The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (42 page)

The John Lucas Athlete's Aftercare Program in Houston, where Rice has spent quite a bit of time since last spring, has become a mandatory stop on the disgraced sports figure's road to redemption. Whether you've been arrested for drunken driving (Rod Strickland) or kicked off your college football team for smoking pot (Tyrann Mathieu), John Lucas is the man to call.

“First thing I did was say you're going to have to pay for your treatment,” Lucas said, recalling his initial conversation with Rice last spring. “Nobody is going to believe you're serious if you don't pay for it. And I'm not going to do insurance. When he heard the numbers—”

“Luc don't do anything cheap,” Rice said.

It's hard to say what, exactly, Lucas does. He has no professional degree in psychology or social work. With his familiar recovery rhetoric, he's more AA sponsor than therapist. (Rice, he says, has to learn that he's just another “bozo on the bus.”)

Lucas does, however, have the credibility of a survivor: about 30 years ago, his promising NBA career was derailed by cocaine and alcohol addiction. He also runs a lot of basketball clinics that can serve as halfway houses for a recovering Big East coach who's trying to get back into the game any way he can, even if that means spending a holiday weekend running layup drills for fifth-graders on a volunteer basis.

Between bites of his burger and fries, Lucas prodded Rice toward self-reflection. “When I was at Robert Morris having the time of my life, I wasn't having the time of my life, because I wanted more,” Rice said. “When I was at Pitt, we went to the Sweet 16—but I just wanted to get a head coaching job. I always wanted more—more, more, more. I wanted to win every day. If you didn't do it, I was going to make you do it. I was going to overwhelm you with intensity, with passion, with motivation.”

At the same time, Lucas also worked on the narrative of Rice's redemption. “He's going to have the gift of sensitivity now,” Lucas said.

The whole conversation felt more than a little contrived, a lunchtime therapy session conducted for my benefit. Rice obviously sought out Lucas because he needed help trying to reclaim his reputation. But it would be unfair, and inaccurate, really, to say that Rice isn't going through something genuine. And if Lucas wasn't exactly offering searing psychological insights—his basic take was that Rice is no different from any other addict, only his vice is perfection—it was clear why Rice finds it comforting to be around him. Since the video, Rice has been defined, above all, by shame. (The same emotion he was often trying to get his own players to feel.) But Lucas, who during his playing days famously awoke from a bender soaked in his own urine, doesn't judge.

There's another thing too. Part of the allure of the world of competitive sports is that it doesn't require self-awareness. Your only job is to win. So when athletes and coaches find themselves in Rice's position, they often don't know how to talk about what they're going through. Lucas's vocabulary may be borrowed from a different recovery movement, but it's better than nothing.

“I make him talk to me about the fears,” Lucas said.

“What are those fears?” I asked.

“I'm not good enough,” Rice said.

“The fear that he won't get another job,” Lucas said. “How long is everything going to be, ‘Mike Rice, disgraced ex-Rutgers coach'?”

Lucas gestured at Rice, whose eyes were red and swollen with tears. “Look at the pain he's in right now. He can't forgive himself . . . If you can't see he's human and genuine, you're missing it. Here's somebody that's truly remorseful, that's trying to get everything back in a day, and I'm trying to tell him that that's gone forever. No one is ever going to forgive him. That's the good thing for Mike Rice. His self-worth will come by who he is now, not by his title.”

 

One important distinction between Mike Rice and your average public figure looking for redemption is that Rice isn't guilty of some discreet transgression that arguably had little or nothing to do with how he did his job. His transgression
was
how he did his job. This is going to make it more challenging for Rice to get back into basketball. But he is determined to coach again.

After his son's game against Brick Township, as Rice and I drove to a pizzeria in a nearby strip mall, I asked him if he had any leads on basketball jobs. He was vague but sounded encouraged. He said that he would have to work his way back up, probably starting as a scout for an NBA team, but that he thought he would eventually get another shot.

