive formation and waved a wideout to reposition himself along the line of scrimmage. From the pocket he found Robustelli for 13 down the left flank.

He handed off to Curtis, who battered and twisted away from one tackler to take on another, work horsing for 17 yards.

He was sacked. But up quickly, the clock running.

Next play, he found Titus for 19 yards.

The chains were moving so the referee stood over Holtey, squatted with the ball.

On the seventh play of the drive Steinman chopped his feet deep in the pocket, showing the patience Andy Hauck had remarked on, going through his read progressions. First receiver, second receiver. He eluded a tackler and finally threw back across the field to a wide-open Todd Coffey on the left sideline for a 22-yard score.

Now the failed point-after conversions loomed large.

Now a missed Robustelli field goal in the third quarter loomed large. “It went right over the top of the goal post,” said Robustelli. “I thought they were going to call it good.” But the goal posts at Autzen Stadium are college-sized, four feet narrower than normal high school goal posts, and Robustelli hadn’t practiced field goals that week in the armory.

Photo: Thomas Glassman

“It went right over the top of the goal post. I thought they were going to call it good.”—Jason Robustelli

If there was anyone left sitting in the stands, they stood for the onside kick. Twenty-two players lined up within 15 yards of each other to fight for the unreliable bounce of a football. 2:25 remaining. Three-point game. Blood on their knuckles. Their tape twisted and ratty. Their helmets with turf marks. The Hands teams on the field.

But the ball bounced as harmlessly as a soccer ball, swallowed up by the Black Tornado.

“Fly to the Ball!” Coach Gida shouted as his defense took the field one last time. He clapped and stomped after players who pulled their helmets on. “Get a turn over, keep it alive — fly to the ball!”

Everyone was doing the math. If North got a first down, the game was over.

Kerry Curtis on a pitch to the left for 4 yards. But even more important, everyone looked up at the clock, shouting at the referee when it ticked on a second after the tackle.

Second-and-6. O’Neill stood over center watching the clock tick down.

Matt Davis for a tough 2.

“Because they were taking their time between plays, we spent more time in the huddle,” Coffey says. ”I remember watching the clock tick down. Even when it got to 1:30 left and then 1:00 left, I was thinking, ‘We’ll get the ball back, march down the field, and score again to win this game.’ Finally, it got to third down and probably 3 or 4 yards to go.”

Ashland could hold them.

All of Ashland’s D-line sat on their knees like exhausted dogs waiting for the Tornado to come to the line. Defensive backs Ethan Titus and Micah Wolf pinched in on the flanks like extra linebackers.

North went in motion. The D-line twitched and shifted. O’Neill watched the clock, then made another hard call, and Darin Gaston bounced on his fingertips into the neutral zone — a gentle yellow penalty flag lofted in the air.

“I don’t remember the end,” Boekenoogen says now. No one seemed to understand. In the huddle Fredrickson called out the defensive formation, and Coffey called out the down and distance. For some reason North ran a hand off to Curtis. Then, on second down Colin O’Neill took a victory knee and several of the Ashland players were visibly confused. They looked up at the clock. Several returned to a huddle that wasn’t there. The North Medford players took a moment themselves before they raised their arms in disbelief, overtaken by their teammates who streaked onto the field from the sideline.

“This whole time I believed we would get the ball back and score,” Coffey says. “But I looked up at the clock and saw 0:15 or something like that. It was only then that I realized we couldn’t stop the clock, and we would lose.”

Boekenoogen was in the same daze. Holtey. Michael Douglas. They didn’t know where to go on the field. Screaming Tornado players bumped into them, surprised them by stopping to shake hands briefly. But it was as if the Ashland players couldn’t hear. A few clear words pierced their confusion, but the free-for-all overwhelmed them. It felt like the view from the top floor of the Marc Antony Hotel, where beyond the initial exhilaration at the sheer drop the boys sensed life going on below without them as its center. Now the glass was gone.

North Medford’s players stood before the television cameras, talked in to microphones, boasted. “They say they can kick our butt every single week. They go on TV and say they have no respect for us, and they can score on us at will. And they can just eat their words right now.”

Aphotographer followed Jeremy Reed as he tried to cover his sobs with his black mitten. Todd Coffey kept looking up at the scoreboard. The five players would be namedFirst Team All State. More than double that of any other team in Oregon. Kacy Curtis was voted to the Second Team; blocking for Boekenoogen had cost him. Jeremy Steinman was an Honorable Mention.

Coach Nagel says he doesn’t know if he believes that football creates character, or as is more popular today, if it reveals character. This was the second hardest defeat of his career, he says, behind only his son’s senior postseason loss. Unlike the dozens of relationships he maintains with other former players, he is not in contact with anyone from the 1993 team.

Kacy Curtis would hoist a full keg of Killian’s Red up onto his shoulders that night to carry into a house party. That anger and willfulness was part of his character. But more a part, was his pregame ritual with Jeremy. Alone in the football stadium they’d idolized as kids, tossing the ball back and forth — how much admiration he felt for his best friend as he watched him handle the ball with his blisters.

At that same house party, Nathan Holtey would drink a fifth of Hood River Vodka and sit in a hallway where people stepped over him. Part of the story of his character. But more a part, the following day his family, his three brothers and two sisters, his mother and father, along with four other Ashland families, caravanned up Dead Indian Road to cut down Christmas trees. But on the drive up the exposed eastern slopes they had to stop so Nathan could vomit on the side of the road. He would decide against playing any of the other sports he lettered in that year. Bent over weakly in the ditch. He had devoted so much to this. His father reached up and gently averted the younger boys’ eyes.

“I occasionally dream even now that I forgot my helmet or some other essential piece,” Jeremy says. Twenty-one years later, more a statement about his character than anything else.

He is not dreaming about football. He is not dreaming about loss. He is dreaming about playbooks dog-eared by his bed. About keeping his hands out of sight at the dinner table. About his father who had flown in for the game. About their mothers in letterman jackets. About the Shakespeare flags flapping in the wind along East Main Street, where sometimes you would encounter a deer on a city street and be frightened by how close it would let you get to it.

The big man in the creaky office chair hasn’t always been here, but he’s here now and will be here as long as he needs to be. The guy known to everyone as Doc sits upright, almost statuesque, scanning the field, stretches of silence interrupted by his soft, grandfatherly voice. He speaks in a gentle voice that is never in a hurry, as timeless as the game he has played and watched his whole life. The Choctaw World Series of Stickball has been played here, at the Choctaw Central High School, as long as he can remember.

He scans rosters for the players’ names as the action unfolds below, squeezed onto the Swiss Army knife playing field designed for soccer, football and track, but sometimes he’s too slow, missing his moment as he slowly inhales and exhales. In this tidy but unswept press box, above the concession stand and butter-popcorn air, he’s both an announcer at the games, and a custodian, of sorts, a keeper. He helps to preserve the game as it once was, explaining its purpose as he watches, demystifying strategy and untangling points of dispute in the game’s history, a history he has both lived and learned.

He’ll tell you it’s an old game, older, and far more violent than lacrosse. He will tell you players carry two sticks instead of one, and use a buckskin ball that should never be touched with a bare hand. There’s a spirituality to the game and the way it is played, but that doesn’t make it into the spoken word of his play-by-play commentary. Neither do his worries, that the game’s traditions are slipping away, even as his people reach out to seize them.

Doc is silent for a moment. Listen. Behind the clash of sticks and sounds of competition, there is a drumbeat, thump, thump, thump, a steady cadence in the background, like a memory nearly lost. Like the game, the drum is from an older time, before Europeans came to this continent, made of hickory and deerskin. And the people, Doc’s people, sitting in the stands, are quiet, too. As they watch this arcane game, sometimes talking to each other in their mother tongue few fully understand anymore, they reconnect to an older time as well. Both could have been lost long ago, a midday shadow gone in sunlight, but on this day they still linger.

This is why they still watch, why they still play, and why Doc sits in this press box for almost two weeks every summer. Few away from here would miss the language or the game, never even knowing they existed, but these people would. And when they listen to the drumbeat, to the speech of their ancestors, and hear the victory shouts in this game, they remember the people they were, they are, and will remain.

This ritual, the 11 days of the Choctaw World Series of Stickball, played on a school field in small town Mississippi, brings their scattered numbers together again in the place of their ancestors, and the past lives again.

It’s good that Doc is back, that they are all back, together again. He hasn’t always been here, although, there was never any doubt that he would return, that any Choctaw tribal member would return.

The Choctaw always come back.

Jackson, Mississippi is where you’ll go first on your way to Choctaw, most likely. It’s a friendly town steeped in a southern drawl and a matter of fact point of view.

In this rural landscape, out of towners are often assumed to have a certain viewpoint, and they’re easily spotted.

“I knew you were from out of town because your shirt was tucked in,” said a woman to a stranger.

But hospitality is also as constant as the unpredictable weather. The sky can change fast in central Mississippi, the thick sticky air uniting in big, gray and black clouds, the cumulonimbus floating together to block out the sun. The rain soon comes, and between Choctaw and the airport in Jackson are miles of woodland that recall an older wilder time, when game first walked these paths.

If you take a wrong turn, you’ll find yourself heading to Choctaw by way of back roads. The cracked, narrow asphalt running past undergrowth that seems to take on its own personality, and roads of red dirt that lead to dead ends; green fields stacked with wrecked rusted cars.

Then, when you’re close enough, they appear: Casinos rise out of the woods, a sudden and surreal combination of civilization and wilderness joined as one.

It is not game, but gaming establishments that feed the tribe now, serve as a source of revenue and provide jobs, a benefit the federal government handed out as a sort of consolation, a tithe for the years of mistreatment all the Indian tribes have suffered. The casinos are a step forward toward a still uncertain and in many ways alien future, but to a degree they also finance the preservation of the past, allowing the tribe some latitude to maintain what remains of their heritage as they believe it should be. But the reservation is not the people, and in truth, the casinos are only a small part, just a sliver of the Choctaw Indian Reservation, a total of 35,000 acres spread over 10 Mississippi counties. Nearly 10,000 tribal members live here in eight communities and many of them send stickball teams to the annual World Series of Stickball, dozens of teams and hundreds of players that gather to remember. Just a bit down the road is the school, and the press box where Harold “Doc” Comby sits in the old office chair. He’s the Deputy Director of Choctaw Public Safety, but he’s set that aside for now.

The Choctaw are cautious, sometimes, wary of what outsiders will do, how they might twist the fabric of who they are into something it is not. They’re no longer alone here. They compete with a deluge of culture that is not their own.

Archive Photos/Getty Images

Above: Hernando de Soto’s expedition was the Choctaw’s first contact with Europeans.

There’s good reason to doubt newcomers. It’s a lesson the Choctaw have learned at great cost over the centuries. Trust in newcomers has cost them almost everything, the lives of their people, their land, and some of who they once were. And it is not an unfamiliar story.

When the Spanish landed in South and Central America in the early 1500s, the cruelty, violence and disease they carried with them affected historic changes on the continents. The Aztecs and Inca were butchered, their wealth stolen and extorted. The highly profitable expeditions of the Conquistadors made Catholic Spain the wealthiest nation in the world, a super power amidst building tensions with Protestant England. It made the nation eager for even more.

Hernando de Soto was the first of these Spanish conquerors to venture deep into what would become Mississippi, crossing the great river that would share the same name, an expedition in the mid 1500s whose only ambition was greed. The Choctaw’s encounter with European armor and guns was bloody, and one-sided. But in spite of this experience, the Choctaw did not turn away the traders who came later. In the late 1700s the Choctaw signed the first of a series of treaties with the federal government, one of the first tribes to do so. These agreements established peace, carving out boundaries for co-existence.

Yet these promises, like many others, would be broken. With each treaty, the Choctaw gave up more land, until the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, signed in 1830, sent thousands of tribe members into exile a few years later, to Oklahoma. More than two-thirds of the 19,000 tribes people living in the land of their ancestors were the first Indians were displaced, relocated to land the federal government had set aside for Native American transplants. It should have been a final blow to the Choctaw in Mississippi.

Yet some refused to leave, digging in to the place where they had always lived. And they are still here today, in the towns of Choctaw, Bogue Chitto, Conehatta, Red River, Standing Pine and others, the homeland of the Choctaw Indians. And for the last 66 years they’ve celebrated their culture with the annual Choctaw Indian Fair, stickball at its center, and remember those who refuse to forget who they are.

Every Fourth of July weekend, Independence Day for American citizens, the Choctaw celebrate their own. While residents of neighboring towns sing the national anthem, conduct parades and have barbecues, the Choctaw gather, tap their drums and play their game in vast numbers, with a level of skill far surpassing that on display in the July 4^th softball game or the backyard Thanksgiving Day touch football game. They are the best in the world at their sport, competing in several divisions, Men, Women, Over-35, and Youth (10-13 and 14-17). For nearly two weeks, games will be played all day long.

Thomas Ben’s role is also custodial. He’s the commissioner of the game, charged with the preservation of the rules, and with ushering the sport into an age of online live streaming, so tribal members who cannot attend can still participate. Slender with a side of toothy grin, he oversees the games as a fan as a much as an official.

On this national holiday, he looks over the game on the field in the thick air aftermath of a heavy rainfall. The players, some in face paint, many shoeless, sprint across the slick grass, sticks in hand, slamming into each other. To the uninitiated, it seems to be blunt force barbarism just civilized enough for sport. Yet that is why they come back each year, to lift who they are on their shoulders and carry it into the future, to find themselves in the game.

“This is us. This defines the Choctaw people,” Ben said. “I’ve traveled to some of the other communities in other states and they lost some of what they hold dear. With us, it’s still strong.”

Today, in an early round of the tournament, they see a mismatch in the 18- to 35-year-old men’s bracket.  Beaver Dam, one of the game’s historically good teams, is outmuscling and outplaying Tushka Homma, a team representing the Choctaw Nation from Oklahoma that has only participated in the annual tournament since 2010, which has taken place in its current form since the ‘60s.

To those who are not Choctaw, the sport at first appears chaotic, a silent film whose plot has yet to be revealed. Dozens of players wielding two long sticks called kabocca race across a the field, apparently smashing each other to the ground at random, a 12-foot-tall wooden post standing upright in front of each of the two football goalposts.

The crowded field adds to the chaos, more crowded than for either football or soccer, and as they race back and forth, they throw something to each other, something too small to catch every time, almost too small to see and keep track of, a small ball, a towa, golf ball sized, spray painted orange.

That makes it easier to see, and after a few moments, as the ball appears and disappears, now in the air, now upon the ground, and now carried between the sticks, the game begins to make more sense too. There is strategy in what first appears as mayhem, subtle feints and misdirection, elegance in between the crevices of brute physicality. The action never stops. The game is played in running time, and just as the ball rolls out of play, an official puts another into the fray so play can continue. The only stoppages in the game come when a player is hurt on the ground and cannot rise, and then a medical cart is called to assist.

That is what outsiders notice first, the bone-jarring collisions between barefoot men, and the way fallen players leap back to their feet quickly, before showing any weakness. In a sense, it is not unlike the way American football is often viewed by those from other countries, a brute contest without subtlety.

But there is more to the game than random collisions. The apparent chaos is full of meaning, and the game rewards the traits of the warrior: speed, strength, endurance and bravery. After the contest begins with something similar to a jump ball at the center of the field, the men pass and shoot the ball with surprising grace, using both sticks to arc it over the mob gathered around each pole. And when a team scores, the ball striking the pole either while shot or carried, the players, and the spectators whoop, and holler. Scoring takes great effort, teamwork, and communication. And like any sport, these are skills that must be learned, passed down from fathers to sons, mothers to daughters.

After the first 15-minute quarter, Beaver Dam leads 5-0, their shots more accurate, their will more strong, and in many cases, particularly among the defenders, their bodies heavier.

Traditionally, the Choctaw used the game as a way to settle disputes and avoid war among the various tribes and communities. It was decisive and challenging, definitive and violent. There were few rules of any kind. The Choctaw called it Ishtaboli, The Little Brother of War.

In the pine tree wilds of central Mississippi, before the Europeans penetrated the forests, the tribes would play the game for days, sometimes fielding hundreds of players per side, on fields that stretched over rough terrain for miles. At times, the game had the feel of real war; the high-pitched rapid cries after a goal, war paint, bloodshed, even death. Like other Native American stickball games, some consider it a forefather of lacrosse. The Choctaw even boast that it is the granddaddy of America’s pastime, baseball, and historians consider it North America’s oldest sport.

Like lacrosse, there are sticks, and a ball, and passing plays. But there the similarities end. This is not a game for private school students; the Little Brother of War has retained its ferocity. There are no helmets, padded gloves, faceguards or chest protectors. Most players don’t even wear shoes. The two sticks the players wield are as long as 36 inches, made of hickory, a tiny buckskin net at the end. In a pinch, deer leather from Walmart works.

The kabocca are not meant to be used as weapons, but when a player is on the attack, and charging toward the goal, or one steps in front of another to stop him, they sometimes have that effect. When a player hurls the ball downfield, the whipping action of the follow through can easily end with a stick in another player’s eye, and sometimes it is not an accident. Although violence is a given, fights and intentional brutality are rare. Ben, a former player, was once clubbed over the head by an opponent who purposely used his stick as a weapon. Even now, he maintains a look of disbelief when he retells the story. These days, rules have made the game safer.

Players can’t tackle below the waist anymore, or hit players who aren’t making a play on the ball, so the contact isn’t quite as fierce as in football, mainly resulting only in the collapse of tackler and the target. But still, it’s not rare for a player to get knocked unconscious or made groggy for a moment or two, yet according to tradition, even the injured should play on. Stopping is a sign of weakness. Still, there are often plenty of replacements if that happens. Although hundreds at a time don’t take the field anymore, at the World Series each team puts 30 on the field at a time, and it’s not unusual for a team to roster to number as many as 100 players.

It’s a sport that allows for a variety of body types. The players aren’t always muscled, or thin, or tall. Some, often the defensive players who remain back, guarding the pole, have the look of offensive linemen. Others, the attackers, are smaller, leaner, and quicker, with soccer-player speed and agility.

Sometimes the game appears chaotic, bodies of all types jockeying for the ball. The limitations of the game and the equipment make the contest all the more difficult. The net on each stick is small, smaller than the mouth of a paper coffee cup. Passing and catching is left to those with the greatest skills, and even then it is difficult. A well-placed tackle can easily disrupt a catch, and catching the golf-ball sized sphere demands concentration and plenty of room: One stick catches the ball, the other cups it in place, but the crowded field doesn’t make that easy. More often, players settle for hurling the towa as far down field as they can toward a clutch of their teammates. Then both sides swarm the ball, bodies flying and falling. When the masses reach the ball, it often has the look of a rugby scrum, players bunched around the ball in hopes of knocking it into the open.

But even when that happens, running with the ball isn’t often a better option, particularly against skilled competition. The player with the ball on the open field is a target, the ball is easily jarred loose, and savvy teams know how to stop a player from running the length of the field. At various moments, one sees flashes of other modern games in Choctaw stickball, the passing of basketball, the back and forth flow of soccer and the line play of football. At times, it seems as if the sport is a mashup of every game that has ever been played from the playground to the stadium, yet it is also a game that remains close to its roots in ritual, not yet commercialized or made safe and sterile.

In this game, Beaver Dam is the bigger, more physical team. Clad in blood-red T-shirts, they crash toward the ball every time it comes near the post. Conspicuously parked in front of the pole, the fabvvsa, is Lorenzo Bell, 6 foot, 6 inches of beard and bulk, his sweaty hair captured in a bandana. Opposing players, hoping not to be nailed by him, generally stay out of his way. But around the post is often where it’s most congested, where players are already smashed together in a kind of stickball mosh pit, making a concussive tackle difficult, and making scoring opportunities a challenge. Getting close with control of the ball is difficult, made more difficult by the number of players the team chooses to leave on defense, and the ferocity they display in defense of their post, which they guard as if it is their home.

Tushka Homma tries scoring from outside. Shooting the ball can have the look of a basketball shot. The player makes a little jump, and raises the sticks in the air, flicking the ends like a sharpshooter flicks his wrist. Like a basketball, the best shots tend to have a high arc and hit the post up high, but plays anywhere on the post are fair game. Still, it takes skill to shoot a tiny ball so it strikes a pole that is maybe four inches in diameter, and strength and will to muscle the ball in close. This is the difference in the game. On this day Beaver Dam’s relentless ferocity and experience overwhelms the less experienced Tushka Homma.

The chasm widens in the second quarter. Leading 8-0 midway through, the action mounts on the sideline. The ball is flung to the edge of the field, the nearest players are not the quickest players, hurtling themselves to get control of the towa. In absence of speed, a wide Beaver Dam enforcer lowers his left shoulder into a Tushka Homma player, knocking him to the wet grass in a clatter, arms and legs flailing.

“Ooooooh,” Doc’s voice crackles through the speakers. “Man, I could hear that one from all the way up here.”

Beaver Dam scores again soon after, and one of its players horse collars a Tushka Homma player. This is the way the game is played, and no one complains. They go on, someone shouting, “Hit him!”

Games with less experienced teams sometimes offer more fan-friendly contests, at least to the unfamiliar; a series of long sprints with armed pursuers waving sticks aloft. Like many other sports, however, it is defense that makes the difference. Tushka Homma, plagued by inexperience as they struggle to stop Beaver Dam’s runners, and are hammered into the ground each time they approach the pole themselves.

“Nine points might seem like a good cushion,” Doc said over the speaker. “But last night we saw Tucker score 22 points.”

Still, it doesn’t look like Tushka Homma will make a strong case to win the game. A Tushka Homma player adorned in blue and white face paint gets smashed to the ground. They call him Pinti in the mother tongue, the translation is The Mouse.

“We’ve played this all our lives,” says The Mouse later, whose given English name is Jared Tom. “To us, it’s like riding a bike.”

At halftime, Beaver Dam goes into the 20-minute break with an 11-0 lead. It is only their first game of the tournament, but as the week wears on, they know the games will get more difficult, that their bodies will ache and injuries will take a toll. And the better teams tend to have strategy, like they do, with coaches and an organized approach. Many coaches are also players who take on the responsibility of organizing the teams, handing out schedules and T-shirts. The very best teams have coaches that patrol the sidelines, shouting out instructions with the fervor and urgency of an NFL coach in the final minutes of the Super Bowl.

Other teams act more like rec league squads, just there to be around friends and have a good time. They pay little attention to where the players stand, and hardly practice. Beaver Dam and Tushka Homma both play to win, but one was more equipped to bring home the title.

The game ended with a whimper, a stoppage after the third quarter with score still 11-0, a 20^th century accommodation to the Little Brother of War.

My uncle could not speak English, not very much, so he didn’t speak much English. He spoke Choctaw to his dog. This dog had a good mind.

In the concrete bleachers before the game began, the fans remembered. Then, there was silence, and no drum beat.

The silence was in honor of one of their own, a gesture of respect for a stickball great and storyteller; a man whose flaws and talent made him into something else, a memory that could survive through rumor and story.

When people mention Jake York, the word “legend” often isn’t far behind. He was a one-armed stickball player, someone the salt and pepper observers of today say was one of the best. All that and a dedicated Marlboro man, they joke. At least a pack a day, even when he was diagnosed with throat cancer.

His name wasn’t even Jake York — it was John Walter — but he wasn’t a legend so much for his achievements on the field. He was something bigger than that. Through stickball he somehow became somebody else, a staunch defender and a carrier of tradition. Transformed, he became a version of himself that left his vices behind, the kind of player who became part of the game’s history. Like Babe Ruth and baseball, there is Jake York and Choctaw stickball, inseparable. That was what the people remembered in the silence, that and the stories he told.

When they threw the newspaper outside, “Holisso hót amálah ákmpa,” [“Go bring me the paper”] calling to the dog, then the dog used to bring it. When it brought it in its mouth, he’d say, “Yakókih,” [“Thank you”] and acknowledge it by shaking its hands, even though it’s a dog.

In that creaky old office chair with the too-loose armrests and the fading black fabric, Doc wheeled across the room. His announcing partner took the reins, and Doc spoke softly, like he was telling a secret. He leaned forward, resting on his right elbow, narrow eyelids peering through wire rim glasses, and spoke about Jake York.

“One time he told me he took LSD and didn’t remember nothing for three days!”

A hearty wheeze of a laugh comes out, his eyes becoming small, his smile becoming broad. These are the memories he keeps, and he doesn’t jealously guard what he remembers. He shares it, because if he doesn’t, it will be gone, just as the finer points of the game will be gone, the spiritual roots will be gone and the history. To share was once to risk losing ownership of their culture. Now, it is a way to preserve it. Because Doc knows if he says nothing, if he does not tell you about Jake York, and nobody shares their game, then no one will know what they have missed.

“If you want to eat, you’ll have to walk here to eat the food,” telling the dog in Choctaw. “Even though you stand on all fours, you must [walk over] to get the food,” he said. And it used to stand up and walk there.

Tradition, says Doc, is meant as a guide for morality. He wonders if the tradition has been lost, if it will ever fully return.

“This game is a part of Native American spirituality. A lot of people don’t understand that,” Doc said. “There’s a reason you don’t touch the ball. It’s spiritual. It represents the Earth. Nobody teaches that anymore.”

It is a problem that transcends culture, the concern of older generations that the kids of today will never understand values as they did, that the path to learning how to live has been forever lost.

Doc is 60 years old, and old enough to feel like tradition still means something. Old enough to forget things, like how he got his nickname.

“People have always called me Doc,” he said. “My parents called me Doc. When I was a kid, I thought that was my real name.”

Younger generations have started to forget the traditions Doc uses as a guide, the ones that teach how to live, how to be good. He’s a child of the land, and lived off it as a kid on the reservation. He picked cotton with his father, and gathered firewood. His father always picked the dead and dying trees, a service to the land they had come from. But unlike many others, Doc once left. He worked for the Bureau of Indian affairs in Minnesota, and Oklahoma, traveling from post to post raising his daughter. And then he returned. There was never any chance he would not come back, it was only a matter of when.

“It doesn’t matter where you die,” Doc said. “The tribe will bring your body home.”

His world is a world where people have two names, and traditions have real meaning. It’s a world that has changed many times. It isn’t change itself that worries the Choctaw but changes in the past haven’t always worked well for them, and sharing who they are hasn’t always turned out well. They are a people who remember the awful things that have happened to them, and they sometimes worry about it happening again. Some are quiet and reserved about their heritage, fearing that if they say too much they’ll lose ownership over who they are, something that has almost happened before. The only fear is that the game, and who they are, could be taken from them.

Someone once asked a former commissioner, Henry Williams if he’d try to get the tournament on TV. Doc remembers the exchange:

“‘How come you don’t have ESPN come out here and tape this?”’ someone asked.

“Because they would take it from us,” Williams said. “If you teach the light-skinned people everything, they’ll take it.”

Even the language itself is at risk. Few but the tribal elders speak the language fluently. The kids, they can understand some words, some sentences, but many cannot hold conversations. It’s less established than the game. But they’re performing triage on the language, allowing for it to be grown and fostered. A language program has been enacted to try and get it back into the schools and to teach the children how to speak the language of their ancestors. Stickball, Ishtaboli, the kabocca and towa, is just a part of the equation, a way to keep the past alive in the present.

Then, “Binilih,” [“Sit”] he commands, and it would sit.

“Ittólah,” [“Lie Down”] he commands, and it would lie down.

“Nosih,” [“Sleep”] he commands, and it would close its eyes.

Jason Lewis came back to make sure the language stayed alive. He grew up far from Choctaw, in the dry air of Southern California where he attended UCLA. But his heritage tugged at him, nagged at him to pay attention, return and take action. He’s 38 now, and works for the Choctaw tribal language program. For three years he’s been working on a program to help the youngest generations learn the language, a key to resuscitating one of the most unique parts of Choctaw culture.

“We’re putting a language program in the schools, because the little ones aren’t getting it at home,” he said. “The language loss is happening really rapidly.”

Jake York knew this, and in his own way, he told people not to give up on their mother tongue. He told them through story, one his uncle had told him; The Dog who Spoke Choctaw. The story became a fixture of modern Choctaw culture, and was collected in Choctaw Tales by Tom Mould. When he died last December, it was one of the ways they remember him, in the story about the dog who knew their language.

That dog was never spoken to in full English, which is how it learned Choctaw. Uncle never spoke to it in English but, “Ittólat tonólish,” [“Lie down and roll”] he’d say, and the dog would lie down and roll.

“Illipah,” [“We eat”] you’d say to make it walk on its hind legs and make it walk there to eat.

“A holisso hoyot alah.” [“Fetch the paper.”] As commanded, it would bring it in its mouth.

That is what I want to tell you. If a dog can learn Choctaw, then you all can learn, too.

The final night of the tournament, the championship game between Beaver Dam and Koni-Hata began as the others have. The procession of players walked in silence, only the drumbeat as the background. But this time the crowd had gathered, collected from the 10,000 Choctaw from the neighboring communities. It was a game that Beaver Dam, in part, dedicated to their storyteller Jake York.

He helped remind this latest generation that it isn’t hard to remember where they came from. They remember the origins of this warlike game, and its power to solve differences. But the people have also forgotten some things, or at least tucked them away for now.

That is why they have begun to open their game to the world. They’ve overlooked some of the wariness they have used to protect themselves, and are less wary of sharing so prized a cultural property. Because sharing it is a way to keep it alive. Practicing the sport in this annual ritual is one way to do so, but another is to keep the game alive in the minds of people who are not their own, adopted enthusiasts of Choctaw culture, to make themselves and their culture visible.

This, in part, is Ben’s job, to help take the game into the future. This year the production crew added aerial footage to the YouTube live stream. It came from a drone, a battery powered quad copter operated from the roof of the press box. High above the field it buzzed and zoomed, following the action, the old and new sharing the future.

And just months after the storyteller passed, the team that has claimed Jake York as their own remembered him in their victory. Beaver Dam took home the trophy, defeating Koni-Hata 3-2 in sudden death overtime.

With victory, the ritual was over. This time there was no silence. That moment had passed, but the team had not forgotten. The squad from Beaver Dam joined together on the field, held their sticks high and tapped them together, a celebration, a remembrance, joining the drum beat. And they gathered around, the sticks forming a peak high above the swarm, chanting their team name, their community name, their language.

They had listened, and they had remembered. And now, on a field in Mississippi, on land that is their own, the past could be heard in the sound of their voice.

All photos taken by William D’Urso.

"Has it ever been tougher to play defensive back in the NFL?"

That question, posited by Kevin Harlan last year during Week 14's matchup between the Bills and Broncos, followed this play, an "illegal contact" infraction by Nickell Robey on Wes Welker in the end zone. Instead of a big-time stop on third-and-7, this became an automatic first down for the Broncos, who would find the end zone two plays later. They went on to win by 7:

This ticky-tacky, touch foul could serve as confirmation that the age of punch-you-in-the-mouth, fearsome cornerbacks like Dick "Night Train" Lane, Lester "The Molester" Hayes, Kevin "The Rock" Ross, or Skip "Dr. Death" Thomas are long gone.

The 2014 season saw new emphases placed on defensive pass interference, defensive holding and illegal contact. The almost-draconian prosecution of this mandate affected game flow and gave the defense a seemingly impossible task. "Defense hasn't been outlawed," wrote The Boston Globe's Christopher Gasper, "but it might as well be."

There was trepidation from players, coaches and fans as to what these rules emphases would do to the game -- both immediately and in the long term -- and no one really knew what to expect. One year later, what's been the effect of the league's decision to further benefit the offensive side of the sport?

The effect of these rules emphases

The long and short of it was that the league wanted to take some of the subjectivity of the defensive pass interference and illegal contact rules out of the game. The NFL's Competition Committee, made up of eight members -- Rich McKay, Jeff Fisher, Stephen Jones, Marvin Lewis, John Mara, Mark Murphy, Ozzie Newsome, Rick Smith and Mike Tomlin -- looked at the existing rulebook and decided to make these calls a point of emphasis. First, they wanted to tighten up the regulation of the 5-yard buffer zone defenders had before they'd be called for illegal contact.

"I think there has been a perception that defensive backs have pushed the envelope with the [buffer zone]," Ben Austro, editor of Football Zebras and author of So You Think You Know Football: The Armchair Ref's Guide to the Official Rules, told me.

"I think a lot of the conversation by the Competition Committee before the 2014 season was due to complaints from both receivers and defensive backs." said Austro. "A legal chuck one week wound up being called more tightly with a different crew, and players were asking for more consistency. Before 2014, if a defensive back was in the process of disengaging in the vicinity of 5 yards, he got the benefit of the doubt, which made the enforcement a little fuzzy. Although the Seahawks wound up being the popular lightning rod for leveraging this enforcement in their favor, it really was more widespread."

"They talk to the officials about these points of emphasis," Jim Daopoulos, who spent 11 years as an on-field NFL official and 12 years as an NFL Supervisor of Officials, told me. "They tell them, 'It says a contact has to occur within 5 yards.' As officials, we used to give them this little buffer zone, you know, 5-and-a-half, maybe 6 yards; we give them that buffer zone to have that little contact."

"Now, what they've said is, 'Hey, no more of that: 5 yards is 5 yards, and that's where the contact stops.'"

And, evidently, they mean all contact:

Yes, that got a flag. Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie barely contacted Larry Fitzgerald, and fell over in the process. However, it could be said, even though the throw is way too high, that his contact disrupted the timing.

The same goes for the play below, where Colts defensive back Greg Toler grazes Patriots receiver Julian Edelman past that 5-yard buffer zone, and draws a flag. The throw is high, probably uncatchable, but if there's any contact, the referees were instructed to throw a flag:

For the most part, they did.

"It's a matter of consistency," said NFL Senior Director of Officiating Al Riveron. "We take out the thought process, the gray area, the 'Well, did he run through it, did it really impede him running the pattern?' Now, everyone knows, you grab a shirt -- if you grab the shirt, period, it's a foul -- if you impede the receiver from running his route after 5 yards, it's a foul. Before, we would stand there and go, 'Well, did it impede the play, did it hold him up? Was the receiver able to run through it?' Now it takes all that judgment out. Now, you hold him, you pull the shirt, you put your arm around his waist and turn him, it's a foul. Whether in anybody's view it impeded him from running his route or not, it's a foul."

It's no surprise that consequently the total number of these fouls called in 2014 jumped up significantly. Here are the numbers from the last five seasons.

