Round-up of fine sentences, part 29
At long last, Kings.
The game of small-town Canada has just been heisted by Hollywood. A group of bearded beach bums has just stolen sports’ most chilling trophy and stuck it where the sun shines.
The most popular puck around here is no longer Wolfgang. Our hottest skaters are no longer in bikinis.
Heaven has frozen over. The Kings are 2012 Stanley Cup champions.
- Bill Plaschke
He fell short in the tryout, posting slower times and lower marks than he had hoped. But that same week his academic fortunes appeared to be improving. He showed up for study hall three straight days and handed in all his assignments on time. “This week has been awesome,” gushed Eileen O’Rourke, one of his mentors. “He’s on a roll right now.”
And then, in a snap, his world came undone. On his way home from a funeral for an uncle, he was pulled over for speeding. What should have been an ordinary traffic violation turned into something far more complicated, as he was cited for driving on a suspended license with $700 in unpaid parking tickets, and for having failed to show up for a court appearance to defend himself. A police officer handcuffed him and drove him downtown, where he was booked and handed a blue jumpsuit.
- Brad Wolverton
A Bellefonte dateline will be the first word on newspaper and Internet stories read by thousands each day. Myriad television personalities will start or end their reports saying they are in Bellefonte. Thirty-eight TV trucks, with the possibility of more, have booked space for the upcoming trial.
- Mark Dent
This isn’t just false humility. It’s false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.
- Michael Lewis
Kevin Durant stood on the court at Chesapeake Energy Arena and let the noise wash over him, noise like you don’t hear anywhere else in pro sports, unique because of the volume but also because of the tone. It is less of a full-throated bellow than a high-pitched shriek, the sound of families with children who are hopped up on candy way past their bedtimes, at the state’s most delightful circus. Durant built this big top, with his youth and his bounce, his long arms and feathery jumpers. Fans around town wear T-shirts with his name in place of the Thunder logo. That’s about right. He and the franchise are interchangeable. They came to Oklahoma City together and they will likely win championships together. The only question is when.
- Lee Jenkins
Chris Webber (college squad player): I rode from the airport in a limo with Larry Bird, and that was such an honor. We talked about playing against the Pistons, different moves, all this stuff. He was just a great dude. Then, as we got out of the car and I was getting my bags, he goes, “Make sure you get your sleep, because tomorrow I’m gonna bust your ass, and you’re going to remember it the rest of the week.”
- Chris Webber
A few more hours of work after that, and I found myself at a bar watching a crew of elderly Boston ironworkers on the TV, framing a gallows for the Miami Heat. Fascinating stuff, to see the most absurdly overhyped team in sports history swoon and swallow its tongue in a big playoff game — again.
- Scott Raab
In this house of horrors, where his championship dreams died so many times, where his career arc was indelibly dented, where he shed his Cleveland Cavaliers jersey for the final time, LeBron James stepped out, stared into the abyss and scoffed at the darkness.
- Howard Beck
BACK when paper and ink still mattered, I fell into a job as a nightside reporter at The Providence Journal, in the habitually newsworthy state of Rhode Island. This was many years ago, before exercise, sobriety and good hygiene had ruined the misanthropic bonhomie of the typical newsroom — or so the romanticizing journalist in me likes to think.
- Dan Barry
A state bureau of investigations agent told me that downtown merchants have been repeatedly told by law enforcement that if they advertise with me there will be repercussions. One retailer, selling fifty-plus papers a week, suddenly stopped, saying they “couldn’t keep up with the quarters.” But it turns out according to their staff, who came running out of the store to tell us, that, actually, they love the paper; some high-ranking person had told them that if they kept selling the paper they would lose the contract to feed all the prisoners in the jail. People will engage in war against you and there has been an economic war waged against us because we did expose the individuals who were expected to enforce the law, but who may in fact be the largest organized criminal group in the community, or they may even be controlling the crime.
