Rorion Gracie is willing to fight to the death to prove he’s the toughest man in the west.

The toughest man in the United States holds no official titles and has had only one fight in years. He lives with his pregnant wife and four children, three small sons and a baby daughter, in a modest ranch house on a tidy little street of similar homes in Torrance, California. He is 37, tall and skinny at 6’2″, 165 pounds, and he does not look very tough. He looks mor like Tom Selleck than like Mr. T. He is dark and handsome like Selleck, with wavy black hair, a trim mustache and a charming, self-deprecating smile. He spends more time in the kitchen than his wife does and wears a woman’s apron. He has an idiosyncratic high-pitched laugh. He picks up a yellowed newspaper with an account of one of his father’s fights, adjusts his bifocals and reads. “‘The most savage, stupid bloody desires of the audience were satisfied,’” he says. Then he laughs. “Heh-heh!”

“I never spank my sons,” Rorion says, “because my father never spanked me.” He spends as much time as possible with his sons. He drives them to their soccer practice in his station wagon. He spends the day with them at the beach.

Rorion once fought a kick-boxing champion and made him beg for mercy in less then three minutes. Before the fight, the kick boxer had stood in his corner of the ring and flexed his muscular arms. He cut the air with savage kicks. The crowd oohed and aahed. Rorion, skinny and stoop-shouldered, stood in his corner and waited. Two minutes and 15 seconds after the bell sounded, he was straddling the kick boxer on the mat in such a way that, if the kick boxer had not surrendered, Rorion would have “choked him out.”

Rorion has made a standing offer to fight anyone in the United States, winner take all, for $100,000. So far he has had no takers – for one simple reason. Rorion’s fights are fights to the finish with no rules. His fights are merely street brawls in a ring bounded by ropes. Kicking, punching, head butting, elbow and knee hits are all fair play in a Gracie fight. Only the accouterments of a street brawl – broken bottles, ash cans, bricks – are missing. The only purpose of referee serves in a Gracie fight is to acknowledge his opponent’s surrender when he taps the mat with his hand or passes out from a choke hold.

Rorion (pronounced Horion, in the Portuguese way) is a master of a kind of no-holds-barred jujitsu practiced by his family in Brazil for 60 years. Gracie jujitsu is a bouillabaisse of the other martial arts: judo (throws), karate (kicks, punches), aikido (twists), boxing (punches) and wrestling (grappling, holds). Its primary purpose is defensive; i.e., to render attackers immobile. Rorion believes that since most real fights end up on the ground 90 percent of the time, Gracie jujitsu is the most devastating of all martial arts, because it relies on a series of intricate wrestling-like moves that are most effective when the combatants are on the ground. All a jujitsu master must do is avoid his attacker’s kicks, punches and stabs until he can throw him to the ground and then apply either a choke hold to render him unconscious or a hold in which he can break his attacker’s arm, leg, back or neck. A jujitsu fight is like a chess match, in that the winner is usually the one who can think the most moves ahead of his opponent.

Jujitsu originated in India 2000 years ago, travelled to Japan (via China) three centuries ago and was introduced to Brazil through Rorion’s family 60 years ago, when a touring Japanese master taught Rorion’s uncle some basic moves. His uncle taught Rorion’s father and the two men grew enamoured of it, as only two small men with monstrous egos could. They took Japanese jujitsu a step further than their teachers by introducing techniques that required less strength than Japanese style and would make their family the most feared and famous in all of Brazil. Rorion’s father, Helio, once fought an opponent in the ring before 20,000 screaming spectators for three hours and 40 minutes, nonstop, before the police finally separated the bloodied combatants. In another ring fight, he so savaged his opponent with kicks to his kidney that many attributed his subsequent death to the fight. When a rival martial-arts teacher once accused the Gracie family of fixing its fights, Helio, surrounded by a taunting crowd, confronted him on the street. He had broken the man’s arms and ribs before the police arrested him. He was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for that beating, but the president of Brazil, a fan of the Gracie family, pardoned him within a week.

Rorion laughs and says, “Heh-heh! My dad kicked his butt.” He is sitting in the den of his tidy little house, sifting through the many newspaper and magazine articles written about his family, while his sons wrestle, jujitsu style, on the floor.

Rorion holds up a photograph of his father in a kimono taken when Helio was 34. He is small, slim man at 5’8″, 135 pounds, with slicked-back hair, an aquiline nose and a pencil-thin mustache. He is hip-tossing his older brother, Carlos, in an open filed. “That was the year my dad read a Reader’s Digest article that said a boxer beat a jujitsu guy,” Rorion says. “Heh-heh! My father offered to fight five boxers in one night. At various times, he offered to fight Primo Carnera, Ezzard Charles and Joe Louis. He put up sixteen thousand dollars and told Louis he’d fight with Louis having no gloves, just taped hands. No one took up his challenge.” Rorion shrugs. “Louis was on vacation and here was this little bee buzzing in his ear and giving him no peace. Heh-heh!”

Helio reigned as the self-proclaimed toughest man in the occidental world for 25 years. He fought 14 fights in the ring and lost only two of them, one to Japanese master Kimura and the other to a much younger man – in fact, his protege – when Helio, at 42, was out of shape. Helio is 75 now, the patriarch of a family of nine children, including seven sons, and 18 grandchildren. Rorion has a photograph of his father at 73, still fit, gaunt-faced, with his aquiline nose and menacing pale-blue eyes. He is posing in his kimono with three of his sons, Rorion, Relson and Rickson, in their kimonos. Father and sons are standing identically – legs spread, arms crossed at their chests, eyes glaring at the camera – underneath a seal of the Gracie Jujitsu Academy, which Carlos and Helio founded in Rio in the Twenties. Helio’s sons have all taught at the academy at one time or another. They are black belts. They are bigger than their father, darker, but the look in their eyes is only a parody of their father’s truly menacing look. Except for Rickson. He has his own look. Not menacing but devoid of emotion. The blankness of the supremely confident. Rickson is 29, as muscular as a bodybuilder, with a Marine’s crewcut, the high cheekbones of an Inca Indian and a square jaw. If Rorion is amiably handsome, Rickson is devastatingly handsome. Noted photographer Bruce Weber devoted 36 pages of his book on Rio (O Rio De Janeiro) to the Gracies and Rickson. Rickson as a baby being tossed high into the air by his father. Rorion and Relson as small boys on the beach, Rorion hooking his leg behind his brother’s before throwing him to the sand. Rickson, in bikini shorts, on his back on a mat in a ring, his legs wrapped around the hips of a muscular black man, also in bikini shorts, who is trying to strangle him.

“Zulu,” says Rorion. “A street fighter. He was thirty pounds heavier than Rickson. He threw Rickson out of the ring four times in their fight.” Rorion gets up to put on a video tape of Rickson’s fight with Zulu for the title of the toughest man in the occidental world. A grainy image flickers on the screen. Zulu is sitting astride Rickson, on his back. He trying to gouge out Rickson’s eyes. Rickson keeps twisting his head left and right to avoid Zulu’s stabbing fingers while, at the same time, he is kicking his heels in the sides of Zulu’s back where his kidneys are. Rorion laughs and says, “Heh-heh! After the fight, Zulu was pissing blood for weeks.”

The two men, locked in combat, roll toward the edge of the ring. The crowd surges forward. Hands reach out and slap at the combatants. The referee kicks at the hands, trying to drive the crowd back, while he grabs the combatants’ legs and pulls them back to the center of the ring. A rain of crushed paper cups descends on the ring. The referee kicks the cups out of the ring like a soccer player.

“Wild people, huh?” says Rorion. “Brazil is a violent country. Watch here.” Rickson stops kicking Zulu’s kidneys, locks his legs around his hips and rolls him over so that now he is on top. He unleashes a barrage of bare-fisted punches to Zulu’s face. Zulu tries to block the blows with his hands.

Zulu manages to roll Rickson over now so that his is on top of him, close to the edge of the ring again. Before Zulu can set himself, Rickson twists Zulu’s body so that Zulu is lying on top of him, both men facing the overhead lights. Rickson gets Zulu in a choke hold and squeezes. Zulu’s eyes begin to roll back in his head.

Rorion, smiling, turns off the video and says, “I used to change Rickson’s diapers. Now he’s the best in the world. Heh-heh!” It amuses him that he is the toughest man in the United States and yet he is not even the toughest man in his own family. “Rickson has never been beaten,” he says. “No on will challenge him after Zulu. It’s been three years. The Gracie family is the only family in history that will fight anyone with no rules. The Gracies don’t believe in Mike Tyson. Rickson issued a public challenge to Mike Tyson, but he has not responded.”

All the while Rorion has been talking. His three sons have been grappling on the floor, like monkeys, in a silent parody of their father and uncle Rickson. Their names are Ryron, Rener and Ralek. Nearby is his daughter Segina. Rorion has two daughters by a previous marriage in Brazil, Riane, 12, and Rose. Rorion believes that the letter R has mystical powers. He also shuns common names, like Robert, because they carry their own associations. “An original name has only the aura you give to it,” he says. It is a belief, one of many, that Rorion inherited from his father, whom he worships almost as a god. (Rorion’s other siblings besides his brothers Relson, 36, and Rickson are brothers Rolker, 24, Royler, 23, Royce, 22, Robin, 15, and sisters Rherica, 20, and Ricci, 12.)

Rorion’s beliefs were fashioned out of Helio and Carlo’ devotion to jujitsu, not merely as a martial art but as the cornerstone for a way of living that encompasses every aspect of a man’s life, from morality and sex to diet. Rorion, for instance, eats only raw fruits and, occasionally, vegetables, and only in certain combinations as prescribed by his uncle Carlos, a nutritionist. His back yard is a greengrocer’s market of boxes of apples, watermelons, bananas, mangoes and papayas he has bought in bulk. A typical Gracie meal might include watermelon juice, sliced persimmons and a side of bananas, and the talk around the Gracie dinner table between Rorion and his wife invariably concerns such questions as whether apricots should be combined with mangoes at a meal. His sons have only a passing acquaintance with foods other than fruits. They have had chicken maybe three times in their lives, and once, at a friend’s birthday party, they were given lollipops, which they began smacking against the side of their heads because they didn’t know what they were.

If the Gracie family’s belief in the efficacy of fruits and the letter R seems nutty, if harmless, then their devotion to warrior values such as courage, honour and chivalry borders on the fanatical. Gracie men do fight at the drop of an insult, with predictably savage results. When Carlos and Helio returned home one night and found a robber in their house, they offered him the choice of fighting or going to jail. He chose to fight. In minutes, his screams woke the neighbourhood: “Jail! Jail! Jail!” When Uncle Carlos fought, he was not content merely to beat an opponent, he also wanted to teach him a lesson, or, as Uncle Carlos likes to say, “He’s gonna get to dreamland all right, but first he must walk through the garden of punishment.”

Rorion laughs and shakes his head. “Uncle Carlos was a bratty little kid. WHen he saw a Japanese guy carrying heavy loads of laundry, he liked to trip him. Heh-heh! He was very aggressive.” When Carlos found opponents scarce for his ring fights, he advertised for them in the newspaper under the headline that read, “IF YOU WANT A BROKEN ARM OR RIB, CONTACT CARLOS GRACIE AT THIS NUMBER.”

