In the early moments of a 1998 playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there was a brief stoppage in play as the referees untangled a special-teams skirmish. Somewhere off camera, reigning NFL MVP and future (alleged) welfare fraudster Brett Favre was idling near Bucs defensive lineman Warren Sapp. He turned to Sapp and asked offhandedly, “How much do you weigh?”

A disruptive force on defense, Sapp wasn’t used to quarterbacks engaging him in conversation, much less questioning his girth. And so, while he answered Favre—“Three-oh-seven Friday”—it wasn’t until the next whistle that he really responded.

“It dawned on me,” Sapp says. “I said, ‘What? You think you can outrun me?’”

Favre: “Oh, I’ll outrun your big ass.”

Sapp liked what he was hearing. He shouted back, “Don’t worry. I’ll give you a chance to prove it.”

Favre and Sapp continued barking at each other the rest of that day and pretty much every other time they played. After a Sapp sack on Favre—which he would do eleven times over the course of his career—the quarterback turned to see who had dragged him to the turf. “Who you think it is?” Sapp asked. The two jawed so much that Favre’s teammates would literally forbid him from talking to Sapp.

“As good as he was as a player, he was equally as good as a talker, and if you were not careful, you would get caught up in that,” per Favre.

Favre wasn’t the only one to hold that opinion. In a 2006 Sports Illustrated piece about trash talk in football, multiple players singled out Sapp as best in class, while the New York Times dubbed him “one of the great blabbermouths in the game.” But if you ask Sapp about this reputation—and I did—he’ll tell you it’s off the mark. “I really wasn’t that big of a trash-talker,” he says. “I just got into conversations with certain dudes.”

It’s not that he denies talking; he just doesn’t think of it as trash. Todd Boyd would agree with this sentiment. As the University of Southern California professor and chair for the study of race and popular culture explains, “I mean, talking trash—it sounds disposable. The metaphor is disposable.”

Says Sapp, “Call it the dozens. Or call it shit talking. That’s all it is.”

As a kid, Sapp learned to engage in verbal combat both at home, where he was the youngest of six siblings, and in the neighborhood, where he would pedal the bike he asked his mom for every December—as either a birthday or Christmas gift—to wherever his friends were hanging out, where he knew they’d be talking shit. “That was our entertainment. That was our fun,” he says. “When we got together, we talked about each other.”

According to the activist H. Rap Brown, who changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the dozens served as linguistic training for many Black youth, too. As he writes in his 1969 memoir: “Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.”And: “We played the Dozens for recreation, like white folks played Scrabble.”

If you didn’t grow up with it, perhaps the easiest way to understand the dozens is to think about the game as the exchange of your-mama jokes—combatants trying to one-up (and even upset) each other, while vying for verbal and creative supremacy via any vulgar means necessary. Usually, this would transpire before an inciting crowd of observers who served to heighten the accolades of success and deepen the humiliation of defeat. But the dozens isn’t so easily defined—neither in format nor content.

According to some accounts, the dozens can be traced to the early days of the United States, when it was played by enslaved people, while Elijah Wald, in his deeply academic book on the subject, Talking ’Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, makes the case that the game has African roots.

As an informal pastime played in schoolyards, on front stoops, and in barrooms, the dozens can claim no unifying theory. It’s always evolving, defined by its participants, informed by context, and infused with local flavor. For many, the dozens is known by other names—like joning, slipping, capping, bagging, or snapping—and individual experiences with the game can be equally varied.

For some, like Sapp, the dozens is an activity undergirded by affection and bonhomie. It is a prosocial endeavor—a bonding ritual—even if there are a few sharp edges. As Steve Jones Jr., the basketball coach and son of ABA star Steve Jones, describes it to me, talking shit was his dad’s “love language.” Todd Boyd can relate.

“My parents talked shit, like regularly. Like every day. It doesn’t get any closer than that,” he says. “After a while, that’s the normal mode of discourse. That’s how Black people talk. Black people I grew up around, anyway.” This dynamic would speak to what are known as “joking relationships,” which were defined by the pioneering social anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown as consisting of “a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism,” in which intimacy can masquerade as hostility. In which, in other words, insults aren’t to be taken personally.

But just as play fighting can become the real thing, the dozens can be a dangerous game: sometimes people get hurt. “It is a risky pleasure,” as Zora Neale Hurston put it. In 1939, the white American psychologist and sociologist John Dollard was the first person to give the dozens serious academic attention in his paper “The Dozens: Dialect of Insult.” He noted that “the themes about which joking is allowed seem to be those most condemned by our social order in other contexts.”

Dollard saw the game not just as idle entertainment, but also as serving a utilitarian function for Black folks living in an openly racist society, specifically as “a valve for aggression” that would have otherwise and rightly been directed at white people, which would also have likely led to violent consequence.

Various other ideas and theories about the functionality of the dozens have emerged over the years, though Wald asserts that “all are interesting as much for what they reveal about the explainers as what they tell us about the game.” But while there may be no authoritative account—and while the meaning of the game to one person can be in direct contradiction with what it means to another—the explanations are instructive.

Some, for example, have cast the game as a means of negotiating social status, a puberty or initiation ritual, an in-group signifier, or a mechanism of survival. These all speak to a kind of testing—a challenge being presented.

This last functionality, in particular, has gained traction with many. In 1970, the psychologist Joseph White writes in Ebony “that the brothers and sisters use the dozens as a game to teach them how to keep cool and think fast under pressure.”

The following year, in their book The Jesus Bag, psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs describe the dozens as “a highly evolved instrument of survival” that introduces Black youth “to the humiliations which will become so intimate a part of their life.” They write, “In the deepest sense, the essence of the dozens lies not in the insults but in the response of the victim.”

Nigerian poet, scholar, and journalist Onwuchekwa Jemie—who links the dozens to similar West African traditions—describes this learned stoicism as a kind of immunization process: “It is as if the system is inoculated with virtual (verbally imagined) strains of the virus.”

But to gain true inoculation, one’s immune response has to be put to the test. And in that sense, the goal of the game is to not just best an opponent, but to get them to lose their cool. It’s why H. Rap Brown described the dozens as “a mean game,” wherein “what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words.” He continued: “The real aim of the Dozens was to get a dude so mad that he’d cry or get mad enough to fight.”

As Dollard writes in 1939, “it is good technique to attack the other fellow at his weak point, if that be found” and that “the one who fights first tends to be viewed as the ‘weaker kidder.’” Warren Sapp can barely imagine his childhood duels devolving into fisticuffs: “No, you throw a punch and nobody is going to hang out with you. You soft-skinned bastard.”

And yet violence was always a possible outcome with the dozens. Any insult contains an implicit and necessary threat, a violation—it’s what gives the insult its power—and if you’re going to disparage someone, especially by “getting close to dangerous truths in comical ways,” as Wald puts it, that invites retaliation, verbal or otherwise.

But even more than that, the dozens could be deployed at times with the explicit intention to hurt or to escalate an encounter to physical conflict. That distinction may not always be clear. As Jemie writes, the dozens is “always ambiguous and double edged. Always, it could be used either to amuse or abuse.” Many who understood the dozens for its bloody potential felt it was best avoided altogether, per Wald. At least one Mississippi establishment even hung a sign to that effect in the late 1920s: If you want to play the dozens, go home.

Others opted out simply because they didn’t want to get their feelings hurt.

Soft-skinned bastards.

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Excerpted from Trash Talk by Rafi Kohan. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

I am good at many things. I can grow vegetables, bake from scratch, cook for a family or a dinner party without embarrassing myself. I can read maps and navigate foreign cities and make minor household repairs.  I can do a headstand and paint a room and tile a backsplash and operate a jackhammer. I’m an excellent driver, a fine teacher and a compelling public speaker. I can carry a tune and not embarrass myself on the dance floor.  I can take direction, decipher texts and get out splinters. I’m a competent writer; I know how to get my point across.

I am good at many things, but, of course, it is possible I overestimate my abilities, à la the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It’s possible I think myself more capable than I am precisely because I lack the skills to accurately self-evaluate.

But I think it is more likely that I am objectively competent at the limited number of activities in which I engage not only because I’ve been doing them so long, but also because being competent is the reason I do them in the first place. Maybe even things I’ve learned later in life— like how to tile a backsplash or teach an online class or supervise other human beings —simply built upon what were already baseline competencies. Maybe I’ve kept learning and being successful at learning mostly because the growth has come in areas that already played to my strengths. Maybe everything new I’ve learned since I was young has played straight to my strengths.

For the first part of our lives, we learn unconsciously, at a breathtaking pace. By the age of ten I had learned at least a thousand things I did know at birth: how to walk and talk and eat with utensils, how to dress myself and tie my shoes and brush my teeth, how to read and write and listen, how to obey and also how to resist.

But at some point, learning becomes conscious. When that happens, to continue learning we must believe we need to learn, must feel ourselves lacking in some area, absent some skill or piece of knowledge which holds the potential to improve our life. This comes easily to children, who are told in constant word and deed that their primary job is to acquire the accumulated knowledge presumably held by members of the adult world. But the older we get the more difficult it is to see, and to acknowledge, our inadequacies.

