At halftime of this year’s Super Bowl, the marquee game of the NFL season, the Kansas City Chiefs trailed the Philadelphia Eagles 24-14 in Glendale, Arizona. What transpired next was the latest remarkable comeback in the career of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, one of the most compelling athletes in sports…and the NFL’s modern comeback master.

Mahomes performed brilliantly on an injured ankle. The Chiefs won 38-35 in one of the most thrilling Super Bowls ever. Cue the stirring music and the “I’m going to DisneyLand!” soundbite.

Our book Kingdom Quarterback tells the story of Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs—a budding dynasty in America’s most popular sport—and it tells the story of Kansas City, a heartland metropolis that boomed more than a century ago before it became defined by segregation, suburbanization, redlining, and the ills that plague all of America’s cities.

It’s also a book about comebacks. The ones that Mahomes engineers on the football field can feel transcendent. He makes them look so easy. But what does it mean for a city to mount a comeback? And why does it feel so difficult? Our book helps explain why.

Whether it’s sports, business, or politics, American life is full of captivating comebacks. We root for them (or against them). We sit transfixed by them. They help us make sense of the world. The books below are our favorite “comeback” books.

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Eli Saslow, Rising out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

This is the story of Derek Black—the so-called prince of the white nationalist movement in the United States. Saslow poignantly chronicles the transformation of an enthusiastic college student who arrives on campus in Florida, maintains his role as the host of a racist radio show, meets a group of close friends, and ultimately chooses to renounce his family’s past and his belief system.

Through detailed reporting and spare prose, the book offers a gripping portrait of a young person that you cannot put down. One of the reasons this “comeback” story is so illuminating is that it’s not neat and tidy—it’s complicated…but ultimately hopeful.

Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

On some level, all comebacks are about resilience, and there aren’t many recent non-fiction books that better capture that than Hidden Figures, which offers the historical accounts of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three Black women and mathematicians who quietly helped NASA vault ahead in the space race. More detailed (and historically accurate) than the acclaimed film version of the same name, Hidden Figures is a sprawling history about a collection of characters who were doubted, then forged the science equivalent of a terrific sports comeback.

Andre Agassi, Open: An Autobiography

Andre Agassi’s tennis career felt like one big comeback. He was a flamboyant prodigy raised by an overbearing father who could not break through and win a grand slam title. He finally did at an unlikely place: Wimbledon in 1992. But he saved his best comeback for later in his career, when he became perhaps the best player in the world for a stretch in late 1999 and early 2000.

Agassi employed the ghost writer J.R. Moehringer, an award-winning journalist and sometimes sports writer who wrote The Tender Bar (and later served as the ghost writer for Prince Harry’s autobiography, Spare). Agassi read The Tender Bar and loved it, which caused him to reach out to Moeringer. What followed was one of the most honest autobiographies from a superstar athlete we’ve ever seen.

Kent Babb, Across the River: Life, Death, and Football in an American City

Babb, a sportswriter at The Washington Post, spent the 2019 season with the high school football team at Edna Karr High School in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. As such, the book follows the familiar structure of a sports book. But this isn’t a comeback story concerned with winning more football games. It’s a deeply reported story of a truly American neighborhood, an against-all-odds tale that invites the reader to meet a group of boys and young men who are trying to avoid the gun violence and poverty that is plaguing their community.

You won’t be able to stop thinking about the players in this book. And you’ll leave with a deep appreciation for what they overcome each day.

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Shortly after musician Zauner graduated from college—and while her band Little Big League struggled to gain a following — her mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They had a tumultuous relationship during Zauner’s high school years, but she moved from Philadelphia to Oregon to care for her during her final months.

While H Mart is a book about death and mourning—it opens with Zauner explaining how she cries at the sight of seafood noodles and rice cakes at the Korean grocery chain named in the book’s title—it’s also about resilience, familial and romantic love, and comebacks. In addition to repairing her relationship with her mother, Zauner connects with her Korean culture through cooking and beats the odds to make it as a musician. She also connects these narratives together with mesmerizing detail.

As a bonus, H Mart pairs well with the excellent Psychopomp, Zauner’s comeback album (under the performing name Japanese Breakfast) inspired by her mother.

Pat Conroy, My Losing Season

Can you have a comeback if you keep losing? As Pat Conroy writes in this memoir of his years playing college basketball for The Citadel, losing “tears along the seam of your own image of yourself.” But as anyone who’s ever played a sport knows, the seam heals, producing a stronger image, even if it takes years to realize what you’ve learned.

Conroy’s self-described mediocre skills as a point guard (he was actually very good) gave him the only outlet for connection to an abusive father and an escape from The Citadel’s hellish hazing system. My Losing Season is also perhaps the only book that accurately portrays how meeting NBA legend Jerry West at a basketball camp and stumbling past Tennessee Williams’s house in New Orleans can both be religious experiences.

 Kara Goucher and Mary Pilon, The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team

Athletes wow us all the time with comebacks on the court, field, and track. They face challenges outside of the games, too, which Goucher, writing with Pilon, openly shares in this memoir. Goucher turned a surprisingly successful college distance running career into an even more surprising and successful professional career, winning a silver medal in the 10,000 Meter Run at the 2007 World Outdoor Championships, the first time an American woman had medaled in that event.

Goucher, who trained with famed runner Alberto Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project, was on top of the world. But then she faced a tougher challenge shared by many women distance runners, who contend with a system riddled with abuse, body shaming, and cheating. Ultimately, Goucher achieves a greater comeback than anything she did in a race: triumphing over Salazar to hold him—and Nike—accountable.

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Kingdom Quarterback by Mark Dent and Rustin Dodd is available from Dutton.

It is probably not entirely coincidental that synthetic testosterone became available in 1935 and that the Mr. America bodybuilding contest started in 1939, Mr. Universe in 1948, and Mr. Olympia in 1955.

Female bodybuilding contests trailed several decades behind male ones, and, as one might expect, audiences differed on what form a female winner should take—​some resemblance to a Grecian goddess’s physique or just hugely muscular. The best of both are rewarded, because today women bodybuilders can compete in five categories: Physique, Figure, Fitness, Bikini, and Wellness. Universally evaluated are poses in increments of 90-​degree turns along with demonstrated poise throughout the judging. The fitness category also requires a dance routine that includes a push-​up, high kick, straddle hold, and side split. Some categories call for high heels and jewelry, others for bare feet.

To prepare for a competition, male bodybuilders tell me, it takes about three months of disciplined work to go from routinely robust to awesome. They continue with their usual strenuous weight-​lifting routine and begin intense endurance training and dieting to reduce their body fat, which masks their musculature. Their diet during the final month consists mostly of chicken breast, fish, broccoli, asparagus, and a little rice supplemented with nutrients and protein shakes, which in total might add up to 1,000 calories per day. The aim is to reduce body fat to 3–​7 percent of the total body, which from a general health perspective is dangerously low. Several days before the competition they begin loading up on carbohydrates to add glycogen and bulk to their already bulging muscles. For the last 36 hours they restrict water and sodium intake, leaving themselves starved, dehydrated, and likely irritable, but now nothing but skin separates their muscles from each judge’s scrutiny. Additionally, some bodybuilders indulge in a pre-​performance belly-​flattening enema. Because of the overall commitment required, most bodybuilders do not compete more than once or twice a year.

For the event itself, a natural tan will not hold up under the bright lights, and advice on the Internet includes, “When you think you’re tan enough, do another two coats! Judges can and will hold a poor tan against you, so err on the side of caution and assume that more is better.” To further take advantage of the bright lights to demonstrate muscle definition, bodybuilders shave with safety razors. Electric ones don’t trim close enough.

For the women, the bikinis are small, sparkly, and require particular attention to detail. “Since you need to make sure you are ‘secured’ in your suits, make sure to bring some suit glue.”

Male bodybuilders compete in three categories: Men’s Physique, Classical Physique, and Men’s Bodybuilding. The typical body shape/size by category is robust, plausible, and unbelievably freakish, respectively. As the muscles get larger from one category to the next, the outfits get smaller: board shorts to small briefs to even smaller “posing briefs.” In Men’s Physique, the contestants are judged from both front and back but without any blatant muscle flexing. For the Classic Physique and Bodybuilding categories, each contestant assumes eight different required poses. These include front and rear double biceps, front and rear lat (latissimus dorsi) spreads, side triceps, side chest, and front abs and thighs. Following the obligatory poses, contestants have an opportunity during the “pose down” to flex freely in an individualized, choreographed sequence of postures that they think maximally display their splendors. In case you think bodybuilding contests have passed you by, some of them have age categories to accommodate everyone, including masters (over 39 years old), grand masters (over 49), and even super ultra platinum masters (over 79).