Rorion Gracie first visited the United States in 1969, when he was 17. He bummed around New York, L.A. and Hawaii for a year. He worked in a restaurant and on a construction site, where he slept. “I was always the first one on the job in the morning,” he says. When his finances got precarious, he panhandled on the street. After years of being protected in the Gracie bosom in Rio, he learned to live on his own. “I grew a lot,” he says. “Trouble only comes to test our reactions.”

When Rorion returned to Brazil at the end of 1970, he went to college, got a law degree, though he has never practiced law, got married, had two children and then got divorced. In 1979, he decided it was time to cut the Gracie umbilical cord and return to the States for good to establish Gracie Jujitsu in the States.

“I felt there were more opportunities in America to spread the work of the Gracie myth,” he says. “I felt that in Brazil, the Gracie family had reached the top and I didn’t want to stay there and live off of my father’s fame.”

The Gracie myth in Brazil began with George Gracie, a blue-eyed Scottish sailor who settled in Brazil in the early 1800′s. His descendants were bankers, diplomats, rubber-plantation barons and confidants of Brazilian emperors. A different kind of fame commenced with Carlos and Helio, whose fights were the stuff of legends. Helio was the first jujitsu master in the occidental world to defeat a Japanese master, Namiki, in 1932. He challenged any and all comers to fight in the ring with him, without rules, to the death. He fought a man to the death, only to have him surrender after four minutes. A newspaper story the following day said that the man had chosen not to die and dubbed him “The Dead Chicken.” Helio fought Fred Ebert for 14 rounds of ten minutes each, until the police climbed into the ring to separate the two combatants, who had broken noses, lost teeth, welts over their eyes and blood streaming down their faces. The fan rioted at the halting of the fight. When Helio challenged a famous Brazilian boxer known as The Drop of Fire to a fight to the death, more than 20,000 fans showed up at the stadium. Only The Drop of Fire never showed, and overnight, the press dubbed him The Drop of Fear. Once, Helio dived into the turbulent, shark-infested Atlantic Ocean to save a man from drowning and was given his nation’s Medal of Honour for his heroism.

Finally, in early 1951, Helio choked to unconsciousness Japan’s number-two master, Kato, in a fight in Brazil that earned him a shot at Japan’s premiere jujitsu master, the toughest man in all the world, Kimura. The fight took place in October of 1951 before thousands of Brazilian fans. kimura, 80 pounds heavier than Helio, agreed to the fight only if Helio, who had a reputation for never surrendering, would promise to tap the mat in surrender if his position seemed hopeless. “kimura was a gentleman,” say Rorion, “and he didn’t like to go to sleep at night dreaming of the sound of broken arms.” The fight lasted 13 minutes. Kimura got Helio in a choke hold and noticed blood coming out of Helio’s ear. “You all right?” Kimura said. “Yes,” Helio said. “Good,” Kimura said, and grabbed Helio’s head and began to crush it like an overripe melon. Carlos threw in the towel.

The next day, Kimura appeared at the Gracie academy to invite Helio to teach at the Imperial Academy of Japan. Even though Helio wasn’t scheduled to fight, Kimura could not guarantee his safety in Japan, where the fans often threaten to kill non-Japanese masters to maintain their monopoly of that martial art. Helio refused the offer. None of the current Japanese masters have dared venture to Rickson’s home turf of Rio.

“The Brazilian youth had no idols before my father,” says Rorion. “They felt there was nothing important known about Brazil. My father gave them hope. Something to believe in.”

Rorion was 27 when he decided to come to the States to spread the word of the Gracie myth. He felt that the seed of Gracie jujitsu would flourish in the fertile soil of America, where men are bigger and stronger than in Brazil. He felt that American men could become a kind of master race of jujitsu warriors. Furthermore, he felt that men, and their women, too, were tired of their world image as the wimps of feminism. As proof, he could point to the popularity of such American movie actors as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris, who personified in their movies the kind of macho warrior that bore the striking resemblance to the roles assumed by Gracie men in real life in Brazil. Only the Gracie men did not need bazookas and machine guns.

Rorion moved to Southern California in 1979 and began to spread the word of Gracie jujitsu while trying to support himself in a strange country. He took a job cleaning houses. He met a woman whose husband was a movie producer. “You should be in movies,” she told Rorion. Her husband took him to Central Casting and soon he was appearing as an extra in such TV series as Hart to Hart, Starsky and Hutch and Hotel. Rorion left the housecleaning business and set up a jujitsu mat in his garage, where he began to teach students. The youngest was the four-year-old son of a movie producer and the oldest, a 75-year-old retired Marine general. When a movie producer saw his fight against Ralph Alegria, the kick boxer, he hired him as a consultant for Lethal Weapon. Rorion choreographed the final fight scene between Mel Gibson and Gary Busey in that movie. Then he met Chuck Norris and began to teach him jujitsu for his movie Hero and the Terror.

While he waited for Gracie jujitsu to catch on in the States, Rorion busied himself with his movies, his students, demonstrations for law-enforcement agencies and colleges and an occasional challenge from a beach bully. He issued a $100,000 challenge, winner take all, to a fight to the death. Finally, a few months ago, a producer called to tell him about a documentary movie he was filming on the martial arts. A kick boxer in that movie, who claimed he was “the baddest dude in the world,” had put up $100,000, winner take all, to fight anyone. Rorion accepted the challenge immediately and then told the producer, “First you better tell him who he’s going to fight.”

Rorion laughs and says, “I sparred a few times with him before. I was very gentle with him. I took him to the mat a few times, showed him some nice choke holds and he tapped the mat. Heh-heh.”

The next day, the producer called back and said that the kick boxer would fight Rorion only under the following rules: Rorion had to put up the entire $100,000, the fight would consist of ten rounds of five minutes each and the two combatants could not stay on the mat for more than a minute at a time. Rorion laughed. “But that is not a street fight,” he said. The producer never called him back.

In the den, Rorion passes his time browsing through the many books, newspapers and magazines with stories about the Gracie family. He holds up pictures of his father fighting Kimura and studies them. “See here,” he says, “the choke.” He memorizes that choke hold and the many facts of Gracie history: the names of long-dead ancestors; the dates of famous fights; the nicknames of vanquished opponents; Dudu, The Elephant, The Drop of Fire, The Dead Chicken, Zulu. He glances at his young sons in kimonos, wrestling on the rug. They grapple, silently, trip one another, tap the mat, stand, begin again. He looks outside to the garage, where two men in kimonos stand in front of the closed door. One man opens it to reveal a spotless, empty room with a grey mat on the floor. There is a photograph of a gaunt, mean-eyed old man, his arms folded across his chest, underneath a seal that reads ACADEMIA GRACIE. The two men step inside onto the mat. They are barefooted. They face each other, plant their legs wide, like crabs, and begin to circle each other like ancient warriors. They circle and circle, looking for an opening on this peaceful day on this quiet street in Torrance.

This article appears with permission from the author.

Paul Solotaroff has a terrific piece on the original Gold’s Gym and the rise of bodybuilding in the latest issue of Men’s Journal:

Muscle, in all its meanings, is such a deeply American trope that it feels like part of our national narrative. We’ve made strength the flag of our exceptionalism and believe, however vainly, that our might will prevail in any test of wills against our foes. We’ve even found a way to monetize muscle, building an industrial complex of health clubs and home gyms and their hugely lucrative sideline: nutritional supplements. Thirty years ago, men stopped at a bar for a cold one after work; now those bars are Ballys and Crunches, and the person sweating beside you is as likely to be a woman as the guy who used to buy the second round. Most of them aren’t there to build contest-quality mass or prepare for strongman shows; they go in pursuit of fitness, which is strength by another name — muscle fit for stock traders and internet geeks.

But if you were born anytime after the release of Conan the Barbarian in 1982, it may shock you to learn that as late as the 1970s, Americans were repelled by the sight of brawn. “I’d go to the beach, and they’d give me the wolf whistle, guys on a blanket wanting to fight,” says Eddie Giuliani, the 1974 Mr. America (short division) and one of the early legends at Gold’s. “Nobody liked guys with the lumps back then. They thought we were all morons and fairies.” George Butler, codirector of Pumping Iron — the landmark documentary that made a rock star of Schwarzenegger and almost single-handedly changed America’s view of well-built men — says, “I always liked to walk behind Arnold in the street so I could check out people’s reactions as we passed. They’d point at him and sneer: ‘God, look at that fucking freak. What a clown.’”

Gold’s Gym didn’t blow that bias away the day it opened for business in 1965. But in less than a decade, it became the Athens of muscle, the cradle of a full-blown body culture and the place where the gods of iron inspired millions. Everything we have now, from moonshot-hitting shortstops to film stars busting out of their bandoliers, began in that no-frills bunker by the beach. Joe Gold, the ornery seaman who built the place and has since been largely forgotten, had a lot of timely help from other people, not least of them Butler, whose charismatic film spread the Gospel of Huge to a scrawny nation. None of that would have happened, though, without Gold’s vision. He made a space where titans congregated.

Solotaroff also wrote a book about this subculture, “The Body Shop: Parties, Pills, and Pumping Iron–Or, My Life in the Age of Muscle.”

You can read an excerpt over at Deadspin.

Here’s another, from Men’s Journal:

It was the fall of 1975, and I was having such a rough go of it that even my hair was depressed. Styled on David Bowie of Aladdin Sane vintage, it was long in back and purportedly spiked on top, but drooped like Three Dog Night in a two-day downpour. I stood 6-foot-1, weighed 150 pounds, and hadn’t been laid since Nixon’s reelection, making me, like George McGovern, a landslide loser. At the ripe age of 20, I had a mad crush on Ginger from Gilligan’s Island and organized my day around the 4 pm reruns. I had plenty of time to watch, having dropped out of college and been fired from a series of flathead jobs, including two at which I actually volunteered.

And so that January, I did what middle-class kids do when life gets bored of beating them senseless — ran, hat in hand, back to college. Though the State University at Stony Brook billed itself as the “Berkeley of the East,” it was fairer, I think, to call it the “McNeese State of the North,” a school whose students were mostly interested in cars and picking up overtime at Sears. To walk the length of my residence hall was to know both the joys of a fierce contact high and the canon of Gregg and Duane Allman.

With the exception of mine, the one door on the hall kept closed belonged to a tall blond kid with big muscles. Actually, big doesn’t begin to give a sense of the guy. The first time I saw Mark, he was leaving the john, wearing a towel so small it gaped at the hip and thigh. He had cannonball shoulders that looked carved from brass — burnished arcs at the top of his arms that flowed into half-moon biceps. His chest was a slab of T-squared boxes, beneath which knelt columns of raised abdominals that bunched and torqued as he moved. I turned around, slack-jawed, and watched him go; it took all my self-control not to applaud.

[Photograph of Paul Solotaroff by Jim Herrington]

“Disappointment was the only thing about the game that lasted. You could try not to get your hopes up, but you might as well tell the cat not to kill the birds.”

The time is 1953; the place, Los Angeles. A burned-out detective, Packard, watches Train, an 18-year-old protegee on the golf course:

“One thought,” Mr. Packard said. “Focus on one thought.”

Train heard that advice before, of course–all the twenty-six handicappers in the world was somewhere on a golf course right now, giving each other swing thoughts–but himself, he didn’t think one thing at a time, and didn’t know how. To start with, everything he saw had names–the ball, the grass, the club, his shoes–and he looked at those things and knew the names, and the names were thoughts. Just like being cold was a thought, and being hungry, and being worried. And besides the thing he was worried about, the worrying itself was a though. Things came and went away; you couldn’t stop it if you tried. He wondered if it was the same way for people that did the big thinking–Eisenhower and General MacArthur–or if somehow they could turn off the names while they was envisioned in a better world.

