Early last week, Tour de France favorite Floyd Landis dropped a bombshell: The American rider has been suffering from the bone disease osteonecrosis for two seasons and will require career-altering hip replacement surgery after the Tour. The painful condition, caused by a 2003 crash, has hardly slowed the 30-year-old rider down. After taking fourth in the grueling, mountainous Stage 5, the Phonak team leader was back in the yellow jersey, having put another minute on his closest rival, Denis Menchov of team Rabobank. Contributing editor Daniel Coyle, who profiled Landis in ���ϳԹ���‘s July cover story, “The New American in Paris,” caught up with the rider in France about living with pain, sporting the yellow jersey, and what’s down the road at the Tour.

Floyd Landis

American rider Floyd Landis wears the yellow jersey during an interview with reporters last week.

���ϳԹ���: What’s been the reaction to the news from the other riders?

Landis: Now they know why I don’t like it when people complain about stomachaches! No, everybody’s been good about it. The only negative stuff was with [Discovery Channel team director Johan] Bruyneel, who said it was a publicity stunt, and that it was stupid to show a weakness. My response is, if it were a weakness, would I be at the front of the race? But if he wants to call it a weakness, fine, let’s call it that. It’s a weakness, and I’m so weak that I’m kicking their asses. Telling all this now is not meant to be some excuse. I’m actually proud that I got back. It’s something that I got through. I was pretty scared for a long time that it wasn’t going to work, and now it’s working, and I’m proud of that.

What was the worst moment in this whole thing?

It’s been two and a half years of this, so it’s hard to pick one. But after the diagnosis and the second surgery [in November 2004, in which a dozen or so holes were drilled into Landis’s hip to relieve pressure], I had to go from California to a training camp in Spain. I rode to the airport, like I usually do, to get in a workout before the flight. But I couldn’t make it all the way. I was able to ride about 40 miles, and then I had to pull over at a gas station and call [my wife] Amber to come pick me up. I couldn’t ride. I sat on the curb and cried.

How has living with the pain changed you?

Pretty much everybody is in a situation like this in life. Mine is just a lot more immediate. Like [doctor Brent] Kay told me, the hip’s not going to last, so I’ve got to race every race like it’s my last, which everybody should do anyway. Seeing life the way I was forced to see it is the way everybody should see it.

How do people in the medical field react to this?

I’ve gotten a lot of emails since the news about the hip came out. Support and advice mostly—which is nice. Before this all came out, I think I mostly confused them. I remember once after last year’s Tour when we were showing the X-rays to this doctor in Switzerland. He walked in, looked at the X-rays, and said, “That guy needs a hip replacement.” Then we told him, “Actually, that guy just raced in the Tour de France, and finished ninth.” The doctor just turned and walked out. He didn’t say a word. I don’t know if he was confused or thought we were lying or what, but he’d had enough.”

Give a prediction for the next few days.

I usually get stronger as the Tour goes along. So don’t worry, I’m going to be good.

To follow Floyd Landis’s bid for his first Tour de France win, go to www.outsideonline.com/2006tour and to learn more about his forthcoming Floyd Landis Foundation, which will assist and educate people about hip replacements, go to

The post From the Hip: Q&A with Floyd Landis appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

FLOYD LANDIS appears at his apartment door wearing his usual expression: a sharp, knowing smile.

Floyd Landis

Floyd Landis, photographed in Los Angeles on April 6, 2006.

Floyd Landis

Landis is currently Team Phonak's lead rider.

Floyd Landis

Floyd Landis

Floyd Landis

The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins, says Landis. “period.”

“Welcome to the palace,” he says.

His gaze flickers playfully around, taking in the small room’s bare white walls and jumbled contents, which resemble a college dorm room after a mild earthquake. Here is the mantel clock frozen at 8:40, as it has been for two years. Here are the shiny piles of helmets and shoes; the tiny balcony stuffed with bikes. Here, sprawled on the couch, is fellow American cyclist Dave Zabriskie, a.k.a. Z-Man, Landis’s sometime roommate. Here’s the stereo vibrating with Ludacris. Here is the crammed bookshelf:��How��the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, alongside thick biographies of Che Guevara and Frank Zappa. Should have known: Landis has a weak spot for revolutionaries.

All in all, it is a glorious squalor, a sophomoric playpen. Compared with the digs of the dozen or so top American cyclists who live here in Girona, Spain—elegant continental apartments within the city’s charming old town—this tawdry cell, in an anonymous Lego-block building a mile outside the town center, constitutes a purposeful intrigue. Especially given that Girona’s most legendary residence, an impeccably renovated apartamento that had belonged to a certain retired Texan, is rumored to have sold to a Madrid businessman for $2.4 million. Which leaves $700-a-month Casa de Floyd—beyond whose dented door a select few have ventured—emanating an ever-increasing sense of transition and mystery.

“I hear it’s completely disgusting,” one young American rider told me worriedly.

“Does he still ride around on that toy scooter?” another wanted to know.

Landis, 30, is the kind of person other bike racers like to tell stories about. A lot of it has to do with the narrative potency of his background, including his escape from a strict, oldfangled Mennonite childhood in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County. A lot of it has to do with Landis’s penchant for offbeat, memorable feats—like riding wheelies after detaching his front tire or seeing how many bags of airline peanuts he can eat during a cross-country flight (28, for those of you keeping score). The result is that his fellow bike racers are constantly telling and retelling Floyd stories, creating a highlight reel that resembles nothing so much as old Warner Bros. cartoons. There is “The Time Floyd Dove into a Dumpster to Get a Pair of Shoes” and “The Time Floyd and Z-Man Drank 30 Cappuccinos in One Sitting” and “The Time Floyd Rode the Tour de France Nine Weeks After Having Major Hip Surgery.” The stories hang together because they have the same plot: a curious, unusually determined guy pushes against conventional limits, causing varying degrees of pain, humiliation, and triumph, not necessarily in that order.

Landis begins our visit by showing me something on his computer: an image of his grimacing face superimposed on the heavily muscled body of an ax-wielding maniac. Beneath the image, in stylish typescript, are the words I’M A HOMO.

“I e-mailed this to Lance and Z-Man and my wife,” Landis says, smiling hugely. “Z-Man and my wife got right back to me—they thought it was pretty funny. I never heard back from Lance, though.”

“I wonder why?” Z-Man asks, deadpan.

They contemplate this question with amused expressions, the two former U.S. Postal��teammates tapping easily into a convenient theme: Landis’s semifamous feud with another former teammate, seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. The clash, which began in 2004 when Landis left Armstrong’s Postal team, and reached soap-operatic proportions during the 2005 season, is now officially over. But it would be unlike Landis and Zabriskie to leave the scab alone, never mind any attempt at diplomacy. So they joke about it. Landis and Zabriskie might be riding the Tour for rival teams—Landis the leader for Phonak, the 27-year-old Zabriskie a key lieutenant for CSC—but it’s instantly apparent why the two have been best friends since they first wore Postal blue together back in 2002.

“We were just wondering if, when this biking thing is over with,” Landis says, “we could apply to Harvard.”

Judging by the bookshelf, I offer, they might have a shot.

“We were thinking we’d get in based on life experience,” Landis says.

“And death experience,” Z-Man points out.

“We know how to kill things,” Landis says with enthusiasm. “Killing things can be extremely useful.”

“For eating,” Z-Man says.

I ask what they eat around here. Bike racers are prodigious eaters, yet the cupboards and counters are distinctly bare.”We eat a lot of eggs,” Landis says. “And we boil chickens.”

“Boiling chickens,” Z-Man says, in a Beavis-like voice. “Gotta boil the chicken.”

“That’s our philosophy, in a nutshell,” Landis says. “You gotta boil the chicken. Until the bird flu comes. Then the chicken boils you.”

“Boo-yah,” says Z-Man.

Landis offers another of his philosophies, one that comes courtesy of comedy writer Jack Handey. “If life deals you lemons,” Landis quotes, “why not go kill someone with the lemons, maybe by shoving them down his throat.”

“Lemons,” says Z-Man. “Leeee-mons.”

IT CAN GO ON like this for hours, and it does. And yet it would be foolish, for all the stoner-Zen appeal of their banter, to miss the fact that there is a great deal more going on beneath the surface. Behind Landis, on the curtain rod, hangs a clean new jersey—the color of lemons, as fate would have it, and proof of the most recent story: “The Time Floyd Won the Paris–Nice Race.” He earned the jersey two days ago, March 12, in the prestigious eight-day, 792-mile, Tour-contender-filled event, which was all the more impressive since it happened right on the heels of his dominating victory in February’s inaugural Tour of California. Throw in his dramatic win in April’s Tour de Georgia and it adds up to an early-season show of power and talent that can only be described as Armstrongesque. While Germany’s Jan Ullrich (T-Mobile) and Italy’s Ivan Basso (CSC) remain the officially sanctioned favorites, Landis now stands poised just behind them. The dark air outside this apartment is filled with voices murmuring the magical words: podium, July, Tour de France.

“Floyd’s the only American with a real shot to win the Tour. What happened in California and Paris–Nice make it obvious. He’s rock solid, he won’t freak out when things get nervous, and this year’s course exceedingly suits his abilities.” —Jonathan Vaughters, 32, U.S. Postal rider, 1998–99, and current director of Team TIAA-CREF

“Floyd is a strong time-trialist, a decent climber, and he’s not afraid. You can build your house on him.” —Axel Merckx, 33, Phonak teammate and son of all-time great Eddy Merckx

“Basso and Ullrich can be beaten. That wasn’t true with Lance, but it is true this year, and it is possible that Floyd, along with some others, could do it.” —Johan Bruyneel, 41, director of U.S. Postal, 1999–2004, and current director ofDiscovery Channel

“Look into Floyd’s eyes and you can see it—he’s like Cassius Clay walking into the ring with the cape on his shoulders. He looks at the other guy and tells him, ‘I’m the fucking greatest, and I’m going to kill you.’ ” —Former U.S. Postal soigneur/masseuse Freddy Viane, 48, who now works for Phonak

Whether Landis hears these voices or believes them is tougher to know. He is smart enough to say little in this regard, because he knows that this year’s Tour, marking the beginning of the post-Armstrong era, is one in which the rules are still being formed. After seven years of airtight control, the stage is wide open, with Landis playing the role of dark horse, the outsider who seems disorganized on the surface but who secretly has a plan—a hard plan, calculated and ruthlessly logical—and who sticks to it with Old Testament tenacity. Which is convenient, all in all, since that’s the role he’s been practicing for quite a while now. And that’s the other thing about Landis: When he practices something, he practices extremely hard.

LANDIS ADORES logic. There is no easier way to infuriate him than to say or do something that does not make sense. We are in a Girona restaurant drinking beer and shooting the breeze with the Z-Man when I begin a sentence with the phrase “Of course, it could be worse . . .”

“What does that mean, really?” Landis wants to know. “Of course it could be worse. If you are alive—if you are standing up and have breath in your lungs to say those words—then, yes, I agree, you’re definitely right, it could be worse.”

Or later, when Z-Man mentions an athlete who spoke about “giving 110 percent.”

“Well, why not 112 percent?” Landis inquires, eyes widening with burning incredulity. “Why not 500 percent or 1,300 percent or 38 billion percent? I mean, if he can crank it up beyond 100 percent, why not? What’s stopping him, exactly?”

Other items on the Landis list include traffic roundabouts (stoplights are superior), French architecture, and, probably most of all, explanations for losing. The latter especially rankles. Bike racers hardly ever win (Landis’s three recent victories tripled his win total from his five-year European career), and so most racers naturally tend to attribute losses to ostensible causes: bonking, lack of training, cold, fatigue, team strength, luck. But their logic is of a smaller magnitude than Landis’s.

“Everybody wants to say, ‘I couldn’t win because of this or that,’ ” he says. “To my way of thinking, it doesn’t matter if your goddamn head fell off or your legs exploded. If you didn’t make it, you didn’t make it. One excuse is as good as another.”

Landis takes a sip and leans forward in his chair. “There’s only one rule: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins. Period. Because you won’t die. Even though you feel like you’ll die, you don’t actually die. Like when you’re training, you can always do one more. Always. As tired as you might think you are, you can always, always do one more.”

Z-Man rouses, concerned. “I hope some 16-year-old doesn’t read this and then go kill himself on the bike,” he says.

“That was what I did,” Landis says, not missing a beat. “I read something like that, and I trained like that, and, yeah, I was pretty damn depressed for a while. Then it got better.”

So there’s no such thing as overtraining?

“If you overtrained, it means that you didn’t train hard enough to handle that level of training,” Landis says, his fingertip rapping the table for emphasis. “So you weren’t overtrained; you were actually undertrained to begin with. So there’s the rule again: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins.”

CASE IN POINT: Landis’s ninth-place finish in the Tour last year. While it would be easy to chalk it up to a flu-like illness that reportedly hit him during the Tour’s final week (which Landis will not admit to), the more pertinent reason was that he lacked what his trainer, Allen Lim, calls the “high-intensity intermittent component.” This is a complicated way of saying that, while Landis could keep a steady pace with race leaders up the steepest mountain, they could gap him by putting on short (ten-second-to-two-minute) bursts of maximum-wattage power. They possessed a tool that he lacked, which some call “high-end snap.”

“Riding for Lance, Floyd was a diesel engine—he had to go steady and strong,” Lim says. “But what we saw when we looked at the Tour numbers was actually encouraging. He hadn’t trained going into the red zone much, and this winter he started doing it. A lot.”

At home in Murrieta, California, Landis began to finish each climb with a prolonged breakneck sprint. He called it Steep Hill Interval Training—a pleasing acronym—and by winter the numbers began to come. He found he could push 1,250 watts for five seconds, as opposed to 900 the previous year—a 39 percent improvement. Which means that on a steep, Tour-type climb, New Floyd will ride 3.7 miles per hour faster than Old Floyd for those five seconds, enough to open a gap of eight meters.

Landis also enjoyed a stress-free off-season, much in contrast with the previous year. In September 2004, a few weeks after Landis had signed with Phonak, team leader Tyler Hamilton and top support rider Santiago Perez received two-year bans for blood doping. (Perez accepted his ban; Hamilton’s final appeal was rejected in February.) The ensuing controversy temporarily endangered the team’s status in cycling’s ProTour organization and thrust Landis unexpectedly into the leader’s role. Last winter, Landis felt like he’d bought a ticket on the Titanic. This winter, however, he simply trained, tracking his progress on the sheets of graph paper he uses for a training log.

Asking most Tour contenders if you can see details of their training files is roughly like asking Coca-Cola executives to divulge their secret recipe. But here is where Landis again proves himself different. All his training and racing data derived from his CycleOps power meter—wattages, intensities, times, cadences—are an open book presided over by Lim, a 33-year-old physiology Ph.D. from Boulder who’s quickly developing a reputation as one of the sport’s brightest minds. On the Web and in PowerPoint presentations, Lim has shared all manner of Landis data, such as his average daily training between May 15 and June 12 of last year (3.5 hours) and his energy intake over that same period (174,000 calories, the equivalent of about 11 Big Macs per day). While the data holds abundant sex appeal for bike geeks, it’s also a sharp piece of psychological strategy. Here I am, the numbers say to the secret-obsessed peloton. Try and match it.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Landis says adamantly. “It’s just a number I produced on a certain day. What matters is what happens on the road.”

The peloton received its first dose of New Floyd at February’s Tour of California, an eight-day, 596-mile race that featured epic, Tour-quality landscape as well as the buzz-worthy presence of top American riders George Hincapie of Discovery Channel, Bobby Julich of CSC, and Levi Leipheimer of Gerolsteiner. All of whom were left behind when Landis utterly dominated Stage 3’s 17-mile time trial, hung on in Stage 5’s climb, and cruised to overall victory. Afterwards, Landis told Lim, “People keep saying I have good form now, but they haven’t seen anything yet.”

In Paris–Nice, they did. The eight-day “Race to the Sun” has long served as the unofficial kickoff of the European racing season, providing Tour contenders with a chance to test their engines. On a snowy, windy March day, Landis hit his new afterburners on Stage 3’s Col de la Croix de Chaubouret and blazed away from the peloton, leaving in his wake a roster of luminaries like Discovery’s José Azevedo (1:26 back), defending Paris–Nice champion Julich (8:47), and Discovery’s Tour hopeful Yaroslav Popovych (9:37).

Getting the lead is one thing; managing it is another. Landis spent the next four days employing the sort of race tactics he’d learned at Postal, using the ample horsepower of his Phonak teammates—including Koos Moerenhout of the Netherlands, Alexandre Moos of Switzerland, and Nicolas Jalabert of France—to chase down threats. He also negotiated with other teams that shared interests in winning stages, an act of political control for which Landis required a different sort of afterburner.

The crux moment arrived in Stage 6, on the way to Cannes. Halfway into the race, a group of 19 broke away, and none of the other teams were willing to help Phonak chase them down. With the gap widening and the race becoming dangerously unstable, Landis decided to send a message.

At the base of a climb, he ordered his team to the front and told them to go full throttle. They blasted for three, five, ten minutes, and when everyone behind was gasping and hurting, Landis turned to address the peloton.

“You want more of that, motherfuckers?” he asked loudly. “Because if you do, we’ve got plenty.”

The race went smoothly the rest of the way. After it ended, I asked Chechu Rubiera, a former teammate of Landis at U.S. Postal, if Floyd had reminded him of anyone in particular at that moment. Rubiera just smiled.

BIKE RACING, AT ITS ESSENCE, is about pain. According to the hackneyed but ultimately reliable theorem, great bike racers draw their strength from fights they’ve encountered elsewhere in life—against poverty, abusive or absent parents, injury, or illness (or, with surprising frequency, all of the above). But even in a peloton brimming with poor tough kids from the wrong side of the tracks, Landis manages to stand out.

“Floyd once told me that during races, it made him feel better to know that there probably weren’t too many other guys who’d shoveled out a septic tank in tattered shoes in the winter,” Z-Man told me. “So he’s got that going for him.”

The essentials of the Landis biography tread perilously close to myth: He was born in Farmersville, Pennsylvania, the second-oldest of six children in an observant Mennonite family. Rules were simple: no television, movies, uncovered heads for women, dancing, or anything that brought glory to the self instead of God. When Landis discovered mountain biking (which was permitted, so long as he covered his bare legs with cotton sweats) at 15, he improved so fast that, when he told his parents he wanted to pursue it as a career, they warned him of God’s wrath. When he wouldn’t listen to Scripture’s logic, his father, Paul, tried a different tack. He saddled Floyd with an endless list of strenuous chores: fixing the car, painting the barn, digging the septic tank. If the boy was too tired, the logic went, he couldn’t ride—a theory that Landis quickly disproved by training at night, often returning to the house at 2 or 3 a.m.

“My parents are good people; we get along fine now,” Landis says. “But that life wasn’t for me. I was determined to get out, and I knew my bike was the only way.”

Landis won the junior national mountain-biking championship at 17, in 1993, and moved to California two years later. When a curious coach measured his VO2 max (generally thought to be a decent indicator of endurance potential), Landis scored nearly 90 milliliters per kilogram per minute, almost two points better than five-time Tour winner Miguel Indurain.

Before arriving in California, Landis’s American cultural experience had consisted mostly of a single viewing of Jaws when he was 12. (“I had to call my mom to take me home,” he says.) While his friends likened him to an unfrozen caveman, Landis set about exploring culture with the resolve of a scientist. Mountain Dew and Kid Rock were judged worthwhile; disco and Oliver Stone movies, not so much.

“His mind is very uncluttered,” says Will Geoghegan, 35, his former teammate on the Team Chevy Trucks mountain-bike squad. “He’s able to see and understand things more clearly than the rest of us.”

Landis saw that pro mountain biking was fading and decided, in 1999, to switch over to domestic road racing. He was spotted and signed by U.S. Postal in 2002 and quickly became friends with Armstrong, who appreciated Landis’s offbeat humor and, even more, his toughness. The latter quality shone most vividly in 2003, when Landis broke a hip in January, had surgery in April, and still managed to ride powerfully in support of Armstrong in the Tour.

Those good feelings came to an end in 2004, when Landis decided not to join U.S. Postal’s new incarnation as the Discovery Channel team. The decision precipitated a feud: What Floyd saw as independence, Armstrong saw as disloyalty. Over most of 2005, the former friends traded words, sharp elbows, and the occasional not-so-subtle gesture (Armstrong pointing derisively to the clock after beating Landis on a summit finish at last April’s Tour de Georgia; Landis yelling “Discover this!” after beating Armstrong in a time trial). At June’s Dauphiné Libéré, Discovery Channel adopted defensive marking tactics designed to prevent Landis from winning, even at the possible expense of the team’s own results. By week three of the Tour de France, Landis and Armstrong were shouting at each other from the bike. It was not a particularly smart fight for Landis to keep up; few people have tangled with Armstrong and come out the better for it. But it’s a measure of his stubbornness that he refused to back down.

“That’s Floyd all over,” Jonathan Vaughters says. “He’s exactly like Lance in that way—they’ve both got an angry core, a chip on their shoulder. And as Floyd matures, he’s getting more successful at channeling that anger in a positive way.”

When the 2005 season ended and Armstrong retired, the dispute quickly cooled. Both sides went out of their way to extend olive branches, a process that accelerated when Discovery team director Johan Bruyneel, with Armstrong’s blessing, took Landis out to dinner and tried to recruit him to join their team. (“Johan even paid!” Landis recalls with a smile.) While Armstrong and Landis are not as close as they once were, things are civil, even warm. When Landis won Paris–Nice, Armstrong e-mailed his congratulations.

“A year of that was too much,” Landis says. “I’ll take whatever responsibility is mine for what happened. In the race, it can be like a video game—you’re killing this guy or that guy. But then afterward you turn it off and everybody’s real people again.

“I saw firsthand what Lance did, and it was superhuman,” he continues. “I saw how his system worked. It’s not necessary for me to be like Lance in every way. But there are some things that I want to take from that and use.”

For instance?

“His boldness at taking charge of things. His willingness to say, This is what I want, and I’m going to take it. It’s very hard to compete against that.”

THERE ARE, OF COURSE, elements that Landis won’t use. While Armstrong was frequently surrounded by a whirling galaxy of trainers, corporations, private jets, and the occasional rock star, Landis has pared his life down to bare essentials: his number-crunching trainer, Lim, and his coach, former Postal rider Robbie Ventura, whom he frequently speaks with over the phone. His wife, Amber, remains in Murrieta with their nine-year-old daughter, Ryan. (“Amber used to come to Europe,” Landis says, “but it’s pretty boring. I’m riding or sleeping.”) While Armstrong desired information as though it were oxygen, Landis rarely answers e-mail, and gives out his telephone number only under duress. His sponsorships consist of a handful of bike-equipment companies.

“Everything with Lance was so big,” Landis says. “He was able to manage it all somehow. For me, that would be stupid. I train hard, I race my bike—that’s it. All the rest, that’s not me. I would be an idiot to try.”

Even as Landis talks, however, the landscape is shifting around him. Sponsors and media are ringing up, asking for some of his time. The Phonak general manager, John Lelangue, wants Landis’s advice on handling a few political matters; the team wants him to come to the Milan–San Remo race the following weekend.

There are also more fundamental matters to think about, specifically the fact that Landis knows he can’t go through the entire season at his present otherworldly level. While he takes exception when other riders suggest that he might be peaking too early for the Tour (“Peaking too early? What is that, Chinese? Let me translate: Blah-blah-fucking-blah”), Landis will shortly decide not to ride the three-week Giro d’Italia, in order to better manage his buildup to the Tour.