For both men and women bodybuilders who, despite overtime in the gym, lack symmetry or who can’t make a particular muscle stand out, assistance is available via Synthol injections or surgical implants. Just as the use of growth-​enhancing medicinals such as steroids, growth hormone, and insulin are unregulated in most competitions, so are physical-​bulk enhancers. Synthol, which is mostly oil with some local anesthetic and alcohol mixed in, is advertised as a posing oil with characteristics purportedly better than baby oil and olive oil. Some bodybuilders, however, use it as a “site enhancement oil” and inject it to “fluff” out an otherwise perfect physique. (Why else would it contain local anesthetic?)

To learn more about this performance art, I recently attended a bodybuilding competition—​as a spectator. The International Natural Bodybuilding Association was the host. It takes great pride in being one of the bodybuilding organizations that pays more than lip service to prohibiting use of performance-​enhancing drugs. The INBA randomly picks contestants for testing and routinely tests winners in each category.

I paid extra for a backstage pass to visit the prep rooms, which early on had standing room only and displayed vast expanses of “tanned” skin tightly stretched over bulging muscles, none freakishly large in accordance with the INBA’s firm stance against performance-​enhancing drugs. Contestants not satisfied with the sheen provided by their newly applied spray tan were applying posing oil to themselves and to the backs of fellow competitors. Some had brought their dumbbells along and were “pumping up” their muscles into full glory. Others were doing slow, controlled push-​ups between strewn-​about gym bags laden with supplements. I glanced into the women’s ready room but immediately turned away in shock. Amazons! In bikinis and high heels! With eye shadow!

The audience nearly filled the 300-​seat theater, and everyone I talked to was either a friend or family member of one of the competitors. Seven judges, male and female, all former bodybuilders, sat in the front row with clipboards in hand. Several rows back a professional photographer clicked away all day, providing images for the INBA’s magazine, Ironman. A forest of trophies covered five or six tables at the back of the stage. For each category, the emcee introduced competitors by name, age, city, time in training, and day job. Many were personal trainers, but the clergy, police force, and business interests were also represented. In categories that had at least three competitors, the host awarded checks of $1,000, $500, and $300 to the top three winners. In addition, the trophy tables were gradually deforested over the day.

For part of the show (after the Amazon jolt, as I recall), I sat next to a woman whose husband was competing. They had flown into Los Angeles from Austin, Texas, the day before, were staying in a hotel for two nights, and then flying home. He won his category, which included seven or eight competitors, so naturally his wife excitedly photographed him holding up his giant $1,000 check. Some silent calculations convinced me, however, that by the time they got home, they would be ahead by only the trophy and maybe some brag rights at their gym—“their gym” because sometimes she also competes. Maybe his photo in Ironman would garner him a product endorsement, movie audition, or additional clients to train, but it had to be more than prize money that motivated him.

I had an even more depressive thought as the day progressed. After they had performed, showered off their tans, and donned warm-​ups, some of the contestants came out and sat in the audience. Although they looked trim and fit, their clothing completely disguised their lean physiques and awesomely developed musculature. For instance, there was no evidence whatsoever that their abs looked like biscuits on a baking sheet and that their silhouettes when performing their front-​lat spreads reminded one of a hulking B-​52 bomber. Consider that the men rigidly diet for at least three months to reduce their body fat to 5 percent of their overall weight. (The American Council on Exercise says that “fit” and “athletic” men have about 16 percent and 9 percent body fat, respectively. For women, the averages are several percentage points higher.) Then the contestants pump iron obsessively and especially spot-​train muscles that aren’t quite as grand as their others to gain “symmetry.” After all of this they might win a trophy and a break-​even weekend in Southern California.

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Excerpted from Muscle: The Gripping Story of Strength and Movement by Roy A. Meals, MD. Copyright © 2023. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Over the blue‑steel waves off Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, in 1935, the sun rose slowly and then all at once, first overtaking the morning stars, then teasing pink on the clouds, before finally splitting the horizon in two. Michael Lerner, a 44‑year‑old heir to a New York City clothing‑store fortune, sat near the boat’s bow, gazing at the ocean, as his guides Tommy Gifford and Lansdell “Bounce” Anderson chapped their hands on the oars.

For hours already, their boat had bobbed fruitlessly without a single bite on Lerner’s bait. Finally the rod twanged with the hit; it was a brutal, fast snatch. His quarry, at last.

The physics of Lerner’s fight with the giant Atlantic bluefin tuna were simple: the tuna was three hundred pounds of muscle hooked to a line made of fifty-four braided strands of spun linen. That line threaded through a rod held by Lerner, who had been strapped to a boat‑mounted swiveling chair that prevented him from being pulled headfirst into the ocean.

Catching a bluefin tuna on rod and reel required the skill, strength, and endurance of a world‑class fisherman, and every piece of gear had to work—from the bamboo rod to its arched metal hook. And as of that day in Wedgeport, it had never been done before.

Deep underwater, the hooked bluefin followed instinct, kicking its powerful sickled tail as it rocketed away from the dory. Like a speeding car, it ramped up its speed, drawing on the digested caloric power of all the tiny fish it had eaten that week on the marine bank locals had dubbed Soldier’s Rip, a bountiful patch of ocean about fifteen kilometers or so offshore from the village.

That power fed its warm organs and dense red blood, its thick muscles throbbing with lactic acid as it pulled and ran. The fish’s pectoral fins slotted into its sides as it strained against Lerner’s rod, its skin flashing a rainbow of colors in agitation.

The metal mechanism of Lerner’s reel screamed as it spun, letting out line faster than his eyes could follow. Even still, the fish towed the wooden dory across the glittering chop. Lerner fought to keep line on the reel without breaking the tenuous connection. He knew it would be something like this, the world crystallized around his human body in a single second: water, wind, and sun; man and fish.

But this wasn’t a gentle tease from the ocean’s depths. This was a tug‑of‑war with a bear. When Ernest Hemingway, a fishing friend of Lerner’s, first saw a big tuna off the coast of Spain, he was shocked at how the giant fish leapt clear of the water, falling back against it “with a noise like horses jumping off a dock.” Anyone capable and canny enough to catch a fish that size, Hemingway wrote with awe, could “enter unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods.”

After being dragged around the ocean for nearly half an hour, Lerner started to tire. But so, too, had the fish. With a final, deep tug, Lerner pulled the bluefin’s gleaming, torpedo‑shaped body alongside the boat, one smooth side of shimmering skin tipped toward the sky.

A golf‑ball‑sized eye gleamed in its blue‑black head, as its sharp pectoral fin slapped the air fruitlessly. The fish, already close to death, flapped its fins with exhaustion, yet it still took every sickled gaff and ounce of strength the three men had to pull its bulk over the dory’s gunwale.

No sooner had Gifford baited and cast the next hook than another tuna, this one even larger, was on the line. Within another hour, Lerner had landed this fish too, also more than 300 pounds, before they called it a day. The trio headed back to port, Gifford and the mate pulling the boat’s oars with bleeding hands and aching backs.

During an era when commercial fishing and adventure‑seeking tourism started to boom and converge, bluefin tuna transformed Wedgeport’s fortunes. Under its cold waters, giant bluefin tuna schooled at the turbulent waters where two prevailing currents collided. From the surface, the rip appeared as a flat plate of ocean ringed by curling waves that seemed to come out of nowhere, and for decades Nova Scotians had witnessed schools of huge tuna congregating there.

Punctuated by a massive undersea bank that pushed nutrients and animal life upward toward the surface, tuna grew huge on that rip, plump from gorging on schools of herring, mackerel, and squid. Catching fish was easy on the rip, and catching fish was what had brought British and French colonizers to Nova Scotia in the first place.

Only a few days before he arrived in Wedgeport in 1935, Lerner had already given up on his dreams of catching a giant bluefin. The avid sportsman and angler had traveled to the remote southern coast of Nova Scotia to join paid guide Gifford for a week of fishing. But all the money in the world can’t conjure a fish that doesn’t bite, and they hadn’t landed a single noteworthy fish. Frustrated and disappointed, the pair decided to head west by train and catch the next ferry across the Gulf of Maine back home to the United States.