“What’s your swing thought?” Mr. Packard said behind him. “What are you telling yourself over the ball?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just get out of the way and let it go.”

That seem to amuse Mr. Packard, and he leaned back on his elbows and shut up to watch. The thing that made it work right wasn’t a thought anyway. It was whatever moved the ideas and thoughts along, the breeze that kept things circulating in and out of your head at a speed where nothing was hurried but nothing stayed so long you had to notice. That was all you wanted in your head to swing a golf club, a light breeze to empty things out.

Didn’t mean you had to be stupid to play the game, but it didn’t hurt.

It’s about golf but it could just was easily be about anything, including baseball.

[Photo Credit: Daniel Seung Lee]

Woke up this morning and tuned in to the men’s final of the Australian Open in the fourth set. Didn’t move for the next two hours. Okay, I lied. I paced around the apartment as I watched Djokovic beat Nadal in a tense match that was played at the highest level. Djokovic has won the last seven meetings against Nadal including the last three Grand Slam finals. Nadal showed great courage today, for sure, but he fell short. Over at SI.com, Jon Wertheim shares this thoughts on the classic match.

[Photo Credit: Ryan Pierse, Getty Images]

After changing his number from 44 to 42.

For fans, teammates and coach, the reaction was unbridled joy. But for the player himself, I can’t even imagine how it felt. This wasn’t a goal that won a trophy, but as William reminded us recently with Don Mattingly’s game winner from 1985, the best moments in sports often take place outside the narrow pursuit of a championship.

The Horse Lovers

By Pat Jordan

Prologue

The movie is “Bluegrass,” a four-hour, CBS-TV mini-series. The actors are Cheryl Ladd, Brian Kerwin, Anthony Andrews, Mickey Rooney, and Wayne Rodgers. The setting is Lexington, Kentucky, Bluegrass Country, where thoroughbred racehorses are bred and trained on rolling pastureland that is zoned strictly for horse farms. The time is late fall. The grassland is turning brown. The leaves on the trees have faded from bright orange to the color of mud. The horses graze quietly in the pasture until another horse intrudes on their meal. They twitch, rear up, and gallop after the intruder, snorting out their hot breath into the damp, cold air. They curl back their lips, baring teeth, and nip the intruder on the flanks before slowing finally and then stopping to graze again.

The fictional plot concerns the efforts of Maude Sage Breen (Ladd) to fulfill her dream of breeding a Triple-Crown thoroughbred. She is thwarted at every turn by her ruthless neighbor, Lowell Shipleigh (Rodgers) and aided by her recovering alcoholic trainer, Dancy Cutler (Kerwin). It is Dancy who wins Maude’s love in a romantic joust with the mysterious Anglo-Irishman, Michael Fitzgerald (Andrews). What unites them all, however, hero, heroine, and villains alike, is that they are all horse lovers.

Scene One

A cold, blustery day at Crestwood Farms outside of Lexington, Ky. Brian Kerwin and Charles Cooper, a black actor from Cincinnati, are huddled in the equipment barn trying to keep warm while waiting for their cue from the Broodmare Barn up the hill where, today, history will be made. The birth of a foal will be filmed for national television. Kerwin and Cooper sip coffee from Styrofoam cups while speaking in hushed reverential tones as if they were expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room.

“Oh, shucks, Miss Scarlett,” says Kerwin, smiling, “I don’t know nuthin’ bout birthn’ horses.” Kerwin, with a veterinarian’s help off camera, is expected to aid in the birth of the foal. “They told me that if it’s a breech birth I have to reach up my hand into the mare and turn the foal’s head around,” he says. He shakes his head at the mystery of what he is about to partake in. Cooper tries to reassure him.

“I aided at my wife’s delivery of our son,” Cooper says. “It was a Caesarian birth. All I could do was stroke her forehead.” He flutters his long eyelashes. “It was a beautiful experience.”

Kerwin nods with admiration. Both men look down at the dirt floor, shuffle their feet. Kerwin begins to talk about the breeding sequence he was involved in filming a few days ago. He had to help a stallion insert his penis in a mare while the crew filmed the scene. “It was all very tastefully done,” He says. Cooper nods in perfect understanding.

Just then, a woman enters the barn. “It’s time,” she says to Kerwin. He crumples up his coffee cup and discards it in a trash barrel. Then he smoothes the sides of his reddish hair. His lean face is bruised and cut. Make-up applied today, after last night’s flight sequence staged at a roadside tavern.

Scene Two

Flashback to midnight of the night before. “Little Jim’s Tavern” out on Georgetown Road next to “The Slumber Inn Motel.” The dirt parking lot, which is usually crowded with rusted Chevys and battered pick-up trucks, is dominated this night by the huge vans of the film crew. Two police cars, their lights blinking, guard the road as if for intruders.

Inside, the small, cave-like, drinking man’s bar is strangely lighted by colorful neon signs that the crew has placed on the bar’s usually blank, concrete walls. The middle of the small room is dominated by three cameras and their crews and bright spotlights aimed toward a corner of the bar where the fight sequence will be staged. The actors are settling into their places for last minute instructions.

At the other end of the bar, in darkness, the bar’s regulars, farm hands, construction workers, and long-haul truck drivers, are loitering around, drinking beer and bourbon, smoking cigarettes, and shooting a few games of pool with Jimalou, the bar’s regular, plump, blonde waitress. “My father owns this place,” she says, as she leans over the pool table and sights the eight ball. “He always wanted a boy.”

Bonnie, the regular barmaid, is pouring drinks for the regulars as she is expected to do for the actors when the scene begins. Bonnie has short, dark hair, lots of blue eye-make-up, and she talks out of the side of her mouth, just as one would expect a barmaid in a roadside tavern to talk. Bonnie is a barmaid. Tough, funny, caustic.

“What’s the difference between being a barmaid and playing a barmaid?” she says. “Simple. I get it right the first time.”

“Bonnie’s the reason we come her,” says Marshall, a regular. “She makes us feel at home.”

“Sure does,” says D.B., tilting back his cowboy hat. “Abuses us just like our wives.” Everyone laughs out loud. One of the film crew looks back at the laughing regulars as if they were misbehaving third graders. He is a very short, bald, finicky-looking man with a red beard. He puts his hands on his hips.

“Quiet, puhleeeze!” he says. Then he turns toward a man who is smoking a cigar. “An no cigar smoke in here,” he adds.

“You’re kidding?” says the man. “In a bar?”

“No cigar smoke in this bar!” says the red-bearded man. Just then one of the crew turns on the smoke machine. Smoke billows into the bar until visibility is zero. Bonnie fakes a few coughs and flaps her hands at the smoke.

“It’s never been this smoky in here,” she says.

“And we never had a fight in here·, either,” adds Jimalou.

The second assistant director, a woman, begins to wave her clipboard wildly in the smoke to get the extras’ attention. “Everyone, everyone, to their places, please!” she calls out. “Have we had everyone?”

Scene Three

The following day at Crestwood Farms. Cheryl Ladd, chewing gum, is standing in the cold outside the Broodmare Barn, waiting for her cue to go inside and assist Kerwin with the birth of the foal. She is a petite woman dressed in worn· jeans and scuffed cowboy boots and she might actually pass for a farm woman if not for her vividly bleached, yellow hair. She is biding her time by telling a small group of people about her love for horses which goes back to her childhood days in Huron, South Dakota, when she was Cheryl Stopelmoor. She has six horses of her own, now, and a Scottish husband and two children, all of whom also love horses. She tells a story about one of her horses who almost lost a hoof when he got it caught in a barbed wire fence. The others scrunch up their faces in pain at that story, but Cheryl’s face remains impassive, her voice flat and uninflected, as befits someone who is used to pain and suffering and even death on a farm.

“We saved the hoof,” she says, snapping her gum. “Of course he walks a little funny now.” The others smile and nod with relief. Cheryl offers around some sugarless gum just as two real farm hands walk by.

“How many broodmares you seen foal?” says one farmhand.

“Thousands,” says the other. “But I never seen sucha fuss as this.”

Scene Four

Inside the Broodmare Barn. An empty stall, littered with yellow hay, is brightly lighted. The camera crew has aimed two cameras at the empty stall. Technicians are making last minute adjustments, fluffing up the straw. In another stall, in darkness, the Broodmare’s big belly sways pendulously as she waits, unsuspecting.

Scene Five

Outside the barn. Everyone is hushed, reverential, expectant. The second assistant director; Cheryl’s stand-in; a CBS female executive; and another woman, are all standing close to the closed barn door. Their ears are pressed against the door, waiting for word of the birth of the foal. Their faces have that rapt, maternal look of expectant mothers.

Arthur Fellows, the. co-producer of this movie, is standing a little apart from the women with a smile on his face. He is a short, tanned, man with a ring of white, friar’s tuft around his bald head. Arthur is a horse lover, a too. He owns 36 horses, he says. He breeds them, trains them, and races them, which is why he is so excited about this movie.

“I told CBS about the breeding sequence,” Fellows says. “They got a bit worried. I tried to reassure them it was all done very tastefully. After all, what could we do? The stallion was all worked up. We couldn’t just pull him off the mare and yell ‘cut’ as if he was an actor?” Fellows goes on to say that it was very difficult to find a mare in foal at this time of year. Most quality horses foal in the spring, he says. Only “cheap” horses, who mate in the pasture, foal in the late fall. Still, he was able to find three mares in foal. Two of the three had their foals unexpectedly, before this birth scene was scheduled to be shot. This is the crew’s last chance to film this historic event, the birth of a foal, and so there is an element of nervousness, coupled with excitement on the set. “It’s going to be a beautiful scene,” says Fellows, smiling.

Suddenly, the veterinarian bursts out of the barn and hurries to his car. He returns with a syringe. “The mare’s not ready yet.” The vet says to Fellows. “I’m gonna induce labor.” Fellows nods and the vet disappears into the barn, where all the actors and crew have taken their places.

The group of women presses their ears again against the barn door. Fellows smiles at them, and says, “Women have this thing about horses.” He quotes a line from the script of “Bluegrass,” which says that all true lovers of horses are 14-year-old females who want to delay their sexuality.

Scene Six

The newly-born foal, pink-eyed and breathing erratically, is lying on the straw in the stall while Cheryl Ladd, kneeling beside it, lovingly strokes its flanks, still coated with its mother’s blood, and the camera crew films the scene. The hushed silence is broken only by Cheryl’s flat, uninflected voice, “Is the camera rolling?”

“Yes, Cheryl,” says Simon Wincer, the Australian director. Simon, too, is a lover of horses. He made his reputation with a horse film called ‘Phar Lap,’ and then made another called “The Lighthorsemen,” and now he is making “Bluegrass.”

“I’ve done my share of horse movies,” Wincer says. “You have to have great patience with horses. Sometimes it’s hair-raising. Stallions can be moody and impossible some days. You just have to try and try again.” He smiles. “After all, you can’t just write them threatening letters as if they were actors.”

Wincer turns to the vet and asks him if the foal is a male or female. The vet goes over to the foal and examines it.

“lt’s a filly,” he says. Everyone smiles. The foal was supposed to be a colt for the purposes of the movie plot. That fact seems not to bother anyone on the set, however, for everyone continually refers to the foal as “he,” and not “she.” What does bother Wincer, however, is the fact that the foal has not stood up yet.