When my son was contemplating a year abroad in high school, we went to an information meeting for the program he would attend. An alumnus of the program, a sweet-faced young man, was asked how hard it was to immerse oneself in a language you did not understand. “Not hard at all,” the young man said, “you just have to be willing to constantly look like an idiot.”

Learning is hard on the ego. Despite teaching for decades—or perhaps because of teaching for decades—I’d forgotten that.

It would certainly explain why I hated the motorcycle class.

The basic rider course, approved by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, requires four hours of classroom learning and 10 hours of on-cycle training over two days. There are twelve of us in the class, including myself and my husband, who takes the class as moral support and also because he loves motorcycles. See above.

Leading us on this adventure are Sam the Scolder and another instructor named Zeke.  Sam we suspect, from his authoritarian posturing and doughy body, of being a cop, but Zeke is shorter, more muscled and also far more chill. Less CHIPS, more Zen.

The course is scheduled to run eight hours Saturday and eight hours Sunday and conclude with written and skills tests. If I pass both, I’ll be allowed to stop in the motorcycle store on the way out and legally drive home a machine capable of reaching 200 miles per hour and 37 times more likely than an automobile to result in my death. Like many things in America, this is insane, but never mind.

Because it is raining, the class begins indoors, inside a massive warehouse stocked with Harleys and Ducatis and Indians (ugh on the name, ugh on the bike) and ATVs and snowmobiles and other expensive toys. We choose our bikes — everyone else has already chosen theirs, the instructor points out — and spend the first thirty or minutes getting familiar with the controls: here’s the throttle, here’s the clutch, here’s the brake. I make special note of the brake. We spend an eternity discussing when to use the choke. The answer, my husband will tell me later, is never, since most modern bikes don’t have one.

My Honda Nighthawk 250s is a good thirty years old and bears the scars of many a drop. Besides injury, dropping the bike is my biggest worry, one which intensifies when I realize I’m the only woman in the class. Dropping the bike gets you serious demerits. I am not going to be the Girl Who Dropped the Bike.

I am also the only Black person, though the class is otherwise diverse, surprisingly so. One guy’s from Russia, another from Italy; both are college students, which makes sense. There’s a man from India and another from somewhere in Central America. He is, he tells us, recently married. (“When I told my wife I wanted a motorcycle, she burst into tears.”)

The remaining students are, like my husband, white. One, a tall, neat, good-looking young man in his early thirties, listens to the introductions then says, in a voice straight out of The Departed, “Lotta accents in this class.”

“Yep,” I say. “Including yours.”

He stares at me a moment, then laughs. His name is Riley. Unlike Sam, he turns out to be a cop.

The youngest student is seventeen. Only three of us, including me and my husband, are old enough to remember a time before the internet or ovens that microwave. Being an elder or whatever we’re called and learning to ride a motorcycle is strange and not a little embarrassing, like showing up, dressed and grinning, at a BTKS concert, or crashing a prom.

Outside in the drizzle we start the bikes, fiddle around some more with the controls and then, astonishingly, begin to ride. The routine for the class is quickly established: Sam outlines a drill, Zeke demonstrates, we line up and try it ourselves, failing or succeeding in plain view. We practice basic skills — starting and stopping, shifting and stopping, using the clutch and finding the friction zone. Though I’ve driven a standard shift car for years, the friction zone on the bike eludes me, raising my frustration, which, in turn, makes my performance worse. Every drill I feel more like Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford (you have to be a certain age to get the reference.) I drive too slow, stop too soon, go the wrong way around the marker. Finding neutral feels impossible; over and over I shift through and stall. Part of the problem is that the bike is too small and my boots, dug out of the closet and borrowed from one of my kids, too clunky and big, but in the moment I don’t make this connection. In the moment I feel incompetent.

The afternoon is easier. Sam departs, off to scold jaywalkers and people who leave leaves on their lawns. We retreat inside, to a cluttered classroom that smells faintly of stale fast food but at least is warm and dry. It’s Zeke’s turn to lead; his instruction method involves having us read portions of the textbook aloud then pausing to discuss. This is not innovative teaching but it gets the job done, the job being cramming enough information into our heads for us to pass the written test. When it’s my turn I read fluidly and answer questions with a snap. In a classroom I am hyper-competent. In a classroom, I am home.

The motorcycle textbook focuses mostly on ways to stay safe while riding: dress appropriately, remain visible, anticipate rather than react to the actions of others. Always have an escape path, or two. Know your risk offset and operate within it. Risk offset, explains Zeke, is the difference between the risks you take and the skills you possess. Low risk, high skills is the gold standard. High risk, high skills, okay. Low risk, low skills is reasonable, especially to begin. The person most likely to get into trouble riding a motorcycle is the person who takes high risks with a low skill set, risking their life on abilities insufficient to the task at hand.

Risk offset. The concept almost makes the entire grumpy day worthwhile.

Zeke is a gentle teacher, gentle in the way of men who have nothing to prove. He’s a veteran (“I got back on the bike when I came back from Afghanistan. My wife couldn’t say no,”) loving father (his daughter keeps calling because their guinea pig had died) and country boy who’s taken his share of spills and learned that what mattered on the road was not speed or noise or badassery or any other kind of macho cosplay. What matters is enjoying the ride and coming home.

“You may be right: that guy who cut you off may be an asshole,” Zeke says. “The question is: do you want to be right, or do you want to be alive?”

This reminds me of a question a therapist once asked me, one that changed my life.  Do you want to be right, or do you want to be loved?

In class, everyone nods their heads as Zeke raises his eyebrows. The right answer to his question is obvious. But the honest answer, the answer I gave the therapist, the answer no one speaks aloud, is: Both.

Day Two we arrive twenty minutes early, bearing boxes of donuts and hot coffee to ward off the morning chill. The donuts are my husband’s idea: there is no quicker way to win friends and influence people than to offer deep-fried food. Later, as we drive the college students back to their train, they will tell us how Sam, who picked them up from the station that morning, spent the commute trashing us and wondering if we’d be late again. Instead, we stand and watch Sam hustle to finish setting up the course as the arriving students gleefully stuff their faces. When Sam sheepishly asks for a donut, my husband winks.

Day Two focuses on control of the bike: S-turns and U-turns and maneuvering. Also on tap are ways to get out of trouble on the road. As in life, Zeke tells us, the question is not whether trouble will come, but when. On a motorcycle, trouble comes often in the form of sudden obstacles. You’re riding down the road and a deer leaps from the bushes, or the school bus in front of you suddenly breaks or a board falls from the back of a truck. The choice, when faced with a sudden obstacle, is to either swerve, ride over or try to stop, and this is a choice best made ahead of time. Zeke gives us a scenario: you’re riding down a beautiful country lane when suddenly a ball rolls out of a driveway, followed, for all you know, by a child. What do you?

“Stop,” I say.

“That’s a lot of people’s instinct,” Zeke says. “But that instinct is usually wrong.”

When trouble comes in the form of a sudden obstacle you probably won’t have time to stop. Even if you do, the guy right behind you may not. The right choice, in this case, Zeke says, is probably to swerve into your escape lane, the one you’ve previously identified. The one you’ve kept at the back of your mind. Always have an escape lane.

We practice racing across the parking lot (racing being a relative term) and then swerving around a barrier, first to the right, then to the left, then to whichever side Zeke points at the last minute. We practice riding over boards and cutting tight corners. We practice riding fast down a long strip and coming to a hard stop on a line without losing the bike. The young men love it. They chatter happily as they wait their turn to perform, revving their motors to hear the sound. The one other older man smiles quietly, keeping mostly to himself. My husband, the star of the class, leads each exercise at the request of the instructors, too tall for his tiny bike but enjoying himself. Everybody but me is having a good time.

“Does she ever smile?” Sam asks my husband, though not in my hearing. Sam is an asshole but not an idiot.

After two hours of maneuvers, it’s time for the road test. My heart thumps and my palms, beneath the thin leather gloves I am wearing, sweat. Even in the moment I know this is ridiculous. I have no plans to actually get a motorcycle, no plans to take long rides on a summer day the way my husband does. If I fail the test, if I don’t get the license, my life will not change. Moreover, my husband told me the last time he took the course (at another school,) everyone in the class passed, including a woman who crashed her bike. These guys are in the business of putting people on the road, not keeping them off. I’m not even the worst person in the class; that would be a young, lanky guy wearing dress shoes and drugstore knit gloves who comes oh-so-close to dropping his bike. If I don’t pass the test it doesn’t matter one whit. Still, I want to do well. I want to appear competent, not for the people who I will never see again, not even for my husband, but for myself. Learning may slow as we age but the ego never relents.

I don’t do well. My turns go outside the lines and my swerves take me right into the back of the imaginary bus. I accelerate too slowly and brake far too soon and my feet touch the ground while I’m turning a slow figure eight. Even as I’m still testing I know that my performance is inadequate. There are only a certain number of points you can lose and it is certain that I have lost those points. I know that I have failed.

“Pass,” says Zeke. To everyone. The college students grin.