As their steam‑powered train chugged along, Lerner couldn’t bear its painfully slow speed. After long minutes of complaining, the pair lunged off their train car at the train’s next stop, lugging bags, hats, and all, and flagged down a rickety passing car that, to Gifford’s eye, looked like “one of the first automobiles ever made.” They negotiated a fare, loaded their tackle, and bounced off heading west down the winding gravel road.

Driving along past wind‑whipped pines and glacier‑hewn boulders, the men eventually stopped for gas at a tiny, ramshackle stand. Inside, pinned to a plank wall, they spied a photo that beggared belief: a black‑and‑white newspaper clipping of a tuna larger than a boulder. At the bottom of the paper’s curling edges someone had scrawled “1,100 pounds.”

Sensing possibility, the Americans interrogated the man behind the counter. That fish? Sure, he said in the region’s lilting Acadian accent. That fish had been caught in Wedgeport, a fishing town to the southeast named for its triangular wedge of land that hangs into the chilly Atlantic like a lonely, thick icicle. That fish inspired the pair to give bluefin fishing in Nova Scotia one more shot.

Late that afternoon, Lerner and Gifford sputtered into Wedgeport dusty from their journey and headed down a slope into the town’s port, asking around for someone who could help them catch a tuna. In a town where women sold hooked rugs from the side of the road for cash and most men held down more than a few jobs, the money those American anglers threw around gleamed. After their first few queries, Lerner found Evée LeBlanc.

In the 1920s, LeBlanc started harpooning the bluefin tuna alongside two other Wedgeport‑based fishermen. “How the men hated those tuna, those horse mackerel!” David MacDonald wrote in 1955 in Canada’s Maclean’s magazine. “As big as a thousand pounds, they wrecked nets. Speared, they fought for hours. And all the monsters were worth was a mean three cents per pound at canneries along the shore.”

By the early 1930s, LeBlanc had already repeatedly tried to catch giant bluefin on rod and reel, a piece of fishing equipment designed for smaller fish. Instead of a delicate linen line, he rigged his rod with a double steel line tied to piano wire. Before the invention of fiberglass rods, a hard tuna strike could reduce a fisherman’s bamboo rod to shards.

At the time, less sportingly but more lucratively, Wedgeport’s fishermen also corralled bluefin in nets in the open ocean en masse. Once the bluefin were netted, the fisherman pulled them to shore, dragging the ponderous catch behind their boats and eventually aground. Helpless in the shallow water, the fish were killed and sent to either Boston’s fish market or a cannery. In 1932, Nova Scotia netters had landed 204 tonnes of tuna, nearly double the previous year’s catch. It was a fishery for flesh and sustenance, not an activity fit for a gentleman.

Despite having no luck with rod and reel, LeBlanc’s brother Louis and another friend did manage to harpoon the largest bluefin tuna ever landed in Wedgeport in 1934, a 1,100‑pound giant they stretched out at the wharf for gawkers. That was likely the fish Lerner eventually glimpsed in the photo at the gas station—a bluefin that had bumped history off its steady trajectory as a low‑value novelty fish.

That picture set the hook. The circle complete, the two Americans rented LeBlanc’s small wooden fishing boat, or dory, and rigged a swivel to the chair on its front—a big‑fish fighting trick Lerner had picked up in the Caribbean—and hired a third man to pull the boat’s second oar. The next day they left at dawn and returned home with their two giant fish: the first rod‑and‑reel tuna ever landed in the region.

By the time Lerner and Gifford arrived back at the dock, Wedgeport boys were shouting news of the fish on the streets, and the men were passed around for backslaps and handshakes. The next day, the pair headed out for more fishing, only to discover a port packed with boats, each crammed with looky‑loos who wanted to see a bluefin caught by rod and reel for themselves. The flotilla, including one boat with a brass band aboard, headed toward the bank where tuna swam; Lerner caught his next two giant tuna to the melodic notes of horns floating across the waves.

After his Nova Scotia trip ended and he returned to New York, Lerner passed along photos of the massive fish to some sportswriters he knew, who published them in newspapers and magazines. Soon the international wires to Yarmouth were humming with interest. Lerner, who, according to Gifford, “would have severed a leg or arm as readily as he would the line if there was a fish on the other end of it,” returned to Wedgeport within weeks. By the end of his second trip, Lerner had landed twenty-six giant bluefin tuna.

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From Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas by Karen Pinchin with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Karen Pinchin.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

In this episode, Andrew talks to Ethan Scheiner, author of Freedom to Win, about the courageous Czechoslovakian hockey team that successfully fought the Soviets for the soul of its people.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

Ethan Scheiner is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. His previous books include Democracy without Competition in Japan and Electoral Systems and Political Context. He now teaches and writes on the intersection of politics and sports. His writing on sports and political resistance has appeared in the Washington Post, Stars and Stripes, Politico, and The Daily Beast.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

In this episode, Andrew talks to R.K. Russell, the author of The Yards Between Us, about being Black and bisexual in the National Football League.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

R. K. Russell was a professional football player in the NFL, and is a social justice advocate, essayist, and artist. In August 2019, Russell made history by becoming the first out active NFL player to identify as bisexual. Since coming out, he has written about his experience as a Black queer man in sports for The New York Times, The L.A. Times, and Out Magazine, among others. Russell has also spearheaded NFL Pride initiatives such as the NFL Super Bowl LVI Pride panel and the NFL’s National Coming Out Day PSA. He has been honored by GAY TIMES (U.K.) as Sportsperson of the Year, and he was selected to the prestigious OUT 100 List in 2019. He lives in Los Angeles.

The Columbia River Bar is the violent meeting of the twelve-hundred-mile-long Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean, the site of over 2,000 shipwrecks. Thirty-three tributaries feed the Big River with rainwater in the ninety miles between the Willamette and the Pacific Ocean, and by late May and early June the flow of the lower Columbia becomes truly stupendous, carrying up to 1.2 million cubic feet of water per second at its mouth.

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Friday, July 16, 2021

As we lifted our boats off the trailer, the sky was low and gray all the way to the horizon, with only a faint spot of lightening in the south to suggest that the sun was there at all. The air was filled with drizzle and mist, precipitation and evaporation, falling and rising. Lowering my end of the main hull onto a damp patch of mossy grass, I felt a slightly claustrophobic sensation of not just the weather closing in around me but the whole world with it. The scene was so far from what I’d imagined, from the picture in my mind of luminous blue overhead and vivid white caps marking our distant goal, that for the first time I felt doubt slipping in through the cracks in my resolve, and wondered about continuing forward.

For months now, my friend Ray Thomas and I had been talking about the RIGHT DAY to cross the Columbia River Bar. The words had been in quotation marks the first few times we’d used them, but grew into all caps as the concept loomed larger and larger in our thoughts. The venture we had in mind would only make sense, we kept reminding each other, if we found the Right Day.

When I’d first spoken to Ray about “the right day” back in April, I’d been quoting Bruce Jones, who, along with occupying the office of mayor of Astoria, Oregon, served as deputy director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum. In the email in which he introduced himself and suggested we meet at the museum, Mayor Jones had attached a photograph of the astounding turbulence a person might encounter at the place where one of the world’s largest, most powerful, and fastest-moving watercourses spills into the Pacific Ocean. Actually, this intersection of river and sea is more of a slam than a spill—“like two giant hammers pounding into each other,” as the head of the Columbia River Bar Pilots Association described it to the New York Times back in 1988.

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We knew already that the wind that day was steady at about twenty-two miles per hour, too intense for a bar crossing in a kayak, but neither of us was prepared for what that felt like on a span of the river where the Columbia’s mouth was only a little more than a mile to the west. The wind waves were three and four feet, not coming in sets at intervals of seven to nine seconds like on the ocean, but in an incessant and erratic chop that struck our boat from changing directions as current and tide thrashed against one another. I was in the front position again, and up there I felt more like a buckaroo than a sailor, being tossed not only from side to side but also fore and aft as we passed abruptly over peak and into trough and then onto peak again, and so forth, our heads soaked, gasping in awe. Our sail was full, and we were both pedaling, going at what was probably the trimaran’s max velocity, about seven miles per hour.