“I thought they stood up right away,” Wincer says to the vet.

The vet shakes his head. “Usually within an hour,” he tells Wincer. “But this foal is very emaciated. I don’t know whether he’s gonna make it.”

The foal is still breathing erratically. Her limbs twitch in spasms, and its pink-rimmed eyes keep closing as if longing for an endless sleep. Cheryl continues to stroke its flanks, while looking at it lovingly. Someone suggests that she try to help the foal stand. Cheryl gets up, straddles the foal, and tries to pull it to its feet. The foals spindly legs stick out at odd angles, and the moment Cheryl lets go, it collapses on its side again. Cheryl looks at her hands. They are coated with blood. Someone throws her a towel and she wipes off the blood. Then she kneels beside the foal again.

Everyone waits in silence for the foal to stand. Endless moments pass. The crew keeps filming. Cheryl keeps smiling at the foal. Behind the cameras, the vet says, in a stage whisper, “We weren’t really sure when the foal was conceived. You can’t tell with these cheap horses. We may have been off quite a .pit on the mare’s due date.”

Finally, Wincer decides that too much film time has been wasted waiting for the foal to stand. He decides to play the next scene without the foal. The vet and a crew member pick up the foal by her legs and carry her, upside down, like a side of beef, to a darkened stall at the end of the barn. They lay the foal on the straw next to her standing mother. The mare nips at her foal’s flanks, a mother’s instinct to make the foal stand and suckle. But the foal is too weak. She twitches at her mother’s nip and then slides back into sleep.

In the brightly lighted stall, Cheryl is still half-lying on the straw, staring, lovingly, down at the patch of bloody straw where the foal had been. Kerwin is kneeling beside her, staring at the empty place, too. The cameras are filming them only from the shoulders up. They begin to recite their lines. They comment on how healthy the little foal looks, how sturdy he is, how someday he’s going to win the Triple Crown, and as they do, the real foal, who was born prematurely so that her birth could be filmed for this movie, lies twitching and gasping for breath in her darkened stall.

Scene Seven

Outside the Broodmare Barn. People are milling around, waiting for the day’s shooting to end inside the barn. Suddenly there is a thunderous applause from inside the barn. One of the women rushes inside and asks if the foal has finally stood. “No,” says a crew member. “We were just applauding because we’re breaking for lunch.”

“Oh,” says the woman. She goes over to the darkened stall where the foal is lying, her belly heaving and collapsing as she struggles for breath.

Cheryl Ladd walks behind the woman and says, “He’d be all right if everyone would just stop staring at him. He just wants to get some sleep.”

Cheryl steps outside and is greeted by a beaming Fellows. “Wasn’t that a great shot of the foal’s birth?” he says. “A great shot.”

Epilogue

Later that night, the actors and crew returned to the Broodmare Barn in another attempt to film the foal standing. They got the foal to its feet for a brief moment and filmed the scene. Then they returned her to her stall. She lay on her side on the straw. Someone threw a blanket over her to keep her shivering body from freezing in the cold, night air. Late that night, the vet returned and fed her intravenously. The next day the foal was taken to a hospital, where she died.

If you have not yet read John Branch’s excellent profile of the late Derek Boogaard, do yourself a favor. “A Boy Learns to Brawl,” is top-notch:

There is no athlete quite like the hockey enforcer, a man and a role viewed alternately as noble and barbaric, necessary and regrettable. Like so many Canadian boys, Boogaard wanted to reach the National Hockey League on the glory of goals. That dream ended early, as it usually does, and no one had to tell him.

But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the N.H.L.’s most fearsome fighter, a caricature of a hockey goon rising nearly 7 feet in his skates.

Over six seasons in the N.H.L., Boogaard accrued three goals and 589 minutes in penalties and a contract paying him $1.6 million a year.

On May 13, his brothers found him dead of an accidental overdose in his Minneapolis apartment. Boogaard was 28. His ashes, taking up two boxes instead of the usual one, rest in a cabinet at his mother’s house in Regina. His brain, however, was removed before the cremation so that it could be examined by scientists.

Boogaard rarely complained about the toll — the crumpled and broken hands, the aching back and the concussions that nobody cared to count. But those who believe Boogaard loved to fight have it wrong. He loved what it brought: a continuation of an unlikely hockey career. And he loved what it meant: vengeance against a lifetime of perceived doubters and the gratitude of teammates glad that he would do a job they could not imagine.

[Photo Credit: AP Photo/Matt Slocum]

The latest installment of Grantland’s “Director’s Cut” series gives Johnette Howard’s first story for The National: “The Making of a Goon,” about hockey enforcer, Joe Kocur:

“See, hockey fighting is different than boxing,” says Kocur, who once visited the training camp of Detroit’s Thomas Hearns — courtesy of Red Wings owner Mike Illitch — to pick up a few tips. “In hockey, fighting is pulling and punching. If you just stand there and hold a guy out and hit him, you won’t faze him. But if you can pull him into you and punch at the same time, that’s when you start hurting people.”

How to hit hard is just one of the lessons an enforcer must learn. There’s also an unwritten and often unspoken code of honor that governs who hits whom, and under what circumstances. Kocur also likes to do research of his own; knowing other fighters’ tendencies helps him avoid surprises. But nothing, Kocur says, supersedes the most basic fighter’s rule: Never, ever lose.

“You’ve got to understand some things about the fighter’s job,” says Demers. “Tough guys in this league are under a tremendous amount of pressure. Unfortunately, many of them are untalented except for fighting, and they’ve gotten here the hard way. And once you’re recognized as a tough guy in this league, you go from having targets to becoming one.

“As long as you’re beating up somebody, the fans are cheering and shouting our name. But the first time you lose one, everyone gets down on you. You have to be fearless. I’ve seen guys lose just once, and pretty soon they just sort of fade away.”

Though coaches and other players all say that Kocur has good all-around hockey talent and that Demers encourages him to use it, Kocur considers himself a fighter first. He believes that preserving his aura of invincibility is essential because “it pays off down the line. Maybe I’ll be going into the corner to get the puck and the guy going with me will think, ‘Uh-oh, it’s Joe Kocur. This guy’s crazy. I won’t give him the elbow in the face. I’ll give him that extra step and poke at the puck instead of trying to take the body.’ And then maybe I can make a play, make a good pass. And maybe we’ll put the puck in the net.”

[Photo Credit: Stefan Alforn]

I am proud to live in New York City every day, but today showed me why ten times over. The support and enthusiam from EVERYONE, in EVERY Borough was just mind blowing and made me so proud to be a New Yorker!!!!

A helluva town.

Check out this BBC radio documentary about the loneliness of the goalkeeper.

[Photograph by Ryan Heffernan via Zach Ancell]

The Curious Childhood of an 11-Year-Old Beauty Queen

By Pat Jordan

It’s eight a.m. The lobby to the Riverfront Hilton in Little Rock, Ark., is crowded with pretty young girls. Their faces are elaborately made up — lipstick, mascara, false lashes; their hair is in curlers. The girls are not playing or giggling. They are just standing there.

These girls are some of the 100 contestants, ranging from infants to 21- year-olds, who will compete this afternoon in the second annual America’s Queen of Queens beauty pageant. They want to be named Baby Queen, Toddler Queen or Empress Queen — and win the cash prize that goes with each title. The overall winner, Grand Supreme Queen, will get $5,000. In room 2046, Dr. Bruce Pancake, a Chattanooga plastic surgeon; his wife, Debbie, a former Miss Chattanooga runner-up; and Tony Calantog, their 23-year- old ”pageant coordinator,” are preparing the Pancakes’ eldest daughter, Blaire Ashley, for the event.

Blaire started entering contests when she was five. Now, six years later, she has competed in more than 100 beauty pageants — and won 90 percent of them. It’s a costly hobby: Entrance fees for national contests range from $250 to $800, and that doesn’t include the elaborate gowns, voice lessons, drama lessons, Tony’s $40-per-hour fee, or traveling expenses. Blaire’s prizes range from hair dryers to television sets to a red Ford Festiva to, last year, $12,000 in cash. ”I like the cold cash,” says Blaire’s mom, Debbie. Blaire likes the crowns. ”I fell in love with this one crown,” says Blaire. ”God! I wanted that crown.” But, she says, she sympathizes with girls not as wealthy as she, girls for whom a crown is not enough. ”I feel sorry for them,” she says. ”They have to win a car because they don’t have one. Their parents yell at them. One girl dieted so much she fainted onstage.”

Child beauty pageants –3,000 or so a year–take place mostly in smaller southern cities but are spreading rapidly; more than 1.5 million contestants vie for the money, cars, trips to Disney World and, most important, the experience that will take them one step closer to becoming Miss America. There is even a magazine — Babette’s Pageant and Talent Gazette — to fuel their dreams. The cover features recent pageant winners wearing crowns and sashes. One section announces innovations like pageants for children missing an arm or with cerebral palsy. Ads pitch banners, robes, crowns, trophies, costumes and the services of makeup experts and pageant coaches. Articles advise little girls on the importance of eye contact and offer tricks for overcoming puffiness and dark circles. But the real problems are saved for the Letters page.

”The kids end up victims,” according to one mother; another writes, ”There is more to life than pageants.” Perhaps, but for some girls and for some girls’ families, pageants are the past, present and future.

Blaire Pancake’s bedroom at home looks like Cinderella’s — after she married the prince. It is filled with crowns, tiaras, batons and trophies, all glittering with rhinestones, that make her old Little League trophy look shabby. She has a bulb-lined makeup mirror and two walk-in closets overstuffed with evening gowns just perfect for a miniature adult. (When Blaire was crowned Little Miss Hollywood Babes Superstar, she had a dress named after her. The Blaire is tulle-skirted and sequined in a herringbone pattern.) Blaire doesn’t play organized sports anymore, though she skis occasionally ) with her family, and she’s just started to make time for a sleepover or two. (School is no problem: Blaire gets A’s.) ”Pageants are my only interest,” she says. ”They’re all I want to do. I love what I’m doing. I want to become Miss America.” Which is why there are no posters of Blaire’s favorite rock stars in her room. No posters of a fantasy heartthrob. Blaire’s room is a shrine to her own fantasy.

Room 2046 of the Riverfront Hilton is something else altogether, a shambles of toys, clothes, rumpled beds, potato chips, Pop Tarts, curling irons, makeup, cans of Coke. The Pancakes have brought three of their four daughters along. Alexis, one, also a pageant winner, is home with a sitter. While their mother, Debbie, hides in the bathroom — where she will stay until she is totally made up — and Tony prepares Blaire, Bruce plays with Elise, three, Miss Southern Charm 1993, and Erin, eight, who used to win pageants until she discovered art and sports.

”When Erin quit, we were sick!” Debbie calls out from the bathroom.

”White-blonde is the perfect look,” says Bruce, dreamily fingering Erin’s hair. Bruce says, ”I’m a plastic surgeon only from the neck up. I enjoy the beauty of the face. No doubt that’s why I’m so involved with Blaire.” Bruce is captivated by his daughter’s beauty but prefers it enhanced: He apologizes to strangers when she is not wearing makeup. Some parents have accused Bruce of enhancing Blaire’s looks with surgery.

Debbie, from the bathroom: ”They can be ugly.” ”It’s ridiculous to operate on children,” adds Bruce. ”But if Blaire wanted me to do something when she’s older, I’d consider it.”