On the face of it, this year’s Tour is a good fit for Landis. While Basso and Ullrich remain the odds-on picks to win, it’s worth noting that each of them is also dealing with an unknown factor: Basso is attempting to win the Giro (a Tour-Giro double has been achieved only twice in the past 13 years), while Ullrich’s spring has been hampered by a recurrent knee injury and his now legendary weight difficulties. The course features two long time trials, a Landis specialty. If he can gain time in the TTs and use his new afterburners to hang with the top climbers in the key mountain stages (11, 15, and 16), he has a shot at the podium or even better. The theory is, while everybody watches Basso and Ullrich, Landis can sneak in. Though, as Ventura points out, “It’s getting harder to play the underdog card when Floyd keeps smashing everyone.”

No matter what happens, however, the Tour is certain to create more Floyd stories. Such as the one that happened last July.

It goes like this: A few days before the Tour started, Landis and Lim were training in a small town high in the Pyrenees of northern Spain. The training had gone longer than originally planned, and Landis awoke the last morning looking at a stormy forecast and a hellacious travel day. In order to make it to a pre-Tour Phonak team meeting in Tours, France, they were scheduled to drive two hours south to Barcelona, catch a plane for the two-hour flight to Paris, get picked up, then drive an additional two hours to Tours. Not a big deal under most circumstances, but on this morning, Landis didn’t want to hopscotch all over Europe like some business traveler. He wanted one last, hard ride.

Lim awoke to the sight of Landis pulling on his biking gear. The trainer was confused. Didn’t he have to pack up? Didn’t he have a plane to catch?

“Not anymore we don’t,” Landis informed Lim.

Lim still didn’t get it.

“What I’m saying is, Fuck it,” Landis said. “I’ll ride there.”

And so Landis did. He pointed his front wheel north toward France and started pedaling. He rode up and over the Pyrenees and down the mountain roads, into the vineyards of Limoux, following the road signs north. Landis rode for six hours, covering 130 miles, then got off his bike, stripped off his mud-soaked jersey and shorts, and hurled them off a nearby cliff. Donning dry clothes, he climbed in the car to drive the rest of the way with Lim. “You know how I got to the Tour last year?” Landis asked. When Lim shook his head, Landis grinned. “Lance’s private jet,” he said.

They arrived in Tours the following morning, a spattered VW Touran screeching up at the team hotel as the rest of the Phonak riders fixed Landis with expressions of baffled wonderment—a moment that Lim described as “very Floyd.”

Back in his apartment, I ask Landis how he’s planning on getting to the Tour this year.

“I have no idea,” he says. “But I’m sure it’ll be interesting.”

The post The New American in Paris appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

THIS WAS POSTAL’S game plan: The eight support riders would take turns leading according to their strengths. Flats specialists Pavel Padrnos and Viatcheslav “Eki” Ekimov, the Eastern Bloc goombahs, would take the valleys. Spaniards Manuel “Triki” Beltran and Benjamin Noval, banged up from early race crashes but recovering, would take the first climbs. Versatile Americans George Hincapie and Floyd Landis would lead up the latter climbs, leaving specialist climbers—Spaniard José Luis Rubiera and Portugal’s José “Ace” Azevedo—for the ten-mile, 8 percent haul up to the mountaintop finish at Plateau de Beille.


“Keep things normal,” instructed team director Johan Bruyneel, the dark-eyed Belgian who had overseen Armstrong’s five previous Tour wins. Bruyneel did not seem to notice how abnormal, even outrageous, it would be for one team to control the race, start to finish, riding out in front and taking all the wind, on the Tour’s toughest stage.


From the start, Postal rode in tight formation, no other teams contesting the space on the road. They set the pace high, not looking back. Three riders managed to escape early on. Voeckler’s La Boulangère teammate Sylvain Chavanel took off with Mickael Rasmussen, of Rabobank, and Basso’s CSC teammate Jens Voigt. But their escape gained them a mere six minutes, while Postal ground away according to the game plan. On the radio, Bruyneel described the damage Postal was causing. Euskaltel-Euskadi’s Haimar Zubeldia, who’d finished fifth the year before, abandoned after 10.5 miles. Eleven minutes later, it was Denis Menchov (11th in 2003), then Gerrit Glomser—world-class riders, breaking apart like Chinese motorcycles.


Phonak’s Tyler Hamilton, who was suffering from a severe back injury from a crash a week earlier in Stage 6, drifted to the back of the peloton. The night before, Phonak’s director, Alvaro Pino, had suggested to Hamilton that it might be time to consider quitting. Hamilton, who had finished fourth in the 2003 Tour despite riding with a fractured collarbone, had said no—he’d gut it out, he’d finish, he’d never quit. Then, late that night, Hamilton sought out Kristopher, his physiotherapist.


“Be honest with me,” Hamilton said. “Is my back fucked?”


“Your back is fucked,” Kristopher said.


As the peloton approached a feed zone, Hamilton stopped pedaling and coasted to a halt. He stood by the side of the road and saluted his team as it went past, then stepped into the team car without a word.


Two hours later, it was Iban Mayo’s turn. The Postals were blasting up the Col d’Agnes, and the Basque rider, a 26-year-old welder’s son considered to be the best pure climber in the world, had been dropped with the rest of Euskaltel-Euskadi. As they rode together, trying to catch up, Mayo suddenly stepped off the bike and stalked disgustedly to the side of the road. His director ran to him and persuaded him to keep going, but the truth was clear: Mayo was broken, cracked, finished. A hundred thousand Basques stood up the road, wondering what had happened to their hero, the man who had defeated Armstrong during a time trial on Mont Ventoux at the Dauphiné Libéré race just five weeks earlier.


Postal rode on, trading the lead according to plan. In best Armstrong form, they kept it casual. They may have been hurting, but they made sure their rivals saw only an easy manner, an occasional joke, the easy flip of a water bottle. On one steep section, riders stared as Hincapie casually rode no-handed while he fiddled with his sunglasses.


“I tried to escape, but Postal was like a giant train that you couldn’t escape,” rider Francisco Mancebo said.


“On the climb of the Agnes, it was unbelievable,” said Levi Leipheimer, an American riding for the Dutch Rabobank squad. “I counted 22 riders in the group, with seven U.S. Postal guys in front. I’ve never seen anything like that.”


“Christ, the Postals were strong,” Australian Michael Rogers said.


But Postal only dug the knife deeper.

ON THE FINAL CLIMB of Plateau de Beille, Postal displayed a clinical application of brute force. First, Hincapie and Landis drove the peloton a half-mile or so, then pulled off. Then the ever gentlemanly Rubiera, jersey unzipped to reveal a pale chest, applied more impolite pressure, reducing the group to 11 riders.


With seven miles left, Rubiera finished his turn at the front and Azevedo took over. After a hard acceleration, 11 riders had been reduced to four. Then Ullrich, the 1997 Tour winner, the rider whose talent Armstrong feared most, slid slowly off the back. Azevedo kept going, his face delirious, until the race had been distilled to Basso and Armstrong, tunneling through the orange throng of Basque spectators. It soon became evident that the previous day’s crowd antics had been merely a warm-up for Mayo’s Basque fans, who still blamed Armstrong for leaving their hero behind after a crash on the cobbles 11 days before. The Basques had already been busy keying the Postal bus and emblazoning a truck belonging to the Outdoor Life Network (OLN), the American cable company broadcasting the Tour live, with the name of the Basque separatist organization, ETA. Now was their chance for more personal revenge, and they took it eagerly, screaming, gesturing, splashing beer and water on the American. Armstrong rode, grim-faced, his tires rolling over the words LANCE PIG, LANCE-EPO. Armstrong let Basso lead through the chaos, Bruyneel’s voice sounding in his ear, keeping him posted on Ullrich’s slide—one minute, two minutes—and keeping up a stream of talk.


“Lance, drink water….Lance, let Basso pull….Lance, talk to him….Lance, push it….Lance, regulate.”


The two rose into the last mile, the previous day’s faces having switched. Armstrong looked comfortable, even serene. Basso, however, looked strained.


“Lance, you must win this stage,” Bruyneel said.


With a third of a mile left, Armstrong zipped up his jersey and moved his hands lower on the handlebars. He sprinted for the line, crossing just feet in front of Basso, teeth gritted, into a wave of cheers and more than a few boos. He punched the air.


An hour later, after the solemnity and gloire of the podium, Armstrong and Crow walked across an open pasture toward a waiting helicopter, encircled by 20 or so arm-linked Clouseaus. A crowd followed, teenagers mostly, shouting what sounded like taunts. Among them was a Basque boy, a skinny, shirtless kid, maybe 16 years old. The boy hopped alongside the gendarmes, waiting for the right moment. When the gendarmes turned, he leaped over their linked arms and made a grab for Armstrong’s black baseball cap. The boy started to lift it off, but it was tight, and as he lifted, Armstrong made a grab for the boy’s arm, but the boy was too fast. He pulled again and the cap came off. The boy ducked, then danced off in triumph, waving his trophy, and the crowd shouted.

THREE DAYS LATER, in the first stage in the Alps, Armstrong was preparing to take his next step toward the yellow jersey. Voeckler’s lead was down to a mere 22 seconds, and Armstrong’s other rivals were steadily falling back. Stage 15’s 112 miles and seven climbs to Villard-de-Lans looked to be a more unpredictable, attack-filled race, a chance for the rivals to take big risks and, for Armstrong, a chance to demonstrate not only his strength but also his famously meticulous planning. Or so it would seem.


Three hours into the stage, Armstrong’s longtime coach Chris Carmichael was standing in OLN’s mobile studio, atop a trailer at Villard-de-Lans. Carmichael, who was working as a Tour commentator, was feeling reflective.


“You know what’s funny?” Carmichael was saying. “Lance hardly talks at all about six Tours. Getting six isn’t at the motivational core of the guy. It’s more like, I’m just going to go to the Tour and kick the shit out of everybody.”


Carmichael was preparing for his analyst role when a piece of surprising news came in: Ullrich had broken away from Armstrong. “Ullrich?” Carmichael turned. “How much time does he have?”


Thirty seconds, the answer came.


Carmichael located a monitor. He crossed his arms and bit his lip.


“Nervous, kid?” OLN commentator Bob Roll asked with a grin. Roll, an author and former pro cyclist, is a friend of Armstrong’s and one of the sport’s more subversive and entertaining characters.


“No,” Carmichael said, leaning in to see the monitor. “It’s under control.”


On the little screen, a five-inch-high Ullrich surged away from Postal, opening up a minute-long gap with about 30 miles to go. He blazed past other riders, his face alight. Behind him, Armstrong was down to only two teammates, Landis and Azevedo. Around the trailer, the crowd buzzed.


“Nervous, kid?” Roll asked again.


“Lance has got, like, seven minutes on Ullrich,” Carmichael said. “No way Ullrich can get even. No way.”


Carmichael leaned in until his nose was inches from the screen. To this point the day had gone well for Armstrong. Mayo, who’d stayed in the Tour after Stage 13 but couldn’t keep up with a team practice ride on an intervening rest day, had quit the race that morning. (“Iban’s problem is mental, not physical,” said his manager, Miguel Madariaga.) The stubborn Voeckler had been dropped by Ullrich’s acceleration, which meant Armstrong would likely end the day in yellow. Now Carmichael watched Ullrich pull away, blowing past the day’s early breakaway riders as if he were on a motorbike. It was a spectacular display of raw power, precisely the kind of surprise attack Ullrich’s fans had been hoping for. The German had quietly endured a case of the flu in the early stages of the race and had been forced to take antibiotics. Now he looked to be healthy and back in fearsome form.


“Too far out,” Carmichael said. “Too far to go.”


Landis led a furious chase, assisted by Basso’s teammate Jens Voigt, who dropped back from the breakaway to help. The sight of CSC helping Armstrong infuriated many of Ullrich’s fans, who saw it as proof of their suspicion that CSC had given up Basso’s chance of winning, and were now content to scrap with Ullrich over second place.


By the time the race entered its last climb to Villard-de-Lans, Carmichael had calmed considerably. Ullrich was caught with less than 20 miles to go. The culling began. With two and a half miles to go, Azevedo rode at the front of a group of ten. With about a mile to go, the group went to five, including Ullrich, then to four: Armstrong and Basso, Ullrich and his T-Mobile teammate Andreas Klöden. Klöden led for much of the final stretch, trying to set up Ullrich for the win.


“C’mon, Lance,” Carmichael said quietly. Behind him, on camera, Al Trautwig and Roll commentated the finish.


Basso attacked. Armstrong reacted instantly, moving up on Basso. The final stretch was tricky, with a tight left corner just before the line. Armstrong picked his moment and dove. He accelerated into the corner, cut it sharply, and flew to the line for the victory. Another sprint, another fist in the air, another yellow jersey.


“Lance Armstrong!” Trautwig boomed. “Laaaaance Armstrong!“


They tallied Armstrong’s gains: With five stages left, he was now in the lead. Basso was second, at 1:25, and Ullrich was down 6:54. The stage had been a perfect demonstration of team and individual strength. And something else, too.


“Did you see that?” Carmichael said to Trautwig during the commercial break.


“See what?” Trautwig didn’t look up.


“Lance knew that turn,” Carmichael said. “He knew that left-hand turn, and that let him cut inside Basso.”


Trautwig looked up blankly. Carmichael tried again.


“He knew the turn,” Carmichael repeated slowly. “He was here this spring. He reconned it.”


The word reconned did it. Trautwig snapped to full alert. That Armstrong won was not news, not anymore. Exactly how he won, however, remained as mysterious to Trautwig as it did to anybody else—after all, the sport was basically a bunch of guys pedaling along. But reconning? That was right up Lance’s alley. It was perfect!


“Get me a telestrator!” Trautwig boomed to his producers. “We’re going to show that on the replay. He knew the turn! He reconned it!”


The studio buzzed with activity as the replay was being prepared. Trautwig scrawled some notes; producers scurried. Over in the corner, a Cheshire-cat grin was spreading slowly across Roll’s blunt features.


“So let me get this straight.” Roll’s smile grew wider. “You are telling me that Lance Armstrong came here back in May, in the snow.”


Carmichael nodded, his face blank.


“Before any of the trailers or barricades or anything was here,” Roll continued, “and he found out exactly where the finish line was going to be, and he remembered that.”


“Uh-huh.” Carmichael’s face stayed deadpan.


Roll smiled and shrugged.


Then Trautwig was bellowing to the producer, getting the telestrator online, preparing to deliver the story. It would not matter that later Armstrong would say that the corner’s sharpness caught him by surprise. It would not matter that 12 and a half miles from the finish line, Armstrong had said to Bruyneel over the radio, “Just have Ace [Azevedo] keep it together. I’m going to win this stage.” It would not matter that the real reason Armstrong won was closer to what Carmichael had said earlier—that Armstrong just plain liked to kick the shit out of everybody at the Tour. For now, the camera’s red light blinked on, and millions of viewers were treated to a vivid, in-depth illustration of how Armstrong had won the stage, way back in May, when he had the icy-cool foresight to recon the finish.

LIKE A BROADWAY MUSICAL or Catholic mass, every Tour features its preordained dramatic climaxes, moments scripted months before by the unseen hand of the Tour’s course designers. The 2004 Tour’s moment came at Stage 16, the 9.6-mile uphill time trial at l’Alpe d’Huez. Armstrong had long targeted the stage, a target that took on added value now that the stakes were clear: It would be his third mountain-stage win in a row, and his chance to distance himself from Basso, the only man who still had a reasonable chance of beating him. But as Armstrong gazed up from the bottom of the mountain, it became clear that Basso wouldn’t be today’s only opponent.


A mountain of people—that’s what it looked like along the Alpe d’Huez route. As if the rock and turf had been scooped out and replaced, starting from the bottom, by geologic layers of humanity. The stout-calved Germans, the lanky Dutch, the gimlet-eyed French, the big-bellied Luxembourgers, the tight-shorts-wearing Danes, all combined to form a hot, heaving pile of sun-broiled, stippled flesh, the citizenry of Europe having set aside their cultural and geopolitical differences to commune in the service of a shared belief, the core of which was painted on the black pavement in large, carefully edged white letters: FUCK LANCE.


Also, LANCE SUCKS, EPO LANCE, GO HOME LANCE, and ARMSTRONG PIG, along with a few less gentle sentiments that sought to express the feelings of the million people who had come here to see the stage.


At this moment, Armstrong had larger concerns, namely the death threat he’d received the night before. Armstrong had learned of it from Bill Stapleton, his agent and lawyer at Capital Sports & Entertainment, who’d been told by Tour organizers, who’d notified French authorities. Death threats were nothing new—Armstrong had received one last year, too, in Toulouse. The team had dealt with it the usual way, a slight variation on the Batman method: his bodyguards, linked-arm rings of gendarmes, a speedy helicopter evacuation from the finish. But today was different. This was a time trial, each rider alone against the clock. Everyone on the mountain knew to the minute when Armstrong would depart. Every troll, if they so desired, could get close enough to touch.


So far this year, Armstrong had been lucky. Even so, teammates reminded him to stay in a group. “Never, ever be alone,” they told him. “If anybody’s going to do anything, it will be then.”


Naturally, the death threat was kept secret, or as secret as possible, which wasn’t very. Truth was, this was completely expected. “Lance spends a lot of time thinking about security, but the bottom line is that there isn’t much that he can do when he’s on the bike,” said Chris Brewer. Brewer, a testicular-cancer survivor who runs Armstrong’s Web site, worked 18 years in the Air Force’s Opposition Forces division. His specialty was infiltration, finding holes in secure zones. “If someone wants to get him bad enough, there are many ways they could get him. And Lance knows that.”


At the start, in the village of Bourg d’Oisans, Armstrong warmed up on the stationary rollers, looking relaxed, chatting with the gendarmes. His mood tightened when he learned Sheryl Crow might have to give up her seat in the follow car for a security agent. But then, another plan: There would be two extra motorcycles, with more security agents aboard, and another next to Bruyneel in the car. “They were sharpshooters,” Armstrong said later. “Badasses.”


“We were terrified,” Bruyneel said.


On the mountain ahead, the mass of humanity shifted restlessly. Many had been waiting for days, wedging campers and tents along the steep roadside; others opted for the less elegant, sleeping-bag-on-the-pavement approach. All of them had spent a long, hot morning defending their space from the arriving hordes as the mountain swelled and grew. The sun slammed down, alcohol flowed, cigarettes flared. When the race began, the crowd contented itself by lazily torturing Armstrong’s teammates, and, by early appearances, they were in rare form. Rubiera reached the top looking as if he might break into tears. CSC’s Voigt received special treatment for his role in helping Armstrong chase down Ullrich the previous day (JUDAS, many of the signs read). His later pleas that he was helping his team captain, Basso, were dismissed as immaterial: Whatever his motive, he was helping Armstrong, and so he was guilty.


They didn’t all hate Armstrong, of course. In fact, many European fans admired the American; they commonly greeted his passing with polite, if unenthusiastic, applause. Armstrong had made efforts to improve his image, speaking more French and expressing respect for the tradition of the race. But no amount of diplomacy could change the brute fact that he, an outsider, had come to dominate Europe’s biggest race at a time when American influence was seen as something less than a good thing. It would be easy to chalk this up to an extension of anti-Bush, anti-American sentiment, but, in fact, the war in Iraq was almost never mentioned. Nor did the relationship seem affected by the latest doping allegations in the pages of L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong, a 375-page book cowritten by Irish reporter and longtime Armstrong nemesis David Walsh and French cycling journalist Pierre Ballester.


No, the truth was that Armstrong offended because he would not give European fans what they desired from their sports heroes: pain, vulnerability, suffering, humanity. His recovery from cancer, the inspirational touchstone for many Americans, was regarded by Europeans with mild interest: a feat of medicine and discipline, certainly, but that was, what, eight years ago? Wasn’t the treatment fairly brief, a matter of months? It was impressive, yes, but hadn’t plenty of other cyclists overcome extraordinarily difficult circumstances? What they wanted was a man wrestling fate, not obliterating it.

FIRST ULLRICH RODE OFF, then Klöden, then Basso, all of them helmetless in the heat. At the last minute, Armstrong considered donning his helmet to fend off any bottles or rocks. He decided not to, figuring it might, in fact, encourage contact. He mounted the start ramp wearing a blue Postal hat turned backwards. In the car, Crow bit her nails.


He had good legs, he’d told her that morning. He could feel it when they hit the floor, the familiar strength and springiness that foretold a good day. But first he would need to get to the top in one piece. The bottom two-thirds of the climb were unbarriered. For five and a half miles, nothing would stand between him and the people—about 24 minutes of what the military-minded Brewer termed “major exposure.”


The first two minutes were flat, a gentle rise from town, a quick zip through the crowds. Then a hard left, the road tilted upward, and he was inside them.


Troll mouths screaming, blasting him with sour breath. Flags snapping like whips. A shaking forest of fists inches in front of his wheel. It seemed as if he was riding down some endless collective throat, a peristaltic dive into some unseen belly. Armstrong stared at the motorcycle’s wheel, felt something warm on his leg. Troll spit.


“It made me sick,” Crow said later.


He rode, his legs firing out the familiar high cadence. All strategy was reduced to one reflex: If I go faster, they can’t get me. The crowd reacted, red-faced men stepping into the road for a crouched, clenched scream, then falling out of the way at the last second. On their motorcycles, the security agents swatted and pushed, trying to clear a path. A roadside gendarme tackled two threatening-looking men, only to have them replaced by more. They threw beer and water; they spat. They were aiming for his face, but most hit his jersey, providing Armstrong a desultory jolt of satisfaction: He was going faster than they’d anticipated.


Bruyneel drove close behind, snowplowing sluggish trolls out of the way. He would draw an official sanction from Tour officials for blocking television-camera motorcycles, but Bruyneel didn’t care: The car’s presence shortened the trolls’ window of opportunity. Bruyneel read the splits, kept up the encouraging talk, as if his voice might block those other voices out.


“Very good, Lance, very good.”


Armstrong marked his progress by the numbers of the turns (signposted in reverse order, from 21 to 1) and the church steeples of the two small hamlets along the road. He moved past the smiling Dutchmen from Maastricht at turn 18, past the Belgian guy at turn 8, who’d parked his camper three weeks ago, and the sad Basques who’d hiked up with their bedsheet signs. Past the German technopop groovers and the other Dutch guy with the microphone, shouting, “Show me your titties!” He rolled over the GO ULLRICH and GO BASSO messages, over the elaborately detailed penises, and over a sign that read, RIP THEIR BALLS OFF, LANCE!


Yes, Americans were here, too, in huge numbers. In their yellow baseball caps and Uncle Sam hats and Postal jerseys, their arms swathed in yellow bracelets, waving Texan and American flags and sending out the whooping, ringing call of the American sports fan. There weren’t just a few, either. There were dozens, hundreds, thousands of bright-eyed, ecstatic Yanks on that mountain (25,000 of them, it was estimated), people who didn’t give a damn about Eurofate or history, people who had come across an ocean and who were now receiving the birthright that every American desires and demands: a miracle.


“Whoooooooooooooooo, Lance!” they shouted as Armstrong rode past. “Whoooooooooooooo!“


He rode furiously. Up ahead, Ullrich had set the day’s top mark at the intermediate time check, besting the previous leading time by a whopping 32 seconds. Armstrong came through, wanting to hear his number, wanting the proof. He listened as Bruyneel read it: He’d beaten Ullrich by 40 seconds.


Forty seconds! Atop the mountain, a group of German fans blinked at the number on the screen, open-mouthed. One turned away in disgust.