After a few moments of being shaken, I felt exhilaration rise in me, and I was grinning crazily, marveling at how well the Hobie absorbed the pounding it was taking, continuously oscillating back to equilibrium, no matter how tilted it was by the waves. We had headed out of the boat basin straight for the buoy that floated in the middle of the river, intent on crossing to the Washington side, a distance of nearly four miles. We got only as far as about a hundred yards from the buoy, though, when Ray, who had the rudder, turned us back to shore.

Randall and Ray approaching the mouth of the Columbia River in the Hobie Adventure Island trimaran on July 16, 2021. Photo courtesy of the author.

The wind and our front-to-back positions made explanation difficult, but when I turned to look at Ray, I was pretty certain I saw fear in his eyes. This was perfectly understandable under the circumstances, I knew, but I was disappointed that we hadn’t continued across the river. And I was surprised. I knew Ray as a risk-taker. He had long been unpopular among the wives of various friends and associates, mainly because they believed he was determined to put not only himself but also their husbands into life-threatening situations. It was a reputation that discomfited him even as he cultivated it.

Yet Ray had been circumspect from the first about the idea—my idea—of us crossing the bar in his trimaran, warning me more than once that it would have to be approached in stages that started with building trust that we could work as a team on the water, and then together studying the Columbia Bar in depth and at length before venturing onto it. That was fine. I was already committed to doing the research in order to write this book, and it seemed like an excellent idea for Ray and me to practice in the trimaran for some number of times before taking on the bar. To my growing concern, and even annoyance in a couple of cases, though, Ray had begun to remark that he wasn’t sure about this whole project, that he doubted I understood how dangerous it was, and that it didn’t mean nearly as much to him as it did to me.

*

The park’s launch ramp was used mainly by large recreational fishing boats, though I had been told that some leaving from there were commercial fishermen. The men who ran or worked the big boats were gawking at us from the moment of our arrival. As we assembled and rigged our trimarans on the strip of grass next to where Ray had parked the van, one guy after another found a reason to walk past and ask if we were going to cross the bar “in those things.” I heard derision in at least several voices, while others seemed skeptical but curious. All of them shook their heads. Ray and Kenny scowled silently at the derisive and were stoically polite to the doubtful, giving terse replies to questions about our boats, which had been seasoned by years of familiarity with the process of putting in trimarans amid myriad motorboats.

Donning our drysuits only increased the circus-like atmosphere we seemed to be creating. Mine was a red-gray-black combination that made me look, according to my wife, like a space traveler in party clothes. Much as I despised the strangulating throat gusset, I agreed with Ray that the security of knowing we could survive in the water for several hours, if it came to that, was worth the discomfort. Padding around in our drysuits, though, made us appear even more like alien life forms to the fishermen.

By the time we put our trimarans into the water, a couple of the fishermen were grumbling about the time we were taking and let us know they wanted us to clear the way. We climbed into the Hobies out of knee-deep water, paddled a few feet away from the launch ramp, then began pedaling. The rest of the fishermen were clustered along the dock next to the ramp, watching us with expressions at once incredulous and comical. “Oh, my God,” I heard one of the men say. “Pedals?”

Guffaws followed as we moved past, then a voice called out from behind us, “No guts, no glory!” followed by even louder laughter. I glanced over at Kenny in the solo Hobie, and he looked anything but amused.

As we entered the channel I heard one last voice shouting “Good luck” and wondered which one of the fishermen that was. The rain had stopped about ten minutes earlier, and the sky already began to show signs of clearing. This produced a phenomenon I’ve seen only on the Pacific coast between Northern California and southern Washington and have always found immensely pleasurable.

A Coast Guard boat navigating the mouth of the Columbia River below Cape Disappointment Lighthouse. Photo courtesy of US Coast Guard Cape Disappointment.

It’s a filmy, silvery light that lays like a substance on one’s surroundings, magically weighting everything that it touches and somehow compressing reality in a way that creates a simultaneous sense of expansion, making what’s near seem far and what’s far all but unbearably close. I’d had trouble falling asleep the night before, bothered by the thought that this could be my last night on earth, until I concluded it was that way all the time, and finally nodded off. Now, in the uncanny light of this day, as Ray opened our sail and we slid out of the channel into Baker Bay, making for the Columbia River, I felt no fear, only anticipation.

Seated in the rear position, I could see just Ray’s back, until he swiveled to look at me over his right shoulder. “You and me, brother,” he called. “Let’s live through this.”

We’ve both lived through a lot already, Ray, I thought to myself. It’s what we’re good at.

*

A pair of passersby marked the latter stage of our approach to the Columbia Bar.

Just before the first of these appeared, I had begun to wonder at what point Ray and I (and Kenny, wherever he might be; behind us was all I knew) would be officially within the Jaws. We had been moving along next to the North Jetty for at least half an hour, and the inside of the South Jetty, where it protruded from Point Adams, was increasingly visible. So we were between the two jetties, but still sailing in relatively smooth waters. The inside of the entrance to the Columbia Bar, I knew, the point where the jetties were most widely spaced apart, was almost exactly a distance of two miles across. The outside of the entrance, where ships came into the river off the ocean, and where the collision of tide and current was truly felt, was only a little more than half a mile wide.

We were at a point where the distance between the jetties was maybe a little more than a mile, I was guessing, not quite “in” the Jaws, I had just decided, when Ray pointed sharply off to his right in the direction of the North Jetty. For a moment I saw nothing, then spotted the fin moving through the water about sixty or seventy feet off our starboard side. It took another second before I recognized the large silver-gray shape moving under the water, beneath the fin, and realized I was looking at a great white shark.

It was the first one of these I had ever seen live. I knew great whites were all along the West Coast of the United States.

Ray told me later it was the first great white he had ever seen also, and that made the sighting seem especially significant, though precisely how, I wasn’t prepared to say. The main thing I was thinking at the time was that, if our trimaran capsized, we’d have more to worry about than simply managing to stay afloat until a rescue boat came for us.

Earlier, I had worried briefly that some water beast could tip the trimaran over. My concern then had been mainly about what was likely the great white’s main prey in these waters, sea lions. We’d seen several of them surface for air already, one not ten feet from our boat. Ray called over his shoulder that I should smack it in the face with a paddle if it swam any closer.

It wasn’t long after we spotted the shark that I saw the big freighter headed toward us, incoming off the ocean across the bar. I blame Ray for the way my breath caught in my throat. Before and during our first two training sessions in the trimaran, Ray had backed up his warnings that I couldn’t “cramp up or crap out” on the bar, and not be able to pedal full speed, by employing the image of some large freighter coming full speed straight at us as it entered the river’s mouth, and he and I needing to be able to pedal out of the way to avoid being crushed.

For a minute or two, when the freighter, coming from the north, began to swing in to port off the ocean, the ship looked as if it were headed our way for sure. The freighter’s left turn wasn’t nearly as sharp as it had seemed for that first minute, however, and when it actually came through the Jaws into the center of the South Channel, the ship was nearly a thousand feet from us.

*

Beyond the rampart of rocks and the view of Cape Disappointment, it was all sandy beach stretching miles up the Long Beach Peninsula to Willapa Bay. Washington’s ocean beaches are in general nowhere near as beautiful as Oregon’s, not only lacking the drama of the oceanfront down south, but with shorelines that tend toward gravelly gray rather than sandy light brown. The Long Beach Peninsula’s beaches are the best Washington has, and we were enjoying our cruise north with their relative safety in sight off the starboard side. We had stopped pedaling and were using only sail.

The Peter Iredale in 1906, when it ran aground on a sandbar just off Clatsop Spit. Photo courtesy of Kiser Photo Co.

The swells were growing steadily larger, though, and all three of us were eying them with mounting concern. This is the first I recall of Kenny’s saying that he’d seen the wave train arriving hours earlier than expected. “I could feel it coming out of the south just as we went past Clatsop Spit,” he told me when I asked him about it later. “I was sort of trying to pretend it wasn’t happening, but I knew it was. That’s why it got so bumpy right as we crossed the bar.”

Ray was goading him a little, especially when some six-footers rolled up on us: “This is what you call a flat ocean, eh, Kenny?”

Wave predictions were usually quite reliable, Kenny insisted, in his own defense. “It was forecast to drop to as low as a half meter, then come back up tomorrow,” he said.