It wasn't just illegal contact that became a major focal point. Defensive holding calls jumped up significantly as well, as shown above. Like the illegal contact mandate, the goal was to take the subjectivity out of it.

"There used to be a lot of 'snuggles' -- we used to call them 'snuggles,' where guys would get together and they'd kind of grab, they'd get in tight," explained Daopoulos. "Well, [the Competition Committee] wanted some of that snuggling to go away too. They want that receiver to run free. They want him to have that opportunity to get open. So, what they did was that they tightened it up."

Defensive holding penalties increased from 115 calls in 2010 to 181 in 2013, then shot up to 235 calls in 2014.

Again, this was the consequence of the NFL trying to take subjectivity out of officiating.

"The problem that used to occur was that there was an awful lot of inconsistency" in how defensive holding was regulated, Daopoulos said. "As officials, you'd watch it, but basically what you'd try to do is, you tried to determine in your gut. You watch the two players and ask, 'What's going on there? Is he getting an advantage? Is there an advantage and disadvantage?' Then, we'd have to make a decision.

"Now, that philosophy has changed a little bit, and they've wanted that called really tight."

What these emphases mean for defenders

Obviously, the (over)emphasis on illegal contact and defensive holding affected the way that defensive backs -- namely cornerbacks -- can play the game. Corners used to be able to get away with heavy jams at the line, muggings really, and could pull and tug on jerseys down the field as long as it wasn't overly obnoxious. That's gone out the window, said Daopoulos.

"Defensive players thought it was called too tightly," he told me. "They thought they weren't really given the opportunity to play defense."

At least, not the type of defense they grew up playing, nor the style they had been coached to do. The new crackdown meant players' styles required more finesse.

"It's a little frustrating," Steelers cornerback Cortez Allen told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "It puts more emphasis on cleaner technique and things like that. It's something we have to deal with."

As Reidel Anthony, a former All-American receiver for the Florida Gators and first-round pick for the Buccaneers, told me, the new rules have changed the way that the game is taught. Anthony, who played five years in the NFL, is now a coach and an instructor for both receivers and cornerbacks with Performance Compound in Tampa. What he sees is an evolution in coverage as the old-school "bump-and-run" coverage has been replaced by a less conspicuous method.

In the old days, corners would use "an arm bar," Anthony told me, "or grab you with their hand when you come out of your break; they'd really get up on you at the line of scrimmage, almost lining up offsides, you know, just being really physical. Nowadays, they can't be that physical, because if they miss, they can't grab, and once the receiver gets by them, they're in a bad situation.

"Everything now is trail-technique (with minimal contract)," he continued. "So, corners are being taught to get into the hip pocket of the receiver and try to read the route. That's why you see a lot of the press coverage now. They try to disrupt the timing of the route just by standing in front of you, and make you adjust your route a little bit and use a release, instead of getting a free release."

Richard Sherman, and the Seahawks, who have been "credited" by some for the implementation of these new rules changes with their physicality over the years, have illustrated this sea change in style that Reidel talked about. Sherman and the Seahawks have implemented an innovative technique called the "step-kick," which focuses less on the jam and instead simply emphasizes patience.

The idea is to disrupt the timing of a route by simply standing in the way of your opponent. They can't get a free release, so they have to use a receiver release technique to get off the line of scrimmage. The strong jam, the pulling and tugging at the line is less common. It's been replaced somewhat by a mirroring at the line, with a trail-technique down the field:

The step-kick technique, as Jayson Jenks of The Seattle Times writes,

Is pretty much as it sounds. At the line of scrimmage, Seattle's corners get in front of their receiver to press. Receivers usually shimmy and shake to create separation at the line -- think of Doug Baldwin -- but the Seahawks teach their corners to take one step sideways when the ball is snapped. That way, the corner is less tempted to react wrongly to the receiver's dancing. That's the "step."

The "kick" in the equation comes when the dancing is over. At some point the receiver has to get going, and when he does, the Seahawks kick their foot backward to run with the receiver and keep him in front of them.

The step-kick in action:

As Sherman told draft prospect Vladimir Emilien on American Muscle, it's all about patience:

"No offense," Sherman tells Emilien, "but I think I can help you."

"So, you see how you are hopping and jumping? Until he gets outside of my frame, I'm not going nowhere. He comes, I'm just here -- he gets outside of my frame? That's when I hop. I'm always in control. Patience. If you can calm down your feet, and relax, it can help you." The step-kick, or as Sherman puts it, the step-hop.

Of course, not every team plays press, and even the Seahawks play a lot of off-coverage. With off-coverage, the technique at the top of receivers' routes must change with the times. No more grabbing and "snuggling" will be permitted, so tape study of route combinations and tendencies becomes even more important. The offense has a clear advantage going forward because receivers can more or less go where they please, unimpeded, with impunity. This means cornerbacks must be more savvy, instinctual and reactive, and footwork and technique are more important than brute strength and physicality.

What it means for the receiver position

The NFL tends to evolve in cycles of action and reaction. Due to the combination of these new rules emphases, and a trend toward bigger cornerbacks on the outside, there's been a reactionary swing that's seen smaller receivers achieve more success.

Since his time in the NFL (1997-2001), Anthony tells me that the NFL has changed tremendously.

"For the smaller guys like myself that were known for speed and not all the strength and big-body wise," he said, "the ability to get a free release, it makes it a lot easier. Because now, after 5 yards, they really can't even put a hand on you.

"So now, you're just running free, you don't have to worry about anyone grabbing on you, tugging on you, pushing you, really slowing you down," he adds. "That's why you see the smaller guys still making a big splash, the Antonio Browns, the Steve Smiths, those guys are 5'9, a buck-eighty-five, a buck-ninety. So, with the ability to get those free releases, with nobody touching you, it makes the game a whole lot easier for the smaller, speed guys."

As you can see over the past five years, the number of "small" receivers (5'11 and under) in the top 20 of NFL catches has not only jumped, but has crowded the top of the list:

Brown, Emmanuel Sanders, Golden Tate, Julian Edelman, Odell Beckham Jr. and Randall Cobb took the league by storm in 2014, and make up six of the top nine in the NFL in receptions. T.Y. Hilton and Steve Smith made the top-20 list as well, checking in at 16 and 18, respectively. This was a departure from the norm, where a few "small" receivers would be sprinkled in among the top-20, but that list was normally dominated by the big, outside No.1 types.

Not only that, but smaller receivers are factoring more in scoring as well. Here are the top touchdown catching receivers from the last five years:

Three small receivers -- Brown, Beckham Jr. and Cobb -- all made the top-10 list among receivers in touchdowns in 2014. Looking through the previous four years, only Wes Welker shows up on those lists, in 2011 and 2013.

As NFL.com's Bucky Brooks noted in a tape study on some of these standout small receivers:

With more NFL defenses utilizing press coverage to disrupt the rhythm of the passing game, coaches and scouts are placing a greater emphasis on acquiring slippery receivers with the speed, quickness and burst to escape the clutches of physical corners on the perimeter. Long, rangy corners routinely struggle to shadow shifty receivers at the line of scrimmage; thus, pass catchers with electric moves and polished route-running skills can often create big-play opportunities on slants and fades.

As Brooks puts it:

For all the value big-bodied receivers bring to the table, particularly in the red zone, it is hard to find a mammoth receiver with the speed and quickness to generate explosive plays in the passing game (receptions that cover at least 25 yards). Offensive coordinators covet pass catchers who can deliver big gains on vertical routes or catch-and-run plays, and most receivers who excel in that area are speedsters with exceptional burst and acceleration. They blow past defenders on an assortment of downfield routes (go-route, post-route and stutter-go), yet also have the ability to turn a crossing route into a big gain.

Anthony, whose knowledge base straddles the old school (his experience in the NFL) with the new (his experience preparing receivers for the NFL), says that the facets coaches and players are focusing on has changed.

First off, of course, is a receiver release. Instead of the physical demands in beating a mugging at the line, it's now a more technical art.

"The first thing at the line of scrimmage is to use your feet," Anthony told me, "but the other thing, is your hands. Getting off the line in press coverage is like being in a boxing match. You throw one punch at a time, and if they throw a left hand out there, you knock it down with your right.

"If they throw a right hand, visa versa," he explained. "So, using your hands is the key. Once you get their hands off you, they can't touch you for the rest of your route. Now, you work the top of your route. That's where you have to be a little more precise, doing a lot of work at the top of the route."

Pittsburgh's Antonio Brown, all 5'10, 186 pounds of him, is one of the best -- and most prolific -- pass catchers in the NFL, and represents the prototype for this new trend toward smaller, shiftier receivers. Below, Brown exhibits what Anthony explains, using his hands to counter Terrance Newman's pesky jam attempt. Once Brown has beaten Newman off the line, you can see Newman's panic set in. He knows he's been beat:

In turn, Newman grabs ahold of Brown's jersey (miraculously not called, for some reason). Brown reacts though, using Newman's momentum against him. He stops on a dime, comes back to the football to make the catch.

Or, as Anthony described: "Move your feet, boom-boom-boom, give them a six-step to go, knock their hands down, now, at the top of the route, if the guy's behind me, guess what? I've got to use my feet like I did on my release."

Brown, naturally, is the master at this. "Give them something that makes it look like you're going outside, then run the dig," explains Anthony. "Or, get them thinking you're going inside, then run the comeback or the out."

Watch below how Brown beats the press, gets the corner in trail-technique, then uses his head, shoulders and footwork to sell an in-breaking dig route, only to run the sharp out-route to the sideline. That's a clinic:

"So, the things that you did at the beginning of the route," said Anthony, "nowadays you have to do that the top, because instead of being right in front of you, he's right behind you."

Effects on the game at large

As you might've guessed, these rules emphases didn't just affect the techniques that players used. They may have correlated with increases in passing yards and passing touchdowns. There are now an average of 473.6 passing yards per game, up more than 30 yards per game since just 2010. The 807 passing touchdowns in 2014 was an all-time record.

However, with all the emphasis on freeing up the offense and increasing scoring, there was a surprising drop in passing attempts in 2014, and even more puzzlingly, scoring went down slightly:

That scoring went down slightly in 2014 is tough to explain. Is this an aberration, a one-year anomaly based on a litany of other factors, or has the league peaked in terms of the scoring explosion? One year is obviously too small a sample size to know with any certainty.

But the curious and contradictory fact that passing attempts went down in 2014 could be partly explained by the fact that there were more penalties enforced for defensive holding (235 in 2014 to just 181 in 2013), and illegal contact (106 to 38) in 2014 than ever before. That's 122 pass attempts (mostly) that became a "no play" in records tracking because of the emphases on holding and illegal contact.

The illegal contact penalty is especially interesting in that it can been exceedingly ticky-tacky -- literally any contact is outlawed -- but it's a 5-yard penalty that results in an automatic first down. I took a look at third downs of 5 or more yards, and the numbers in 2014 compared to previous years are telling:

These raw numbers aren't incredibly striking in that they're super prevalent, but those touch-fouls on illegal contact on third-and-long have the potential to completely change games, particularly late in the fourth quarter.

They're drive extenders, crucial in both comeback attempts and in putting games away. They can completely change the complexion of a game. And, the frequency of touch-fouls being called on third-and-5-plus nearly tripled. On the sport's most important down (third), the rules emphases really showed up, and the onus is now less on the offense converting a tough pass play from the pocket and now more reliant on simply drawing a flag. Third-and-5-plus plays are only converted about 30 percent f the time. Will these emphases increase the odds on third-and-long significantly? Will offenses take advantage of this with plays and route combinations designed to draw these ticky-tacky, illegal contact penalties?

If refs are being instructed to take all subjectivity out of it, it's certainly possible.

The bottom line

Seahawks corner Richard Sherman didn't mince words last year when he pointed out that the NFL simply wants more scoring because of the popularity and importance of fantasy football. "When the fantasy football numbers need to be what they need to be, then the league needs to do what it needs to do to get it done," he said. "This is a money-driven league, so whatever sells the tickets is gonna sell the tickets."

Former NFL official and Supervisor of Officials Jim Daopolous didn't disagree. "Every year, the Competition Committee gets together, and they try to determine what they can do to improve the game. They change rules for two reasons: One, to increase offense, to increase scoring, and number two, for safety reasons."

The offensive numbers bear that out. The TV ratings bear that out. The NFL is more popular than ever. It's simply up to the players to adapt to this irreversible trend toward favoring the offense.

Savvy defenders must observe, know the tendencies of certain referees, and adapt to how tightly the game is being called until calls become more consistent. That isn't actually that different than before.

And if defenders feel diminished or like the added scrutiny makes the game softer? Tough luck.

Ray Perez is Dr. Death. Dr. Death is the Oakland Raiders. The Oakland Raiders are everything to Perez, who has been advocating ceaselessly to keep the team in Oakland while attending school at Sacramento State. Dr. Death isn't an alter ego, but an extension of Perez himself, a silver, black and dagger'd face of the movement to retain the team. He has traveled back and forth from Sacramento to Oakland to speak with politicians and developers, and is in contact with officials at least every other day. He hasn't slept much.

"My grades took a hit, because that's how indulged I've been, and that's how much this stadium situation has taken over," says Perez -- Death. "I've been front and center, and people know me as Dr. Death, this guy who is fighting to keep the team here, and I get personally attacked on social media, like, 'You're dumb, you're stupid, you don't know what you're talking about,' to, 'Thank you so much for doing so much for us.'"

The good thing about the stress is that it isn't for naught. Perez has confidence, though tempered, that the Raiders will remain in Oakland.

That's more than fans will say in St. Louis, according to Michael Morhaus, a CPA who is still holding onto his seat licenses even though his father, upset at the product on the field, got rid of his two years ago. Morhaus has been taking the temperature of the fanbase through multiple conversations. Almost everyone is certain that owner Stan Kroenke would rather be in Los Angeles. Only Morhaus' neighbor is optimistic -- "he's at 51 percent thinking that they'll stay."

Elsa/Getty Images

"My dad and I used to go to the games all the time, back when you could walk around better," Morhaus says. "It was first row, 35-yard line. We were right behind the offensive line and the Gatorade, so I could literally see Jim Hanifan going over the printouts with Orlando Pace and the rest of the offensive line, and I was 30 feet from Kurt Warner and Marshall Faulk and Isaac Bruce."

Morhaus says he'll always be a Rams fan -- "Until they leave."

The Chargers have had the most protracted battle for a new stadium of the three teams up for relocation. Over the last 14 years, the team has wrestled with the city to get a facility in downtown San Diego. When Kroenke bought land in Inglewood, the Chargers, fearing they'd lose the Southern California market, quickly pushed forward plans for a stadium in Carson that could be shared with the Raiders.

That stung Chargers fans. Andy Glickman works as a creative development manager for an online learning company in L.A., but his heart is in San Diego and the Chargers are his team. He hates Los Angeles with a passion. He says that owner Dean Spanos is attracted to L.A. like a man in a stale marriage might be attracted "to the hot stripper down the street." The stadium debate is affecting Glickman's health.

"I was getting headaches, like migraines, and I couldn't figure out what it was," Glickman says. "And then I bolt up at night, in my sleep, thinking about, you know, 'Those fuckers aren't even paying attention to the-- ' that's when I realize that ... 'Oh my god, that's what's creating stress headaches.'"

Andy Glickman & son

Los Angeles is a specter to these fans, something that has wriggled into their heads by its mere possibility. Nobody likes it, everyone respects it. It's admittedly cool, undeniably big, and likely a profitable place to play football even if attendance, much less passionate and long-term attendance, isn't as guaranteed as front offices would like you to believe. Los Angeles has had plenty to fill the the NFL void the last two decades -- the Lakers, Clippers, Kings, Dodgers, Angels, Trojans, Bruins and Galaxy -- and fans have plenty of other things to do if wins are scarce.

L.A. will enjoy its new toy, to be sure, but the cost will be tears.

Former Cleveland Browns running back Earnest Byner remembers when the players were informed in a team meeting that the franchise would be moving to Baltimore, the pin-drop silence -- they were shocked -- and the immediate acceptance of the situation. The players didn't protest. Nobody spoke up. They did, however, bear the brunt of the city's heartache.

"It was after a game and I was leaving, trying to get to the car, and this lady was talking to me about the team, and, I mean, she was crying," Byner says. "I just, I just ended up holding her and having her head on my shoulder. I felt the pain. I mean, I wasn't in her place, but I just knew she was hurting, you know?"

Players have the best view of the relocation process, nestled between ownership and fans. They know lots of tales of overwhelming dedication. Houston Oilers kicker Al Del Greco was prepared for the move to Tennessee -- he had relocated once before, from St. Louis to Arizona with the Cardinals -- but to do so he had to leave behind a dedicated group of 15 fans that had been outside the locker room at every game at the Astrodome, and at the Houston airport to see the team take off and land whenever it traveled.

Former Raiders and Rams linebacker Mike Jones recalls Raiders fans in the Bay Area coming to see him play for the Sacramento Surge in the World League right after his innocuous first season as an undrafted rookie ... three years before the team moved back to Oakland.

Two memories will always stick with Rams legend Isaac Bruce: The warm and loving embrace of Rams fans when football returned to St. Louis, and, conversely, the fights in the stands when the Rams and Raiders played each other in Los Angeles.

"I was kind of in awe because I had never seen anything like that,"  Bruce says. "I went to Memphis and we probably averaged about 40,000. You had well over 50,000 people, people pledging their allegiance to their team and willing to fight about it. So for me to just see that in the stands, I was kind of shocked.

"It was something totally new to me."

Football is a business. Players accept that notion quickly because it's vital to their livelihood. Fans ostensibly know it, too, but it's hard to reconcile how they use sports with what an owner might call an "experience" or "product." Sports, to fans, are an escape, a way to bond and an identity. However the Raiders, Rams and Chargers may portray their stadium efforts -- the purported economic benefits and promises to inject vitality into the community -- make no mistake that they know what their leverage truly is. In their bids for new stadiums, it's the fanbases that are being held for ransom.

Michael Morhaus

• • •

From 1992 to 2003, 17 of the NFL's 32 teams built new stadiums, largely on promises of economic growth. From 1991 to 2004, 78 stadiums were built across the United States' four major pro leagues -- the NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB -- using 61-percent public funding, according to Reuben Fischer-Baum for Deadspin. The NFL took public funding more heavily than other sports. That trend has only slightly decreased over time, with public funding making up 56 percent of the total costs of new NFL stadiums and renovations from 1997 to 2015, according to the Minnesota Convention, Leisure & Tourism Association. City officials launched effective campaigns to explain to the public why it was in their best interest to give their tax dollars to team owners.

In a 2003 book, Private Stadium, Public Dollars, Rick Eckstein and Kevin Delaney spoke with some of the most influential people involved in bids to build new stadiums in various cities. One business executive in Hartford, Conn., told them how building a new stadium for the New England Patriots would put "feet on the street." A public official in Pittsburgh said that a new baseball park would put "heads in beds."

If teams and city officials couldn't sway the public with handy mnemonics, they'd appeal to their sense of civic pride, sometimes warning that the city would fall off a social and economic cliff. In Cleveland, they warned that it could become the next Akron, in Cincinnati they warned of becoming Louisville, in Denver they warned of becoming Omaha.

A recent estimate by journalist Neil deMause estimated $20 billion in subsidies to big four sports teams from 1990 to 2011. Nearly across the board, pro sports teams did not come close to returning the investment. And quality of life improvements claimed by the franchise were "a load of crap," Eckstein wrote to me.

He continued:

"Los Angeles has been doing just fine without football for the last decade; there has not been a mass exodus from Seattle after the Sonics left; the Long Island suburbs will not go vacant with the Islanders moving to Brooklyn, just as they survived the Nets leaving; Montreal has shown no ill effects after losing the Expos while the Nationals decidedly did NOT put DC 'on the map'" ...

An economist at Lake Forest College named Robert Baade published seminal research on the economic impact of pro sports franchises on cities. In 1994, he found that, among 30 cities that had built new stadiums between 1958 and 1987, there had been no measurable economic impact in 27 of them, and a negative economic impact in the other three.

Others corroborate Baade's premise. Mark Rosentraub, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, found in 1997 that pro teams, on average, account for just 0.2 percent of a city's total employment. Charles Euchner, author of Playing the Field: Why sports teams move and cities fight to keep them, and Alex Fynn, a British author who has written extensively about Arsenal, separately determined that a pro sports team provides roughly the same economic benefit to a community as a large supermarket. In the 1990s, Fynn found that Premier League soccer clubs averaged less revenue than each of Tesco's 20 largest stores.

Studies conducted by teams themselves contradict economists, of course, but their methodology is suspect. For example, deMause pointed out a study done by a consulting firm that claimed that $325 million in public spending on the Dallas Cowboys' new stadium in Arlington would generate $238 million a year in economic activity:

Critics immediately pointed out that this merely totaled up all spending that would take place in and around the stadium. Hidden deep in the report was the more meaningful estimate that Arlington would see just $1.8 million a year in new tax revenues while spending $20 million a year on stadium subsidies.

The massive difference in accounting has much to do with something called the "substitution effect." Money spent on games means money that isn't spent doing other activities within the city. Because families have limited entertainment budgets, judging the economic benefit of a stadium based solely on revenue can be misleading. Eckstein and Delaney suggest that the ancillary impact is actually negative, because businesses want to get away from stadiums and save themselves from excessive noise, crowds and dearth of parking.

And no, society does not crumble when teams leave, deMause tells me.

"Do sales tax receipts go down? No. Does per capita income go down? No. Do job numbers go down? No."

The best argument for keeping teams in town is that sports arguably make a positive impact on a population's quality of life, but even that claim is rife with problems.

"Clearly if all the teams were to move out of my city, I would consider it a detriment to my quality of life," deMause says with a laugh. "The question then is, how do you put a price on that?"

Measuring a city's quality of life -- its happiness, essentially -- is nigh impossible, and attempts by some teams wouldn't pass the loosest standards test. Eckstein recalls being told "bike messengers noticed people around town smiling more" as justification for Cleveland's Gateway Project.

The intangible benefit of sports teams is probably greater than zero, but if you put a price on it it'd be much less than teams demand for new stadiums. DeMause points out one study published in 2005 by Bruce Johnson, Michael Mondello and John Whitehead that asked citizens of Jacksonville how much they would pay to keep the Jaguars based on their own personal valuations. It came up with a rough estimate between $19.6 million and $53 million.

"Which is significant," deMause says. "On the other hand, the number of stadium deals that have kept a team in town by offering them $40 million or less is virtually none. It's almost always more than that."

In St. Louis, for example, a judge overturned a city ordinance that would have required a public vote on funding for a new stadium, clearing the way for a riverfront project that will cost $388 million in tax incentives and state and city bond proceeds as part of a $998 million plan that may or may not convince the Rams to stay.

Armed with 20 years of research (and with a little help from popular media), cities have recently begun mounting stiff resistance against demanding teams. Mayors in Anaheim, Calgary, Glendale and Minneapolis have all recently stood firm against sports franchises.

In Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf has wielded her leverage freely, stating outright that she would not support any expenditure that she could otherwise "spend on police, parks or libraries." Last January, she tried to pit the Raiders against the Oakland A's -- long-time co-tenants, now both vying for new stadiums -- saying that she would allow both teams to make bids for separate or joint stadiums on the O.Co Coliseum site. Oakland is trying to amend an $18 million shortfall and hire more police to combat rising crime. Schaaf used her city's financial reality as a bargaining chip.

DeMause says that it's premature to consider this influx of resistance a "movement" -- "I say that as someone who has, a couple times before, thought that the tide was starting to turn then realized that it was just a momentary pause."

There are counterpoints still -- St. Louis' current stadium efforts, for example, or $376 million borrowed by Cobb County to build a new park for the Atlanta Braves. DeMause is willing to call the example of Schaaf and company a "mini trend," however, with the potential to grow into something significant.

Still, a longview of economic and quality of life arguments can obscure their impact on an individual level. Dr. Death is happy to make the case that while fighting to keep the Raiders in Oakland, "we're also fighting for generations.

"And having that stadium here in Northern California, it's going to give the quality of life, it's going to raise it so much that it's going to bring jobs, transportation will be better, the quality of life would be better," he says. "And if the Raiders were to leave, our quality of life is going to crumble, literally."

Even worse may be subjugation to Los Angeles. In San Diego, the big brother-little brother syndrome is real, and getting the Chargers would just one more thing L.A. doesn't deserve. According to Glickman, the hate has been passed down for generations. His mom inspired his disdain for what he calls Los Angeles' "veneers" -- i.e., its claims to the best culture, best places and best people.

Robert Carlson, an account executive at a healthcare company in Mission Valley, is considering moving away if the team leaves. The Chargers are one of the few things still tying him to a city that has become financially difficult to live in. Losing the team to Los Angeles would be added insult.

"Even though Carson isn't technically L.A., it's right there," Carlson says. "It just makes it seem even worse, so I think that's why a lot of the true Chargers supporters were even more excited because it is L.A. and it'd be a -- I don't know, it'd be another instance where we lost out to them."

Robert Carlson

• • •

Nearly 20 years ago, the Cleveland Browns caught players, fans and media off guard when owner Art Modell announced, after a 4-5 start, that the franchise was moving to Baltimore. Modell has become a bad word in Cleveland, but it's not hard to understand why he made the move. Baltimore gave him one of the sweetest deals ever given to an NFL team -- a brand new $200 million stadium and up to $75 million in moving expenses. It also left Browns fans in a heap of misery.

Author and Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Terry Pluto covered the fallout firsthand.

"It was traumatic because nobody really believed it would happen," Pluto says. "The rumors were always that the Indians would move, not the Browns, because frankly the Browns were not -- they were the one team that was the most consistently supported."

One problem: The Indians already had a new facility and the Browns were playing in decaying Cleveland Stadium.

An already teetering season cratered after the announcement. The Browns lost five straight games after Nov. 6, four of them by double digits. In what has become a familiar process in Cleveland, starting quarterback Vinny Testaverde was benched in hopes that backup Eric Zeier could revive the offense. It worked briefly -- Zeier led the team to a win over the Bengals in his first start -- but the team promptly deteriorated, successively losing by 27 points to the Oilers, 17 to the Steelers and 11 to the Packers before Zeier was benched.

The quarterback controversy exasperated a tense atmosphere created by Modell's announcement.

"I do remember one of those guys was saying, 'Man, they've got be crazy to think that we're not going to be affected by this,"' Byner recalls. "I remember walking in the locker room, I could see the guy's face. Nobody was naive to what was happening and to the possibilities of how it might affect all of us, not just game-wise but life-wise. Our life was changing at the time. As a matter of fact, it had already changed."

Pluto saw the same thing.

"I think most of them just wanted the season over, and I don't blame them," he says. "Covering it I always wanted the thing over."

Fans were more than demoralized -- they were incensed. Protests sprouted, and angry faxes flooded the NFL office. Byner described the atmosphere inside Cleveland Stadium as "almost eerie," with vitriol toward Modell being the most prominent outward emotion. Red-faced fans yelled at Byner directly at public appearances just to vent.

"I don't think they were mad at me, just mad in general," Byner says. "The ones that did that were expressing their frustration. I didn't feel that they were mad at me. I just stood, listened, and consoled the best I could."

After the Browns left, so did a bit of Cleveland's spirit. Peter Pattakos, a Cleveland lawyer who also runs the aptly-named sports blog Cleveland Frowns, was in high school at the time. He remembers the disillusionment.

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"You're just like, 'How can this happen?' Especially for a team that was supported as well as it was like the Browns by its fans," Pattakos says. "We were selling out the games, there's no question of fan support. To me, I think, what it does, it highlights just what a farce it is to have these owners interpose between the public and the teams.

"You sort of feel like a zombie football fan."

The injustice only mounted. In their fifth season since moving the Baltimore, the Ravens won a Super Bowl under the guidance of general manager Ozzie Newsome, who had once starred for Cleveland. At the same time, the expansion Browns floundered in their second season, going 3-13 in one of the worst seasons in franchise history.

Byner remembers the last game ever played at Cleveland Stadium. The Browns mercifully won, 26-10, over the Bengals, and Byner had one of the best games of his long career, rushing for 121 yards on 31 carries. Toward the end of the game, he turned to offensive tackle Tony Jones on the bench and said he was going to go thank the Dawg Pound, Cleveland's bleacher section of diehard fans. Before he knew it, he had shaken hands with fans in half the sections of the stadium -- "Some people didn't want to turn me loose."

"When you're a fan and the team doesn't play well, if they're losing, you feel like you lose," Byner says. "That's the way we all take it personally as fans. So when we won, some of the people were elated because, again, they felt like they won."

After three seasons without football, fans returned to the stands when the Browns returned to Cleveland.

"The professional game was basically born here," Pattakos says. "The NFL was started in Akron, the Hall of Fame is here. People really love their football here. The Browns were always a big part of that. Just as a community, just as a part of the culture, something that ties together your Sunday with your family or whatever it might be."

• • •

Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani has been the face and voice of the Chargers' stadium efforts since 2002. In that time, he has not shied away from media, nor has he deviated much from his core message. The city of San Diego has failed the team, he says, and so the team has no choice but to relocate at this juncture.

It's business. After failed explorative forays into satellite cities, the Chargers are desperate for a new stadium, preferably in downtown San Diego. Fabiani doesn't make any arguments about keeping the city's local economy strong or make an easy play at the fans' little brother complex toward L.A. He freely admits that Kroenke and the Rams forced the team to make a decision in its best financial interests.

"We patiently tried working to get something done with San Diego," Fabiani says. "We were prepared to continue that work throughout 2015. And then in January, seemingly out of nowhere, the Rams announced a signature gathering effort in Inglewood to entitle their stadium.

"We had two choices at that point. One, we could have done nothing, in which case the Rams would have had the chance to move into the L.A. market and take away the 25 percent of our season-ticket business that comes from L.A. and Orange County."

The Chargers' other option, the one it chose, was to "create an alternative." The Carson project would be a joint $1.7 billion venture with the Raiders. Fabiani is certain it would work. The only public spending necessary would be $80 million to finish cleanup of the landfill site. More importantly to the Chargers, the stadium would be situated off the highway neatly between L.A. and Orange County, and they would be able to begin breaking ground very soon.

Fabiani doesn't hesitate to talk up Los Angeles' earning potential.

"You have to start with the fundamental proposition that there are 21 million people within a 90-minute drive of the Carson stadium, and more if you add another 30-minute drive because you're including San Diego into that," Fabiani says.

"Second, it's a market where people and companies are willing to pay premium prices for premium product, so if you have a nice suite, if you have a nice club seat -- the stadium is obviously extremely well located next to the 405 freeway, the busiest freeway in the world. It will have Super Bowls there so the naming rights would be valuable -- it's all of those things that go together."

The biggest flaw in the Chargers' plan may be the supposition that L.A. is a viable market. Fabiani repeatedly cited the 49ers' privately-funded stadium in Santa Clara as the model that Carson can use to pay for itself. The problem is, Carson's immediate area isn't as affluent as Santa Clara's. A relatively convenient drive doesn't make an attraction worth visiting on its own. Twenty years ago, the Raiders and Rams moved out of the city after Angelenos stopped showing up to the stadiums to watch poorly performing football teams.

Fabiani's response is that Carson by itself will bring in fans because it'll be "a state of the art stadium, which L.A. has never had for pro football," and that's true to an extent. Eckstein and Delaney found that new stadiums have a honeymoon period during which attendance isn't tied to performance. But while an early study by Baade suggested that this period can last up to 10 years, follow-up research by Eckstein and Delaney indicates that the period has recently gotten much shorter.

"My well informed impression would say the honeymoon for honeymoon periods is over," Eckstein wrote to me. "Whereas Coors Field and Jacobs Field had attendance honeymoons lasting 10 years, now the norm would be more like two to three years."

Fabiani says that the team's own market research shows that Los Angeles will be a profitable market for the Chargers. Unfortunately, Fabiani could not provide that research upon request.

As for the glory of bringing professional football back to Los Angeles -- restoring the Rams or Raiders, or starting a new legacy with the Chargers -- that stuff is beside the point. Fabiani doesn't talk much about the Chargers' on-field product, and the Rams and Raiders haven't said much of anything publicly about their futures (the Rams declined to speak to me for this story, the Raiders did not respond to multiple requests).

All three teams seem perfectly at peace with letting the conversations center on finances and glossy animated stadium renderings narrated by a rented Hollywood semi-star. They may not be able to argue that they'll enrich the surroundings in any way with a straight face, certainly not enough to make a difference to a behemoth like L.A., but it doesn't matter. Owners don't need to be the good guys, because fans rarely ever love them in the first place.

For the most part, fans fall in love with the players and coaches long before they get to know the incomprehensible business side.

They might be like Glickman's 12-year-old son, who still takes his sports cues from his dad:

"I'm kind of cluing him into what's going on" Glickman recalls, "and he said, 'So if the Chargers moved you wouldn't be said?' And I said 'no, not really.' And he got really emotional, he started to tear up. Just the idea, the thought to him, that I wouldn't have a favorite team, he couldn't grasp it."

Or they may be like Carlson was, a young kid once in need of an escape during a divorce.

"They went to the Super Bowl in '94 ... I'd get excited over dumb things like the Chargers jacket I wore to school and I thought it was the coolest thing," he says. "Not having a strong family to go home to, something like that cheers up more than just playing a video game or something by yourself," adding a laugh. "It just felt like when everybody was in that year, it just felt like I was part of a bigger family."

Chad Farley & the Bolthawks

"It's like someone telling you Christmas is no longer going to be in your location for the foreseeable future, and I would probably say that to somebody [who's] not a big fan," says Chad Farley, who is part of a group of fans known as the Bolthawks. "That's just one day and you get together with friends and family, but I do that eight times throughout the year, every sporting event, and we all talk about it in the offseason, plan for it, get ready for it."

The Bolthawks are trying to get a mass order of white, blue and yellow mohawks to pass out among their section when LaDainian Tomlinson's jersey is retired in November.

These fans don't have anything good to say about Fabiani. None of them has any idea what they will do if the Chargers move. Farley says he may still root for the Chargers but not the city of L.A. -- that way he can keep his old jerseys. Glickman has already considered "the mortality of the fan life," and his best guess is he'll retreat into fantasy football. Carlson would try to root for the Padres and maybe hope for an NHL franchise to come one day. He may simply move out of San Diego.

"It would suck," Carlson says with a laugh. "There'd be one less thing to look forward to. For football every week you feel like something special could happen even if your team's not in it."