Over the past several months, Rice told me repeatedly that he was going to emerge from this experience a better man, a better father, and a better coach. It was the sort of thing that anyone in his position would say, and I always glossed over it in our conversations. But it's actually an interesting issue. It's not, as it might seem on the surface, simply a matter of whether Mike Rice has “learned from his mistakes.” It's a more universal, even philosophical question: can we really change who we are?

I was impressed by Rice's coaching during his son's game that evening, in particular how focused he was on every little thing his players were doing. This is exactly what most serious athletes want: a passionate coach who's doing everything he can to make you a better player. But I also wondered how difficult that intensity must be to corral, especially for someone with Rice's background and makeup. It's possible that Rice might be a better man and father if he could learn to harness his intensity and get past the need to always have to prove something. But that might not make him a better coach.

A lot of coaches do start their careers unable to calibrate their intensity. They gradually figure out that it doesn't much matter if this approach is successful, to say nothing of appropriate. It's not sustainable. An important part of this process is becoming self-aware, learning how to truly stand outside yourself. Another is absorbing something we were all told as kids: winning isn't everything. Or maybe it would be more precise in the context of Mike Rice to say that if winning is everything, you're probably going to wind up damaging a lot of people, yourself among them.

“I wish I would have been more thoughtful in how I went about making them forged as a team, making them tougher as a unit,” Rice told me. By now, the restaurant had emptied, and our waitress was resetting the tables around us for the next day, making sure we knew that it was time to leave. Rice paused for a moment, before either saying what he knew he was supposed to say or trying on a new identity. “Or maybe just accepting that sometimes you have to accept that you are who you are. Look, we're not very good, but we're going to try every day, and we're going to do the right things.”

FROM THE NEW YORKER

 

T
HE MOST ACCOMPLISHED MAN
in the world's most glamorous sport stands at a drafting table all day. Using a number 2B pencil and a right-angle ruler, he produces as many as 300 drawings a week. The energy-drink company employing him dedicates another five staffers to scanning and converting his images into digital form, for analysis and manipulation on a computer-aided design (CAD) system. His name is Adrian Newey, and he is often said to perceive solid objects not by their outlines but by the flow of air currents around them. The drawings reflect this aerodynamic perversion: dense concentrations of swooping lines that flatter a rear suspension, say, and suggest something more on the order of a space shuttle. In a sense, he sketches speed itself.

Newey's sport is Formula One racing, the caviar to NASCAR's Cheetos. He is the chief technical officer for Red Bull Racing, Formula One's premier outfit, and spends most weekdays at a factory in the planned city of Milton Keynes, an hour northwest of London. “It's a bit NASA,” my tour guide, Anthony Ward, said when I was granted the rare privilege of admission, last fall. We passed stereolithography machines and giant autoclaves operated by men in white lab coats, and a supercomputer with processing power equivalent to 100,000 iPads, according to Ward, who recited that last detail with a mixture of pride and chagrin. “We would be bigger if we could,” he said, and began explaining the complex rules governing the ratio of resources that teams may allocate to their computational-fluid-dynamics departments and their wind tunnels, if they choose to have them. Red Bull's wind tunnel, in nearby Bedford, was originally built by England's Ministry of Defense, to test the Concorde. The rules and regulations extend for hundreds of pages, for reasons having to do with safety, politics, and whim; they amount to the “formula” that gives this billion-dollar pinewood derby its name.

Red Bull's drivers, Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, live in Switzerland and Buckinghamshire, respectively, and turn up in Milton Keynes only occasionally, to use the video-arcade-like simulator that mimics the track conditions of the various circuits, from the winding roads of Monte Carlo and the long straights of Monza to the steep hills of Spa-Francorchamps. “When Adrian arrived, he said that two things we should do are build a simulator and also introduce a gearbox dyno,” Ward continued, referring to a dynamometer that tests the performance of transmissions under volatile, high-speed conditions. Using buttons on the steering wheel, drivers may shift as many as 3,500 times per race.

