The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (33 page)

To understand the end, maybe you have to go understand the beginning, way before racing, back to 1949, when Dick was eight years old. He was playing tag with a cousin up in the rafters of the house his uncle was building in Rudolph when he fell and broke his hip. He dragged himself home, and his mother took him to the hospital. He spent six months there, and missed a year of school. Doctors weren't sure if he'd ever walk again.

Once he got home, he wore a cast on his leg for months before he and his brothers got tired of the thing and cut it off. He'd walk again, but always with a slight limp.

In 2007, 58 years after the fall, that hip needed to be replaced. The limp was becoming too painful. He also had stents put in, doctors put him on blood thinners, and told him he ought to stay off the track. In 2009, he told the
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
he still felt good enough to race, but he admitted to feeling the wear and tear from years of bumping cars and hitting walls. “I'm paying for some of my good times,” he said, “but at the same time, I'm getting better and better with old age.”

But sometime after, only his family knows when, he began feeling a stabbing pain two inches under his left nipple. Dick Trickle didn't cuss all that often, but when the pain became too much he started to really let the words fly. His phone conversations got shorter because he just couldn't go on. He went to doctor after doctor, looking for help, for years. We can't help, they told him, because we can't find the pain.

The problem with pain is that most doctors need to know what's causing it before they can treat it. Prescribe the wrong drug, and you might mask the real problem. Prescribe the drug to the wrong person, and they might abuse it. One study found that chronic pain increases the risk of suicide by 32 percent. It can leave people desperate. It can change people.

After the pain started, Dick Trickle stopped smoking. But by that point, he was already dealing with another kind of pain too.

In 2001, Vicky's daughter Nicole, Trickle's granddaughter, was on the way home from volleyball practice. She stopped for gas at a minimart and was pulling back onto the road when a pickup truck smashed into her side of the car. She died instantly. Dick never talked about it with Kenny all that much. That wasn't surprising. “You are never going to get a feeling out of Dick Trickle,” he said. Still, Kenny knew he was grieving. Other friends said he never got over her death.

They buried Nicole at Forest Lawn. Her death came just three years after his nephew, Chuck's son Chris, died after being shot in Las Vegas. Police there have never solved the crime. Chris was an up-and-coming race car driver. He called Dick for advice all the time.

“You never know what a man is thinking,” Kenny said. Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was pain. Maybe it was a combination of both.

Race car drivers don't like to talk about pain. It shows vulnerability. And besides, it might keep them off the track. Dick Trickle endured a lifetime of crashes and hard hits. He wasn't a complainer. But he'd been through a lot of pain. His chest. His hip. His granddaughter. His nephew. Dick Trickle was always a guy who looked ahead. He didn't dwell on the past. He always raced so he could race again. But there were no more races. Ahead, all Dick saw was suffering.

A week before his death, Dick called Chuck. I don't know how much longer I can take it, he said.

On May 15, Dick Trickle went to the Duke Heart Center in Durham. This was his best chance to get better. Doctors ran more tests. But it was the same answer. We can't find anything wrong with you.

On May 16, he was dead.

Kenny thinks everything was done deliberately. Dick Trickle didn't kill himself at home. He didn't do it on a piece of property that somebody else could buy sometime. He ended his life at the same cemetery where his granddaughter was buried, where he would be buried. He made sure Darlene and the family had enough money.

The Trickle family is still private. Chad Trickle politely declined to talk about his father. Vicky didn't return an email. Their racing days are done. But they still know there are a lot of people out there who loved Dick Trickle. Two weeks after the funeral, Kenny got a package in the mail from Darlene. It was an old Dick Trickle T-shirt.

Most of the grave markers at the Forest Lawn Cemetery are flush to the ground, so from a distance, one looks the same as the next. You almost have to know where you're going to find the spot where Dick Trickle is buried, on the gentle slope of a North Carolina hill. You can barely see a gas station across Highway 150. Beer, coffee, and cigarettes aren't too far away.

His grave is right in front of Nicole's. There are a few trinkets on it. A little number 99 checkered flag. A toy John Deere tractor. A Titleist golf ball with the words
MISS YOU DAD
. Some flowers. There's an oak tree nearby. It's sunny. The driveway through the cemetery is a small asphalt oval.

Fitting, really. Dick Trickle always liked a short track best.