Armstrong rode through the last of the crowd and on to the relative safety of the barriered road. Up ahead, at turn 3, he could see Basso, who was having a bad day. He’d trained here in May, but now his legs would not turn the same gear. Basso was straining, his grace evaporating, his face etched in pain. Armstrong surged past without a look.


He sprinted for the line, fists clenched, teeth bared, an image of freshly peeled ferocity. Some of the crowd shouted, but many more stared. After 155 riders, 155 different exhausted faces, they were seeing something different, a face that did not ask for applause or love or understanding or anything except the animal respect due a superior force.


Armstrong crossed the line, winning by 1:01 and extending his lead over his closest rival, Basso, by 2:23. He Batmanned to the safety of the trailer, accompanied by Serge and Erwin.


“Got ’em,” he said.

“Very good, very good, very good.
Come on Lance, come on, very good, come on, come on, come on.
Come on Lance, kill those fucking motherfuckers!
Very good Lance, very good.
Stay in the middle of the road. Stay in the middle of the road.
Very good Lance, very good. Come on come on come on.
Come on Lance, come on come on COME ON!
Very good, very good, very good!
Come on come on come on come on come on.
Fifty seconds faster than Ullrich. Fifty seconds faster than Ullrich.
Find our rhythm find our rhythm find our rhythm.
Very good, very good, very good come on come on come on.
Come on Lance, come on come on come on!
Come on Lance, come on COME ON COME ON COME ON.
Come on Lance, come on come on COME ON!
Come on Lance come on come on COME ON!
Very good Lance come on GO GO GO GO GO!
Here we turn to the right on the big road.
Come on come on COME ON!
Come on Lance come on come on.
Three hundred meters uphill and then it’s downhill. Come on!
Yes yes yes yes yes!
Come on Lance, come on, we can take Basso, we can catch Basso.
Basso is there, Basso is there in front of you.
Not too close to the people, not too close to the people.
Come on Lance, come on come on come on come on!
Still 50 seconds for Ullrich, 50 seconds for Ullrich.
Come on Lance! Come on come on come on COME ON!
Come on Lance! Come on! Come on! COME ON!
Come on Lance! Come on! Come on! 5k! 5k!
Come on Lance! Come on come on COME ON!
Come on Lance! Come on! Come on! Come on!
Come on Lance! Come on! Come on! 5k! 5k!
Come on come on come on!
Come on Lance! Come on! Come on! Come on! GO GO GO!
There’s Basso in front of you, there’s Basso!
Here we go left… that’s it… come on come on.
No turns anymore, all straight. Come on! Come on! COME ON!
Come on Lance, two kilometers.
Come on man come on! Let’s go for Basso! Come on come on COME ON!
Come on Lance very good very good very good come on push it! Push it! PUSH IT!
Come on Lance come on come on come on.
The last kilometer’s easier Lance, the last kilometer’s easier.
Come on Lance, come on! Come on! Come on!
Come on Lance! Come on! Come on! A minute on Ullrich, a minute!
Come on come on!
Great job! Great job!
GREAT! GREAT! GREAT! GREAT! GREAT!”

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TYLER HAMILTON, WHO IS by some accounts both the toughest and nicest cyclist on the planet, has a certain look he gives whenever he tells one of his stories. It is subtle, but since Hamilton, 33, has built a career on subtle moves, it is worth attending.

Tyler Hamilton in Spain

“I prefer to let my legs do the talking”: Tyler Hamilton in Girona, Spain, April 2004

Tyler Hamilton in Girona

Room with a view: Hamilton with his dog, Tugboat, on the balcony of his Girona apartment, one floor up from former teammate Lance Armstrong

Tyler Hamilton

Front runner: “If I fall on my face,” says Hamilton, “there’s no one to blame but me.”

Here’s how it goes: First Hamilton makes eye contact; then he widens his boyish green eyes a fraction of an inch in faint surprise; then he tilts his head in an understanding nod.


“I crashed and broke my shoulder early”—eyes lock on—”but the doctors didn’t really know it was broken”—eyebrows up—”so I just kept riding”—nod, smile. Pretty soon you’re nodding and smiling, too, and the air fills with warm, brotherly affection, along with the unmistakable implication that if you’d somehow been in the same situation (which happened to be at the 2002 Giro d’Italia, a three-week race in which Hamilton finished second), you would have done exactly the same thing.


The irony of this gesture—that a man best known for enduring pain might put his energies into the pleasure of others—is not something Hamilton would appreciate, or even notice. It is simply what he does. It has fueled his ascent from washed-up college skier to a position as Lance Armstrong’s lieutenant from 1999 to 2001, then to a spot as lead rider on the talented Danish CSC team in 2002, and to a fourth-place finish for that team in the 2003 Tour—despite racing three weeks with a fractured collarbone. At the 2004 Tour, Hamilton will captain a newly fortified Swiss team, Phonak, and take on the singular aim—insert your own Greek myth here—of supplanting his friend and former leader at the pinnacle of the cycling world.


Of course, that’s not the kind of thing Hamilton would actually say—the most he’ll tell you is that he hopes to finish in the top three. It’s hard to believe he will find environs more hopeful than the ones he’s in now, seated comfortably amid the springtime bustle of an outdoor café in Girona, Spain, where he trains during the European racing season each January to fall. But according to his rules, Hamilton isn’t talking about self-centered things like hope or ambition—no, he’s doing something more basic. He’s counting his refurbished teeth.


“Eleven, or twelve, I think,” says the Marblehead, Massachusetts, native, referring to the number of molars he had recapped after grinding them down to their nerves during the Giro. “It was a lot of trips to the dentist, that’s for sure. And that drive into Boston—that’s where my dentist is—that’s no fun. Traffic can get pretty bad, you know?”


We know. We also know that Tyler Hamilton’s niceness, like Britney Spears’s appeal, is a phenomenon that is often observed but rarely comprehended. His five-foot-eight, 135-pound form radiates an almost paternal alertness to small needs, his hands reaching out to open doors, tickle babies, pay for coffees, scratch exactly the right spot behind a dog’s ears. It would be easy to miss what dwells quietly beneath, namely a massive deposit of granitic reserve, a quality perfected by English Protestants and exported to Hamilton’s New England hometown, a quality built on one rule: The bolder you are, the more deferential you must be.


“I prefer to let my legs do the talking,” Hamilton likes to say. The rest of his body is not exactly uncommunicative: There’s the long, white scar along the middle finger of his left hand, the result of a bloody crash in last year’s Tour of Holland, in which he also cracked his femur. There’s the tentacle of a scar above his right eyebrow, courtesy of a car door he encountered while warming up for a 2002 race, and the usual hieroglyph of road-rash scars on his legs and elbows—all of which Hamilton regards with cheerful indifference, or at least seems to.


“Somewhere deep inside, he’s got that edge, that urge to kill,” says former U.S. Postal Service teammate Jonathan Vaughters, 31. “The sport’s too hard not to have it. But he buries it very well. I’m not saying he does it intentionally as a tactic. But as a tactic, it works.”


Exactly what Hamilton is burying is the more interesting question, and might be why some oddsmakers slot him a notch above the second tier of Tour contenders, though still behind Armstrong and German Jan Ullrich (the 1997 Tour winner and five-time runner-up). There is evidence for their optimism: This is Hamilton’s first year as sole team leader, and he will enjoy the unquestioning support of Phonak’s eight other Tour riders, many of whom he handpicked. But there are other, less tangible reasons. As last year’s Tour vividly illustrated, Hamilton, a strong climber and time-trialist, possesses something the others don’t: a whiff of mystery, the sense of something unknowable shifting beneath the placid surface.


“Once, when I was 14 and he was 11, we were fighting,” his brother, Geoff Hamilton, 36, says. “I nailed him, right on the button, and he went down hard. I was a lot bigger than him, and so I figured it’s over. And then… . Ty bounces off the floor and comes at me, boom, like a tiger. I remember thinking, Whoa, what is this?”

LIKE MOST TYLER HAMILTON stories, the tale of his 2003 Tour de France follows a three-act dramatic formula: first a fateful crash, then a devastating injury, followed by an improbable comeback.


Act I: A sunny July afternoon in the riverside village of Meaux, finish of Stage 1. In his second season after leaving Armstrong’s USPS team, Hamilton has elevated his game to a new level, becoming the first American to win the brutal 160-mile Liège–Bastogne–Liège race, in April, then winning the Tour of Romandie a week later. With the skilled CSC team behind him, he carries high hopes for the Tour, all of which quite literally crumple on a narrow curve near the first day’s finish, when the usual thing happens—one rider twitches, another puts a foot down—sparking a hideous pile-up that knocks Hamilton over at 40 miles per hour.


“That hurt a lot,” Hamilton says.


Act II: Two doctors x-ray and examine him. The right collarbone is fractured, a clean crack in the shape of a V. The Tour’s official newspaper is notified, headlines are written: Hamilton Out. Then a third doctor examines him and notes that, while the bone is broken, it is not displaced. In a Hamiltonian stroke of luck, the fracture occurred near the spot where he broke his collarbone in 2002, and a mass of fresh bone growth has prevented the new fracture from spreading. “C’est possible,” the doctor says.


Act III: Hamilton, pale and bandaged, wobbles out for Stage 2. His suitcase is packed and brought to the first feed zone in anticipation of his dropping out. His 34-year-old wife, Haven, who met Hamilton at the 1996 Tour du Pont, where she was volunteering, ponders how she’ll console him. But he finishes the 127-mile stage in the lead group, and the Tour is never the same.


“On a pain scale of one to ten,” Hamilton says, “that was ten.”


“It is the finest example of courage that I’ve come across,” decrees veteran Tour doctor Gerard Porte in the press, adding that your average person would have taken four weeks off work. Historians root eagerly through the Tour’s ample cupboard of noble wounded—Pascal Simon’s broken shoulder blade in 1983; Honoré Barthélémy’s broken shoulder and wrist, and injured eye, in 1920; Eddy Merckx’s 1975 finish with a broken jaw—and watch as Hamilton steadily matches them all. The squad of filmmakers who are featuring Hamilton as the centerpiece of a 2005 Imax movie on how the brain works (called Brain Power) keep their cameras rolling, scarcely believing that God could script so perfectly. Inevitably, a rival team director accuses Hamilton and CSC of fakery, precipitating the rarely seen spectacle of a team parading X rays to prove one of their riders really is injured.


Barred by anti-doping regulations from taking any useful painkillers, Hamilton turns to scads of Tylenol and other, less conventional methods—like a good-luck vial of salt in his jersey pocket. Each night, CSC’s lanky Danish healer, Ole Kare Foli, applies acupressure and “channels energy” while Hamilton sleeps.


It seems to work. A few days later, on the steeps of L’Alpe d’Huez, in Stage 8, Hamilton not only rides in the lead group but attacks four times. Then things suddenly get worse. Favoring the injury, Hamilton compresses a nerve in his lower back. The night after Stage 10, Foli tries to massage Hamilton to loosen him up for the needed spinal adjustment, but the pain is too great.


“That really, really hurt a lot,” Hamilton says. “At least what I remember of it.”


Haven has more vivid recollections. “Ty was lying there in the dark, and he couldn’t move,” she says. “Then he says, ‘Just do it, do the adjustment now.’ Ole went to straighten him out, and Tyler’s screaming and Ole is crying and I’m crying, wondering what could be worth all this.”


Eight days later, Hamilton provides a succinct answer with an incredible Act IV in Stage 16, a day in which he is nearly dropped early on, is ridden back to the pack by his team, then breaks away and rides alone through the mists up Bagarguy, one of the Tour’s steepest climbs, his eyes grimaced to slits, his cheeks, according to one account, streaked with tears.


He outrides the superior power of the chasing pack for 70 miles and wins his first Tour stage, giving television commentators plenty of time to let their voices dissolve with emotion as they declare it one of the longest and most courageous solo breakaways in Tour history. Hamilton’s unexpected victory briefly eclipses all other story lines, including that of his former teammate Armstrong. As Hamilton sums things up, “That day felt really good.”


It is a measure of the Tour’s insularity that the full impact of Hamilton’s feat doesn’t hit home until a couple weeks later. It happens in an unlikely place, the trading floor of the American Stock Exchange, where he’s been asked to ring the opening bell. Hamilton is a touch nervous about going there—a skinny cyclist in the trading pits of Wall Street? He finished fourth, remember?


Hamilton is game, though, and he follows the script, ringing the bell and making the rounds amid the craze of shouting NFL-size guys in their luridly colored jackets. Then it happens. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices one of the big shaved-head guys pointing at him and whispering to another big shaved-head guy. And pretty soon that second guy is whispering to a third guy, and before long a whole burly tribe of traders gather around Ty and they’re going bananas! They know who he is, the whole collarbone story, and, what’s more, they love him! Because in Hamilton the pit jocks recognize one of their own, a regular Joe with a secret streak of balls-out insanity, and they can’t help but mark the occasion by giving him a new name: Tyler Fucking Hamilton. And all of a sudden Tyler Fucking Hamilton is shooting the breeze about the Yanks and the Sox, inhabiting this strange high ground of celebrity. Almost as if he’s been preparing for moments like this his whole life.

CRAZYKIDS, THEY CALLED IT. Not the parents—they didn’t call it anything, because most didn’t know it existed, and those who did know wished they didn’t. This was strictly kids-only, six or eight of them, united around a simple proposition: to go out in the woods every day and do something big. Climb a mountain. Cross a frozen river—or, better, a partly frozen one. Tyler was 13, and it was how he spent his winter weekends with a few other kids at New Hampshire’s Wildcat Mountain ski school, in the White Mountains. The group included Mark Synnott, who would grow up to be a big-wall climber, and Rob Frost, now a noted adventure filmmaker. But back then they were a bunch of restless pups who wanted to see how close they could sneak toward the edge and not get hurt.


If they did get hurt, they were usually too numb to notice. Wildcat Mountain, near Mount Washington, is a squat, north-facing slab of ice to which the term “resort” is usually applied ironically. Godawful weather is the norm, and from a tender age Hamilton was faithfully submitted to its charms, his family making the three-hour trip from their Marblehead home each winter weekend. Though Tyler had already displayed a somewhat alarming tendency to find pain (broken ankle, several stitched-up chins), Wildcat was the place where he spent time in its company.


After all, his parents, Bill and Lorna Hamilton, had met skiing Tuckerman’s Ravine, a famously gnarly hike-in descent in the White Mountains, and had essentially stayed outdoors ever since. If you were a Hamilton in the 1980s, it was a given: Summers were spent sailing, winters skiing, and in between were rafting trips to Alaska and climbs on Mount Washington. Craziness was permitted on these adventures, even tacitly encouraged. Within the walls of the Hamilton house, however, another set of rules prevailed, mostly enforced by Bill, a computer consultant. Telephones were answered properly, meals attended punctually. And one of the most explicit rules regarded boasting.


“It just was not done,” Jennifer Linehan, Tyler’s 37-year-old sister, remembers. “If you talked big about something you’d accomplished, they would listen politely and then move on.”


Not that there weren’t things to boast about. All three Hamilton kids were good athletes, and by his early teens Tyler was one of the top downhill racers in New England. But that didn’t mean he could act like it. After winning races, Hamilton was required by his father to congratulate the dejected losers. Hamilton would make the rounds, nodding and smiling—I just got lucky this time; next time it’ll be you—and pretty soon the other kids would be nodding and smiling right along with him.


In 1987, Hamilton went to Holderness School, a sports-minded boarding academy near Plymouth, New Hampshire, where Crazykid energy was funneled into a grid of old-fashioned Episcopalian discipline, and where Hamilton roomed with the son of former East German cyclist Peter Kaiter, who introduced Hamilton to European-style bike racing. Hamilton attended mandatory church services and was instructed by people like Phil Peck, a former Olympic nordic coach who could recite the Book of Common Prayer and anaerobic-threshold statistics with equal authority.


In 1990, Hamilton entered the University of Colorado, in Boulder, as a freshman and joined the school’s ski team as a walk-on. The following year, he broke two vertebrae in a mountain-bike crash, ending his downhill career and sending him to pedal off his frustrations in the Rocky Mountains. A promising part-time cyclist, Hamilton quickly excelled when it became his focus; he joined the university’s cycling team in 1992—winning the collegiate nationals in 1993—rode for the U.S. national team in ’94, turned pro in ’95, helped Armstrong win the Tour with USPS from 1999 to 2001, and went to the CSC team in 2002. Each year he moved to a new level. “Baby steps,” Hamilton calls them.


“Tyler started later than most,” says Jim Ochowicz, who coached Hamilton at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and serves as president of USA Cycling, the sport’s governing body in the U.S. “He might be 33, but his body isn’t as beat up as a lot of the other guys who started cycling at 15. He’s still got room to explore.”

THAT EXPLORATION reached new territory this winter when Ochowicz helped arrange an agreement for Hamilton to join Phonak, a Swiss team, sponsored by a hearing-aid company, with a $9 million budget and equally large ambitions. Their offer—to build a team solely around Hamilton for the Tour de France, to give him say on personnel and equipment and a high-six-figure salary—was too good to refuse. Being team leader brings with it new pressures, which Hamilton welcomes with a metaphor that one hopes will prove less than apt. “If I fall on my face,” he says, “there’s no one to blame but me.”


Having friends will help—particularly when one of them happens to be the peloton’s unquestioned boss. Unlike some of Armstrong’s departed teammates, Hamilton has gone out of his way to maintain a good relationship with the Texan. When Postal’s team director, Johan Bruyneel, urged then-domestique Hamilton to go after his first major victory at the 2000 Dauphine Libere, Hamilton would not ride ahead until he got the OK from Armstrong himself. A year later, before departing Postal for CSC, Hamilton involved his team leader to the extent that by the end it seemed almost like Armstrong’s idea. And when a certain Girona apartment became available in 2001, Hamilton called Armstrong, who’d already bought the first floor, to see if he’d be OK with the Hamiltons living above. “He didn’t want it to be weird,” Haven says. “And of course Lance was happy about it.”


Travel schedules being what they are, the two top Americans cross paths mostly at races but remain, in Geoff Hamilton’s estimation, “professional friends,” exchanging occasional e-mails. When they arrived in Girona this winter, Armstrong and girlfriend Sheryl Crow hosted the Hamiltons at a small dinner party. It’s the sort of relationship that suits both riders, and has suited the sport’s headline writers no less well: Lance and Tyler, the bold Texan and the reserved New Englander, two American archetypes.


“Lance and I have two different characters,” Hamilton says. “Lance is good at talking, and he’s got what it takes to back it up every step of the way. I’m quieter. What he does works for him, and what I do works for me.”


A blessedly sunny Friday in March. Team Hamilton heads to the office—namely a short, innocuous stretch of gently rolling two-lane a few miles north of Girona known as the Strip. Today is a motor-pacing day, which means that Haven drives their Audi Quattro a few inches in front of Hamilton’s front wheel, shielding him from the wind. She motor-paces him for one stretch, then he does a lap alone, then they repeat, riding back and forth along the Strip for two or three hours.


“Boring, isn’t it?” says Haven, who is Hamilton’s confidante, chef, and partner in the Tyler Hamilton Foundation and the company Inside Track Tours, which, among other things, gives clients a view of the Tour each summer. But like any good New Englander will tell you, boring can have a higher purpose: in this case, the subtle but profound changes her husband’s body is undergoing in preparation for the Tour. Already slender, he will lose five more pounds, a task made difficult by his sturdy skier’s physique. His body fat will drop to practically nothing, and his skin will become, Haven says, like cellophane. “If I touch him in the middle of the night,” she says, “his body will be red-hot, like his metabolism is revving.”


There are other changes, too. When races approach, particularly before time trials, Hamilton slips into what Haven calls “race mode.” Life will get quieter—no visitors, no media, no distractions. His family knows the rules: no phone calls the day or two before a major race, longer before the Tour—or, if you do call, plan on it being rather brief. His brother, Geoff, calls it the “no go” area.


“I’m not sure what he does,” Geoff says. “I just know that this is how his mind works, getting ready to take the pain, to do what it takes.”


As it happens, the area of the human brain that handles pain signals is the same area that helps create and interpret emotion. It’s a roughly walnut-size spot called the anterior cingulate cortex, and its influence on our personality is gigantic—”the seat of the soul,” some biologists have called it. “I think the brain of a guy like Hamilton is wired differently,” says Dan Galper, a senior research associate in the psychiatry department at the University of Texas. “To endure what he endures and stay in control, there’s no question that something unique is going on.”


The notion that pain—as opposed to, say, sight or smell or musical ability—is intertwined with our essential personalities is one that would seem to apply to Hamilton. Perhaps he’s nice because he’s tough, and he’s tough because he’s nice. At least to a point.


Yes, now it can be told: There are times when Tyler Hamilton is not nice. During a race a couple of years ago, Hamilton handed his sunglasses to a mechanic in his team car to be cleaned. Seconds ticked away, riders sped past, and the mechanic was still fervently wiping and rewiping the glasses. Finally, Hamilton had had enough. “How long does it take,” he yelled, “to clean a pair of fucking glasses?!“


Back in the Girona café after training, however, afloat on a pleasant river of conversation, such an outburst seems very far away. Except for one moment, when Hamilton is asked what he thinks about while in race mode.


“Ummm,” he says, his eyes focusing on something in the middle distance. “That’s a good question.”


He answers eventually—talking about memorizing the course and mulling tactics—but there are no widened eyes, no nod, no friendly intimation of shared ground. You can’t help but get the feeling that here begins the no-go area. Perhaps there are some sorts of wilderness that are best explored alone.

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September dusk in the hills of Berkeley, California, and David Brower is working in his office. He is writing a letter, and it's getting late.

He pauses often, pen tapping as he summons the rhythms and imagery to transform a string of mere words into something more powerful: a message. When he makes the slightest move to the side, his old swivel chair yowls in protest. Anne, his wife, has asked him several times to oil the bearings, but she doesn't mention it anymore. The screech of metal has become for her a kind of code: Short screeches mean her husband is working; a long screech means he is turning away from his desk and perhaps coming to bed. When she hears nothing, she comes to check, cane thumping down the dim hallway, to make sure her husband is where he should be, head bent over his papers, white hair ablaze in a cone of lamplight.

Brower works through sunset. After the letter, there's a book to look at, a luncheon to arrange, a grant proposal to examine, a radio interview to do, and then, perhaps after a martini, the real work begins.��

Each afternoon, Brower's desk receives a stack of environmental journals, magazines, books, newsletters, updates, pamphlets, and broadsheets from all regions of the globe, reams of paper deepening at the steady rate of four inches a day. About twice a week, Brower dives in, tearing out pages, pressing down sticky notes, performing hasty origami on countless leaves of newsprint, cutting and pressing the anonymous flow with an imperial hand until only the vital information remains. Governments proclaim, scientists reveal, ambassadors declare, activists denounce, politicians waffle, and rebellions are crushed; human civilization gushes along on a torrent of print, and Brower inhales all of it in great thirsty gulps. Once he has done that, his instinct calls for utterance, expressive action. To tell them, all of them: Can't they see what's happening? Within the walls of his modest home there are 11 telephones, a fax machine, a typewriter, a laser printer, and a PowerBook. His latest goal is to write a newspaper column, preferably syndicated worldwide. He is learning his way around the Internet. He is 83 years old.

If there's enough time, Brower will fax some of his findings to one of the hundreds of environmental organizations with which he is affiliated, perhaps with a note: You have to see this. Maybe they'll turn up in the Sermon, the stump speech that Brower delivers in various forms a hundred or so times a year, a witty assemblage of eco-parables and scary statistics that says, in essence, (1) the earth's living body is under dire attack and (2) with energy and boldness it can be healed.

