The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (20 page)

Since Notre Dame was blown out in the BCS national championship game, Te'o has kept a low profile. He has tweeted sparingly, and he declined an invitation to the Senior Bowl. His father made news recently when he announced on the “Manti Te'o ‘Official' Fan Club” Facebook page that he had “black listed” the
Honolulu Star-Advertiser
, which had carried a photo on its front page of Manti getting bowled over by Alabama's Eddie Lacy in the title game.

Te'o hasn't tweeted at Lennay since November 6, when he wrote:

 

@lennaykay I miss you!

—Manti Te'o (@MTeo_5) November 7, 2012

 

As of this writing, Te'o's Twitter profile carries a quotation from Alexandre Dumas's
The Count of Monte Cristo
, the great adventure novel about a man in disguise.

 

Life is a storm. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.

 

We called a cell phone for Manti Te'o, but the number we had is not accepting calls. Brian Te'o, Manti's father, was in a meeting when we called, according to a text message he sent in response. Ronaiah Tuiasosopo did not answer his phone or respond to multiple text messages. We left a message with Notre Dame earlier this afternoon. We'll update with comments when and if we get any.

 

Update (5:17
P.M.
):
Notre Dame responds:

 

On Dec. 26, Notre Dame coaches were informed by Manti Te'o and his parents that Manti had been the victim of what appears to be a hoax in which someone using the fictitious name Lennay Kekua apparently ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia. The University immediately initiated an investigation to assist Manti and his family in discovering the motive for and nature of this hoax. While the proper authorities will continue to investigate this troubling matter, this appears to be, at a minimum, a sad and very cruel deception to entertain its perpetrators.

Dennis Brown

University Spokesman/Assistant Vice President

 

Update (6:10
P.M.
):
Manti Te'o's statement:

 

This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her. To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating. It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother's death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life. I am enormously grateful for the support of my family, friends and Notre Dame fans throughout this year. To think that I shared with them my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been. In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious. If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was. Fortunately, I have many wonderful things in my life, and I'm looking forward to putting this painful experience behind me as I focus on preparing for the NFL Draft.

FROM
ESPN.COM

 

“H
ELLO AGAIN, EVERYONE
, I'm Howard Cosell. We're delighted to be able to bring you this very, very quaint, unique event.”

On Thursday night, September 20, 1973, 50 million Americans, fatigued by Vietnam and Watergate, tuned in to see whether a woman could defeat a man on a tennis court. Dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes,” the match pitted Billie Jean King, the 29-year-old champion of that summer's Wimbledon and a crusader for the women's liberation movement, against Bobby Riggs, the 55-year-old gambler, hustler, and long-ago tennis champ who had willingly become America's bespectacled caricature of male chauvinism.

Before 30,472 at the Houston Astrodome, still the largest crowd to watch tennis in the United States, the spectacle felt like a cross between a heavyweight championship bout and an old-time tent revival. Flanked by young women, Riggs, in a canary-yellow Sugar Daddy warm-up jacket, was imperiously carted into the Astrodome aboard a gilded rickshaw. Not to be outdone, King, wearing a blue-and-white sequined tennis dress, sat like Cleopatra in a chariot delivered courtside by bare-chested, muscle-ripped young men. Moments before the first serve, King presented Riggs with a squealing, squirming piglet. “Look at that male chauvinist pig,” Cosell told viewers. “That symbolizes what Bobby Riggs is holding up . . .”

All of the vaudevillian hoopla made it easy to forget the enormous stakes and the far-reaching social consequences. King was playing not just for public acceptance of the women's game but also an opportunity to prove her gender's equality at a time when women could still not obtain a credit card without a man's signature. If she were to defeat Bobby Riggs, the triumph would be shared by every woman who knew she deserved equal pay, opportunities, and respect. Equally sweet, King would cram shut the mouth of a male chauvinist clown who had chortled that a woman belonged in the bedroom and the kitchen but certainly not in the same arena competing against a man. For Riggs, the $100,000 winner-take-all match offered big money and a perfect launching pad to a late-in-life career playing exhibition matches against women.

It seemed a certain payday for him. Four months earlier, Riggs had crushed Margaret Court, the world's number-one women's tennis player, 6–2, 6–1, in an exhibition labeled by the media as the “Mother's Day Massacre.” Court's defeat had persuaded King to play Riggs. Nearly everyone in tennis expected a similarly lopsided result. On the ABC broadcast, Pancho Gonzales, John Newcombe, and even 18-year-old Chrissie Evert predicted Riggs would defeat King, then the number-two-ranked woman. In Las Vegas, the smart money was on Bobby Riggs. Jimmy the Greek declared, “King money is scarce. It's hard to find a bet on the girl.”

But by aggressively attacking the net and smashing precision shots, King ran a winded, out-of-shape Riggs all over the court. Riggs made a slew of unforced errors, hitting soft returns directly at King or into the net and double-faulting at key moments, including on set point in the first set. “I don't understand,” Cosell said after a King winner off a Riggs backhand. “He's been feeding her that backhand all night.” Midway through the third set, Riggs looked drained and complained of hand cramps. After King took match point, winning in straight sets, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3, Riggs mustered the energy to hop the net. “I underestimated you,” he whispered in King's ear.

Several hours later, Bobby Riggs lay in an ice bath in the Tarzan Room of Houston's AstroWorld Hotel. Despondent and alone, Riggs contemplated lowering his head into the icy water and drowning himself.

“This was the worst thing in the world I've ever done,” Bobby Riggs later told his son, Larry, about his defeat before the whole world. “The worst thing I've ever done.”