- Jonathan Austin
Anyway, my wife told me that the doctor treating my father’s pneumonia needed to hear from me that night about what is called the “Do Not Resuscitate” call. In short, the doctor was going to ask me if I wanted to let my father die. I remember that the decision did not take a second. To this day, I am startled by how easy it was. (Anyone who thinks this callous or cruel has not looked Alzheimer’s in the face.) I’m going to tell the doctor to let him go, I told my wife. And, at that moment, I swear to God, the gates slammed open and the Belmont Stakes went off. A horse named Easy Goer won. I made up some of the day’s losses on a French horse named Le Voyageur, who came in third at a decent price. A huge thunderstorm blew up that night and, as the rain and wind lashed the trees outside my hotel room, the doctor finally called and I gave him the instructions. Then I watched the lightning for a good long while.
- Charles Pierce
Bonus:
So he took his joy where he could find it, and in small doses, usually at 3:00 A.M., as his offspring slept and couldn’t bother him. But since enjoyment of things was counter to my father’s natural state of being, his stabs at pleasure didn’t really ever work out for him. For instance, there’s my father now, sitting on the couch in the living room, 3:00 A.M., stark naked, glass shattered everywhere. Glass covered the couch, glass spilling onto the floor. Son of a bitch! my father bellowed from deep in his belly, which is what he did. Lean and handsome when he was young, he’d gotten fat and intimidating by the time I came along. He had big steely paws and a belt like a bullwhip. He’d hit you in the back and you’d feel it clear through to the front. High-and-tight, black horn-rims, gritted teeth. It took nothing to set him off, and you did not want to tangle with that. And now he had an ass full of glass.
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Of course, my father numbered his boys among the reprobates and never missed an opportunity to let us know it. He resented that we just assumed that we’d have stuff, like food and clothes. In the great ledger of material things, my family didn’t merit a mention. We had little to speak of, and as the youngest I got everything we did have last. It was just life and nobody complained. But compared with some of the boys I went to school with, we were absolutely prosperous. In my town, you showed yourself to be truly poor by showing up at school barefoot. And there were so many kids without shoes that we really didn’t think much of it. I remember one kid from my street vividly. Aiken was a fully muscled man at ten. Aiken was weathered at ten — steel-calloused hands, deep-set, weary eyes — looked like he punched a clock as a longshoreman just in time to make it to Mrs. Norris’s fifth-grade class every morning. Aiken had no shoes, and he wore the same clothes every day of the week. You’d see his mama out in the yard doing the wash on Sunday, and they’d start out clean on Monday, and by Friday they’d have fresh holes and be pretty ripe. But Aiken walked through the world unfazed by this, and even though we didn’t have a pot to piss in, either, I felt sorry for him all the same. In Aiken’s grim acceptance of the world and its privations, my father saw a lesson for me. When my brothers and I asked for extravagances, like shoes, Daddy would say, “You girls better marry rich wives, you’ve got expensive tastes.” Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, surely this was meant affectionately! A little ribbing, to make men of us. But just to make sure that we knew he wasn’t joking in the slightest, he’d quickly add: “You’ll never amount to anything.”
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From early on, I was aware of the hostage situation that prevailed at our house. I thought to myself: Who is the angry man who lives here, and why does he hate me so much? But unlike in a typical hostage situation, our captor would leave for long stretches — guy really worked his balls off — only to swoop back onto the premises and pitilessly reassert his mercurial will and crushing authority. Before I started school, my mother would sit me down in the afternoon and talk to me just before he came home, preparing. “You know how Daddy gets,” she would say, giving me useful strategies to deal with the hulking child about to walk through the door, as if I were the rational adult.
-
I had hated this man for most of my life, a hate probably not even he deserved. And I had loved him as much as a son can love a father. And I had pitied him, and scorned him for not knowing my exceptional brothers — James, Craig, Kevin, John, Christopher — for even a second, and for not once seeing me. But here, at the last, he saw everything.
This word came to me: forgive.
“I’m dying,” he said, and smiled.
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay to die. It’s time to rest, Dad.”
- Mark Warren
Write By Me