But there's never enough time. That is the point. So Brower simply reads the stack of mail and keeps going, making speeches and writing letters until there's more mail to wade through, more speeches to give, more letters to write. It never ends; if it did, so would Brower. He has made a preacher's bargain with life. He constructs messages—on biopreserves and hypercars, wilderness restoration and population control—and messages, in turn, construct him. They form the framework of his days, magnetically coupling him to thousands of anonymous faces with brief, intense sparks, each spark affirming his identity as the most charismatic, controversial environmental leader of the century.

Brower is wholly or partly responsible for what the movement considers many of its greatest rescues—the Grand Canyon, Kings Canyon, the North Cascades, Point Reyes, Redwood National Park, and Dinosaur National Monument—and equally responsible for some of its most tragic losses, including Utah's Glen Canyon. He founded Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute and helped start the League of Conservation Voters. More important, Brower is a visionary in the most fundamental sense of the word. In the late fifties and sixties, using film, books, and the persuasive resonance of his voice, he taught the American public how to see and relate to wilderness—a skill being appreciated anew by activists dissatisfied with today's bloodless, technocratic approach. He is a cultivator of talent—”soft path” physicist Amory Lovins and population guru Paul Ehrlich were first recognized and encouraged by Brower—and of an endless fount of ideas awaiting fruition, including the National Biosphere Reserve System and the World Ecological Bank, which would provide funding for preservation projects. Not all of his ideas take root, and Brower doesn't seem to expect them to. He is, as he puts it, a catalyst, a coaxer, a pied piper whose main function is “to turn on the lights.”

He is also, as numerous people will testify, holy hell to work with. Beneath his genial veneer lies an obsessive, uncompromising drive that led to a series of bitter disputes and his unhappy departures from both the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. Prickly and single-minded, Brower seems always to move too fast, want too much, push too hard. No one can keep up. His sense of mission comes before allegiances, before friendship and family, before everyday comfort and affection. He's given a million dollars of his own money to support small environmental projects. Year by year, he has purified his life until all that remains is the David Brower ecological gospel in excelsis, the totality of which is contained in the most primal of assertions: I know.

But there is one reality that cannot be disguised. Slowly, inevitably, Brower's body is beginning to fail. He fights these changes as he fights everything he despises: stiff-arms them with clever wordplay, obliterates them with sheer will, steadfastly refuses to alter his course. His death, when it comes, will undoubtedly set off a rush to embrace his ideals and his memory—both of which are safe, easy to love. But for now there is just the old man in the lamplight, existing on the periphery of the movement he helped create, etching out messages for an unseen audience. Before our eyes, Brower is being transfigured into the embodiment of his own sermon, a living metaphor for a planet being consumed by itself. The difference, of course, is that his body cannot be healed. And Brower, the visionary, seems the last to see.

“How late will he work?” I ask. Anne shrugs. “I never know. Sometimes till two or three in the morning. Sometimes later.”

We walk to the back patio, and Anne pours strawberry-banana nectar into tiny glasses. She talks of their upcoming trip to the eastern Sierra Nevada, a reunion with old Sierra Club friends. She is looking forward to it warily. Brower's 1969 split with the Sierra Club was an earthshaking event, a source of such anger and sadness that tempers still flare despite courteous exteriors. “It could be wonderful,” she says. “Then again, it could be horrid. One never knows.”

Anne Brower is a small woman with shrewd, knowing eyes. She has been married to David for 52 years. Her friends call her a saint, because they can conceive of no one else who would have stayed with him. She won't agree, of course. To be a saint, one must do something.

“I'm very uninteresting compared to David,” she says firmly. “Everything has always been connected to his work. I've lost my identity.

“There was one time when I thought we'd finally get away for a vacation together,” she says. “It was back in 1969, after David was fired. I saw an ad for a beautiful house on Big Sur. We rented it for the year, and I even bought towels, thinking, 'Well, now he won't have to work so much anymore.' We stayed there one night. He went right on doing what he had been doing.”

After a while, the conversation turns to a more somber subject. From deep within the house, there's a faint squeak, and Anne nods as if to confirm it: He's still there.

“David doesn't think about death at all,” she says. “I think at my age there's nothing more exciting that's going to happen to me except dying. But he believes that if he were to think about death, it would keep him from accomplishing things. He wants to work up to the bitter end.”

“But why? Can't he rest awhile?”

Anne's eyes move quickly to mine. She looks mildly surprised. “Why, he has to save the world.”

David Brower is not a hard man to meet, he is hard to catch. He spends half the year voyaging on a dizzying wave of conferences, retreats, book readings, film festivals, lectures, and benefits. It's been said that he never met an invitation he didn't like. His quotidian duties include the chairmanship of Earth Island Institute, which he founded in 1982, and membership on the board of the Sierra Club, to which he was reelected this year. When in town, he can be spotted buzzing around the Bay Area in his slightly beat-up 1983 Corolla, the one with the FREE AL GORE bumper sticker. He drives the Berkeley hills like a dervish, accelerating into blind corners, downshifting on the fly. Following Brower is frightening, though the feeling is slightly attenuated by the realization that he was born four years after the introduction of the Model T.

Brower loves restaurants, particularly fifties-era seafood-and-steak joints with studded-leather booths and bartenders who know his preferences—Tanqueray martinis straight up, no distractions. He doesn't like to dine with just one other person, so he typically invites a crowd. More sociable, he says. Sinbad's, on the Embarcadero, at one.

The voice is what one notices first. Not that the rest slips past. He's a big man, with the rawboned physicality of a former football star. The unclimbable crag of a face, totemic cheek-creases, wild blooms of eyebrows, glistening blue eyes, and a halo of pearly hair combine to create such an aura of spiritual heft that it's a good ten minutes before one notices that Brower is something less than an image of sartorial splendor, outfitted in his customary garb of a T-shirt and well-frayed blazer, mismatched polyester pants, and inexpensive running shoes with Velcro closures. Bowed legs and a sore knee—the latter partly a result of a 1936 ski injury—lend a hint of a John Wayne saunter. When he walks across a room, eyes track him, and Brower looks resolutely at the floor. It's hard to tell whether he's shy or just looking where he's going.

But the voice, so vigorous and yet so intimate, is what stands out. Brower begins each sentence in the tenor register and slides into a velvet baritone, looping melodies around themselves, hitting words with unexpected emphases so that the listener has the sense of hearing them for the first time. He doesn't speak words so much as play his voice, a cornetlike music that spirals above the atonal chug of normal conversation. There is no gap between Brower's public and private dialects, as sometimes occurs with public figures. Furious, depressed, or asking would you please pass the salt, Brower sings. “When he's speaking to a crowd, it's like he's whispering to you,” says Patrick Goldsworthy, an old friend from the Sierra Club. “He says things with feeling.”

Brower found the voice in the early 1940s when, as a shy mountaineer, he was asked to talk in front of 200 people on a Sierra Club High Trip. He doesn't remember much about what he said—something about the landscape, the mountains. But standing there, in front of the campfire, something inside him awoke. “He used to be so quiet,” Anne says. “Now you just drop in a nickel and the cassette plays.”

“Now, take a bird's feather, for instance,” Brower says, spearing a shrimp. “I just marvel at that structure—the hairs, the spacing, the pattern. It's a very nice bit of design, enabling it to fly, to handle temperature changes. Or look at beetles. Did you realize that there's a beetle that can produce steam to fire at enemies? There's a clam that can manufacture cement at the temperature of seawater. What's the trick? We have no idea. If we found out, we might pave everything in sight.” He chuckles, with a quick glance to make sure I'm chuckling, too.

“There are certain advantages to being an octogenarian. For instance, I can be outrageous. I was only mildly outrageous before 80, but now there's nothing they can do to hurt you. They might, of course.” He smiles into his Tanqueray. “But probably not.”

He recites poetry. He counts pelicans, noting that his all-time Sinbad's lunch record stands at 176, happy hour included. He seems content, an emotion that militant environmentalists—militant anybodies, for that matter—aren't supposed to possess after a half-century of throwing themselves into the establishment's toothy maw. Even his pacemaker, recently implanted to correct a mild fibrillation, is charmingly evoked. “My doctors told me to get this pacemaker so I could keep up with myself,” he says.

But between the riffs, there's silence. Long, awkward, fork-scraping silences. Anne shoots guests a sympathetic look. Words possess tremendous power with Brower, but he cannot or will not employ them for small talk. He won't ask about you, and he would prefer if you didn't ask too deeply about him. His words fly up and out; they soar like so many pelicans. Then you wait until more appear.

Even with his closest friends, Brower can sit for an hour and not speak. He's ephemeral at social gatherings, preferring to avoid them or linger in a corner. At conferences he hovers near the door, unless he's at the podium. He's more at ease with a thousand people he doesn't know, his friends say, than with one person he does.

His behavior forces his friends to explain, and so they do. He's shy. He's preoccupied. He's aloof. He's humble. He's arrogant. He's honest. He's scared to death of people.

Some boil over in frustration. “He could have become a nationally known leader,” says former Sierra Club colleague Jim Moorman. To Brower, however, speculation is moot. He can't change—and even if he did, what would be the cost? What places wouldn't get saved? What ideas wouldn't be born? Besides, as he likes to say, “I don't like people telling me what to do.”

Of course, personal costs have piled up, but Brower, ever optimistic, ever in control, has always managed to deal with them. Friends no longer speak to him? Forgive them, then find new ones. Environmental groups fire him, call him selfish and irresponsible? Start another group. Start two-they'll come around. Children grow distant in your absence? Take them on unforgettable adventures; they'll come around, too. But keep moving forward. “A ship in harbor is safe,” he likes to say. “But that's not what ships are built for.”

While Brower remains for the most part in good health, his body has suffered breakdowns: bladder cancer ten years ago, recurrent sciatica, a fainting spell before the pacemaker was implanted. In public he deals with mortality in typical Browerian style, kidding about applying for a 20-year extension and stating his fervent hope that the recipient of his dust will have as much fun with it as he himself is currently having. But mostly he deals with it by not dealing with it, traveling incessantly.

“Some people need money, some people need power,” says Edwin Matthews Jr., a former Brower protégé at Friends of the Earth who split with him over management style. “What Dave needs is to be appreciated. Or maybe to be loved. He's in his element telling a story he's told 500 times to a group of people 50 years younger sitting around him in a circle, listening.”

Part of his work is to oversee the creation of his own legacy. The two volumes of his 904-page autobiography, For Earth's Sake (1990) and Work in Progress (1991), are less the story of Brower's life than a meticulous exhibition of his old writings, reflections, and wish lists, a kind of museum of the interpreted self. He wrote his most recent book, an extended sermon titled Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run, in a focused stretch of four months, giving coauthor Steve Chapple the distinct impression that this was “his last shot at getting it right.”

“He has faith in his destiny,” says Martin Litton, an old friend and ally who served on the Sierra Club board from 1964 to 1972. “He feels he was placed on earth to do these things that no one else can do.”��

Those close to him say that even as Brower continues at an unrelenting pace, he has also begun to repair broken relationships. He is paying more attention to his family. A few years ago Anne began accompanying him on some of his travels. He says “love you” when he tells his children good-bye, and he looks them in the eye when he says it. He attempts what for Brower borders on the inconceivable: He sits around and talks about nothing at all. The old ship is trying, with supreme difficulty, to get accustomed to harbor.

“I like him a lot better now,” says his daughter, Barbara, a professor of geography at Oregon's Portland State University. “He's a more attentive father, and he's turned into a good grandfather. His humanity has increased.”

To Brower's surprise and pleasure, his 49-year-old son, Bob, has offered to accompany him and Anne to this weekend's High Trip reunion in Lone Pine, California. The second of their four children has been beset by what are gently called “Bob's troubles”—a head injury from a motorcycle accident, bad luck with jobs and women, and other, more personal demons.

“This trip will be good for Bob,” Brower pronounces, draining his coffee. “Getting out into the wildness will help Bob be Bob again.”

Another long silence. Chairs shift. Then Brower stands abruptly, announces that it's time to go, and walks toward the restaurant door.

Strawberry Creek was a fine place to grow up. Its upper reaches were a rolling paradise of trails, and that's where David Brower spent his days. The Browers were like other families who lived in the crude Victorian houses on Haste Street, a stubborn and religious mix of third- and fourth-generation immigrants. His father, Ross Brower, taught mechanical drawing at the University of California, Berkeley, on whose undeveloped campus Strawberry Creek flowed. David, one of four professor's kids, had the run of the hills, bicycling, hiking, and catching butterflies, which he pinned on cardboard. He was a solitary boy, and this was his kingdom.

Things got tough when David was in the third grade. The university fired his father, who had to manage apartments to get by. Around the same time, his mother fell ill. Her vision slipped away—an inoperable brain tumor, they were told. One day David stood wordless at the foot of her bed as she peered at him, trying to guess who he might be.

Their walks began as a way for David to escape chores around the apartments. But his mother loved the hills and found the strength to walk for hours. They went again and again, the tall woman and her bowlegged boy, as far as they could walk, past the farthest reaches of Strawberry Creek to the top of Grizzly Peak, where you could see the whole world. She gripped his left arm and he led the way, telling her where the rough places were. And other things, too.

Now we're in the pines. The fog is clearing. There are some wildflowers in the clearing, and a red-tailed hawk flying above them, looking for field mice. There's a breeze coming off the ocean. It'll be beautiful at the summit. This way.

It was good preparation, walking those hills. His boyhood friends used to joke, “He who follows a Brower never follows a trail,” and their words would remain true throughout his life. Whenever Brower reached a personal or professional crossroads, he could sense where he was—and, more important, where he wanted to be. To others he would sometimes look foolish, lost. But Brower didn't mind: He was in motion, rising above the rest, and if his friends didn't come along, well, he would wave to them when he got to the mountaintop.

After dropping out of college during the Depression—the established road to higher education never suited Brower—he paired with various friends and disappeared into the Sierra for weeks. Toting Survey of Sierra Routes and Records and a bag of small notebooks to leave as registers, they set out to leave their names on as many peaks as possible. They cached food in candy cans and huddled through storms without tents. Brower was nearly six-foot-two, 170 pounds, and rawhide-strong. He was the happiest he had ever been.

Inevitably, he met people who liked to do the same thing. Sierra Club members traveled in big groups, wore jaunty alpine hats, sang campfire songs, and talked about the sainted founder, John Muir, who had implored them to “explore, enjoy, and preserve” these mountains. It became their trinity. Gradually Brower grew to like their gracious camaraderie, their clannish verve. These were talented, first-rate people—lawyers, doctors, writers from pedigreed California families. And they liked him. Put him anywhere in the Sierra at night, they said admiringly, and he would know where he was by sunrise.

The club became family, and soon Brower was wearing an alpine hat and leading High Trips, the 200-person, two- and four-week outings. Scissoring along on his bowed legs, he walked faster than anyone, and more optimistically. “Brower miles” became a running gag. Dave's got a place that ain't on the map—he says it's just a mile away. Then they'd bushwhack a half-dozen miles and find themselves someplace unforgettable, Brower yodeling in triumph. Roping up with fellow Sierrans, he tackled difficult first ascents, like that of Shiprock in New Mexico, for which his team employed a new device called an expansion bolt. With his long reach and flowing style, Brower usually climbed lead, and he scored more than 70 first ascents. Camel Cigarettes wondered about the possibility of his becoming a spokesperson, and with good reason. Club women swooned over the tousle-haired Adonis; they would lie down in the trail for him, it was said. But he stepped over. There were always more places to go.

For Brower, the only thing that compared with climbing was writing. He spent winter nights bent over his desk at home, transforming the sensory clutter of his expeditions into words, images, and stories. On the expanse of the page, the expeditions were different, more clever, tidy, as if he had tapped into a sort of parallel reality that stripped away all the nonsense and cut immediately to the important things: beauty, truth, heroism, wilderness. He liked it immensely, this word-magic, and he could tell that he was good. He landed a job as an editor with the University of California Press in 1941 and, at about the same time, won a seat on the Sierra Club's board of directors. On High Trips, people began asking him to speak. They sat around him in a circle, and Brower could see their eyes shining in the firelight.

At his new job, he shared an office with a woman named Anne Hus. She was an editor too, worldly and whip-smart, and they sipped sherry at her parents' house. Brower, now 29, needed near-violent prodding from his Sierra Club friends to keep up the pursuit—after all, he was heading off to fight the Germans, and she was engaged to another. But her engagement broke apart. From a train on the way to officer candidate school, he wrote a letter proposing marriage. She wrote back. Two weeks after their wedding, they went to a movie. It was their first real date.

When Brower returned from the war. He threw himself into Sierra Club works. But he was interested in fulfilling the last part of Muir's trinity. Mountains could be ruined—he had seen it in Europe—not by bombs, but by far more dangerous weapons: roads and bridges, ski chalets and power lines. Now here was a cause to believe in.

His timing was perfect. Fueled by postwar expansion, the Bureau of Reclamation was looking to dam the Colorado River in Utah's Dinosaur National Monument. The club's leadership decided to organize, to motivate, and Brower took the lead. They made him executive director in 1952. Nobody knew what an executive director did, since the club had never had one before. But whatever Brower did, that was it. Give riveting testimony before Congress. Make headlines. Build public support. He filmed and narrated wilderness-awareness movies on Yosemite and the North Cascades. He invented a new genre of book, monstrously big, wildly expensive exhibits of heartbreakingly beautiful wilderness photos by his friend Ansel Adams and others. The books were Brower's special pride. He determined the tint of each photo, the placement of each comma. Move the readers to tears, he said, and their action will follow. He was resoundingly right. Club membership increased from 7,000 to 77,000 during his tenure (today it hovers at around a half-million). Pundits say he invented environmentalism for the media age, but what he really did was something simpler: He took the American public by the hand and showed it what he saw.��

Meanwhile his own family was growing up. Most of the child-rearing fell to Anne, of course. David was too busy, too involved. Anne uses the word “encapsulated.” She could drop a dinner plate behind him and he'd keep working. Sometimes birthdays and other special occasions slipped past. “You don't know me from the girl next door!” his daughter, Barbara, screamed at him. “Of course I do,” Brower replied without missing a beat. “She's a little taller and has blond hair.”

There was so much to do. When the bureau tried to dam the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon, he ran full-page ads in the New York Times, one of which read, “If They Turn Grand Canyon Into a Cash Register Is Any National Park Safe?” Perfect! Public sympathy swelled, the dam was scuttled, and though the club was stripped of its valuable tax-deductible status (IRS regulations prohibit direct political action), the loss was more than offset by small, nondeductible contributions. Brower called for more books, more words, more pictures. More action! He was featured in Life magazine. When the board of directors—some of whom were old climbing pals—objected over the tax issue or worried that too much of the club's budget was tied up in books, he ignored them, or threatened to resign, or used that voice of his. Is it more important to keep the bottom line black or the earth green?

Battles were being won: Dinosaur, the Wilderness Act of 1964, Point Reyes National Seashore. Lost battles, like that over Glen Canyon in the late fifties, held even more power—Brower never visited the canyon but agreed to its being dammed in exchange for the cancellation of two other dam projects in northeastern Utah's Echo Park and Split Mountain. When the dam that would soon create Lake Powell was being built, Brower made repeated pilgrimages to the place, compiled films, commissioned books, and transformed his shortsightedness into a cross that he still bears. “Glen Canyon died in 1963 and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you,” he wrote in The Place No One Knew (1963). He vowed never to commit the same sin again.

Relations with the club's board, however, worsened. Friends wrote him letters, pleaded with him to change his ways. (“Please take a good, long, objective look at the present aspect of the Club, its finances, and its programs—and, very important, at yourself!!! As ever, Ansel.”) But Brower wouldn't change. He ignored lines of authority and spent money without board approval. Seemingly oblivious to rising financial problems—the club lost $100,000 a year in 1967 and 1968—Brower demanded a costly international series of books. How could he change? The bastards weren't resting, and relentless action was the best way to get more money. Couldn't they see?

In 1969 they fired him. Technically it was a resignation, but everyone knew the truth. First a coldly worded telegram relieving him of fiscal responsibilities, then a series of votes. “The Happening,” Sierrans called it in hushed tones. Almost all of Brower's friends voted against him, including Adams. The Sierrans salved their doubts by talking of “cleansing” the club, by comparing Brower to a noble but foolish climber who got too far above his protection, who hurt the club by taking selfish risks. How could they understand that there was no self left to risk? He was on a mission they couldn't imagine. This was bigger than rivers, bigger than any lines on the map. They would see, once he got to the mountaintop.

As we get ready to leave for the Sierra Club High Trip reunion in Lone Pine the next morning, Brower putters around his house, looking for something. He moves carefully in the labyrinthine spaces of his living room, bending into corners as if he were sniffing orchids in a garden.

“I know where it is,” he says. “It should be right here.”

Elbow-deep in a stack of papers, he extracts his quarry, a magazine story on Yosemite. He places it carefully on another stack and moves on, tracking down something else.

“Could you give me a tour of the house?” I ask. Brower does not turn. After a moment I ask again, and he looks at me incredulously. Where would he begin? With the 100 or so file boxes stacked in every possible cranny—ten under the baby grand piano, six behind the couch—which serve as the repositories of his daily clipping and filing? Or with the warrenlike basement, where Bob Brower resides, its windows covered by more boxes? Or perhaps with the rocks, the hundreds of granite, limestone, quartzite, agate, and sandstone keepsakes, many from Glen Canyon, which lend the distinct impression that a glacier has just receded through his living room? Or out on the patio, with the four garbage cans brimming with golf balls, the fruit of Brower's morning strolls near the links, colors in one can, whites in the others? Or perhaps the bedroom, the door of which is papered with dozens of tattered name tags, each reaffirming the identity of the person within: HELLO MY NAME IS DAVID BROWER. Brower cannot give a tour because the meaning of his home, like the meaning of himself, is not found in any individual object. Everything here is equivalent, possessing significance only within the arc of relentless action that created it.

“Here are some pictures,” he says finally. He points them out, one by one: black-and-white portraits of him and Anne the year they married, smiling grandkids captured in a snapshot, the surreal poise of an Ansel Adams landscape, images of family closeness, of wilderness, of a life rich in people.

��

But these images aren't complete, not as a record of relationships. Where are Dick and Doris Leonard, his best friends during the early Sierra Club years? Where is Dan Luten, his old next-door neighbor, fellow mountaineer, and longtime colleague? Where is Edwin Matthews? Where are Wallace Stegner, Phil Berry, Mike McCloskey, Dr. Luna Leopold, all the others?

Unlike his wife (“I hated them all,” says Anne of the Sierrans who voted against her husband), Brower says he holds no grudges. In the months after the Happening, he was determined not to become a pariah. He kept his membership and did his best to maintain the social ties despite lingering tensions. In 1983, when the petition was circulated to renominate him to the board, he made a special point of obtaining the signatures of old friends such as Adams. When Brower encounters former colleagues—as he will this weekend at Lone Pine—he exudes cordiality, and it is usually returned in kind. After all, there's important work to be done, work that transcends personal disputes. But no cordiality can resurrect the promise of these relationships. They are shadows, ghosts of a time long past.

“Brower overlooked certain aspects of human relations that are important,” says Hal Gilliam, former environmental columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. “He never made amends, never apologized for his mistakes. I know so many people who worshiped him and then were turned off.”