FROM ROLLING STONE

 

W
HO IS THE MOST DOMINANT FIGURE
in sports today? LeBron James? Michael Phelps? Please. Get that weak sauce out of here. It is Serena Williams. She runs women's tennis like Kim Jong-un runs North Korea: ruthlessly, with spare moments of comedy, indolence, and the occasional appearance of a split personality.

Here are the facts. Serena is the number-one tennis player in the world. Maria Sharapova is the number-two tennis player in the world. Sharapova is tall, white, and blond, and, because of that, makes more money in endorsements than Serena, who is black, beautiful, and built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at sports arenas. Sharapova has not beaten Serena in nine years. Think about that for a moment. Nine years ago Matchbox Twenty and John Edwards mattered. The chasm between Serena and the rest of women's tennis is as vast and broad as the space between Ryan Lochte's ears. Get back to me when LeBron beats Kevin Durant's Oklahoma City Thunder every time for nine years.

Serena's dominance has been fueled by not giving a shit what you or anyone else thinks about her methods. Serena has been giving tennis the two-finger salute for more than half her life. Not that she cops to it. “Lots of my friends have been telling me lately that I'm spoiled,” Serena says with a baffled look on her face. “And I'm like, ‘Really? I'm not spoiled.'”

I almost spit Coke through my nose. Serena does what she wants, when she wants. If she'd pulled a Jamesian I'm-taking-my-talents-to-South-Beach event, she would have put it on pay-per-view and hawked her Home Shopping Network all-under-a-hundred-bucks fashion line during the commercial breaks. And she would not have given a flying fuck what you thought. This is a woman who one minute is reading inspirational notes during changeovers and then, in the 2009 U.S. Open semifinals, threatening to personally make a line judge eat a tennis ball.

Tennis ninnies chided Serena for taking months off earlier in her career to flirt with fashion and make cameo TV appearances, you know, like a normal person might do after making tens of millions of dollars. Chris Evert, an icon of the game, questioned Serena's dedication just 18 months ago.

Evert couldn't have been more wrong. The players Serena entered the game with are long retired, burned out, and discarded. Meanwhile, Serena came back last year from foot problems and blood clots that could have killed her. Instead, she has gone 74-3 since losing at the 2012 French Open and won three Grand Slams and an Olympic gold medal. After each one, tennis gurus whispered, “That was Serena's last hurrah.”

Not quite. This year she has won the past four tournaments she's entered and is on a 31-match winning streak, the longest of her career. If she doesn't pocket her sixth Wimbledon and her fifth U.S. Open titles this summer, check the ground because the world may have spun off its axis. She's never been more dominant than now, at the age of 31, which is about 179 in tennis years. (Evert now says Serena is the best of all time.) Hell, even dating Brett Ratner couldn't stop her. Neither could older sister Venus, merely the second-best tennis player of the past 20 years.

What's her secret? Serena only compromises with herself.

“I've thought it would be cool to have a baby young,” says Serena. “You know, be my road dog—like my dogs, they travel the world—but there's always something you have to give up for success. Everything comes at a cost. Just what are you willing to pay for it?”

Good question.

 

Serena and Venus Williams share a house in a gated community in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where the rest of the residents have been enjoying the early-bird specials for years. They like it that way; it keeps out the riffraff. On a misty March morning, Serena answers the door in sweats and a T-shirt, her long hair flowing in about seven directions.

“Come on in,” she says, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “I've got to practice, ugh.” Then her face brightens. “But then we'll go get my nails done. I'm getting them done in colors that change with my mood. Now,
that
I'm looking forward to.”

She turns around and sarcastically sings a few bars of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” in a not-bad voice. The sisters have lived here for a decade, but the house still has a transient, hedge-funder's-second-home feel. Amazon boxes and dozens of shoes sit stacked in the foyer next to a giant painting of Venus. (She's not around.) There's a sparkly chandelier and a massive antique mirror leaning against the wall. But the action takes place in the kitchen, where a cook hands Serena a green potion. She drinks it reluctantly.

“I had chicken and waffles the other day, so I've got to make up for it,” she says. “Ai-yi-yi.”

An assistant brings in some new Green Day T-shirts—they're her favorite band. Serena reanimates and does a bunny hop around the dining room. “These are cool, so cool!”

