The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (7 page)

Marzo cut his trips down to six or ten a year, and began seeing a behaviorist who taught him cues for managing the fans and press. The treatments salved his panic. Though sparingly seen in contests, he won his sport's Oscar for Best Male Performance at the 2008 Surfer Poll Awards and became a bigger rock star in near-absentia than most of the tour's top guns. Marzo can go on earning a substantial living even if he never wins a championship or the handful of tourneys he enters when the mood occurs. The public adores him, especially kids, who seek him out in the trade publications and online sites where surfers gain exposure. "If he wants to surf contests, great," says Wasilewski. "If not, we'll film him wherever he roams, do Webisodes fans kill to see, which justifies what we pay him. He'll be with us as long as he wants. He's a part of our family."

 

But even with the fact of his diagnosis, the surf world expects things of Marzo. Tierney thinks he should "bite the bullet" and do the Qualifying Series, which can now be completed in a "doable" six months instead of a hellish year. "It would be a tough haul, but he'd get to join the World Tour and surf against his idols in great waves," Tierney insists. "He's one of the five best on the planet in terms of talent, and with focus and a couple of years' experience he could be one of the best who ever did it." Marzo's manager is pinning hopes on a prospective new pro tour for big-air, balls-out riders. "Just 16 guys, the best progressive surfers, and an hour, not a half-hour, for heats. No one knows if it'll go yet—there's no sponsor attached—but it would be perfect for Clay," says Varnes. Even Marzo is prone to grand ambitions, though they change each time you ask him. "The new tour would be cool—I could deal," he says. But the next day he's talking about the free-surf option, in which the great alternative riders—Dane Reynolds, Bruce Irons—command big money to travel the globe for films and photo shoots.

Still, as I stand on the rise overlooking the beach in Maui, it's hard to imagine how a kid like Marzo could manage any of those options. I think back on our first—and last—sit-down chat, in which he all but fled the room, screaming. It began well enough, with Marzo talking about his childhood and name-checking his heroes, Bruce Irons and Kalani Robb. "Those guys invented the moves," he says. "We were just trying to take them farther." Then, out of the blue, he announces that surfing is the thing that "saved" him. "It's the best drug ever," he says, "and I'm lucky to have it."

I gently ask what it saved him from. He stares out the window and starts to yank his forelock. "I just ... see things different, from the back of my brain," he says. "Other people see 'em from the front, I guess. It's not good or bad, just how I am. Sort of makes it harder, though, you know?"

"How so?"

His free hand paws the side of his trunks, damp in the air-chilled room. "Well, I need people's help to get stuff done. Telling me where to go and what to say, and sometimes I don't like that, or I'm tired and don't want..."

The sentence just hangs there, whirring in space. I hold off, giving him room to work through the tangle of half-formed thoughts. Instead, he tugs his hair so hard that a clump comes off in his fingers. Panicked, I ask about the feeling he gets when he does something splendid on a wave. "I can't describe it," he says, slouching so low that he burrows into his chest. "Just pleasure, I guess. Where you want it over and over, and do anything to get it ... Are we almost done?"

"Just one more," I say, looking at a poster-size photo on the wall. In it, Marzo is stock-still on his board, raising his arms in benediction as a 20-foot wave hulks above him. In the undepicted instant after the photo was taken, he paddled coolly around the edge of the wave before it smashed him to bits on the rocks. "What do you think when you see that picture?" I ask.

He mashes his lower lip, but releases the hair he's wrapped around a clenched index finger. "I was stoked," he says. "That wave was
bombing,
and there was another, even bigger, right behind it."

What he doesn't add is that he had just returned from a nightmare trip and felt blessed to be home again. Marzo is a creature of waves, but of
these
waves, the rocky, shark-toothed waters of Maui that he knows by heart. Look at him now, out beyond the reef, doing tricks to raise his flagging spirits. In surf no bigger than a picket fence, he's positioned himself above the swell, skimming like a coin from crest to crest. Just as each dies, he spies a new section to carve his name upon, hurling his board up the short-sleeve face to ride the foam again. He's forgotten the guys watching from their pickup trucks, and the small crowd up here with our mouths agape, and the father he can't please, and the brother who cut him dead—all of that's gone now, carried away by the hunchbacked westerly waves. He'll surf until lunchtime, then come back after a nap, and if not for the tiger sharks that hunt these waters once the sun goes down, he might never get out of the bliss machine, which makes no claims, only grants them.