Some ghosts are more corporeal than others. Dick Leonard was Brower's strong-minded mentor and climbing buddy; people said they seemed like brothers. In 1952 Leonard pushed for Brower to become the club's executive director, and in 1969, saying he had to preserve the organization, he orchestrated Brower's removal. Brower carried no rancor, making a point of celebrating each New Year's Eve with the Leonards, as always. But a few years ago Dick fell ill. It was a long and painful ordeal; friends wept at seeing the once-powerful climber trapped at home in a wheelchair, blind. But Brower never wept with them. Though he lived less than a mile away, he never visited. Doris Leonard, puzzled and saddened, could only conclude that it wasn't her husband Brower was avoiding; it was the other presence in that house.

Brower has a recurring nightmare. In it, he is trying to get something done—packing for a trip, cleaning the house—and he can't finish in time. He is sweating and trying hard, but the work keeps piling up and the clock keeps ticking. The harder he tries, the worse things get. And then it's time.

Within days of leaving the Sierra Club in 1969, Brower was on the move. With a few loyal staffers and thousands of disaffected members, he set out to realize his vision of what the Sierra Club could have become: a global, media-savvy, politically muscular activist group. He called the new organization Friends of the Earth, and it would be the first truly international environmental group. Newly christened the archdruid of environmentalism by John McPhee's New Yorker profile, Brower attacked on all fronts: Nuclear weapons. Solar energy. Population control. The California condor. The Alaska Pipeline. Toxics. Whales. Brower's role was to act as visionary and catalyst, traveling widely, casting his net. He preached the Sermon to thrilled campus crowds, always ending with the Goethe couplet that had become his credo: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Then he'd look at the rapt faces and say, “There's magic in you. Let it out.” You could hear a pin drop. It was marvelous.

Meanwhile his children had grown up. The three boys, like their father, weren't overly enamored with college. Ken worked on his writing (which like his father's was concerned with the environment), Barbara studied geography, and Bob and John pursued less structured endeavors, dabbling in electronics and recycling, respectively. They were too old to go on summer trips now. There were the usual modern family pains—hospital visits, broken relationships, fumbling for careers—and David simply didn't have time to come home and play catch-up. He would later calculate that in the first 40 years of his marriage, he spent an aggregate of 25 years away.

Almost from FOE's beginning, board members were worried. Money came rapidly—the group had a $1.5 million budget within a few years—and departed just as quickly. Led by Brower's enthusiasm, FOE started dozens of new projects each year. Every few weeks or so, some young person would walk into the Pacific Avenue headquarters: Hi. Dave, uh, hired me to work on overgrazing. The staff swelled to 50, triple that of comparably budgeted environmental groups. But every time FOE tried to get its financial house in order, there was Brower, eyes glistening, singing in that incantatory voice. We can work faster, better, harder. We'll get more members, sell more books, take on more projects. He was unstoppable.

But by the mideighties the FOE board had heard the voice too often. The coffers were nearly empty, and the staff had divided into virulent pro- and anti-Brower factions. Three successive presidents had resigned, chorusing protests that their work was being undercut by Brower. New kids kept strolling in. “Founder's syndrome,” pronounced a management consultant, diagnosing a disease with only one known cure. So in 1986 it happened again. Another board vote, another ousting, another round of damaged friendships and bitter recriminations.

Within months, Brower emerged with another group. This time, he swore, he was through with bureaucracies and boards. Earth Island Institute would be built according to the Brower model: an umbrella organization for small projects, each responsible for its own staffing and its own wallet. The scheme has worked out pretty well. EII has made a name for itself through the dolphin-safe tuna campaign and other successes. Brower gets to be Brower, shaking up worldviews with big ideas. Infuriated as ever by inaction, he still makes noise at board meetings, threatening to resign three times in recent years. “He gets frustrated that Earth Island doesn't have the infrastructure like he had at his other groups,” says Chris Franklin, Brower's personal assistant. “He stands up at meetings and does an I'm-going-to-take-my-ball-and-go-home sort of thing.”

These flare-ups are part of the primal drive that has defined the course of Brower's life from mountain climber to environmental agitator to ethereal visionary, the same drive that in its intransigence created a place like Earth Island Institute. This is where he belongs, among people yet profoundly apart. He does not wish to cause distress; he simply has no choice. He must take people by the arm and lead. This way.��

The tiny town of Lone Pine, California, lies on the border of two universes. To the east stretches some of the harshest desert in America, trailing down to Death Valley, 104 miles away. To the west swells the 14,000-foot rampart of the southern Sierra, including Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower 48. Lone Pine sits in a narrow shelf between the two worlds, cushioned by chaparral and cottonwoods, fully belonging to neither.

It's a good setting for a High Trip reunion. Club members have come from as far away as Maine. They gather outside town on Friday evening, next to a small lake in the shadow of Mount Whitney, about 50 people in all. They arrive wearing trail regalia, neckerchiefs and too-snug jeans, toting coolers of beer and dilapidated photo albums. Teeth flash in shouts of greeting; bear hugs knock hats to the dirt.

The Brower family arrives late, just before sunset. Quietly, with David leading, they pick their way to the edge of the group. David seats his wife in a comfortable chair before finding an adjacent log for himself and Bob. He deftly fixes drinks from his nylon daypack, an old-fashioned for her, a martini for himself, straight up, no distractions. Then he leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks around. A warm wind blows from the desert; the air tastes of sage. The noise of the far-off highway is hard to distinguish from the papery rev of dragonflies. Brower's eyes move around the campsite, taking it all in.

He looks at the people. There are no ghosts here, no old rivals of battles past. These are only faces, some recollected, some new. Brower waits for them to come over. By and by, they do.

“Do you remember me? I was 12 when you led us on a Yosemite trip.”

“You always walked so fast, Dave—and it don't look like you've slowed down much.”

Brower smiles and nods, and the visitors wait expectantly for small talk. A colorful story, perhaps, or a fond recital of names and reminiscences. Anne smiles at them. “Aren't these gnats amazing?” Brower says.

He's looking at the small cloud of insects hovering off his shoulder, a mad tornado of feathery motes. He lifts his big hand and slowly moves it through the gnats; they repool instantly. He does it again and then stares at the creatures. “What's their method of communication?” he asks. “What sort of compass do they use to figure out where they need to go? How do they talk to one another? These are some of the things I'd like to know.”

Hands rise and touch gnats. Brower smiles and raises his martini in a toast. “Amazing. If we humans could only communicate half as well, everybody might get along a little better.”

People chuckle. Brower chuckles. Alone at the other end of the log, Bob sips his beer and watches his father. Brower leans forward, and the words begin to pour forth. He talks about the Internet, the importance of learning multiple languages, the foolishness of Bob Dole, and the role of religion in society. He talks, and people gather, dragging lawn chairs, magnetized by the passion of his voice. Then Brower notices something.

“Look!” The group follows his outstretched hand. “Look!”

Brower is pointing at the hills a few miles to the east, over which a glowing rim has appeared. The harvest moon. Round and opalescent as the iris of some monstrous eye, it slides into view, decorating the windblown lake with a thousand glittering replications. The air resounds in childlike coos and adolescent howls. But Brower's voice chimes above them all, calling out numbers: the distance between Earth and the Moon, the distance between each and the Sun. He is letting this little gathering know, within a few miles, precisely where they stand in relation to the rest of the galaxy. He stands, his hair lustrous in the moonlight. I know.

Later, in the flicker of the campfire, someone pulls out a guitar. With rusty voices, the group launches into the old hiking songs. They sing “The 12 Days of Hiking” to the Christmas tune, jubilantly hollering, “Five Brow-er miles!”

Then Brower sings. It's an old song from the beginning of the century, a ballad whose words nobody else could remember, a tragic song about a family broken apart by love and fate. The guitarist tries the first verse, but then loses the melody. Brower keeps going. Lit by firelight, holding a little dog that has found its way to his lap, Brower sings sweetly and alone.

The next morning Brower has bristlecone pines on his mind. The organizers have scheduled a slot of free time, and he's planning to drive the hour north to Bishop to check up on the planet's oldest living inhabitants. It's been 50 years since he's seen them. “I want to see how they're doing,” he says. Brower is sitting in a small deck chair next to the outdoor pool at the Dow Villa Hotel, where the group has gathered for sweet rolls and coffee. Bedecked in shorts and a short-sleeved sportshirt, Brower blends faultlessly with the camera-necked specimens of Turista americana. He's also as antsy. “Where's your son?” he asks Anne. She shrugs. Bristlecone pines can wait.

Bob finally arrives and settles in for coffee. Brower shifts his chair so he can see Whitney's summit and talks about the speech he is going to give at tonight's dinner. He wants to ignite the revival of full-scale High Trips, which were discontinued in the early seventies because of the Forest Service's concerns about impact, among other things. It's an old issue, and in all likelihood a dead one, as mule-supported group tours have gone hopelessly out of fashion, supplanted by mountain bikes, ultralight packs, and other so-called advances. But nothing is hopeless.

“We allowed ourselves to be stopped, and we shouldn't have,” he says. “High Trips were exactly what John Muir intended—they were the first ecotours. And we let somebody tell us we couldn't do them?”��

Then something makes him stop. He takes a few deep breaths and attempts to speak. He can't. The words won't work. They come out garbled, insane, sputtering off his lips.

He sits up straighter and inhales deeply, filling his chest with oxygen. His right hand feels for his left wrist. He tries to count the beats of his pulse, but the numbers won't fall in line.

Bob notices. “Dave, you OK?”

His father manages a nod. But his vision blurs and shimmers; he can't see Bob, Anne, anything. He needs something immovable, something real. He turns and looks up, past the cool white metal of the swimming pool fence, to the Sierra. But Mount Whitney buzzes and wavers. He stares for more than a minute, squinting and glaring ferociously, attempting by force of will to make the mountains stop. They will not.��

“Dad, you OK? You need some oxygen?

Brower doesn't hear. He steeples his hands around his mouth, his lips moving. He is not praying.

When the paramedics arrive, his pulse is 58 and weak, his respirations shallow. They strap an oxygen mask over his face and wrap him in a rough blanket. Since he is conscious, they ask questions: Who are you? What day is it? He answers only one. “I'm David Brower,” he says.

In the waiting room at Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine, there's ranch oak furniture, a soda machine, and a softly humming clock. The nurse asks what religion she should write on the admission form. “None,” says Anne, and then corrects herself. “Put 'Lapsed Presbyterian.'”

Anne and Bob sit quietly, having shifted into the unnatural placidity that emergency rooms require. Bob flips through an electronics magazine; Anne taps her cane handle. Encouraged by the reviving effect that the oxygen seemed to have, they haven't permitted themselves to consider the possibility that this could be anything more than a faint.

“I think all he needs to do is go back to the hotel and sleep a little,” says Anne. “Then he'll feel better.” Then to me: “I'm sorry you didn't get to see the bristlecone pines.”

The doctor comes in, a lean young man with sympathetic eyes. Gently, he asks a few questions and then sums up the situation. Anne and Bob listen intently, comprehending only scraps of meaning. Possible blood clot. Brain. Aphasic—he's having trouble using words. These things often pass, he tells them, but it's best to let him sleep here and then go to Bishop for a CAT scan in the morning.

“Your husband is one of my heroes,” he says.

“Oh, you're another one of those,” replies Anne.

An hour later in the waiting room, the situation begins to sink in. Deprived of oxygen, part of her husband's brain has stopped functioning. It may function again. It may not. Anne's eyes focus on the clock. For the first time, she looks weary.

“He suppresses the idea of his dying because he has so much he wants to do,” says Anne. “I think it may not be good to suppress those thoughts. I don't. I think about it every now and then. He never does, and it comes out in bad ways, like it did today. In his feeling really…lonely.”

“I knew it was serious when the paramedics were talking to him and he says, 'Bob, what should I do?'” says Bob. He shakes his head. “He's never asked me that before. Not ever.”

“I plan to have, at his memorial service, great big baskets of rocks,” says Anne. “I'll say, 'I know David loved those rocks, he got them all, so please take 30 or 40 with you when you leave.' I hope to get them all out of the house then.”

Brower's condition steadily improves. When Anne comes to his bedside, he recognizes her and speaks clearly. His strength seems to be coming back, though his vision hasn't. When he looks into someone's face, he can see only one eye.

Through the night, every hour or so, a nurse wakes him. Where are you? What day is it? What's your name? They carry pen and paper to write down his responses should he make any mistakes. Earlier Anne asked him if she could bring any books or newspapers from the hotel. He said no, not tonight.

The next morning Brower is sitting up in his hospital bed. His legs are casually crossed, the remains of his breakfast scattered on the tray in front of him. Wires trail from beneath his polka-dot gown, sending information to unseen machines. Anne is relieved to see that he looks himself.

“They seem to water the lawn here a great deal,” he says, pointing out the window. “I hope it's just in the morning and evening and not in the heat of the day. That would be a waste.”

Without prompting, he takes us through the incident in vivid detail, as if he were talking about one of his climbs: the initial dizziness, the inability to speak, his attempt to make Whitney sit still. The sentences stream forth in a smooth narrative flow, each word carefully chosen. With image and rhythm, he is creating a story to obliterate the ravages of his body.

But there comes a point in his telling when everything stops, when he arrives at a nothingness where words don't exist. He doesn't know what happened, because he wasn't there. This is where his story ends. This is where Brower cannot be Brower anymore. He can only be human.

“It was scary,” he says. “I didn't like it at all.” Then, more plaintively, “I want to go home.”

“Poor dear,” says Anne, laying her hand upon his.

And after a while, he will go home. He will go home where the doctors will tell him he has suffered a stroke and give him pills to thin his blood. His daughter will fly in from Portland and straighten the office up, and he won't particularly mind. Though spelling will confound him for a while, his speech will come back with full vigor. Soon he will joke with audiences about his “conking out,” using his story to create sparks of energy and affection. This incident will be folded into his identity and will provide him with new words to loft out into the night from his old swivel chair, new messages to tell us where we are and where we need to go.

But for now he needs a CAT scan in Bishop, and the ambulance thrums outside. Brower looks at the gurney disdainfully but realizes that he has no choice. Straight-backed, with great dignity, he sits down and swings his legs up. The paramedics touch a hidden lever, and the gurney springs skyward, raising him four feet off the floor. He leans back, knits his fingers behind his head, and looks toward the door.��

“Here we go,” he says.

Daniel Coyle, a former senior editor of ���ϳԹ���, is the author of Hardball: A Season in the Projects, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. His feature on the world's fastest men appeared in the June issue.

The post The High Cost of Being David Brower appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

It's a bright, orchid-scented morning outside the customs area at Tonga's Fua'amotu International Airport, on the main island of Tongatapu. A merry throng of locals, resplendent in woven grass skirts, clusters around a double door, greeting friends and relatives from the weekly Honolulu flight. Every few moments the doors swing open, triggering a round of shouts and bearlike embraces. Luggage carts wobble beneath piles of boxed TVs, cigarettes, VCRs, Nintendos, microwaves, and other American exotica. A Christmaslike expectancy hangs in the air, each moment holding the promise of happy surprise.

The doors part, and emerges into the tropical sunshine, blinking like a newborn. He stands a burly five-foot-seven and carries his muscly arms slightly away from his torso, as if they were electrically charged. He wears leather sandals, snug denim shorts, and a sport shirt unbuttoned to reveal a silver Celtic cross nestling between tawny hummocks of pectoral flesh. Framed by the sharply creased brim of a black baseball cap, his face is strikingly handsome, in a computer-enhanced kind of way. His blond ponytail hangs piratically on his right shoulder, stained a zippy orange in spots where the Estëe Lauder Self-Action Tanning Creme has rubbed from his skin.

“So what are Tongans gonna think of a hyper guy in a ponytail?” he asks me. His voice rises into his trademark primal scream. “COME ON—YOU CAN DO IT!”

At the sound of his voice, several large bodies swivel, radiating a degree of menace attainable only by impassive, powerfully built men wearing skirts. Ever alert to audience mood, Little shifts to the hoarse sotto voce he uses for a whisper. “They gonna rip my head off, or what?”

Good question. Though the Tongans' reputation for size and ferocity is unparalleled in the Pacific, it's important to note that they haven't massacred any foreigners since 1806, shortly before the widespread practice of cannibalism fell out of style. Tenaciously independent—visitors are often reminded that this is the only South Pacific nation never colonized by a European power—Tongans nonetheless welcomed Christian missionaries with open arms, a historical tidbit that does not go unappreciated by their latest guest.

“That's cool,” Little says. “They'll get to know me, don't worry.”

Tony Little, as his infomercials tell us, is a Worldwide Electronic Media Superstar, Record-Breaking Business Entrepreneur, Record-Breaking Health and Fitness Expert, and the World's Number One Personal Trainer. Shouting on late-night television, the 41-year-old former bodybuilder has, since blasting onto the national airwaves ten years ago, persuaded more people to exercise than anyone else on the planet. He is the highly evolved embodiment of our multibillion-dollar-a-year national fitness obsession, selling $170 million in equipment and videos last year alone, an amount roughly twice Tonga's gross domestic product. Little ranks as the unrivaled emperor of the highly competitive personal-fitness industry because he possesses the ability to, as one of his colleagues puts it, “irritate, irritate, irritate” viewers into buying ab machines, fitness gliders, books, bio-rockers, leopard-skin leotards, workout shoes, vitamins, dog beds, and dozens of other products stamped with his image. Three days from now, he'll be screaming at a thousand neophyte network-marketers in Philadelphia, but for the next 40 hours he belongs to Tonga, or rather, Tonga belongs to him. He strides to the van, shrugs off his bags, and takes a moment to gaze back at the palm trees, the paradisiacal skies, the grass-skirted civitas who until this moment could not have dreamed that Tony Little existed.

“Holy shit,” says the World's Number One Personal Trainer. “These people are huge!”

Weaving through a gauntlet of scurrying chickens, the van grinds toward Tonga's capital city of Nuku'alofa, literally, “abode of love.” Little peppers our driver with questions about the country's population (97,000, 25,000 of whom live in Nuku'alofa), industries (almost entirely subsistence-level farming and fishing), language (Tongan and English taught in schools; 90 percent literacy), and crucially, television availability (sadly, not much—one Pacific-feed channel, no infomercials as yet). After several moments, Little leans back in his seat.

“I got this thing figured out,” he announces. “This is a monarchy, right? You just stop the fatty food from coming in, get some Spam-sniffing dogs. Then get some adult recreation going—it needs to be fun, you got to make it fun, some baseball, maybe football. Hey Valu, do people here play softball?”

Valu Leha, our genial and mumbly driver, who bears an unnerving resemblance to O. J. Simpson, lights a cigarette. His eyes narrow in deep consideration. “Mmm, yes, a little bit, I think.”

Leha is being agreeable. By the government's best estimates, 60 percent of adult Tongan women and 40 percent of the men qualify as obese; rates of diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension are beyond epidemic proportion; and life expectancy has sagged into the high sixties. The average 14-year-old weighs 145 pounds and ranks sleeping and watching videos as his two favorite activities. The mainstays of the local diet are tinned corned beef and fried sipi, a belly-cut of mutton imported from New Zealand. Mary Bourke, Miss Tonga 1996, stands five-foot-three, weighs 143 pounds, and is teased for being too skinny. It took visiting physician Frank Gutmann six months to teach the nurses at the national hospital to refrain from chortling when he prescribed weight loss to his patients. Tongans do not, despite Leha's courteous answer, play softball.

They are, however, trying to lose weight, inspired by their beloved 79-year-old monarch, King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV. Following his own 20-year drop from 444 pounds to a relatively ectomorphic 319, he decreed a national war on flab in 1995. In keeping with the deific powers that allow him to appoint cabinet ministers for life and be referenced in print with capitalized pronouns, he promoted a series of government-sponsored exercise and nutrition classes, health walks, and weight-loss contests. In posters and handouts, loyal subjects are reminded, “You are what you eat.” Street corners bloom with edifying banners that glorify Tongan feats of athleticism, notably His Majesty's 1932 pole-vault of ten feet, a national age-group record that stood unbroken until 1989. Were the king not on an extended tour of America, he would be lifting weights at the gym in Nuku'alofa and in all ways gracefully shouldering his national role-model status (though the license plate on his British diplomatic Rolls still reads 1 ton).

In its first two years, the health and fitness program has met with less than regal results. Half of the 2,296 people registered for the weight-loss contests dropped out, and approximately 70 percent of those who finished have put some or all of the weight back on. Organizers have encountered technical difficulties—several scales at the 26 weigh stations broke under the constant strain—but mostly, they're running up against a more intractable problem: The average citizen lacks a compelling reason to reduce.

“You must remember, this is Tonga,” says Malakai 'Ake, the noncommunicable disease officer at the Ministry of Health. “Most people are farmers, and food is the central preoccupation of our culture. Obesity is a sign of nobility and sophistication, and it's exceedingly difficult to change that overnight. Given that, the weight-loss program is quite a success.”

Leha yawns. Two days ago, he was up all night helping to prepare a feast for his nephew's seventh birthday. The menu was for 60 people and included 14 suckling pigs, eight roasted chickens, 40 pounds of baked yams, raw fish in coconut milk, macaroni, lu pulu (salted beef wrapped in taro leaves), mussels, lobster, octopus, watermelon, breadfruit, mango, yellow cake, and fruit sherbet. “A small feast,” Leha says apologetically. “You should see some of the big ones, like for the 50th anniversary of the high school.” He spreads his arms wide and smiles. “Ten days of feasts. Big feasts.”

“I got one,” shouts Little from the back of the van. “A slogan for Tonga: We show a photo of a good-looking woman walking down the street, and we say, 'It's cool to eat low-fat, because you'll get that.'”

“Mmm,” Leha says. “You're funny.”

“God, my bicep is killing me,” Little moans, flexing his arm slowly over his lunch of grilled whitefish, french fries, and coffee. “I was doing curls at the gym in Hawaii and a bunch of kids were yelling my name and pointing at their abs. I lost concentration for a fraction of a second. Boom, sprained it.” He shakes his head in disbelief.

The injury comes at a bad time. At 199 pounds, Little's already 14 pounds overweight, and his 35-inch waistline is three inches broader than he'd like. Beneath his black muscle-shirt I can make out the faint outline of his waist-trimmer, a Velcro-closed neoprene truss he wears when he works out.

“Would you believe my blow-dryer won't work?” he says. “The plug won't fit in the socket, and now my hair's going to be all packed down. I didn't pack any of my detangler either.” He tugs on the bill of his cap. “I'll be lucky to get a brush through the stuff tomorrow.”

Little knows adversity. His promising bodybuilding career was derailed when his car was hit by a bus in 1983. Depressed and 50 pounds overweight, he “drummed up his last spark of passion and drive” to produce his first cable fitness show in his home state of Florida. Other trials have followed, each overcome in turn.

“There was the time I accidentally sat in a pool of acid at a pet-supply manufacturer and burnt my butt and balls; then I got kicked in the balls by a horse—those were both in '85. I've been electrocuted a couple of different times, got meningitis from a bad spinal tap, and my ex-wife beat me up and dislocated my jaw—the National Enquirer did a pretty accurate piece on that. Then there was the car wreck last year: Got run off the road going 50, slid backward down a hill—the only frigging hill in Florida—and hit a palm tree. Split my face open like a cantaloupe, got 160 stitches, and was back on television 21 days later.” He pauses to swallow a fry. “See, everything that happens to me becomes a selling point. In fact, there's a stitch coming through my nose right now.” He leans forward, permitting closer examination.

“Mmm,” says Leha, chewing a large piece of prime rib.

“So I was just visiting my 11-year-old son at this camp in the Berkshires,” Little says by way of transition. “It's a weight-loss camp, and this place is great. But it's only open three months out of the year. Three months! Which gets me thinking: Convert this thing to year-round, bring in adults, and boom, it could be huge!” His voice drops to a businesslike timbre. “I'm seriously considering acquiring an interest.