Owners are the gatekeepers to a remarkable product built by GMs, coaches and players on top of a foundation of emotions laid by their customers. That is management's last but trumping advantage that ensures teams will never stay put: The game will never mean as much to them as it does to us.

• • •

Unlike Dr. Death himself, his father was soft spoken. He introduced his son to Raiders football, but rooted for them in a reserved manner. He never wanted a high-five. Mostly, he wanted to be left alone during games.

He had an impressive collection of Raider memorabilia, however, which ingrained Raider football into Dr. Death at an early age, even if subliminally. The two watched games together before the team moved back to Oakland. They went to a game soon after the team returned and sat 20 rows up in the Black Hole section of the Coliseum. Seeing everything firsthand, Dr. Death says he finally understood the meaning and history behind his father's pictures and paintings. He saw Violator and Gorilla Rilla and several other Raider superfans. He had a blast -- "And I told my dad, 'Dad, I want to go again, that was cool.'"

The next year, Dr. Death told his dad he wanted to begin dressing up. His dad gave the OK, but with a caveat: "No skulls and no spikes, you have to do your own thing."

Dr. Death gradually became what he is today: Crazy pants, daggers on a hardhat like a mohawk, jersey over shoulder pads, face painted silver with excessively applied eye black. "Dr. Death" was the nickname for Raiders safety Skip Thomas. Dr. Death, the fan, became a season-ticket holder in 2010, and doesn't really care whether you refer to him as Dr. Death or his legal name. He'll continue to be Dr. Death if the Raiders move, but he won't be following the team to L.A.

"Dr. Death is my complete identity, even amongst my friends," Death says. "Even my co-workers who don't follow football at all, they know that that's part of my identity and that's who -- it's my official merit badge wherever I go. What does that merit badge really mean when the company goes and leaves? It's like wearing a badge for a company that just filed for bankruptcy and left."

The Raiders define Northern California for Dr. Death, too, a point he has argued extensively with fans on his Facebook page who suggest he isn't a true fan if he isn't willing to watch the team if it is playing in Los Angeles. Dr. Death has considered that reality.

"People think, 'I'm going to be a Raider no matter what, I don't care if they play in London or wherever, I'm always going to be a Raider,'" he says. "But to many of us here, where the Raiders originated then left and then came back, this is bigger than football."

Shortly after 3 p.m. on Friday, May 1, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao weighed in for their historic encounter that would be contested the following night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. Later on Friday afternoon, collection agents for the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which had been contracted to oversee drug testing for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, went to Mayweather’s Las Vegas home to conduct a random unannounced drug test.

Tom Cooper/Getty Images

The collection agents found evidence of an IV being administered to Mayweather. Bob Bennett, the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which had jurisdiction over the fight, says that USADA did not tell the commission whether the IV was actually being administered when the agents arrived. USADA did later advise the NSAC that Mayweather’s medical team told its agents that the IV was administered to address concerns related to dehydration.

Mayweather’s medical team also told the collection agents that the IV consisted of two separate mixes. The first was a mixture of 250 milliliters of saline and multi-vitamins. The second was a 500-milliliter mixture of saline and Vitamin C. Seven hundred and fifty milliliters equals 25.361 ounces, an amount equal to roughly 16 percent of the blood normally present in an average adult male.

The mixes themselves are not prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which sets the standards that USADA purports to follow. However, their intravenous administration is prohibited by WADA.

More specifically, the 2015 WADA “Prohibited Substances and Methods List” states, “Intravenous infusions and/or injections of more than 50 ml per 6 hour period are prohibited except for those legitimately received in the course of hospital admissions, surgical procedures, or clinical investigations.”

This prohibition is in effect at all times that the athlete is subject to testing. It exists because, in addition to being administered for the purpose of adding specific substances to a person’s body, an IV infusion can dilute or mask the presence of another substance that is already in the recipient’s system or might be added to it in the near future.

What happened next with regard to Mayweather is extremely troubling.

The first fighter of note to test positive for steroids after a professional championship fight was Frans Botha, who decisioned Axel Schulz in Germany to win the vacant International Boxing Federation heavyweight crown in 1995 but was stripped of the title by the IBF after a urine test indicated the use of anabolic steroids.

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Frans Botha’s 1995 victory against Axel Schulz was overturned after he tested positive for anabolic steroids

Bernd Wende/ullstein bild via Getty Images

It’s a matter of record that, since then, Fernando Vargas (stanozolol), Lamont Peterson (an unspecified anabolic steroid), Andre Berto (norandrosterone), Antonio Tarver (drostanolone), Roy Jones (an unspecified anabolic steroid), James Toney (nandrolone, boldenone metabolite, and stanozolol metabolite), Brandon Rios (methylhexaneamine), Erik Morales (clenbuterol), Richard Hall (an unspecified anabolic steroid), Cruz Carbajal (nandrolone and hydrochlorothiazide), Orlando Salido (nandrolone), and Tony Thompson (hydrochlorothiazide) are among the fighters who have tested positive for the presence of a prohibited performance enhancing drug or masking agent in their system.

Almost always, fighters who test positive express disbelief and maintain that the prohibited substance was ingested without their knowledge. In most instances, punishment has been minimal or there has been no punishment at all.

Other fighters like former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, Shane Mosley (who won belts in three different weight classes), and heavyweight contender Jameel McCline, did not test positive but were named in conjunction with PED investigations conducted by federal law enforcement authorities.

By way of example, on August 29, 2006, federal Drug Enforcement Agency officials in Alabama raided a compounding pharmacy (a pharmacy that makes its own drugs generically) called Applied Pharmacy Services. The documents seized included records revealing that a patient named “Evan Fields” picked up three vials of testosterone and related injection supplies from a doctor in Columbus, Georgia in June 2004. That same month, Fields received five vials of a human growth hormone called Saizen. The documents further revealed that, in September 2004, Fields underwent treatment for hypogonadism (a condition in which the body does not produce enough natural testosterone, often a consequence of the use of performance enhancing drugs). The home address, telephone number, and date of birth listed for Evan Fields in Applied Pharmacy’s records were identical to those of Evander Holyfield.

Similarly, Shane Mosley never tested positive for illegal performance enhancing drugs. But his testimony before a grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) made it clear that he used prohibited PEDs prior to his 2003 victory over Oscar De La Hoya.

Many types of PED use are prohibited in boxing and other sports because of health concerns and the fact that they give athletes an unfair competitive advantage. Their use also often violates federal laws regarding controlled substances. But PED use is more prevalent in boxing today than ever before, particularly at the elite level. Some conditioning coaches have well-known reputations for shady tactics. In many gyms, there is a person on site who serves as a pipeline to PED suppliers.

Indeed, for many fighters, the prevailing ethic seems to be, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” In a clean world, fighters don’t get older, heavier, and faster at the same time. But that’s what’s happening in boxing. Fighters are reconfiguring their bodies and, in some instances, look like totally different physical beings. Improved performances at an advanced age are becoming common. Fighters at age 35 are outperforming what they could do when they were thirty. In some instances, fighters are starting to perform at an elite level at an age when they would normally be expected to be on a downward slide.

Victor Conte was the founder and president of BALCO and at the vortex of several well-publicized PED scandals. He spent four months in prison after pleading guilty to illegal steroid distribution and tax fraud in 2005. Since then, Conte has undergone a remarkable transformation and is now a forceful advocate for clean sport. What makes him a particularly valuable asset is his knowledge of how the performance enhancing drugs game was - and is - played. Indeed, former federal prosecutor Jeff Novitzky, who was instrumental in putting Conte behind bars, acknowledged in a recent interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that Conte now has “an anti-doping platform” and has come “over to the good side.”

“The use of performance enhancing drugs is rampant in boxing, particularly at the elite level,” Conte recently told this writer. “If there was serious testing and the fighters believed that the testing was effective, they’d be less inclined to use prohibited drugs. But almost across the board, state athletic commissions have minimal expertise, limited funding, and little or no will to address the problem. So knowing that the testing programs are inept, many fighters feel that they’re forced to use these drugs to compete on a level playing field.”

In recent years, the United States Anti-Doping Agency has stepped into the enforcement void.

USADA was created in 1999 pursuant to the recommendation of a United States Olympic Committee task force that recognized the need for credible PED testing of all Olympic and Paralympic athletes representing the United States.

John Thys/AFP/Getty Images

Above: USADA Chief Executive Officer Travis Tygart

Despite its name, USADA is neither a government agency nor part of the United States Olympic Committee. It is an independent “not-for-profit” corporation headquartered in Colorado Springs that offers drug-testing services for a fee. Most notably, the United States Olympic and Paralympic movement utilize its services. Because of this role, USADA receives approximately $10 million annually in Congressional funding, more in Olympic years.

USADA’s website states, “The organization continues to aspire to be a leader in the global anti-doping community in order to protect the rights of clean athletes and the integrity of competition around the world. We hold ourselves to the same high standards exhibited by athletes who fully embrace true sport. We commit to the following core values to guide our decisions and behaviors.” The core values listed are integrity, respect, teamwork, responsibility, and courage.

Travis Tygart, the chief executive officer of USADA, has spearheaded the organization’s expansion into professional boxing. That opportunity initially arose in late 2009, when drug testing became an issue in the first round of negotiations for a proposed fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. When those negotiations fell through, Mayweather opted instead for a May 1, 2010, bout against Shane Mosley.

During a March 18, 2010, conference call to promote Mayweather-Mosley, Tygart advised the media, “Both athletes have agreed to USADA’s testing protocols, including blood and urine testing, which is unannounced, which is anywhere and anytime. There is no limit to the number of tests that we can complete on these boxers.”

Thereafter, Tygart moved aggressively to expand USADA’s footprint in boxing and forged a working relationship with Richard Schaefer, who until 2014 served as CEO of Golden Boy Promotions, one of boxing’s most influential promoters. USADA also became the drug-testing agency of choice for fighters advised by Al Haymon, who is now the most powerful person in boxing. In addition to representing Mayweather, Haymon is the driving force behind Premier Boxing Champions. He has bought time on CBS, NBC, ESPN, Spike, and several other networks to showcase his product. Most boxing matches televised by Showtime also feature Haymon fighters.

Drug testing, if it is to inspire confidence, should be largely transparent. Much of USADA’s operation insofar as boxing is concerned is shrouded in secrecy. Sometimes there’s an announcement when USADA oversees drug testing for a fight. Other times, there is not. The organization has resisted filing its boxer drug-testing contracts with governing state athletic commissions. On several occasions, New York and Nevada have forced the issue. Compliance has often been slow in coming.

When asked to identify the boxing matches for which a USADA drug-testing contract was filed with either the New York or Nevada State Athletic Commissions, Travis Tygart declined through a spokesperson (USADA senior communications manager Annie Skinner) to answer the question.

USADA’s fee structure (which USADA has endeavored to shield from public view) has also raised eyebrows.

Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

USADA received an up-front payment of $150,000 to administer drug testing for 2015’s Mayweather-Pacquiao fight

The primary alternative to USADA insofar as PED testing for boxers is concerned is the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association (VADA). Like USADA, VADA’s testing laboratories are accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency and it uses internationally recognized collection agencies. Unlike USADA, VADA utilizes carbon isotope ratio (CIR) testing on every urine sample it collects from a boxer. USADA often declines to administer CIR testing on grounds that it’s unnecessary and too expensive. Of course, the less expensive that tests are to administer, the better it is for USADA’s bottom line.

VADA charged a total of $16,000 to administer drug testing for the April 18, 2015, junior-welterweight fight between Ruslan Provodnikov and Lucas Matthysse. By contrast, USADA charged $36,000 to administer drug testing for the April 11, 2015, middleweight encounter between Andy Lee and Peter Quillin.

The Lee-Quillin bout was part of Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions series. USADA is often paid quite generously for services rendered in conjunction with fights in which Haymon plays a role.

A notable example is the fee paid to USADA for administering drug testing in conjunction with the May 2, 2015, Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. Haymon advises Mayweather, and Team Mayweather controlled the promotion. USADA’s contract called for it to receive an up-front payment of $150,000 to test Mayweather and Pacquiao.

More troubling than USADA’s fee structure are the accommodations that it seems to have made for clients who either pay more for its services or use USADA on a regular basis. The case of Erik Morales, who has held world titles in three weight divisions, is an example.

Under standard sports drug testing protocols, when blood or urine is taken from an athlete, it is divided into an “A” and “B” sample. The “A” sample is tested first. If it tests negative, end of story; the athlete has tested “clean.” If, however, the “A” sample tests positive, the athlete has the right to demand that the “B” sample be tested. If the “B” sample tests negative, the athlete is presumed to be clean. But if the “B” sample also tests positive, the first positive finding is confirmed and the athlete then has a problem.

In 2012, Erik Morales was promoted by Golden Boy, which, as earlier noted, was under the leadership of Richard Schaefer. Golden Boy was the lead promoter for an Oct. 20 fight card at Barclays Center in Brooklyn that was to be headlined by Morales vs Danny Garcia.

On Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012, the website Halestorm Sports reported that Morales had tested positive for a banned substance. Thereafter, Golden Boy and USADA engaged in damage control.

Al Bello/Getty Images for Golden Boy Promotions

Above: Erik Morales after his 2012 fight against Danny Garcia

Dan Rafael of ESPN.com spoke with two sources and wrote, “The reason the fight has not been called off, according to one of the sources, is because Morales’ ‘A’ sample tested positive but the results of the ‘B’ sample test likely won’t be available until after the fight. ‘[USADA] said it could be a false positive,’ one of the sources with knowledge of the disclosure said.”

Richard Schaefer told Chris Mannix of SI.com, “USADA has now started the process. The process will play out. There is not going to be a rush to judgment. Morales is a legendary fighter. And really, nobody deserves a rush to judgment. You are innocent until proven guilty.”

Then, on Friday, one day before the scheduled fight, Keith Idec revealed on Boxing Scene that samples had been taken from Morales on at least three occasions. Final test results from the samples taken on Oct. 17 were not in yet. But both the “A” and “B” samples taken from Morales on Oct. 3 and Oct. 10 had tested positive for clenbuterol. In other words, Morales had tested positive for clenbuterol four times.

JC Olivera/Getty Images

Morales tested positive for clenbuterol four times before fighting Danny Garcia

Clenbuterol, a therapeutic drug first developed for people with breathing disorders such as asthma, is widely used by bodybuilders and athletes. It helps the body increase its metabolism and process the conversion of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats into useful energy. It also boosts muscle growth and eliminates excess fats caused by the use of certain steroids. Its therapeutic use is banned in the United States, as is its use in animals raised for human consumption. It is also banned by WADA.

Under the WADA prohibited list, no amount of clenbuterol is allowed in a competitor’s body. The measure is qualitative, not quantitative. Either clenbuterol is there or it is not.

According to a report in the New York Daily News, after Morales was confronted with the positive test results, he claimed a USADA official suggested that he might have inadvertently ingested clenbuterol by eating contaminated meat. Meanwhile, the New York State Athletic Commission issued a statement referencing a representation by Morales that he “unintentionally ingested contaminated food.”

However, no evidence was offered in support of the contention that Morales had ingested contaminated meat.

Nor was any explanation forthcoming as to why USADA kept taking samples from Morales after four tests (two “A” samples and two “B” samples from separate collections) came back positive. Giving Morales these additional tests was akin to giving someone who has been arrested for driving while intoxicated a second and third blood test a week after the arrest.

The moment that the “B” sample from Morales’ first test came back positive, standard testing protocol dictated that this information be forwarded to the New York State Athletic Commission. But neither USADA nor Richard Schaefer did so in a timely manner. Rather, it appears as though the commission and the public may have been deliberately misled in regard to the testing and how many tests Morales had failed.

New York State Athletic Commission sources say that the first notice the NYSAC received regarding Morales’ test results came in a three-way telephone conversation with representatives of Golden Boy and USADA after the story broke on Halestorm Sports. In that conversation, the commission was told that there were “some questionable test results” for Morales but that testing of Morales’ “B” sample would not be available until after the fight.

Travis Tygart has since said, “The licensing body was aware of the positive test prior to the fight. What they did with it was their call.”

That’s terribly misleading.

This writer submitted a request for information to the New York State Athletic Commission asking whether it was advised that Erik Morales had tested positive for Clenbuterol prior to the Oct. 18, 2012, revelation on Halestorm Sports.

On Aug. 10, 2015, Laz Benitez (a spokesperson for the New York State Department of State, which oversees the NYSAC) advised in writing, “There is no indication in the Commission’s files that it was notified of this matter prior to October 18, 2012.”

The Garcia-Morales fight was allowed to proceed on Oct. 20, in part because the NYSAC did not know of Morales’ test history until it was too late for the commission to fully consider the evidence and make a decision to stop the fight. Since then, people in the PED-testing community have begun to openly question the role played in boxing by USADA. What good are tests if the results are not properly reported?

Don Catlin founded the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory in 1982 and is one of the founders of modern drug testing in sports. Three years ago, Catlin told this writer, “USADA should not enter into a contract that doesn’t call for it to report positive test results to the appropriate governing body. If it’s true that USADA reported the results [in the Morales case] to Golden Boy and not to the governing state athletic commission, that’s a recipe for deception.”

When asked about the possibility of withholding notification because of inadvertent use (such as eating contaminated meat), Catlin declared, “No! The International Olympic Committee allowed for those waivers 25 years ago, and it didn’t work. An athlete takes a steroid, tests positive, and then claims it was inadvertent. No one says, ‘I was cheating. You caught me.’”

Victor Conte is in accord and says, “The Erik Morales case was a travesty. If you’re doing honest testing, you don’t have a positive “A” and “B” sample and then another positive “A” and “B” sample and keep going until you get a negative result.”

In the absence of a credible explanation for what happened or an acknowledgement by USADA that there was wrongdoing that will not be repeated, the Erik Morales matter casts a pall over USADA.

The way things stand now, how can any of USADA’s testing in any sport be trusted by the sports establishment or the public? Would USADA handle the testing of an Olympic athlete the way it handled the testing of Erik Morales?

That brings us to Floyd Mayweather and USADA.

Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

Mayweather has gone to great lengths to propagate the notion that he is in the forefront of PED testing to “clean up” boxing. Beginning with his 2010 fight against Shane Mosley, he has mandated that he and his opponent be subjected to what he calls “Olympic-style testing” by USADA.

At a media “roundtable” in New York before the June 24, 2013, kick-off press conference for Mayweather vs. Canelo Alvarez, Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe declared, “We’ve put in place a mechanism where all Mayweather Promotions fighters will do mandatory blood and urine testing 365-24-7 by USADA.”

But neither Mayweather nor the fighters that Mayweather Promotions has under contract have undergone 365-24-7 testing - tests that can be administered any place at any time and would make it more risky for an athlete to use prohibited PEDs.

Drug testing for a Mayweather fight generally begins shortly after the fight is announced. Mayweather and his opponent agree to keep USADA advised as to their whereabouts at all times and submit to an unlimited number of unannounced blood and urine tests. That sounds good. But in effect, USADA allows Mayweather to determine when the testing begins. That leaves a long period of time during which there are no checks on what substances he might put into his body.

For example, Mayweather didn’t announce Andre Berto as the opponent for his upcoming Sept. 12 fight until Aug. 4, only 39 days before the fight. That didn’t leave much time for serious drug testing. From the conclusion of the Pacquiao fight until the Berto announcement, Mayweather was not subject to USADA testing.

Here, the thoughts of Victor Conte are instructive.

Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

Above: Victor Conte, once the vortex of several well-publicized PED scandals, is now a forceful advocate for clean sport

“Mayweather is not doing ‘Olympic-style testing,’” Conte states. “Olympic testing means that you can be tested twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. If USADA was serious about boxing becoming a clean sport, it would say, ‘We don’t do one-offs. If you sign up for USADA testing, we reserve the right to test you at any time 365-24-7.’ But that’s not what USADA does with Mayweather or any other fighter that I know of.”

“The benefits that an athlete retains from using anabolic steroids and certain other PEDs carry over for months,” Conte continues. “Anybody who knows anything about the way these drugs work knows that you don’t perform at your best when you’re actually on the drugs. You get maximum benefit after the use stops. I can’t tell you what Floyd Mayweather is and isn’t doing. What he could be doing is this. The fight is over. First, he uses these drugs for tissue repair. Then he can stay on them until he announces his next fight, at which time he’s the one who decides when the next round of testing starts. And by the time testing starts, the drugs have cleared his system.

“Do I know that’s what’s happening? No, I don’t. I do know that the testing period for Mayweather’s fights is getting shorter and shorter. What is it for this one? Five weeks? The whole concept of one man dictating the testing schedule is wrong. But USADA lets Mayweather do it. USADA is not doing effective comprehensive testing on Floyd Mayweather. Testing for four or five weeks before a fight is nonsense.”

As noted earlier, USADA CEO Travis Tygart declined to be interviewed for this article. Instead, senior communications manager Annie Skinner emailed a statement to this writer that outlines USADA’s mission and reads in part, “Just like for our Olympic athletes, any pro-boxing program follows WADA’s international standards, including: the Prohibited List, the International Standard for Testing & Investigations (ISTI), the International Standard for Therapeutic Use Exemptions (ISTUEs) and the International Standards for Protection of Privacy and Personal Information (ISPPPI).”

Skinner’s statement is incorrect. This writer has obtained a copy of the contract entered into between USADA, Floyd Mayweather, and Manny Pacquiao for drug testing in conjunction with Mayweather-Pacquiao. A copy of the entire contract can be found here.

Paragraph 30 of the contract states, “If any rule or regulation whatsoever incorporated or referenced herein conflicts in any respect with the terms of this Agreement, this Agreement shall in all such respects control. Such rules and regulations include, but are not limited to: the Code [the World Anti-Doping Code]; the USADA Protocol; the WADA Prohibited List; the ISTUE [WADA International Standard for Therapeutic Use Exemptions]; and the ISTI [WADA International Standard for Testing and Investigations].”

In other words, USADA was not bound by the drug testing protocols that one might have expected it to follow in conjunction with Mayweather-Pacquiao. And this divergence was significant vis-a-vis its rulings with regard to the IV that was administered to Mayweather on May 1.

In evaluating USADA’s conduct with regard to Mayweather’s IV, the evolution of the USADA-Mayweather-Pacquiao contract is important.

It was announced publicly that the bout contract Mayweather and Pacquiao signed in February 2015 to fight each other provided that drug testing would be conducted by USADA. But the actual contract with USADA remained to be negotiated. In early March, USADA presented the Pacquiao camp with a contract that allowed the testing agency to grant a retroactive therapeutic use exemption (TUE) to either fighter in the event that the fighter tested positive for a prohibited drug. That retroactive exemption could have been granted without notifying the Nevada State Athletic Commission or the opposing fighter’s camp.

Team Pacquiao thought that was outrageous and an opportunity for Mayweather to game the system. Pacquiao refused to sign the contract.

Thereafter, Mayweather and USADA agreed to mutual notification and the limitation of retroactive therapeutic use exemptions to narrowly delineated circumstances. With regard to notice, a copy of the final USADA-Mayweather-Pacquiao contract provides: “Mayweather and Pacquiao agree that USADA shall notify both athletes within 24 hours of any of the following occurrences: (1) the approval by USADA of a TUE application submitted by either athlete; and/or (2) the existence of and/or any modification to an existing approved TUE. Notification pursuant to this paragraph shall consist of and be limited to: (a) the date of the application; (b) the prohibited substance(s) or method(s) for which the TUE is sought; and (c) the manner of use for the prohibited substance(s) or method(s) for which the TUE is sought.”

How was Mayweather’s IV handled by USADA?

As previously noted, the weigh-in and IV administration occurred on May 1. The fight was on May 2. For 20 days after the IV was administered, USADA chose not to notify the Nevada State Athletic Commission about the procedure.

Finally, on May 21, USADA sent a letter to Francisco Aguilar and Bob Bennett (respectively, the chairman and executive director of the NSAC) with a copy to Top Rank (Pacquiao’s promoter) informing them that a retroactive therapeutic use exemption had been granted to Mayweather. The letter did not say when the request for the retroactive TUE was made by Mayweather or when it was granted by USADA.

Subsequent correspondence in response to requests by the NSAC and Top Rank for further information revealed that the TUE was not applied for until May 19 and was granted on May 20.

Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Oli Scarff/Getty Images

In other words, 18 days after the fight, USADA gave Mayweather a retroactive therapeutic use exemption for a procedure that is on the WADA “Prohibited Substances and Methods List.” And because of a loophole in its drug-testing contract, USADA wasn’t obligated to notify the Nevada State Athletic Commission or Pacquiao camp regarding Mayweather’s IV until after the retroactive TUE was granted.

Meanwhile, on May 2 (fight night), Pacquiao’s request to be injected with Toradol (a legal substance) to ease the pain caused by a torn rotator cuff was denied by the Nevada State Athletic Commission because the request was not made in a timely manner.

A conclusion that one might draw from these events is that it helps to have friends at USADA.

“It’s bizarre,” Don Catlin says with regard to the retroactive therapeutic use exemption that USADA granted to Mayweather. “It’s very troubling to me. USADA has yet to explain to my satisfaction why Mayweather needed an IV infusion. There might be a valid explanation, but I don’t know what it is.”

Victor Conte is equally perturbed.

“I don’t get it,” Conte says. “There are strict criteria for the granting of a TUE. You don’t hand them out like Halloween candy. And this sort of IV use is clearly against the rules. Also, from a medical point of view, if they’re administering what they said they did, it doesn’t make sense to me. There are more effective ways to rehydrate. If you drank ice-cold Celtic seawater, you’d have far greater benefits. It’s very suspicious to me. I can tell you that IV drugs clear an athlete’s system more quickly than drugs that are administered by subcutaneous injection. So why did USADA make this decision? Why did they grant something that’s prohibited? In my view, that’s something federal law enforcement officials should be asking Travis Tygart.”

Bob Bennett (who worked for the FBI before assuming his present position as executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission) has this to say: “The TUE for Mayweather’s IV - and the IV was administered at Floyd’s house, not in a medical facility, and wasn’t brought to our attention at the time - was totally unacceptable. I’ve made it clear to Travis Tygart that this should not happen again. We have the sole authority to grant any and all TUEs in the state of Nevada. USADA is a drug-testing agency. USADA should not be granting waivers and exemptions. Not in this state. We are less than pleased that USADA acted the way it did.”

If Bennett looks at what transpired before he became executive director of the NSAC, he might have further reason to question USADA’s performance.

The use of carbon isotope ratio (CIR) testing as a means of identifying the presence of exogenous (synthetic) testosterone in an athlete’s body was developed in part under the direction of Don Catlin. It has been used in conjunction with Olympic testing since the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano.

As noted earlier, USADA often declines to administer CIR testing to boxers on grounds that it is unnecessary and too expensive. The cost is roughly $400 per test, although VADA CEO Dr. Margaret Goodman notes, “If you do a lot of them, you can negotiate price.”

If VADA (which charges far less than USADA for drug testing) can afford CIR testing on every urine sample that it collects from a boxer, then USADA can afford it too.

“If you’re serious about drug testing,” says Victor Conte, “you do CIR testing.”

But CIR testing has been not been fully utilized for Floyd Mayweather’s fights. Instead, USADA has chosen to rely primarily on a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio test to determine if exogenous testosterone is in an athlete’s system.

Testosterone and epitestosterone are naturally occurring hormones. Testosterone is performance enhancing. Epitestosterone is not.

A normal testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio is slightly more than 1-to-1. Conte says that one recent study of the general population “placed the average T-E ratio for whites at 1.2-to-1 and for blacks at 1.3-to-1.”

Under WADA standards, a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio of up to 4-to-1 is acceptable. That allows for any reasonable variation in an athlete’s natural testosterone level (which, for an elite athlete, might be particularly high). If the ratio is above 4-to-1, an athlete is presumed to be doping.

Some athletes who use exogenous testosterone game the system by administering exogenous epitestosterone to drive their testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio down beneath the permitted ceiling. This can be done by injection or by the application of epitestosterone as a cream. In the absence of a CIR test, this masks the use of synthetic testosterone.

But there’s a catch. If an athlete tries to manipulate his or her testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio, it is difficult to balance the outcome. If an athlete uses too much epitestosterone - and the precise amount is difficult to calibrate - the result can be an abnormally low T-E ratio.

“In and of itself,” Conte explains, “an abnormally low T-E ratio is not proof of doping. The ratio can vary for the same athlete from test to test. But an abnormally low T-E ratio is a red flag. And if you’re serious about the testing, the next thing you do [after a low T-E ratio test result] is administer a CIR test on the same sample.”

Earlier this year, in response to a request for documents, the Nevada State Athletic Commission produced two lab reports listing the testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio on tests that it (not USADA) had overseen on Floyd Mayweather. In one instance, blood and urine samples were taken from Mayweather on Aug. 18, 2011 (prior to his Sept. 17 fight against Victor Ortiz). In the other instance, blood and urine samples were taken from Mayweather on April 3, 2013 (prior to his May 4 fight against Robert Guerrero).

Mayweather’s testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio for the April 3, 2013, sample was 0.80. His testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio for the Aug. 18, 2011, sample was 0.69.

“That’s a warning flag,” says Don Catlin. “If you’re serious about the testing, it tells you to do the CIR test.”

The Nevada State Athletic Commission wasn’t as knowledgeable with regard to PED testing several years ago as it is now. Commission personnel might not have understood the possible implications of the 0.69 and 0.80 numbers. But USADA officials were knowledgeable.

Did USADA perform CIR testing on Mayweather’s urine samples during that time period? What were the results? And if there was no CIR testing, what testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio did USADA’s tests show? At present, the answers to these questions are not publicly known.

Note to investigators: CIR tests can be performed retroactively on frozen samples.

All of this leads to another issue. As noted by NSAC executive director Bob Bennett, “As of now, USADA does not give us the full test results. They give us the contracts for drug testing and summaries that tell us whether a fighter has tested positive or negative. It is incumbent on them to notify us if a fighter tests positive. But no, they don’t give us the full test results.”

Laz Benitez reports a similar lack of transparency in New York. On Aug. 10, Benitez advised this writer that the New York State Athletic Commission had received information from USADA regarding test results for four fights where the drug testing was conducted by USADA. But Benitez added, “The results received were summaries.”

Why is that significant? Because full test results can raise a red flag that’s not apparent on the face of a summary. Once again, a look at the relationship between USADA and Floyd Mayweather is instructive.

On Dec. 30, 2009, Manny Pacquiao sued Mayweather for defamation. Pacquiao’s complaint, filed in the United States District Court for Nevada, alleged that Mayweather and several other defendants had falsely accused him of using, and continuing to use, illegal performance enhancing drugs. The court case moved slowly, as litigation often does. Then things changed dramatically.

As reported by this writer on MaxBoxing in Dec. 2012, information filtered through the drug-testing community on May 20, 2012 to the effect that Mayweather had tested positive on three occasions for an illegal performance-enhancing drug. More specifically, it was rumored that Mayweather’s “A” sample had tested positive three times and, after each positive test, USADA had given Floyd an inadvertent use waiver. These waivers, if they were in fact given, would have negated the need to test Floyd’s “B” samples. And because the “B” samples were never tested, a loophole in Mayweather’s USADA contract would have allowed testing to continue without the positive “A” sample results being reported to Mayweather’s opponent or the Nevada State Athletic Commission.

Pacquiao’s attorneys became aware of the rumor in late-May. On June 4, 2012, they served document demands and subpoenas on Mayweather, Mayweather Promotions, Golden Boy (Mayweather’s co-promoter), and USADA demanding the production of all documents relating to PED testing of Mayweather in conjunction with his fights against Shane Mosley, Victor Ortiz, and Miguel Cotto. These were the three fights that Mayweather had been tested for by USADA up until that time.

The documents were not produced. After pleading guilty to charges of domestic violence and harassment, Mayweather spent nine weeks in the Clark County Detention Center. He was released from jail on Aug. 2. Then settlement talks heated up.

A stipulation of settlement ending the defamation case was filed with the court on Sept. 25, 2012. The parties agreed to a confidentiality clause that kept the terms of settlement secret. However, prior to the agreement being signed, two sources with detailed knowledge of the proceedings told this writer that Mayweather’s initial monetary settlement offer was “substantially more” than Pacquiao’s attorneys had expected it would be. An agreement in principle was reached soon afterward. The settlement meant that the demand for documents relating to USADA’s testing of Mayweather became moot.

If Mayweather’s “A” sample tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug on one or more occasions and he was given a waiver by USADA that concealed this fact from the Nevada State Athletic Commission, his opponent, and the public, it could contribute to a scandal that undermines the already-shaky public confidence in boxing. At present, the relevant information is not a matter of public record.

USADA CEO Travis Tygart (through senior communications manager Annie Skinner) declined to state how many times the “A” sample of a professional boxer tested by USADA has come back positive for a prohibited substance.

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

What is clear though, is that USADA is not catching the PED users in boxing. Tygart says that’s because his organization’s educational programs and the knowledge that USADA will catch cheaters deters wrongdoing. But the changing physiques and performance levels of some of the elite fighters tested by USADA suggest otherwise.

A simple comparison will suffice. As of Aug. 1, 2015, VADA had conducted drug testing for 18 professional fights. Three of the fighters tested by VADA (Andre Berto, former IBF-WBA 140-pound champion Lamont Peterson, and former 135-pound WBA titleholder Brandon Rios) tested positive for a banned substance.

Contrast that with USADA. Annie Skinner says that Mayweather-Berto will be the 46th fight for which USADA has conducted drug testing. In an Aug. 14, email she acknowledges, “At this time, the only professional boxer under USADA’s program who has been found to have committed an anti-doping rule violation is Erik Morales.”

One can speculate that, had Halestorm Sports not broken the Morales story, USADA might not have “found” that Morales committed an anti-doping violation either.

“USADA’s boxing testing program is propaganda; that’s all,” says Victor Conte. “It has one set of rules for some fighters and a different set of rules for others. That’s not the way real drug testing works. Travis Tygart wants people to think that anyone who questions USADA is against clean sport. But that’s nonsense.”

After Lance Armstrong’s defoliation for illegal PED use, Tygart was interviewed by Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes. Armstrong, Tygart declared, was “cowardly” and had “defrauded millions of people.”

Pelley then asked, “If Lance Armstrong had prevailed in this case and you had failed, what would the effect on sport have been?”

“It would have been huge,” Tygart answered, “because athletes would have known that some are too big to fail.”

“And the message that sends is what?” Pelley pressed.