This contest has the Pancakes worried. Blaire will be competing against 12- year-olds, some of whom, according to Bruce, ”have the breast development of women.” Blaire is tall and thin, like a stick figure, but this talk of breasts does not seem to bother her. She sits in a chair, dressed in a nightshirt, her hair in curlers, and watches cartoons while Tony fusses over her. Blaire is used to hearing adults talk about the tools of competition. Like the fake tooth she’ll wear today to hide the missing baby tooth. When Tony begins gluing on Blaire’s fake nails, she holds out her hands, limp-wristed, like the delicate wings of a bird. Finished, Tony dabs makeup on Blaire’s eyelids, which flutter shut, then open.

”Now Maybelline Great Lash,” says Tony. ”All the models use it.” Bruce looks over. ”New makeup! Oh, perfect!” he says. Finally, smiling, Tony holds up a lipstick. ”Lasting Kiss,” he says. ”We can kiss collars and napkins, and it won’t come off.” He turns, puckers his lips and blows a kiss across the room.

At 14, Tony Calantog weighed 250 pounds. He went on to play offensive and defensive tackle on his Pensacola, Fla., high school football team. His teammates called him Otho, after the interior decorator in Beetlejuice. But Tony preferred to decorate the faces of little girls. Word of Tony’s expertise in makeup, dance, modeling, dressmaking and fashion coordinating soon spread throughout the child beauty pageant subculture.

”I saw Blaire five years ago in a Jacksonville pageant,” Tony says. ”I didn’t think much of her. Come on! She wore blue eye shadow!” Bruce asked him to help redesign Blaire. After he did, Tony says, ”she became glamorous. She had a certain look, and beautiful hair.”

”Some parents said it was hair extensions,” calls out Debbie.

”Blaire loves the stage,” says Tony. ”She totally turns on. She becomes . . . Blaire! A total package. It’s who she is.”

”She comes alive,” adds Bruce. ”She has that sparkle of spontaneity judges look for.”

”I love pageants,” Blaire interjects, speaking in a precise, adult voice. ”Except when I have to do two back-to-back. Then I have to tell my father I can’t take it anymore. I need a break. Pageants are easy for me, except for doing my hair. I’m very tender-headed. Oh, and the interviews. I try to make the judges like me. If I don’t win, I try harder to make them like me next time.”

”In our first pageant we had no talent,” Debbie says. ”She, not we, honey,” says Bruce. ”Now Blaire looks the judges in the eye,” boasts Debbie, still in the bathroom. ”She smiles, turns on that charm that makes them look at her. That’s talent.”

”We try not to enter too many pageants where the interview is important,” says Tony.

”We put Blaire in a package deal,” says Debbie. ”Clothes, beauty, talent, because she’s got a blah personality, like me.”

”Oh, honey,” says Bruce. Blaire is oblivious.

When Tony begins combing out Blaire’s hair, so thick with curls it almost obscures her face, Debbie emerges from her lair. ”Hi!” she says. ”I’m the mom.” Her face is heavily made up, her blond hair stiffly curled. She is wearing a black velvet pant-suit trimmed with gold brocade. Debbie has a doctorate in pharmacy, which comes in handy whenever Blaire is sick, like now. She has had the flu and was coughing and nauseated until Debbie gave her Dimetapp and an antibiotic. Today Blaire is feeling better. She is eating grapes, grasped delicately between her red fake fingernails. She eats each grape in three bites, with her front teeth, her lips curled back so as not to muss her lipstick. Debbie looks at Blaire’s hair and frowns.

”It’s too full.” Tony says, ”It’ll fall.” Debbie says, ”The main thing is to frame the face.” There is a knock on the door. Tony cries out, ”Oh, my shoes! My shoes!” He rips open a box and takes out a pair of shiny silver high heels. ”Cinderella’s slippers,” says Bruce. Blaire puts them on. ”They’re too big,” she says, without expression. ”Just watch out for the cracks in the stage,” says Debbie.

Tony holds up a black rhinestoned cocktail dress and stares at it in the mirror. ”I couldn’t wait!” he says. The dress is for the talent competition, in which Blaire will sing ”On My Own” from Les Miserables as one of her numbers. Blaire usually wears coral (”her best color,” says Tony), as she will in the western-wear, sportswear and formalwear competitions, which are really exercises in modeling. (The girls walk up and down a runway, posing, hands on hips, a little turn here and there.) Tony and Debbie make most of Blaire’s costumes. When she outgrows one, they sell it, often at a profit because of Blaire’s winning reputation. Everyone wants an original Blaire. Blaire unself-consciously strips down to her panties, a seasoned performer in a crowded dressing room. Tony helps her pull on her pantyhose, then her black dress. Blaire grabs a cordless microphone. (”You should have heard her before voice lessons,” Tony says.) While Blaire performs in front of the mirror, Tony stands behind her, pantomiming her act. He spreads his arms at the finale and bows, mouthing silently but with great exaggeration, ”Thank you!” Behind them, Erin faces the wall, drawing furiously. Elise, meanwhile, is holding up a bruised finger to her mother. Debbie looks at it and says, ”Did you cry? No. Good. Don’t ever make a scene.” Bruce stares lovingly at Blaire.

The ballroom at the Hilton is packed with parents, many of them overweight women in sweat suits or jeans, and their beer-bellied husbands in long-haul $ truckers’ caps. Bruce, Debbie, Erin and Elise, all wearing badges on their chests with Blaire’s photograph on them, are standing against the back wall, trying to be inconspicuous. Some of the parents have complained that the Pancakes get too much attention. Blaire is waiting in line with about 20 other girls. She stares, without expression, at the floor while Tony fusses with her hair. A few places behind her stands Ariel Murray, her main competition. Ariel has already won three cars, and last August she defeated Blaire in an Atlanta pageant.

”Blaire won Miss Photogenic,” says Debbie. ”And we were missing teeth.” When Blaire goes on, it is a seasoned performer who stalks the stage, belting out ”New York! New York!” moderately well, except for the high notes. For the first time in hours, Blaire is truly alive. She bows and leaves the stage. As Blaire and her mother walk back to the hotel room, Debbie says, ”If you had held the mike closer, you would have been more dynamic. But you wouldn’t. Ariel did it.”

Back in room 2046, Blaire wraps herself in her mother’s white satin kimono. Outside, little girls race down the hall, squealing. But Blaire has work to do.

Debbie: ”What’s your favorite color?”

Blaire: ”Coral.”

Debbie: ”Say ‘Because it looks good on me.’ ”

Bruce: ”If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?”

Blaire: ”Myself, so I can obtain my goals.”

Bruce: ”What’s your secret weapon?”

Blaire: ”When people have problems, I try to help them.”

Bruce: ”You mean, help your sisters?”

Blaire: ”Aw, yeah, help my sisters.”

Debbie: ”Don’t say ‘Aw.’ ”

Bruce: ”If you went to the moon, who would you take with you?”

Blaire: ”My mom, because she never goes anywhere.”

Bruce: ”If you could be like anyone, who would you be like?”

Blaire: ”Leanza Cornett, because she was Miss America.”

Bruce: ”When you look in the mirror, what do you see?”

Blaire: ”Myself. I like what I see.”

Debbie gets down on her knees and begins rubbing moisturizer into Blaire’s legs because she will be wearing shorts for the interview. ”If you cough, say ‘Excuse me,’ ” Debbie says. Blaire holds out her arms, and Debbie rubs moisturizer into them. ”If they ask what the smell is,” says Tony, ”say ‘Wings.’ ”S He throws out his arms. ”Tra-la!”

Tony takes Blaire to the  interview, which is conducted in private, and Bruce goes out for some fast food. With them gone, Debbie expresses her true fears: ”You got to watch out for them Louisiana girls. They pull ‘em out of the swamps. They’re dumb but gorgeous.”

When Blaire returns, she says she thinks she did well. ”It’s not hard for me to talk to adults,” she explains in her precise voice. ”I like to spend time with adults, even though I have to act older because they expect more from me.” Maybe Blaire, who has given up a child’s spontaneity, shows so little offstage emotion because she’s so busy editing herself with adults.

On Sunday morning, the third day of the pageant, all the girls, in their gowns, and their parents assemble in the ballroom. When last year’s Grand Supreme Queen gives up her crown, the pageant organizer, a short, bald man, begins to cry. Then the winners in each group are announced. When Blaire’s name is not called for her group, the Pancakes turn to leave. But the pageant organizer urges them to stay. Finally, after each of the group winners has been introduced, the name of the Grand Supreme Queen is called out: ”Blaire Ashley Pancake!”

Her parents scream with joy as Blaire takes the stage to receive her crown and her five $1,000 stacks of $1 bills. The huge piles weigh heavy in her hands, like bricks. Blaire stands there for only a moment, smiling, looking slight and a little bit lost, before she leaves the stage. On the nine-hour ride back to Chattanooga, Bruce, Debbie and Tony are still too excited to sleep. Tony says, ”I feel great. I did everything correct.”

Debbie says, ”My parents think we go overboard with pageants.”

Blaire says nothing. She is asleep, clutching her crown in her hands.

As sports fans, we’re on the lookout for “greatest of all time.” It matters. It’s Jordan. It’s Tiger. It’s why we react so viscerally, one way or the other, to Barry Bonds. Albert Pujols is one of the greatest players of all time, and he walks on water and hops on clouds for us. And of course Mariano Rivera is the greatest reliever of all time, and we revel in that almost every time we hear Enter Sandman.

Last night Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal for the US Open championship. The Joker is 64-2 this season, and has taken out the world’s number two player six times. He holds three majors and only lost in the French Open semis to the the number three player in the world – who happens to also have a claim as the greatest tennis player of all-time. It might be the greatest season in the history of modern professional tennis.

The only real blemish on Djokovic’s season was the semi final loss at the French. If he had survived Federer there, and somehow managed to beat Nadal in the final, this would be an open and shut case. Beating Rafa on the red clay of Roland Garros would be as difficult as wrestling a great white in open waters. He never got the chance to test himself, but lest we forget, Djokovic did beat Nadal on red clay not once but twice in run-ups to the French Open.

The Joker’s only lost 23 sets this season. In his victories, he needed five sets only once, the epic semis in the US Open versus Federer. One of his two losses came in the tournament before the US Open in which he reitred to fourth-ranked Andy Murray. He won ten of the 12 tournaments he entered. It was a lesson in dominance.

The level of dominance is only as strong as the rest of the field. Since Nadal is at the top of his game and Federer is aging very gracefully, not to mention the excellence of Andy Murray, the field is quite strong. Rafa won the French and made two other Major finals. Murray made the finals of the Australian, and the semis of the three others and Federer made one final and two semis. None of the 2011 titles came easily.

Against these titans of tennis, Djokovic went 12-2. And he had to take out two of them, back-to-back in the same tournament four times. In his seven semi-final and finals appearance in the Majors, six of the opponents were either Nadal, Federer or Murray. His only “easy” match was Jo-Wilfired Tsonga in the Wimbledon semis.

There are a few other seasons in tennis history that might be as good as this one.  John McEnroe in 1984 went 84-3. But he only held two Majors. He lost the French to Lendl after being up two sets to none. Roger Federer went 81-4 in 2005, but also only managed two Majors. Going back to Rod Laver (1960s) and Don Budge (1930s), we can find Grand Slam winners, but tennis was a different game then and I’m not one to comment on the evolution. Several other players have won three Majors in a season, but not with the periphal dominance of the Joker.