“I'm unique because God gave me a gift to see things simple,” he continues. “If the Tongan people conceive, believe, and achieve, they'll watch that body fat leave. Hey!” he signals the waitress, voice tight with urgency. “Can I get more coffee?”

Three hours later, we're at Teufaiva Fitness Centre, a high-ceilinged cinder-block gymnasium with an ancient Primo Carnera poster above the front desk. Little's visit has ignited a steady murmur of anticipatory coverage: radio and television ads, an article in the weekly paper, and here, outside the gym, a large signboard plastered with his toothy image.

“Hello, hi, you look great,” Little tells people as they shyly file in, their eyes flitting from the poster to the real thing. A few are wearing traditional garb; most are outfitted in pastel sweats. As the appointed hour comes, Little is apprehensive. Pacing and sipping coffee—he averages eight to ten cups a day—he peeks into the gym, where perhaps 70 people have gathered.

“This place looks dead,” he says.”Is this all the people that are going to come?”

“Look,” says Leha, gesturing with his cigarette tip.

A woman steps out from behind the building. She's wearing polka-dot green tights and a pink T-shirt, a kitchen towel tied around her head as a makeshift sweatband. She's six feet tall and weighs 342 pounds by her own estimate. Her name is Katalina. Little's eyes light up; this is the telegenic moment he has been waiting for. Gesturing for Ray, the cameraman, to follow, he leaps down the steps and walks to her. The top of his head is exactly level with the tip of her chin.

“HOLD ME,” Little bellows, pretending to leap into her arms.

Katalina's arms stay at her sides. Little jiggles her shoulder, as if to awaken her. “HEY! YOU LOOK GREAT! REALLY!” He pokes her in the belly. “HOW MUCH OF THAT DO YOU WANT TO LOSE?”

Some of Katalina's friends are beginning to laugh. “Twenty kilo,” she says, and breaks into a smile. “Maybe 25.”

“TWENTY-FIVE! WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT!” Little escorts her through the doors, his hand nested in hers like a child's. A few minutes later, he begins.

“MY NAME IS TONY LITTLE,” he shouts. “I'M THE WORLD'S NUMBER ONE PERSONAL TRAINER, AND I THINK YOU SHOULD HAVE FUN IF YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE FITNESS!”

Throwing a glance toward Ray, he walks to a woman seated on a bench and plops down on her lap. The crowd laughs loudly. “My husband!” she hisses in his ear. Little leaps off as if hit by an electric shock.

He finds his feet and faces the crowd, ponytail swinging. “I believe in ENERGY! I believe in ENTHUSIASM! I believe in a ZEST FOR LIFE!”

On his early infomercials, Little honed his pitch by employing a feedback loop: a monitor that provided a running tally of the number of calls coming in. When he said the right thing, the screen turned red. Now, in front of the quiet Tongan audience, he pulls out all the stops. He yells about calories, that a pound of muscle burns more than a pound of fat, that diets don't work. He tells them about the school bus that hit him and his Lazarus-like series of recoveries. Throughout, the people sit politely, laughing occasionally, not asking questions. At one point he howls, “EATING SIPI IS LIKE SAYING 'I WANNA DIE!'” and in response receives a solitary cough.

Near the end of his 20-minute spiel, he pauses, then cuts to the chase.

“Because I'm aggressive enough to ask for what I want, I've got a 15,000-square-foot house, seven cars, I've got my kids' college paid for, I've got a future, and I can die tomorrow and be absolutely happy because I had ENERGY, I had FUN!”

The Tongans look at him blankly. The woman on whose lap he sat slouches next to her now-scowling husband. Katalina scratches a polka-dotted leg. The only sound is the rhythmic creak of ceiling fans.

“Tough crowd,” Little says, climbing back into the van. “But I think I really connected to that big woman, the one with the towel on her head. Did you see the expression on her face?”

The road swarms with chickens. Little regards them circumspectly. “If I lived here, I'd be a king,” he says. “I'd go around at night and steal the chickens, paint 'TL' on them, and sell them on TV: THESE ARE FORTIFIED CHICKENS! THESE ARE VITAMIN CHICKENS!”

The next morning little is back at Teufaiva Fitness Centre, bestowing gifts on the staff: training videos, fat-measuring calipers (which are immediately and vigorously deployed), his trademarked negativity sucks shirts and hats, up-close glossies of his post-car-wreck face, and the piêces de rësistance, two Tony Little Gazelle Gliders, ski-trainer-like devices that sell for $249.99 with shipping. Last New Year's Eve on QVC, Little sold 13,000 of these in 80 minutes.

Little unpacks a glider. Forty-three pounds of aluminum tubing hit the tile floor with a hollow clank. “I have no idea how this thing goes together,” he tells an instructor. “It's supposed to take ten minutes.”

Forty minutes and several hammer blows later, the Gazelle Glider stands in the center of the gym, wobbling slightly. Little hops aboard, seizes the handles, and quickly demonstrates the Basic Glide, the Slim Glide, the Low Glide, the Forward Push, and his personal favorite, the Back Pull.

“CHA-CHA-CHA!” Little waggles his head ebulliently. “WE'RE DANCING!”

He's still dancing when the motorcade rolls in: two police motorcycles, two Toyota Land Cruisers, and a Mercedes limousine. At the sound of tires, everyone in the gym moves in well-practiced choreography. The weight-loss personnel and visitors exit briskly. The Teufaiva staff scurries to tidy up, changing the music from the Beatles to Labour of Love, Tonga's most renowned pop-gospel group. In seconds the gym is vacant, clean, and ready for the daily workout of the king's brother and next-in-command, King Regent Tu'ipelehake Tupou.

Thirteen guards from the Tongan Defense Forces and police escort His Royal Highness into the gym. At 77, having suffered the debilitating effects of a degenerative nerve disease, Tu'ipelehake is not the physical equal of his older brother. Nonetheless, he takes his fitness seriously, hitting the gym five days a week for a carefully monitored two-hour program of stretches and weight lifting with Kalauta Kupu, Teufaiva's muscular manager. Today is a stretching day, and so the gym staff has set up a low table covered with inch-thick blue matting. A crew-cut lieutenant marches in bearing a box of Kleenex, a stopwatch, and a large frilly pillow cross-stitched with orange and purple flowers. He places them on the table and stands frowning at attention.

The 330-pound king regent wears a burgundy sweatsuit and black high-top Reeboks. Even seated in his wheelchair, Tu'ipelehake is a giant, with papery skin and dark, amused eyes that rove the room and come to rest on Tony Little.

“A real pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty,” Little bows. A member of the royal guard helps lift the king regent's arm for a handshake. “Are you ready to do a workout-with me?” Little exaggeratedly elbows Kupu to the side.

His Highness seems unable to speak, but he is able to laugh, a gulping, sucking sound like the call of a bull sea lion. Sensing receptivity, Little points an accusing finger at Kupu. “DOES HE HAVE TECHNIQUE? IS HE ANY GOOD? YOU SHOULD HIRE ME!”

His Highness laughs hard. The lieutenant stiffly extends a white towel and blots a spume of royal saliva. With great formality, Little presents the king regent with a gift basket of Tony Little Cortura personal care products: the Gentle Facial Scrub, the Finishing Spritz, the Body Lotion, the Colloidal Vera Intense Moisture Conditioning Lotion, and the Nature's Miracle Rejuvenating Complex with 6 Percent Alpha-Hydroxy Formula Including Glycolic Acid, Vitamins, and Antioxidants. He demonstrates the Gazelle Glider and promises to send one for the king regent's personal use. He does the cha-cha-cha move. “TO HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS, YOUR MAJESTY,” he shouts.

The workout begins. Four guards raise the king regent from the wheelchair to a sitting position on the edge of the table. His head is gently lowered to the flowered pillow, the Reeboks are placed in rubber stirrups, and his legs are moved in slow cycling motion by Kupu and another staffer to the peppy two-four beat of “Saved, Saved, Saved.” The stopwatch chirps, and Tu'ipelehake is returned upright. He gestures to the lieutenant, communicating a desire. Little, watching the exchange intently, whispers loudly in my ear.

“I think they want to put him in that thing.” His ponytail jerks toward the Gazelle Glider. “It's only made to take 300 pounds, and if it breaks…” He looks frantically about the room, as if checking for escape routes.

Before Little can interrupt, five guards prop Tu'ipelehake into a standing position, while two more skid the Gazelle Glider next to the table. It stands there teetering while all seven fall into formation around His Highness's bountiful physique. Two seize each leg, plying their shoulders against the king regent's buttocks; two more secure grips on the royal armpits. The lieutenant hovers grimly, white towel held at the ready.

With great solemnity and some panting, the men lift His Highness onto the glider.

“YOU CAN DO IT,” Little shouts. “YOU'RE NOT RUNNING, YOU'RE SCOOTING!”

At Little's command, the guards operate His Highness's limbs. Tu'ipelehake looks down and is greatly pleased by the sight of his moving feet. He begins to laugh his great bull-seal laugh, “Ooooooeegghhhhh, ooooooeegg.”

The collapse begins in stages. The dark eyes go glassy, the knees buckle, and the king regent loses rigidity in his spine. Perhaps it's the heat, perhaps the excitement of the moment, but whatever the reason, Tu'ipelehake is slumping into a faint, his head dipping toward the horrified Little, whose arms reach out helplessly.

Little will later call what happens next “a miracle.” As the king regent's unsupported weight tumbles downward, Little prays to God that his Gazelle Glider not break. As he has become accustomed, God answers. The flimsy tubes absorb the blow, supporting Tu'ipelehake for one tenuous instant. Reacting with well-drilled precision, the guards arrest his fall, lift him out of the Gazelle Glider, and deposit him safely on the edge of the table.

Regaining his composure, Tu'ipelehake takes a series of deep breaths. After a few moments' rest, he resumes his exercise program. The guards relax. The stern lieutenant, leaning over to apply a towel to His Highness's upper lip, shoots Little a quick, affirming smile, as if to say everything's OK, as if to confirm Little's bedrock belief that adversity can be overcome, that strangers can become friends, that fat people can become thin, that, as Little shouted to the crowd at Teufaiva yesterday, “THERE'S ALWAYS A WAY!”

But Little doesn't notice. His head is down, and he's adjusting the little silver cross on his chest so that it hangs straight.

“Well,” he sighs, “I guess that's the end of that workout.”

The post Tony Little Saves Tonga appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

ONCE UPON A TIME NOT SO LONG AGO, in a gold-mining town in the foothills of the Sierra mountains, an unlucky baby was born. It was hard for the doctors to tell that the baby was unlucky, because everything about him looked fine. He had blond hair and sumo-wrestler thighs and catlike blue eyes that crinkled into slits when he smiled. But this baby was unlucky because he was born with something extra in his blood, a chemical called meth-amphetamine. The doctors were not optimistic. They predicted the baby would grow up small and skinny, that he would probably have trouble learning things, and maybe worse.

Lucky guy: Roger at home in Placerville, California, weighed down by 89 of his snowboarding medal

Sky’s the limit: Trampoline action in Roger’s backyard

High on the slopes of Oregon’s Mount Hood

Wacth this! Roger cavorting in the family garden

Roger at eighteen months

In the Sierra, age six

Sporting a mohawk at seven

Pause, then play: from left, Dave, Roger, and Terrie Carver, with Black Jack, Longtail, Bubba, and Wilma

The mother was allowed to keep him on two conditions: She promised not to take the methamphetamine anymore, and she promised to meet with her probation officer every couple of weeks. The arrangement seemed to work for a few months. Then, suddenly, it didn’t. The mother missed her appointments. The police came to check on the baby, and they saw that now he even looked unlucky. His sumo-wrestler thighs were lean. His eyes seemed stunned and blank. When they undid the baby’s diaper to change him, they saw that his hipbones stuck out.
So the baby went to a new family, a couple who could no longer have children of their own. The people weren’t rich, but they had a good place to live, with tall oak trees and a pond with fish and a basketball hoop and a tree house. They loved the baby. They nursed him back to health, and as soon as they could they adopted him.

Seasons passed, and the baby grew into a boy. He did turn out smaller and skinnier than other kids his age, and he also turned out to have a terrific amount of energy. He slept little. He jumped off tall furniture. At two, he could hurl a baseball with surprising accuracy, beaning unsuspecting adults between the eyes. The energy made him fun to be around, but it also got him into trouble—with teachers, with other kids, with everyone. His parents tried hard to find something that would suit the boy’s restless nature, things like music, karate, soccer, and baseball. But nothing seemed to fit. The parents felt like they were fighting against the methamphetamine. They felt trapped. They wondered if the boy would always be unlucky.

Then one winter, just after he turned five, the boy took a trip into the Sierra mountains to try something new. And just like that, all at once, everything seemed to begin.

“WATCH THIS!”

Roger Carver is in his backyard in Placerville, California, climbing a dilapidated skateboard halfpipe with a basketball under his arm. The ramp is ten feet tall, and its plywood skin has peeled away to reveal the dinosaur ribs of its wooden innards. Roger wants to see if he can make a shot—not a regular basketball shot, but a “hekka-far shot.” Hekka-far is what you call a really far shot, the kind of shot fans take at the halftimes of NBA games to win a million dollars. Roger, who is 12, has short blond hair and cheeks flushed bright pink. He has spent the last four hours bouncing on a trampoline, climbing a tree, fishing for bass, spinning the basketball on his finger, practicing a new 360 grab move on his skateboard, and hopping around the yard in quick, froggy jumps. He is not tired; Roger is never tired, except at night after he takes his white pill, and sometimes not even then.

He reaches the top and stands in the sunlight. The ball looks large compared with the rest of him. Roger is a shade over four-foot-six and weighs 76 pounds, though he’s pretty sure he’s gained a little lately and now is up to 79, seriously.

“Don’t you go and fall, Roger,” his mother, Terrie, warns in a fierce voice.

“Mo-om!” Roger says exasperatedly. “I’m not going to fall.”

His voice is the first thing you notice about Roger Carver. It’s high and lilting, a voice his parents liken to that of a cartoon chipmunk. Roger does not care for the sound of his voice, but it doesn’t stop him from using it all the time: doing impressions, sound effects, and, most of all, singing. Roger has always liked to sing. Up and down the radio dial he goes, producing clear, trilling versions of Creed, Blink-182, Santana, Pat Benatar. Heart-breaker, dream maker, love taker, don’t you mess around with me. He likes to sing while he’s snowboarding, made-up songs that flow to a fast and unfollowable rhythm—boom a bappa boombamboom bappa boom bappa bop.
No, Roger Carver will not fall, because he was born with hekka-good balance. How good? Well, you can add it up: There’s the 19 national snowboarding championships he’s won over the past six years in the sport’s five events (halfpipe, slopestyle, slalom, giant slalom, and boardercross). There’s the fact that he hasn’t been beaten in the slalom or giant slalom since he was seven. There are the four snowboarding videos and the movie with Michael Keaton (which was kind of lame but which you might have heard of anyway, called Jack Frost). There are the dozens of boxes of free clothes and equipment, and the photos in Transworld Snowboarding. But the most impressive thing about Roger’s balance is that he never seems to fall. If they gave a medal for not falling, Roger would win every time. When people try to describe it, they make comparisons: He is like a rag doll. He is like one of those weeble-wobble toys that always bounces back. They make comparisons because merely telling the story doesn’t capture the sheer impossibility of it. Like the time this year at the nationals when he caught an edge and shot 50 feet off the course, then somehow turned, nailed the gate he’d missed, and went on to win. Or the nationals slalom race when he beat all but five of the men in the 30- to 39-year-old division and everybody made a big deal out of it because he’d just turned eight.

There are tons of stories like that.

There are other stories, too, ones that don’t have anything to do with snowboarding but with the other stuff Roger does. Because Roger is always doing something. He is always skateboarding or doing tricks on his mountain bike or jumping really high on a trampoline, higher than Jason or Chad or Josh or Ethan or any of the other kids in his sixth-grade class. If you spend any time with Roger, you get the distinct impression that he could never not be doing something. Like right now, for instance, as he stands on top of the broken-down skateboard ramp and throws the basketball at the distant hoop. He watches it fall perfectly through the net and sends that high voice ringing across the yard.

“Did you see that? Did you?”

WHEN GROWN-UPS, in particular coaches and national- team organizers, talk about Roger, their voices get high and excited, sort of like his. They talk about the Olympics and sponsorships and careers. They say that snowboarding is the hottest sport in America, and that whoever turns out to be the hottest kid in the hottest sport—well, that kid is going to be very hot indeed. They talk about Shaun White, that freckly 16-year-old Californian who reportedly earned close to a million dollars last year, along with two automobiles he wasn’t old enough to drive. They talk about Roger and they use phrases like “a younger Shaun” and “cross-marketing” and “magazine kid.” They say all those things while at the same time pointing out the dozens of roadblocks that stand between any 12-year-old and greatness. Roger, they say, is one of a handful of promising snowboarders, the majority of whom, if history is any guide, are as famous at this precise moment as they will ever be.

But in the end, they believe in Roger. The scope of his accomplishments, his foundling status, his blue-collar background, the kismet of his last name—all of it tells them that this isn’t about talent or potential, it’s about destiny. These grown-ups, like all grown-ups, hold in their hearts the idea of the Wonder Boy, and they want Roger Carver to be that boy. (The deeper truth is, we want to be that boy, and this is the closest we’ll come.)
But ask Roger about the future and his eyes rake the ground. He says something like, “I want to go into the Coast Guard, you know, so I can drive boats.”

What else?

“Getting a new four-wheeler would be cool. Or winning a truck.”

What else?

He thinks. A game board of lines forms on his brow.

“I want new tires for our four-wheeler trailer. So I can haul my stuff and friends around. You know, to do things.”

That’s it?

He thinks.

“That’s it.”

Roger may be 12, but he knows that being the Wonder Boy is a complicated job. He knows this partly through his parents, self-sufficient and resolutely undreamy people whose voices do not get excited when they talk about their son’s snowboarding future. But mostly he knows it through experience. He knows how sneakily the forces of destiny operate, how they slip invisibly into your blood, how they can catch you by surprise.

“I really don’t know why I’m good at snowboarding,” he says. “It’s just luck, I guess. I mean, I just got into it, and then here I am.” He laughs, an incredulous chirp. “Roger Carver.

“I know my life is my real life,” he continues. “I know I’m not living a ghost life, but still, sometimes it feels weird. I mean, who am I? Sometimes I think about it and it’s like, how can that be? To go from that life to this.” He shakes his head. “The odds must be one in a million—no, make that a billion. One in a billion.”

IF YOU COULD GET a hekka-strong microscope and take a picture of a single molecule of methamphetamine, you would think that it looked a little bit like a tadpole. There’s a ring of six carbon atoms at the head, then a tail made of four other carbons and a nitrogen, the whole thing buzzing with energy. And that’s the way it works in the body—it buzzes through the blood up to the brain, and when it gets there the drug plays a trick. It tricks the brain into releasing dopamine, which is the stuff that makes you feel pleasure and allows you to concentrate.
If you were a baby and you had a lot of methamphetamine in your blood (and the doctors said that Roger had a lot), your brain might be different afterward. Researchers aren’t yet sure exactly how or why, but methamphetamine exposure seems to be associated with a number of conditions, including paralysis, cerebral palsy, seizures, short-term memory loss, social problems, attention disorders, and hyperactivity.

One theory is that methamphetamine reduces the brain’s ability to produce dopamine on its own. Without enough dopamine, the world seems dull. You get bored, and because you’re bored you do crazy things, like yelling or jumping up and down or not keeping your hands to yourself. “The pleasure you or I would get out of lying in bed reading a good book, they get by jumping off a bridge,” says Paul Brethen, director of the Matrix Institute, a drug-treatment-and-research organization near Los Angeles. “They need to be out on that cutting edge because it’s the only thing that makes them feel alive. Or they take pills.”

Roger takes blue pills called Adderall, which are amphetamines, and white pills called clonidine to help him sleep. He takes two blues when he wakes up, two more at noon, and one and a half whites before bed. Taking the pills makes him feel good. But so does not taking them.

“I feel more energized right away,” Roger says. “It makes me feel like…’Take the chance.’ Take the chance—like, raising my hand or yelling or something. Like I’m not choosing it, but I am, automatically. I don’t like it, either. I get in trouble for it and it’s not cool and everybody thinks I’m a bad person.”

But right now, Roger is feeling OK. It’s a perfectly blue May afternoon, and he’s in his front yard. Standing still. This is worth noting because it doesn’t happen very often. You can sense the effort behind it in the tensed way he holds his arms, in the silent brushing of his sneaker against the dirt, and mostly in his eyes, those feline, slightly hooded blue eyes, which flicker as if he has a secret he can’t wait to tell.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you some things.”

If possible, Roger looks skinnier up close than he does from a distance. His shoulders seem broader, his arms more dangly, his neck more fluted. His body resembles that of a basketball player who has unexpectedly shrunk to half size, an impression reinforced by his wardrobe of loose T-shirts and shorts. The T-shirt fits well enough, but the shorts are held up with a belt, the end of which hangs below Roger’s knees like a vestigial tail. This puzzles Roger, who’s positive he’s been gaining weight.

“See?” he says, pulling up his shirt and gathering a half-inch of skin between his fingers. “I’m starting to get a belly.”

“Right,” says his friend Cody, who has come over to skateboard.

“No, really,” Roger persists. “It’s true.”

Roger lives with his parents in a modest one-story cedar- shingled house on the hilly outskirts of Placerville, population 10,000. It’s a hobbity, fifties-era house with plywood countertops and a hammock chair and four wild-eyed Boston terriers that patrol the living room. It is small, which is fine, because the Carvers spend most of their time outside, either in the garden or by the fire pit or sometimes, on hot summer nights, sleeping on the trampoline. Privacy is no problem—their six acres are bristly with trees and bordered on the north by a tall wooden fence. To Roger, the best part about home is the skate park, a vast, curvilinear moonscape of concrete. No one else Roger knows has a skate park in his yard—never mind one built by his father. His eyes dwell on the half bowl, the rails, the pyramid. He looks at it so intently that he doesn’t hear his mother approach, her sandals crunching on the pale gravel.

“Did you take your pills today?” Terrie wants to know.

“Yes!”

“Did you pick up your fishing rod?” his father, Dave, calls from the workshop. “I thought I saw it out there on the grass.”

“I did!”

TERRIE, WHO IS 42, has long hair and slate-blue eyes, and works summers in the office of a photography studio. Dave, 47, is tall and mellow, with an angular face and big, watery eyes. He’s co-owner of a concrete company in town. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they vaguely resemble the couple in American Gothic, emanating the same brand of capable, pitchforked watchfulness. They watch Roger all the time, making sure he has all his gear, making sure he’s watching his money, making sure he isn’t doing anything too dangerous. They’ve built a framework of rules around him, a clear set of dos and don’ts that reside in their eyes as surely as if they were chalked on the skate-park concrete. Be polite—always thank your coach at the end of the day. Wear your helmet when you’re boarding, even if nobody else does. Don’t talk back. Don’t brag. Don’t lose the gear your sponsors send—if you do, pay for the replacement. And of course, don’t forget to take your pills.

“If he misses one, you know,” Terrie says. “He’ll walk in that door moving twice the normal speed, talking back, and he’ll be doing that laugh.”
“If I hear the laugh, oh my God, it’s all over,” says Trevor Brown, his alpine coach at the Heavenly Ski and Snowboard Foundation. “Instead of going 100 miles an hour, he’s going 300. Then it’s Tasmanian devil time.”