But I pull Zeke aside as the others hustle towards the classroom to take the written test. I don’t yet know I will not only achieve a perfect score on that assessment but will find myself racing to finish first, to leap up mere minutes after the test begins and hand the paper to Zeke with a flourish of victory—but I know , as if that  know I will perform well on that assessment and I do, not only scoring 100 but finishing first, heart pounding, As the others hustle inside for the written test, I pull him aside. I didn’t pass, I insist. It doesn’t matter if I wasn’t the worst one in the class. It doesn’t matter if I was close enough. I don’t want a mercy D, I want the F I earned. I didn’t pass and I want him to say as much. I am not, it turns out, the kind of person who is good at everything she does. Only a person fairly good at acknowledging reality.

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Excerpted from Everday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed by Kim McLarin. Used with permission of the publisher, IG Publishing. Copyright 2023 by Kim McLarin.

At halftime of this year’s Super Bowl, the marquee game of the NFL season, the Kansas City Chiefs trailed the Philadelphia Eagles 24-14 in Glendale, Arizona. What transpired next was the latest remarkable comeback in the career of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, one of the most compelling athletes in sports…and the NFL’s modern comeback master.

Mahomes performed brilliantly on an injured ankle. The Chiefs won 38-35 in one of the most thrilling Super Bowls ever. Cue the stirring music and the “I’m going to DisneyLand!” soundbite.

Our book Kingdom Quarterback tells the story of Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs—a budding dynasty in America’s most popular sport—and it tells the story of Kansas City, a heartland metropolis that boomed more than a century ago before it became defined by segregation, suburbanization, redlining, and the ills that plague all of America’s cities.

It’s also a book about comebacks. The ones that Mahomes engineers on the football field can feel transcendent. He makes them look so easy. But what does it mean for a city to mount a comeback? And why does it feel so difficult? Our book helps explain why.

Whether it’s sports, business, or politics, American life is full of captivating comebacks. We root for them (or against them). We sit transfixed by them. They help us make sense of the world. The books below are our favorite “comeback” books.

*

Eli Saslow, Rising out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

This is the story of Derek Black—the so-called prince of the white nationalist movement in the United States. Saslow poignantly chronicles the transformation of an enthusiastic college student who arrives on campus in Florida, maintains his role as the host of a racist radio show, meets a group of close friends, and ultimately chooses to renounce his family’s past and his belief system.

Through detailed reporting and spare prose, the book offers a gripping portrait of a young person that you cannot put down. One of the reasons this “comeback” story is so illuminating is that it’s not neat and tidy—it’s complicated…but ultimately hopeful.

Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

On some level, all comebacks are about resilience, and there aren’t many recent non-fiction books that better capture that than Hidden Figures, which offers the historical accounts of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three Black women and mathematicians who quietly helped NASA vault ahead in the space race. More detailed (and historically accurate) than the acclaimed film version of the same name, Hidden Figures is a sprawling history about a collection of characters who were doubted, then forged the science equivalent of a terrific sports comeback.

Andre Agassi, Open: An Autobiography

Andre Agassi’s tennis career felt like one big comeback. He was a flamboyant prodigy raised by an overbearing father who could not break through and win a grand slam title. He finally did at an unlikely place: Wimbledon in 1992. But he saved his best comeback for later in his career, when he became perhaps the best player in the world for a stretch in late 1999 and early 2000.

Agassi employed the ghost writer J.R. Moehringer, an award-winning journalist and sometimes sports writer who wrote The Tender Bar (and later served as the ghost writer for Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare). Agassi read The Tender Bar and loved it, which caused him to reach out to Moeringer. What followed was one of the most honest autobiographies from a superstar athlete we’ve ever seen.

Kent Babb, Across the River: Life, Death, and Football in an American City

Babb, a sportswriter at The Washington Post, spent the 2019 season with the high school football team at Edna Karr High School in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. As such, the book follows the familiar structure of a sports book. But this isn’t a comeback story concerned with winning more football games. It’s a deeply reported story of a truly American neighborhood, an against-all-odds tale that invites the reader to meet a group of boys and young men who are trying to avoid the gun violence and poverty that is plaguing their community.

You won’t be able to stop thinking about the players in this book. And you’ll leave with a deep appreciation for what they overcome each day.

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Shortly after musician Zauner graduated from college—and while her band Little Big League struggled to gain a following — her mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They had a tumultuous relationship during Zauner’s high school years, but she moved from Philadelphia to Oregon to care for her during her final months.

While H Mart is a book about death and mourning—it opens with Zauner explaining how she cries at the sight of seafood noodles and rice cakes at the Korean grocery chain named in the book’s title—it’s also about resilience, familial and romantic love, and comebacks. In addition to repairing her relationship with her mother, Zauner connects with her Korean culture through cooking and beats the odds to make it as a musician. She also connects these narratives together with mesmerizing detail.

As a bonus, H Mart pairs well with the excellent Psychopomp, Zauner’s comeback album (under the performing name Japanese Breakfast) inspired by her mother.

Pat Conroy, My Losing Season

Can you have a comeback if you keep losing? As Pat Conroy writes in this memoir of his years playing college basketball for The Citadel, losing “tears along the seam of your own image of yourself.” But as anyone who’s ever played a sport knows, the seam heals, producing a stronger image, even if it takes years to realize what you’ve learned.

Conroy’s self-described mediocre skills as a point guard (he was actually very good) gave him the only outlet for connection to an abusive father and an escape from The Citadel’s hellish hazing system. My Losing Season is also perhaps the only book that accurately portrays how meeting NBA legend Jerry West at a basketball camp and stumbling past Tennessee Williams’s house in New Orleans can both be religious experiences.

 Kara Goucher and Mary Pilon, The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team

Athletes wow us all the time with comebacks on the court, field, and track. They face challenges outside of the games, too, which Goucher, writing with Pilon, openly shares in this memoir. Goucher turned a surprisingly successful college distance running career into an even more surprising and successful professional career, winning a silver medal in the 10,000 Meter Run at the 2007 World Outdoor Championships, the first time an American woman had medaled in that event.

Goucher, who trained with famed runner Alberto Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project, was on top of the world. But then she faced a tougher challenge shared by many women distance runners, who contend with a system riddled with abuse, body shaming, and cheating. Ultimately, Goucher achieves a greater comeback than anything she did in a race: triumphing over Salazar to hold him—and Nike—accountable.

_________________________

Kingdom Quarterback by Mark Dent and Rustin Dodd is available from Dutton.

It is probably not entirely coincidental that synthetic testosterone became available in 1935 and that the Mr. America bodybuilding contest started in 1939, Mr. Universe in 1948, and Mr. Olympia in 1955.

Female bodybuilding contests trailed several decades behind male ones, and, as one might expect, audiences differed on what form a female winner should take—​some resemblance to a Grecian goddess’s physique or just hugely muscular. The best of both are rewarded, because today women bodybuilders can compete in five categories: Physique, Figure, Fitness, Bikini, and Wellness. Universally evaluated are poses in increments of 90-​degree turns along with demonstrated poise throughout the judging. The fitness category also requires a dance routine that includes a push-​up, high kick, straddle hold, and side split. Some categories call for high heels and jewelry, others for bare feet.

To prepare for a competition, male bodybuilders tell me, it takes about three months of disciplined work to go from routinely robust to awesome. They continue with their usual strenuous weight-​lifting routine and begin intense endurance training and dieting to reduce their body fat, which masks their musculature. Their diet during the final month consists mostly of chicken breast, fish, broccoli, asparagus, and a little rice supplemented with nutrients and protein shakes, which in total might add up to 1,000 calories per day. The aim is to reduce body fat to 3–​7 percent of the total body, which from a general health perspective is dangerously low. Several days before the competition they begin loading up on carbohydrates to add glycogen and bulk to their already bulging muscles. For the last 36 hours they restrict water and sodium intake, leaving themselves starved, dehydrated, and likely irritable, but now nothing but skin separates their muscles from each judge’s scrutiny. Additionally, some bodybuilders indulge in a pre-​performance belly-​flattening enema. Because of the overall commitment required, most bodybuilders do not compete more than once or twice a year.

For the event itself, a natural tan will not hold up under the bright lights, and advice on the Internet includes, “When you think you’re tan enough, do another two coats! Judges can and will hold a poor tan against you, so err on the side of caution and assume that more is better.” To further take advantage of the bright lights to demonstrate muscle definition, bodybuilders shave with safety razors. Electric ones don’t trim close enough.

For the women, the bikinis are small, sparkly, and require particular attention to detail. “Since you need to make sure you are ‘secured’ in your suits, make sure to bring some suit glue.”

Male bodybuilders compete in three categories: Men’s Physique, Classical Physique, and Men’s Bodybuilding. The typical body shape/size by category is robust, plausible, and unbelievably freakish, respectively. As the muscles get larger from one category to the next, the outfits get smaller: board shorts to small briefs to even smaller “posing briefs.” In Men’s Physique, the contestants are judged from both front and back but without any blatant muscle flexing. For the Classic Physique and Bodybuilding categories, each contestant assumes eight different required poses. These include front and rear double biceps, front and rear lat (latissimus dorsi) spreads, side triceps, side chest, and front abs and thighs. Following the obligatory poses, contestants have an opportunity during the “pose down” to flex freely in an individualized, choreographed sequence of postures that they think maximally display their splendors. In case you think bodybuilding contests have passed you by, some of them have age categories to accommodate everyone, including masters (over 39 years old), grand masters (over 49), and even super ultra platinum masters (over 79).