I don’t know enough about tennis to say with any certainty how the Joker has risen so far above the rest of the top players. But watching him humble Nadal with his powerful forehand made a lasting impression. Also, Djokovic recently went to a Gluten-free diet and it has changed his life for the better.

The tennis season does not end with the Majors, so Djokovic can still add to his resume, or fall off the perch, but the way he’s playing right now, I don’t think anybody can take him out. However, after 1984, John McEnroe never won another Major final and fell out of the top tier faster than Ivan Lendl could chug a Snapple.

Running Cars

By Pat Jordan

Rod Chadwick, 38, is running cars in the hot sun. He sprints across the street to the parking lot. A tall, leanly-muscled man in a t-shirt, sweatpants, and soiled sneakers. He has a Sam Shepherd face, only more gaunt, with hollows for cheeks and slits for eyes. The face of a pale Indian or a tightly-strung, ascetic.

It is four o’clock on a lazy, Sunday afternoon in May. There is a long line of stopped cars leading from one end of the street to the awning over the entrance to Shooter’s Bar and Restaurant on the Intracoastal Waterway in Ft. Lauderdale. A BMW-M3 convertible. A Ferrari Testarossa. A black Corvette. An Excaliber. A Lincoln Continental with blacked-out windows. A pink, Volkswagon Rabbitt convertible. A British Racing Green Jaguar XJ-6. A Chrysler Le Baron with a rentacar sticker on its bumper. A dove-gray, Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL. A Guards red Porsche Turbo with the slant-nose front end.

The locals are driving in from their day at the beach. Strippers, both male (“Crazy Horse Saloon”) and female (“The Booby Trap Lounge”). Bartenders and cocktail waitresses. Businessmen and lawyers. Plastic surgeons and insurance fraud experts. Importers and exporters of South American goods. Real estate ladies. Hookers. Body builders. Cattlemen and pepper farmers. Mistresses. Drug runners. DEA informers. A bouillabaisse of Ft. Lauderdale locals winding down their weekend with a few Cuba Libres and Rum Runners at Shooter’s overlooking the water. They sit at the bar, watching the white yachts, blinding in the setting sun, cruise up the waterway. They mill around the docks, seeing and being seen, alongside the docked speedboats. A band in Hawaiian shirts is playing a medley of Jimmy Buffett’s greatest hits from under the shade of a palm tree. A man on a docked speedboat invites a girl on the dock to come aboard for a drink. Maybe a little cruise, he adds, grinning. The girl smiles, shakes her head, no. A local girl who knows that such an invitation always ends with her confronting two options. Suck or swim.

The older men have swept-back, silver hair and gold chains nestled, just so, in their fluffed out chest hair. The younger men are tanned, muscular, with droopy mustaches and spandex bicycle shorts. The older women are pale, heavily made-up, with ash-blond hair that is cut severely short, but not so short as to expose the face lift scars behind their ears. They are wearing long, silk dresses and textured nylons held up by white lace garter belts and, occasionally, an ankle bracelet that reads, “If you can read this, you can eat me.” The younger women are tanned and trim, with brassier, blond hair and oversized breasts recently implanted by a Peruvian plastic surgeon in Miami. They are wearing spandex, mini-dresses or satin jogging shorts with high-cut Reeboks and some of them are still wearing their g-string bikini bathing suits with their stiletto, high-heeled shoes, their American Express gold cards tucked into the top of their bikini bottom.

Rod Chadwick, sweating in the hot sun, holds open the driver’s door of the slant-nose Porsche while a fat man-boy of twenty, struggles out from behind the steering wheel. The man tells Rod he wants his car parked up front, for everyone to see. He slips a $20 bill into Rod’s hand as deftly as a quarterback handing off to a fullback. Years ago, Rod had a football scholarship to Georgia Tech, where he majored in architecture. He transferred to Catawba College in North Carolina and switched to a history major. He helped support himself even then by running cars. When he was graduated he did a little student teaching but decided that was not for him. He opened a frozen yogurt business but didn’t like working indoors. He worked on construction for a while but even that was too confining. He began to run cars again. He has been running cars on-and-off for over twenty years. A valet, now pushing forty, or, as the writing on his t-shirt says, “Automotive Relocation Engineer.” That was Donnie Brown’s idea. He owns the valet-parking concession at Shooter’s and a number of other South Florida clubs, where the valet parking business is rivaled only by Southern California.

Donnie is 28, chubby, preppy-looking with his rosy cheeks and dark, Princeton-cut hair. He was a swimmer and football player at Pine Crest, an exclusive prep school in Ft. Lauderdale. When he left school he missed the jockey, macho image he had as a football Player so he took a job running cars during the 2 a.m.-to-4 a.m. shift at Club Dallas out on Federal Highway near the airport.

“It was a redneck club,” Donnie says, sipping club soda at Shooter’s bar. “They hired me and a few other football players because we weren’t afraid of the rednecks. Nobody else wanted to work that shift.”

It was a rough shift, Donnie says. The rednecks would get drunk and mean by 2 a.m., and spoiling for a fight. When the bouncers threw them out of the club, they were still spoiling for a fight and now the valets had to deal with them. Even while they fought the rednecks, Donnie and his friends had to protect the cars in the lot. One night, a furious patron followed Donnie and his friends home after work. He pulled alongside their car, pointed a .44 Magnum at them, and began firing.

Even on quiet nights, the valets at Club Dallas still had to deal with the transvestite hookers who worked the cars pulling into the lot. The valets brought rotten eggs to work and fired them at the hookers. The eggs smelled so badly that the hookers had to go home and change clothes. It discouraged them from working Club Dallas.

Donnie laughs at the memory of those hookers dripping egg. Like all valets, he loves to tell valet stories. He once parked a Mustang and the passenger side door flew off. It skated across the parking lot like an oversized hockey puck. The other valets leaped in turn, like kids jumping rope, as the door skated under their feet. The girl who owned the Mustang apologized for not telling Donnie that the door always flew off when making a left turn. One night, a valet wrapped a customer’s car into a tree. To console the girl who owned it, he drove her home in his car and did not come back for three days.

“She never did file charges against us,” Donnie says. He smiles. “Girls are attracted to guys who run cars. The guys are usually young, in-shape, and have an image of being rebels.” Often such girls show their attraction to valets by the way they step out of their cars. “The ones who don’t wear underwear are always the worst,” Donnie says. “They make a point of flashing it when you hold the door open for them. Then they make eye contact and smile.”

Often those girls are in the car with a rich, older man who is financing them but whom they don’t really like very much. When those girls “flash” a young, handsome, hard-working valet it is as if to form a bond between them, as if to say, “This old bastard may be paying for it but I’m letting you see it for nothing, honey.” One such girl emerged from the passenger seat of a Ferrari at Shooter’s one night and winked at the valet who held open her door. Then she waited while her date, fat man in his sixties tried to get himself out from behind the steering wheel. His belly got stuck behind the wheel. The valet tried to pull him free. A crowd began to form. Someone laughed. The fat man’s face grew flushed as he struggled. The girl, embarrassed, began to backpedal into the crowd. When the fat man was finally freed, the crowd broke into applause. The girl was gone.

“Guys in Ferraris and sports cars are usually the best tippers,” Donnie says. “Guys in Rolls Royces are the worst. They’re more conservative and cheap. Now a guy in a Mercedes 560 is a better tipper than a guy in a 190. Guys in middle of the road cars are the most unpredictable. If they go out to dinner with their wife, they only tip a buck. If they go out drinking with the guys they tip better. Tourists are bad, too. Most of them come from the north where there is little valet parking. They don’t understand it. One night we had two identical white rental Lincolns pull in. When they left we gave the wrong car to each tourist. We discovered our mistake when one guy came back and accused us of eating the pizza he had left in the back seat.”

Donnie laughs. “I always liked running cars,” he says. “It was a freelance thing. A valet knows everything. He can’t hold a real job. He has to have that sense of freedom, the camaraderie thing. It usta be that valets were just street kids cleaned up a bit. Now, they’re college kids who plan to go on to bigger and better things.”

Donnie has gone on to bigger and better things. He has gone from a runner of cars to the owner of his own valet service, “Continental Valet Co.” He has a beeper on his hip. He plans to organize a country-wide valet service some day. Already, he has organized Shooter’s valet service in Cleveland. Still, like most former valets, he can’t quite get the job out of his system. Every so often, he likes to run a few cars, just to keep his hand in it.

“My parents and my girlfriend say I can’t run cars forever,” he says. “I say, why not? I’m making $50,000 a year. I got a beeper with an 800 number.”

Rod parks the slant-nose Porsche in front of Shooters and sprints back to the awning to open the door of the pink, Rabbit. A girl steps out and says, “It’s my prize, Rod. Take good care of it,” and slips him a $5 bill. Rod tells her not to worry. Then he parks the Rabbit and returns to the awning.

“Sure it bothers me,” Rod says. “A 20-year-old kid in an $80,000 Porsche. I’ve driven some of the most exotic cars in the world. Testarossas, Lambos, Silver Clouds, and all I can afford to own is a beat up, old, Volkswagen. The best a valet can do is make a living. Then why do I do it?” Rod’s thin lips smile. “For the freedom. The action. And the characters. I minored in theater in college and some of the characters I meet belong in a play.”

He got his first valet job at seventeen and the first night he went to work he watched in disbelief as his boss chased a man around a car because the man had given him a ten cent tip. When he worked at Club Dallas, a long haul truck driver pulled up to the valet stand in an eighteen-wheeler with a loaded trailer. “It was the wildest thing I ever valeted,” Rod says. “The guy had on a cowboy hat, boots, the whole outfit. He slipped me a five and went inside. I sat in the cab for ten minutes trying to figure out the gears, but I parked that SOB. Another time I opened the door for a guy in a Testarossa and the handle came off in my hand. I thought the guy would go nuts, but he just said, ‘That handle’s been giving me trouble since I bought the car.’ and handed me a twenty. Sports car guys are the best tippers. The worst tippers are the guys who just came into money. They go off the wall if their car gets the slightest scratch. I tell ‘em, ‘Jesus Christ, mac, it’s only a car!’”

Women are bad tippers, Rod says, because they think it’s a man’s duty. Except for women in the bar business and those attracted to valets. Some women see in valets, scuffling for a buck, everything they’ve tried to distance themselves from in their life. Valets remind them of their meager past and it angers them. “They call us, scum,” Rod says. “They yell, ‘Get a real job, scum!’”

Just then a boy in his late teens comes up to Rod. He tells Rod he’s thinking of running cars and wonders, “Should I work for tips or a percentage of the take?”
Rod doesn’t hesitate. He says, “Depends on whether it’s a locals’ club or a tourist club. Whether it’s during the season or not. And whether you’re good at hustling the front spots.” The kid nods, thanks Rod, and leaves. Rod turns and says, “Running cars is a day-to-day thing. There’s no future. Oh, we have our fantasies, the beautiful car, the beautiful babe, but after awhile you get pragmatic. They’re unrealistic fantasies. Now, a $100 tip is real.”

