The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (38 page)

If all else fails: yoga.

 

The physical and social barriers that come with a larger cup size mean that the Schurkovas and Haleps of the world stand out. Nothing appears to be weighing Serena Williams down on the court, but her measurements represent such an outlier that when Caroline Wozniacki stuffed her tank top and skirt with towels at a Brazilian exhibition match last year, everyone knew which great she was ridiculing. Serena took the impression in jest, dismissing charges that it was racist. (Apparently, Wozniacki's temporary augmentation didn't weigh her down either; she won the point.)

But even when an athlete's breasts aren't notably large—and no matter how expertly she works to contain them—she still must contend with oglers who fixate on her peaks instead of her performance. When Halep announced her plans for surgery, more than 1,400 men signed a petition begging her to stay busty. Water polo matches are so notorious for nipple slips that bloggers hover over the pause button in hopes of glimpsing an areola. And in the rare case that a breast is on full display, all hell can break loose. Even as Carmouche was threatening to break her neck, Rousey felt as if her falling bra was a life-or-death situation too. If she failed to get a grip, “I'd be morbidly embarrassed,” she says.

Nebiat Habtemariam can relate. At the 1997 world championships, the 18-year-old Eritrean runner suffered the longest wardrobe malfunction of all time during a qualifying heat for the women's 5,000-meter run. Lacking her own gear, Habtemariam asked to borrow another runner's red singlet for the race. What she failed to borrow was a sports bra. She spent her 18 minutes on the track with one breast perpetually in view. She didn't leave her hotel room for the rest of the week.

But the run of shame wasn't the end of Habtemariam's story. She kept running—in two more world championships, three Olympic Games, and countless other competitions. Last year she was the third woman to finish the Milano City Marathon, her lime-green and blue sports bra securely in place. It was further confirmation that the world's best athletes are those who have managed to transcend the limits—and the addendums—to the human body. Or as Rousey put it about her one-two punch of neutralizing Carmouche and her little black bra at the same time: “Multitasking!”

FROM ESPN: THE MAGAZINE

 

T
HE ATHLETIC DIRECTOR
walked onto the field unannounced, wearing jeans and sandals, and Todd Hoffner knew in that moment that something was terribly wrong. Nobody interrupted his football practices at Minnesota State Mankato without advance notice and permission. His success as head coach was based on maintaining total control; each practice was scripted to the minute. He believed small disruptions in preparation became big problems during games, so he sometimes asked his players to recite a motto: No mistakes. No distractions. No surprises.

Now, on August 17, 2012, his life was about to become the story of all three.

The athletic director approached Hoffner at midfield and told the coach he wanted to speak with him privately. “What's this about?” Hoffner asked, but the athletic director simply motioned for him to follow. Only a month earlier, Hoffner had earned a new four-year contract with a raise of more than 15 percent, and he had already stated his plans to stay at Mankato for the rest of his career. Hoffner and the AD walked into an adjacent building, where a woman from the university's human resources department was waiting. She handed Hoffner a typed note on university letterhead, and he hurriedly began to read, each phrase blurring into the next. Investigative leave. Effective immediately. No longer permitted on university grounds.

“Is this a joke?” Hoffner asked. “What did I do?” The woman from HR refused to answer. She told him to leave campus immediately. She said he would learn more about the university's reasoning in the next few days.

Hoffner drove back to his house in the nearby town of Eagle Lake, his hands shaking at the steering wheel, and told his wife, Melodee, who was equally at a loss. For the next three days, he barely slept. Mel vomited from stress. Todd watched game film at midnight in the living room, seeking comfort in routine. Together they made a list of potential reasons for Hoffner's banishment. He had worked his assistant coaches 70 or 80 hours a week despite their occasional complaints about long hours. He had cussed, punished players for breaking his rules, and, every once in a while, lightly grabbed a player.
Did they suddenly decide you drive people too hard?
his wife asked.

Some other colleagues saw Division II football as an obscure stopover on the way to bigger jobs, but not Hoffner, a farm boy from Esmond, North Dakota, who had started his coaching career in nine-man high school football. Now he was entering his fifth season as Mankato's head coach, earning six figures and winning division titles—by some measures the most successful coach in the school's history. Now strangers at the grocery store stopped to congratulate him and take his picture. Now he had a house in the suburbs where a motivational poster hung in the kitchen:
IF YOU BELIEVE IT, YOU CAN ACHIEVE IT
.

He had always wanted only one kind of life, a coach's life, and now, at age 46, he had it. There was his beautiful wife who dressed in Mankato purple, his three young kids and their tradition of Family Fun Nights on Fridays, his one free night during the off-season, when they would go to Chuck E. Cheese's, then come home to watch a movie. He was muscular, competitive, and stoic. His friends considered him the model of a football coach: beloved by some assistants, feared by some administrators, but respected by almost everyone on campus.

Now he phoned the university and heard he would receive an overnight letter, which didn't show up for days. So he began to slowly disassemble the life he had built. He wanted to prepare for the worst, in case he was suspended or demoted or even fired. He called coaches at other small colleges, asking about vacant assistant positions. He canceled his golf club membership, convinced he wouldn't be able to afford it without a job.

He was about to suspend his cable on a Tuesday morning when five police cars pulled up to his house. Two officers approached the door. Hoffner greeted them outside.

“What's all this about?” Hoffner asked.

This time he got an answer, and it only confounded him more.

He was under arrest on suspicion of producing and possessing child pornography.

 

By the time Blue Earth County assistant district attorney Mike Hanson sat down with two police detectives to watch the videos that would determine Todd Hoffner's guilt or innocence, half a dozen people at the university and beyond had already seen the evidence and rendered their own verdicts.