Patrick Mouratoglou, her newish French coach and possibly her boyfriend, emerges from a back room. He's handsome in that dark-haired Frenchman kind of way. He says nothing but carries a bagful of rackets.

Serena sighs.

“I guess it's time to do it.”

We head over to some nearby courts in my rental car (there's a white Rolls in the driveway).

“That's Casper,” says Serena. “I like to name my cars. And, you know, Casper seemed obvious for that one.”

Like most everyone in modern America, Serena travels with an entourage. There's Mouratoglou, the cook, the physical therapist, and Aleksandar “Big Sascha” Bajin, her much-put-upon hitting partner. The caravan heads to a court about a half-mile from the house and begins loading out the gear. It's two days before the start of the Sony Open in Miami, one of the circuit's premier nonmajors and the first significant test for Serena since she was upset in the quarterfinals at the Australian Open after spraining an ankle that had ballooned to three times its normal size.

Serena was beaten by the beautiful and—for sportswriters—conveniently black Sloane Stephens, leading tennis commentators to call her the “New Serena.” Stephens proceeded to lose seven of her next 10 matches and earned Serena's annoyance when the press suggested that Stephens regarded Serena as a mentor. Stephens objected, saying no way in hell was Serena her mentor, and questioned whether Serena had dissed her on Twitter, proving the tennis tour is much like
Mean Girls
with prize money. (“I don't know where all that mentor stuff came from,” Serena says. “I am definitely not that girl's mentor.”)

She's been recovering from the ankle injury for two months, but if anyone is feeling the pressure, nobody shows it. Jackie, Serena's beloved old white dog, curls up in her tennis bag and goes to sleep. Serena changes from the Green Day shirt—she doesn't want to get it sweaty—and slips on an Incredible Hulk T-shirt festooned with six-pack abs.

Bajin is ready to warm up, but Serena has other things on her mind. “I had a dream last night,” she says to no one in particular. “My dad was in the Mafia, and he'd done something bad, and there were body parts everywhere, but I didn't want to see them.” Bajin stops stretching and listens in. “Then the Mafia came over to our house, but it wasn't our real house, and they had grenades and rifles.”

Everyone in the entourage looks at their collective feet, and Serena goes on. “My dreams always have a twist. Then I was swimming with Venus, and then she was holding a shark in her hands pushing at me. I mean, what does that mean?”

This seems like an easy one. The Williams sisters are known inside the tennis world equally for their on-court achievements and for being the offspring of one Richard Williams, who was raised by a single mom in Shreveport, Louisiana, and schooled the girls for hours on the glass-strewn courts in Compton, California, from the age of seven. Richard turned two children of the ghetto into legends in a gilded sport run by Veuve Clicquot–sipping country-club types. This has not always gone over well. Richard has steamrolled other players and tour staffers—hence the dead bodies—to get his girls their just due. Sometimes, he's been heroic—he gave the black-power salute at a tournament in Indian Wells, California, a decade ago—after the crowd shamefully booed Serena with racial overtones. And sometimes he has been insufferable—dancing on the broadcasting booth at Wimbledon, proclaiming his daughters the best ever.

Richard's antics so sucked the oxygen out of the girls' worlds that most fans forgot it was the Williams sisters' mother, Oracene Price, who shared in the coaching and steadied the girls whenever Richard went slightly cuckoo. (Serena's parents divorced years ago. Richard was suspected of assault in 1999 after his wife was hospitalized with several broken ribs. He denied assaulting her, and no charges were ever filed.)

Part of the myth of Richard was you didn't know when he was telling the truth—he once said a businessman offered him $78 million for the rights to Serena's and Venus's future winnings—or when he was trying to mind-fuck you on behalf of his daughters. But you can watch grainy footage of Richard, Venus, and Serena piling out of a VW bus with a seat taken out to hold more baskets of tennis balls. He was the magical-realism version of Earl Woods, Tiger's military dad. And there was a method to his demented psychology. While many of his fellow tennis dads were entering their kids into cutthroat junior tennis tournaments at the age of 10, Richard kept his girls largely sequestered, hitting with men and working on their fundamentals so that when they turned pro at 14 they were almost fully hatched with power strokes never seen in the women's game. Along the way, Richard has jettisoned coaches, trampled officials, and browbeaten reporters, all in the name of his girls.