For both men and women bodybuilders who, despite overtime in the gym, lack symmetry or who can’t make a particular muscle stand out, assistance is available via Synthol injections or surgical implants. Just as the use of growth-​enhancing medicinals such as steroids, growth hormone, and insulin are unregulated in most competitions, so are physical-​bulk enhancers. Synthol, which is mostly oil with some local anesthetic and alcohol mixed in, is advertised as a posing oil with characteristics purportedly better than baby oil and olive oil. Some bodybuilders, however, use it as a “site enhancement oil” and inject it to “fluff” out an otherwise perfect physique. (Why else would it contain local anesthetic?)

To learn more about this performance art, I recently attended a bodybuilding competition—​as a spectator. The International Natural Bodybuilding Association was the host. It takes great pride in being one of the bodybuilding organizations that pays more than lip service to prohibiting use of performance-​enhancing drugs. The INBA randomly picks contestants for testing and routinely tests winners in each category.

I paid extra for a backstage pass to visit the prep rooms, which early on had standing room only and displayed vast expanses of “tanned” skin tightly stretched over bulging muscles, none freakishly large in accordance with the INBA’s firm stance against performance-​enhancing drugs. Contestants not satisfied with the sheen provided by their newly applied spray tan were applying posing oil to themselves and to the backs of fellow competitors. Some had brought their dumbbells along and were “pumping up” their muscles into full glory. Others were doing slow, controlled push-​ups between strewn-​about gym bags laden with supplements. I glanced into the women’s ready room but immediately turned away in shock. Amazons! In bikinis and high heels! With eye shadow!

The audience nearly filled the 300-​seat theater, and everyone I talked to was either a friend or family member of one of the competitors. Seven judges, male and female, all former bodybuilders, sat in the front row with clipboards in hand. Several rows back a professional photographer clicked away all day, providing images for the INBA’s magazine, Ironman. A forest of trophies covered five or six tables at the back of the stage. For each category, the emcee introduced competitors by name, age, city, time in training, and day job. Many were personal trainers, but the clergy, police force, and business interests were also represented. In categories that had at least three competitors, the host awarded checks of $1,000, $500, and $300 to the top three winners. In addition, the trophy tables were gradually deforested over the day.

For part of the show (after the Amazon jolt, as I recall), I sat next to a woman whose husband was competing. They had flown into Los Angeles from Austin, Texas, the day before, were staying in a hotel for two nights, and then flying home. He won his category, which included seven or eight competitors, so naturally his wife excitedly photographed him holding up his giant $1,000 check. Some silent calculations convinced me, however, that by the time they got home, they would be ahead by only the trophy and maybe some brag rights at their gym—“their gym” because sometimes she also competes. Maybe his photo in Ironman would garner him a product endorsement, movie audition, or additional clients to train, but it had to be more than prize money that motivated him.

I had an even more depressive thought as the day progressed. After they had performed, showered off their tans, and donned warm-​ups, some of the contestants came out and sat in the audience. Although they looked trim and fit, their clothing completely disguised their lean physiques and awesomely developed musculature. For instance, there was no evidence whatsoever that their abs looked like biscuits on a baking sheet and that their silhouettes when performing their front-​lat spreads reminded one of a hulking B-​52 bomber. Consider that the men rigidly diet for at least three months to reduce their body fat to 5 percent of their overall weight. (The American Council on Exercise says that “fit” and “athletic” men have about 16 percent and 9 percent body fat, respectively. For women, the averages are several percentage points higher.) Then the contestants pump iron obsessively and especially spot-​train muscles that aren’t quite as grand as their others to gain “symmetry.” After all of this they might win a trophy and a break-​even weekend in Southern California.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Muscle: The Gripping Story of Strength and Movement by Roy A. Meals, MD. Copyright © 2023. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Over the blue‑steel waves off Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, in 1935, the sun rose slowly and then all at once, first overtaking the morning stars, then teasing pink on the clouds, before finally splitting the horizon in two. Michael Lerner, a 44‑year‑old heir to a New York City clothing‑store fortune, sat near the boat’s bow, gazing at the ocean, as his guides Tommy Gifford and Lansdell “Bounce” Anderson chapped their hands on the oars.

For hours already, their boat had bobbed fruitlessly without a single bite on Lerner’s bait. Finally the rod twanged with the hit; it was a brutal, fast snatch. His quarry, at last.

The physics of Lerner’s fight with the giant Atlantic bluefin tuna were simple: the tuna was three hundred pounds of muscle hooked to a line made of fifty-four braided strands of spun linen. That line threaded through a rod held by Lerner, who had been strapped to a boat‑mounted swiveling chair that prevented him from being pulled headfirst into the ocean.

Catching a bluefin tuna on rod and reel required the skill, strength, and endurance of a world‑class fisherman, and every piece of gear had to work—from the bamboo rod to its arched metal hook. And as of that day in Wedgeport, it had never been done before.

Deep underwater, the hooked bluefin followed instinct, kicking its powerful sickled tail as it rocketed away from the dory. Like a speeding car, it ramped up its speed, drawing on the digested caloric power of all the tiny fish it had eaten that week on the marine bank locals had dubbed Soldier’s Rip, a bountiful patch of ocean about fifteen kilometers or so offshore from the village.

That power fed its warm organs and dense red blood, its thick muscles throbbing with lactic acid as it pulled and ran. The fish’s pectoral fins slotted into its sides as it strained against Lerner’s rod, its skin flashing a rainbow of colors in agitation.

The metal mechanism of Lerner’s reel screamed as it spun, letting out line faster than his eyes could follow. Even still, the fish towed the wooden dory across the glittering chop. Lerner fought to keep line on the reel without breaking the tenuous connection. He knew it would be something like this, the world crystallized around his human body in a single second: water, wind, and sun; man and fish.

But this wasn’t a gentle tease from the ocean’s depths. This was a tug‑of‑war with a bear. When Ernest Hemingway, a fishing friend of Lerner’s, first saw a big tuna off the coast of Spain, he was shocked at how the giant fish leapt clear of the water, falling back against it “with a noise like horses jumping off a dock.” Anyone capable and canny enough to catch a fish that size, Hemingway wrote with awe, could “enter unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods.”

After being dragged around the ocean for nearly half an hour, Lerner started to tire. But so, too, had the fish. With a final, deep tug, Lerner pulled the bluefin’s gleaming, torpedo‑shaped body alongside the boat, one smooth side of shimmering skin tipped toward the sky.

A golf‑ball‑sized eye gleamed in its blue‑black head, as its sharp pectoral fin slapped the air fruitlessly. The fish, already close to death, flapped its fins with exhaustion, yet it still took every sickled gaff and ounce of strength the three men had to pull its bulk over the dory’s gunwale.

No sooner had Gifford baited and cast the next hook than another tuna, this one even larger, was on the line. Within another hour, Lerner had landed this fish too, also more than 300 pounds, before they called it a day. The trio headed back to port, Gifford and the mate pulling the boat’s oars with bleeding hands and aching backs.

During an era when commercial fishing and adventure‑seeking tourism started to boom and converge, bluefin tuna transformed Wedgeport’s fortunes. Under its cold waters, giant bluefin tuna schooled at the turbulent waters where two prevailing currents collided. From the surface, the rip appeared as a flat plate of ocean ringed by curling waves that seemed to come out of nowhere, and for decades Nova Scotians had witnessed schools of huge tuna congregating there.

Punctuated by a massive undersea bank that pushed nutrients and animal life upward toward the surface, tuna grew huge on that rip, plump from gorging on schools of herring, mackerel, and squid. Catching fish was easy on the rip, and catching fish was what had brought British and French colonizers to Nova Scotia in the first place.

Only a few days before he arrived in Wedgeport in 1935, Lerner had already given up on his dreams of catching a giant bluefin. The avid sportsman and angler had traveled to the remote southern coast of Nova Scotia to join paid guide Gifford for a week of fishing. But all the money in the world can’t conjure a fish that doesn’t bite, and they hadn’t landed a single noteworthy fish. Frustrated and disappointed, the pair decided to head west by train and catch the next ferry across the Gulf of Maine back home to the United States.

As their steam‑powered train chugged along, Lerner couldn’t bear its painfully slow speed. After long minutes of complaining, the pair lunged off their train car at the train’s next stop, lugging bags, hats, and all, and flagged down a rickety passing car that, to Gifford’s eye, looked like “one of the first automobiles ever made.” They negotiated a fare, loaded their tackle, and bounced off heading west down the winding gravel road.

Driving along past wind‑whipped pines and glacier‑hewn boulders, the men eventually stopped for gas at a tiny, ramshackle stand. Inside, pinned to a plank wall, they spied a photo that beggared belief: a black‑and‑white newspaper clipping of a tuna larger than a boulder. At the bottom of the paper’s curling edges someone had scrawled “1,100 pounds.”