“Cheat your way to the top. And if you get too big and too popular and too powerful, if you do it that well, you’ll never be held accountable.”

USADA is the dominant force in American sports insofar as drug testing is concerned. But it is not too big and powerful to be held accountable.

The essence of boxing is such that all participants are at risk. The increasing use of performance enhancing drugs makes these risks unacceptable.

Fighters are entitled to an initial presumption of innocence when questions arise regarding the use of performance enhancing drugs. Based on their performance, Muhammad Ali (blessed with preternatural speed and stamina) and Rocky Marciano (who absorbed incredible punishment and seemed to grow stronger as a fight wore on) might have been suspected of illegal drug use had PEDs been available to them.

But fighters who are clean are also entitled to know that they’re not facing an opponent who has augmented his firepower through the use of performance enhancing drugs. And any state athletic commission that fails to limit the use of PEDs within its jurisdiction is unfit to regulate boxing.

Richard Pound was one of the founders and the first president of the World Anti-Doping Agency. On May 13, 2013, a committee that Pound chaired submitted a report entitled “Lack of Effectiveness of Testing Programs” to WADA.

In part, that report states, “The primary reason for the apparent lack of success of the testing programs does not lie with the science involved. While there may well be some drugs or combinations of drugs and methods of which the anti-doping community is unaware, the science now available is both robust and reliable. The real problems are the human and political factors. There is no general appetite to undertake the effort and expense of a successful effort to deliver doping-free sport. This applies with varying degrees at the level of athletes, international sport organizations, national Olympic committees, national anti-doping organizations, and governments. It is reflected in low standards of compliance measurement, unwillingness to undertake critical analysis of the necessary requirements, unwillingness to follow-up on suspicions and information, unwillingness to share available information, and unwillingness to commit the necessary informed intelligence, effective actions, and other resources to the fight against doping in sport.”

A website and those who write for it are not the final arbiters of whether USADA has acted properly insofar as drug testing in boxing is concerned. Nor can they fully investigate USADA. But Congress and various law enforcement agencies can.

There’s an open issue as to whether USADA has become an instrument of accommodation. For an agency that tests United States Olympic athletes and receives $10 million a year from the federal government, that’s a significant issue.

Meanwhile, the presence of performance enhancing drugs in boxing cries out for action. To ensure a level playing field, a national solution with uniform national testing standards is essential. A year-round testing program is necessary. It should be a condition of being granted a boxing license in this country that any fighter is subject to blood and urine testing at any time. While logistics and cost would make mandatory testing on a broad scale impractical, unannounced spot testing could be implemented, particularly on elite fighters.

All contracts for drug testing should be filed upon execution with the Association of Boxing Commissions and the governing state athletic commission. Full tests results, not just summaries, should be disclosed immediately to the governing commission. A commission doctor should review all test results as they come in.

As the Pound Report states, “The objective is to improve the efficacy of testing procedures and other anti-doping activities, not merely to rely on having performed a certain number of tests.” Also, as recommended by the Pound Report, “CIR testing for artificial testosterone should be increased forthwith.”

Ten years ago, John Ruiz lost a 12-round decision to James Toney in a heavyweight championship fight at Madison Square Garden. Then Toney tested positive for nandrolone. The outcome of the fight was changed to no decision. Toney was suspended for 90 days, and Ruiz was reinstated as champion.

Ed Mulholland/WireImage

“The only sport in which steroids can kill someone other than the person using them is boxing,” Ruiz said afterward. “You’re stronger when you use steroids. You’re quicker and faster. If a baseball player uses steroids, he hits more home runs. So what? I’m not saying that it’s right, but you’re not putting anyone else at risk. When a fighter is juiced, it’s dangerous.”

Then Ruiz observed, “People go crazy about the effect that steroids have when a bat hits a ball. What about when a fist hits a head?”

When the sun looms over the Harvey Bear Ranch Park trailhead, the San Martin, California park, like much of the parched state, takes on the crispy brown color of a bowl of Golden Grahams. But early on a Saturday morning, the sun is resting, and Harvey Bear looks, and feels, more like a nightclub.

Headlamps bounce against the dark, and laughter bursts out from a tent containing a swarm of runners and a buffet of potato chips, energy bars, crackers with Nutella and cups of Coca-Cola. It’s chilly near the start of the Run-de-Vous, one of the hundreds of ultrarunning races that take place every year, but seven volunteers are working like the dwarves pounding packs of ice on the pavement and shuffling the broken cubes and sponges into buckets of water. They know what’s coming.

“Good morning!” the runners chirp at each other, like morning cardinals, and leading the way is Catra Corbett, who punctuates her greetings with hugs. Corbett, 50, looks dressed for the nightclub, with arm warmers in rainbow stripes, a matching skirt checkered with neon pink, yellow and purple and a silver and blue tank top with Hoka One One across the front, one of her many sponsors. It’s too early for the rays of energy Corbett’s giving off, but as first light cracks the night sky and the runners start to gather under race director Rajeev Patel, who is standing on a small ladder, Corbett’s mood is brighter than her headlamp. She’s practically giddy.

“It’s very unusual that I get to have fun in a race,” Corbett said.

“Fun,” for Corbett, means she’s only running a 50K, 31 miles. Yes, this woman is treating a race that’s five miles longer than a marathon like a casual jog with her dog. But for her, that’s exactly what it is. Corbett is a little hobbled after a 100-mile race a week ago blistered the pads of her near bulletproof feet (she has an especially gruesome story about her big toe exploding after she trimmed the nail). So she decided to make this day about Truman, who will strive as much as his tiny legs can to become the first dachshund, as far as anyone knows, to run a 50K. Catra’s there to pace him. Normally, he paces her for a good chunk of one of her long runs, which is why Truman’s attempt isn’t nearly as abusive as it sounds. Truman ran 1,300 miles in 2014. As dachshunds go, Truman, with white, lightning slashes against a thunderstorm-gray coat, is a badass.

More than 20 years ago, Corbett would have felt more at home in a nightclub than on a trail. Fun for her then meant dancing for hours a night, high on meth and cloaked in black clothes and white makeup, like a vampire. Now she looks like a punk rock fairy, a colorful sprite known for her spirit and enthusiasm.

People have been known to look at the flashy colors and the 50 tattoos and the 25 piercings and the fuchsia and purple hair, which hasn’t been its original dark brown since she was 13, and assume she’s the nightclubbing hairdresser of her old days. Far from it.

She runs at least 80 miles a week, eats 12 pounds of fruit a day with some veggies and nuts on the weekend, and has run every day for more than 1,000 days in a row. Corbett is only one of five people in the world to finish a hundred 100-mile runs (she’s done 116), and only the second woman to do so (Monica Scholz, a Canadian, is the other). This year alone she’s done three 100-mile races and a 200-miler as well. Next year, she hopes to finish the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in less than 100 days, an average of 25 miles a day. As if that isn’t enough of a challenge, during the trip, she plans to run additional ultras, until she’s also collected a 100-miler, a 50-miler and a 50K.

Running 100 miles requires a disturbing tolerance for suffering. She ran her first in Texas in 1999 without knowing that she needed to wear roomy shoes to account for her swelling feet, blistering her heels so much that a medic asked her if she planned to finish. She’s peed blood from severe dehydration more than once. The predictable misery of an unpredictable event such as a 100-miler is why she wears such bright colors. Pink is positive, she said. It lights the way like a headlamp through the inevitable dark moments of an ultramarathon.

Yet her worst night didn’t come on a course. That came before all this, in jail, when she was arrested for selling meth. That night was the “ah-ha” moment just about every addict needs to quit. Just like a number of other ultrarunners in the sport today, she found running to help her stay sober. Ultrarunning has consumed her life for 16 years, made her a social media star and, as Patel calls her, one of the icons of the sport.

Maybe that is why she feels most bonded to Truman among all the dachshunds she has owned, she said, because he was reborn through running as well. Three years ago Corbett was still mourning her dachshund, Rocky, who had died a few months before, when she received Truman, who grew up with a hoarder. She initially planned to foster him, not adopt him. He seemed to need her, and she needed him, too. The vet, given his tough situation, told her that because of his past, he would always be kind of broken. Rather than believe that, Corbett chose to bring him to Mission Peak. She set him on the ground and began to run. He began to follow her. He has since raced up it 100 times.

Every run is a nod to their rebirth. This Aug. 15 weekend, Truman and Corbett planned to celebrate together.

Addicted To Run

Corbett suggests that 50 percent of ultrarunners, at least the ones she knows, are ex-addicts of one kind or another. While that number is impossible to verify, and honestly seems a little high, ultrarunners agree that addiction fits with its extreme nature.

“You do have to have an obsessive personality to do this sport,” said George Velasco, who has run many races, crewed many others, and was running a 50-miler at Run-de-Vous.

Obsessive? Only at an ultra such as Run-De-Vous would you hear ridiculous statements such as “I’m out of shape, so I’m only doing a 50K today.” Patel, the race director who writes a blog as Rajeev the Runner, just went through a flare-up of his Crohn’s Disease, and yet even as he winced in pain, he talked about running 100 miles again one day. Velasco himself carries a stuffed Curious George in the front of his pack because he considers his addiction to ultrarunning, which has trashed his right leg, a monkey on his back.

Charlie Engle, one of the sport’s most well-known extremists, was a crack junkie who spent time in prison. Timothy Olson, who holds the course record to the Western States 100, one of ultrarunning’s most prestigious events, was a drug addict. Ben Hian, way back in the 1990s, possibly pioneered recovering from drugs through ultrarunning and won several 100-mile races. There are many others.

Bryon Powell, editor of the popular ultrarunning website iRunFar, said he gets a little weary, and wary, of pronouncements that anyone who runs an ultramarathon must either be recovering or addicted to the sport or both.

“I swear there really are normal people who do these things,” Powell said with a laugh. “Honest.”

Look at Mike Palmer, 61. He is a quiet administrative assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, and his story sounds like the millions you hear from road marathoners. He was in his 30s and realized simple things, like walking a flight of stairs left him exhausted. He remembered running cross-country in high school and started again, then did a marathon, and then another fast enough to qualify for Boston. He decided to take it further after hearing unassuming ultrarunning pioneer Dick Collins, who once ran an ultra a month for 12 years, say running a 50-miler, with its relaxed people and pace and beautiful scenery, was easier than running a marathon. Palmer has since completed 26 trail 100s. He runs for a reason that has nothing to do with any kind of personal demon.

“Let’s be honest. It’s a source of pride,” Palmer said.

But Powell also acknowledges that there are many others who need to run, and, just like his site says, run far. Rob Krar, one of the best, suffers from severe depression. Running helps him control it. Angie White is director of the Kentucky Animal Relief Fund, a rescue that exclusively takes in senior dogs, and she deals with wretched stories of mistreatment nearly every day. She runs to work off her trauma from the worst cases, and the Run-de-Vous is her fifth attempt at a 100-miler. Scientists are even studying running as a way to help calm post-traumatic stress disorder.

Powell is quiet and feeds off Corbett’s energy and her propensity for filling dead space with an endless stream of chatter. So, in a way, the sport’s ability to snag quirky folks may also be part of the allure of ultrarunning for people such as Powell. Running for hours, he meets people who are otherwise nothing like him.

“You know, I tend to think things through, like forever, and she’s very impulsive,” Powell said with a smile. “It balances me out.”

One Night in Jail

One day in the early 1990’s in Fremont, California, where she grew up, Corbett took a call for her boyfriend, a small-time dealer who sold just enough meth to keep their personal supply going. Soon after, just like a scene from “COPS,” the police came busting down their door. It was the best thing that happened to her, she said.

While working at a salon during the day and clubbing on most nights, she had started snorting meth at the behest of her friends and kept at it until some days she drove for hours trying to score. She surrendered to the drug for three years, even using after her boyfriend tried to quit, and she remembers being in her room one day and thinking how her life kind of sucked but that she was powerless to do anything about it. She thinks she was about 27, maybe 29. She isn’t quite sure.

“I just don’t remember those years that closely,” she says now.

After her arrest, she was thrown in the women’s jail with everyone else, the grandmothers and the gangsters. She was barely a woman, a girl, really, and was appalled at the ugly holding pen and scrubs, the disgusting room, and the icky, itchy, gray wool blanket they gave her. She wondered how she was going to wash her face. She realized with horror that she had cut the hair of the guy who took her mug shot.

I don’t belong here, she said aloud, to anyone who would listen, thinking of the cop who arrested her and then lied, promising her own cell.

Her boyfriend accepted the blame, and the judge, taking her job and first offense into account, let her go through diversion. She called her mother and told her about her addiction. Her mom, Corbett’s only parent after her father died when she was 17, angrily reminded her that her sister, who was bipolar, had become a heroin addict.

Her friends wondered when she was going to do drugs again, but that didn’t sound fun anymore. I don’t belong here, she thought again.

She moved away from her friends, and her old life, and decided to get a job at Whole Foods, more for the discount on produce than a paycheck. She’s still there, and has been there 16 years, now as a supervisor in the nutrition and body care department.

Corbett was already a vegetarian, something she had practiced since she was 9, when her brother informed her that her beloved bull, Charlie, was now in the freezer. Getting healthy, she said, wasn’t that far-fetched.

She went to the gym, mainly because it gave her a way to fill her life and burn off her excess energy since she wasn’t clubbing anymore. She started walking her dog three miles a day, and two years after she got clean, she decided to run the distance she usually walked.

Running was unusual for Corbett, despite her dad’s love for the sport of running: they used to watch the Boston Marathon on TV together. She finished the three miles and was proud of herself, so she looked for a 10K to run because her father loved that distance, and she wanted to honor him after his death from an unexpected heart attack at 49. Corbett, now older than her father, still misses her parents. Her mother died in 2002, and she still cries at their graves.

The 10K was tough — she wore black and ran too hard — but afterwards saw a flyer for the San Francisco marathon on her windshield. She entered and bought a book to learn how to train for it. Her first long run was supposed to be nine miles, so she drove the distance to measure it. When she finished, she was thrilled.

At the marathon, some athletic friends told her to bring a nutritional gel because she would hit a wall at mile 22. She took the gel at mile 22 and looked for a wall to appear. She never found it and finished with a solid time, a little over four hours.

, After planning to complete all the marathons in California, learned that a 50K was only six miles longer, and was introduced to trail running in her first race of that distance. She did a 50-miler that same month and her first 100-miler, the Rocky Raccoon in 1999, a couple months later.

There are many tricks to an ultramarathon that make it possible, or easier, depending on a runner’s ability. Many change their shoes several times, use duct tape to cover their blisters and eat candy, such as Kit Kat chocolate bars, before a tough climb. But Catra had no way of knowing any of those tricks at first, and there were few ways to connect with other runners before social media made it easy. These days, even someone who wants to learn how to run a 5K can download a “Couch to 5K” training plan app.

“Fuck, I knew nothing, and there was nowhere I could go for any help,” she said.

She made many mistakes, but she also fell in love.

She sticks to the ultras now because she loves running through the mountains and on trails, not on the asphalt and concrete courses of big-city marathons. And she’s found a way to stand out because Corbett does like to stand out. And not only because of the tattoos and attire.

She will wear nice clothes to work, skirts and dresses mostly, but they resemble her ultrarunning outfits in that they are usually bright and flashy, topped with a huge pink bow in her wild, curly hair. She added many of the tattoos after she got clean, and she’s thankful for that, given that she prefers pretty or childlike, almost innocent art, to the skulls and black roses she surely would have added during her goth period. A favorite tat is of Max, the character from Where the Wild Things Are, because she used to carry a stuffed toy of him in her backpack and lost it during a race. She wants a Hello Kitty making a peace sign for her next one.

Ultrarunning helps Corbett stand out in the running world because, well, she isn’t very fast, and the sport tends to reward the turtles, not the rabbits, save for the very few elites capable of winning a race. If she ran marathons, no one would probably notice her, even in her attire. Her best time in a 100-miler is a little more than 21 hours, averaging just over 5 mph, solid but unspectacular. Corbett, though, just keeps going and going, and she recovers quickly, giving her the two tools ultrarunners need to pile up the accomplishments that make her special. She holds the women’s record for completing the John Muir Trail twice, out and back, consecutively, for a total of 424 miles (she did it in 12 days). As it turns out, she figures dancing the night away and then cutting hair on her feet all day was a great way to prepare for the rigors of an ultra.

Today Corbett lives a stripped-down life, renting a room for the last five years from a grizzled ultrarunner she met while trudging her way up Mission Peak. She would like a house and hopes to move soon, but she also doesn’t really crave anything material save for more Hoka One One shoes and another cute outfit from Running Skirts, another one of her sponsors. Corbett just got a raise from Whole Foods, and her sponsors pay for gear, supplies, and an occasional race, but she can’t afford too much more in California than a spare room.

“When you’re out there, on the trail,” Corbett said, “you realize how much stuff you don’t really need.”

During Corbett’s annual review a month ago, her Whole Foods supervisor told her she was doing well, and her only complaint was that she wished Corbett worked more. Corbett asks for lots of three-day weekends so she can race. Ultrarunning is her life. She’s dating an ultrarunner, and has an ex-boyfriend who was an ultrarunner, and most of her friends are ultrarunners. Truman, her dog, is an ultrarunner. She’s happiest out there trotting on the trail with Truman and thinking how much her life has changed since she stopped doing drugs.

“I’m just thankful I’m not in that situation any longer,” Corbett said. “But I have no regrets. If I hadn’t gone through that, I would not be out here running because I needed to get healthy after all the drugs. I hated running. It’s because of that former life that made me want to have the life I have now.”

A Fair Trade?

The rapper Eminem, whose “Lose Yourself” was recently voted as the most popular running song in a Runner’s World poll, claims he ran 17 miles a day on the treadmill to beat an addiction to alcohol and painkillers, stating that his “addict’s brain” led him to get carried away with running.

“It’s easy to understand how people replace addiction with exercise,” Eminem said recently in an article for Men’s Journal. “One addiction for another, but one that’s good for them.”

Actually, many who treat addiction say Eminem is wrong, even those who emphasize exercise and sports to help others recover. Trading addictions, which is what many assume addicts do when they turn to ultrarunning or other extreme sports, does not ensure sobriety.

Todd Crandell, the founder of Racing For Recovery, an organization that promotes a healthy lifestyle and fitness to help addicts overcome substance abuse, started his nonprofit in 2001 after getting sober in 1993. Although Crandell is proud of his many accomplishments, including finishing more than 20 Ironman races, recovery, Crandell said, takes love and family and support and self-esteem. For many, it may even require belief in a higher power and a 12-step program. It requires a lifetime of work, a race that never ends.

“Even some of my own clients went back to using because they really didn’t change their lives,” Crandell said. “If they’re out riding their bikes for six hours and still missing out on life and family things, then you’re not really recovering.”

There is no doubt completing a race is a powerful drug in its own right. David Clark, a 44-year-old from Louisville, Colorado, once weighed more than 300 pounds, chugged a bottle of scotch a day and gobbled fast food and handfuls of painkillers. He now weighs 160 pounds, eats a vegan diet and has completed 29 ultramarathons. He also owns his own gym, Snap Fitness.

“You put yourself in this tough situation, and you tell yourself that you trust yourself and you won’t quit,” Clark said of ultrarunning. “For an addict, that’s an amazing thing.”

He believes in that power, and that’s why in 2011 he started the Superman project, which helps addicts reinvent themselves as athletes. When Clark was an addict, he couldn’t trust himself to quit drinking long enough to wrap his kids’ Christmas presents. Now he can rely on his internal strength to get him through Badwater, a 135-mile trudge through Death Valley, the hottest corner of the U.S.

David McNew/Getty Images

Above: A runner attempts the Badwater ultramarathon

Even Clark admits that his training can sometimes resemble his old habits, and his comment offers some insight into the attraction addicts feel toward ultrarunning.

“I have definitely been an extreme person,” Clark said. “I think when you are so extreme on the negative side, you almost have to do extremes in the positive side to balance that out.”

Yet many ultrarunners, especially the old-school veterans, have probably taken it too far, Corbett said. Velasco needs to get his leg fixed — “everything” is wrong with it, he said — but he doesn’t want to take the six months off to recover. Corbett knows of many others whose bodies are now broken in one way or another because they raced too much. Corbett herself hasn’t been hurt despite all those races, and she attributes that to strength training, her fruitarian diet and refusal to overtrain. Ultrarunning may be her life, but she does not consider it an addiction.

Clark knows the warning signs from his past life. He now looks at recovery and running independently. Running is wonderful, he said, but it’s not sobriety.

“Running interrupted the daily process of using,” Clark said, “and then it made me feel better and cleared the space to go through the spiritual work.

“The thing is, you can’t help but feel lucky when you make it out. Most people don’t.”

Come Together

Addicts who want to get sober have to give up much more than the drug itself. As Corbett did, most have to say goodbye to their friends and change their life. For many, part of the attraction to ultrarunning is the family and support they find in the ultrarunning community.

A big ultrarunning race usually includes only a few hundred participants, so they all tend to know each other, which is impossible in a race of 20,000 half-marathoners. There’s something about that smaller group, and the fact that they’re all punch-drunk, puking, and in pain, that makes participants feel like they’re all in this together.

In most races, ultrarunners need the support of a crew to fix them meals, watch over their shoes (an ultrarunner will go through several pairs in a race) and doctor their dirty feet. The crews are generally made up of other runners, who will also pace their racer in the last half, when they are typically tired, thirsty and as irritable, as a 2-year-old toddler. It’s a supportive, even loving place, exactly the kind of fellowship an addict needs to beat drugs. That may be as much of an attraction as the physical activity.

You can’t find that feel at every race. There are signs that the old-school group led by veterans such as Velasco and Palmer and Corbett are being overrun in the larger events by younger, uptight athletes coming off a background in Ironman competitions and road marathons.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this comes from the Leadville 100, one of the first and most iconic 100-mile trail runs in Colorado. More than 900 runners crowded the trail in 2013, and this year, more than 750 ran. Some in that race didn’t seem to understand the unspoken rules of the trail. There seems to be more of those people all the time.

“I was dismayed to see all the gel packets all over the trail at Angeles Crest,” Palmer said about this year’s race.

Yet there is still a different feel at ultramarathons, said Powell of iRunFar. When he ran his Hardrock race this year, he knew most of the 150 people running it with him.

At this year’s Western States 100, one of the more prestigious events, 70-year-old Gunhild Swanson was minutes from the cutoff time and less than a mile from the finish. Krar, a 100-mile win already in his legs, nevertheless ran with her the last 1.3 in flip-flops to push her to the end. She finished with six seconds to spare.

“You may not know the guy on your left is a PhD, and the guy on your right is a recovering alcoholic because honestly, you don’t care,” Powell said. “If you’re a dick, they will judge you, but it’s not about what you are or what you’re wearing. It’s a community that welcomes you with open arms.”

The Spirit Of Ultrarunning

The sun needed a little time to warm up, like an old car, but around 10 a.m., it had revved up and spread its rays across Harvey Bear at the Run-de-Vous, heating the two-mile strip of asphalt like a Hibachi grill and threatening to turn Truman into a smoked sausage. Patel, the race director, camped out at the timing mat in a chair, by a monitor that listed the runners’ times and the number of laps they had completed.

If most ultra marathons are run on trails, through forests or up mountains, the Run-de-Vous is, by comparison, a hamster’s wheel. To finish a 50K, a runner (or a badass dachshund), needed to complete a little more than 15 laps. It’s still a nice trail, but running the same loop over and over can be tough.

“Well done,” Patel said to each runner as he or she scuffled across the mat for another lap.

When Truman trotted up with Corbett, a few of the 50 volunteers, crew members and spectators cheered, mostly for Truman. Corbett, planning to pull her dog from the race by noon, paused for a selfie with him.

Not everyone likes the tattoos and the selfies and pink hair, which Corbett acknowledges.

“There’s some narcissism there,” Velasco noted with a smile.

Most ultrarunners, however, even the grizzled veterans, are willing to tolerate, or even embrace that flashy image because of what Corbett does for the sport. Her vanity, for instance, helps promote it.

She’s got deals with Ultra Gam Gaiters, Nuya Nutrition, Jem Raw Organics, Garden of Life and Beyond Meat from her numbers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and her blog, Dirt Diva. She may even be a trendsetter. When Corbett signed with Hoka One One in 2010, she didn’t like the plain white women’s shoes and spray painted them. Hoka got dozens of calls the next day from other runners who said they all wanted the shoes in the colors that Corbett was wearing. Now many running shoes, clothes and gear are draped in bright colors.

Corbett - and Truman - are two of the most popular ultrarunners in the sport. She’s managed to reach that stature without dominating races like other well-known, champion ultrarunners such as Anna Frost, who won this year’s insanely difficult Hardrock 100, Krar or Kilian Jornet, known for smashing speed records up huge mountains and holder of course records in many races, including the Hardrock.

“The world needs a figure like her,” said Velasco, who is one of Corbett’s closest friends, as he worked on another lap. “She gets a lot of people who normally wouldn’t be out here to do something like this.”

And as self-serving as Corbett appears to be, she personally does as much for the ultrarunning community as anyone. Corbett encourages anyone who passes her and has stopped many times in a 100-mile race to offer advice, or even care for, those runners who aren’t looking good (relatively, anyway), with little regard for her own time or her own misery. She crews and paces for many others, and that can take a full weekend, either running 50 miles with a hurting, cranky, sleep-deprived racer or sleeping in a van in 15-minute increments between filling bottles and making snacks. After she ran her 200-mile race, a race that took everything she had just to finish, a few days later she was out marking and setting the course for a local 50K. Corbett also lobbies Whole Foods to donate food and supplies for races.

“That’s the spirit of ultrarunning,” Patel said. “It’s not about herself. It’s really not. It’s about the community.”

White, who runs the senior dog rescue in Kentucky, turned to Corbett after attempting, and failing, four other 100-mile races. Corbett agreed to coach her and used Truman to raise money for her program. Corbett’s many followers online responded by donating more than $1,200.

“She’s one of my life heroes,” White said. “I only had to ask once.”

Addicts use support groups, churches, AA meetings, sponsors and outpatient counseling to overcome addiction, with mixed results. Ultrarunning gives Corbett, and many like her, a place to go. It feels like home, said Palmer, another close friend of Corbett despite having nothing in common with her other than running.

“You’re in another world when you’re out here,” Palmer said. “I mean, why can’t we have that in real life? Why can’t we have aid stations, where everyone knows you and cheers for you?”

He sighs.

“Instead, it’s ‘You know, you really need to work on this.’”

Frozen treats and fun with friends

By 2 p.m., the temperature spiked to 100 degrees, and all the ice the volunteers worked so hard to chop had melted. There were only the ultrarunners, those who supported them, and the determination to go another lap.

The few runners still going for 50 or 100 miles — many of them by this point had dropped down a distance — were walking, usually with towels soaked with cold water wrapped around their heads. Only White, who trained in the Kentucky humidity, and Ed Ettinghausen, who grew up in steamy Temecula, California, owns the record for running the most 100-milers in a year and likes to wear a Jester’s costume for all his races, were still running.

And then Patel, grinning madly, waved a Popsicle in front of a participant’s face. When the limping, sweaty walker realized it wasn’t a hallucination, he almost started weeping.

“Oh, my God, man,” he said. “Wow. Thanks.”

The popsicles were presents from three different ultrarunners, all who arrived within a half-hour of each other and knew exactly what the others craved.

“Awesome, guys,” Patel told the runners. “Un-fricken-believable man.”

Velasco pauses by Corbett’s chair for a break between laps for his 50-miler. Corbett, after 22 miles, had pulled Truman from the trail and was waiting for dusk to run again. She was antsy, though, and struggling with just sitting around at a race. She decided to crew Velasco a bit.

“Where are your shoes? Why are you taking off that shirt? Why aren’t you sitting down? What are you eating? What are you drinking?” Corbett started chirping. “Sit. Sit. Sit!”

“Catra,” Velasco said with exhaustion, not necessarily from the race. “Relax.”

Still, Velasco did indeed sit, and Powell, Velasco and Corbett began talking about what they usually talk about when they’re together. They talked about their peeps and past races. They laughed about the time Velasco shit his pants running up Mount Whitney, and their aches and pains, and sun poisoning and crewing bitchy runners.

Then Velasco left to do another lap and caught up to White, who was still trotting along.

Corbett stayed behind. The temperature peaked at 101, but by 6:30 p.m., it started to cool a bit. She would bring Truman back out, and as the sun began to set, he would finish his 50K. The next day, just before the 32-hour cutoff, White would finish her first 100 with Corbett by her side.

It was the least she could do. Corbett has her own pacers. When she’s struggling, as she did the week before to finish her 100, she thinks about her parents, or past dogs, running with her. But she also thinks of so many other ultrarunners who had to give it up. They are all still part of the community too.

“There are others who would give anything to still be able to do this,” Corbett said. “That’s how I make myself finish.”

That’s also why she wants it to last, and that means she needs to do her part to support it. The sun fell behind the hills, cloaking Harvey Bear’s crispy brown with darkness, and with the laughter and the twinkling headlamps, it once again looked like a nightclub, the kind that used to keep Corbett up late at night.

Corbett, still wearing the checkered skirt and pulling up her neon arm warmers, planned to stay up late, as she has many times before in both her former and current lives.

This time, in this life, she worked the aid station deep into the night, ending her fun, relaxed day serving Coca-Cola, hugs and cheers as the moon shined its light over her family and the place they all belong.

Start with his eyes. “Paul’s eyes,” Chelsea Oliver says, “instantly drew me in.” Rise from the pinewoods off Hadaway Road in Kennesaw, battle under the fiercest lights of the SEC, land in the NFL — and there’s much to see. Whole worlds. “Laser beams,” Tra Battle, Paul’s teammate with the University of Georgia and the San Diego Chargers remembers. “It’s like his eyes wouldn’t shut,” Chris Burgett, a college teammate says. Coming home late from a road game at Arkansas, Chris once woke to the whole bus snoozing, but there was Paul. Looking out the window. Dreaming in real time.

Maybe the intensity of childhood’s gaze never left him. Growing up with two big brothers, he had to pay attention. “Paul was aware,” Price, the oldest by two years, says. “Had to be,” Patrick adds. “But you could always tell exactly where Paul was at,” Chelsea says “from the look in his eyes.” So see here, now, the wide, bright eyes of Paul Oliver. Remember them. When they close, yours must open.

First Note

You end up loving so much, but first you love a voice — We hand it off to Herschel, there’s a hole. 5… 10 … 12 … He’s running over people. Oh you, Herschel Walker! — the gravel-throated, urgency lights you all up.

The voice belongs to Larry Munson from Hennepin County, Minnesota. He served as a medic in the Second World War, played piano for Sinatra. His broadcast voice was cut in Devils Lake, North Dakota.

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

Above: Star UGA running back Hershel Walker

You’re a child. You know none of this. You don’t know he got his break following Curt Gowdy on KFBC as the play-by-play voice of the Wyoming Cowboys. You’re four years old in 1980. Georgia loses just four games over the next four years. In those seasons and in that voice, you hear in his pronouns (“we,” “us,” “our,” and “them,” “they,” “these people”), a primal claim for home itself.

You’re 10 when your dad takes you to your first Georgia game (Duke, ‘86 season opener). TV simplifies football. From the stands in Sanford Stadium, the action feels distant, disconnected. Your dad, a native Hoosier, watches with Zen detachment. Sensing your confusion, he tells you to watch one player and not just the quarterback. Note the position. Study his movements. See his body language. Mark his adjustments.

So you focus on a single player. Troy Sadowski. You note the position. Tight end. You watch the pattern. And then, you move to the next. Cassius Osborn. Wide Receiver. And you repeat. Gradually, the game unfolds.

Your father claims to root for both Georgia and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. If pressed for his favorite, he’ll say, “The Atlanta Falcons.” But you remember how he tossed you in the air after Herschel went airborne against Notre Dame. You recall how he and your mother led you in breathing exercises as you wept through the final seconds of the 27-23 loss against Penn State in the ‘83 Sugar Bowl.

In the second quarter of that ho-hum ‘86 season opener, your dad takes off his headphones and places them on your head. The radio runs hot with Munson’s voice. These people are in this thing and don’t think for a moment they’ll stop coming at us.

On Sunday nights you call the Bulldog Hotline on AM750 WSB to speak with Georgia head coach Vince Dooley and Larry Munson. Munson growls and fumbles your name every time. “Let’s go to … Jerome … in Decatur. Jerome, whaddya got?”

“Coach Dooley,” your pre-pre-pubescent voice begins, “can we bring back the red road pants that Herschel wore against Tennessee?” And later: “Coach, what’s your favorite Herschel memory?” Also too: “Coach, how awesome was Herschel?”

On those Sunday nights, after Munson signs off, WSB plays Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision. You need Graham’s somnolent tones and drowsy hymns as your blood runs hot with a voice that pounds with your heart in the dark: Herschel, Georgia, Touchdown.

The Moment: All on Paul

On Nov. 25, 2006, Paul Oliver was tasked with the impossible. Stop No. 21.

The demands of his assignment stretched from the sawdust floor of Holcomb’s Barbeque in White Plains, Georgia, to the high-rise condos of Midtown Atlanta. For more than 20 years, Georgia fans had waited for the next Herschel: a transcendent talent who’d restore national glory. But Walker was gone. So we waited and winced in ‘90 as Tech claimed a national title. Through four presidents, an Olympics in Atlanta, and two wars in Iraq — we waited — weathering the rise of Tennessee and Florida’s reign. And every season, Larry Munson warned believers from Camilla’s pecan groves to Chickamauga’s cloudy peaks: there’d never be another 34.

Twenty-one wasn’t a running back. The greatest talent the Peach State had produced in a generation was a wide receiver and a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket. The mind boggled, but since his days at Sandy Creek High School in Tyrone, everything Calvin Johnson did boggled the mind. With size like Herschel, skill like Herschel, Johnson was Herschel-like, too, in his humility. After a physics-defying catch against NC State, the All-American, Biletnikoff winner, allowed himself: “I’m amazed myself at that one.” State coach Chuck Amato put it differently. “He’s got a cape and he’s got an ‘S’ on his chest.”

#8: Paul Oliver

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

#21: Calvin Johnson

Rob Tringali/Sportschrome/Getty Images

Tech soared into Athens on Johnson’s coattails at 9-2 and already 2006 ACC Coastal Division Champs. While there’s no exact phrase for the fullness of the Indian summer that greeted all of us pouring into Sanford Stadium that Saturday, get the picture: The second day after Thanksgiving. Seventy degrees. Sunshine. Treetops all fire and flame. Tech and Georgia: the 99^th year of Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate. Tech and Georgia: the 100-yard field, faded down both hashes, lined and shadowed with harvest, with consequence.