“Well, it’s come back up today,” Ray replied, with a derisive snicker. It was a friendly game of mockery and one-upmanship that he and Kenny played constantly.

I still wasn’t worried. The beach was right there. I could have slipped off the trimaran and swum to the sand pretty easily, I reckoned. Kenny, though, told me later that he had been worried, and was getting more worried with every passing minute. “I was watching up the coast, and I saw the waves were coming in sets of seven to nine,” he said. “There was usually only one big wave in each set, though, so I figured we were probably okay.” Bear in mind, Kenny said, “when you’re out on the ocean looking at waves, they’re harder to judge. Surfers like to study the waves for half an hour on shore before they go out, because it’s way more difficult when you’re on the ocean.”

In fact, the surfers already were out in force on the beach at Seaview, drawn by word that some very rideable waves were coming. As we approached, we saw them pointing at us, several shaking their heads. I assumed it was because we were in their way. The families and couples on the beach were watching us too, using their palms like visors against the afternoon sun that was now over our right shoulders.

Our appearance must have been dramatic, coming in off the sea in such unusual craft. We stopped and sat just outside where the waves were breaking, considering the situation. A beach landing clearly was going to be more exciting than we’d planned.

I can’t remember whether it was Ray or Kenny who first brought up the possibility that we could turn around, sail back the other way up the coast, recross the bar, and land at the very same dock where we’d launched a few hours earlier. They threw it back and forth for a few minutes, Kenny clearly a little more inclined to turn around than Ray was, although “I really did want to get off the ocean,” Kenny told me later. “And the beach was right there.”

I must admit that I weighed in on the side of just going ahead with the beach landing. I knew how silly it would sound to point out that I’d already gone to the trouble of dropping my car at Seaview, so I gave my other bad reason, this being that the beach landing was what we’d planned and we’d all feel regret later if we didn’t follow through.

In the end it was Ray’s call. “Let’s do this,” he said.

Kenny told us to go ahead, he’d see what happened. The big man did offer a piece of prudent advice, though, which was to try to pick the smallest wave we could, ride it in as far as possible, then try to catch another small wave to the beach.

As Ray handed me the paddle I was supposed to steady us with, he grinned at me and said, “Seems like a big wave will carry us a lot closer to shore, doesn’t it?”

I may have grinned back. A flaw we shared was the tendency to weigh all options carefully, then decide that “On the other hand, fuck it” worked too. It’s what happens to boys for whom taking action has been the only real alternative to despair.

A six-foot-plus wave came early in the next set, and Ray and I pedaled atop it. Any notion that we could surf a breaker that size in a vessel as ungainly as the trimaran vanished almost instantly. We were swung like a tilt-a-whirl car on the crest of the wave, then plunged down sideways when it began to break. My back paddling did little or nothing to correct us, and I was looking down at Ray as we inverted to well past forty-five degrees.

What we didn’t know, and Kenny didn’t either, was that the beach at Seaview was a maze of small sandbars, creating amazingly random depths. Whether the shoal we slammed into with the back of the portside ama saved us is questionable, but this collision did happen right at what felt like the tipping point, and just at the instant I thought we were going over we bounced backward briefly, then the wave whirled us again. I was on the low side for a fraction of a second, until the wave spun us even more violently, putting Ray on the bottom again.

Time did slow in what I imagined might be our last seconds of life. I was looking straight down at Ray, observing the expression of helpless terror on his face as the trimaran was flung toward vertical again. This time it really felt like we were going over, and from my position on top of the wave it occurred to me that I probably had at least a chance to leap clear, assuming I possessed even a vestige of the agility that had been the main basis of any athletic talent I’d had when I was younger. If the flipping boat caught me before I was clear, though . . . Well, that would be bad.

But Ray’s position was truly desperate: if the boat flipped, he would go over backward, headfirst into the sand, with the boat right on top of him. A broken neck seemed all but certain.

Again the back of the portside ama struck a sandbar, but this time it dug in as if to vault us further toward the tipping point. We were turning over for sure, I knew, when it finally occurred to me to pull my feet out of the pedal straps and plant them on what had previously been the bottom of the boat. I felt the trimaran shudder as it lifted me to a point where I was directly above Ray, and then, astoundingly, the aka that braced the portside ama snapped, and the sudden give that produced created some sort of counter to our forward momentum and the main hull of the boat came back down just a little as the wave spilled us out into a cavity between two sandbars, maybe thirty feet from the waterline.

I remember seeing the ama floating loose in the water for a second, and then, I’m not sure how, I was out of the broken trimaran and pulling it up onto the beach with the rope at the bow of the boat. Ray climbed out of the boat a few seconds later and helped me drag it all the way up onto the dry sand. I was only vaguely aware of all the people standing and staring at us, but then I heard some of them begin to applaud. Ray grabbed me by both shoulders, his face inches from mine, pale eyes wide, taking short, rapid breaths. “Do you . . .” he got out, then choked up. “Do you know . . .” he managed on his second attempt, but this time hyperventilation stopped his voice. He squeezed my shoulders, looked down at the sand for an instant, then again stared directly into my eyes: “. . . how close we just came to dying.” His voice was somewhere between a gasp and a croak.

“I do know, Ray. I do,” I told him. I patted his arm. “Breathe slow, brother.”

A brief expression of suspicion passed over his face. “Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“Am I?” As a matter of fact, I was. “I’m just happy that we made it,” I told him.

Ray nodded, but without conviction, as if he doubted it was that simple.

I held his gaze another moment, then turned finally to face all the people on the beach who were still gaping at us. The spectacle we’d created only really registered with me then. Stunned expressions were everywhere. Some of the surfers tried to scorn us, I think, but even they were so overwhelmed by what they’d just witnessed that they looked more dazed than disdainful. A lot of the other people were smiling, some appreciatively, like that was the best entertainment they’d enjoyed in a long time.

I was still too happy to be alive to feel embarrassed, so I smiled back. My phone burred. I pulled it out of the waterproof lanyard case I carried it in and saw that Kenny had sent me a text from out there on the sea. “Shoot a video of me coming in,” it read. I tried, but after about seven or eight minutes of keeping my phone aimed at Kenny as he paddled in place, letting waves pass under him, I got tired of it and ended the video. He later sent a long and detailed text to his brother (a waterman extraordinaire himself) explaining what was going on. Out of respect for his accomplishment, of which Kenny was justifiably proud, here’s the whole thing:

After watching their ama rise overhead twice, I hung outside
for 10 minutes timing waves, practicing backstrokes, and getting
jacked. The beat was classic 7 or 9 waves on about 8
seconds. 3 to 5 bigs and about 30 seconds of flats in between.
I chased after a fourth, backed off a steep 5 by jamming paddle
straight down on port and leveraging it off the aka to stop a
hard right broach and somehow came out of the white water
pointed straight at the beach. Max pedal on the Mirage drive
and kayak paddle to get through the impact zone. Not fast
enough and wave 6 spun me hard, so jam full vertical paddle
against starboard aka and feather to stop the oversteer.
Bounced an ama on the high tide bar and spun sideways in a
foot of water. Got out of the boat before the next wave and
pushed it ahead through 3 feet to dry sand.

I did get the last minute or so on video, and kept the camera on Kenny as he stepped up onto the beach looking thoroughly exhilarated. “Wow,” he said. “That was absolutely the scariest thing I’ve done in years.”

_____________________________

From Graveyard of the Pacific, by Randall Sullivan. Courtesy Grove Atlantic, copyright Randall Sullivan, 2023.

It was late afternoon, one week before his cough started, when Rivs left for the Grand Canyon. The cicadas had just begun their end-of-day chorus as Derrick Lytle pulled up to our house in a tan minivan, his bare foot, tinged copper from red rock sand, hanging out the driver’s window.

Though Rivs usually ran the Grand Canyon alone, today he was joined by his adventure-videographer friend, who had come down from southern Utah to run a longer variation of the infamous Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim route. Their plan was to run across the canyon and back along Bright Angel Trail, a grueling forty-eight-mile trek of unforgiving terrain with over eleven thousand feet of climbing. A multiday bucket list journey for most hikers, this was a somewhat routine ten-hour run for Rivs and his endurance athlete friends.

Derrick slowed his van to a crunching stop as though he had all the time in the world, stepping out onto our unpaved driveway with a broad grin stretched across his sun-worn face.