“The laugh,” Dave says, nodding. “You could do anything to him and he’ll just keep laughing at you—I mean, it’s like Jekyll and Hyde. Without the pills, he’s a different kid.”

“I tried homeopathy, herbs, everything,” Terrie adds. “But when we tried the pills, they worked, and so he takes them. We literally couldn’t live without them.”

Terrie and Dave talk like this in front of Roger. They don’t do this to be cruel or show-offy; it’s just family policy. Within the Carver house, the most important rule is to Put Everything Out There. So they do, even when those things are embarrassing. Like Roger’s problems in school (“Math is a huge struggle,” Terrie says. “He has trouble following patterns”). Or his outbursts in class, or the recent fine-tunings of his medication. All are discussed in clear, impersonal voices, as if they were chatting about the weather. Listening to Terrie and Dave talk to Roger is to hear one message repeated over and over: “Yes, your brain is different.” And you hear its implied corollary: “Get used to it.”

“They’re always reminding me of stuff,” Roger says in the living room. “I think they’re good parents—not too overprotective, not too underprotective.”

“They’re pretty cool,” Cody agrees, flopping on the couch and closing his eyes. Roger looks at his friend sympathetically. Roger is one of those kids who has lots of friends instead of one best friend—partly, it seems, because he tires them out quickly. He watches Cody for a second, then turns away.

“So,” he says, “want to see my room?”

IT’S A COZY, cavelike space, a cluttered mix of dark and light. A sheep skull gazes from the paneled wall. A toy monkey grips a trapeze. Glinting armies of rocks are deployed on two large shelves. The sun catches a bright square of yarn that Roger crocheted when he was younger. (“I was into that for a while,” he explains.) The only clue to Roger’s sporting life is the snowboards stacked like cordwood at the foot of his bed. If you ask why he keeps them here and not in the shed or the garage, he will shrug his thin shoulders.

“I dunno,” he says. “Maybe I just like having them close.”
Roger begins to unstack the snowboards, laying them gently on the bed, where they tilt and slide as if they might suddenly do a trick on their own. When he’s finished, there’s a bright pile of 22 boards, from the new jet-black K2 Zeppelin (K2 has been Roger’s board sponsor since he was seven) to a dinged-up purple board barely half its size. He unearths the Barney-colored plank, holding its edges with his fingertips.

“This is really, really old,” he says. “See?”

If you ask him how he got started snowboarding, Roger will tell a story. He was five. Dave and Terrie’s biological son, Dustin, was 15. Roger liked Dustin a lot, and Dustin liked snowboarding a lot. So …

“I was on the hill,” he says, “and this instructor was trying to tell me something about keeping my arms straight and I just took off and went schkeewww, schkeewww, schkeeewww. Then my mom saw me and was kinda surprised.”

What happened next?

“For the first year I followed Dustin and his friends around, and they were really nice to me and let me come and everything. Then a whole bunch of stuff happened.”

What kind of stuff?

He hesitates. His knuckles work a quick rhythm on the purple paint.

“You know,” he says. “A lot.”

Officially, Roger’s career began with his fifth-place-overall finish in the United States of America Snowboard Association’s seven-and-under division in 1997. Then came three straight years in which Roger won the alpine/freestyle combined titles and began to receive some benefits of his newfound stature: sponsorships, invitations to K2’s summer house in Mount Hood, getting sent by RipCurl to the Whistler Camp of Champions, the nonspeaking role as a flame-haired snowboarder in the Keaton movie. (“It was fun, sort of, but mostly boring,” Roger remembers.) Then the last two years, in which Roger won the overall alpine and finished third in combined. Meanwhile, the sport exploded. Participation in the USASA nationals went from 600 to 1,200; corporate sponsorship went through the roof; and along came the inevitable rise of formalized coaching programs built to churn out camera-ready superstars.

From their sleepy Placerville outpost, Roger’s parents regard the frenzy with stolid bemusement, not noting the economic changes so much as the cultural ones, namely the appearance of what they call “soccer parents”—that well-dressed, energetic breed who badger coaches, suck up to sponsors, and get, as Dave puts it, “a little overinvolved.” Roger has snowboarded with several Tahoe-area teams over the past few years, most recently at Heavenly. These teams are made up of kids from Roger’s age on up whose parents pay around $1,500 for them to snowboard every weekday from December to March and to race in USASA events on weekends. Other top kids attend elite sports-oriented academies like Vermont’s Stratton Mountain School ($26,000 a year in tuition). But the egalitarian South Tahoe scene suits the Carvers, who homeschool Roger during the season and enroll him in the local public school the rest of the year. For nationals, which in past years have taken place in Telluride, Colorado, and Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, they plan a family vacation. Dave and Terrie hear about other snowboarders getting private coaches and it makes them smile, not just because of the expense.

“Truth is,” Dave says, “I don’t think one person could keep track of him.”

“He’s a maniac on the hill. He never gets tired and he never wants to quit,” says Kyle Frankland, who coached Roger for two years on the Donner Summit Snowboard Team. “He won’t eat, he won’t drink, he’ll just keep making turns.”

ROGER’S TURNS, like all true athleticism, look ludicrously simple. When he’s on his board he is relaxed, his hands loose, the fingertips slightly curled. As the turn initiates, his knees bend slightly and he seems to hang over the snow, a marionette suspended by invisible wires of speed and centripetal force. Watching him, you’re struck less by his speed than by the stillness that lies at the center of each turn. Riding a rail, the coaches call it, because that’s exactly what it is—locating an invisible curve of steel beneath the snow and following where it leads.

“It’s not something you can teach; it’s something he was born with,” says Trevor Brown. “When he turns he doesn’t let it break loose, he doesn’t skid or scrub, he just…he just”—Brown searches unsuccessfully for a less corny word—”carves.”
Roger has come up with a theory of why he is so good at snowboarding. He thinks there might be a part of him that’s like a robot, that behaves as if it were programmed, generating tricks and turns as his other self pushes the buttons.

“Something in my mind tells me to do these things,” he says. “It’s not me, it’s my body, seriously. My body just does it. It’s weird—it, like, commands me, almost.

“It’s hard to explain,” he continues. “Maybe what my birth mom did, you know, making me drug-exposed, maybe it makes me better and maybe it doesn’t. I mean, maybe what she did deformed me in a way—or maybe it deformed me in a good way. I’ll never know—and I never want to know.”

Roger says that a few times—that he never wants to know about his past. But even so, he often ends up talking about it, about his birth mother. It becomes clear that his mind is circling this subject as it circles everything.

“Sometimes I try to imagine what she looks like,” he says. “Mom says she looks like her, but taller. I dunno. I have three other brothers and sisters. They’re older, and I guess I look like them.”

He fusses with his belt, jamming the tail into his pocket, pulling it out.

“I sometimes talk to my sister, on the phone. She wants to snowboard, too—they live a couple towns over, I think. With my grandma.

“I talked to her a few times. Not in real life, but on the phone. She’s, like, really nice. She’s interested in talking to me, which is really good.”

He shakes his head.

“It’s weird,” he says. “It’s all really weird.”

Roger knows about methamphetamine. He knows it’s a problem around Placerville and other places—he’s heard about the labs in the woods, about people being afraid to camp down by the Cosumnes River, and he’s seen the skinny, intense people walking around town. Knowing helps, but it creates tangly questions: Why did my mom do drugs when she was pregnant? What did it feel like? Why couldn’t she quit? Didn’t she love me?

“We tell him that drugs mess people up,” Terrie says. “They might not be bad people, but when they do those kinds of things you don’t want to be around them.”

“He always says, ‘Tell me the truth,'” says Dave. “He doesn’t want any B.S.”

“The truth is, these pills are part of his life forever,” Terrie says. “What his mother did changed him, period, and he has to know that. He has to know the story behind everything. So we tell him.”

When Roger asks why Terrie couldn’t have any more kids after Dustin, he hears the story about the ovarian cyst and the emergency hysterectomy. When Roger asks about his birth father, he hears the story about the drug smuggler who went to prison. When Roger asks about Terrie’s childhood, he hears about a teenager who found out that the man she’d been calling Dad for 16 years wasn’t her actual father, and he hears his mother’s fierce voice say, “You’re not going to have any surprises like that.”

So Roger listens to the stories and his mind keeps churning, pushing for more, and eventually Terrie and Dave are left with the last story, the only story that means anything. They tell him about the baby in the hospital, the unlucky boy whose hipbones stuck out. They tell him about the little kid who could hit people between the eyes with a baseball, whose mother took him to a mountain one day and then turned to see him flying down it. They tell him the story and Roger listens and tries to feel his way along.

THERE’S A GAME Roger likes to play in the car called Name That Song. You hit the seek button and see who can name the artist first. If you do, you get a point.

“It’s a good game,” he says. “You’ll like it.”
Driving with Roger is fun and a little tiring. It’s fun because he’s always looking out the window and noticing things you might not. It’s tiring because, at the same time, he’s fiddling with the air vents and the fan, turning on the hazard lights, leaning over to check the speedometer.

“Britney,” he says, and hits the button.

“Train.” Click.

“Destiny’s Child.”

To this soundtrack, you move along the roads, tracing in and out of canyons, up and down steep hills under a dome of California sky. You drive through tunnels of trees, past sprawling vineyards and rusting mansions of corrugated metal. You see streets: Glory, Magic, Paydirt, Serendipity. You see people: An elderly jogger. A couple pushing a double stroller. A man walking a black dog.

“I want to get off my pills someday,” Roger says. “I think if I stay around regular people a lot, maybe that will help me. I met a guy one time who used to take pills, and now he doesn’t. He controls it with his mind—you know, just by thinking about it real hard. I guess that’s what I want to do in the future. But it’s really hard to know what’s going to happen. You know, who knows, really?”

When you ask them about the future, Roger’s parents express a similar feeling.

“We’ll probably do snowboarding again next year,” Terrie says. “Then, nationals are in Maine, at Sunday River. That would make a fun trip.”

What about further down the line?

“Too soon to say,” Dave says. “Way too soon.”

“We don’t think about it,” Terrie says firmly. “I’m not saying Roger couldn’t go pro or do the Olympics. I’m just saying that if he doesn’t, or if he decides to quit tomorrow, it will be fine with me.”

“He could, too.” Dave says. “He could walk in the door and announce that he’s done. He did it with soccer and trick-or-treating. Just came home one day and said, ÔI’m not doing that anymore.’ And he didn’t.”

Roger clicks to a Tom Petty song. It’s a good one, so he takes his finger off the button and lets the song play out. His hands tap the dashboard and his body rocks back and forth in the seat, and when the chorus comes he can’t hold it in anymore. He sucks in a deep breath and just belts it out in that chipmunky voice—Yeah, I’m free, I’m free fallin’!

When it’s over, he’s quiet for a while. Then Roger notices something.

“There,” he says, tapping on the glass. “There’s a mountain over there with a cool story.”

Let’s hear it.

“It’s an Indian place and it’s really old. The story is that if an Indian brave was sad because something bad happened—like they couldn’t get married or if their wife died or something—they would climb up to the top by themselves and just jump off, and on the way down they would magically change into some animal before they hit the ground—you know, a hawk or a bear or something that was their true spirit.”

Roger thinks about this. He futzes with the air vent some more, looks at the green world speeding past, punches the seek button.

“That’s a good story,” he says.

The post Boy Wonder appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

It’s our first morning together, and we’re circumnavigating Nugent’s home: 900 acres of glacier-cut Michigan woodscape 40 miles west of Ann Arbor that he refers to as Ted’s World. One of the first things a visitor learns upon entering Ted’s World is that there exists a set of exacting, unbreakable rules, and the most important rule is that natural balances must be maintained.

“Do you have any idea how many millions of songbirds are killed by feral cats each year?” he asked me earlier, fingering the tiny crosshatches on the grip of the Glock ten-millimeter semiautomatic he carries above his right hip. “Nugent Varmint Patrol. I kill every cat I see.”

The speedometer noses 80, and I brace for the swerve, the muffled thump. It doesn’t come. As we reach the cat, Nugent extends his right hand, sights down a long index finger, and mimics a shot. The cat springs into the trees, chased by a bright spume of maple leaves. Nugent smiles and nods, pleased by the exchange. His fingers drum the wheel in the pit-a-pat rhythm that plays beneath his every sentence.

“Bada-ba-boom, bada-ba-bam, Mother Nature can’t kill ’em like I can,” he sings. Then he leans across the seat and gives my shoulder a brotherly punch, as he does when he’s feeling expansive and wants to jostle me into realizing that he’s got the universe boiled down to a hard, knowable kernel.

“Death is the truth!” Nugent says. “Anybody who doesn’t see that is a fool living in a bullshit fantasy world. You can either participate as a reasoning, caring player in the cycle of life and death or you can turn your back on it. There’s no middle ground. In the final analysis, will I be condemned for shooting cats? Yes. But I think it’s condemnable not to shoot cats.”

He turns to face me, indignant. As the road flashes by unheeded, he lets me in on another truth.

“What everybody sees as offensive is actually attractive, and what they see as attractive is actually offensive.” He punches my shoulder again, softer this time. “Death is good. Wildness is good.”

“Is Ted Nugent good?” I ask.

“Is Ted Nugent good?” He smiles at the highway, and mashes the accelerator to the floor, his voice rising to a jubilant shout. “TED NUGENT IS GREAT! TED NUGENT IS GREAT! TED NUGENT IS FUCKING GREAT!”

The chain-link gate that marks the entrance to Ted’s World stands ten feet high, 20 feet wide, and is wreathed in a bright mosaic of No Trespassing signs. A single-lane track leads into a cattail swamp, through a tangle of white oak and hickory, and on to a drafty corrugated-steel building where Nugent spends each weekday morning from six to ten hosting his Detroit radio call-in show.

“Uncle Ted here, and I am bright-eyed and throbbing with Tedstosterone because the bucks are on the move, the Nuge is in the groove, I am swinging by a nostril hair over the yawning abyss, and my senses are erect, organic, and orgasmic with the spirit of the wild.” Pause. “How are you?”

Then he laughs, his signature, demented, well-practiced giggle that sounds like something out of a Three Stooges movie ù NYAH-hah-hah! ù and that, like many other elements of his repertoire, has less to do with how he feels than how he wants you to feel: entertained, off-balance, intrigued. We shake hands, and it begins. “I thought you’d be one of those pastrami-breath New York motherfuckers, and I’d have to gut you with a soup spoon,” he says into the microphone. The voice is boyish and clear, with broad midwestern vowels and hard-cut consonants. “The liberal media come down here and try to do a probe o’ Nuge, try to tell America what I’m about, like I’m gonna fit in some magazine story.”

He roosts on a black swivel chair beneath fluorescent lights, tipped toward the microphone as if he were about to spring through it. Rock musicians are incapable of aging gracefully, but at 49 Nugent is at least in the ballpark. He’s a rawboned six-three and 180 pounds, with facial features that would seem oversize on a less commanding visage: the wedge of nose with large equine nostrils, the broad mouth bridged by a Fu Manchu mustache, the hazel eyes under bushy eyebrows whose stray tendrils twitch and hop like insect antennae. A touch of gray flickers in his signature mane; the hint of a belly shows beneath his camouflage T-shirt. Hunched on his seat, blading his fingernails with a pocketknife, he looks sly and sorcererlike: the barbarian sage, coiled for action. It comes as no surprise when a ravishing blond in a leopard-skin coat strolls into the studio and kisses him on the lips.

Nugent is exultant. “Is this one fine-ass wench of a wife or what?” he asks me and his radio audience. Shemane, who runs an aerobics studio when she isn’t teaching her Queen of the Forest self-defense workshop, smiles demurely. The 35-year-old former radio traffic girl is Nugent’s second wife and, as subscribers of Ted Nugent ���ϳԹ��� Outdoors magazine can attest, looks equally stunning posed in a black bikini or next to a just-killed warthog.

“Have you seen my daughter Sasha?” Nugent continues. “Talk about gorgeous. And my boy Toby ù 21 years old, six-three, 200 clean-living pounds of American boy. And this big guy. Come scwuggle with Dad, my little monkey.”

Backpack-toting, Vans-wearing, angelic-faced, seven-year old Rocco Winchester Nugent sidles up to the chair for a brief scwuggle. Then, as they do most days, dad and son recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and dad queries son about schoolwork and son responds in a clear, obedient voice. They stand there, the American family in happy domestic huddle, every word captured by the microphone and beamed at 50,000 watts over the blighted but hopeful postindustrial steppes of Motor City.

“I’ll pick up Rocco at school, then I’m going hunting,” Nugent says, still at the mike.

“Great.” says Shemane. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll just kill me a big buck.”

So dawns another day in Ted’s World, where sparest mundanity glows with simple truth: Family is good, country is good, and most of all, hunting is good. So good, in fact, that Nugent has embarked on a personal mission to return hunting to the honored position it once held in American society, back before urbanization, animal rights, Walt Disney, and the hordes of well-meaning Lycra-clad city slickers transformed the outdoors into a cheery theme park. Nugent’s goal is to inspire the nation’s 16 million hunters to rise up and throw off their shackles of political correctness, to loudly and proudly proclaim the Nugent creed that killing animals is not only natural, but necessary. Of course, crusades being what they are, anyone who opposes him is evil and must, as he will tell me, “get their heads ripped off, get crushed, get ground up until they shit blood.”

On the air, Nugent is busy relating his latest media coup. “So I’m on Politically Incorrect the other day and we’re posing for pictures and I put my arm around [Health and Human Services Secretary] Donna Shalala, who’s like three feet tall. So she puts her arm around my waist and ù whooooa ù she feels my Glock and her eyes go BOOM! There’s Secret Service guys all over the studio, checking the crowd, and I’m sitting up there hugging a member of the Cabinet, and I’m packing.” He gives his demented giggle. “You’ve got to love that.

“I dominated that show…the people are roaring, applauding, laughing,” he says. “You know what that applause is? It’s America saying, ‘Ted, we agree.’ You know what that laughter is? It’s America saying, ‘Ted, we’re comfortable with that joke. We’re comfortable with you.’ “

The show wraps up. We walk the hundred yards to his house, a large, well-kept two-story clapboard surrounded by a horse stable and kennels for Nugent’s three hunting dogs. We’re greeted by a charcoal-colored stray that the Nugents adopted a few months back and dubbed Snowy. She rubs languorously on Nugent’s shins, whiskers atwitch, antsy for her master’s touch.

“Yeah,” he says briskly. “We got a cat.”

Nugent starts to reach for her, then hesitates. He looks at the cat and at me, aware of the paradoxes that spring up when you construct a life of deciding who’s right, who’s wrong, and who dies.

“I should shoot you,” he whispers tenderly, rumpling Snowy’s fur. “I should put a bullet in your fuzzy little ass. I really should.”

The cat closes its eyes and purrs.

“See!” Nugent says. “She agrees with me.”

Early afternoon, and the green Suburban is whistling down county roads, rolling through stop signs, wheeling around matrons in Oldsmobiles who peer surprisedly over spectacles. The Nuge is running errands, and there’s no time to lose.

“Hey there, mama, out of the way. Big boy coming through.”

Nugent drives fast not just because he enjoys it, but because he has a lot to do. In the purposeful overload that is his life, there are dogs to tend, guns to test, targets to shoot, tree-stands to fix, videos to film, broadheads to sharpen, brush to pile, stalls to clean, and of course, animals to hunt. So Nugent has developed a system: mornings for radio, early afternoon for chores, and the rest of the day for hunting. Different vehicles for different assignments: the Suburban for runabouts, the 1966 Bronco shortbed for bird hunting, the two Corvette ZR-1s for speed runs, and the zebra-stripe Monster Gonzo Bronco with the four-barrel carb, cowl-mounted police lights, double side-window gun racks, and public-address speaker for occasions when he wishes to make more of an impression. Nugent is an avid devotee of Flaubert’s law: regular and orderly in life, savage and original in art. This is a man who straightens tea towels on oven doors, who wipes the drippy edge of ketchup bottles in restaurants, who won’t permit his son to leave the house without a handkerchief. “A cloth handkerchief,” he clarifies. “Folded.”

As we drive, he coolly lays out the arithmetical gospel of the pro-hunting case: the 18 million whitetails that make up the nation’s expanding deer population, the absence of natural predators, and the millions of dollars lost annually to habitat destruction. He brings up the 7,000 elk that starved to death in Yellowstone two winters ago and insists that hunting would have caused less pain and waste. He quotes studies that meat procured from the wild uses fewer resources than store-bought meat or even vegetables, when you factor in habitat loss and the pollution costs. Which leads him to the point that it’s considerably more eco-sensitive and efficient for him to shoot, gut, and cook his meat than to buy it in a grocery store ù which he hasn’t done, he says, since the Nixon administration. He acknowledges the similarities between his views and those of environmentalists, particularly when it comes to his hatred of mindless development and his obsessive desire for habitat protection.

All in all, it’s a surprisingly well practiced, cogent, and logical presentation, the kind of thoughtful argument that Nugent’s observers use to illustrate what they call the five-20 rule: Listen to him for five minutes, you’ll loathe him. Listen for 20, and he starts to make sense. It also happens to be the kind of argument that has inspired some hunters and environmentalists to engage in a careful rapprochement after decades of political warfare. In Montana, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is working with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation to restore 11,000 acres north of Yellowstone. On a larger scale, 37 organizations (including such diverse groups as the Sierra Club and the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society) have formed the Natural Resource Summit of America to, among other things, deter efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act. It’s a level of cooperation that harks back to the historic camping trip of hunter Theodore Roosevelt and greenie John Muir that resulted in the formation of our national park system. In other words, it’s good news that would seem to inspire Nugent toward some degree of optimism, or at least righteous vindication. But it doesn’t. The more he talks, the angrier he gets, frustrated with the 80 percent of society that makes up the nonhunting public. He fumes about the passage of ten of 13 hunter-restrictive state ballot initiatives in this decade, his fury increasing until, as it always does, it finds a flashpoint. He catches sight of the local paper folded on the seat ù the Jackson Citizen Patriot, for which Nugent writes an outdoors column.

“This guy wrote in last week,” Nugent says. “Complains about my ‘kill of the week’ stories. Said I gave hunters a bad name.”

He sucks a chestful of air; his face tightens. “First of all, I write my column every other week, not every week ù get your facts straight, you asswipe. Second, I don’t write about a hunt every time ù I’ll write entire columns about songbirds and trees and snow geese. Third, I wallow in the thrill of the hunt, the encounter, the chase, and the kill ù it’s all thrilling. But it’s not about killing. It’s about the value system that produces these thrilling experiences. That’s my message, that’s always been my message. Hey, buddy, does ‘fuck you’ ring any bells?”

Nugent accelerates past a tractor. “You know, that magazine you work for is pretty cute,” he says. “But how can they project this fantasy world of biking, hiking, and windsurfing and ignore the fundamental realities? You can’t. Your readers need the Nuge ù you can’t deny it. I’m a force in the outdoors, with or without your stamp of approval. The assholes don’t like me to say the things I do, and I love to piss assholes off. You know why?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Because it proves I’m not an asshole!”

There are those who would beg to differ. Nugent is despised by people from all reaches of the sporting community and beyond, including Wayne Pacelle, vice-president of the Humane Society of the United States (“He’s a lustful, rapacious killer, way out of the American mainstream”); by moderate hunting ethicists such as David Petersen, editor of an essay collection called A Hunter’s Heart (“He’s obnoxious, brash, and a bully. He embodies and magnifies aspects of hunting that the general public detests”); by old-line hunters such as Glenn St. Charles, founder of the esteemed Pope & Young bowhunting club (“He’s a loose cannon, covering the trails with washtubs of blood”); and by at least one of his Michigan neighbors (“He’s a horse’s ass, if you ask me”). Some just sputter when they hear his name. “Ohhh, my God,” says Chris Anderlik, a Michigan animal-rights activist. “Killer…asshole…monster.”