At 7-4, Georgia had already dropped games to Vanderbilt and Kentucky. In a dismal season, Paul Oliver’s emergence at corner was one of Georgia’s few bright spots. Back in October, Bulldogs fans took to AM sports radio and message boards with calls for Oliver to play both ways, like Champ Bailey years before. Oliver, a Parade High School All-American at Harrison, who’d also starred at receiver and returner, deflected the attention. “There is a lot of talent over there [on offense] and those guys are really capable of making plays,” he said. “It is just a matter of doing it.”

Doing it against 21 was up to Paul, but he wouldn’t be alone. Safety Tra Battle, a 5′10 former walk-on who’d hit and ball-hawked his way into an All-American senior captain, was one of Paul’s roommates. “Watching film that week, we saw teams doubling Calvin,” Tra remembers. “We weren’t going to do any of that. We trusted our scheme. We trusted Paul.”

Tra had reason to trust. Two weeks earlier, against fifth-ranked Auburn on the road, they had been nearly perfect and saved Georgia’s season. Tra had three interceptions, a touchdown; Paul posted a pick, a sack, and two tackles for losses. Now, they needed an encore.

Mike Zarrilli/Getty Images

“You know, I should’ve picked it.”— Tra Battle

Standing in section 109, I shielded my eyes as Tech — white tops, gold pants — swarmed the field, sun blazing off their brilliant golden helmets. Georgia countered. Storming out of the tunnel in silver britches, the Bulldogs formed a great wave of red — fire alarm red — and poured onto the field. We rose and roared.

My Bulldog date, Alice, who would later become my wife, squeezed my hand. Eric, my Bulldog buddy, put his arm on my shoulder and howled.

Toe met leather and Tech received the kickoff. On first down, Tech went deep, but Paul and Tra converged on 21. Incomplete. Tra, who yielded half-a-foot to Johnson, shot to his feet barking. Calvin and Paul jogged back silently. Battle kept jawing. “You know,” Tra says, watching the replay this summer, “I should’ve picked it.”

Over the next four hours, Tra did the talking as Paul did it all. Paul shadowed, hand-fought, and hounded Calvin Johnson and beat him on every contested ball. Johnson’s stat line for the day: two receptions, 13 yards.

“We had a wolverine on Calvin Johnson the whole game,” defensive lineman Ray Gant told reporters moments after Georgia’s 15-13 victory. “Paul Oliver played like a champion today.” Georgia’s defensive coordinator Willie Martinez said, “We put it all on Paul. To do what he did, that’s hard. That tells you what kind of player he is.”

Many of us already suspected what kind of player Paul was. The year before — 2005 — I stood in section 109 as Oliver made one of the almost great plays in Georgia history. Against Auburn that night, he was everywhere: Six tackles, two caused fumbles, a pick. With less than two minutes remaining, Georgia protected a two-point lead.

On fourth-and-10, Auburn came to the line with Georgia’s national ranking of No. 4 and Auburn’s of No. 6, in the balance. I watched Paul and Tra on the far side of the field. As Auburn’s quarterback Brandon Cox took the snap and looked downfield, Auburn receiver Devin Aromashodu found a vast expanse of green — wide open — and caught the ball. He soon shook Tra and streaked for the end zone, but a bright red blur had an angle.

As Paul gained on Aromashodu, my own neuronal lightening cast the ghost of Alabama’s George Teague yanking the ball from Miami’s Lamar Thomas in the ‘93 Sugar Bowl. While Teague rode and ripped, Paul leapt and punched and out came the ball.

The Immaculate Fumble. The oblong ball, however, would not obey and rolled out the back of the end zone. The officials huddled, awarded Auburn the ball on the 3-yard line. Milking the clock, Auburn chipped in a field goal, and celebrated. What happened to Tra? Where was Tra?

One true story is that Georgia called Cover-3 and Tra Battle peeled out in cover 2. Another true story ran online the next morning. Concussion Limited Battle. Tra sustained the brain injury in a collision with a teammate before the half. Woozy, unsettled, Tra managed to avoid detection, told trainers he was fine, and played the rest of the game.

Ten years later, at Cream & Shuga Coffee in Jefferson, Georgia, Tra Battle sits across from me at a table by the window with his 4-year-old son, Emmanuel. When I ask about Aromashadu’s catch and Paul’s leap, Tra shakes his head. The entire second half is a blank. The question Where was Tra? is a riddle even for neuroscientists. Tra was on advanced autopilot. Tra was playing zombie-ball. Tra was there, but not there.

Tra and I watch the play on YouTube more than once. “When Paul punched the ball out,” Tra says, “that’s when I woke up.” Tra leans closer and we peer into another slow motion ESPN replay of Paul Oliver catapulting through space. “Right there,” Tra sighs, “that’s when … I reappeared.”

After the game, Tra wandered the sidelines, staring at the lights. Teammates gently explained that the game was over.

But at the end of the ‘06 season, Tra’s “missed assignment” and Paul’s leaping almost-heroics from ‘05, fit neatly into a new narrative. Against Georgia’s two most historic and hated rivals, Tra Battle had earned redemption and Paul Oliver validation.

The final moment with Tech even suggested a perfect ending. With a minute left, Paul picked off the final pass intended for Johnson. Lingering on the ground, he clutched the ball to his chest. Victory, Georgia. I kissed Alice, hugged Eric, and turned to find Paul Oliver. As the stadium — 92,746 — shook, Paul lay motionless near the far sideline.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

As teammates and trainers circled Paul, the CBS broadcast crew told viewers at home that freshman Matthew Stafford, with his modest 171 yards passing and one touchdown, was The Ruby Tuesday Player of the Game. In the stands, we knew better.

Tech’s defense slinked back onto the field. Was Paul moving? Sitting up? Officials stopped the clock for the young man still on the hard earth. On the Tech sideline, Calvin Johnson stood with his hands on his hips, staring past the open west end zone to a spot on the horizon where the sun had already set.

A great ring of hands gathered Paul up and he walked off the field, recovering his breath with each step. The clock started again. Stomping, we hollered unintelligible hallelujahs into the night as Paul Oliver’s moment became our moment, his triumph, our own.

After one final knee, with time expiring, Matt Stafford turned and flung the ball up into a future where he and Calvin Johnson would team together as Detroit Lions and Paul and Tra would both be San Diego Chargers.

George Gojkovich/Getty Images

Photo courtesy Chelsea Oliver

Donald Miralle/Getty Images

In California, Paul married his college sweetheart Chelsea, a volleyball standout at UGA, and native of Southern California. They had two dogs — Dooley and Herschel. And then came the little ones, Simeon and Silas. Paul played four seasons with the Chargers, where he was converted to safety. Appearing in 57 games, he totaled four interceptions and 113 tackles, and when he became a free agent, he signed with the Saints. Paul saw the NFL much like his mother would tell him: you are a manual laborer, you work with your hands, this is your job.

Kissing Chelsea goodbye in the mornings, he’d announce, “I’m going to work.”

That work came with occupational hazards and dangers unacknowledged by his employer. In 2010, Paul sustained a concussion against the Raiders that blacked out the entire second half. He never left the field. Later, with the Saints, in a preseason game in Oxnard, Paul tackled Raider Michael Bush on the sideline, but was slow getting up.

Chelsea didn’t hear from him. Simeon was only a few a months old and Paul had been calling and Skyping multiple times a day. Now she called and texted, frantic. Finally, after two days she got a hold of him on Skype. With bloodshot eyes, Paul told her that he’d been concussed again and that he’d call soon.

His brain needed to rest. The Saints put him on injured reserve. The Chargers needed veteran help in the defensive secondary. Paul put on his pads, cleats, and helmet and went back to work in San Diego.

Paul was never the same.

That last year in San Diego, Chelsea watched Paul transform. Previously, he’d map out their days and meals — looking for places to take Dooley and Herschel, new recipes to cook, new restaurants to try. Paul had told Chelsea he had wanted to play in the NFL for 10 years. Now, he had a constant headache. Now, he came home and sank into the sofa with his iPad. Or he retreated upstairs into silence and darkness.

The 2011 season was Paul’s last in the NFL. The family stayed in San Diego another year. Paul tried to recharge. The Titans brought him in for a workout, but didn’t sign him. Physically, he couldn’t lift weights or run without the headaches, the perpetual jackhammer and icepick. In 2013, Paul packed his family up and moved back home to Kennesaw. He wanted his brothers and his mother to know his family. He knew he was taking Chelsea away from hers, so he began a mission to convince her brother Garrett to move to Georgia, too. Paul surrounded himself and Chelsea with a network of family and best friends so they could begin their next chapter.

That chapter back in Georgia would be brief: While Chelsea coached high school volleyball, Paul stayed home, a dad. He’d taken care of his NFL money and talked to Price about opening a turnkey company (“Prestige”) as owner and general contractor. Using Price’s knowledge in residence management and maintenance and his father-in-law’s experience in general contracting, Paul saw potential. Coaching, too, was an option. Both Price and Patrick coached in the Cobb County youth football league. From the outside, Paul had options, connections, resources, futures to choose. But in his every waking moment, his brain was betraying him.

You know this story, even if you don’t know Paul’s story. From years of football, Paul had sustained repeated blows to the head. Season after season, the avalanche of these hits cascaded into microscopic neurological protein deposits known as tau. These proteins wrapped and tangled around brain vessels and cells as part of the progressive, neurological disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) a progressive degenerative disease of the brain caused by repetitive trauma. Robbing reason, stealing the keys to mood, ransacking memory, CTE erases the very essence of what allows for a human being.

Yet, he was still Paul. Sure, he kept asking Price and Patrick for recommendations on garage door openers. Yes, he told his best friend Andy he didn’t feel quite right. But do you repeat yourself? Lose things? Sometimes, inexplicably, feel off? Paul remained the undisputed champ of every backyard barbecue, the cookout king, master of the grill. Smiling as he handed you your plate, Paul asked you about your dog, your job, your day.

Back home, exhausted, Paul unraveled. He blew up at Chelsea: shoving her, kicking her, pulling her hair. Before, he rarely raised his voice and never his hands. The next day, he’d apologize as if it had all been a bad dream. “Something’s wrong with me,” he said, “I can’t control myself.” Paul pleaded — the next time he fell apart Chelsea should repeat the names of their sons. “Just say Simeon and Silas,” Paul said, “until I snap out of it.”

Did it work?

“No,” Chelsea says. “Well, at first. The first few times it did.”

On Sept. 17, 2013 Paul sat across from Chelsea’s father, Jeff Young, at the dining room table in the ranch home where Chelsea grew up in Fountain Valley, California. They drank wine and talked into the night. Paul was in Orange County for a full-body scan from the neck down. The receipt for glory? A double hip replacement by age 40; severely impaired shoulders; two Achilles hanging by threads; two swollen hands buckshot with bone chips. He was 29 years old. Two weeks later doctors planned to conduct neurological tests and a brain scan.

Jeff poured them both another glass and asked Paul how he even managed get around. Paul smiled and shook his head. What he really wanted to know about was his brain. Paul told Jeff his memory was slipping. Sometimes he’d walk into rooms without knowing why. At the grocery store, he’d turn down an aisle and just stare. He rarely left the home.

“Something,” Paul said, “is going on with my brain.”

They discussed the return trip: Paul and Chelsea and the boys would stay with Jeff. Chelsea would see her two brothers and sister. Simeon and Silas would play with their cousins at the beach. And Paul would receive a full-battery of neurological testing.

Before Paul left, per custom, Jeff wrapped him in a bear hug. In Georgia you might shake hands, Jeff warned Paul early on, but in California we hug.

Seven days later, on Sept. 24, 2013, 11 years to the day of Mike Webster’s death, Paul Oliver woke to a world he could no longer recognize or sort. “That morning,” Chelsea says, “his eyes were almost completely glazed over.”

They argued that afternoon. Paul railed about dirty dishes in the sink, but the sink was empty. Into the evening, he raged. Patrick was on his way to the house, but Paul called and told him not to come over. Chelsea said she was leaving the house with the boys. Paul hopped over the baby gate and climbed the stairs to their bedroom. He went to the dresser and grabbed a recently purchased handgun. Standing atop the landing, with Chelsea looking up, Paul pointed the gun to his head.

No one wants to hear what happens next. And I don’t want to tell it. The moment requires both facing and turning away. But even in turning, maybe we can recover a measure of what’s owed Paul Oliver while doing some basic cost accounting with the game we love.

The day after, Jeff and Garrett Young flew a red-eye from California into Atlanta. Garett and Paul’s Uncle David first entered the quiet and empty home. Their instructions were clear: one high chair, the clean clothesbasket in the laundry room, and two sippy cups.

Love Note: October 1996

When did you realize you loved it in a way you couldn’t love anything else? Maybe you were in Bryant-Denny Stadium on the fourth Saturday of October 1996. Alabama is up 13-0, but Peyton — squinting hard through a driving rain — has Tennessee on the march.

As sheets of rain fall on Manning and the 100,000 souls in every possible shade of orange poncho in Knoxville, you sit bone-dry and alone in Tuscaloosa.

Lance King/Replay Photos via Getty Images

You’re a college sophomore and member of the Speech and Debate team. You’ve been eliminated from each event after round one at the University of Alabama Invitational. The judges let you know the score. Style: too conversational, too casual. Argumentation: grandiose, hyperbolic. Eliminate the personal pronoun. Hands out of pockets. Tighten your tie. No suit? You’re 20; you write bad poetry. You like to think yourself as a seer of secret truths, a lyrical stylist. You don’t own a suit.

Exiled, you wander the deserted quad, under the shade of magnolias. Strolling past Denny Chimes, the campanile tower, you stand at the entrance of Foster Auditorium where George Wallace shrieked against the “unwelcomed, unwanted, and unwarranted.”

In the lobby of a student center, you find the game on a TV. A semi-circle of old folks in wheelchairs, all white, huddle in front of the muted large-screen. Each senior citizen holds matching gray stuffed elephants in Crimson Tide sweaters. Two black nurses, in starched white, keep an eye on the drips and oxygen tanks. Are they alumni? Did they watch Namath and Stabler? Does superstition anchor them here?

You could ask, but that would break the spell with words.

One nurse bites her nails on third downs as the other leafs through a magazine. The old folks, clutching their stuffed dolls, shake their heads as Peyton busies himself with being Peyton: the dutiful honor student, ruthlessly efficient, somehow joyless.

You decide for some fresh air.

The sign on the chain-linked gate clearly defines trespassing as a criminal offense, but if the city fathers truly mean it, would the 15-foot fence be so climbable?

Crows line the stadium’s upper deck. Pigeons hunt between the bleachers. Stray crimson streamers stick to the concrete, plastered by bourbon and Coke. In Knoxville, along the banks of the Tennessee River, the fourth quarter begins, but in Tuscaloosa, inside the enormous silence, you dream of kickoffs.

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Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

“It’s all in the balance,” Faulkner writes in Intruder in the Dust, “it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun.” While Faulkner was imagining Pickett’s charge, for future generations those fields were 100 yards long. Before playing Yale in 1910, Vanderbilt coach Dan McGugin told his team, “It is the South versus the North, Confederate against Yankee. Remember the campfires of your fathers and forefathers.” On the road, teams like Virginia wore gray. When Ohio State went south to play Auburn in 1917, The Birmingham News noted: “(The) game will be fought in the proud shadow of the Confederacy, and the grandfathers of these southern boys … were the men that hurled back those Yankee invaders.” After VMI defeated Penn in Philadelphia in 1922, the VMI band struck up “Dixie” and soon the tradition spread throughout the South.

If college players were mock soldiers, the original soldiers had fans too. Before the First Battle of Bull Run, Union Captain John Tidball noted the gathering crowd:

They came in all manner of ways, some in stylish carriages, others in city hacks … everybody seemed to have taken a general holiday … All manner of people were represented in this crowd, from the most grave and noble senators to hotel waiters.

While the D.C. crowd cheered for the North, they were rooting for the grandeur of the contest, something ancient. William Howard Russell, London Times, notes:

The spectators were all excited, and a lady with an opera glass who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood — ”That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate?”

Those Civil War tailgates couldn’t last through the slaughter that followed. Demure eyes turned from the terror and prayed. There would be no picnics at the Hornet’s Nest in Shiloh, the wall at Fredericksburg, or Fort Pillow and Donaldson. Home fronts vanished into front lines. Farms and fields flipped overnight into amputation tents and mass graves. Southerners sought safety from the horror, and if all we’d known was pillage, plunder and the perpetual whip, we lit out for a point behind the blue lines toward freedom.

Afterward, we held no Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, no public forums in schools and churches to air our grievances and sort responsibility. We burned the churches and schools and reaped the coals and ashes. And in time, we erected high school altars and college coliseums as staging grounds for some irrecoverable violence.

Oh, but what grounds! Start in the Carolina Lowcountry and Summerville High, where rice once ruled. Ride west along the Black Belt, where flesh was flayed for short crop cotton on the plains of Valdosta, home of the Wildcats, 23-time Georgia State champs. Dip south into the everglades, into Pahokee, into the Muck Bowl. Scoop the deep dark loam that yielded so much torture and sugar. Go west, past Birmingham’s furnaces, over Red Mountain, through the bluffs of Natchez, and across that big brown river. Tap the brakes as you enter the villages and hamlets of Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas.

Under those autumn lights, roars go up for young men who take the field in the singular and furious name of something we can’t fully fathom.

This frenzy crests in stadiums throughout the SEC. Take measure on a Saturday night in Tiger Stadium, late in quarter four, in the Valley marked Death. Mark the trembling the earth. Stand in Jordan-Hare as the golden war eagle circles the field with sunlight clipping its wings. Note the crack at your chest. Hear — at Georgia — the lone trumpeter in the upper deck of the south stands split the silence before kickoff with the first seven notes of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Keep one eye dry. At least try.

Steve Franz/LSU/Collegiate Images/ Getty Images

The thunderclap of the SEC isn’t rooted in dusty echoes of New York press box scribes. Our pageantry isn’t a tournament of roses. Antique jugs, axes, and wooden buckets are not our prizes. Instead, crackling through the sonic southern nights is the leftover voltage from our American Civil War — agony, fury, and jubilee.

Before you leave, you know you must. As the sun sets, you walk onto the field and pace the sideline. The moment requires words, but they have to be earned. Unsure of which acreage he stalked, you march across the 50, and patrol the western sideline too. Under an almost crimson sky, with your hands in your pockets, you say: Bear. Sugar. Sugar Bowl. Sugar Bear. Paul Bear.

Pallbearer. Football.

Behind The Wheel

Price Oliver accelerated through traffic and missed his turn. Damn, he thought. He’d driven the route countless times. On the night his youngest brother died, Price got a call from Patrick giving him the news. Price thought Patrick and Paul were pulling a prank. Not funny, Price said. Patrick said he wasn’t joking and to get to Paul’s house now. Price hung up and hit the gas. Not funny fellas.

Photo courtesy Price Oliver

Left-right: Patrick, Paul and Price Oliver

The Oliver brothers had recently lost both their grandfather, Simeon Scandrett, the family patriarch, and their Uncle Peter. The boys’ own father was out of the picture, but they had father figures, in their uncles and grandfather, next door in Kennesaw off Hadaway Road. The land sat a few miles from Kennesaw Mountain, where Sherman clashed with Confederate forces. Simeon had cut trails through the pine-studded acreage with a Bobcat bulldozer, connecting the three family homes. The Oliver brothers fished, chased dogs, played extra-extra inning baseball with cousins, ran from dogs, scrambled up trees, built intricate forts, fought pinecone wars, and for a long time didn’t know that they were poor.

Price called Paul’s cell. No answer. He missed a turn, cursed, tried Paul again and again, voicemail. Seriously guys?C’mon.

When the water was shut off, they hiked in shifts to Simeon’s house with buckets. When the electricity was cut, Simeon supplied flashlights and candles. When the random pickup stopped in the cover of night on Hadaway — with its passengers spilling out squealing nigger this nigger that while wielding baseball bats to the family mailbox — Simeon Scandrett, a Korean War vet, made sure the box was back up by morning. He instructed his grandsons that when they got the mail to bring the mailbox up, too. And in the mornings, before the school bus arrived, Price, Patrick or Paul would carry the mailbox from the porch back down the drive and plant it into the red soil under a hard rising sun.

A joke like this constituted a genuine brotherly tiff. Price would have to punch both kid brothers square in the chest, without word or warning.

He first spotted the parked police cars, the crime investigation van, the quiet, and then Price knew what he already knew: you don’t joke around about something like this.

“Bald Head is gone,” the late night text read. “I think he took his own life.” The message, from former Georgia teammate Mario Raley, sent Chris Burgett outside and under the stars. His first thoughts went to Chelsea and the boys. And then he thought of his old roommate. As one of the best high school running backs in Georgia in 1999, Chris had lead Chattahoochee over Paul’s Harrison team in the playoffs. At Georgia, Chris switched to the defensive secondary and formed a bond with Paul. They’d spent late nights in their dorm solving the problems of the world, bumping music, and casting their own futures. Chris had a million questions, but one took hold and would not let go: why?

Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Above: UGA coach Mark Richt

The night after Paul Oliver died, Georgia coach Mark Richt received a late call. The voice was indistinct. The caller choked back tears. It took Richt a few minutes to hear the words of his former captain. Tra Battle had been driving all day up and down the back roads between Athens and Jefferson in northeast Georgia. He’d parked his car on the bridge of the Bear Creek Reservoir, a few feet from the water. Occasionally, he’d thought of suicide during his depression once his playing days were over. Now, Tra told his former coach he was scared. He told Richt he wasn’t sure all of what Paul was going through, but he felt he was going to do the same.

“I kept trying to rationalize why. Initially, I assumed he was going through the same thing as me. Maybe he felt as I felt emotionally,” Tra tells me. “By the point I got to Bear Creek I felt, maybe this is the way, maybe this is what should happened, maybe this is how I end the problems.”

Richt told Tra to come to his house right away.

That same evening, Hall of Fame linebacker Harry Carson gave a talk in Boston for an advance screening of the PBS Frontline documentary, League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis. After the showing, Carson fielded questions. One of the very first questions was about Paul Oliver.

Carson connected Oliver’s death to blows to the head sustained in football. Here Carson spoke from experience. Drafted in 1976, Carson found that by 1981 he would become unexpectedly depressed and suicidal. He had to resist the urge to drive his car off the Tappan Zee Bridge and into the Hudson River. Carson noted other changes too: a slower memory, delayed speech. He filed these feelings away and played seven more seasons. After retiring, he was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome.

I asked Harry Carson over the phone in the summer of 2015, why he spoke out that night about Paul Oliver. “I’ve been speaking out for some time because I know that there are players out there who are suffering. I want them to know that they are not alone.”

Football players, by nature, feel the need for stoicism. But there is a tipping point, according to Carson, where strength becomes weakness. “Most of us are not aware of what we experience neurologically. We are trained, sometimes overtly, to not be vulnerable or admit to pain. Suck it up. Don’t cry.”

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Above: HOF linebacker Harry Carson plays against the Dallas Cowboys

League of Denial, which debuted on PBS two weeks after Paul died, depicts the discovery of CTE by Dr. Bennet Omalu and Mike Webster’s horrific demise caused by the disease. During his decline, a consulting doctor asked Webster if he’d ever been in a car accident? “Oh,” Webster said in a humor that betrayed his condition, “probably about 25,000 times or so.”

According to Stefan Duma, a professor at Virginia Tech, who has been studying the G-forces in football collisions since 2004, this number of 25,000 is actually “highly probable.” Duma also notes that not all car crashes are created equal. Some are mere fender benders and most football hits register somewhere on the car crash rank of 20-30 G-forces. Concussions are believed to occur at 90 G and above. However, recent studies by Professor Eric Nauman and his team at Purdue University have revealed that it is precisely these repetitive lower end collisions, where concussions aren’t even registered, that can most dramatically impact and alter the integrity of a brain. The impact is cumulative. The damage is done in doses.

An automobile is designed to absorb impact — the “crumple zones” absorb energy, protecting the driver and passengers. A football helmet, a hard plastic encasing, prevents skull fractures and rarely cracks, but it does not absorb the energy to protect the brain. In the course of any game, where up to 22 individual car wrecks can occur on a single play, no helmet can’t stop the human brain for sloshing and slamming into the skull. And one major symptom from this brain trauma — that almost took Harry Carson over the Tappan Zee Bridge and perhaps drove Tra to the edge of Bear Creek — are ideations of suicide.

While Carson managed to steady the wheel, for others it turns. Former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman Justin Strzelczyk weaved through on-coming traffic at 100 mph, heading the wrong way on I-90 in central New York, before colliding with a diesel tanker. The plume of smoke was spotted a mile away. In Charlotte, Chris Henry, a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals, stood in the bed of a speeding bright yellow F-150, arguing with the driver, his fiancé, before falling to his death on Oakdale Road. Two years before his death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau, headed south on Carlsbad Boulevard in southern California and hurled his silver Escalade over a guardrail, down a rocky cliff, and toward the morning surf.

Strzelcyk died in 2004; Henry in 2009; Seau in 2012. All had CTE.

Paul Oliver had been dead one week when I passed out copies of James Wright’s poem “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio” to my first period high school writing students in Arvada, Colorado on October 1, 2013.

For 15 years, I’ve handed out copies of Wright’s poem during the first week of October. The poem depicts fathers in eastern Ohio working unforgiving jobs while their wives sink under the weight of loneliness. Together, though, they share football, the love of their sons.

That October morning, I stood in front of a room of teenagers, gazing at the words I knew by heart, unable to read. My job is to read — the students write — together we discuss. I stared at the lines, stumbled, and stopped. A hard pause. Sorry guys. A hand in the back. Yes? A volunteer. Thank you. A student finished the last stanza I could not start:

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October

And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

Tragedy would not follow tragedy that night at Bear Creek Reservoir. Tra Battle put his car in reverse and drove to Richt’s home. When Georgia took the field against No. 6 ranked LSU days later in Athens, the team wore black stickers on the back of the helmet. “PO.”

Chris Burgett stared at the ceiling and remembered how he and Tra had to joke around in practice to get Paul to smile. When the pads were on, Paul was all business. Off the field, even years later, Paul remained the humble guy who Chris counted as a brother. Even in the NFL, Paul’s close friends were teammates like Mike Tolbert, who could count on one hand how many stoplights were in their hometown. Chris remembered something else too: he and Paul had promised each other when they were roommates at Georgia that they would start a foundation one day to educate and empower children. Both had been raised in affluent north metro Atlanta suburbs — Kennesaw and Alpharetta — as black kids in a white sea. They wanted to give back. They also figured they had time to chart that course.

Hours after Paul Oliver died, Price Oliver parked his pickup as his brother Patrick rounded the corner from the driveway. Price was a sprinter in high school. He held the Harrison High School record in 100 meters for more than a decade and still holds the record for 200 meters. Patrick, a state finalist his senior year for powerlifting — bench pressing 315, squatting 415, deadlifting 450 — opened his large arms and embraced his brother. Without a word, they wept. Paul, their “little big brother” had Price’s speed and Patrick’s strength and a style that was his own. The three had always moved as one, but as Price and Patrick gathered themselves and walked to Chelsea and the boys, they took their first steps into a world unknown.

Georgia played the 2013 season with the PO stickers on the back of the helmet, but in 2014 the stickers were gone. My questions remained and ran through October, into the holy wars of November, and beyond bowl season. So in the summer of ‘15, I packed my car and headed to Georgia. The highlights and victories — were they the sum of my bargain with Paul Oliver? What are the limits and terms between player and fan? Was I not entertained?

Camp: June 12, 2015

The first whistle blows at 9 a.m. — 50 high school kids from Metro Atlanta stretch and warm-up. Their cadence, clapping, and calisthenics echo through the fog and mist hugging the pines that surround Cobleigh Field at Harrison High School.

Legions of American high school football players this morning are doing the same. But these players at the Paul Oliver Football and Life Skills Camp might be the first to attend a camp whose goal is to not only improve their skills, but to raise awareness of CTE.

The white and black kids self-segregate into straight lines. Each wears a camp T-shirt with Paul’s No. 27 on the back. Counselors and coaches — former University of Georgia, and Harrison teammates and opponents — stroll down the lines, including Patrick and Price Oliver.

During his senior year, Patrick teamed with Paul in his transcendent junior season. Too amped to sit still, Price had to watch alone as his little brothers perfected moves they first mastered on Hadaway against each other. Price, who now works as a maintenance supervisor at Camden Properties, and Patrick, who works for Coca-Cola, haven’t stepped on this field in ages. Both smile as the sun bears down on the kids clapping and chanting.

Strolling through the lines of campers, twirling a whistle, walks Chris Burgett. The more Chris read after Paul died, the less he slept. The less he slept, the more he read. Could playing football result in brain damage? When the link between Paul and CTE was confirmed, Chris reached out to Chelsea. Together, they formed The Oliver Tree Foundation: a non-profit organization to empower young athletes and promote awareness about CTE. Chris knew Paul would spear a foundation; he didn’t expect the work of that foundation to be done without Paul.

High up in the stands is a solitary figure, a woman in a white blouse and blue pants. She sips from a Dasani water bottle. It’s unclear if she’s smiling or squinting from the sun. As a whistle blows and the camp divides into stations, Price walks closer and says:

“That’s mom. That’s where she always sat. And she never missed a game.”

Dorsey Levens, the longtime Green Bay Packer and former Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket, stands by the track, watching football without the pop, thud, or crack from helmets or pads. Levens, who has made a documentary Bell Rung on concussions and CTE, is the camp’s keynote speaker.

As Levens watches, I ask if he feels the paradox.

“Totally,” he says, without me having to unpack the particular paradox.

“Every time I step onto a football field I feel it.”

Later, as we talk on the phone, Levens explains. He watches the sport, follows it closely, even plays fantasy football, but it’s not the same.

“I watch the game differently now,” he says.

How so?

“I cringe a lot more.”

As the campers take a knee and gather around, Dorsey Levens tells a basketball story. During his junior year, in the New York High School State Championship, he missed a critical late free throw. He decided the next summer he’d do whatever it took to be in the best shape possible. So he woke up early and lifted. In the afternoons, he ran. He shot free throws and jumped rope into the night.

“I made a choice to be different. How many of you have made the choice to be different?”

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“I watch the game differently now … I cringe a lot more” — Dorsey Levens

Levens’ message is boilerplate sports camp, but his presence commands attention. As he speaks, I realize I’m nodding along and then notice other coaches doing the same. Levens has a second message for the campers. “The sport you’re playing is violent, OK? You must be aware of all sorts of things. But first and foremost be aware of your own health. Especially your brain. Pay attention to your head.”

He tells the group that when they see stars, experience fogginess, or get their ‘bell rung’ that means, “You’ve had a concussion. Get off the field. Tell a coach.”

The scenario he describes feels at odds with the basic DNA of football. A high school pulling guard, perfectly and violent executes a block, but feels woozy, dinged, and instead of going back to the huddle, jogs to the sideline? A coach greets him with a series of questions that do not belittle his toughness, patriotism, or the legitimacy of his birth, but gauge his baseline neurological functioning?

Yes. If football is to have a future, such conversations might be required.

When I ask Levens, a veteran of 11 NFL seasons, if he thinks he might have CTE, he doesn’t hesitate: “I think we all do. All of us who played at a high level. We have some form of it.” He knows a former teammate who has just recently been diagnosed with dementia and a prominent former player who spends days inside with the lights out, ‘Going Dark.’ When I ask Levens if his son will play someday, he says, “No way. My child will not step onto a football field.” He walks that back a bit and measures his words: “Let’s put it this way. Should it come up, it would be a very, very careful conversation.”

As he wraps up with the campers under a scorching sun, the kids close out and head for lunch. Coaches get in line with their phones to pose for pictures. Levens smiles, accommodates, and makes sure he speaks with Patrick, Price, Chris and Mrs. Oliver.

Lunch is the staple of every Metro Atlanta sports camp for decades: soggy Chick-fil-A Chicken sandwiches (two pickles) with bottled water. The groups of black and white now blur: some sit together and complain about the pickles or Algebra II; others gossip about girls; some rag each other about their shoes; others quote Drake lyrics back and forth.

The whistle blows and the collective groan goes up. “Seven-on-seven,” a coach calls out.

A bank of clouds block the sun and a drizzle starts. Perfect weather for a camper, not so for an English teacher or a mom in the bleachers. I move to the sideline where Janice Oliver now stands. When the rain picks up, we both head for cover.

As a single mom, who managed a day care, raised three boys, and took night classes for ten years at Kennesaw State University to complete her degree, Janice Oliver does not suffer foolishness. These days, she works for the state in helping implement and ensure delivery of the HOPE Scholarship at universities and college throughout Georgia.

We talk education policy, the pleasures and perils of teaching, and before long our talk turns to Paul. She shares what many will tell me on this day: they didn’t see it coming.

Days before he died, Janice watched Paul put Simeon, age 2, in a timeout. Simeon protested. Paul gently put him back. Simeon tried to escape. Paul, even more patiently, redirected. Simeon asked for his truck, but Paul explained timeout was for thinking about his actions.

“Paul was a good father,” Janice says. “And he loved those boys.”

Laughter from the field is punctuated with shouts. The sun is shining and rain is pouring: a Georgia monsoon. One seven-on-seven game is quarterbacked by Derrick Tinsley, a former star running back at Marietta High School and later with Tennessee. Mario Raley, from Independence High School in Charlotte and a former Georgia receiver, leads the other.

I ask Janice if she saw any other signs in Paul when they moved to Georgia.

“You replay events. You wish you’d known. You wish you could go back and help.”

The rain echoes against the bleachers hard and loud.

“But Mrs. Oliver,” I say, “Paul had an aggressive neurological disease. His brain was damaged. What could anyone have done?”

“Can I ask you a question, Mr. Collins?” Janice says.

I tell her she can.

“Are you a parent?”

I tell her I am. Two little girls. Rose and Grace: ages 3 and 8 months.

“Then you know what goes into loving a child,” she says.

Another celebratory whistle blows — three short blasts — touchdown Team Tinsley.

“So you can imagine,” she says.

My imagination reaches for the unimaginable.