Sensing possibility, the Americans interrogated the man behind the counter. That fish? Sure, he said in the region’s lilting Acadian accent. That fish had been caught in Wedgeport, a fishing town to the southeast named for its triangular wedge of land that hangs into the chilly Atlantic like a lonely, thick icicle. That fish inspired the pair to give bluefin fishing in Nova Scotia one more shot.

Late that afternoon, Lerner and Gifford sputtered into Wedgeport dusty from their journey and headed down a slope into the town’s port, asking around for someone who could help them catch a tuna. In a town where women sold hooked rugs from the side of the road for cash and most men held down more than a few jobs, the money those American anglers threw around gleamed. After their first few queries, Lerner found Evée LeBlanc.

In the 1920s, LeBlanc started harpooning the bluefin tuna alongside two other Wedgeport‑based fishermen. “How the men hated those tuna, those horse mackerel!” David MacDonald wrote in 1955 in Canada’s Maclean’s magazine. “As big as a thousand pounds, they wrecked nets. Speared, they fought for hours. And all the monsters were worth was a mean three cents per pound at canneries along the shore.”

By the early 1930s, LeBlanc had already repeatedly tried to catch giant bluefin on rod and reel, a piece of fishing equipment designed for smaller fish. Instead of a delicate linen line, he rigged his rod with a double steel line tied to piano wire. Before the invention of fiberglass rods, a hard tuna strike could reduce a fisherman’s bamboo rod to shards.

At the time, less sportingly but more lucratively, Wedgeport’s fishermen also corralled bluefin in nets in the open ocean en masse. Once the bluefin were netted, the fisherman pulled them to shore, dragging the ponderous catch behind their boats and eventually aground. Helpless in the shallow water, the fish were killed and sent to either Boston’s fish market or a cannery. In 1932, Nova Scotia netters had landed 204 tonnes of tuna, nearly double the previous year’s catch. It was a fishery for flesh and sustenance, not an activity fit for a gentleman.

Despite having no luck with rod and reel, LeBlanc’s brother Louis and another friend did manage to harpoon the largest bluefin tuna ever landed in Wedgeport in 1934, a 1,100‑pound giant they stretched out at the wharf for gawkers. That was likely the fish Lerner eventually glimpsed in the photo at the gas station—a bluefin that had bumped history off its steady trajectory as a low‑value novelty fish.

That picture set the hook. The circle complete, the two Americans rented LeBlanc’s small wooden fishing boat, or dory, and rigged a swivel to the chair on its front—a big‑fish fighting trick Lerner had picked up in the Caribbean—and hired a third man to pull the boat’s second oar. The next day they left at dawn and returned home with their two giant fish: the first rod‑and‑reel tuna ever landed in the region.

By the time Lerner and Gifford arrived back at the dock, Wedgeport boys were shouting news of the fish on the streets, and the men were passed around for backslaps and handshakes. The next day, the pair headed out for more fishing, only to discover a port packed with boats, each crammed with looky‑loos who wanted to see a bluefin caught by rod and reel for themselves. The flotilla, including one boat with a brass band aboard, headed toward the bank where tuna swam; Lerner caught his next two giant tuna to the melodic notes of horns floating across the waves.

After his Nova Scotia trip ended and he returned to New York, Lerner passed along photos of the massive fish to some sportswriters he knew, who published them in newspapers and magazines. Soon the international wires to Yarmouth were humming with interest. Lerner, who, according to Gifford, “would have severed a leg or arm as readily as he would the line if there was a fish on the other end of it,” returned to Wedgeport within weeks. By the end of his second trip, Lerner had landed twenty-six giant bluefin tuna.

______________________________

From Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas by Karen Pinchin with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Karen Pinchin.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

In this episode, Andrew talks to Ethan Scheiner, author of Freedom to Win, about the courageous Czechoslovakian hockey team that successfully fought the Soviets for the soul of its people.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

Ethan Scheiner is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. His previous books include Democracy without Competition in Japan and Electoral Systems and Political Context. He now teaches and writes on the intersection of politics and sports. His writing on sports and political resistance has appeared in the Washington Post, Stars and Stripes, Politico, and The Daily Beast.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

In this episode, Andrew talks to R.K. Russell, the author of The Yards Between Us, about being Black and bisexual in the National Football League.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

R. K. Russell was a professional football player in the NFL, and is a social justice advocate, essayist, and artist. In August 2019, Russell made history by becoming the first out active NFL player to identify as bisexual. Since coming out, he has written about his experience as a Black queer man in sports for The New York Times, The L.A. Times, and Out Magazine, among others. Russell has also spearheaded NFL Pride initiatives such as the NFL Super Bowl LVI Pride panel and the NFL’s National Coming Out Day PSA. He has been honored by GAY TIMES (U.K.) as Sportsperson of the Year, and he was selected to the prestigious OUT 100 List in 2019. He lives in Los Angeles.

The Columbia River Bar is the violent meeting of the twelve-hundred-mile-long Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean, the site of over 2,000 shipwrecks. Thirty-three tributaries feed the Big River with rainwater in the ninety miles between the Willamette and the Pacific Ocean, and by late May and early June the flow of the lower Columbia becomes truly stupendous, carrying up to 1.2 million cubic feet of water per second at its mouth.

*

Friday, July 16, 2021

As we lifted our boats off the trailer, the sky was low and gray all the way to the horizon, with only a faint spot of lightening in the south to suggest that the sun was there at all. The air was filled with drizzle and mist, precipitation and evaporation, falling and rising. Lowering my end of the main hull onto a damp patch of mossy grass, I felt a slightly claustrophobic sensation of not just the weather closing in around me but the whole world with it. The scene was so far from what I’d imagined, from the picture in my mind of luminous blue overhead and vivid white caps marking our distant goal, that for the first time I felt doubt slipping in through the cracks in my resolve, and wondered about continuing forward.

For months now, my friend Ray Thomas and I had been talking about the RIGHT DAY to cross the Columbia River Bar. The words had been in quotation marks the first few times we’d used them, but grew into all caps as the concept loomed larger and larger in our thoughts. The venture we had in mind would only make sense, we kept reminding each other, if we found the Right Day.

When I’d first spoken to Ray about “the right day” back in April, I’d been quoting Bruce Jones, who, along with occupying the office of mayor of Astoria, Oregon, served as deputy director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum. In the email in which he introduced himself and suggested we meet at the museum, Mayor Jones had attached a photograph of the astounding turbulence a person might encounter at the place where one of the world’s largest, most powerful, and fastest-moving watercourses spills into the Pacific Ocean. Actually, this intersection of river and sea is more of a slam than a spill—“like two giant hammers pounding into each other,” as the head of the Columbia River Bar Pilots Association described it to the New York Times back in 1988.

*

We knew already that the wind that day was steady at about twenty-two miles per hour, too intense for a bar crossing in a kayak, but neither of us was prepared for what that felt like on a span of the river where the Columbia’s mouth was only a little more than a mile to the west. The wind waves were three and four feet, not coming in sets at intervals of seven to nine seconds like on the ocean, but in an incessant and erratic chop that struck our boat from changing directions as current and tide thrashed against one another. I was in the front position again, and up there I felt more like a buckaroo than a sailor, being tossed not only from side to side but also fore and aft as we passed abruptly over peak and into trough and then onto peak again, and so forth, our heads soaked, gasping in awe. Our sail was full, and we were both pedaling, going at what was probably the trimaran’s max velocity, about seven miles per hour.

After a few moments of being shaken, I felt exhilaration rise in me, and I was grinning crazily, marveling at how well the Hobie absorbed the pounding it was taking, continuously oscillating back to equilibrium, no matter how tilted it was by the waves. We had headed out of the boat basin straight for the buoy that floated in the middle of the river, intent on crossing to the Washington side, a distance of nearly four miles. We got only as far as about a hundred yards from the buoy, though, when Ray, who had the rudder, turned us back to shore.

Randall and Ray approaching the mouth of the Columbia River in the Hobie Adventure Island trimaran on July 16, 2021. Photo courtesy of the author.

The wind and our front-to-back positions made explanation difficult, but when I turned to look at Ray, I was pretty certain I saw fear in his eyes. This was perfectly understandable under the circumstances, I knew, but I was disappointed that we hadn’t continued across the river. And I was surprised. I knew Ray as a risk-taker. He had long been unpopular among the wives of various friends and associates, mainly because they believed he was determined to put not only himself but also their husbands into life-threatening situations. It was a reputation that discomfited him even as he cultivated it.

Yet Ray had been circumspect from the first about the idea—my idea—of us crossing the bar in his trimaran, warning me more than once that it would have to be approached in stages that started with building trust that we could work as a team on the water, and then together studying the Columbia Bar in depth and at length before venturing onto it. That was fine. I was already committed to doing the research in order to write this book, and it seemed like an excellent idea for Ray and me to practice in the trimaran for some number of times before taking on the bar. To my growing concern, and even annoyance in a couple of cases, though, Ray had begun to remark that he wasn’t sure about this whole project, that he doubted I understood how dangerous it was, and that it didn’t mean nearly as much to him as it did to me.