“I don’t know, man. I think women in this town dig the idea that I might be a dirtbag dad,” he said in drawn-out syllables, introducing the rental as his “Babe Mobile” while tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. Rivs and I laughed, appreciating the irony: Derrick was, for the moment, married only to the desert and his independence. His baby—a converted live-in 4×4 truck he’d spent years building out—was in the shop for repairs.

After a brief meeting to prepare gear and food, Rivs and Derrick left for the South Rim of the Grand Canyon just before sundown. Rivs often preferred to run the canyon at night—partly to avoid the staggering heat, but mostly to remind himself that he wasn’t afraid of the dark.

As an empath, he learned at a young age that sustained movement was the least destructive way for him to metabolize emotional pain—both his own and that which he absorbed from others. He found reprieve from the heaviness only outdoors and through sustained physical exertion.

“I don’t run to be fit,” he once told me. “I mostly run to not hurt so much.”

*

I always imagined he left some of his pain at the bottom of the canyon—as though he’d negotiated physical anguish for emotional relief, unburdening himself among the igneous rock and cottonwood trees. Whatever heaviness held him before, he always returned from the canyon a little bit lighter, with gratitude for the life he was able to live and a quiet reverence for the space in which he found it.

This time was different.

When Rivs came home with Derrick the following afternoon, he was shaken. There was a soft fear in his eyes as he hobbled out of the Babe Mobile—the kind that bends inward, imploding in the acknowledgment of one’s mortality. I’d seen this look before, just not on him.

“That was rough. I actually thought I might not make it out,” he said as he peeled his salt-stained hydration pack out of the trunk.

After a long shower, Rivs laid on the spare mattress we’d put in the basement for Derrick. With eyes half shut he explained his descent down Bright Angel Trail.

He felt short of breath the entire night but tried to brush it off, convinced that his body would sort itself out along the way. It wasn’t until 15 miles into their run—a few miles past Phantom Ranch campground—that Rivs finally stopped running. He was overheating and couldn’t keep his heart rate down. He couldn’t catch his breath. “Sorry, man. I think I’ve gotta cut it short tonight. Something just isn’t right,” he said, and Derrick agreed in his calm, laid-back manner.

Slowly, they started back towards the van rather than continue on to the North Rim of the canyon.

But they only made it another half hour, back to Phantom Ranch, when Rivs said he needed to rest again. Weak and disoriented, he laid himself on an old picnic bench, struggling to breathe.

As a seasoned athlete with an academic background in exercise physiology, Rivs had a good understanding of the human body and how it worked—especially under physical stress. That night, unable to regulate his body temperature and with his heart racing at a rate inconsistent with his fitness, Rivs assumed he was suffering from heat stroke. Even after sundown, the Grand Canyon in June was a quagmire of stagnant heat, with temperatures hovering near 100 around the clock. Tonight was no different, with the Phantom Ranch thermometer reading a stifling 99 degrees Fahrenheit.

By midnight, after spending an hour on the picnic bench sweating through cold chills, Rivs knew that if he didn’t get out of the canyon soon, he’d likely die right there beside the Colorado River. Both he and Derrick had spent enough time in dangerous situations to know that the bottom of the Grand Canyon was not a place to be when things weren’t going right, especially during a global pandemic. With all national parks closed due to COVID-19—the Grand Canyon included—tonight there would be no park rangers, no mule trains, no helicopters, no rescue teams to call.

Feverish and disoriented, Rivs picked himself up off the bench and forced down a burrito before starting on the five-thousand-foot ascent.

The climb out took 10 hours—a stretch of switchback trails that he normally completed in less than two.

“I really didn’t think I was gonna make it,” he confessed that evening, the two of us squeezed next to Derrick on the mattress. Rivs kept shaking his head in disbelief.

After a takeout meal that he hardly touched, Rivs asked if I’d inflate a blow-up mattress for him in the basement, where it was cold and dark.

He slept for 18 hours straight, long past Derrick’s departure the next morning.

__________________________________

From the book EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE by Steph Catudal Copyright @ 2023 by Stephanie Catudal. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Before we dig into the very real harm caused by anti-fat bias in youth sports, we need to deal with the most obvious counterargument: that it’s not fatphobia to say that being thinner improves athletic performance—it’s science.

“Weight is an easy target because it’s visible, and we’ve tied it to every performance marker,” says Eva Pila, PhD, an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology at Western University in Ontario. “I’ve had so many conversations with coaches and high-level trainers where the argument is, ‘Well, this is just basic physics.’”

Consider a sport like rowing, where athletes compete to see who can push a boat through the water the fastest. Pila has worked with coaches who argue that weight management is a critical component of their athletes’ training regimens because the more the boat weighs (and by “the boat,” we mean both the inanimate object and the people sitting inside it), the harder athletes will have to work to push it along. “Nobody asks, ‘Should we build a better boat?’” she notes.

Dana Voelker, PhD, also a kinesiologist and associate professor of sport and exercise psychology at West Virginia University, who has studied weight stigma in figure skating, points to a commonly invoked “80-pound rule,” which dictates that a female figure skater must weigh at least 80 pounds less than the male figure skater who must lift her.

“Why 80 pounds?” she asks. “It’s used as a proclamation of science, but where is that science? And why do we emphasize the female skaters losing weight but focus less on male skaters getting stronger?”

“It’s just physics” also assumes fat athletes can’t bring other skills to a sport beyond their physical presence. But fat people can be strong, fast, flexible, and graceful. And research on the relationship between weight and physical fitness, much like the relationship between weight and health outcomes, is largely correlative and clearest at the extreme ends of the BMI scale, both high and low.

“When you look at everybody in the middle, it’s not so clear,” says Christy Greenleaf, PhD, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. “There are people in bigger bodies that can do all kinds of physical activities at high levels.”

Many have cult followings on social media: The fat activist and writer Ragen Chastain has won ballroom dance competitions and run marathons; Mirna Valerio, known as “the Mirnavator,” is a fat ultramarathon runner and hiker; Jessamyn Stanley is a fat yoga celebrity, author, and fitness influencer; author and influencer Meg Boggs is a fat powerlifter; and Louise Green, author of Big Fit Girl, runs the Size Inclusive Training Academy to help personal trainers work with folks in all body sizes.

But few fat people compete at the highest levels of most sports. And maybe, sometimes, this is physics. But sometimes that “physics” has a very high human cost: “The body control piece is just seen as part of what has to happen at the elite levels,” says Pila. “When shaving a second off your time makes the difference between getting a medal or not, folks will say we have to look at every possible way of optimizing performance. This is what must be done, and sometimes mental health must suffer.”

And maybe, more often, it’s not physics at all but rather the larger athlete’s experience of anti-fat bias that keeps the doors to elite sports slammed shut. Because we see anti-fat bias emerge even in sports like shot put and powerlifting, where conventional wisdom holds that size equals strength, as well as football and rugby, where larger bodies are considered an asset, at least for certain positions.

Across the sports spectrum, fat athletes can expect to encounter locker-room teasing, size-based nicknames, and differential treatment. “Fat athletes may excel” in certain sports, writes Frankie de la Cretaz, a journalist who covers sports, gender, and queerness, in a 2022 article for Global Sports Matters:

But they are still overlooked when it comes to getting sponsorships. [ … ] Even in sports where fat athletes may contribute to a team’s success—like a touchdown made possible by the blocking of a lineman—it is never those players who are allowed to be the face of a team. The glory and renown goes to quarterbacks or running backs.

In this way, assigning kids to sports by body types doesn’t eliminate bias; it only narrows our understanding of what kids in different bodies can do. Laura, an attorney in Oakland, California, says people started asking if her now 17-year-old autistic son, Thomas, would play football when he was four years old. Laura is tall; Thomas’s dad is tall and bigger bodied, and Thomas, at 17, wears a men’s 3XL.

“He’s been way off the growth charts his whole life,” Laura says. And on many trips to the park or the grocery store, she could expect to hear a passing comment of “Get that boy signed up for football!”

Laura remembers touring a local high school when Thomas was in eighth grade and already over six feet tall. “The assistant football coach spotted us walking in the door and gave us this jolly but uncomfortably hard sell the whole time,” she says.

Thomas was flattered but also confused. He has never had any interest in football and views the constant commentary as “just one of those weird things adults always say,” much to Laura’s relief. “The risk for head injuries in football really concerns me,” she says. “But it is tricky because this is one of the few sports where a bigger body is celebrated and sought after. And that’s a different experience from other sports, where you’re just the big kid on the team.”