Janice Oliver then turns, faces me, and lowers her sunglasses to the bridge of her nose.

“The pain is always and the responsibility is forever,” she says.

When Georgia kicks off months later against Louisiana-Monroe, I’ll hear those words. Later that night when Alabama battles Wisconsin, I’ll hear Janice Oliver’s voice when Badgers safety Michael Caputo takes a routine knee to the helmet. Dazed, Caputo lines up in the Alabama huddle until a Crimson Tide lineman calls to the bench. Wisconsin trainers guide Caputo off the field and away from the fury.

I will hear those words.

The rain lifts and the waves of humidity rise higher. The field radiates its own heat and seems to shiver like an oasis, a mirage.

Paul’s Uncle David Scandrett, who played linebacker at Tennessee, pays a visit. So do former Bulldogs Sean Jones, a safety with the Cleveland Browns, and Fernando Velasco, an offensive lineman with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Tennessee Titans. Other former UGA players BJ Albert and Patrick Croffie shout encouragement. Each player at the camp serves as a reminder — just as every smoker won’t develop cancer and not every boxer will get punch drunk, not every football players will not wage an invisible battle with CTE.

But enough will. And the more one plays, as the hits pile up, so do the odds. According to a recent Frontline report, 96 percent of NFL players examined and 79 percent of all football players who played at the high school level and above have CTE. And as national authors and prominent bloggers announce they’re against football and wash their hands of the gladiatorial blood sport, America’s children continue to play. “We are not advocating the end of American Football, but we are advocating the beginning of open communication about brain injury,” Chris Burgett will tell me in an email later. “We have become advocates to communicate how contact sports can potentially affect an athlete’s health and mental well being from a long-term perspective. There are too many ties between high profile football players and depression, brain injury, and suicide to turn a blind eye.”

When the final whistle blows, Mrs. Oliver comes to the field. The campers — black, white, linemen, skill positions, soaked, stinking and smiling — pass Janice Oliver as she leans against the fence. She’s smiling, too.

The coaches banter and trade barbs from their own glory days at midfield. When Janice approaches, the group goes quiet. Some remove their hats. In the front, they take a knee and everyone forms a semi-circle around Janice Oliver.

“Today was a good day,” she says, “and I want to thank you all for making this special.”

The coaches line up to hug Janice and thank her. Everyone poses for pictures. They all promise to do it next year. Word will spread. The camp will grow. And then the coaches, former teammates and opponents, say goodbye. Life is rarely simple. That’s one reason we need sports. Sports simplify. And the scene at the end of this camp is unmistakable: a grieving mother and her two sons walk off a football field, alone together, missing one.

A week after the camp, I sit in the living room of Andy Elliot’s home in Marietta. Andy was an offensive lineman, a counselor at the camp, and Paul’s best friend. When Paul and Chelsea moved back to Georgia, Andy and his wife Ashley’s back porch was their favorite spot. Paul and Chelsea were looking to buy a house down the street.

Above: Andy Elliot(l) with Patrick and Price Oliver

Often both wives stared as their husbands spoke a language that was all their own, one they perfected in long silences of high school and college, when they’d disappear for days to fish. They grilled whatever they caught along with Po’ Boy Sausages while listening to Nas, Outkast and Pastor Troy.

After Paul died, Chelsea and the boys stayed with Andy and Ashley before they left for California. Getting Simeon ready in the mornings was a challenge. Those duties had been Paul’s. Paul loved spoiling Simeon with candy. To try and maintain a sense of normalcy, everyone made sure Simeon got Kit-Kat candy bars.

“Just a few weeks ago,” Andy says, smiling, “we found a wrapper under the sofa. And then another by the blinds.”

On that October morning in 2013 when Chelsea and the boys drove off with Janice for the Atlanta airport, Andy buckled Simeon into his car seat. “Simeon looked at me with those big eyes … and there was Paul,” Andy says, before his words break off.

Later, I confess that I struggle with the paradox of watching football after knowing what happened to Paul. Andy nods.

“Look, Paul was more than football,” he says. “We didn’t even talk football. We talked about our lives. We talked fishing and music. That day of camp was great, it meant a lot to see everyone, but it’s hard. It’s hard to be around the game.”

Leaving Andy’s house, I drive toward Kennesaw Memorial Park, getting turned around more than once, before pulling into the open gates. Patrick and Price told me where Paul was buried, but Price warned: “You can go there, but Paul isn’t there. Paul is wherever there’s a kid chasing a ball or running from a dog. Paul is with us in the woods as we swap stories. Paul is with those boys right now in California.”

I read the names of strangers. I don’t know a soul buried here. I used to root for one, but as I’m learning, I barely knew him at all. Andy’s statement There was more to Paul bounces against truisms told around tailgates and televisions: It’s only a game, but it’s the only game. And: Football is not a matter of life and death: it’s more important than that.

Up and down the rows of graves in the sweltering midday sun, I keep an unofficial scoreboard. I count: two plastic Mother Marys, one star of David, two ceramic angels, one model car, several deflated balloons, dozens of faded plastic flowers, and three Georgia Bulldog flags. Go Dawgs.

The red and black banners sway in an afternoon breeze that brings neither comfort nor relief.

Grace Note: January 2001

Georgia head coach Mark Richt walks into the Ramsey Student Center in a black leather BCS coat, followed by his newly minted coaching staff. It’s his first Monday on the job.

You do what any self-respecting Georgia fan would. It might be the first day of classes, but there’s plenty of time for introductions. You walk up and offer your hand. He takes it. And then you place your other hand on top of his. It’s probably not the first time he’s been stopped that morning. Probably too not the first time he finds himself praying with a stranger about the program he’d inherited.

“Prayer” might not best capture the tone and content of your exchange. You don’t bow your head or close your eyes. Neither does he. It’s unclear, exactly, what mutual deity you’re petitioning. In Richt’s eyes, you don’t detect motions of the Holy Spirit, but you do catch possible hints and hues of Tom Landry’s cobalt blues.

Scott Cunningham/Getty Images

You don’t say: Sweet God, Coach, this state produces more SEC players than any other. Close the borders. Recruit Rome, Tifton, Austell, Villa Rica, Warner Robins; seal off Stone Mountain, Tucker and all of Metro Atlanta. Shut the state down.

Coach, you don’t whisper, if you can stomach it, watch last season’s Tech film. We had 11 NFL players on defense as Tech quarterback George Godsey — who runs a sub-6 40 — donkey-trotted 33 yards down the sideline untouched.

Coach, you don’t explain, on a dark night in ‘99, we spotted Auburn 38points and allowed the very pedestrian Leard to Daniels combo look like Montana to Rice Reincarnated. No adjustments, no attitude, nothing. Losing happens, you don’t say. Some things you can’t control, but Coach Richt, for the love of God, compete.

Instead, you recite, word for word, The Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Then, instead of Amen, you offer, “Coach, welcome to Georgia. There’s work to be done.”

“Well, thank you,” Richt says, your hands still clasped, “We’ll do our best. No one will be working harder.”

Coachspeak, of course. Cliché, sure. Every coach gets hamstrung by the lexicon.

The difference? On that gray morning, as you walk away from Coach Richt, whose record stands at 0-0, you believe every word.

The Good Coach

Entering his 15^th season, Mark Richt (136-48 .739) stands as Dean of SEC coaches. His Georgia teams have played for six SEC titles, claiming two. During Richt’s tenure, Spurrier has left a Gator, returned a Gamecock; Saban has pulled a wide U-Turn too; rivals Florida, Auburn and Tennessee have turned over eight different coaching regimes.

And now, Richt is kind enough to not confess forgetting our first meeting.

“Wow,” he says, “that sure was a long time ago.”

The main wall of Richt’s office is covered with Governor cups, given for each of his 12 victories over Tech. He runs a clean program and a clean office. After our talk at an adjacent table, he applies Windex and terry cloth to the prints left by yours truly.

“I’m kind of clean freak,” he says, almost apologetically.

Richt gets brandished in some circles with “not winning the big one” label. Such critiques forget that Georgia’s own Vince Dooley needed 17 years before he won a National Championship. Or that Bobby Bowden took 18 years and Tom Osborne 19.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Richt is also known for his outspoken Christian faith and his family’s adoption in 1999 of two toddlers — Anya and Zach — from Ukraine.

The night after Paul died, when Tra pulled up into Richt’s driveway, a collection of former teammates who played with both Paul and Tra greeted their former captain. Richt called them, along with the team chaplain, in advance. Richt and Tra, who grew up the son of a pastor prayed late into the night.

That Saturday, Georgia defeated LSU in a raucous 44-41 battle of Top 10 Teams.

Four days later, Richt took his seat at Burnt Hickory Baptist Church in Kennesaw. After Paul’s funeral, the family held a private burial at Kennesaw Memorial Cemetery.

“The hearse drove off and we were all kind of standing there,” Richt says, “and there were probably 30 to 50 former Georgia players. We were looking at each other and reminisced and the mood lightened.”

Richt told the players he was planning an event in the spring. “I’m going to call it The ‘PO Network,’ to name it after Paul. We need to meet just for the sake of being close to each other, for the sake of trying to help everybody find their way.” Richt hoped the network would help provide job opportunities for players when the final game ended.

Paul Oliver would be buried within the hour, but forces were in motion to establish what that legacy of help would mean. As Richt arrived back in Athens to game plan for Tennessee, Chelsea heard from Paul’s agent. Chris Nowinski of the Sports Legacy Institute was curious: Would she be willing to donate Paul’s brain?

An autopsy could confirm what Paul himself had suspected. The significant catch: Paul had been buried. For the autopsy, Paul would have to be exhumed, his brain removed, and the body re-buried.

“I tried to imagine what Paul would want me to do,” Chelsea says, “and then I acted.”

Paul’s brain was flown to Boston and to the lab of Dr. Ann McKee, Professor of Neurology and Pathology at Boston University’s School of Medicine. Due to a backlog of brains — athletes, soldiers — the results of the autopsy would take six months.

Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

In February 2014, the first PO Network event was a success. Chelsea and Price and Patrick Oliver were there. Tra Battle and Chris Burgett were able to connect and share how hard they had taken Paul’s death. While professional networking was covered, the reunion aspect of the PO Network created a support system for returning players. For Richt, whose life changed as a graduate assistant at FSU in 1986 when Seminole linemen Pablo Lopez was shot during a fight outside a party, Paul’s death left little doubt in his mind on the necessity of such a network.

“The PO Network exists because of my desire to bless our players, to help them transition from football to life.”

Richt’s transition reads across his office. On one side on the main wall is a picture from his playing days at Miami. The other holds an image from his coaching days at FSU. That transition, however, was rocky. After a brief stop in Bronco camp alongside fellow rookie John Elway, Denver cut Richt loose.

“All of my identity was in that [football] and then it was going up in flames. I did a bunch of stupid stuff that I never dreamed I would do, just because I didn’t know how to react to not being that guy — not realizing the dreams I had set for myself.”

Stephen Dunn/Getty Images

“Paul Oliver had Stage 2 CTE. It was clear. Undisputedly, CTE.”— Dr. Ann McKee

For Paul Oliver though, the challenge of that transition wasn’t philosophical, but pathological.

A month after the first PO Network Event, Chelsea was notified that the autopsy results were ready. She called Price and Patrick to be in on the call with Dr. Ann McKee.

“Paul Oliver had Stage 2 CTE,” McKee tells me. “There were parts of the brain that were missing due to the gunshot wound and the difficulties which were encountered in harvesting the brain,” she says. “But there was still tissue that was in good condition.

“CTE was most predominant in the temporal lobe, the amygdala, and the hippocampus,” she explains. “We also saw it in the frontal lobe. It was clear. Undisputedly, CTE.”

Many players struggle with the loss of notoriety and purpose, or as Richt says identity.

Paul Oliver’s brain was under siege.

“We weren’t shocked,” Chelsea says, “We knew. But now we knew for sure.”

“It still didn’t change the fact,” Price says, “that Paul was gone.”

While the results confirmed what Paul and Chelsea suspected, it raised new challenges for The PO Network. No amount of networking can rewire a damaged brain. Reunion with trusted teammates cannot wish an aggressive neurological disease to a halt.

Currently, CTE is not on The PO Network’s agenda. I ask Richt if college football — coaches, players, media, and fans — are prepared to have an honest discussion on CTE. Richt’s natural register is toward calm and careful calibration with his words. But the silence between us now lingers a bit longer.

“I don’t know enough about it to be honest with you. But as most things in life, whether you’re ready or not, those discussions, if they need to happen, will happen,” he says.

Many don’t share Richt’s faith in the inevitability of such conversations. Harry Carson says, “No, they are not ready. Not until it is their own son or family member on the field who ends up suffering.” Carson also says cognitive decline haunts generations of players. “Many current coaches played at high levels. They’ve been around. They know. They know former teammates who are suffering,” he said.

Carson’s words echo in Richt’s office and reflect off the image from his Miami days.

From slurring his speech on Cleveland sports radio, to confessions of insomnia, pounding headaches, and financial woes, Bernie Kosar’s cognitive slide hasn’t been secret. His troubles fit a familiar pattern: a 2006 divorce settlement sited his “increasingly erratic and bizarre behavior and addictions” and a 2013 DUI arrest notes he was driving a black Cadillac 74 mph at 2:40 a.m. through a construction zone.

When I bring up Kosar, Richt stands and reaches for the picture.

He hands me a photograph of the ‘82 Miami Hurricane quarterbacks and says, “Take a look there.”

Looking there, in black and white, is a curly haired Kosar, redshirt freshman, numbered 20. True freshman Vinny Testaverde squints into the future. Senior star Jim Kelly smiles, cocksure. Boyish backup Kyle Vanderwende and coach Earl Morrall do not smile. And there stands a stoic Mark Richt, also a senior. They look young, indomitable, and forever quarterbacks. Sunlight cracks through the black and white. When the final playing gun sounds, between them all there will be nine Super Bowl appearances, 70 miles worth of NFL passing yards, and almost 800 professional touchdowns.

None of those numbers belong to Richt. The game humbles all. The frustrated athlete is the father to the man.

We discuss the hard luck of Morrall, a former coach whose story Richt can trace with his own. Despite leading the Colts to Super Bowl III, Unitas replaced Morrall after an early pick. In ‘72, he led the Dolphins to perfection — many people forget that— but Morrall ceded the spot back to Griese before Super Bowl VII.

“You learn you can’t always get what you want,” Richt says. “It was healthy for me.”

Along the 50-yard line of my consciousness float the images of Johnny U’s flattop, Bob Griese’s Coke-Bottle glasses, and the white cleats of Joe Willie Namath. Palm trees sway and bend at the Orange Bowl and for a moment CTE is just a stain on some slide.

Joe Robbins/Getty Images

“You learn you can’t always get what you want. It was healthy for me” — Mark Richt

I weigh my next words and look out the office window over Georgia’s plush practice fields. What would you rather discuss with Mark Richt? A brain-damaged Bernie Kosar hooked up to an IV of fish oil in a detox center in Florida or Super Bowl III? The good soldiering of Earl Morrall or Paul Oliver getting stumped by a trip to the grocery store?

Holding the photo, I ask Richt if The PO Network and the college game are better positioned to provide mental health resources for players than the NFL.

“Possibly. I want to help. We are really in the process of finding out how much help we are giving. I want to be where I don’t have limitations to help. Which could include anything. There is a lot of energy — positive energy around it — but we will still try to nail down exactly what is the best way to function, which gives us the most freedom to help.”

What Richt doesn’t share is that he has already done that precise thing. After Tra Battle’s late night meeting, Richt had Ron Courson, head of the Georgia training staff, set up an appointment with a mental health counselor for Tra the next morning. For a year, Tra saw a counselor and learned how to grieve and treat his depression.

Despite Paul’s own suspicions about his brain and the autopsy’s results, the network that bears his name and initials, does not address CTE. While the camaraderie and networking are important, both Chris and Chelsea hold out hope that information and education about CTE will be included next year.

In the end, Richt says: “I want to stay connected to everybody and I want them to know that Georgia is still here at the end to help with the transition.”

But a full reckoning of those transitions would include the thin line between sentient consciousness and the cascading effects of brain trauma.

The PO Network might be a place where college football begins a dialogue on the magnitude of mental health and CTE. And that might require a coach who once went across an ocean with his wife to adopt a child and brought back two. A coach who pounded the table after Paul died and said, “I don’t want this to happen to another one of my boys.” A coach who knows both chapter and verse: Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.

Paul Oliver didn’t die of depression from a world without football; he died from a brain disease caused by the repetitive head banging in football. He didn’t need a job to fill a void in his soul; he needed neurological treatment for a ravished brain.

Paul almost received that help. Instead, Chelsea flew alone to California weeks later with the boys. During the same conversation she told the family that Paul’s brain was being autopsied, Chelsea announced she was moving back home.

At Hartsfield-Jackson International airport, officials gave Janice Oliver a security pass to walk Chelsea and Simeon and Silas to their gate. Before boarding, Chelsea hugged Janice. Together, they wept. Boarding the plane, Chelsea thought, “This is really happening.” One stewardess helped Simeon into his seat. Another stewardess handed Chelsea a stiff whiskey.

Both boys closed their eyes, and fell asleep as their mother wondered when exactly she’d stop crying.

I turn off my recorder. Mark Richt cleans the table and replaces the photograph. I share with him my wife’s obsessive cleaning habits. He laughs and we briefly compare notes on Colorado. He was born in Broomfield; I live in Boulder. We walk out together and shake hands. I wish him well with The PO Network and he wishes me safe travels.

Heading down the long corridors of Georgia’s football command center, past the titanic closed office doors of coaches, my feet carry me into Heritage Hall. A tractor beam pulls me straight to the glass display where I spent hours as a boy gazing up at the bright red jersey and battered red helmet.

Now, I stand eye level with Herschel Walker’s gear from the ‘83 Sugar Bowl. The right shoulder is streaked with stray Nittany Lion blue. The ‘G’ at the center of the helmet is smudged. Its black paint bleeds down the side like skid marks from screeching tires.

Footnote: July 18, 2015

You sit in the same coffee shop you used to anchor in your ancient college days. Opening your laptop to transcribe the conversation with Coach Richt, something about Charleston, South Carolina is trending on Twitter.

The coffee shop buzzes with caffeinated Methodists. The United Methodist Conference is back in town. The tables are full of leather bound King James Versions with cracked spines, iPads with glowing Cross-Reference Concordance Scripture apps, and lattes. Across from you lounge summer school sorority sisters and fraternity brothers buried behind their phones next to stacks of unopened Psychology and Finance textbooks. Their T-shirts announce nostalgia for days not yet gone: 2014 Daddy Daughter Softball Day! Kappa Alpha: Faithful Unto Death.

You read the blocks of 140 characters about Charleston. At first, you think you’re reading the synopsis of a new crime show. Facts take shape and the picture forms. Bible Study. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Race war. Nine dead. Overhead, the speakers play In a Sentimental Mood. You close the laptop and try to think of a place to be alone.

Walking across North Campus you remember your favorite times in Athens weren’t those six Saturdays in the fall, but the summer and winter holidays. Athens opens up with pockets of unexpected quiet. You walk past the library and past Park Hall. You keep a hopeful eye out for Dr. Hubert McAlexander, who’s retired. The dapper professor from Holly Springs, Mississippi, who wore seersucker suits and gold ties, didn’t so much teach Faulkner, but channeled and charmed his ghosts into the classroom’s ether.

And you remember that wintry day in Park Hall with the radiator humming over the silence and Dr. McAlexander’s unmistakable and uncanny Faulknerian voice reading the final words of Absalom, Absalom!: “I don’t hate it,” Quinten said quickly, at once, immediately, “I don’t hate it,” he said, I don’t hate it, he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don’t, I don’t, I don’t hate it. I don’t hate it.”

You walked out of Park Hall after class and went down to the Jim Gillis Bridge overlooking Sanford Stadium. Full of ponderous undergraduate weight, you balanced thoughts of the South between love and hate, and looked into that stadium that held so much of what you loved.

Now, the stadium gates are locked, but you still have some local knowledge.

High in the bleachers of Sanford Stadium, you sit alone and try to trace a decade ago when Paul Oliver streaked down the sideline against Auburn and leaped into the night. You study the spot where he clinched victory against Tech. You look into the stadium arc lights and imagine them full borne and blazing. You think of Tra Battle gazing up and wondering where he was exactly and what all of it meant.

How easy it is each fall, in all those lights, to lose sight of each who suffers, either from CTE or symptoms identified with CTE. Granted, he’s hard to see — the singular player who suffers — but he contains multitudes: Mike Webster…You saw parts of this man disappear…Dave Duerson…wasn’t fading, but he was…Tony Dorsett…like a fog…Karl Mecklenburg…can’t see…Jim McMahon…can’t get home…Shane Dronett…woke up screaming…it is, Al Toon says, what it is…Tom McHale’s…brain slammed against his skull…Joe DeLamuielleure… saw stars everyday…Fred McNeill…tells his wife that the people chasing him through the night have been replaced by armies of insects…Andre Waters…had various religious reading material scattered throughout the residence…Bubby Brister…is slipping…the ringing, Kevin Kolb says, is like someone shooting a shotgun right next to my ear, every second of every day…Ollie Matson…just endured it…John Grimsley…would lose his temper…Mark Duper…can’t remember…Terry Tautolo…sleeps in a tunnel…Gary Plummer…has dementia…We were told, Leonard Marshall says, if you see stars, take Advil…Charlie Brown…wears sunglasses…Forrest Blue…saw giant soldiers chopping cars on the highway…The NFL, Brent Boyd testified to Congress, is trying to distance themselves from liability for all the carnage left behind by our NFL concussions — just as tobacco companies fought like hell to deny the links between smoking and cancer…Merril Hoge…can’t remember his daughter’s name…Brett Favre…can’t remember his daughter’s soccer season…Steve Gleason…leaves videos for his son to watch when he is gone…Ralph Wenzel…no longer communicates in complete sentences…Kevin Turner…receives oxygen through a port in his neck and nutrition through a tube in his stomach…Steve Smith…uses his eyes to control a computer’s voice-activated system…Terry Long…swallowed anti-freeze…George Visger…pisses blood…Lew Carpenter…began having trouble keeping things organized…Ted Johnson….shuffled from one dark room to another…it is, Wayne Chrebet says, what it is….These young players, Rayfield Wright says, have no idea what’s in store for them…John Mackey…did not want to brush his teeth or shower…Ray Easterling…scoured the neighborhood for toppled trees to chop…Herschel Walker…played Russian Roulette…I got to go, Jovan Belcher said before pulling the trigger, I can’t be here…Hope, Darryl Talley’s daughter Gabrielle says, is not in great abundance right now.

“Something’s wrong with my brain,” Paul told Chelsea’s dad.

Sporting News via Getty Images

Above: Mike Webster, the first former NFL player diagnosed with CTE

Mike Webster — juiced up on a daily regimen of 80 mg of Ritalin — suspected his brain had been damaged too. Webster wrote long, rambling letters on yellow legal paper into the night. On one page, he wrote: “Not revenge, no sir. But reckoning.”

Reckoning: a noun, “the act of calculating;” “a bill of accounts;” “measuring the value of something.”

“Hey!” a voice calls out.

Two construction workers in hard hats appear in an aisle on the upper deck. The older one points in your direction.

“You know, you’re not supposed to be here,” he says, more tired than angry. “Who let you in?”

You try to explain, but what can you say?

“Sorry,” you say, and ask for a few more minutes.

The man in the hard hat looks down to the field and then up to you in the bleachers.

“Two minutes,” he says. “And then you gotta go.”

You nod, spend two minutes more, and then you go.

California

The pieces on the hardwood floor were marked Straight Track (ST), Curved Track (CT), and (CST) Curved Switch Track. Female (F) and Male (M) pieces, varying in shape and size, were clearly noted. The Bridge and Viaduct and Tunnel did not require notation.

For Thomas the Train Engine to chug to life on Christmas Eve 2014, all Chelsea Oliver had to do was follow the directions in miniscule font and assemble the parts. Near midnight, with the boys asleep, it was all she could do to stop crying.

“I missed him. I missed Paul.”

Chelsea doesn’t often catch herself in tears these nights. Not like that first year. In the weeks after returning from Georgia, she’d walk and weep alone at night on the beach. Sometimes she’d scream. Other nights, she’d sit silently under the stars and watch the tides. She’d always been best in crisis, but this registered somewhere beyond crisis.

So Chelsea rode the uneven swells of shock. Many days were simply so crowded with details, deadlines — the boys, bills, moving boxes — that she collapsed at night.

Other times, she couldn’t sleep and as night eddied into day, she couldn’t eat; she made herself eat; she threw up. Sometimes, without reason or rhyme, the scent of blood and smoke would drift back down the halls of memory.

She knew then that she needed help. She scheduled an appointment with a therapist.

“Now,” she says, “I’m better at anticipating and processing those moments.”

Under the blinking lights of the Christmas tree, Chelsea didn’t need a reminder that grief can go dark for a stretch only to circle back again. She also didn’t need an extended metaphor. She needed Paul.

Simeon and Silas sprinted into the living room that morning. She snapped pictures, sipped coffee, and made room for brand new Star Wars action figures, books and Legos. And in the corner of the room, Thomas the Train Engine hummed around the tracks.

The preschool teacher wasn’t sure of what to do. The class was making Father’s Day cards. She asked Chelsea what she should tell the boys, but Simeon took the lead. He told his teacher that his daddy was busy in heaven right now being their guardian angel.

Armed with a feather duster, Simeon Oliver, age 4, runs from his brother Silas, age 2, who wields a pillow. They dart from living room to kitchen, front yard, and back into the ranch home in Fountain Valley, a quiet middle class suburb of Orange County.

Jeff Young grills for the crowd of his four adult children, their spouses, 10 grandkids, and the stranger at the table. Herschel, a huge and happy German shepherd, follows Jeff, room to room. Dooley, Herschel’s companion, passed away a few years ago.

“Paul loved being a dad. That’s what he lived for.”

Climbing into his seat — pit stop — Simeon takes huge, uneven bites of his hot dog. The stranger compliments his appetite. Simeon smiles and says, “I am 4 years old. I grew up on my birthday. Now, I’m a big boy.”

After dinner, Jeff and Chelsea and the stranger speak in the kitchen as the cousins play.

“Paul loved being a dad,” Chelsea says. “That’s what he lived for. The boys.”

As she speaks, Simeon and Silas take turns jumping from the sofa. When Simeon jumps, he throws his arms and legs out in an ‘X’ as in here, here marks the spot.

“Paul knew something was wrong,” Jeff continues, “but he didn’t know what.”

Silas follows Simeon and copies the same fearless jump: Arms out, legs out.

The stranger notes the identical jump and the rock rising in his throat.

The mad dash of feather duster and pillow resume: circling the table, down the hall and back again. The stranger takes a knee and rubs Herschel’s belly and neck and scratches behind his ears as Herschel wags his tail.

The winded boys call truce and Simeon, not without ceremony, presents the stranger with the feather duster.

“Is this the secret sword of truth?” the stranger asks.

Simeon’s eyes grow wide and narrow.

“No,” Simeon says, in a tone that’s tender, “it’s a feather duster.”

I’m eating breakfast with Chelsea’s older brother Garrett Young at Dory Deli, near Newport Beach. Like his sister, Garrett has the presence and confidence of an athlete who’s grown up next to the beach. A one-time college baseball player, drafted by the Red Sox, Garrett will team with Chelsea later that morning to dominate beach volleyball. Garrett also works as a police officer in Newport and has another detail on Paul’s death.

Garrett doesn’t require many words to persuade. After volleyball at the beach, he’ll announce that we’re all getting into the ocean. I left my trunks in room 318 at Motel 6.

“Boxers, dude. C’mon.”

Across the sands of Newport Beach, I walk in my Hanes and wade into the chilly Pacific.

But at Dory’s that morning, as the big screen TVs on either side of us broadcast ESPN’s coverage of Broncos training camp, Garrett speaks deliberately:

“Paul first fired two or three shots into the ceiling. After that, he ejected the magazine. Now, Paul was not really Paul. With everything going on in his brain, he was raging and not in control. And he was also new to guns. If you are new to guns, you’re not really familiar with the manipulation of the weapon. So it wasn’t second nature for him to clear the weapon. A part of me thinks that when he put the gun to his head, he was trying to scare Chelsea. He might not have known that even if you eject the magazine, another round automatically chambers. And when the trigger gets pulled, it goes.”

Later that night, in room 318, I stare at the ceiling. One more in the chamber. I want this to anchor every other detail in Paul’s death, but it floats like another note in a sea of sadness that I can’t figure, file, or sort.

For Paul’s birthday on March 30, Chelsea buys the boys Paul’s favorite: Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches, waffle fries, and two large Cookies & Cream Milkshakes (no cherry, no whipped cream.) Then the boys write messages to their dad on white balloons. Together, Simeon and Silas walk into the front yard, stare up into the sun, and release the strings as their words fold into the enormous blue sheet of sky.

Photo courtesy Chelsea Oliver

Night falls, as I drive south down I-5. A sports radio show previews the NFC West. Oceanside, my destination, is an hour south of Room 318, where I can’t sleep.

The radio host details the 49ers offseason overhaul: the departure of Harbaugh, and the early retirements of Anthony Davis, Patrick Willis and Chris Borland.

Sedans, souped-up Silverados, station wagons, stretch Hummer limos, tricked out bikes with LED illumination, and SUV’s all hurl down the highway. I stay in the middle lane.

Borland’s name vanishes as the host segues into a sermon on the value of veteran quarterbacking. There’s no mention of Borland’s motivation. No comment on his commitment to maintain the integrity of his brain.

Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images

Above: Chris Borland retired from the NFL over fears of long-term head trauma

On the shoulder, smoke rises from the hood of an Aerostar minivan. Hazards flashing.

Weeks earlier, back in Georgia, Tra Battle told me that when he moved California he intentionally refused to use his GPS when driving. He wanted to improve his powers of concentration and memory. Intention might be Tra Battle’s favorite word.

As a father of four, a full-time student with designs on medical school or hospital administration, Tra also works full-time as an anesthesiology operating room technician at Athens Regional Hospital. Tra intentionally fills his rare off-days with his four children. Luisa, his wife is from Venezuela, and the Battle home is intentionally bi-lingual. Intentionally, they don’t own a television. With intention, Tra told me, he wants his days filled with meaning and purpose.

In the spring of 2013, when Chelsea texted Tra about Paul’s confirmed diagnosis of CTE, Tra’s thoughts drifted back to the battlefields he shared with his friend. “Our playing styles were completely different. I was always the one to go in and just totally sacrifice my body … fleshbomb! So since then, anytime I get into one of those moods, I wonder: ‘How bad am I?’”

When his own dark moods arrive, Tra says, “I am much better at dealing with it because I am able to talk and share what I am feeling. Then it gets released. And I can do something to remedy the situation.” That remedy varies from working on his short game, doing CrossFit, or riding his road bike for miles and miles. “My endorphin release,” he says.

Motion, meaning, and intention: the values that shaped Tra on the field help him navigate now down a road that others, including Harry Carson, have traveled.

The hazy sea of traffic and lights come to a close as I pull off the exit and down the commercial area of Oceanside.

Before we parted that afternoon in Georgia, Tra asked: “Do you know what professional athlete I respect the most? More than Lance Armstrong coming back from cancer or an athlete competing with a prosthetic limb? Even more than say, Jackie Robinson?”

I told him I didn’t.

“Chris Borland, the linebacker with the 49ers. To make the conscientious choice that this isn’t worth my life. To walk away. To be taller than the game. That required courage.”

Harry Carson, the Hall of Fame linebacker, tells me: “Chris Borland is my hero.”

Carson says a parent would be crazy to allow their child to play football, yet when he and others say it, the words too often slip past without sticking. But a clear and certain logic takes hold when you substitute the name of the game we love with “car wrecks.” Would you allow your child to play car wrecks? A parent would be crazy to allow their child to play car wrecks. Knowing what he knows now, Carson says he wouldn’t play car wrecks again. Carson and Tra Battle, both former car wreck captains, now count heroic the man who walked away from fame, fortune, and years of future car wrecks.

Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images

I steer through Oceanside, the former home of Junior Seau, a recent inductee of The Pro Car Wreck Hall of Fame, and turn around in a Jack-in-the-Box parking lot, under a line of palms. On the drive back, I silence the radio, roll down the windows, and listen as the traffic roars.

On most mornings, Chelsea Oliver wakes at 7 and gets Simeon and Silas their smoothies and then whisks them off to school. The drive to preschool isn’t far. It’s the same she’d attended as a little girl in Fountain Valley. Some mornings the boys linger. Other mornings they dart straight ahead without waving goodbye.

On this Sept. 24, she’s not sure what her day will consist, but it’s likely she’ll be at the beach watching the water. She does know exactly where she’ll be next March 30.  Chelsea plans to go skydiving.  She wanted to do it on the anniversary of his death, Sept.24, but could not find a babysitter, so now she plans to wait until his birthday.

Photo courtesy Chelsea Oliver

Paul told Tra, back in their UGA dorm, “I’ve found the one.”

“The one?” Tra asked.

Paul pulled up the UGA Volleyball Team website and pointed to Chelsea.

Tra laughed and said, “Good luck.”

Tra had seen teammates hit on Chelsea, ask for her number, throw wads of paper in study hall at her, and trip over themselves trying to open the door for her. Chelsea had a mantra: “I don’t date football players.”

Tra shook his head.

“We’ll see,” Paul said.

On their first date at Paul’s dorm room in the East Campus Village, Chelsea brought over Mr. and Mrs. Smith, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Chelsea sat on the sofa and he sat on the chair across from her. Halfway through the movie, she could tell Paul was staring at her, “with those big eyes.”

“Do I have something on my face?” Chelsea said.

He smiled and said she didn’t.

“Do I look like an alien?” she asked.

Paul laughed and said, “I’ve never met anyone in my life like you.” Chelsea still wasn’t smiling. Paul tried to explain.

During the movie, she’d made fun of him. She cracked jokes. She cussed. She wasn’t demure like so many southern girls seeking their Mrs. Degree.

Now, Chelsea smiled. “OK,” she said.

He asked if he could come sit next to her.

“Sure,” she said.

Paul was 21. Chelsea was 20. And they were in love.

Two dogs, two kids, two cross-country moves, and seven years later, Paul and Chelsea Oliver sat on the sofa in their house in Marietta, Georgia.