* * *

Roland Venton, dark and threatening in his wheat-colored suit, stands in the doorway of his bar, Roland’s, out on Federal Highway and watches the cars pull into his lot. It is six o’clock on a Friday evening and Roland’s is where all the local high-rollers begin their long, party weekend. The men are dressed mostly in suits and ties and the women in dresses and business suits. No shorts or g-strings get by Roland’s suspicious eyes. A Mercedes 450-SL convertible pulls up to the entrance. Nigel, the manager of Roland’s valet service, opens the driver’s side door. As he does, he leans over and slips his valet ticket on the inside of the windshield as a tall, beautiful brunette slides out, her skirt hiking up to her thighs as she does. She walks past Roland with her head held regally high, like a deposed monarch walking into exile past her serfs.

When Nigel returns to the valet stand beside the entrance he says to one of the valets, “Her name’s Loretta this week. Crimminy, she’s changed her names three times this month.” He laughs. “I wonder what Loretta does for a living?” Nigel is in his thirties, a soft-looking man with orange hair and a British accent. He’s been running cars for eight years, ever since he came to Ft. Lauderdale from his native Birmingham, England.

“I love the people,” he says. “You meet every kind. Plus the women. They got fat husbands and lawyers for boyfriends. They see valets as something different. When you open the door for a woman you always lean over a bit and put the ticket on the inside of the windshield just as she’s getting out.” He smiles. “It’s all in the positioning.”

Then, like most valets, Nigel begins to tell valet stories. One night Roland asked Nigel to drive home a customer who was too drunk to drive. “He starts putting his hands all over me when we get to the New River tunnel,” Nigel says. “Jeez, I shoulda known. He’s from California. I stopped the car at a gas station and leaped out and ran. The guy just sat there drunk. But he wasn’t so hammered he didn’t know what his preference was.” Another night, Nigel says a girl came in with her boyfriend and parked a Corvette. They got into a fight in the bar and the girl came out alone. She asked for the guy’s keys and drove off. The guy came out and called the cops on her. Nigel went with him to the police station. The cops said there was nothing they could do about it. The guy got abusive, and before long, five cops had to subdue him with nightsticks. “I almost ended up in the slammer,” Nigel says. He shakes his head as another 450 SL pulls in. A young, handsome valet gets in the car, adjusts the mirror and begins to comb his hair before he drives off. “We hired one guy to run cars,” Nigel says, “and the first night he steals a Corvette and wraps it around a pole. The police report said there was a guy wearing a Roland’s valet shirt running down the highway. Another night, somebody stole a Ferrari in the back lot. We found it parked at Shooter’s that night, before the owner ever came out of Roland’s. The keys were on the seat alongside of a parking ticket. We got it back to the owner just as he stepped outside. ‘Boy, that was fast,’ he said, and gave us a nice tip. To this day, he still doesn’t know his car had been stolen.”

* * *

Dougie is leaning against his white Buick Regal low-rider that is his pride and joy – second, of course, to his beloved surfboard – in the parking lot of “The Booby Trap Lounge, Home of Stylish Nude Entertainment.” It is ten o’clock on a Friday night and “The Trap” is filled with nude dancers under conical lights and businessmen and working men, most of whom prefer to park their own cars, rather than valet them with Dougie. He could not care less. He gets a deuce for every car parked at The Trap, whether he parks it himself or not. He makes between $30-and-$100 a night as a valet, but he’s not much into running cars. He sees it only as a job that frees his days for surfing. The first thing Dougie does when he wakes each morning is call the weather bureau for a surf report. “If there’s a big blow coming,” Dougie says, “I don’t show up for work.”

Dougie is 23, with curly, blond hair and a wispy mustache. A street kid who refers to non-surfers as “zombies” and “Kooks” and The Trap’s customers as “Dudes,” as in, “Sure, Dude, you can park your own ride, but it’s still a deuce.”

“We get mostly businessmen, construction guys, and Columbian drug dealers,” he says. “The Columbians pull up in their Ferraris and don’t even get out of their car. They say, ‘Wait a minute, man, I gotta call Columbia.’ They call on their car phones. Man, those dudes got three and four beepers on their hip. But they tip nice. The worst tippers are the undercovers. They drop in once a week to make sure the girls don’t show no pink. I can smell ‘em coming. Old Spice and polished black shoes. They never tip.”

While Dougie is talking, Angel, one of the Trap’s dancers, comes outside, carrying a duffle bag. She tells Dougie she is waiting for a taxi. She had to leave work early, she says, because she took sick.

“That’s too bad,” Dougie says. Angel reminds Dougie of the night he was working the lot at The Trap and a girl came out of the club naked and sat down beside him and started to cry. “It was amateur night,” Dougie says. “She lost, but she thought she should have won. She was so upset she just ran out of the club and sat down with me. Cars were stopping allover the street. It’s a miracle there were no accidents.” He smiles, shrugs, as if to say, “one of the little perks running cars at The Trap.”

Inside The Trap, JB, Jimbo, Jimmy Brown, who owns the valet concession at The Trap and a number of other less flamboyant South Florida clubs, is having a club soda at the bar while a friend of his, wearing only boxer shorts, is oil wrestling a dancer in a make shift boxing ring on center stage. JB, smiling, watches his friend grapple with the girl coated with baby oil. He turns back to the bar and says, “I couldn’t have anyone but Dougie work The Trap. He’s street smart. He knows how to deal with the strippers. If I had a college kid here the strippers would take advantage of him. Dougie just cools them down with his ‘Heh, baby, it’s cool. Chill out.’” JB smiles, “I couldn’t pry Dougie outta the trade.”

Most of the valets JB hires are athletes, preferably soccer players or track stars, because they can run all night long like thoroughbreds. When JB owned the concession at Roland’s his kids used to run 600 cars a night. Non-athletes never lasted through a weekend. “Women are good runners, too,” he says. “They have patience with customers. The boys don’t, they just compete for tips. One kid, Mike, was always competing with the other valets to see how fast he could bring up a car. After work, he wanted to race the other valets for their tips.”

One of JB’s valets smashed up an exotic car on his first night and was never seen since. Another took a Lamborghini Countach he was supposed to valet for a little cruise on The Strip, picked up two girls, and didn’t return until late that night. The Lambo’s owner just laughed. Still another of JB’s valets took out a car and robbed a bank with it.

“But the funniest thing I ever saw,” says JB, “was the night Dougie went to get a jeep for this customer. Someone had stripped it in the parking lot. No dash, no seats, no steering wheel even. Dougie pulls the car in front of the club and he’s sitting on the floor, steering the jeep with a pair of pliers around the column. He gets out and says, ‘Heh, Dude. You always drive like this?’”

JB is 38, of Portuguese and Italian extraction by way of Boston. He came down to Ft. Lauderdale for his honeymoon in 1974, fell in love with it, and after his divorce three months later returned for good. He worked mostly as a bartender in local clubs such as Jack Foley’s “Bootleggers,” where he made the acquaintance of a number of successful bar owners, like Roland Venton. They took a liking to him. He was a hard-working, savvy kid, who knew how to be respectful to older men. Roland, particularly, took JB under his wing. He told him there was no future in bartending, and suggested that JB get in the valet business. JB began by running cars.

“I was 32 and I didn’t have enough money to go to the dentist, but I was driving Lambo’s every night,” says JB. “The first one I drove I couldn’t even open the door. One night, this gorgeous chick comes in in a Jag. I open the door for her, she gets out, I hop in and shut the door on the hem of her dress. When she walked away her entire dress just peeled off her. She stood there, naked, screaming hysterically. What’d I do? I parked the Jag.”

Roland gave JB his first break when he turned over his valet concession to him. Then other club owners followed suit. Today, married again, JB drives his own exotic car, a new Porsche turbo. Still, he can’t resist the urge every now and then to run a few cars himself. He was running cars at a club a few months ago when a highly placed member of George Bush’s presidential campaign stopped by during the Florida primary. The man, who was trailed by a flock of secret service types, was so drunk and abusive that JB refused to park his car. JB took the man’s keys and shoved them into the man’s shirt pocket. The pocket ripped.

“We lunged at each other in a second,” JB says, “and then all of a sudden all these secret service types are all over me with drawn guns. The cops came. They said they didn’t care who the secret service guys were, they were going to arrest them anyway.” JB laughs. “A lot of time the attitude of the customer determines where you park his car. If he’s abusive you bury his car and make him wait. We like to park exotic cars upfront so we can keep an eye on them. The cheapest Mercedes radio costs $1500, you know. Insurance is killing us. It can cost from $5000 to $12000 a year for a valet service, depending on the number of spots you have in a lot. The most important thing about running a valet service is to remember that for a lot of people their sole possession is their vehicle. They may have a stack of payment books like the yellow pages, but still, it’s their pride and joy. You gotta make nobodies feel like somebodies. No matter what kind of car they’re driving, a Mazda or a Rolls, you gotta let them know that car is special. Most times, the Mazda guy will be so appreciative he’ll tip you more than the Rolls guy. The Rolls guy figures you’re only a valet so why bother to impress you. Then he’ll go-into the club and spend $2000 on champagne. Here’s another thing about a Rolls guy. He’s always the slowest guy to get out of his car and the slowest to get back in it. He wants to make sure everybody gets a good look. You know what I mean?”

It is midnight on Saturday in North Miami. There are three white stretch Lincoln limousines parked out front of “The Crazy Horse Saloon.” A ladies’ bachelor party at the male strip club. The limo drivers, young women in white shirts, black ties, and drivers’ caps, are lounging around on the hoods of their cars. Farther down the road, in a shopping mall, Façade’s is just beginning to come alive. Façade’s is a late night disco out of “Saturday Night. Fever.” Nobody much goes to Facade’s before midnight, and even then only on Thursday and Saturday nights. The Facade’s crowd is mostly young, very rich; very macho, very “dressed” in black silk suits or dresses, and very Latin. It is a city club. It differs from Shooters in the way that Miami differs from Ft. Lauderdale. Ft. Lauderdale is older, more laid-back, a beach town filled with men and women who’s idea of dressing up is to wear as few clothes as possible. Miami is a city of bright lights. It is filled with young Anglos and Latins on the make. It is the kind of city where such people go to “make it” before moving up to a bigger city like New York or LA. Ft. Lauderdale is where people go who have already made it in LA or New York and don’t want to pay the price anymore, who want to, as Dougie would put it, “Chill out.”

At the entrance to Facade’s, a burly, handsome man in a tuxedo is checking IDs before letting customers past a roped off area into the club. There is a line of potential customers, mostly Latins, in shinny, dark suits and dresses. The men, in their twenties, invariably wear dark sunglasses and some of them, straw hats. The dark-haired, dark-eyed, young women have red camelia’s in their luxuriant air. Steve, the manager of Facade’s valet service, surveys the crowd and says, “Arrogant, rich Latins. They’re swimming in money. Twenty-three-year-old kids jump out of $125,000 cars with $10,000 worth of jewelry on them.” Steve shakes his head. “They look like they were chopping banana plants only a week ago. You wonder, huh, where did they get so much money so soon?” Steve laughs, a good-looking, articulate man in his twenties, who is wearing a tuxedo shirt, bow tie, and black pants. All the valets at Façade’s are dressed formally. It is Donnie Brown’s idea. Donnie owns the valet concession at Facade’s.

“It’s a very classy club,” Donnie says. “People go there to put on a show. They’re all wearing their Mr. T starter kit and driving fancy cars. I’ve seen kids leave a valet a $100 tip. One night, I had this kid running cars who used to be a gymnast. This young Latin kid slipped him a $100 to park his car up front and the gymnast was so happy he did a backward flip. The Latin kid thought that was so cool he told him if he could do it again, he’d tip him another $100. The gymnast did it again. It was four a.m. Pretty soon a crowd began to form. The gymnast kept doing these flips and the Latin kid kept slipping him hundred dollar bills and everyone was laughing.”