Within the field of kinesiology, scholars are divided on the question of whether the experience of anti-fat bias has a bigger impact than weight itself on a person’s fitness level and athletic performance.

“Some people see this as a social justice issue because if we’re not creating environments where all youth can feel empowered to participate, we are systematically keeping people from experiencing the benefits of the sport,” says Pila. “But there is also a camp that recognizes that, sure, at the participatory level, sport can be for everybody. But at the elite levels, exclusivity is a normative part of competing. So, we don’t have to change the system because only very exceptional people can get to that stage anyway.”

The problem with that latter argument is that “very exceptional” has always been code for thin.

“In many sports, we’ve never tried anything different,” says Voelker. “We haven’t allowed people of certain body types to excel and move forward to the next level. So, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that is far more about social construction than science.” We don’t even know what fat athletes can do at elite levels in most sports, because they never get there. And our resistance to changing is rooted in culture and emotion.

“There is often this sense that we have certain rules in place to protect the authenticity of a sport,” says Greenleaf. Consider the expectations around form and line for dancers, or the conviction of the head coach Natalie works with that he needs “long and lean” runners. “We hold on to these things as sacred,” says Greenleaf. “But rules change all the time.”

She draws a parallel with the long-running debate about the high rates of head trauma in American football: “We know football is dangerous for athletes. But when I ask students, ‘Could we create a form of football that doesn’t involve head trauma?’ they can’t wrap their heads around it,” she explains. “These are people who care about health! But there’s this huge disconnect.”

These “rules,” which are traditions and rituals borne out of bias, may only apply in theory to elite athletes, but they absolutely ripple out and down through every level of competition. Meghan Seaman owns the On Stage Dance Studio in Stratford, Ontario. Even when placing dancers on her competitive team, Seaman never factors in weight. “If you’re willing to put in the work, I will find a place for you,” she says.

Her competitive dance team travels to five competitions and puts on two shows each year between September and May. At every competition, Meghan’s team of just over one hundred dancers, some tall, some short, some thin, some fat, line up next to teams where virtually every girl is five foot seven and weighs 100 pounds. “I feel like the impression of my team at dance competitions is that my studio takes it less seriously,” says Meghan. “Which is kind of true if [body size] is your scale. Nobody on my team would make it onto their team.”

Meghan grew up in the dance world, taking lessons and performing from the age of five to 18, and says she spent most of those years justifying her own disordered eating habits as necessary in her quest to be “a better dancer,” which meant having the ideal thin dancer’s body. “My experiences really shape the environment I strive to create for my students today,” Meghan says.

She prioritizes diversity when she hires instructors and trains the staff not to give compliments or corrections related to a dancer’s body size or shape. “There is a big difference between saying to a child, ‘Suck in that stomach!’ and ‘Your butt is sticking out!’ or saying to a child, ‘Lengthen your spine,’” she notes.

Meghan also gently challenges students who make fatphobic comments. If a student says, “I feel so gross in my leotard, I ate a huge dinner,” Meghan responds, “Good, you needed that dinner. You’re going to dance for two hours.” When she hears, “I’m too fat to be a ballerina, I can’t get my leg that high,” she explains why flexibility and endurance have nothing to do with body size.

To Meghan, this style of teaching feels worth it because it allows her to bring what she loves about dance to so many  more students, even  if she doesn’t have the glory of winning more competitions or sending students on to Canada’s National Ballet School. “The percentage of kids I teach that are going to have a career in dance is so minuscule, I would much rather focus on helping them have a good time, be active, and make friends and memories,” she says.

That’s true of all kids, in all physical activities. No matter how much thinness matters or doesn’t at the Olympics, most of our kids aren’t going there. And yet the sports leagues and dance classes we sign them up for are structured around the possibility that one of them might. That helps to justify training regimens and messaging that perpetuate anti-fat bias.

“You could say, ‘Well, let’s change the standards of this sport,’” Pila says. “But they land on, ‘Let’s change the athlete.’”

__________________________________

From Fat Talk. Used with the permission of the publisher, Henry Holt and Co. Copyright © 2023 by Virginia Sole-Smith.

“Oh man, I think that sumbitch is actually dead!”

It was a hair-dryer-in-the-face-hot Sunday afternoon at McCormick Field, home of the Asheville Tourists of the South Atlantic League, the proud but not great Class A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies, the first full step of every ballplayer’s cleat-wearing march toward the big leagues.

On this day in 1994, amid a summer when those big leagues were constantly on the cusp of shutting down their season over money, McCormick Field was the perfect antidote for everyone’s MLB illness. It was everything that is right about baseball. A perfectly picturesque all-American throwback minor-league ballpark, just as it was when it was christened in 1924 and just as it still is today.

A grandstand packed with patrons, buzzed in the box seats on cold beer and peanuts, and none of it had cost them more than a few bucks. A baseball band-box carved into a Blue Ridge mountainside, laced with the unmistakable scent of western North Carolina honeysuckle blooms. A circle of gray concrete, green vines, and a kaleidoscope of advertising billboards, all wrapped around a diamond of a ballfield that for nearly a century has been tread upon by the Cooperstown-bound cleats of Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Willie Stargell, as well as thousands of minor leaguers whose names and unfulfilled big-league dreams have been lost to time.

In 1924, in the ballpark’s first official professional game, Cobb’s notoriously sharp cleats churned the dirt around McCormick Field’s second base, sprinting around the bag after he slapped a home run. In 1948, Jackie Robinson patrolled that same dirt, in town with the barnstorming Brooklyn Dodgers. Now, seventy summers after Cobb and nearly forty-six years to that exact day after Robinson’s visit, surrounded by minor leaguers of 1994, I was convinced that the very same spot of earth where the Georgia Peach and No. 42 had once roamed had just become a crime scene.

The shouter was right. Yes, that sumbitch really did look dead.

Looking back now, I am embarrassed at my surprise. After all, the man who lay motionless where the now-scorched infield dirt met the now-blown-back edge of the outfield grass was known as Captain Dynamite and his Exploding Coffin of Death.

I was a recent college graduate making $100 a week (cash) working in the Asheville Tourists’ front office. We had a summertime calendar packed with game day entertainers, everything from an Elvis impersonator (“Elvis Himselvis”) and a Blues Brothers–themed comedy act to appearances from Ronald McDonald and Billy Bird, the mascot of the Class AAA Louisville Redbirds. Billy was a much more affordable option than the most famous feathered mascot in all of sports, the San Diego Chicken.

Every performer commanded an appearance fee, covering an extremely wide financial scale. Most asked for several thousand dollars for one evening’s work at the ballyard. It was worth it. Every scheduled performance, whether it be a brand-name Chicken or a AAA Billy, brought an instant boost to that night’s ticket sales.

But there were 71 home games in a Minor League Baseball season, and every team had only so much money to spend on pregame acts. In other words, not every night can feature Elvis Himselvis or the Blues Brothers. Sometimes you must book Captain Dynamite and his Exploding Coffin of Death. I believe his fee was $500 (also cash).

Among the endless tasks that can be found on the to-do list of a minor-league ball club’s young, fresh-legged $100 employees is aiding those game day entertainers, helping out with whatever they might need. That could mean lending a hand to carry equipment to the field or sneaking them a postshow six-pack from the beer cooler. When the good Captain rolled up to the ballpark in a well-rusted station wagon, he made it known that he required no such aid. In a superpolite, almost hushed tone, the overtanned fire hydrant of a man smiled and explained that he had brought his own road crew. He pointed to a hard-around-the-edges woman, a living Andrew Wyeth image that I assumed to be his wife, and a half-dozen unbathed children. I supposed they were his grandchildren.

Captain Dynamite was 78 years of age but looked at least 30 years older than that. Like redneck clockwork, the little Dynamites each grabbed a panel of foam board from the back of the Family Truckster and carried it through the stadium service entrance toward the playing field. There, they constructed a rudimentary rectangular box atop the dirt just behind second base.

Spoiler alert: The “Coffin” wasn’t a coffin at all. It was a home-made foam faux sarcophagus that had been painted black, but not well enough in a few spots to hide the “3M Insulation” logos. As for the “of Death” part of the setup, well, that looked pretty damn real. At least it certainly felt real as the Captain began carefully stuffing the box with old-school explosives, bright red sticks with long fuses that looked as if they had been stolen directly from the ACME stash of Wile E. Coyote. They even had “TNT” printed on them.