*

The park’s launch ramp was used mainly by large recreational fishing boats, though I had been told that some leaving from there were commercial fishermen. The men who ran or worked the big boats were gawking at us from the moment of our arrival. As we assembled and rigged our trimarans on the strip of grass next to where Ray had parked the van, one guy after another found a reason to walk past and ask if we were going to cross the bar “in those things.” I heard derision in at least several voices, while others seemed skeptical but curious. All of them shook their heads. Ray and Kenny scowled silently at the derisive and were stoically polite to the doubtful, giving terse replies to questions about our boats, which had been seasoned by years of familiarity with the process of putting in trimarans amid myriad motorboats.

Donning our drysuits only increased the circus-like atmosphere we seemed to be creating. Mine was a red-gray-black combination that made me look, according to my wife, like a space traveler in party clothes. Much as I despised the strangulating throat gusset, I agreed with Ray that the security of knowing we could survive in the water for several hours, if it came to that, was worth the discomfort. Padding around in our drysuits, though, made us appear even more like alien life forms to the fishermen.

By the time we put our trimarans into the water, a couple of the fishermen were grumbling about the time we were taking and let us know they wanted us to clear the way. We climbed into the Hobies out of knee-deep water, paddled a few feet away from the launch ramp, then began pedaling. The rest of the fishermen were clustered along the dock next to the ramp, watching us with expressions at once incredulous and comical. “Oh, my God,” I heard one of the men say. “Pedals?”

Guffaws followed as we moved past, then a voice called out from behind us, “No guts, no glory!” followed by even louder laughter. I glanced over at Kenny in the solo Hobie, and he looked anything but amused.

As we entered the channel I heard one last voice shouting “Good luck” and wondered which one of the fishermen that was. The rain had stopped about ten minutes earlier, and the sky already began to show signs of clearing. This produced a phenomenon I’ve seen only on the Pacific coast between Northern California and southern Washington and have always found immensely pleasurable.

A Coast Guard boat navigating the mouth of the Columbia River below Cape Disappointment Lighthouse. Photo courtesy of US Coast Guard Cape Disappointment.

It’s a filmy, silvery light that lays like a substance on one’s surroundings, magically weighting everything that it touches and somehow compressing reality in a way that creates a simultaneous sense of expansion, making what’s near seem far and what’s far all but unbearably close. I’d had trouble falling asleep the night before, bothered by the thought that this could be my last night on earth, until I concluded it was that way all the time, and finally nodded off. Now, in the uncanny light of this day, as Ray opened our sail and we slid out of the channel into Baker Bay, making for the Columbia River, I felt no fear, only anticipation.

Seated in the rear position, I could see just Ray’s back, until he swiveled to look at me over his right shoulder. “You and me, brother,” he called. “Let’s live through this.”

We’ve both lived through a lot already, Ray, I thought to myself. It’s what we’re good at.

*

A pair of passersby marked the latter stage of our approach to the Columbia Bar.

Just before the first of these appeared, I had begun to wonder at what point Ray and I (and Kenny, wherever he might be; behind us was all I knew) would be officially within the Jaws. We had been moving along next to the North Jetty for at least half an hour, and the inside of the South Jetty, where it protruded from Point Adams, was increasingly visible. So we were between the two jetties, but still sailing in relatively smooth waters. The inside of the entrance to the Columbia Bar, I knew, the point where the jetties were most widely spaced apart, was almost exactly a distance of two miles across. The outside of the entrance, where ships came into the river off the ocean, and where the collision of tide and current was truly felt, was only a little more than half a mile wide.

We were at a point where the distance between the jetties was maybe a little more than a mile, I was guessing, not quite “in” the Jaws, I had just decided, when Ray pointed sharply off to his right in the direction of the North Jetty. For a moment I saw nothing, then spotted the fin moving through the water about sixty or seventy feet off our starboard side. It took another second before I recognized the large silver-gray shape moving under the water, beneath the fin, and realized I was looking at a great white shark.

It was the first one of these I had ever seen live. I knew great whites were all along the West Coast of the United States.

Ray told me later it was the first great white he had ever seen also, and that made the sighting seem especially significant, though precisely how, I wasn’t prepared to say. The main thing I was thinking at the time was that, if our trimaran capsized, we’d have more to worry about than simply managing to stay afloat until a rescue boat came for us.

Earlier, I had worried briefly that some water beast could tip the trimaran over. My concern then had been mainly about what was likely the great white’s main prey in these waters, sea lions. We’d seen several of them surface for air already, one not ten feet from our boat. Ray called over his shoulder that I should smack it in the face with a paddle if it swam any closer.

It wasn’t long after we spotted the shark that I saw the big freighter headed toward us, incoming off the ocean across the bar. I blame Ray for the way my breath caught in my throat. Before and during our first two training sessions in the trimaran, Ray had backed up his warnings that I couldn’t “cramp up or crap out” on the bar, and not be able to pedal full speed, by employing the image of some large freighter coming full speed straight at us as it entered the river’s mouth, and he and I needing to be able to pedal out of the way to avoid being crushed.

For a minute or two, when the freighter, coming from the north, began to swing in to port off the ocean, the ship looked as if it were headed our way for sure. The freighter’s left turn wasn’t nearly as sharp as it had seemed for that first minute, however, and when it actually came through the Jaws into the center of the South Channel, the ship was nearly a thousand feet from us.

*

Beyond the rampart of rocks and the view of Cape Disappointment, it was all sandy beach stretching miles up the Long Beach Peninsula to Willapa Bay. Washington’s ocean beaches are in general nowhere near as beautiful as Oregon’s, not only lacking the drama of the oceanfront down south, but with shorelines that tend toward gravelly gray rather than sandy light brown. The Long Beach Peninsula’s beaches are the best Washington has, and we were enjoying our cruise north with their relative safety in sight off the starboard side. We had stopped pedaling and were using only sail.

The Peter Iredale in 1906, when it ran aground on a sandbar just off Clatsop Spit. Photo courtesy of Kiser Photo Co.

The swells were growing steadily larger, though, and all three of us were eying them with mounting concern. This is the first I recall of Kenny’s saying that he’d seen the wave train arriving hours earlier than expected. “I could feel it coming out of the south just as we went past Clatsop Spit,” he told me when I asked him about it later. “I was sort of trying to pretend it wasn’t happening, but I knew it was. That’s why it got so bumpy right as we crossed the bar.”

Ray was goading him a little, especially when some six-footers rolled up on us: “This is what you call a flat ocean, eh, Kenny?”

Wave predictions were usually quite reliable, Kenny insisted, in his own defense. “It was forecast to drop to as low as a half meter, then come back up tomorrow,” he said.

“Well, it’s come back up today,” Ray replied, with a derisive snicker. It was a friendly game of mockery and one-upmanship that he and Kenny played constantly.

I still wasn’t worried. The beach was right there. I could have slipped off the trimaran and swum to the sand pretty easily, I reckoned. Kenny, though, told me later that he had been worried, and was getting more worried with every passing minute. “I was watching up the coast, and I saw the waves were coming in sets of seven to nine,” he said. “There was usually only one big wave in each set, though, so I figured we were probably okay.” Bear in mind, Kenny said, “when you’re out on the ocean looking at waves, they’re harder to judge. Surfers like to study the waves for half an hour on shore before they go out, because it’s way more difficult when you’re on the ocean.”

In fact, the surfers already were out in force on the beach at Seaview, drawn by word that some very rideable waves were coming. As we approached, we saw them pointing at us, several shaking their heads. I assumed it was because we were in their way. The families and couples on the beach were watching us too, using their palms like visors against the afternoon sun that was now over our right shoulders.

Our appearance must have been dramatic, coming in off the sea in such unusual craft. We stopped and sat just outside where the waves were breaking, considering the situation. A beach landing clearly was going to be more exciting than we’d planned.

I can’t remember whether it was Ray or Kenny who first brought up the possibility that we could turn around, sail back the other way up the coast, recross the bar, and land at the very same dock where we’d launched a few hours earlier. They threw it back and forth for a few minutes, Kenny clearly a little more inclined to turn around than Ray was, although “I really did want to get off the ocean,” Kenny told me later. “And the beach was right there.”

I must admit that I weighed in on the side of just going ahead with the beach landing. I knew how silly it would sound to point out that I’d already gone to the trouble of dropping my car at Seaview, so I gave my other bad reason, this being that the beach landing was what we’d planned and we’d all feel regret later if we didn’t follow through.

In the end it was Ray’s call. “Let’s do this,” he said.

Kenny told us to go ahead, he’d see what happened. The big man did offer a piece of prudent advice, though, which was to try to pick the smallest wave we could, ride it in as far as possible, then try to catch another small wave to the beach.

As Ray handed me the paddle I was supposed to steady us with, he grinned at me and said, “Seems like a big wave will carry us a lot closer to shore, doesn’t it?”

I may have grinned back. A flaw we shared was the tendency to weigh all options carefully, then decide that “On the other hand, fuck it” worked too. It’s what happens to boys for whom taking action has been the only real alternative to despair.