Some 550 people work at the factory, which comprises three steel-and-glass buildings, two of them linked underground. No tires are produced there; Pirelli supplies those. The engines, made by Renault, are shipped from France. The brake calipers are by Brembo, in Italy. There is a gym deep in the basement of one of the buildings, ostensibly for the pit crew to keep in shape, though I didn't see anybody working out. The Milton Keynes operation is principally about engineering and carbon composites: the chassis, or monocoque, and the odd-looking bracketing structures, called “wings,” that are affixed on either end to improve the “global flow field around the car,” as Newey says. The wings are tweaked throughout the season, in what's known as “bespoke customization” for each race. Everything is measured to within less than 10 microns—one-fifth the diameter of a human hair—of Newey's specifications, in the hope of shaving tenths of a second off lap times, the difference between a world champion and a 200-mile-an-hour billboard.

Newey's own office is comparatively spare and low-tech. Its distinctive feature is the drafting table—like one in an architect's studio—alongside a filing cabinet of blueprints that have inspired the fastest vehicles on wheels. “I'm probably the last dinosaur in the industry that still uses a drawing board,” he said, and nearly winced, calling himself a “creature of habit.” Newey is 54, just old enough (and talented enough) to have shrugged off the migration to CAD, in the 1990s, without seeming like a vain anachronism, and self-aware enough to know that this quirk has helped to elevate him in the popular conception above the rank of mere boffin. The pencil lends him a mystique. Rumors persist that he sometimes gets lost while driving home, deep in thought. Not long ago, a manufacturing trade magazine ranked him as the second-greatest corporate designer of our time, after Jonathan Ive, the creator of the iPod and the iPad, and ahead of Sir James Dyson (the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner), Steve Jobs, the electric-car pioneer Elon Musk, and Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. A Twitter account devoted to legends about his supernatural powers of invention (“Adrian Newey designed MacGyver's Swiss Army Knife”) has more than 6,000 followers. He has been called “the second-most-famous son” of his hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon, and the Michelangelo of motor racing. He is long-limbed, ever so slightly stooped, and aerodynamically bald on top, with short gray hair on the sides framing a large set of ears that interrupt his global flow field.

“Racing cars are very messy vehicles,” Newey said, as if apologizing for unseen imperfections. (“He's got to dumb himself down to talk to us guys,” Mark Webber warned me. “He's on another planet.”) Newey continued, “If it weren't for the regulations, you certainly wouldn't design them the way they are. Having exposed wheels makes an
awful
mess. Having an open cockpit with the driver's head sticking out the top isn't great.”

We sat for a while, discussing brake ducts and double diffusers and kinetic-energy-recovery systems, and then Newey invited me to join him for lunch. He unlocked a door with his fingerprint, and soon we were in the canteen with a consultant and a designer, talking about the upcoming United States Grand Prix, at the brand-new Circuit of the Americas, in Austin. It was to be the first Formula One event in the States in five years, and marked the beginning of a concerted westward push in the sport's marketing, after years of expansion to venues like Shanghai and Singapore and Mokpo, a small South Korean port known for shipbuilding and prostitution. A new street course was being planned in Weehawken, New Jersey, which would offer spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline, if the sport's promoters and Governor Chris Christie could agree on who should pay for road resurfacing. A new television contract with NBC was set to take effect in 2013, replacing the more marginalized SPEED Network. And Ron Howard was working on a movie, scheduled for wide release next fall, about the momentous 1976 Formula One season, with its fiercely contested rivalry between the carousing English lothario James Hunt and the Austrian Niki Lauda.

“Is there much talk about the Texas race in the U.S.?” Newey asked, and they all seemed vexed when I said that I hadn't heard any.

“America's got quite a lot going on there, with the election,” the consultant conceded.

“For a sport outside America to break in seems to be quite difficult,” Newey said.

The other designer puzzled over the matter a while longer, and asked, “So is NASCAR popular across the States, or is it just for the crazed rednecks?”