After packing the Coffin with the Death, our hero proceeded to pull a dark green jumpsuit over his jeans and dirty T-shirt, complete with well-worn all-caps “CAPTAIN DYNAMITE” embroidered across his back, along with the smoke-stained orange cloth image of an explosion. He then yanked a heavily scarred motorcycle helmet over his head, climbed into the foam board casket, and lay down among the explosives like a hillbilly Dracula as the lid was sealed above him. His crew shuffled down to the end of the wire, settling in alongside the first baseline, where Wile E.’s T-handled detonator machine was standing by.

I was watching all this unfold from the steps of the home dugout, only 150 feet or so from the coffin. I purposely stood a little lower than earth line, should that dugout suddenly need to become a fallout shelter. One by one, the Asheville Tourists ballplayers filled the space around me, mouths agape, as the countdown from the press box reverberated throughout McCormick Field and the surrounding neighborhood.

“Ten … nine … eight … seven …”

Anyone who had watched television over the previous few decades likely recognized the seat-rattling bass tone of the public-address announcer. Not the name but certainly the voice. It was broadcasting pioneer Sam Zurich, now a retiree living in the North Carolina mountains. For years he voiced promos and commercials for CBS television and local stations across the Carolinas. Sam had seen it all. He was the model of an unflappable broadcasting professional. But as he looked down from his press box perch to the coffin below, even Sam’s rock-solid tone carried a hint of “Exactly what in the world are we counting down to here?”

“Six … five … four …”

All 1,100 fans in attendance were on their feet. I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Tourists righty pitcher John Thomson. He was on his way to a ten-year big-league career. But not yet. Today he was a twenty-year-old prospect half-jokingly handing out batting helmets to those of us in the dugout. “Just in case,” he explained in his Mississippi accent. “Some of that guy’s body parts might come flying in here.”

“Three … two … one …”

BOOM.

The concussion from the explosion was so forceful that the tiny ballpark could barely contain it. The ground was shaken with such power that a plastic cup from the box seats had been blown in from above, dropped from the hand of a temporarily incapacitated baseball fan, and splashed Pepsi all over the floor of the dugout. A flock of startled birds launched from the trees that towered behind the outfield fence. In the distance, car alarms could be heard from every parking lot around McCormick Field, whistles and chimes triggered by the blast. Everyone in the building reflexively raised their hands to their faces, covering their ears, eyes, or both.

When my eyes finally reopened and focused on the field, all I could see was a giant rising cloud of white smoke and falling debris of red infield dirt. That dirt was mixed with hundreds of pieces of black, silver, and pink foam, all dancing back to the ground like snow. The debris field was large. My initial reaction was, This is going to take forever to clean up. My second thought was formed as the smoke lifted and the Captain finally came into view, lying facedown in the dirt, not moving so much as one finger as the Family Dynamite scrambled toward him. I never spoke my reaction aloud. I didn’t have to. One of the ballplayers said it for me.

“Oh man, I think that sumbitch is actually dead!”

Prior to the performance we had been told that the Captain was in the middle of what amounted to his farewell tour. After four decades, several thousand explosions on everything from county fairgrounds to drag strips, and at least two arrests on charges of improper storage of explosives, Patrick O’Brien was grooming his replacement. Lady Dynamite was already making a simultaneous circuit of summertime ballpark stops, a much younger and much more spangly female version of the act, complete with an Evel Knievel–style cape covering her shoulders and a thong-anchored bodysuit of her own design that covered nothing. But right now, we were thinking that her predecessor’s farewell tour was over. Best we could tell, he had just said farewell to life.

Captain Dynamite’s crew shook him and screamed at him, all while the remnants of his Coffin of Death settled onto the infield around them. The weathered woman leaned into his helmeted face. I couldn’t tell if perhaps she’d stuck smelling salts under his nose or if maybe she had slapped him. Whatever she did, it worked. Captain Dynamite’s limbs stiffened, he sat up, and with the assistance of his family/crew, he rose to stand atop wobbly knees and waved to the audience, our jaws collectively unhinged.

Take that, Death.

My coworkers and I ran onto the field to start picking up the debris. I jogged by a stunned Captain Dynamite as he left the field, his arms draped over his companions’ shoulders for support as a small trail of blood trickled down one cheek. “Great job!” I said, giving him a thumbs-up. He looked at me and smiled wearily. Clearly, he had no idea what I’d just said. She barked into his ear, “He says you did a great job!” Captain Dynamite replied, but his hushed tone was long gone, his ears no doubt ringing like the bells of St. Paul’s.

“THANK YOU VERY MUCH!”

I think he tried to wink at me, but that’s when I realized that one of his eyes was glass. I also think he tried to give me a return thumbs-up, but that’s when I discovered that he was two fingers short of a full set. Scooting along behind the couple was one of the children, a boy of perhaps seven years of age, who looked me right in the eye as he dragged a roll of wire behind him and said, “My daddy done blowed himself up.”

As the Dynamites loaded back into their station wagon with the Captain’s five hundred bucks, we hurriedly ran off the field, dragging trash bags that we had just stuffed with a thousand Coffin of Death remnants. As we stepped off the diamond, the home-team Asheville Tourists, in their sparkling pinstriped home whites, trotted by us to take up their positions and take on the Hickory Crawdads. Another shout echoed throughout McCormick Field. It came from behind home plate.

“Play ball!”

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From Welcome to the Circus of Baseball: A Story of the Perfect Summer at the Perfect Ballpark at the Perfect Time by Ryan McGee. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2023 by Ryan McGee.

Jellyfish, jellies, medusae, quallen, and agua mala—regardless of what you call them, they instill fear and wonder in humans. They are slimy, cold, wet, and jiggly, lacking a brain or a heart or any sort of remorse when they sting us. Indeed, the world’s most venomous animal is a jellyfish— this creature doesn’t just sting; it kills its victims in as little as two minutes. The pain can be so intense that some say death would come as a relief.

Jellyfish, however, are as beguiling as they are dangerous. They are found in a dazzling array of colors, shapes, and sizes. They are distributed from the North Pole to the South Pole, from the surface to the deepest of the deep seas, and even in freshwater. Some are so delicate they shatter with the smallest disturbance to the water, while others are so appallingly tenacious they can withstand almost any temperature or salinity, starvation, or even being chopped into bits. Some are biologically immortal.

Crowned Jellyfish, Netrostoma coerulescens © WaterFrame / Alamy Stock Photo

Academic and amateur study of natural history has been dominated by charismatic megafauna, that is, creatures with fur and feathers, plus frogs. Jellyfish have been virtually ignored for hundreds of years. However, they are now enjoying something of a renaissance. This, one might argue, is because jellyfish have become so bothersome that they are demanding our attention.

Increasingly, many people are noticing larger blooms of jellyfish in areas impacted by humans. Overfishing, pollution, climate change, and many other types of disturbance to coastal habitats are stimulating some species of jellyfish to bloom into superabundances, where they wreak unimaginable havoc. Industries from aquaculture to power plants, from shipping, to tourism the world over are cursing the losses they incur because of jellyfish.

Pacific Sea Nettle, Chrysaora fuscescens © Lisa-ann Gershwin

But while some are shaking their fists in anger, others are smiling all the way to the bank. Jellyfish are now being commercially harvested and used in a range of products, including thickeners for caramel candies, fat-free substitutes in baked goods, potato-chip-like snacks, a super-growth fertilizer for rice, super-absorbent paper towels and sanitary products, and as a delicacy in many Asian cuisines.

With this attention on jellyfish problems and opportunities, their fascinating biology and ecology are receiving more interest too. People want to understand these mysterious alien beings. One of their least-told secrets is how these living fossils have survived more than half a billion years of Earth’s ever-changing history. Millions of other species have evolved and become extinct, some have grown legs or bones or feathers, or walked on land or learned to fly, but jellyfish haven’t changed. They haven’t needed to. What they do, and how they do it, works. They are so adaptable and so perfectly suited to changing environments they have outlived 99 percent of the species that have ever existed. And still they thrive.

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Excerpted from Shapeshifters: The Wondrous World of Jellyfish by Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin. Copyright © 2023 by UniPress Books Limited. Available from Abrams Books.