Chelsea recalls Sept. 23, 2013 as a good day. During that last year in San Diego, she could count on a few good days each week. In Georgia, it was a few good days each month.

But that night, as Simeon played and Silas slept, Paul and Chelsea watched Boardwalk Empire and Paul’s favorite, The Food Network.

Putting down the remote, Paul inched closer to her on the sofa. He put his arm around Chelsea and pulled her close. “I love you incredibly,” he said.

“That was,” Chelsea tells me, “our goodbye.”

So next March 30, Paul’s birthday, as the small door of the plane opens, Chelsea will be high above San Diego and all these pieces of Paul and Not Paul. Depending on the haze, maybe she will spot Qualcomm Stadium where he intercepted the Raiders’ Carson Palmer in 2011. Somewhere below will be Arcadia at Stonecrest Village, the apartments where Paul made his “world-famous-down-home” spaghetti night after night for he and Tra. Beneath the clouds will be Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla where Simeon and Silas were born. Far up the freeway, closer to L.A., is the ridgeline of Big Bear Mountain where Paul spent an entire day sledding with his nieces and nephews in thick powder.

Winding their way up the sun-glazed mountain that winter morning, Paul rode the brakes and glanced out the window. He wiped his forehead, his palms. Chelsea finally asked if he was OK. Should they switch drivers? He told her not to tell anyone, but he was really afraid of heights.

I confess a similar affliction and ask Chelsea if she’s scared too. She smiles. “After everything that’s happened,” she says, “what’s left to be scared of?”

On Paul’s birthday, Chelsea plans to step into the sky and fall from 12,000 feet. Experiencing rapid changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure, she will plummet through the clouds. With the jigsawed landscape below rising, she’ll feel a jolt. Then, she’ll float. Sailing through the sky, under an impossible sun, Chelsea Oliver will glide gently back down toward solid ground.

Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images

Final Note: November 16, 2002

What would you do? Georgia is playing at Auburn with a chance to go to the SEC Championship. It’s been 20 years since Georgia won a SEC Title. Kickoff is 3:30 Eastern; 2:30 Central in Auburn; 1:30 Mountain, where you live. Your CBS affiliate is showing The Mountain West Conference Game of the Week.

On Monday you call the office of programming at KRQE 13, the local Albuquerque CBS affiliate. Sorry, they say. They encourage you to contact CBS offices in New York.

You call CBS offices in New York. They encourage you to contact your local CBS affiliate. You contemplate throwing your phone through the window.

On Wednesday, an owner of a local sports bar says your best bet is to head north past the border. Pueblo. Trinidad. Find a sports bar closer to Denver’s CBS feed.

On Thursday, you pack your bags to drive to Colorado to watch Georgia play Auburn. You feel sick. But you’re a graduate assistant, teaching basic composition. You’re broke.

The answer, a Hail Mary, arrives in the mail on Friday. You open a Discover Card^TM and purchase, in the great American tradition, what you can’t afford.

You call Eric, your Bulldog buddy in Athens. No answer. You call a hundred times. You repeat in voicemail after voicemail the flight information.

Delta: window seat. Flight time: three hours. You take off shortly after sunrise. You barely slept. Over Texas, you close your eyes, and pray strange prayers.

Eric pulls curbside at Atlanta’s airport, his pickup covered in mud. He smiles. You toss your bag in the back and can’t remember being so happy to see another human being.

Eric teaches at UGA in Religious Studies as an adjunct. He’s been mountain biking and camping in the woods since Friday morning. He needed solitude before kickoff. He couldn’t sleep. Nervous mojo. Something that morning told him to check his messages.

You stop at a Walmart ATM on the Alabama state line. Eric withdraws his last 200 dollars. The two scalped tickets will cost 150.

Across the plains, under a gray sky, you walk into the Auburn RV Village. A tailgate, booming Jimmy Buffett, calls you over. A foam tiger tail extends from their RV. A man with a gray goatee, camouflage overalls, and orange hoodie smiles while the thinner, more orange Paula Deen at his hip says, “Hey Bulldogs! Smile! Its only a game!”

You aren’t in the mood, but you will not be that guy.

“Forgive us, ma’am,” Eric says, “we’re just sick and tired of losing to Auburn.”

They laugh, you laugh. Everyone shakes hands. They invite you back after the game. Best tailgate in Lee County. Cooking a whole hog. Win, lose or draw! You and Eric make a thousand assurances to break bread with them and fully intend no such thing.

You aren’t fooled. This is, in the words of Larry Munson, total war. And that truth smacks your face and licks when you walk into the roaring wall of orange and blue. Guitar chords rip pure menace as the voice of Axl Rose welcomes you to the jungle.

You bypass your ticketed seats to hunker down in section 11, lower level, east stands, shoulder to shoulder with Georgia fans. The ball is on the tee. You find your radio headset and scan through static until the voice of Larry Munson rings hard and true.

And for the next four hours, the singular thing with a million variations, unfolds with the requisite violence and grace that borders on rhapsodic.

Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images

At halftime, Georgia is down 14-3. It’s cold. You can see your breath.

“Gotta get some goddamned points,” a man with a Mr. Clean shaved head turns and says.

Sparkplug built, he wears a game-worn white Georgia jersey from the ‘85 Sun Bowl. He says he played a little special teams back in the day. You’re prone to call bullshit on Mr. Clean, but when he produces a flask from under the jersey and offers, you count your blessings. Fireball. Canadian whiskey. Cinnamon.

Down four, with two minutes to go, Georgia drives toward the south end zone. Munson doesn’t always help with downs, distances, and substitutions. Sometimes you wish he was less Homeric Bard and more Syracuse or Missouri Journalism Broadcast School Smooth. He’s also 80 years old. You know your days together are numbered.

With a minute and 30 seconds to play, Georgia faces fourth-and-15 from the Auburn 19.

Crowd roars at us. Three wide outs. Man, we’ve had some shots today, haven’t we?

Munson’s resignation echoes the voltage of your own central nervous system. Back in ‘82, Georgia had to stop a late Auburn pass in the end zone. Then, Munson pleaded: If you didn’t hear me, you guys,‘Hunker Down.’ After Georgia halted Auburn’s final heave, Munson cried out:  Oh look at the sugar falling out of the sky, look at the sugar falling out of the sky … .

You lock onto Fred Gibson, Georgia’s lanky wide out, on the right side of the field. The snap to David Greene. So has Auburn. The safety help shades to the right.

There he goes to the corner again and we jump up …You follow an underthrown wobbly ball headed for the left corner of the end zone. You see Georgia’s Michael Johnson go up and you lose sight of what you can see next.

Several events happen separately and at once. The orange and blue shakers in the stands go limp. An official’s arms shoot up. The Georgia bench explodes. Larry Munson is screaming: TOUCHDOWN! OH, GOD A TOUCHDOWN!

Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images

And then the girders bend. The stadium falls apart. Mr. Clean military presses you into the air. (You go about 190.) You’re screaming, searching for flags. Mr. Clean, who played a little special teams back in ‘85, screams too as he spins you around.

A security guard, clearly from the correct side of the state line, jumps up and down.

Eric hugs David Pollack’s mother and extended family.

An old timer in a Bulldogs Santa hat places his hands over his face.

You’re screaming: “No flags you son of bitches! Throw no flags! No flags!”

Mr. Clean screams: “I swallowed my dip! I swallowed my dip!”

Georgia holds Auburn on downs. Georgia takes a knee. Georgia is going to the SEC Championship. Georgia is going to the Sugar Bowl. The clock shows all zeroes.

As Georgia people dance and cry, your hands tremble. Is this real? You check the scoreboard. Already scrubbed. You smile. A few rows down, jubilant Georgia players reach out to ecstatic fans. Fluorescent vested security maintains order.

Georgia students and fans stormed this field in ‘86 only to be sprayed by high-pressured water hoses. You were 10 and listening to Munson. The next year Auburn fans ripped Georgia’s hallowed hedges in revenge. That was the first fistfight you ever saw. Not a fight exactly, just frat-on-frat violence.

The crowd empties and Eric sits down. You follow. You will stay until you’re the last ones left or the lights go black or law enforcement escorts you out.

The divine electricity shines on the green turf below as the wind blows bits of stray tape and Powerade cups. Alone in that immensity, you won’t charge the field or vandalize shrubbery, but the moment calls for something.

And there, on the other side of the stadium, staring at us from behind the goal posts: The Great Seeing Eye with three famous blue letters against a yellow banner — CBS SPORTS.

The plastic banner comes down easily, folds, and fits securely under your arm.

Outside the brick walls of the stadium, you stumble upon the gate with Georgia team buses and Georgia Highway Patrol cars, blue lights blazing. Coach Richt emerges from the tunnel and we cheer. In a suit now, he waves and is whisked away by state troopers.

Families of players — little brothers, sisters, cousins, grandmas — wait for the team along with boosters: smooth faced cherubic men with unlit cigars dangling from their lips.

The players file out in black Nike warm ups to cheers. Calls of first names! Nicknames! Hugs! More hugs! Big hugs! You think: “This is just like a family reunion.” And then you realize it is. One booster, a fat man in red suspenders, smacks safety Sean Jones, the hero of the day (11 tackles, two INTs) hard on the shoulder. Jones nods, smiles, winces.

Eric spots Tony Milton, a reserve running back and a student in his Western Religion class. Up from poverty in Florida, Milton spent time in high school living out of his car. To call the odds he’s overcome significant is to understate the case.

Milton spots Eric, lowers his head, and walks over.

“Mr. Covington,” he says, “I can explain. It’s almost there. Almost finished.”’

They share a moment of confusion until Eric realizes that Milton’s talking about a first draft on his Protestant Reformation paper. He asks for a Monday extension. Eric pretends to ponder and relents. Monday, it is. Milton says thanks and extends his hand.

“Tony!” Eric says.

“Yeah?”

“We did it!”

The smile returns to Tony Milton’s face.

“Ah! Yes we did Cov, yes we did!”

Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images

They hug and with that you and Eric wander into the night. Bone-tired, you’re suddenly very cold and hungry all at once. You halved a Clif Bar that morning.

Walking across a parking lot, Eric stops and says, “Now, look at that.”

The RV with the huge foam tiger tail is still blasting Jimmy Buffett.

“Easier to show up now isn’t it?” the voice announces.

Red solo cups appear in your hands: Bourbon with a splash of Coke.

A big screen TV shows Ohio State and Illinois, but you join everyone else and watch kids in the parking lot in Cadillac Williams jerseys hurling NERF spirals.

The man with the gray goatee discusses his time-share in Destin with Eric as you’re handed a hot plate, piled high. Menthol slim Paula Deen slides next to you.

“Now, over in Athens y’all wouldn’t be like this,” she says.” Y’all sulk. Admit it.”

You blow on your plate and nod. You admit it.

“And Bama people — just as soon spit on you. Florida folks used to be OK. Then they started winning. And LSU people, can you even call them people?”

You sip your bourbon, their bourbon, and nod. Between bites of Memphis-style barbeque and brown sugared baked beans, you keep nodding as she regales you with stories from the past. You’re thinking of the future. Georgia has freshmen and sophomores at critical positions: contributors, leaders, nascent stars. More, you think. More sugar, endless skies.

And at that moment, your fandom — a hundred-yard Eden — holds nothing to doubt, no denial to parse, no burden of knowledge. To paraphrase an armchair general from those heady days: you don’t know yet what you don’t know.

You know only the ancient rush of food and fire from a vanquished foe.

“Good, isn’t it?” the man with the gray goatee calls out. Chewing, you close your eyes and nod as smoke drifts toward the stars over Alabama.

And at that same moment, in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Medical Examiner’s office, the slides of Mike Webster’s brain tissue sit forgotten on the desk of the brilliant and brash Dr. Bennet Omalu — who won’t forget for long.

And racing out of Lee County on I-85, a long line of tractor-trailers speed past rows of pines and billboards for Bible verses and breast augmentation. Tearing across Georgia’s red clay border, the 18-wheelers howl for Atlanta. Heading up 285, the 40-ton machines rumble through traffic onto I-75 toward Kennesaw, where a high school student, a beautiful son named Paul Oliver, dreams of football with eyes wide open as the cars slide by, terribly fast, and do not touch.

Here’s how Sander Stroom from Estonia won the 2014 Settlers of Catan World Championship. Sander was stuck at nine points, one short of a win. Two other players — from Latvia and Japan — grappled turn by turn for the longest road, each a lucky roll away from the 10-point victory. The fourth finalist, from Germany, trailed in points, boxed in with no room to expand.

The German also had one development card — a special card worth either a bonus or the chance to attack an opponent — face down in front of him. Because he’d neglected to play it, the others assumed that card was worth a whole victory point — the most valuable of its kind, wasted on a player who was nowhere near the necessary 10 points. Every top player knows how many of those free points exist in the deck, and the leaders reasoned that the German possessed the last one, leaving available only cards insufficient to seal a win.

Sander saw something different.

He remembered the German player remarking that his chances of rallying were practically finished. He’d noticed him looking reluctant to interfere with the battle being waged between the true contenders. Sander suspected he was holding a Knight, but didn’t want to play it and face the choice of robbing one player, swinging the fate of the championship. The German was being sportsmanlike, not logical.

So when it became Sander’s turn and he didn’t hold enough resource cards to build something for that winning point, he decided to purchase one of the last development cards. Japan and Latvia were astonished, agreeing nothing left in the deck would get Sander the win. But there it was, flipped face up instantly: the final victory point card, long available for anyone to buy cheaply, yet unclaimed until Sander grabbed it to get his 10th point and become Catan world champion.

In a game driven by memorization and statistical analysis, Sander gained the deciding edge by reading an opponent’s emotions. He won a trophy and a free cruise.

You know someone who settles. If you’ve never played Settlers of Catan yourself, then I guarantee at least one of your acquaintances, whether that person is a game enthusiast or not, sometimes sits at a table or computer to roll dice, build cities, and trade sheep for wood.

Catan is having a moment in the mainstream. The board game just passed its 20th anniversary, and yet it’s only penetrated popular culture over the last few years; it was featured on The Big Bang Theory and Parks and Recreation, and the Green Bay Packers recently confessed their addiction to it. The fifth edition of Settlers, which is only superficially distinct from its predecessors, is among the best-selling board games on Amazon, while new expansions, themed versions, and Catan-related merchandise emerge every month.

The game is German, both in origin and style. It is German in that its creator, Klaus Teuber, is a former dental technician from Darmstadt who graduated from basement hobbyist to full-time gaming mogul when Die Siedler von Catan won the coveted Spiel des Jahres award in 1995, then found immediate commercial success in both his home country and abroad. Teuber’s Catan company remains partnered with its manufacturer, Mayfair, a game industry titan.

Catan is German, too, in that it typifies a school of design that emphasizes strategy over luck and commerce over conflict. Games get fierce, and you’re still relying on dice rolls, but a winning campaign demands constant analysis and cannot be accomplished without a degree of cooperation from your eventual victims. No player is eliminated until somebody wins, no player wins by lording over opponents.

People view Catan as the first board game of its kind to achieve crossover success outside Europe, attracting hobbyists and relative non-gamers alike. It led a wave of popularity that’s still producing German-style hits today: If you’ve recently tried Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, or Ticket to Ride, you played something gamers consider finer than the simple, cutthroat games that dominated the American market’s previous century.

Catan is like Monopoly in that you build properties — settlements (worth one point) and cities (worth two) connected by roads — at the junctures of 19 hexagonal tiles associated with resources and collect an occupied tile’s resource (in the form of a card) when someone rolls its associated number. You then spend the resource cards you’ve acquired to build more properties, which bring in more resources, and so forth. You get rich and expand your civilization.

What’s different about Catan? Everything else. The tiles are shuffled into the game board and randomly assigned dice-roll numbers between 2 and 12, producing a unique map each game, with each game producing a very different economy. You roll two dice, so if a particular resource, say lumber, has all its tiles clustered into a corner of the map, or if all its tiles end up associated with low-probability dice rolls like 2 or 12 (rather than a high-probability number like, say, 8), one player might monopolize it, or it could become rare for all players.

Every player needs every resource, but no player starts the game with reliable access to all of them so everyone must barter and steal. This is where Catan is like poker. You want players to trade you resource cards you need. You don’t want them to block your resource production or steal from you, which anyone who rolls a 7 or buys a development card called a Knight can do. Staving opponents off requires tact, fair distribution of attacks, and even bluffing — convincing your adversaries you are not a threat, or at least not the biggest threat at the table.

The game is won when a player scores 10 victory points through any combination of city settling, road building, resource card cajoling, or development card accruing.

I picked up Settlers of Catan in college when a friend brought it on a weekend vacation to Vermont. I hardly went outside that whole trip. I don’t like board games at all, but something about the chattiness of the game and the fact that I got pretty good at it pretty fast made it appealing. We played regularly throughout the rest of school, and after graduating I played online (under the name KeyshawnJohnson. Opponents sometimes didn’t steal from me because they thought I was him.) until it became too frequent a procrastination vice and I kicked the habit. I’ve gotten my girlfriend and a few friends and family members hooked on the game, and still play the tabletop version whenever three or four of us assemble.

At some point, while checking to see if people ever meet up with strangers to play Catan, I found that not only is that the case, but there exist local qualifier tournaments all over the country. Those feed into a national tournament held in August at Earth’s biggest tabletop game convention in Indianapolis, which feeds into a USA team that plays the SETTLERS OF CATAN WORLD TOURNAMENT held every two years, half the time at a fucking castle in Germany. I wanted in.

I had to know: What is a national Catan tournament like? Who are the competitors in those tournaments? How good can you really be at Catan? How good am *I* at Catan?

I wanted to compete, but there were just months until the Catan National Championship (CNC) at Indy Gen Con, and the only remaining June regional qualifier I found was in Milwaukee.

So I flew to Milwaukee.

MILWAUKEE

Ghostbusters play giant Jenga in the lobby of a Milwaukee airport hotel

Summerfest is amazing. It’s the largest music festival in the world, with huge acts playing 11 stages over 11 days in mid-summer, the absolute best time to spend beside shimmering Lake Michigan.

The Nexus Game Fair is not part of Summerfest. While the rest of the city enjoyed all-day performances and streets lined with food trucks, hundreds of people spent a long June weekend in the air conditioned conference rooms of the Crowne Plaza Milwaukee Airport hotel.

Everyone looked delighted. Rows and rows of men, children, and the occasional woman test-played unfamiliar boards and cards or played pick-up games of old classics.

Gray-haired men prodding tiny artillery around turf battlefield tables occasionally burst out in cheers.

Adults, some in costumes, circled with scripts in hand around castles made of wood and styrofoam, living out RPG scenarios.

Special guests, which is to say hobbling old guys with ponytails, commanded the magnetism of celebrities, but were kind and approachable to the quivering fans in their midst.

I pushed a closed door to peek at five people clicking at computer monitors in pitch darkness, muttering about coordinates while a sixth person paced back and forth issuing orders, studying some sort of cyber spacecraft on a projection screen at the room’s front.

Game salesmen occupied booths in one “dealer hall,” or they traveled the hotel lobbies stopping attendees to make a well-rehearsed pitch: “You like Cards Against Humanity? Well, what if it had PICTURES!?”

Outside the door of something labeled The Pathfinder Society, a teenager in costume asked a staff member to scoop popcorn for him because he couldn’t get the door of the machine to work.

In the corner of one hall, behind a table of old folks playing out a 10-hour-long Battle of Hannut, was the Catan tournament. Fifteen people at the Game Fair joined me for the final play-in day of the regional qualifier.

I arrived to find a state of minor controversy. Daniel Ashburn, the IT guy and game collector running the tournament for Nexus, was visibly chagrined to deliver the bad news that competitors who’d participated in either of the two prior play-in days were not eligible to play another, that their scores were set.

Heads hung. Chris Massey, a recent University of Oklahoma graduate who’d driven 17 hours to Milwaukee from Fort Worth, Texas (“The other qualifiers were during school.”) told me with eyes shut and face flush how he’d mailed in his performance in some previous games because he wasn’t feeling well, and was now disappointed to find that those scores were locked in.

“Initially, they said basically you could sign up for as many days as you wanted. You could sign up for Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, or all three, and just try to compete a lot to get into the final.”

So he registered for every day, believing his best score would be the one to count, like taking the SAT multiple times. Then, days before the qualifier, Mayfair officials visited on behalf of the CNC and said they’d withhold their official blessing if the tournament was run that way.

“There was poor communication,” Massey told me, “and they were kinda trying to rush to make things fit the schedule and the rules they’d just gotten the week beforehand.”

This was Milwaukee’s first regional Catan qualifier — Nexus is just two years old, as Milwaukee hosted the massive Gen Con itself until 2002 — so some growing pains were expected and eventually understood. Frustration settled and the games began.

We each played two four-player games, all settling the same arrangement of resource tiles and numbers, with our scores added to form standings from which the top eight players from all three days would advance.

My first game was among kids, two of whom came from a crew of five frattily-dressed college guys who’d driven up from Kenosha and Madison. I had the win in hand when one of the Kenosha crew, a feathery-haired rising Northwestern sophomore named Nick Trimark, swooped in and bought two development cards the turn before me — both of them victory points to get him from 8 to 10 and the win. It was a Hail Mary, and it worked. Nick smirked and high-fived his bros while I seethed.

Afterward, I asked Trimark and company if they frequented such tournaments. In fact, it wasn’t just their first experience with organized board gaming, but their first ever convention, and Catan was the only present game in which they had interest. They weren’t used to this crowd, and chuckled a bit at their own affinity for settling.

“Sometimes I’m ashamed to ask people if they play Catan because I don’t wanna seem like I’m nerdy. And then if they don’t know I’m like ‘Oh it’s nothing.’ And if they do I’m like ‘YEAH!’ It’s like instant brotherhood.”

The guys agreed that they didn’t fit in at the convention, but nodded along with the assertion that everyone was “really cool and friendly.”

I felt the same. The mountain of games I’d never heard of and scores of gamers wearing costumes I didn’t recognize, excited about things I didn’t understand, were overwhelming. Still, at least in the Catan corner, people seemed friendly and, excepting the guy who flossed right at his table and another guy thumbing away at a PlayStation Vita in the middle of our game, pretty … well, normal.

My second game included two Catan veterans. Mandy Sanders, an IT project manager from Peoria, Illinois, learned the game from her husband in 2001, and went on to compete in several national tournaments at Gen Con in Indianapolis. Michael Tobin, a teacher from Grayslake, Illinois, embraced the game upon its introduction at a convention in 1995, when the rules were still written in German. He won the first official CNC out of a dozen or so people, receiving an expired $10 gift certificate as his prize.

Chris, Mandy, Nick, and a fourth player, Joe, place their initial settlements in the Milwaukee semifinal

Mandy won our game swiftly, and we talked shop around the table while the other games took longer to produce a winner on identical boards. She remarked that she didn’t recognize a single person at Nexus, but usually knew half the people in any Catan tournament.

“You eyeball the room and you know who’s been there before and who’s good. It becomes part of the meta-game, too. You’re like, ‘Oh that person is really good,’ so the first time you roll a 7, all else being equal, you’re going after that person.”

I noted that there also weren’t many women in the room. Mandy said it was the same at all tournaments, but didn’t seem to mind.

“I think the mix is probably about the same as it is here. There’s always a few women. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t really notice to tell you the truth.”

Tobin offered that the games had been nearly all men in the ’90s, and that more women were entering each year, “although I do see almost all white.”

With no wins and low points in my two games, I didn’t advance to the eight-player semifinals. Nick and Mandy, each with a win, did. Chris did, too, despite his concerns over the last-minute rule change.

Both Nick and Mandy made it to the final four-person game, a battle that lasted hours because the proctors had saved one of Mayfair’s cruelest pre-mapped board designs for last. The resources weren’t mixed at all — all the lumber spots were clustered in one corner, adjacent to a strip of wool spots, which sat next to all the ore spots, and so forth. Players open by placing two free settlements, and in this situation, no one could start the game with access to all the resources. Trades were essential from the start, but players were nervous to oblige opponents with a trip to the CNC at stake.

Daniel and William Cress, his good friend and a volunteer at Nexus, grinned over the players’ exasperation at the extreme board.

“It’s brutal.”

“That’s why we chose it.”

Once trades happened and the game got moving, Nick’s red pieces consumed the map. He reached a winning 10 points despite one player basically devoting her turn to building a road longer than his, aided by the players trading her the necessary resources, allied in hopes of delaying their collective demise. Roads connect settlements, and the person with the longest continuous road on the board adds two points to their score — those points change hands throughout the game, but couldn’t ultimately be kept away from Nick.

After Nick posed for photos with his trophy and filled out the information for his all-expenses-paid trip to the CNC at Gen Con in Indianapolis, I asked him to describe his first competitive board gaming experience.

Nick poses with his Nexus Game Fair Catan trophy, friends at his side

“It felt pretty professional. It was a good environment to be in, just being around people who like Catan and like playing. Everyone was pretty good.”

He wasn’t sure which of his dudes to bring along as the free plus-one at Gen Con.

I returned to New York disappointed I would have to cover the national championship as a spectator, not a participant, until I realized how completely wrong I was. Milwaukee was the last regional qualifier, but the day before the nationals in late July, the biggest and best qualifying opportunity would take place right in Indianapolis. Anyone at Gen Con could play in the Catan Open, a tournament with around 120 available seats that would fill 16 of the 48 slots in the CNC quarterfinals. Meanwhile, Nick was the only one of 20 at Nexus who qualified, and the larger regional qualifiers I saw had even harsher ratios. I shouldn’t have gone to Milwaukee at all.

So I signed up for the Open and convinced Max, one of my best and smartest friends, and the player who wins roughly half our group’s Catan games, to join me as well. I figured he was my ringer.

INDIANAPOLIS

After a night spent in Charlotte because of bad weather and flight delays, Max and I drove straight from the Indianapolis airport to the Indiana Convention Center downtown, sprinting through thousands of lolling cosplayers to one of the arena-sized halls. A Mayfair representative was already handing out table assignments for the first games of the Catan Open. If not for a brief disagreement over whether a Canadian player was allowed to qualify (he was not), we would have been too late.

Around 30 boards, some pushed onto the long “open gaming” tables outside the cordoned, carpeted section reserved for the tournament, sat ready for us, each bearing resource tiles and numbers arranged in the same positions. The people inside the pen sat at special Catan tables with felt holders for each player’s settlement pieces around a hexagonal inset for the board.

Once again, I was toppled from the precipice of victory in my first game. I had the grain and ore in hand to build a city for my winning point, just waiting my turn, when Martin Smith, a crew-cut actuary from northern Illinois, bought a development card that ended up being a full 10th victory point. His 10-year-old son approached the table moments later and squealed “WOOOO!” when he found out dad had won.

Martin, like Michael in Milwaukee, had known the game since the days of translating it from German 20 years ago. Martin told me he attends three or four conventions a year, and plays Catan at a couple of them as a break from the more serious stuff, enjoying the game’s more “slice of life” crowd.

Bob's Burgers cosplayers battle with foam swords

“I think it’s a much wider draw than almost any other game. I’m used to the war games with all the hardcore grognards. There’s stereotypes about those guys and the D&D guys have stereotypes, too. I don’t want to denigrate anybody, but: beer belly, big beard, maybe not as socially active. That’s the stereotype, not necessarily always true. It’s not at all true of Catan.”

Another player at our table exuded palpable Chill Dad vibes in his tie-dyed Moody Blues T-shirt. A retired Pepsi salesman and professional prom DJ from Chicago, Brian Cummings had picked up Catan just a few years ago when a fellow disc golf player told him about it. He now plays with some buddies and their wives, summoned weekly by a group text. He burns mix CDs and they all hang out and try new games, of which Brian seemed to prefer Catan for the “sneaky” and “evolving” nature of gameplay, and the level of emotion it stirs.

“I’ve seen a guy lose 50 bucks in a poker game but when he loses this board game he gets more pissed off.”

I didn’t come close to winning my other two play-in games. My final table was a bit of a joke. Three of us mentioned we’d lost all hope of qualifying, and the fourth, a young and disarmingly polite Seattle software developer named Justin Woo, mopped us to get a crucial second win. Looking at the standings later, I realized an older Australian man at my table had been fibbing; he had a win under his belt and would have advanced to the semifinal with another.

Another failure was disappointing, because I was surprised at how casual the competition seemed — players joked and gossiped so much that I wondered if they weren’t taking the tournament seriously. I’d come into each game on edge, but relaxed into the patter of the table, only to find an opponent placing her 10th point before I’d even started keeping count.

Max had won one of his three games, but didn’t amass enough points in the other two to rank among the top 16 advancing to the quarterfinal. When we reunited after our defeats, Max was most excited to have lost to the 2014 national champion, a shaggy, smiley 2015 DePaul graduate wearing the frayed garb of a skateboarder who, Max heard, was attending Gen Con with his identical twin. He’d only revealed his prior year’s glory after winning the present game. His name was Chris Broderick, and I had to meet him.

Meeting him was very easy, because Chris and his stockier, mustached duplicate, Tim, loitered among the tables well after they’d finished dominating the Open — Chris third and Tim eighth among the advancing 16 — hugging and chatting up other players like old pals.

Max and the Broderick twins survey a board

Chris told me that hobnobbing was part of every Catan event, not just because tournament veterans become acquainted, but because it’s beneficial at least in the early stages to gather some bright minds and survey the best settling spots on the board as a small group.

“I’m friends with a bunch of quote unquote ‘top players’ — really good players — so we all just sit around and talk and we argue about what we think is best. And usually there’s a logical decision for each position and we can plan it out and once you play it out before the game the settling process is really simple.”

He recalled fondly his first overseas journey, traveling to Berlin for the World Championships — winning at Gen Con is how you get on the USA team — and didn’t hesitate to explain the circumstances of his “meteoric rise” from neighborhood player and “lucky” regional tournament winner to national champ.

“I didn’t expect to do anything, which I think helps with this game because if you go into a game and you’re super arrogant and think you’re great, people aren’t going to like you, and that’s a huge part of the game.”

So that explained why Max had no idea he was sitting with a Catan great until after the game. It was a calculated decision. Chris kept his history to himself and, he said, made sure to be really sweet with everyone at the table. This helps when a 7 gets rolled, or a Knight card gets played, and it’s time for your opponent to pick someone to rob.

“Even if you’re ahead, they don’t want to ruin your day because they like you! So they’ll steal from you but block a lesser spot of yours because they actually like you and they don’t want you to not like them after the game.”

The niceness seemed to come naturally to Chris, who’s just a gregarious sort, but that couldn’t be his whole game, right? He must count cards — that is, memorize every resource card every player picks up — or be able to calculate complex odds on the fly or practice constantly or … something.

Chris assured me he knew the basic probabilities and favored certain strategies, but no, he utilized neither special mathematic brilliance nor much training beyond his regular games with friends.

“I think it’s just about relaxing. You have to be confident. It’s better when you’re having fun, and it’s much more convincing to the other players when you’re actually having fun that you’re not pulling a fast one on them — even if you are pulling a fast one on them, it’s much more convincing. You’ve got to have that balance.”

Max and I paced the room as games wound down. Maybe a quarter of the participants were women. At one table, a player who insisted on being called Mongo was about to win, playing with special black building pieces he’d brought himself. Fans sidled up to greet Eric Millegan, erstwhile series regular on Bones and beloved Catan community member, a patriarch of what Columbus, Ohio’s Emily Brodbeck described to me as “kind of a weird family network” who meet a few times a year to catch up and settle.

Once the Open wrapped, everyone left to drink.

Saturday, Max and I arrived early and finally enjoyed the opportunity to explore Gen Con a bit. The convention’s reported attendance was a record 61,423, just a hair under the capacity of the Colts stadium the convention center adjoins. Where the Milwaukee crowd and its playground stuffed into a few hotel ballrooms overwhelmed me, the vastness of Gen Con felt like a universe beyond my comprehension.

Adrift in a sea of geeks, and at one point literally barricaded by a costume parade, we visited only one other hall. It contained an acre — really, an acre — of paired-off men flipping Magic: The Gathering cards in advance of a high-stakes tournament in which professional players would participate. Several Catan players had told me Magic tournaments are far tenser and more serious than their own competition because of the money involved. When I saw a booth selling a $1,200 card — a piece of cardboard bearing a picture of a tree — I believed them.

Nearing 10 a.m., we returned to the tiny Catan district of this airy indoor city. Winners from all the regional qualifiers were rolling in, along with the 16 best players from the previous day. Nick from the Milwaukee tournament arrived without any of his college crew, but with his grandfather, Jim. I wondered if Jim, a pharmacist (and of the dozens of people I interviewed, the only person who told me he reads SB Nation regularly), knew about the game. He said he’d only heard of it two weeks prior, when Nick, whose parents insisted he not make the drive from Kenosha alone, found all other family members busy and figured grandpa would enjoy the trip.

“He said ‘Catan’ and I said ‘what the blue blazes is that!?”

They’d listened to “Nick’s music” on the way to Gen Con — classical, because the 19-year-old is a double major in engineering and concert piano and making me feel inadequate. Grandpa Jim vowed they’d listen to Frank Sinatra the whole way back.

Nick rolls dice while Grandpa Jim looks on

Nick and Grandpa were in for a long day — the top 15 out of 48 would advance, their scores from four straight games determining rank. Games can last as short as half an hour, but with so much at stake, and not enough Mayfair reps around to institute a three-minute turn clock, trade negotiations and calculations ran unchecked. Four games with breaks in between to pee, eat, and study the next board added up to an eight-hour Catan session.

It was exhausting just to watch, but it gave Max and I time to appreciate the wonder of 48 players — 38 men, 10 women — settling identical boards in foursomes, a dozen parallel universes unfolding at once. The same map that one player conquered in 30 minutes took other tables over two hours. Slight variety in initial settlement positions, plus the whims of the almighty dice, were enough to produce such divergence. It was like watching the same Super Bowl played 12 times in the same conditions, but with one substitution or tweaked play call spiraling each into a wildly disparate result.

After one of the more protracted games ended in his shocking defeat, Justin from Seattle seemed almost giddy with despair. Someone lucked into three victory point development cards in a row. Just like my very first loss, but even more improbable.

“It’s literally like a hail mary in football. You throw the ball and you pray for God. That’s what he did and he got it.”

I mentioned to Justin that the previous day at our table, he’d been almost outlandishly nice, congratulating each of us every time we built anything on the board, and that I’d noticed the same behavior in this quarterfinal. He may have been emulating other top players he observed.