A six-foot-plus wave came early in the next set, and Ray and I pedaled atop it. Any notion that we could surf a breaker that size in a vessel as ungainly as the trimaran vanished almost instantly. We were swung like a tilt-a-whirl car on the crest of the wave, then plunged down sideways when it began to break. My back paddling did little or nothing to correct us, and I was looking down at Ray as we inverted to well past forty-five degrees.

What we didn’t know, and Kenny didn’t either, was that the beach at Seaview was a maze of small sandbars, creating amazingly random depths. Whether the shoal we slammed into with the back of the portside ama saved us is questionable, but this collision did happen right at what felt like the tipping point, and just at the instant I thought we were going over we bounced backward briefly, then the wave whirled us again. I was on the low side for a fraction of a second, until the wave spun us even more violently, putting Ray on the bottom again.

Time did slow in what I imagined might be our last seconds of life. I was looking straight down at Ray, observing the expression of helpless terror on his face as the trimaran was flung toward vertical again. This time it really felt like we were going over, and from my position on top of the wave it occurred to me that I probably had at least a chance to leap clear, assuming I possessed even a vestige of the agility that had been the main basis of any athletic talent I’d had when I was younger. If the flipping boat caught me before I was clear, though . . . Well, that would be bad.

But Ray’s position was truly desperate: if the boat flipped, he would go over backward, headfirst into the sand, with the boat right on top of him. A broken neck seemed all but certain.

Again the back of the portside ama struck a sandbar, but this time it dug in as if to vault us further toward the tipping point. We were turning over for sure, I knew, when it finally occurred to me to pull my feet out of the pedal straps and plant them on what had previously been the bottom of the boat. I felt the trimaran shudder as it lifted me to a point where I was directly above Ray, and then, astoundingly, the aka that braced the portside ama snapped, and the sudden give that produced created some sort of counter to our forward momentum and the main hull of the boat came back down just a little as the wave spilled us out into a cavity between two sandbars, maybe thirty feet from the waterline.

I remember seeing the ama floating loose in the water for a second, and then, I’m not sure how, I was out of the broken trimaran and pulling it up onto the beach with the rope at the bow of the boat. Ray climbed out of the boat a few seconds later and helped me drag it all the way up onto the dry sand. I was only vaguely aware of all the people standing and staring at us, but then I heard some of them begin to applaud. Ray grabbed me by both shoulders, his face inches from mine, pale eyes wide, taking short, rapid breaths. “Do you . . .” he got out, then choked up. “Do you know . . .” he managed on his second attempt, but this time hyperventilation stopped his voice. He squeezed my shoulders, looked down at the sand for an instant, then again stared directly into my eyes: “. . . how close we just came to dying.” His voice was somewhere between a gasp and a croak.

“I do know, Ray. I do,” I told him. I patted his arm. “Breathe slow, brother.”

A brief expression of suspicion passed over his face. “Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“Am I?” As a matter of fact, I was. “I’m just happy that we made it,” I told him.

Ray nodded, but without conviction, as if he doubted it was that simple.

I held his gaze another moment, then turned finally to face all the people on the beach who were still gaping at us. The spectacle we’d created only really registered with me then. Stunned expressions were everywhere. Some of the surfers tried to scorn us, I think, but even they were so overwhelmed by what they’d just witnessed that they looked more dazed than disdainful. A lot of the other people were smiling, some appreciatively, like that was the best entertainment they’d enjoyed in a long time.

I was still too happy to be alive to feel embarrassed, so I smiled back. My phone burred. I pulled it out of the waterproof lanyard case I carried it in and saw that Kenny had sent me a text from out there on the sea. “Shoot a video of me coming in,” it read. I tried, but after about seven or eight minutes of keeping my phone aimed at Kenny as he paddled in place, letting waves pass under him, I got tired of it and ended the video. He later sent a long and detailed text to his brother (a waterman extraordinaire himself) explaining what was going on. Out of respect for his accomplishment, of which Kenny was justifiably proud, here’s the whole thing:

After watching their ama rise overhead twice, I hung outside
for 10 minutes timing waves, practicing backstrokes, and getting
jacked. The beat was classic 7 or 9 waves on about 8
seconds. 3 to 5 bigs and about 30 seconds of flats in between.
I chased after a fourth, backed off a steep 5 by jamming paddle
straight down on port and leveraging it off the aka to stop a
hard right broach and somehow came out of the white water
pointed straight at the beach. Max pedal on the Mirage drive
and kayak paddle to get through the impact zone. Not fast
enough and wave 6 spun me hard, so jam full vertical paddle
against starboard aka and feather to stop the oversteer.
Bounced an ama on the high tide bar and spun sideways in a
foot of water. Got out of the boat before the next wave and
pushed it ahead through 3 feet to dry sand.

I did get the last minute or so on video, and kept the camera on Kenny as he stepped up onto the beach looking thoroughly exhilarated. “Wow,” he said. “That was absolutely the scariest thing I’ve done in years.”

_____________________________

From Graveyard of the Pacific, by Randall Sullivan. Courtesy Grove Atlantic, copyright Randall Sullivan, 2023.

It was late afternoon, one week before his cough started, when Rivs left for the Grand Canyon. The cicadas had just begun their end-of-day chorus as Derrick Lytle pulled up to our house in a tan minivan, his bare foot, tinged copper from red rock sand, hanging out the driver’s window.

Though Rivs usually ran the Grand Canyon alone, today he was joined by his adventure-videographer friend, who had come down from southern Utah to run a longer variation of the infamous Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim route. Their plan was to run across the canyon and back along Bright Angel Trail, a grueling forty-eight-mile trek of unforgiving terrain with over eleven thousand feet of climbing. A multiday bucket list journey for most hikers, this was a somewhat routine ten-hour run for Rivs and his endurance athlete friends.

Derrick slowed his van to a crunching stop as though he had all the time in the world, stepping out onto our unpaved driveway with a broad grin stretched across his sun-worn face.

“I don’t know, man. I think women in this town dig the idea that I might be a dirtbag dad,” he said in drawn-out syllables, introducing the rental as his “Babe Mobile” while tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. Rivs and I laughed, appreciating the irony: Derrick was, for the moment, married only to the desert and his independence. His baby—a converted live-in 4×4 truck he’d spent years building out—was in the shop for repairs.

After a brief meeting to prepare gear and food, Rivs and Derrick left for the South Rim of the Grand Canyon just before sundown. Rivs often preferred to run the canyon at night—partly to avoid the staggering heat, but mostly to remind himself that he wasn’t afraid of the dark.

As an empath, he learned at a young age that sustained movement was the least destructive way for him to metabolize emotional pain—both his own and that which he absorbed from others. He found reprieve from the heaviness only outdoors and through sustained physical exertion.

“I don’t run to be fit,” he once told me. “I mostly run to not hurt so much.”

*

I always imagined he left some of his pain at the bottom of the canyon—as though he’d negotiated physical anguish for emotional relief, unburdening himself among the igneous rock and cottonwood trees. Whatever heaviness held him before, he always returned from the canyon a little bit lighter, with gratitude for the life he was able to live and a quiet reverence for the space in which he found it.

This time was different.

When Rivs came home with Derrick the following afternoon, he was shaken. There was a soft fear in his eyes as he hobbled out of the Babe Mobile—the kind that bends inward, imploding in the acknowledgment of one’s mortality. I’d seen this look before, just not on him.

“That was rough. I actually thought I might not make it out,” he said as he peeled his salt-stained hydration pack out of the trunk.

After a long shower, Rivs laid on the spare mattress we’d put in the basement for Derrick. With eyes half shut he explained his descent down Bright Angel Trail.

He felt short of breath the entire night but tried to brush it off, convinced that his body would sort itself out along the way. It wasn’t until 15 miles into their run—a few miles past Phantom Ranch campground—that Rivs finally stopped running. He was overheating and couldn’t keep his heart rate down. He couldn’t catch his breath. “Sorry, man. I think I’ve gotta cut it short tonight. Something just isn’t right,” he said, and Derrick agreed in his calm, laid-back manner.

Slowly, they started back towards the van rather than continue on to the North Rim of the canyon.

But they only made it another half hour, back to Phantom Ranch, when Rivs said he needed to rest again. Weak and disoriented, he laid himself on an old picnic bench, struggling to breathe.

As a seasoned athlete with an academic background in exercise physiology, Rivs had a good understanding of the human body and how it worked—especially under physical stress. That night, unable to regulate his body temperature and with his heart racing at a rate inconsistent with his fitness, Rivs assumed he was suffering from heat stroke. Even after sundown, the Grand Canyon in June was a quagmire of stagnant heat, with temperatures hovering near 100 around the clock. Tonight was no different, with the Phantom Ranch thermometer reading a stifling 99 degrees Fahrenheit.

By midnight, after spending an hour on the picnic bench sweating through cold chills, Rivs knew that if he didn’t get out of the canyon soon, he’d likely die right there beside the Colorado River. Both he and Derrick had spent enough time in dangerous situations to know that the bottom of the Grand Canyon was not a place to be when things weren’t going right, especially during a global pandemic. With all national parks closed due to COVID-19—the Grand Canyon included—tonight there would be no park rangers, no mule trains, no helicopters, no rescue teams to call.

Feverish and disoriented, Rivs picked himself up off the bench and forced down a burrito before starting on the five-thousand-foot ascent.

