The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (50 page)

"I'm in downtown Copiapo," he said.

Caneo got on a bus in Santiago. Twelve hours later, he joined Climent. They called Diego Solis, who flew in from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The men, once stars on Atacama, hadn't been together in a quarter of a century. That didn't matter. "It could be 1,000 years," Caneo says, "and I would have recognized them."

The time fell away. Solis laughed and stuck his finger in Ramon's ear. Climent made fun of Solis's lily-white skin. "The next Michael Jackson," he cracked.

The three walked around town. At a local café on the plaza, a crowd gathered. People stared and pointed. Their heroes had returned. Cameras flashed. Hands reached out. First there was joy, but then a sad feeling slowly came over everyone. The people of Copiapo realized
why
these three men were back in town.

They had come because an old friend was in trouble.

"We are not friends just of games," Caneo says. "We are friends of the heart."

The three men, in their fifties now, drove out to the mine last week. They passed the familiar roadside shrine where they had run 29 years ago; a homemade flag flapped above it asking not for a soccer victory but for the safe return of the miners. The terrain close to San Jose is often described as a moonscape. It's become a bit of a cliché, but it's true. Put it this way. If you were a location scout for a George Lucas film about the end of the world, you'd be getting a nice Christmas bonus. The place is barren, and the harsh desert alongside the gravel road to the mine made the men nervous. It was Caneo's turn to get chills. They imagined Lobos's last trip to this remote, lonely mine. They looked at the tall drills and tried to picture him buried down below. Anger spread throughout the car: how could a man who had brought so much joy to a city end up working in such a hell?

When they arrived at the dusty camp, the men milled around, waiting. They'd been told there might be a chance to speak with Franklin by phone. Olmos, the old equipment manager, met them there, across from the CNN truck, and he played the Atacama fight song on his phone. All three players met Carolina; they stood in a tight circle and listened to her explain the situation. She sounded so grown up. The last time they'd seen her, she'd been a baby. Now she was a woman. They asked questions, and she did her best to answer. She saw the concern on their faces, and, for the first time, she understood why they mattered so much to her father.

She understood they were brothers.

Climent stood on the dusty path and looked at the chaos around him. Straight ahead, teams drilled all day and all night, with three options reaching for the miners. Dozens of tents were pitched around the area, with smoldering campfires. Painted messages of hope covered rocks. Banners hung everywhere. Hundreds of Chilean flags flapped in the breeze. A crowd of priests performed Mass. Clowns tied balloon animals for children. People gripped letters that had arrived from the doves.

"This is crazy," Climent said.

Welcome to Camp Hope.

When the mine collapsed, the strange little tent city grew up around the rescue operation. The families moved out here into the desert, dealing with blistering days and frigid nights. It was a circus. Some folks wept openly. Others fought. One miner suffered the great misfortune of his wife and mistress arriving simultaneously. Carolina Lobos lived in a tent, chain-smoking cigarettes, getting up to three packs a day before Lobos was found alive. "I have to stop smoking when my father gets out of the mine," she says. "I promised him and God."

The television trucks followed, and they have moved in too. The networks and big cable operations, from around the world, have built wooden platforms for live shots, setting up satellites and booking every hotel room and Winnebago for miles. There are almost more reporters than family members, an impressive teacher-to-student ratio.

As weeks passed, some people began commuting from Copiapo. Carolina did that too, though she feels closer to her father at the mine than at home. Every night, she slept with the Adidas T-shirt they took out of his locker at the top of the mine. She slept with regret too. Before, she took family for granted. She cared for her father but never really took the time to show him. The accident made her realize what she had missed. With her father in a strange purgatory, not really dead or alive, she imagined what life would be like after he came back to the surface. She made plans. "To give him all the love that I never gave him," she says. "Help him. Take care of him. Protect him."

This past week, moving between her tent at Camp Hope and her breezy front porch in Copiapo, Carolina counted the days until her father returned. The end seemed near. She thought about all the little miracles of the past two months, about the middle-aged men who showed her what being a teammate truly meant.

"They are the most beautiful memories he has," she says. "He told me they were very important to him. These guys who helped him to be the soccer player and the man he is."

The men who played for Atacama have waited in hospital rooms and stood at the front of churches, traveled for weddings and for christenings. Many of them are godparents. They've always been there for each other, and now, three of them stood at the top of a collapsed mine, staring at a white office phone.

Lobos picked up his receiver a half-mile away, below their feet. He expected his daughter on the other end.

"We have a surprise," Carolina says. "Say hello to old miners from Atacama."

The old players crowded around the phone, leaning down to the speaker. They all started talking. Franklin heard voices from his past. He couldn't see their faces, but he knew them all.

Mario!

Diego!

Ramon!

They tried to keep it light, telling stories about a girl they all used to know, making fun of the billboards around Chile decorated with the miners' photos. Everyone took a turn, giving him encouragement, hoping to transport him, even if just for a few minutes, outside of the mine. Soon, their time came to an end. The laughter stopped. The conversation turned serious. In a few minutes, all the former players would go back to their car and ride away in silence, thinking about their brother stuck down in the earth. But at the phone, they first had to say goodbye.

"I'll come back when you get out to get a beer," Climent says.

"Goodbye, friend," Olmos says.

"I'm gonna stay here forever with you," Caneo says. "We are all with you, my friend."

Lobos began to sob. He had so many things to say. He could have told them about the beauty of his memories. He could have told them that the bonds they formed when everything seemed possible had survived the withering of time. Athletes might grow old and apart, but they never stop being teammates.

"I am crying," he said. "I never expected you to come here."

FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

"W-
W-W-WHAT IS THIS
?"

As he tore open the brightly colored paper, the boy's heart dropped. It was flat, so it wasn't a baseball or a glove.