“You need to be nice or they’re gonna screw you over. People are gonna get you. You see all the good players, they’ll go up like ‘Hey how’s it going?’ They don’t give a shit! They don’t care, but the good players will be like ‘Yeah man, how you doing? Oh, so nice to meet you.’”

Justin waved his arms and pitched his voice to mock the top players.

“You switch on the social stuff. You’ll be like ‘Yeah, hey, how’s it going? What’s up? What’s up?’ and then after that, like ‘Fuck you, man.”

Justin unwinds after a surprise defeat

Like Chris Broderick, Justin is outgoing, and must come by some of his table presence honestly. He wasn’t so sure about some of the charmers he met in other games.

“I’m not saying all board game guys are introverts, but we’re not like MC Hammer or something. We’re not like those type of people. We’re board game people. We stay home and play board games.”

Justin falling short of that win proved fatal, as it was his only shot of grabbing enough points to reach Sunday morning’s CNC semifinal.

Nick, too, was toast. With his grandfather observing from outside the pen — except for one of the middle contests, which he skipped to nap back at the hotel — Nick found himself in consecutive three-player games, a situation of questionable fairness that everyone hates, but one that couldn’t be avoided when tired competitors dropped from the tournament without notice. On both those wide-open and easily unbalanced boards — one player always seems to end up with all the space to expand — Nick faltered. He called the whole experience “fun” but “pretty bogus.”

Even the defending champ fell just short of the top 15. Chris told me afterward he’d been targeted for theft by other players even when he wasn’t in the lead, probably because his cover as reigning champion had been blown.

His twin brother, though, gutted out a couple wins at tables full of older guys with decades of experience (One of them described to Max and me his game at the 2012 World Championships in photographic detail. It took 20 minutes). Tim ranked third, earning the right to pick a seat in his semifinal — a crucial choice of position in the snake-style draft for the initial settlement placements. Chris, meanwhile, fell to 18th, just short of the cut.

I told Tim I’d been hoping he and Chris would face each other in the final, the only possible way they’d meet, since Mayfair officials avoid putting family at the same tables to avoid collusion. Tim sounded disappointed, too, because as close and supportive as the brothers are — they live together and spent the Indianapolis weekend sleeping together in the family van to save money (“Terrible, but doable.”) — they are also each other’s fiercest competition. He fancies himself a better settler than Chris, “but statistics prove me wrong over time, obviously.”

Tim looked forward to his vanquished twin’s presence on the final day, not just for the company, but because they play similar styles — lots of development cards left face-down longer than necessary to keep a low profile and sneak up on opposition in what Catan vets call the “stealth strategy” —  and could appraise the board together before the game.

He echoed Chris on the value of understanding people over constant statistical analysis, though he professed more skill for reading faces than fooling others with his own.

“People count the [resource] cards. They know what everyone has all the time. They count the dice rolls. They know the probabilities in the back of their head. But I think that’s kind of distracting. I like to look more at what — like, if people draw a [development] card — what they look like, kind of like reading people in poker.”

For Sunday’s semifinal, the carpeted pen was cleared but for four tables, each playing a game producing one winner to reach the final later that day. Max and I arrived early and immediately noticed an unfamiliar face: a tall, goateed, Kangol-wearing man wheeling a suitcase, like he’d come directly from the airport. At once, it struck us that 15 people advancing yesterday constituted an odd number — one short, and our confusion was soon answered by the other semifinalists grumbling about the new guy in their midst.

Conventions are big money. It’s the ideal setting to pander to gamers, and companies plot carefully to determine which “cons” are worth staging their biggest releases, best sales, and official tournaments. Such presences dictate the success of each convention. For instance, the Origins Game Fair, now located in Columbus, Ohio, used to be the supreme of its kind, but now everyone agrees it’s well below Gen Con on the gaming totem pole, probably because of diminishing participance from Wizards of the Coast — makers of Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon — after the mega toy corporation Hasbro purchased them.

Mayfair still casts a big footprint at Gen Con, Origins and the like, but they just started their own convention, too. CatanCon 1 was held over a weekend in late April at a resort in Nashville, Tennessee, and it included a regional qualifier tournament notable for a major distinction: Unlike other qualifiers, the winner of that tournament advanced straight to the semis, bypassing Saturday’s grueling, four-game, 48-player quarterfinal. One way to get people to show up.

So yeah, the guy who came from Nashville had a target on his back Sunday morning. He proved a worthy competitor, but didn’t advance.

Tim and Chris Broderick chat after Tim went down in the semifinals

Tim, meanwhile, went down fast in his semifinal game. Bafflingly fast. Chris looked on with mouth agape and shoulders fixed in a disbelieving shrug as Scott Scribner — an Ohio State University grant manager and previous national champ who’d qualified at CharCon in West Virginia — turned apt starting positions, a carefully timed road-building development card, and some devastatingly lucky dice rolls into a sudden longest road, then plopped a settlement right where Tim was about to build for his 10th point. It was the quickest victory I saw all weekend, a peaceful act of municipal construction that stung like an ambush.

For several minutes after the game’s conclusion, the Broderick twins bowed over the board, staring down Scott’s surprise build that dashed their dreams of a zygotic dynasty. The freshly defeated Tim looked in much better spirits than his spectating brother. Chris still held his face in his hands when I left to watch another table.

One of the longer semifinal games went to Shiv Chopra, an FDIC technology program manager from Silver Spring, Maryland. As a competitor in several prior national-level championships, he’d been invited to Catan Masters, a special tournament at the beginning of Gen Con to which only the very best players were admitted. He placed third in that tournament, only to learn that that whole final foursome — each of them fixtures in this community — had earned seats in Saturday’s qualifier and advanced, him now all the way to the final table.

I’d first spotted Shiv on Saturday, when he frazzled a younger player with assertions that she’d short-changed the bank while swapping cards in to purchase a city. (She hadn’t, but it took five exasperated minutes for her to prove.) Shiv later described his greatest Catan skill as “perseverance: Grinding it out in the game — seeing little opportunities and taking advantage of them,” adding that along with that grit and the necessary analytical ability, “25 percent of the game is social.”

He named Mandy Sanders — my old friend and adversary from Milwaukee — as a paragon of that 25 percent, someone who convinces the table “these are not the droids you’re looking for” no matter the situation.

“Everyone’s nice, but she just exudes this aura of niceness, and so even when she’s crushing you, there’ll be people who won’t attack her.”

The final table stood dead center in the pen, surrounded by cameras and wired with microphones. We dozen or so spectators couldn’t make out the game’s details, a deliberate set up so no one could peep cards and communicate secret signals to any finalist. We watched a “shadow table” in the corner, a matching board updated each turn by a Mayfair staffer to reflect the most recent turn. She laid development cards in front of empty chairs and placed building pieces of all 4 colors around the map. It’s like sitting so far from a basketball game that they add another court next to you, on which actors recreate each possession moments after it happens.

The final table surrounded by live-streaming equipment, with spectators surrounding the "shadow table" at right

Behind us, older guys who’d been eliminated from the tournament — “Catan legends,” whispered another spectator — recreated the final map themselves, and played it out as a pick-up game. Deeper into the “open gaming” section, a Catan Junior tournament took place alongside adults testing Star Trek Catan.

The prophylactic distance between us and the CNC final hardly mattered. Once it’s all on the line, the players don’t need help knowing their opponents’ hands. Especially later in the final, even the mellowest players track every roll and watch every resource card their rivals collect, appraising each other’s building capability turn by turn.

Under such tight mutual surveillance, that “stealth strategy” is favored — development cards are drawn blindly, inspected, then stashed face-down until use. Others are left to guess how many of your development cards are worth whole points, how many can be used to pillage, and how many will buy you resource bonuses. That’s where all that physiognomy and bluffing comes in.

Ironically, all four players — Shiv, Scott, and two other men named Robert and MJ — played that strategy, which ultimately foiled the whole thing. We at the shadow table realized, moments before the finalists did, that not only had every single development card been bought, but all of them that weren’t victory points had been revealed and played. Every player knew exactly where everyone else stood. The win came down to position and luck — hardly any more strategy, and no more of the poker that helped Sander shock the world in 2014.

With all cards quite literally on the table, Scott’s orange civilization prevailed. Unlike his sudden production in the semifinal, this was a long-dreaded feat of outlasting his adversaries once they’d exhausted nearly every piece the game box had to offer. Scott exhaled and reached for handshakes while the others dropped their resource cards. Shiv half-seriously thrust an index finger at MJ to hector him for missing an opportunity to stymie Scott a few turns ago.

Scott, whose hometown friends introduced him to Catan as a diversion following a “negative life-changing event” in 1997, reflected that he was far less nervous than during his previous trip to the final, “loose” in the face of “some tension between players” at that high-stakes table. It was satisfying just the same.

“It is an awesome feeling to know that your kung fu is strong.”

Scott represented the USA in Germany after his first CNC win 2006. He won’t travel far this time, as the next Worlds in Fall 2016 will take place stateside — rumor has it in Colorado.

Max and I want to be there, too. When we finally departed the frigid caverns of the Convention Center, squinting under mid-summer daylight, we turned back to face the building and vowed to return next year. We want to compete again after all we’ve learned, and when I added that I’d like to see these Catan folk again, Max agreed.

“I want to be friends with these people.”

Credits

Photos & Text: Seth Rosenthal

Editor: Elena Bergeron

Gifs: Jon Bois

Design & Development: Graham MacAree

The sun has only just risen over the San Gabriel Valley. Already, the gym is alive with sound.

In Los Angeles, on South Fairfax Ave., below where it meets Wilshire Blvd. in the city’s west end, sits the Orthodox Shalhevet High School, a three-story brick and glass private school. Class is still out one morning late in August, but summer’s window is closing. Even before 7:30 a.m., school staff and maintenance workers filter in and out to prep for the new year. This early in the day, they exchange few words between them.

The most noise, and certainly the most action, is found inside two sets of double doors by the school’s rear entrance. Hip-hop pulses through portable speakers set on the gym’s bleachers, and basketballs echo as they pound the floor again and again. Soon, intensity will escalate. Sneakers will squeak on the hardwood. Breathing will become labored. By 7:40, shirts are dotted with sweat.

Photo: @Kicknit_

More than a half-dozen ball players mill about the gym in various roles, one directing drills, others participating as placeholders in them, and others still observing the action. They all exist in the orbit of one man, 25 years old then by exactly four days, wearing the lone piece of NBA apparel on the court.

This is Seth Curry. Not Steph Curry, the better known of the basketball playing brothers, and that is kind of the point. The NBA’s reigning MVP, champion and media darling surely trains hard in the offseason, but there is no way his workouts will ever again be quite like this. If it were Steph Curry inside Shalhevet High School on this morning, there would certainly be more attention paid to what is going on in the gym.

Instead, with little curiosity from those nearby, Seth Curry goes through the drills he must perfect to be considered in the same conversation as his older brother. At first glance, they are similar in likeness, their dark hair cropped short, their faces sharing many features, even their names easy to confuse.

But the brothers are not the same. Steph is much more polished, more outgoing. “Seth is very much to himself and very independent,” Steph says. Even their jumpers, a family hallmark, are launched from different angles; Steph’s beginning low, often appearing as if flicked from his hip, Seth’s release more traditional, shot from up top, high near his head.

In the school’s gym, Seth cuts quickly left and right with the ball, mimicking game situations where he will be challenged to create his own shot. He wears a Sacramento Kings team T-shirt, and there is meaning in that. Curry was a great star in college, an explosive guard and prolific scorer who played much of his NCAA career under Mike Krzyzewski at Duke. His future appeared set … after college, Seth would follow his brother to the NBA, who himself followed behind their father, Dell, a legendary shooter that played 16 seasons with five NBA teams.

Seth’s story, however, is not so linear. Injuries and lost opportunities sent him in revolutions around the NBA, circling the league, even touching down for a time or two, but never sticking the way it was long presumed he would. One day he would be lighting up the NBA’s D-League, so much better than his opponents he didn’t seem to fit in. Then, upon promotion to teams like the Memphis Grizzlies, Cleveland Cavaliers and Phoenix Suns, he would disappear and never see the court. As soon as he arrived in the NBA, sometimes even on the very same day, Curry was always sent right back down.

Photo: Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images

L-R: Seth, Stephen and Dell Curry

It seemed he could not live up to the family basketball legacy. But he would whisper barely a word about what many who observed him wondered, how he was handling it, always being compared to that brother, to that dad. The weight of expectations, they thought, must be unbearable.

He swore he was making his own way in life, that he would succeed in the sport at his own pace, and indeed this summer he has lived up to his word. Following two years journeying through the far reaches of professional basketball, in July Curry signed his first guaranteed contract in the NBA. After he dominated in yet another season at pro basketball’s lower levels, this time a performance so impressive it earned him a spot on the All-NBA Summer League team, the Kings offered Curry a two-year deal worth $2 million.

On the professional scale, it isn’t much, but for Curry it is altogether something different. For the first time he will be afforded the chance to claim his own stake in the NBA, to prove that he belongs and that he was always meant to stay. It will be the truest way he can shake the comparisons, of people rarely measuring him without doing so against the basketball stars, past and present, that share his last name.

Curry often said it never bothered him, that being discussed in the same breath as Steph or Dell was something to cherish. But Curry was always quiet, too, a homebody who liked to keep to himself. How could you tell if it got to him, anyway?

“Being around Seth and how he carried himself, you would never know if it was hard for him or not,” says Curry’s sister, Sydel. “To this day, I still don’t know how he really felt about it.”

Growing up, the games always seemed to end the same on that court, the two buckets behind the Curry home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Steph, older and stronger, would beat on his little brother in basketball, their games spilling into arguments and a familiar routine: Seth, often infuriated over what he felt was his brother’s cheating, heaving the ball far off into the distance. Sometimes, he grew so incensed he would grab the ball and instead bring it into the house in protest.

The two boys were the oldest of three children born to Dell and Sonya Curry, a prominent couple that had set their roots in the Tar Heel state. Dell, who spent a decade of his long NBA career with the Charlotte Hornets, had met Sonya at Virginia Tech, where they were both varsity stars - basketball for him, volleyball for her. Following his retirement, Dell became the color man for Charlotte’s NBA broadcasts, while Sonya ran the Montessori school she and her husband founded years earlier in nearby Huntersville.

Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images

Above: Dell Curry holds Seth, 1993

Steph was born two years before Seth, who was followed four years later by Sydel. By now, you know the family well. Had you turned on most any of the Golden State Warriors’ playoff games last year, there in the stands, always in the focus of network cameras, were the Currys, today’s first family of basketball, relishing Steph’s fairytale ride to the NBA title.

It was the culmination of nearly three decades of firm parenting by Dell and Sonya. They provided their children every opportunity in the world to thrive, but made certain they earned each success along the way.

Seth was the quiet kid of the bunch, piping up most often to crack wise before shying away around those he didn’t know. He was a natural in school, good grades coming easy to him, though his parents always asked him to do the things that were never simple. If he studied just 30 minutes more each day, his mother told him, he could turn his impressive report card into an exemplary one.

He was incredibly perceptive from an early age, always finding the angles in life but sometimes, also, the shortcuts. “If he wanted to do something, he was very determined,” Sonya says. “But he had to be shown the benefit of things. He gave you just enough but wasn’t going to give you that extra.”

As a boy, he developed a competitive streak, and of course there was no greater antagonist in his life than Steph. When Seth would storm away from the court following those games that turned into screaming matches, Steph would have to acquiesce to his younger brother. “It was his way of trying to get under my skin, and it usually worked!” Steph says. “I’d have to give in and give him the (foul) call or whatever he wanted so we could keep playing.”

By high school, Seth was a standout guard at Charlotte Christian, scoring more points in a season than Steph had when he passed through a few years before, but even then it was not easy to escape his older brother’s shadow. One game in 2008, against rival Charlotte Latin, came following Steph’s breakout spring at Davidson, where he captured the attention of the sports world during March Madness with one high-arcing three-pointer after another. The underdog Wildcats stunned their way to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament, losing by just two to eventual champion Kansas. Steph had officially arrived on the national stage.

Back in Charlotte, Seth was left to hear the jeers. His coaches always noticed that Seth loved to play when the crowd was into a game, though on this day the opposing fans chose to narrow their gaze on him. “You’re not Steph-en!” they chanted. “You’re not Steph-en!” Over and again, the words came down on the younger brother. “You could see Seth like, ‘OK, I’m gonna get this going’” says Charlotte Christian coach Shonn Brown. “He didn’t get frustrated; he didn’t say anything. He hit four or five threes on consecutive possessions and he was just looking at the crowd.”

He could score, there was no question about that. But Curry also was, by his own admission, not quite ready then for the next level. “I was a bit of a late bloomer,” he says. “Honestly, I wasn’t that good. I wasn’t one of the best players in the country.” Though he was an offensive force in high school, the rest of his game had yet to mature. Like his brother before him, who went lightly recruited and ended up at a mid-major college, Curry failed to attract interest from the biggest programs in the country.

But he did not go completely overlooked. When Curry was a junior, he was shooting one day in a back gym at Charlotte Christian, pulling up from 28 and 29 feet and letting it fly. He didn’t make every bucket, yet the display caught the eye of Ritchie McKay, the head coach at Virginia’s Liberty University. McKay watched for about eight minutes before he had seen enough. He approached Brown. “I’m offering him,” McKay said.

Curry’s senior season came and went, and while he excelled, leading the Knights to a 21-11 record, scouts and recruiters derided him as the dreaded “tweener,” not a true point guard and too small, at 6’2, to be a capable shooting guard. Only three other schools offered him a scholarship - William& Mary, the Air Force Academy and his brother’s university, Davidson - but Seth chose to stick with the program that had first shown interest. “I thought we were getting a steal,” McKay says.

Curry arrived at Liberty in the fall of 2008 and was an immediate success. He scored 20.2 points per game, most in the entire nation for a college freshman, even though defenses tried every gimmick available to stop him. Opponents doubled Curry, designed entire game plans to deny him the ball, and on many occasions even tried the box-and-one, a so-called “junk” defense created to focus almost entirely on a single opposing player. Nothing seemed to work.

Photo: Sandra Mu/Getty Images

Above: Seth Curry represents the United States in a U19 Basketball World Championships match

The Flames went 23-12 that season, good for the second-most wins in the Big South, and in Curry the program had a star to build around. But what Curry needed then to reach his true potential was stronger competition and a bigger stage on which to shine. Since its founding in 1971, Liberty has reached the NCAA tournament only three times, and in fact no Big South team has ever won more than a single March Madness game.

McKay caught wind that Curry was considering a transfer from one of his assistants during the final game of Liberty’s season. Once news broke nationwide, McKay must have received a hundred calls from coaches at major schools across the country, many of them the same men that had paid Curry little mind when he was an upperclassman in high school. “Hey, can we talk to Seth?” they asked McKay. “Can we get his number?”

Suddenly, the decision of where to play was his. Curry chose Duke as the school to finish his college career, because it was close to home but also because the chance to play for Krzyzewski in such a storied program could not be passed over. Curry sat out a season under the NCAA’s transfer rules, returning to game action in the fall of 2010.

At Liberty, he had been the face of his program, but in Durham every player had the potential to become a star, and Curry found others ahead of him in the pecking order. During his first season, when the Blue Devils went 32-5 but failed to reach the Elite Eight, Curry was passed over on the depth chart in favor of guards Kyrie Irving and Nolan Smith. Although he shot nearly 44 percent from deep, Curry averaged only nine points per game, and most of his playing time arrived when Irving was out with an injury.

On campus, other students knew Curry because he was on the basketball team, but this was Duke, an elite private school that churns out CEOs and other prominent alumni with great regularity. Despite his standing in sports, he could live a normal life at school, free from screaming fans trailing him to the cafeteria. For Curry, this often meant laying low, returning after class or practice to his room to watch movies or television. “I’m not really someone who’s always out on the scene going places,” he says. “I’m a homebody. That’s just who I am.”

As a junior, with Irving and Smith both in the NBA, Curry became a starter, splitting backcourt duties with Austin Rivers. He learned quickly how the spotlight shined brighter at Duke than it ever could at Liberty, especially so once the Blue Devils were famously bounced by 15-seed Lehigh in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Curry had a rough game, scoring only seven points on 1-of-9 shooting from the field, “When you’re winning, (Duke) is the best place you can be in the country, by far,” he says. “But when you’re losing, you’re having a bad year, it’s one of the worst because all eyes are on you. There’s pressure.”

Photo: Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images

Still, as a senior, Curry was pegged to become the program’s top option on offense, though even this didn’t come easy. He had been suffering from shin splints, and a month before the season began doctors found he had developed a stress fracture in his right leg. Rather than lose the year on a medical redshirt, he decided to play at partial capacity, sitting out many practices to preserve his body for game action.

Even with his ailing legs, the Blue Devils leaned heavily on Curry; he logged more than 32 minutes per game, mostly at shooting guard. Unlike his brother at Davidson before him, Curry was tasked less with distributing than with putting the ball in the hoop, handing out just 1.5 assists per game but also leading the team with an average scoring mark of 17.5 points. “If he wasn’t hurt the whole year,” Krzyzewski says, “I thought he might have been the leading scorer in the country. That’s how good he became.”

Photo: Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images

Duke lost to Louisville one game shy of the Final Four, Curry scoring 12 points in his finale, but worse than that Curry required an operation after the season to correct his leg injury. He was already considered undersized for the NBA, but now GMs grew unsure how he would recover from surgery. Ahead of the draft, Curry was unable to work out for teams. His stock was falling, a surprise to those nearest him. “I saw him as someone that could immediately score in the NBA,” says Ryan Kelly, the Los Angeles Lakers forward that played three seasons with Curry at Duke. “I was thinking, ‘Man, some team’s gotta want him as someone to put the ball in the basket.’”

Curry watched the 2013 NBA Draft at home with his family, talking to his agent, Alex Saratsis, throughout the night. The first round passed, and suddenly it was getting late into the second and final round without Curry’s name being called. His recovery notwithstanding, Curry was certain he would be chosen, that picks 45-60 absolutely would not pass without his selection. “I felt like I proved all year I was one of the best players in the country,” he says.

The draft ended, and yet his name was not called. Curry had not been picked, old questions about his size asked again and new ones, about his health, asked for the first time. It was another slight, once more he had been overlooked as a player with a future at the next level of basketball. But it also instilled in Curry a resolve he has been forced to confront at every turn. Nothing in this sport would be given to him. There is no birthright to an NBA career.

He set out as an undrafted free agent, searching for any opportunity to show his worth. “I thought I was an NBA player,” Curry says. “I was going to have to prove myself when I got on the court.”

He could not have known then how long it would take.

Of all the places, of course it would be Oakland. Two months following the draft, after he had been passed over by each of the 27 NBA teams that held a pick in 2013, Curry signed a non-guaranteed deal with the Golden State Warriors. The team was led by a player that was surely no coincidence, Seth’s brother, Steph.

It was a marketing lay-up, the Curry boys united at last, those backyard dreams come to life, but the transaction also placed Seth again in the shade of his older brother.

Rocky Widner/NBAE via Getty Images

As teammates, the Currys would not last. Seth received little playing time in the preseason, and for a scoring guard his 2.6 points per game did not satisfy Golden State. On Oct. 25, just before the regular season began, Seth was waived and sent to the nearby D-League team, the Santa Cruz Warriors.

With the guidance of his father and Saratsis, Curry designed a plan. He would give himself two years to reach the NBA, laboring in D-League outposts for little respect and less pay, honing his skills, before he would consider changing course. If he didn’t secure an NBA guarantee by the fall of 2015, he would take the money available overseas, accepting one of the many lucrative offers he’d received to join clubs in Russia, Spain or any number of other top foreign destinations for American players.

He scored 36 points in his first game for Santa Cruz in 2013, and after just a month he received his first 10-day contract, with Memphis. Curry thought finally he had found a home in Tennessee, a place he would play out the rest of the year and then survey new opportunities after the season. Yet the reality was much more cruel. Curry made his NBA introduction on Jan. 5, 2014, against Detroit, played four minutes, attempted zero shots and recorded no other statistics. The very same night of his debut, the Grizzlies waived him.

Back in Santa Cruz, coach Casey Hill wondered what he would see from Curry upon his return. For every D-League participant, a call-up is the dream. Yet when the NBA doesn’t work, each player has his own response. Some turn off, defeated. Others come back determined, but gun only for their own numbers.

Curry returned to the Warriors during the 2014 NBA D-League Showcase in Reno. Up next on the schedule for Santa Cruz was the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, the much-discussed affiliate of the Houston Rockets that ran teams off the floor with high scores and three-pointers to spare. Curry scored a team-high 27 points, but did not do so at the expense of his teammates. He also dished out eight assists, and Santa Cruz won by 12. “It was like he hadn’t even missed a beat,” says Hill.

Tim Cattera/NBAE via Getty Images

So it went for Curry, who would continue his dominance in the D-League without achieving satisfaction in the NBA. Steph would drop him a line on big game days, making sure his brother knew he and the family had his back, but the encouragement could not change his basketball fortune. In March, the Cavaliers summoned Curry on another 10-day contract offer, and in Cleveland Curry scored his first NBA bucket, a three from the corner against Houston. Yet that was all he would do. The Cavs treated Curry more like a temporary roster fix than a prospect toward its future. His contract was not renewed, and it was back to Santa Cruz once more.

If frustrations boiled over for Curry, if he could not come to terms with his fate just shy of the NBA, he let it show to precisely no one. His parents offered advice. His mother urged him to keep perspective, to know that, no matter the doors it seemed man was closing to him, it was all part of God’s will. “He does internalize his frustrations, but I think they come out in very healthy ways,” says Hill. “He’ll get in the gym, shoot extra shots. Basketball seems to be a very soothing thing for him. Basketball seems to be his equalizer.”

It continued in 2014, when Curry, since traded to the D-League’s Erie (Pa.) BayHawks, flourished again. He averaged 23.8 points per game, and buried an absurd 48.4 percent of his field goals, including 46.7 percent on three-point attempts. “It baffled me that a guy could shoot 46 percent from three and not be in the NBA,” says Kelly. “I don’t care - the (three-point) line’s the same no matter where you are.”

All over again, he was presumed by most to be headed soon to the NBA, never to return to play on the shores of northwestern Pennsylvania. During the spring of 2015, another 10-day contract came, this time with the Suns, and once more it led nowhere. Those short-term contracts began to seem to Curry like an unwinnable game. By the middle of the season, many NBA teams practice as little as possible to conserve energy, and so the chances to learn a system and earn the respect of new teammates and coaches are almost zero. “You get in for a minute, two minutes at the end of the game,” Curry says. “If you play well, it’s the end of the game, so it doesn’t really matter. If you don’t play well, you kind of look bad. It’s a tough situation, but that’s what you sign up for.”

By the end of the season, offers kept pouring in for Curry to play abroad, to make a comfortable six-figure salary and leave his non-glamorous D-League lifestyle behind. He was in a peculiar spot. Curry still felt he had NBA skill; that he never doubted. But he began to wonder whether he would ever get the chance to show it.

Jack Arent/NBAE via Getty Images

With only months left until he would consider overseas bids, Curry suited up once more, this time for the New Orleans Pelicans team in the NBA’s summer league in Las Vegas. He had played in summer league before, a year earlier in Orlando with the Magic, but for his final showcase he came equipped with enhanced skills.

Dogged for years with concerns over his ballhandling, in April Curry began work with Johnny Stephene, a prominent dribbling coach who also happened to be Curry’s former teammate at Liberty. Stephene had worked out NBA stars like Kevin Durant and DeMar DeRozan, though with Curry he had a pupil much smaller in size. Rather than have him wait on the wing or trail a fast break to get open looks, the challenge for Stephene was to improve Curry’s ability to create space on his own. Once he could free himself on the court at the NBA level, he could unleash his deadly jumper.

In gyms across L.A., up to four times each week, Stephene and his crew ran Curry through drill after drill, dribbling off the pick and roll, creating efficient ways for Curry to shift and slide into the paint, always toward the hoop. “A lot of players, there’s a way they want to practice,” Stephene says. “Seth wasn’t one of those players. He never gave me any excuses. He just came into the gym and trusted me.”

Armed with a new handle, Curry broke out in summer league. He received plenty of minutes (33.1 per game), and also the chance to dribble the ball more than he’d had in the past. He darted in and around screens, he found the lane. Once in the paint, he would launch his own attack at the basket or find an open teammate on the perimeter. Oddly, it was his three-point shot that failed him - he shot just 8 of 36 from deep in Las Vegas - but the rest was proof he had rounded out his game. Curry averaged a team-high 24.3 points over six games, and led New Orleans to the summer league semifinals.

Curry was showing the skills NBA teams have never coveted more - the ability for shooters to spread the floor, but also handle the ball and slice to the net. He emerged as one of the brightest offseason stars, and after summer league a handful of teams, including the Pelicans and Warriors, sought Curry’s services.

But another club swooped in at the last hour. In Sacramento, the Kings’ new GM and vice president of basketball operations is one of the franchise’s most beloved players, former center Vlade Divac. Divac made his name in the Californian capital on the great Kings teams of the early 2000s, but before that he played a long career elsewhere. For two seasons in the mid-’90s he was a member of the Hornets, where he played beside a veteran wing named Dell Curry.

Rocky Widner/Getty Images

Above: Vlade Divac with Dell Curry

Divac marvelled at the notion, that Seth, who Divac remembered as a baby brought by his dad to practices in Charlotte, was now grown and on Sacramento’s radar as a possible signee. Divac called his old teammate to relay his intrigue, and Dell passed Divac along to Saratsis. Divac had no interest in playing games - he had a need for a third guard, someone to come off the bench and create space behind a backcourt that already included Rajon Rondo and Darren Collison, talented, crafty players but, especially in the case of Rondo, not exceptional outside shooters.

Divac could offer two years at a rate the team could afford. More importantly, he could offer Curry a guarantee. Not more than a half-hour later, Divac’s phone rang. Curry was glad to be a Sacramento King.

He allowed himself a small moment of reflection, though as usual the real emotion of his signing was displayed not by Curry but by those closest to him. His friends and family rejoiced. “I was so excited and proud of him,” Steph says. Sonya found her eyes welling up for a full two days after, no matter if Seth kept true to his form, sharing with her the good news but only doing so by text message. “I still can’t talk a lot about it,” his mother says. “My voice is getting kind of shaky now.”

The comparisons are not likely to stop because Curry has captured his NBA dream. They can only become more pronounced now, more direct, the line more easily drawn between Curry’s accomplishments in a league in which his father and brother have produced so much.

And yet the truth has always been this: it all matters little to Curry. He has forever been able to block out the pressure, to retreat within himself whenever outsiders wanted to stack Seth up against Steph or Dell. “I never compared myself to what my dad did or what Stephen did,” Seth says. “I’m just me. I know the opportunities I have. I know what I want to accomplish.” Adds Krzyzewski: “Seth is his own man. Seth is very comfortable with Seth.”

That doesn’t mean there is nothing left to show. If the real work in basketball started following his final season at Duke, it is amplified now, the expectations attached a guaranteed NBA contract realer than what Curry has ever faced before. “He’s finally recognized for his work and talent,” says Divac. “Now, he has even more pressure to prove it.”

On the Kings, Curry will start the season as a reserve, learning his NBA craft in limited minutes. Those that have played alongside him expect Curry to be hungry. “This isn’t like an, ‘Oh, now I’ve made it’ thing,” says Mason Plumlee, the Portland Trail Blazers center and another teammate from Duke. “He’s looking to make an impact with the team. He’s a guy that’s always onto the next thing. He’s never satisfied with where he’s at.”

Every game will mean plenty to Curry, but of course there will also be circles on his calendar. On Nov. 23, Sacramento plays Charlotte in North Carolina, where Dell will sit courtside, calling the action for the Hornets’ broadcast. Seth always got a kick when Dell would call his brother’s games in years past and refer to Steph as “Curry” on the air. Seth forecasts no favorable treatment in his dad’s analysis of him. “He won’t rip me,” Seth says, “but he’ll be honest.”

For the Curry family, the biggest date this fall will be seven games into the year, when the Kings host the Warriors for the teams’ first matchup of the season. It’s hardly a far trip - Seth’s new rented townhouse in Sacramento is just 75 minutes or so from Steph’s home in the Bay Area - but it will be the end of a much longer journey. For the first time, after so many childhood scraps and epic H-O-R-S-E matches, Seth will suit up in real competition against his brother.

Already, relatives have begun chiding Steph, teasing that they will show up to the game wearing only Kings gear in support of Seth. Never before has the boys’ grandmother, Dell’s mother Juanita, visited California to watch either grandson play. But on Nov. 7, she plans to be in the stands in Sacramento.

It will be a special matchup. For Seth, it will also be an incredible challenge. At times, he will have to guard his older brother, the owner of what may be the NBA’s best handle and what is certainly its best shot. “I know everything about him,” Seth says. “But that’s still tough, obviously.”

Photo: Steve Yeater/NBAE via Getty Images

Their bond has never been stronger. These past few years, as Seth has supported Steph as he rose to superstardom, and Steph has supported Seth as he grit his way toward the NBA, have especially drawn them closer. They are forever brothers, but they have also developed into great friends today, too. “We talk a lot,” Steph says, “and mostly it’s about things other than basketball.” Seth will sidestep comparisons to his brother and father on the court, however he will not run from them entirely. For the Kings, Seth will wear No. 30, just like Steph, just like Dell before him.

Back in Los Angeles last month, Curry is shown footage of his morning workout, which was filmed for a documentary being produced on his work with Stephene. Curry’s trainers and associates whoop and roar with delight over the visuals, each ‘round-the-back dribble or up-and-under lay-in more dynamic than the last. Curry smirks, but otherwise sits unmoved as the video plays.

They are, after all, techniques he must use with regularity in the NBA, where size and speed will be against him. It is a league in which he is still unproven, but he has at least shown he is still not satisfied with his game. During shooting drills on this morning, Curry is such a perfectionist that even three misses in a row is occasion to curse himself out.

Past the double doors, in the lobby of the school outside the gym, a curious few gather. An older man in slacks and a yarmulke cranes his neck to peer through the glass windows that lead to the court.

Word has spread that the brother of Steph Curry, the NBA’s most valuable player, is in the gym training. The man cups a hand to his eyes to better his view, scanning the floor where a group of tall, athletic men hustle about.

“Which one is he?” the man asks.

Seth Curry has arrived in the NBA. Now it is time to make himself known.