FROM
DEADSPIN.COM

T
OM BLOOMBERG DECIDED
to teach me how to punch another kid unconscious on a hot summer day in rural Manitoba. He called this unsolicited lesson "the moves." I was 15. Tom, an oak trunk of a man who lived two doors down from my family's cottage, knew that I was entering a tough age for hockey players and decided I was ready.

Tom had done well in hockey. He'd earned himself a tryout for the St. Louis Blues. Now he sold real estate. We stood above Falcon Lake on his dock, sticky with freshly lacquered stain, and Tom began the lesson with a story about a fight he'd won. The morning after the brawl, he'd woken up with a throbbing hand and driven to a hospital. Tom attributed the pain to a broken bone in his hand; the X-ray found that in fact the pain originated in his knuckle, into which his opponent's tooth had interred itself.

Tom segued into hockey fighting's rules of engagement: 1. Never fight with your visor on. 2. Don't antagonize only to back down. 3. Star players have immunity. 4. Enforcers only battle other enforcers. 5. No trash talk if you can avoid it.

Last, Tom showed me how to tear off another guy's helmet and how to use his own jersey against him. If everything went well, I'd grab him by his equipment and yank his face into my fist until the refs stepped in. Then Tom wiggled his pecs at me and dove into the lake.

The lesson had lasted five minutes, but it was an important one. I started playing competitive hockey at age five, which is what you do when you grow up in western Canada. You play until your trajectory stalls or your father allows you to quit—whichever comes first. For a short stint, I played on an elite team. I was a tall kid, which meant that I played defense and was tasked with protecting our goalie. "Protecting the goalie" is a coaching euphemism for "goon." I was given this role at age seven.

This was a loosely defined role but in general it meant that I attacked anyone who bothered our goalie. If it happened, I was supposed to hit him, though my coaches never provided any further instructions. This was confusing for a second-grader: if this was my job, and it was so important, why didn't they teach me how to do it?

Aside from Tom, no one ever actually taught me how to fight. Teaching kids to fight is the single biggest taboo in the minor hockey establishment. With or without instruction, my role was locked anyway. Despite 12 years of junior hockey, no coach ever taught me to stickhandle, deflect a shot from the point, or roof the puck with a backhand. But how to hip-check? How to discreetly break a wrist with a slash? No problem, kid.

Most coaches stop short of fighting lessons because they don't know how or can't bring themselves to do it. Instead, fight lessons are whispered from a deviant uncle, a friend's dad, a neighbor. It's a sort of Talmudic tradition, passed down orally through generations of goons.

So I was shocked to learn, in 2007, that someone had violated that tradition and opened a school that promised to teach kids how to fight each other on skates. The world's only hockey fight camp for children was the brainchild of Trevor Lakness, a franchisee of Puckmasters, a chain of year-round hockey schools. Fight camp was held twice a year, cost $50, and was unadvertised. Players as young as 11 were welcome to attend the one-day clinic, where they learned basic fighting theory, how to throw punches, grapple, defend themselves, and the code of ethics as it pertained to helmet-less, bare-knuckle fighting among children in skates.

I wasn't sure hockey fighting could be taught, at least, not in any kind of codified way. Most fights last less than a minute, and outcomes appear random. Enforcers are just as likely to land punches as they are to be punched; to grab jerseys but get separated by refs before the fight can begin; to start throwing punches only to lose balance and fall to the ice.

I had to see for myself. When I called Trevor and asked to enroll in kiddie fight camp, he said no. This was not because I'm about six-foot-three and weigh 210 pounds. Trevor just thought I'd bring more negative press attention to his camp.

There had been plenty.
Sports Illustrated
had called it "goon school"; an ESPN columnist dismissed it as "completely ridiculous"; a
Minneapolis Star Tribune
column claimed the camp was "indoctrinating a fresh generation of kids into [a] warped mindset." A spokesman for Hockey Canada, the organization that oversees all of Canada's amateur hockey leagues, condemned it on the nation's largest TV news broadcast. The white-hot media reaction had already cost Trevor his insurance. His provider had learned that kids were punching other kids and dropped him. Trevor simply switched to another company and kept on going.