He ran his fingers across the blue vinyl cover, touched the white sheets of paper, slowly bit his lip to keep from crying. This wasn't a Christmas present, it was a school supply. It was a binder filled with blank pages. The boy looked angrily over at the balding man wearing a weary smile and a stray piece of tinsel on his shoulder.

"I-I-I can't play with this," the boy said.

"Yes, you can," the father said.

The awkward, stammering eighth-grader slapped Jackson Five and
Gilligan's Island
stickers on the binder to at least make it look cool, then tucked it into the bottom drawer next to his plaid shorts and forgot all about it. The next time he saw it was March, three months later, as he headed out to watch a sandlot baseball game. He had earlier announced to his family that when he grew up, he was going be a sportswriter, using the universal language of bats and balls to connect to a world he couldn't easily touch. On this day, he had finally worked up the courage to practice covering a game.

"Wait," said his father, emerging from the boy's bedroom, holding that dusty blue binder covered in stickers. "If you're going to be a sportswriter, you have to have a notebook."

"Oh y-y-yeah," the boy said. "My n-n-notebook."

And so he toted that binder to the baseball game, to a high school track meet the next day, somewhere new every weekend, wiping the dust off his giant glasses and pulling chewed pencils out of his wrinkled shirt pocket and filling that binder, reveling in words that worked, shouting in a voice that didn't stammer, adding exclamation points for the drama,
Bobby Kleinart hit the heck out of that baseball for a home run off the concession stands for Westport Chevron, boxes of Good N' Plenty went flying, what a play!

Soon the white pages became full, and so more pages were carefully added, more baseballs clearing the fence, more snacks falling out of the sky, words written by a nobody for nobody, words meaning everything, the binder and the boy growing together.

 

"W-w-what is this?"

The gift sat in the basement, unwrapped, shiny and cluttered and weird. It was an electric typewriter given to a ninth-grader who had no idea how to use it. This wasn't a Christmas present, it was a third-period class.

"I-I-I can't type," the boy said.

"But I can," his mother said. "Bring me your binder."

Its stickers had worn down into bits of shiny strips, and its vinyl was cracked and frayed, but the binder's pages still exhaled the cluttered breath of scribbled observations—
the Ballard High cross-country team is one tough cookie!
His mother opened to his most recent story, turned a switch, started a strange whir, and began pecking.

"W-w-what are you doing?" the boy said.

"Don't you want this in that newspaper?" the mother said.

Oh yeah. That newspaper. It was a neighborhood weekly that needed stories to fill the space between school announcements and mortuary ads. A month earlier, the boy visited their storefront offices, opening his binder, showing the balding old boss his stories, watching him slowly shake his head.

"Your handwriting is terrible," the boss said. "Did you know that newspapers use typewriters?"

He could not begin typing class until the summer, so his mother spent hours every weekend tapping his stories to life. He scribbled, and she typed, word for word, her third full-time job, sometimes falling asleep between paragraphs, but always finishing in time to say, "Great story" and "Let's go."

Then, together, in the middle of every Sunday night, the mother and the boy would ride through the darkened city to that newspaper's storefront, where the boy would slide that week's stories into a mail slot, then rush back to the car for the relieved drive home, the sportswriter and his ghostwriter.

 

"W-w-what is this?"

The gift was covered in light blue tissue paper, held together with a frayed red ribbon. The young man opened it carefully, forced a smile, scratched his head.

It was a scrapbook. But it was an empty scrapbook. It was two covers of ornate brown leather held together by dozens of empty pieces of gray construction paper. It was silly.

"Th-th-this is great, but w-w-what's going in it?" the young man asked.

"You," his grandmother said.

So for the next seven years, she put him there, filling the scrapbook with everything the young man wrote, for now he was an amateur sportswriter being published in any newspaper that would have him. The grandmother carefully cut and pasted every volleyball feature, shuffleboard column, and flag football game story, everything from the neighborhood weekly, the high school newspaper, and soon even from the tiny college newspaper. She underlined phrases in her careful handwriting. She drew her own exclamation points after words with more than one syllable. The book grew fat and messy as she grew old and frail.

The young man thought she was saving stories about other people. The grandmother knew better. She knew these would wind up being stories about a young man, chronicling his increased confidence, his diminished stammer, the slow realization of his dream.

 

"Dad, what was your best gift ever?"

The middle-aged man is sitting with his three children around a Christmas tree. He has been a sportswriter for more than half of his life now, still chasing that dream, still thankful it is a journey he has not taken alone. He looks at his children sitting amid the shiny torn wrapping paper, the kids covered in the solitary pleasures of iPods and Uggs and software programs that do things mothers and electric typewriters could never do. He wonders if he can ever give them what was given to him. He wonders if they will ever understand. One of them asks him again.

"Dad, what was your best gift ever?"

He looks up at a photo on the mantle. It is a 30-year-old family photograph. It contains the images of the father who still calls every other day to ask what he has in his notebook, the mother who now types him encouragement in emails, and the grandmother who died during his first year at one of this country's biggest newspapers. Before passing, she insisted that he stay on the job and skip her funeral. She insisted he write one more story for that scrapbook.

"Daaad! What was your best gift! C'mon."

He points to the photo. "They were," he said.

FROM GQ

C
HRISTINE HAD THE EYES
all the girls wanted, translucent turquoise marbles fringed by strawberry blond lashes. And the smile. Wide and natural, but somehow coy and elusive too. You could work for years and not get that right. Her peach-colored blouse draped just so on her six-foot-one frame, the silky skirt skimming her calves. She had let her sun-streaked blond hair grow to chin length, and she helped it along by pinning on a little hairpiece that grazed her broad shoulders.