The inquiry began on August 10 because of an everyday inconvenience: Hoffner's university-owned cell phone had broken, and he brought it to the school's IT department. A technician offered a temporary replacement phone and agreed to rescue Hoffner's photos and videos. A few days later, the technician was “very shocked,” he later testified, to find videos of Hoffner's naked children on his old phone—one of them 92 seconds long and the other 10, both recorded earlier in the summer.

During the previous year, the university president had sent an email to all employees telling them to report suspected sexual crimes in the wake of accusations against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. “Subject: Sexual Violence Reporting,” the email had read. “Importance: High.” So the technician brought Hoffner's videos to a supervisor, who alerted someone in HR, who notified the police. But even the police didn't know whether what they were watching was a crime. The officers found the videos “disturbing,” they said, but they also realized these were ambiguous acts by Hoffner's own children. They wanted more guidance on how to proceed, so they called Hanson.

Hanson had worked dozens of child pornography cases in his seven years as a prosecutor for Blue Earth County and had once specialized in sex crimes in Indiana. He had helped convict pedophiles, rapists, and serial sex offenders. Of all the important purposes of his job, the one he talked about most was protecting children.

He pushed Play on the first video; it showed a living room with three children standing on an ottoman in the center of the frame. There were two girls, ages four and nine, and a boy, eight. They wore towels and faced away from the camera. Around 10 seconds into the video, they dropped their towels and turned to the camera while singing in unison, “Hey, watchya doing naked!” The boy grabbed his penis as he jumped and danced. Hanson thought it looked like masturbation. The girls touched their butts and mooned the camera while they sang and giggled. Their faces sometimes cut out of the frame, but their bodies stayed in view. The children occasionally pushed each other's backs and bottoms. About halfway through the 92 seconds, they put their towels back on, climbed back onto the ottoman, and then began the naked routine again.

Hanson had seen all kinds of pornography in his years as a prosecutor. He knew the legal definitions of “lewd” and “masturbation” and “pornographic.” He also believed that a good prosecutor had to trust his own eyes.

The second video, filmed only a few seconds later, showed more of the same. The girls sang and danced while naked. Then their brother ran into view wearing nothing but a football helmet. Hoffner could be heard chuckling behind the camera just before the screen went dark.

“If these videos don't cross the line, where is the line?” Hanson wrote in a court memo he later filed with the judge. (Hoffner has since had the videos sealed in court;
The Magazine
pieced together their content through court filings.)

Hanson told the police that what they were watching looked like a crime, and the police decided to pursue it.

“These videos are not the proverbial baby in the bathtub photographs,” he wrote to the judge. “You'll know it when you see it.”

 

It took four hours in jail before Hoffner was told that the charges against him related to videos of his children on his cell phone. It took a night behind bars and then another day for police to allow him to watch those videos with his lawyer. A police officer sat in the room with them to provide supervision. The lawyer took notes. Hoffner tried to pretend the children on the screen were strangers, hoping it would help him critique the videos more harshly.

They watched in silence. The police officer fidgeted in his seat.

“That was it?” Hoffner said when the second video ended. “The only thing I saw was a bunch of happy kids.”

He explained to the lawyer that his children had been nearing their bedtime on a weeknight. They had just gotten out of a bubble bath, which the three kids often took together in a big banana-shaped tub upstairs because the Hoffners believed in teaching their children to be comfortable with their bodies. “There's no parenting book that says kids shouldn't be naked together,” Hoffner said. He had been downstairs working while his kids took a bath. They suddenly appeared before him with their hair wet and towels wrapped around their waists. They said they had made up a skit and wanted Hoffner to film it. He had no idea what they were going to do; he didn't particularly care. He had a team to coach and a season to prepare for. Football was his obsession, and at times during the season he was home before his children's bedtime only once or twice in a week. He was a loving but distracted father, he said. And his goal in this moment was to appease them—to speed up the sometimes-interminable bedtime routine, get them to bed, and return to the TV—so he grabbed his BlackBerry and hit Record.

The kids dropped their towels. They sang and danced and shouted. His son played air guitar, and his daughters bobbed their heads to an imaginary beat. Hoffner held his phone to his chest and continued to film.

“Wow, are you guys done yet?” he said about 20 seconds into the first video.

“No,” the four-year-old said.

“Let's start over, guys,” the nine-year-old said.

“Guys, do the right thing!” the four-year-old said.

“Is the show over?” Hoffner asked again. And a few seconds later, just before he stopped recording, he said, “The show is over.”

He had never thought about or watched the video again—until now, sitting in jail with his lawyer. Maybe here, in this space, any video of naked children automatically looked like child porn, Hoffner thought. But to him, it depicted a regular night at the Hoffner house: three goofy kids, comfortable in their own skin, trying hard to delay bedtime.

“Anybody who thinks this is porn or abuse doesn't know my family,” Hoffner told his lawyer.

 

He hired a publicist, who arranged a news conference. Mel agreed to give a speech there. She never watched the videos herself, but she had seen plenty of her children's naked dance routines. “The charges against my husband are ridiculous and baseless,” she said during the August 27 news conference. “My family does what every family does—we take videos and pictures of our kids in all their craziness.”

As a guidance counselor at Mankato West High, Mel knew enough about psychology to analyze her own emotions. “Profound sadness that manifests as anger,” she said. She was angry at the university for being “irresponsible,” she said; and at the assistant football coaches for never having the courage to support or defend her husband publicly; and at the coaches' wives, once her closest friends, who now wouldn't even answer her calls; and at the community as a whole for believing that her husband could be anything other than a loving parent, a loyal employee, an unsentimental farm boy, a good football coach. “I feel almost unsafe living here, the way so many people get awkward around us and freeze us out,” she said.

She started on medication. She read books about criminology and posted on college football message boards in support of her husband, who had never before been arrested or suspended.