Mostly, Trevor said no because he saw my U.S. area code on his call display. "I don't need more American media attention," he said. I knew that some Canadians use "American" as a slur and explained that I grew up in Alberta playing Canada's game. Trevor warmed up, but not much. So I told him that I play hockey with a certain dead man's gloves.

That dead man was former Toronto Maple Leaf enforcer John "Rambo" Kordic, one of the most feared goons in NHL his tory. Kordic died in 1992 from respiratory failure. The autopsy found a stew of steroids and cocaine in his blood. A year before his death, Kordic gave a pair of his gloves to my uncle Earl, who was the Leafs' doctor at the time, and Earl gave them to me. I remember the raw disbelief. Kordic had actually touched these things, had worn them, played in them, and very likely dropped them. It took me a year to get over it and actually use them, though I later decided that playing with Kordic's gloves was disrespectful. Now they sit inside a sealed Rubbermaid container in the attic.

Mentioning the Kordic relic was a desperate move. I did it to convince Trevor that I understood hockey violence, its history, its purpose, and its unspoken rules.

It worked. Trevor invited me to the camp's July session in Saskatchewan, where I would be treated like a regular camper. I'd get in on all the drills and instruction sessions and have access to interview any teachers, students, or parents willing to talk to me. Trevor was vague about whether I'd be fighting children or not. I didn't care. I was in.

As we wrapped up the call, discussing the logistics of attending the camp, I asked Trevor how I should transport my fragile, $200 carbon-fiber hockey sticks on an airplane.

"Don't bother," he said. "We don't even bring pucks on the ice."

 

The Puckmasters rink is housed inside a white cinder-block building in Regina, a small city surrounded by a rural area that approximates Kansas only with more winter and less Christ. Often mispronounced by outsiders, "Regina" rhymes with what no city should. Far from the glittering buildings of downtown, Puckmasters' rink sits in an industrial strip mall between the backside of a Staples and across from Don's Auto Repair & Air Conditioning. The day I arrived, Puckmasters' gravel parking lot was empty except for an abandoned Suzuki Esteem, which someone had cut in half and left to rot on a wooden palette.

Trevor was late. The door to Puckmasters was locked. I waited outside in the July heat while children disgorged from their parents' Cavaliers and Windstars. Some were prepubescent kids already wearing full gear besides the helmets and skates that they carried with them, and some were voice-cracking teenagers in long T-shirts who were just shy of six feet tall. After about an hour, Todd Holt, Trevor's business partner, arrived and let us in. Todd, a short, barrel-chested guy in his mid-thirties, was an eighth-round NHL draft pick in 1993. He never made it to the NHL but bears a striking resemblance to his first cousin, Theoren Fleury, the former NHL all-star. Todd left me to explore the building.

The first thing I noticed was that there is no ice at Puckmasters, just a half-sized rink made from EZ Glide, a high-density plastic surface that behaves like ice, only skates don't glide as far. Each stride feels like 10. Without ice or a building air-conditioner, the room temperature felt close to 80.

In a corner next to the plastic rink, a whiteboard had been hung with two notes written in erasable marker. The first read, "Wallsit record Nolan & Cody 25:30," in neat handwriting; the other, scrawled in a child's writing, declared that "Kyle Sucks." Life-size vinyl posters of Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin had been stuck to the walls. Twelve more vinyl cutouts of encouraging words were stuck to the far wall above the fake ice: Great! Super! Scintillating! Yes! Fantastic! Excellent! Dynamite! Awesome! Wow! Great job! Superb! Outstanding! A single hole pocked the drywall below the words. Inside was a puck.

I left the rink room and walked toward Trevor's office in the lobby, where I met Brad Herauf, a neckless 26-year-old player with wide-set eyes and a dark buzz cut, relaxing on a couch. At the time, Brad, a guest instructor at the camp, was playing center for the Florida Everblades in the ECHL; he'd later move on to the Albany River Rats of the American Hockey League. He looked small for pro hockey but he has a solid reputation as a fighter, totaling 785 penalty minutes over his first three seasons in the ECHL. He had a deep midsummer's tan from three months off the ice. I made some small talk about the ECHL but he interrupted me. He'd been briefed.