The climb out took 10 hours—a stretch of switchback trails that he normally completed in less than two.

“I really didn’t think I was gonna make it,” he confessed that evening, the two of us squeezed next to Derrick on the mattress. Rivs kept shaking his head in disbelief.

After a takeout meal that he hardly touched, Rivs asked if I’d inflate a blow-up mattress for him in the basement, where it was cold and dark.

He slept for 18 hours straight, long past Derrick’s departure the next morning.

__________________________________

From the book EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE by Steph Catudal Copyright @ 2023 by Stephanie Catudal. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Before we dig into the very real harm caused by anti-fat bias in youth sports, we need to deal with the most obvious counterargument: that it’s not fatphobia to say that being thinner improves athletic performance—it’s science.

“Weight is an easy target because it’s visible, and we’ve tied it to every performance marker,” says Eva Pila, PhD, an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology at Western University in Ontario. “I’ve had so many conversations with coaches and high-level trainers where the argument is, ‘Well, this is just basic physics.’”

Consider a sport like rowing, where athletes compete to see who can push a boat through the water the fastest. Pila has worked with coaches who argue that weight management is a critical component of their athletes’ training regimens because the more the boat weighs (and by “the boat,” we mean both the inanimate object and the people sitting inside it), the harder athletes will have to work to push it along. “Nobody asks, ‘Should we build a better boat?’” she notes.

Dana Voelker, PhD, also a kinesiologist and associate professor of sport and exercise psychology at West Virginia University, who has studied weight stigma in figure skating, points to a commonly invoked “80-pound rule,” which dictates that a female figure skater must weigh at least 80 pounds less than the male figure skater who must lift her.

“Why 80 pounds?” she asks. “It’s used as a proclamation of science, but where is that science? And why do we emphasize the female skaters losing weight but focus less on male skaters getting stronger?”

“It’s just physics” also assumes fat athletes can’t bring other skills to a sport beyond their physical presence. But fat people can be strong, fast, flexible, and graceful. And research on the relationship between weight and physical fitness, much like the relationship between weight and health outcomes, is largely correlative and clearest at the extreme ends of the BMI scale, both high and low.

“When you look at everybody in the middle, it’s not so clear,” says Christy Greenleaf, PhD, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. “There are people in bigger bodies that can do all kinds of physical activities at high levels.”

Many have cult followings on social media: The fat activist and writer Ragen Chastain has won ballroom dance competitions and run marathons; Mirna Valerio, known as “the Mirnavator,” is a fat ultramarathon runner and hiker; Jessamyn Stanley is a fat yoga celebrity, author, and fitness influencer; author and influencer Meg Boggs is a fat powerlifter; and Louise Green, author of Big Fit Girl, runs the Size Inclusive Training Academy to help personal trainers work with folks in all body sizes.

But few fat people compete at the highest levels of most sports. And maybe, sometimes, this is physics. But sometimes that “physics” has a very high human cost: “The body control piece is just seen as part of what has to happen at the elite levels,” says Pila. “When shaving a second off your time makes the difference between getting a medal or not, folks will say we have to look at every possible way of optimizing performance. This is what must be done, and sometimes mental health must suffer.”

And maybe, more often, it’s not physics at all but rather the larger athlete’s experience of anti-fat bias that keeps the doors to elite sports slammed shut. Because we see anti-fat bias emerge even in sports like shot put and powerlifting, where conventional wisdom holds that size equals strength, as well as football and rugby, where larger bodies are considered an asset, at least for certain positions.

Across the sports spectrum, fat athletes can expect to encounter locker-room teasing, size-based nicknames, and differential treatment. “Fat athletes may excel” in certain sports, writes Frankie de la Cretaz, a journalist who covers sports, gender, and queerness, in a 2022 article for Global Sports Matters:

But they are still overlooked when it comes to getting sponsorships. [ … ] Even in sports where fat athletes may contribute to a team’s success—like a touchdown made possible by the blocking of a lineman—it is never those players who are allowed to be the face of a team. The glory and renown goes to quarterbacks or running backs.

In this way, assigning kids to sports by body types doesn’t eliminate bias; it only narrows our understanding of what kids in different bodies can do. Laura, an attorney in Oakland, California, says people started asking if her now 17-year-old autistic son, Thomas, would play football when he was four years old. Laura is tall; Thomas’s dad is tall and bigger bodied, and Thomas, at 17, wears a men’s 3XL.

“He’s been way off the growth charts his whole life,” Laura says. And on many trips to the park or the grocery store, she could expect to hear a passing comment of “Get that boy signed up for football!”

Laura remembers touring a local high school when Thomas was in eighth grade and already over six feet tall. “The assistant football coach spotted us walking in the door and gave us this jolly but uncomfortably hard sell the whole time,” she says.

Thomas was flattered but also confused. He has never had any interest in football and views the constant commentary as “just one of those weird things adults always say,” much to Laura’s relief. “The risk for head injuries in football really concerns me,” she says. “But it is tricky because this is one of the few sports where a bigger body is celebrated and sought after. And that’s a different experience from other sports, where you’re just the big kid on the team.”

Within the field of kinesiology, scholars are divided on the question of whether the experience of anti-fat bias has a bigger impact than weight itself on a person’s fitness level and athletic performance.

“Some people see this as a social justice issue because if we’re not creating environments where all youth can feel empowered to participate, we are systematically keeping people from experiencing the benefits of the sport,” says Pila. “But there is also a camp that recognizes that, sure, at the participatory level, sport can be for everybody. But at the elite levels, exclusivity is a normative part of competing. So, we don’t have to change the system because only very exceptional people can get to that stage anyway.”

The problem with that latter argument is that “very exceptional” has always been code for thin.

“In many sports, we’ve never tried anything different,” says Voelker. “We haven’t allowed people of certain body types to excel and move forward to the next level. So, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that is far more about social construction than science.” We don’t even know what fat athletes can do at elite levels in most sports, because they never get there. And our resistance to changing is rooted in culture and emotion.

“There is often this sense that we have certain rules in place to protect the authenticity of a sport,” says Greenleaf. Consider the expectations around form and line for dancers, or the conviction of the head coach Natalie works with that he needs “long and lean” runners. “We hold on to these things as sacred,” says Greenleaf. “But rules change all the time.”

She draws a parallel with the long-running debate about the high rates of head trauma in American football: “We know football is dangerous for athletes. But when I ask students, ‘Could we create a form of football that doesn’t involve head trauma?’ they can’t wrap their heads around it,” she explains. “These are people who care about health! But there’s this huge disconnect.”

These “rules,” which are traditions and rituals borne out of bias, may only apply in theory to elite athletes, but they absolutely ripple out and down through every level of competition. Meghan Seaman owns the On Stage Dance Studio in Stratford, Ontario. Even when placing dancers on her competitive team, Seaman never factors in weight. “If you’re willing to put in the work, I will find a place for you,” she says.

Her competitive dance team travels to five competitions and puts on two shows each year between September and May. At every competition, Meghan’s team of just over one hundred dancers, some tall, some short, some thin, some fat, line up next to teams where virtually every girl is five foot seven and weighs 100 pounds. “I feel like the impression of my team at dance competitions is that my studio takes it less seriously,” says Meghan. “Which is kind of true if [body size] is your scale. Nobody on my team would make it onto their team.”

Meghan grew up in the dance world, taking lessons and performing from the age of five to 18, and says she spent most of those years justifying her own disordered eating habits as necessary in her quest to be “a better dancer,” which meant having the ideal thin dancer’s body. “My experiences really shape the environment I strive to create for my students today,” Meghan says.

She prioritizes diversity when she hires instructors and trains the staff not to give compliments or corrections related to a dancer’s body size or shape. “There is a big difference between saying to a child, ‘Suck in that stomach!’ and ‘Your butt is sticking out!’ or saying to a child, ‘Lengthen your spine,’” she notes.

Meghan also gently challenges students who make fatphobic comments. If a student says, “I feel so gross in my leotard, I ate a huge dinner,” Meghan responds, “Good, you needed that dinner. You’re going to dance for two hours.” When she hears, “I’m too fat to be a ballerina, I can’t get my leg that high,” she explains why flexibility and endurance have nothing to do with body size.

To Meghan, this style of teaching feels worth it because it allows her to bring what she loves about dance to so many  more students, even  if she doesn’t have the glory of winning more competitions or sending students on to Canada’s National Ballet School. “The percentage of kids I teach that are going to have a career in dance is so minuscule, I would much rather focus on helping them have a good time, be active, and make friends and memories,” she says.

That’s true of all kids, in all physical activities. No matter how much thinness matters or doesn’t at the Olympics, most of our kids aren’t going there. And yet the sports leagues and dance classes we sign them up for are structured around the possibility that one of them might. That helps to justify training regimens and messaging that perpetuate anti-fat bias.

“You could say, ‘Well, let’s change the standards of this sport,’” Pila says. “But they land on, ‘Let’s change the athlete.’”

__________________________________

From Fat Talk. Used with the permission of the publisher, Henry Holt and Co. Copyright © 2023 by Virginia Sole-Smith.