 

When Hal Shaw heard the voices at the Palma Ceia Golf and Country Club in Tampa, Florida, on a winter night some 40 years ago, he turned off the bench light over his worktable and locked the bag room door. He feared burglars. Who else would be approaching the pro shop long after midnight? Then Shaw, who was there late rushing to repair members' golf clubs for the next day's tournament, heard the pro shop's front door unlock and swing open.

Peering through a diamond-shaped window, Shaw, then a 39-year-old assistant golf pro, watched four sharply dressed men stroll into the pro shop. He says he instantly recognized three of them: Frank Ragano, a Palma Ceia member and mob attorney whose wife took golf lessons from Shaw, and two others he knew from newspaper photographs—Santo Trafficante Jr., the Florida mob boss whom Ragano represented, and Carlos Marcello, the head of the New Orleans mob. Trafficante and Marcello, now deceased, were among the most infamous Mafia leaders in America; Marcello would later confide to an FBI informant that he had ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A fourth man, whom Shaw says he didn't recognize, joined them.

Shaw's workroom was about 20 feet from the men, who sat at a circular table. Through the window to the darkened bag room door, he could see them, but they couldn't see him. Shaw says he was “petrified” as he tried to remain completely still, worrying that the men would find him lurking there. Then Shaw heard something he'd keep secret for the next 40 years: Bobby Riggs owed the gangsters more than $100,000 from lost sports bets, and he had a plan to pay it back.

Shaw, now 79, told the story of what he saw and heard that Tampa night to a friend late last year for the first time. This spring, he told it to
Outside the Lines.

The men, Shaw says, used an array of nicknames for Riggs—“Riggsy,” “BB,” “Bobby Bolita.” Ragano told the men that “Riggsy” was prepared to “set up two matches . . . against the two best women players in the world,” Shaw says. “He mentioned Margaret Court—and it's easy for me to remember that because one of my aunt's names was Margaret so that, you know, wasn't hard to remember—and the second lady was Billie Jean King.”

Ragano explained that Riggs “had the first match already in the works . . . and the second match he knew would follow because of Billie Jean King's popularity and everything that it would be kind of a slam-dunk to get her to play him bragging about beating Margaret Court,” Shaw says Ragano told the men. Shaw also says he heard Ragano mention an unidentified mob man in Chicago who would help engineer the proposed fix.

“Mr. Ragano was emphatic,” Shaw recalls. “Riggs had assured him that the fix would be in—he would beat Margaret Court and then he would go in the tank” against King, but Riggs pledged he'd “make it appear that it was on the up and up.”

At first, Trafficante and Marcello expressed skepticism, Shaw says. They wondered whether Riggs was in playing shape to defeat Court or King, but Ragano, now deceased, assured them Riggs was training. The men also wondered whether there would be enough interest in exhibition tennis matches to generate substantial betting action. In the early 1970s, as it does today, tennis attracted a tiny fraction of sports betting dollars. Ragano assured them that there was ample time for Riggs to get the media to promote the matches so enough people would be interested to place bets with the mobsters' network of illegal bookmakers.

Finally, Shaw says, the men asked about Riggs's price for the fix. “Ragano says, ‘Well, he's going to [get] peanuts compared to what we're going to make out of this, so he has asked for his debt to be erased.'” Riggs “has also asked for a certain amount of money to be discussed later to be put in a bank account for him in England,” Ragano told the men, according to Shaw.

After nearly an hour, the four men stood up, shook hands, and agreed they'd move forward with Riggs's proposal, Shaw says.

Lamar Waldron, an author of several books about the Mafia, says Shaw's account of the meeting rings true. “In the early 1970s, proposed deals were usually brought to Trafficante and Marcello by other cities' mob leaders, businessmen and lawyers for the mob,” says Waldron, whose book
Legacy of Secrecy
is being developed into a film by Leonardo DiCaprio, with Robert De Niro slated to play Marcello. “They'd accept some, pass on others. I know Marcello and Trafficante also met during that period in the Tampa area.”

After the men left the pro shop, Shaw says he stayed hidden in the darkened room for a half-hour until he was certain they were gone.

“Mobsters have been here for centuries,” Shaw says of Tampa, where he has lived his entire life. “There were gangland murders on top of one another. I was brought up with the fear factor. You don't mess around with these people. You stay clear of them, and you don't do anything that would make them angry.”

But as he approaches his 80th birthday this December, Shaw says he is motivated to tell his story. “There are certain things in my life that I have to talk about, have to get off my chest,” he says of the meeting, which he says occurred during the last week of 1972 or the first week in 1973. “It's been 40 years, okay, and I've carried this with me for 40 years . . . The fear is gone . . . And I wanted to make sure, if possible, I could set the record straight—let the world know that this was not what it seemed to be.”

 

Robert Larimore Riggs, the youngest of six children, was born in Los Angeles in 1918. His father was a minister, but young Bobby ignored his father's warnings about the evils of gambling. He won nickels racing boys in a Los Angeles park, played marbles and penny-ante poker, and mastered his own invented games of chance. After winning his first racket on a bet at the age of 11, Riggs played the game nonstop, using smarts and guile to compensate for his five-foot-seven-inch frame, and became a dominant amateur tennis player.

Before Wimbledon in 1939, Riggs visited the London betting shops and was stunned to see he was listed at 25–1 odds to win the men's singles championship. So he placed a remarkably presumptuous parlay bet on himself that would only pay off if he'd win the singles title, the doubles championship, and the mixed-doubles title. At Wimbledon, then an amateur tournament, no one had ever won all three in the same year. But at age 21, Riggs pulled off the remarkable feat and won, from the bookmakers, a total of $108,000, more than $1.7 million in today's dollars. “I blew it all back on gambling like any young kid will do,” he told
Tennis Week
in 1995. “I liked to go to the casinos and bet on the horse races and play gin. I got overmatched a few times.”