* * *

Rod Chadwick is sitting in a chair, under the shade of Shooter’s awning, eating a tuna-melt sandwich. It is a quiet, weekday afternoon and there are no cars in sight. Some of the other valets are across the street at Fran O’Briens’ sports bar. They’re having a beer and playing video games until the late afternoon crowd pulls into Shooter’s.

Rod chews his sandwich quickly, like a man who’s used to eating on the run. Even with no cars to park, he seems nervous, edgy, filled with energy he needs to disperse someplace. Running cars.

“I never got a straight job because I need my freedom,” Rod says. “I take my valet job seriously, though. I’d like to be respected as someone who does his job well and not thought of as scum. If there’s a valet fantasy, that’s it. To be respected as a human being.”

Just then a Mercedes 560 SEL pulls in under the awning. Rod jumps up and hustles over to the driver’s door. He opens it, hands the driver, a man in a business suit, his parking ticket, and watches as the man goes inside. Before Rod gets into the car to park it, he notices something on the windshield. He pulls a rag out of his back pocket, rubs it across the windshield and then, satisfied, gets in the car, and drives it across the street to the parking lot. Then he sprints back to his tuna-melt.

First, Louisa Thomas on Venus Williams:

She has always seemed to have an ambivalent relationship to tennis. She is the most recognizable exponent of the game (even more than Serena, perhaps, because she came first) and also a vanishing act, an ambassador and outsider at once. She wanted to be the best, but it wasn’t always clear that she wanted to play at all. Richard Williams said he wanted his daughters to be extraordinary, to stand apart. They do. But that doesn’t quite capture Venus. Nothing does. She is elusive.

The challenge, Venus made clear early on, was to change the game without letting it change her. She has always held something back. Her story isn’t one about a rise and fall, glory and fade. She has become a kind of ghost.

This isn’t because she has other interests outside of tennis, which is often the knock. The spookiest thing about her is that she is one of the greatest competitors in the women’s game, but also one of the most indifferent. She’s a winner who somehow doesn’t need to win. So — and this is the question that has always bugged me, and the question I’ll be thinking about as I watch her in this tournament, and write about it here — why does she continue to play?

Next, Jane Leavy remembers Mike Flanagan:

Unlike my colleagues who have written in recent days of having covered him over the past 30 years as a pitcher, pitching coach, general manager, and broadcaster for the Orioles, Flanagan was in and out of my life as quickly as I tried to get in and out of the locker room. But he stayed with me in ways I didn’t realize until I heard about his death. What struck me about the conversation that day in the locker room was his interest in me. Most athlete-cum-celebs are too busy bemoaning the obligations of public personhood, too consumed by the ego-distorting attentions of doting reporters hanging breathlessly on every not-so-well-chosen word, to think about anyone other than themselves. But Flanagan really wanted to know about me, and because his interest was palpably authentic I told him things I never expected to reveal in a major league clubhouse, where revelation was supposed to be the other way around. I told him the naked truth.

…Flanagan’s suicide and that of former Yankee pitcher Hideki Irabu after the spotlight passed them by, that of Denver Bronco’s receiver Kenny McKinley and LPGA golfer Erica Blasberg after suffering debilitating injuries, and that of former Pro Bowl safety Dave Duerson, who shot himself in the chest so his brain could be studied for evidence of trauma-induced disease — which was found to be ample — cry out for the availability of on-going psychological services for professional athletes and for a reexamination of the fallacious assumptions we make as a result of their sturdy professional lives.

[Photo Credit: moonchild1111]

Here’s a nice little essay by Geoff Dyer:

Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner living in an overcrowded city on a tiny island where courts are in short supply, but I love seeing tennis courts: from a plane as it descends (there never seem to be any on the way up) or from speeding trains and cars. This is a purely aesthetic — i.e., pointless — pleasure, but if I am out walking or cycling, this fondness for court-spotting has obvious practical advantages. Over time, in London, I have discovered every public court within a playable distance of home.

…It is in America that you encounter true abundance, both public and private. Descending in a plane over California — or North Carolina or Texas — it seems that tennis courts are more potent than swimming pools as symbols of freedom from the realm of necessity. Which raises the question: What profiteth a man if he gains a world of free courts yet lacks a partner? For life is not just a search for tennis courts; it is also a search for someone to play with.

[Photo Credit: Roosevelt Islander]

I was never a brave child. I faked a groin injury at a roller-skating party because the other kids were stronger skaters than me. I refused an invitation to try out for an all-star team that would represent America in a Canadian tournament because I didn’t make the cut the year before and couldn’t face another rejection.

More than anything, I don’t want my sons to be paralyzed by that same kind of fear in their childhoods. But at the first sign of trouble, I want to run in there and pull them out of the fire.

Searching for something to occupy our oldest son during his first summer vacation from pre-school, my wife and I stumbled upon a day camp at a local yoga studio. It advertised a full week of art, music, dance, cooking, field trips and, of course, yoga, all appropriate for three-to-nine-year olds. Since our potential camper was three going on four, this seemed to be a viable option to kill off a week of inactivity.

When my wife dropped him off on the first day, he was shy, but also excited. He’s timid in new situations but always loosens up. As my wife looked around, she noticed that though the camp was appropriate for younger kids, only kids seven and older had signed up for this week.

Out of a dozen children, he was the youngest by several years. For some of you who were tough kids or who have tough kids or just don’t think about kids that much, this might not seem like a big deal. But imagine walking out of pre-school one day and walking into second or third grade the next. It has the potential to be scary.

“Im trying not to cry.” She texted me from the bus on her way to work.  “He’s too little, what have we done?”

Should I go get him? No, he’s not an egg, I reminded myself. The instructors will look out for him. He can make it through one day. But I was terrified that he would be terrified and I was angry with myself for screwing up something as simple as summer camp.

We could have researched the camp more. We could have made sure he was signed up with a buddy. We should have been better prepared than we were. I was afraid we looked liked neglectful parents. Sitting at my desk, I could feel I was blushing.

When I got home that night I braced for bad news, but he immediately began to show me some of the yoga positions he had learned that day. He especially loved the pose with his feet up on the wall and his hands down on the floor. And he showed me a pretty decent warrior pose as well.

I was so relieved. I thought everything was OK, that he must have enjoyed the experience. Maybe even he would be excited to go back?

My first clue that this was not the case came when I put him to bed that night. He said, “Today was my last day at camp.” I corrected him , “No, today was your first day at camp. You have four more days.” I put four fingers in the air. He was messing with me and he smiled as he said, “No, it was my last day.” He went to sleep.

The camp posted some pictures of their activities and my wife and I scrolled through the set. Our faces sagged together. All the pictures in the beginning were of the older kids. They were doing a complex art project. They were playing poker for crissakes. My son has never even seen a deck of cards. Even in the wide shots, there was no trace of him. We imagined him curled up in a corner by himself.

And then there he was playing with Lego. And then doing yoga. And then in the music circle. The other kids dwarfed him. He looked like their batboy. It was hard to tell if he was having fun, but he wasn’t visibly upset. We reassured ourselves that he was OK and that we should try another day. Our unspoken doubts hung there in the negative space of our agreement.

When I went to work in the morning, he seemed set to go back. But when he had to walk out the door, he was a mess. And it wasn’t the meltdown of the tired, or of the hungry, or of the bratty. I’ve experienced all of those. This was the last resort of the powerless. Please don’t make me do this.

Clinging to the door frame of the yoga studio, in between sobs, he said, “It’s too hard. I’m not good enough. I can’t do it.” I wish I was there for that moment to help him and I’m glad I wasn’t because I don’t know what I would have done. I might have let him off the hook. He’s too young to worry about all that stuff.

I also remembered the shame I still feel for all the times I shrank away from challenges like this. But whose fear am I accomodating, his or mine? There’s a line somewhere here but I can’t see it.

At the end of the second day, he had survived. There were more tears to come, but smiles too. The next morning was easier. The week passed and maybe he won’t even remember the particulars. But my wife and I will.

After that second day, before he went to sleep, he made it clear that he understood he was going back three more times. But he had also come to another conclusion:

“After camp is over, I’m never doing yoga again.”  Ah, well. Good thing it wasn’t baseball camp.

I don’t know from hockey but I thoroughly enjoyed this recent bonus piece by Leigh Montville on the Boston Bruins:

The standing ovation was a return to the past. No, not the standing ovation at TD Garden last Friday night, the 10-minute communal fret-celebration at the end of that 1–0, stomach-churning win over the Lightning in the seventh game of the Eastern Conference finals that sent the Bruins into their best-of-seven transcontinental arm wrestle with the Canucks for the Stanley Cup. No, that was frenzied normality, a universal sports staple, excited people in an exciting moment.

The standing ovation the next afternoon at Pizzeria Regina in the North End was different. That was the way life once was in Boston hockey.

“Milan Lucic came in….” Richie Zapata, manager of the restaurant, reported.

Yes, Milan Lucic. Bruins winger. Still only 22 years old. Fourth year with the team. Six-feet-three, 228 pounds. A fan favorite since he arrived as a 19-year-old, straight from the Vancouver Giants, his junior team. Banger, scrapper, thumper. Yes.

“Johnny Boychuk was with him….”

Yes. Johnny Boychuk. Defenseman. Twenty-seven. Six-feet-two, 225 pounds. Third year with the Bruins. Big-time slap shot from the point. Cannon.

“They were with their girlfriends…. ”

Yes.

“I gave them a booth in the back. They ordered a large pepperoni with peppers and mushrooms. I gave them some extra slices. Took care of it. They were nice. Signed some metal pizza plates for the waitresses. Just nice. Nobody bothered them.”

So when the two Bruins and their girlfriends finished their meal at the original Pizzeria Regina—not one of the other Pizzeria Regina locations around the area, the original, with the familiar red-and-white-checked tablecloths, with the smart-mouth waitresses, with the waiting line that goes out the door most of the time and down the stairs straight onto Thacher Street, when they stood up, well, everyone else in the restaurant also stood up. And started clapping. Just like that.

Game Six of the Stanley Cup Finals are tonight in Boston, with the Bruins trailing 3-2.

Word to God.

Federer will play his nemesis Rafa Nadal on Sunday for all the marbles. Here’s hoping he’s got one more great match in him. To beat Nadal at the French would be something.

There’s a fun gallery of sports fans sleeping over at SI.com. Check it out.

Big sports Saturday. The Kentucky Derby is in a few hours. If you’ve never read Hunter Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” here’s your chance.

Later tonight, Manny Pacquiao fights “Sugar” Shane Mosley, though Gary Andrew Poole wonders when Pacman will fight the Right American (aka Floyd Mayweather, Jr.).

For you hoop heads, the Celtics look to avoid going down 3-0 like the Lakers. Good news for them is that they are at home. I figure they’ll win tonight but don’t think they can stop the Heat in the series.

On the baseball diamond, Andre Ethier looks to tie a Dodger team record by extending his hitting streak to 31 out at Citifield. And down in Texas the Yanks would love to see Bartolo Colon to keep things rolling. Bunch o runs wouldn’t hoit, now would it boys?

Get the clicker ready, good people, grab some eats, and settle in for a night of high fat bastardness.

[Photo Credit: Christian Science Monitor]