Others, however, acknowledge Nugent’s potential as a bridge from the traditionally insular hunting community, particularly given his ability to use the media. “He could be a powerful voice, not just for hunting, but for the environmental movement, if he could just control his venting,” says Ted Kerasote, hunting ethicist and author of Bloodties and Heart of Home. “Maybe he needs a handler.”

“Nugent is doing some constructive and clever things,” says Mary Zeiss Stange, author of Woman the Hunter, a scholarly take on the cultural history of hunting. “He’s a good showman and he really cares. I just hope he realizes that he doesn’t do himself or anybody else any favors with that whack ’em and stack ’em stuff. It doesn’t square with the good he does ù or the good he could do if he tempered his style a little.”

Such a proposition is more complex than it may appear, because to spend time with Nugent is to realize that, at the deepest level, he is his style. Nugent’s blood-lust rocker persona ranks as his singular creation, born of hard circumstance and honed over the decades into an impermeable carapace of ego and belief. Few celebrity personas, mainstream or obscure, have evolved so completely; few have been willing to dismiss any notion of a hidden interior life, to declare, as Nugent does, that the fiction is real ù that the act is no act. To some, his strategy creates a figure of clownish bluster and infantile aggression; to others, a gutsy firebrand who puts his money where his mouth is. But there can be no doubting the strategy’s price: He must, at all costs, stay in character.

“Wait a second,” he says as we pull up to a stop sign. The automatic window whirs down. Closing his eyes, he elaborately sniffs the air.

“I smell a buck,” he says.

He checks my face and sees doubt. “I’m not kidding! I can smell them from hundreds of yards off ù big, beastadon bucks in rut, getting all smelly and horny.” He scans the woods and gives a slow, conspiratorial nod. “He’s in there, I guarantee it.”

Later I ask if, as he has written, he really shot a robin at 100 yards with a slingshot. “Nailed him,” he says. “Centerpunched.”

I ask again. The length of a football field? With a normal slingshot? Nugent stares me down.

“In flight,” he says.

This is Nugent’s game; he is constantly challenging you to believe him, and when he’s questioned, he won’t back down. Which is why he finds it tricky to adapt to a world that sometimes accepts his views and trickier still to make the changes he must make to transcend the status of fringe curiosity and become the national statesman he wants to be. So he adapts in tiny, fitful steps ù forging what amounts to a stealth campaign of embracing new philosophies, reacting to criticism, updating his message, and never, ever admitting to it. Nugent, by his rules, must always be Nugent.

“I think I might be the most intense human being who ever lived,” he says. When asked to name someone who comes close, he thinks awhile and settles on Muhammad Ali. “Pretty intense,” Nugent allows. “Of course, he didn’t go as long as I have.”

Nugent got his first guitar in 1956, when he was seven. He didn’t want to play guitar any more than his older brother Jeff wanted to play trumpet or his younger brother John wanted to play drums. But he got one, and he practiced because that was the rule. There were many rules in the Nugent household: military-spec haircuts, for one. If a Coke was opened, half of it was to be poured into a juice glass and placed in the refrigerator for later. Toilet paper was to be used four sheets at a time. At the dinner table, food was arranged on the plate and eaten sequentially ù beans, meat, potatoes, salad ù and passed clockwise, and if it wasn’t, Warren Nugent had his steel-and-leather riding crop to make sure the miscreant noticed. Warren was a military man, a drill sergeant in Ike’s army until he came back to a job as a regional rep for a steel company in Detroit. He drank, and he gave his three sons and daughter what was then referred to as a “physical upbringing.” They were to be successful, or else.

“Dad could tell me to do something, and I’d just not do it,” says first-born Jeff, now president of Neutrogena. “But Ted always felt the need to rebel. He had to make a big deal out of it. He had a creative side, and he hated being penned in.”

Ted played his guitar, and Ted got out. At 14, he was winning band contests by leaping onto the judges’ table and soloing from his knees. Soon after, he was sneaking out of the house to open for the Supremes. A year after high school graduation, he was gliding back into his old neighborhood in a Cadillac limo with the number-two song in the nation, “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” which he cowrote for his band, the Amboy Dukes. By the early seventies he was carving out a niche as rock and roll’s primitive wild man. Swinging on a rope, wearing a rabbit-skin loincloth (“with no bottom panel, so the women could enjoy me”), Nugent created a figure that exceeded parody’s grasp. He shot flaming arrows, shattered glass with guitar feedback, rappelled from catwalks, leaped from 16-foot amplifiers, and perhaps most impressive, remained as sober as a churchman. Nugent famously turned down acid from Hendrix (providing grist for his oft-repeated couplet: “Jimi did drugs and Jimi’s dead. I went hunting, and I’m still Ted”), eschewed alcohol, and indulged only in vices of a more natural variety. At morning wake-up knocks, roadies would stand in awe as the girls filed out of Nugent’s hotel room ù one… two…three…four…five. “I am totally a product of my own desires,” he declared in 1977. “I am the nucleus. I have life dicked.”

For a brief time, Nugent seemed correct. Three consecutive albums went double-platinum with such riffs as “Cat Scratch Fever” and “If You Can’t Lick ‘Em, Lick ‘Em”; from 1977 to 1979 Nugent was the largest-grossing tour act in the world. He headlined in front of 500,000 at Cal Jam and wielded his pistols on the cover of Rolling Stone. The bicoastal rock establishment, however, never accepted him as much more than a regional act, and Nugent ignored them, living in his two-bedroom, one-bath Michigan farmhouse, disregarding their advice to update his music and image. “I thrived in the rock industry,” he says, “in spite of the industry.”

When the albums stopped selling widely in the eighties, Nugent maintained a core following in the Midwest among a fiercely devoted male, blue-collar crowd. He played 200 shows a year in small arenas and sold a trickle of albums both here and abroad (he’s quite popular in Japan). He dabbled in other media, guesting as a drug dealer on Miami Vice, explaining guitar feedback to wide-eyed kids on Newton’s Apple. Spurred by his loyal following, his concerts and music became increasingly hunting-oriented, and when hunting came under attack in the late eighties, Nugent started fighting back ù at first with onstage rants, then in more organized ways. As a tribute to late friend and legendary Michigan hunter Fred Bear, Nugent founded Ted Nugent World Bowhunters in 1988. “Propelled by the high visibility power of my Rock n’ Roll career,” he wrote, “I will take the truth high, far, and wide.”

It didn’t take long for the mainstream to notice. Specifically, it took Down to Earth, a 1988 assemblage of Nugent’s private video footage that friends had encouraged him to release. “This ain’t no Disneyland,” Nugent warns at the outset and proceeds to arrow nine wild pigs, a Spanish goat, a turkey, a squirrel, and an armadillo, at one point showing the entire montage in slow motion, laughing his demented laugh and doing his “gutpile boogie.” The tape was circulated widely through hunting stores and mail-order catalogs, igniting hue and cry among hunters and animal-rights activists alike, who objected to, among other things, the excessive celebration of death. Nugent found himself vilified, ridiculed, and accused of ruining the pastime he professed to love. Stung, he responded the only way he knew how: by switching into what he calls Defiant Mode and launching a Pattonesque all-fronts attack. He released CDs of hunting music (including such songs as “I Just Wanna Go Huntin'” and “Fred Bear: The American Hunter’s Anthem”), filmed the Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild television series (featuring illustrative arrow-entry points and how-to gutting tips and bringing in $3 million as a PBS fund-raiser in hunter-heavy areas), wrote a book called Blood Trails, a detailed accounting of 120 Nuge kills (“The Zwickey 2 Blade had penetrated the entire skull, slicing the brain, and severing a big vein. YUM YUM!!”), spoke at governor’s conferences, and opened his bowhunting megastore-museum in Jackson, outfitting it with all the trappings of a vibrant Nugent hunting culture, including used, autographed Whackmaster arrows ($19.95), the I Kill It, I Grill It apron ($16.95), the Baby Camo Diaper Set ($19.95), Christmas stockings in the signature Nugent zebra stripe ($14.95), and 17 styles of Nugent baseball caps. Such aggressive marketing, combined with his group’s lack of not-for-profit status, gave rise to rumors of profiteering, which Nugent dismisses by citing a $3 million loss on the store alone. “When he gets down to his last $10 million,” Jeff Nugent says, “then he’ll get worried.”

More surprisingly, he gradually showed an ability to adapt. In a 1991 “Teditorial” in his ���ϳԹ��� Outdoors magazine, he encouraged his followers never to make fun or light of the killing of an animal, and he apologized for making those mistakes in Down to Earth. He has increasingly imbued his message with American Indian ritual, to the point of being inducted as a blood brother of the Lakota tribe. He retrofitted his speaking strategy to a two-pronged attack, as he puts it, “hitting them with the wild Motor City madman side, then hitting them with the spiritual side.” Last year, to broaden appeal, he changed the name of the organization to Ted Nugent United Sportsmen of America. In his home, near the black-and-white vanity, are stacked copies of The Road Less Traveled and Beyond and Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life.

“Ted has toned it down some, in order to persevere,” says Lee Fields, TNUSA’s Florida director. “In certain contexts, he avoids words like blood, guts, kill. But he will politely remind people that their daily actions involve the death of animals, that a leather jacket is a fur coat with a haircut.”

Politically, TNUSA’s actions tend toward a rootsy catchall: letter-writing campaigns, game-meat giveaways to shelters, highway cleanups, kids’ camps, tree plantings, and the like. There are only a handful of employees and little infrastructure, no national meetings other than the info-sessions before concerts, no political strategy other than the defense of hunting at all costs ù which often puts it at odds with the more moderate hunting community over issues such as using bait to attract bears and hunting mountain lions. While Nugent muffled some criticism by selling his interest in a Michigan mink ranch, he continues to operate Sunrize Acres, his fenced-in 340-acre hunting ranch outside Jackson, where he can personally guide you to a trophy bison bull ($5,000), Russian boar, or whitetail deer ($1,000 each) and where he holds his annual Rape ‘O the Hills hunting jamboree. But he offers only a token defense when faced with the criticism of hunting ranches ù lack of fair chase, the questionable ethics of purchasing a trophy animal. “I understand the criticism,” he says. “But there is a recreational value to hunting, and to deny that would be stupid.”

As we near the turnoff for his home, he stops the car with a screech. Forty yards off the road, a magnificent eight-point buck stands in a shoulder-high field of goldenrod. Nugent points his trigger finger at him.

“Aaahhh. Is that fucking gorgeous or what? He’s 200 pounds at least, maybe three and a half years old. I mean, this is what it’s all about.”

The buck stares blankly at the car, twitching its ears.

“If I was in Defiant Mode, I’d do him for sure, right here, right now, with the handgun,” Nugent says. “Then you’d write about it, and they’d all have a riot with me, they’d say, ‘He has no respect for animals.'”

He watches the buck for a while and then slides the gearshift into drive. “Defiant Mode is fun, but it’s a lot of work.”

It’s late afternoon and windy when we return; a storm front is rolling in from the west. Nugent kicks off his shoes, unlocks the back door, and walks into his 5,000-square-foot custom-designed home, the sanctum sanctorum of Ted’s World. Spread before us, the space is dark and cavernous. Kitchen, dining, and living rooms form one flowing unit; upstairs bedrooms are set along a balcony overlooking it all. When he built it seven years ago, Nugent kept interior walls to a minimum, freeing up sight lines so the family could enjoy the feeling of being together. Right now, though, there’s nobody to see. Rocco is at a friend’s; Shemane is teaching another class. Sasha and Toby have their own place, and his older daughter, Starr, lives a couple hours’ drive away in Berkley. It’s just Nugent and faithful Snowy, now pawing happily at his woolen socks.

Tedquarters, as it’s known, looks as one might expect it to. The dining room wall is studded with heads and hides of bears, moose, oryx, caribou, whitetails, warthogs, and lions, to name a few, and the zebra-stripe motif finds its way onto dining-room chairs, carpet, and a tea set. But overall, it’s quite modest and homey, with a few surprising touches: Well-leafed issues of Harper’s and Martha Stewart Living adorn the coffee table; a portly ceramic cow stands guard in the bay window.

“Another bachelor night,” Nugent says, poking impatiently around the fridge. “It’s not like the studio is that busy. I’ve told Shemane she ought to quit that and spend more time at home. Of course, she’s saying the same thing to me, asking me why do I put up with all this shit? Why don’t I go out and just do what I want to do ù -hunt, travel, have fun?” He shrugs his shoulders wearily. “Have fun? I am having fun. This is fun.” He sits down in a zebra-stripe chair. He dials up Shemane and asks about dinner, reminding her to pick up more ginger ale. He checks his Dayminder and makes some phone calls; his manager says that Michael Moore of TV Nation wants him to come on the show and hand out automatic weapons to the crowd. Nugent says thanks, but no. He rants a short time about liberals like Moore and then stops, his anger thin and unsustainable. He rubs his eyes tiredly. The animal heads look down on him, lamplight pooling in their glass eyes. Snowflakes tick against the windowpanes and begin to pile. It’s tranquil, the first quiet moment of the day. Sensing the mood change, Nugent is compelled to explain.

“Yeah, I’m still living the dream,” he says. “It seems to be effortless, but as you can see, it’s not. It’s definitely not.”

The phone rings. It’s Earl, the manager at Sunrize Acres. There’s a buck down outside the ranch, just beyond the eastern fence. Nugent grips the phone tighter.

“Wounded?” he wants to know. “Car? Bullet? Arrow?”

Earl doesn’t know. The deer walked around all night, acting funny. Then it just lay down. Earl drove right up to it, and it didn’t move. It looks like it’s going to die, he says.

Nugent springs to his feet, energized. This is what he lives for: a complication to be simplified, disorder to be repaired. Moreover, he’s excited to have an audience. “Come on,” he says. “Your readers need to see this.”

It’s snowing hard by the time we reach Sunrize. We pick up Earl, who directs us to the deer, still lying in a field of alfalfa, its head raised. We bump slowly across the furrows and approach the animal from the back, pulling up a scant ten feet away.

The automatic window lowers. The deer’s delicate ears swivel like radar dishes, but its head doesn’t turn. Nugent looks for a moment, then unholsters the Glock.

“You’re a pretty buck, all right,” he says as he sights in. There’s a short, metallic thunderclap, and the .40-caliber softpoint enters the deer’s brain. The deer lurches; then its head droops and falls gently to the snow.

Nugent steps out of the car and walks over. “Your dancing days are over, pal,” he says, poking the eye with a sprig of alfalfa to make sure.

Stretched out in the snow, the body steams faintly. Its coat is rich gold, its belly streaked in white, its eye pearlescent black. Earl puts his hand over the heart. “Still pumping,” he says. “Doesn’t know he’s dead.”

Nugent and Earl place their hands on the body, searching for signs of injury or disease. They find none. They grip its antlers, guess its weight, pat its ribs, check its hooves, and wonder why it lay down and gave up. Nugent probes the skull for the bullet hole and lifts an index finger painted bright red.

After all the rhetoric and politics, this is what it comes down to: two men standing quietly around a body in a lonesome field, everything slowly being covered in snow. This is what Nugent wants you to see: a logical, humane, perfect kill, an example of man’s conscious and caring participation in the natural cycle.

“I got to do what I got to do,” he says, rubbing the blood on his thumb and feeling its wetness. “It’s going to freeze, starve to death, get eaten by dogs. This is the only thing to do. It’s our responsibility.”

Yet there’s still something hard about it, something that bids Nugent to spend time looking at the deer, touching it, talking about it, something that is either genuine emotion or a calculated attempt to simulate it ù for him, perhaps, the two have become the same thing. All we can say is this: The deer was alive; now it is not. Animal ù the word is derived from the Latin word for “soul” ù has again been transformed into meat. Nugent wants to show us that death is good, but in the end he can only show us that death is.

The post Better Environmentalism Through Killing appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

“Let's see if we can miss the reef this time,” Joseph Hazelwood says to me. Then he laughs.��That's the first thing you notice about Joe Hazelwood, the laugh. It's not a laugh, actually; it's a joyless simulation of a laugh, a swift propulsion of air through the nose that mimics laughter's cadence but lacks its music, signifying neither joy nor scorn, but information. Laughter is a vital element of the Hazelwood vocabulary. Dark eyes bracketed by wrinkles, large bald head bobbing up and down, ever-present Marlboro tilting dangerously from his lips, he wields mirth as one might wield a friendly elbow: easing tension, forging a conspiratorial mood, letting you know in no uncertain terms that he, along with everybody else ù better than everybody else ù gets the joke. To be Joe Hazelwood is to be preternaturally alert to double entendres, puns, one-liners, coincidences, any flashing link between this moment and that dark night in March 1989 when he was transfigured from an anonymous but skilled professional into a lasting national symbol of rank incompetence and drunken idiocy. When the opportunity for a joke presents itself, he is coiled and ready, anticipating its arrival, deflecting it with topspin, and then laughing his ersatz laugh ù at the joke, to be sure, but also at the irony of his telling the joke. To be Joe Hazelwood is to be a connoisseur of irony, a seeker of veiled meanings. He may have lost his career, his ship, and his reputation, but he's still got perspective. He's still cool about it. Earlier today, Hazelwood was describing a different tanker run that he made through Prince William Sound. “We left Valdez fully loaded…” He pulls up short. “The ship, I mean—not me.” The Marlboro tip glows and bobs.

We're in the Seamen's Church Institute, a tidy brick building in lower Manhattan that serves as a training center for merchant mariners. We've come here at my request from the midtown law office where Hazelwood works to take a spin in the bridge simulator. This full-scale, state-of-the-art device has been set up to replicate the conditions at midnight, March 23, 1989, a few moments before the Exxon Valdez bellied-up on Bligh Reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound and began disgorging 11 million gallons of crude oil, obliterating life on 1,244 miles of coastline, and forever altering the way in which we view the vulnerability of our wild places. Instantly overlaid by myth, the spill has become crystallized in the public imagination as the archetypal catastrophe, Captain Joseph Jeffrey Hazelwood its archetypal cause.

The captain is nothing if not punctual, so we arrived at five o'clock, exactly on schedule, and waited a few minutes while the simulator's operator booted up its Valdez program. Hazelwood was eager to get started: In order to catch his 6:24 train home to Huntington, Long Island, he calculated that he must depart here at 5:45, no later. Now, as our facsimile tanker approaches the facsimile reef, he steps comfortably around the bridge, eyeing the engine-order telegraph, tweaking the radar, confidently adjusting the dials and knobs. Satisfied, he steps back and checks his watch: 5:35.

Beyond the frames of five bridge windows, the mountains of Prince William Sound part to reveal a passage ten miles wide. Ahead, the monolithic main deck of the supertanker recedes toward the horizon. Winds are calm, skies dark, visibility eight miles. We've left the shipping lanes, just as the Exxon Valdez departed them in order to avoid ice. Off the starboard bow, a tiny red light pulses once every four seconds ù Bligh Reef buoy. Radar shows that we're passing Busby Island, the spot where the tanker was to have begun its starboard turn back into the shipping lanes. An SCI captain named James Fitzpatrick, who has been informed of Hazelwood's time restriction, mans the helm.

“The moment of truth,” Hazelwood says flatly. “Give me right 20.”

“Right two-zero, Cap,” says Fitzpatrick.

The ship begins to swing. Hazelwood does not look to the radar screen for proof; he waits to see it, as he later says, “to feel the turn.” The red buoy light begins to slide across the windows, imperceptibly at first, then with silken rapidity. After two minutes, during which time we've advanced a bare seven-tenths of a mile, our 1,000-foot, 250,000-ton virtual supertanker—weighing 40,000 tons more than the Exxon Valdez—has turned on a dime. The buoy bobs innocuously off our port side. We've missed Bligh Reef by more than two miles.

Eyes on the horizon, Hazelwood speaks. “That's all you'd have to do. That's all anybody would have had to do.”

“OK,” says Fitzpatrick, picking up the note of finality. “Time to catch that train.”

Hazelwood doesn't reply. The ship presses onward. Bligh Reef buoy disappears from view. Minutes pass.

“Uh, Captain…” The dutiful Fitzpatrick taps his watch, which shows ten minutes until six.

Hazelwood doesn't move. His head fixes on the horizon, eyes reflecting the radar screen's endless clocklike whirl.

“Give me left ten, midshipman steady,” he says, ordering a course that will route the tanker back into the lanes, bound for Naked Island and the open ocean beyond.

“Left ten,” echoes Fitzpatrick. Again, Hazelwood waits to feel the turn.

Somewhere beneath us, a subway rumbles toward Penn Station. Hazelwood lets it go. He stays on the bridge because eight years ago he didn't stay. He stays on the bridge because he is in purgatory and in purgatory you can laugh, or cry, or protest your innocence, but the only thing that matters is reliving your sin over and over until either you or God is worn out. And that's the other thing you learn about Joe Hazelwood: He's served notice to God that it's not going to be him.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” he says.

It's my first meeting with Hazelwood, and he's standing in the cramped disarray of his 8-by-14-foot office, feet set wide apart, palms held out in parodic greeting. He's wearing a button-down oxford shirt, khakis, a Jerry Garcia-designed tie, and dress loafers, all of it enshrouded in the smoke and steam of his medicinal Marlboros and coffee. At 51, his body is that of a younger man: six feet, 180 pounds, broad shoulders tapering to a 34-inch waist, corded forearms below carefully rolled sleeves. Beneath the graying skein of beard, the face is small and childlike, with leathery skin crosshatched and furrowed by wrinkles, russet-colored eyes set in a wary squint, and obstinately protruding lower lip. He doesn't look at me as he talks, instead tipping his head toward the blue carpet. Eye contact comes in furtive volleys, to prevent the subtleties of his words from passing unnoticed or, worse, being misread for earnestness.

After a few minutes it becomes apparent that Hazelwood's not going to sit down. “I work standing up,” he explains to his coffee cup. An old shipboard habit, and not his only one. “When I first came here, I walked around shutting every door in sight. Drove everybody nuts. Kept cleaning off my desk, too. As you can see,” he indicates the avalanche of manila folders, sticky notes, and coffee-ringed napkins fanning out before him, “I've made the adjustment.”

There have been other adjustments. The drop in salary from $100,000 to “enough to live on.” The dearth of vacation. The daily 90-minute commute on the Long Island Railroad, or as he calls it, the Train of the Living Dead. “It's scary,” he says. “I catch myself moving to the spot on the platform where the doors are going to be when the train stops.” He places a long index finger to his temple and pulls the trigger. “I always swore I'd never be one of those guys.”

Every morning begins the same way. “Let's see what disasters we've got today,” he says, rattling open a copy of Lloyd's List, a maritime industry daily, and turning to the casualty report. Good news: capsized barge in San Francisco Bay, bulk carrier aground in Turkey, iron-ore carrier stranded in the Yellow Sea, cement-carrying barge near Guyana suffering “extensive damage” following a collision with an unknown submerged object. Hazelwood's job, among other things, is to negotiate settlements between cargo insurers, which his firm represents, and the parties liable for the losses, usually the shipping companies. Each morning brings a dozen or more new claims: delaminated plywood, sea-soaked paper, rancid plums, torn cellulose, rotting bananas. The files accumulate on his desk in great tilting stacks. Hazelwood makes a point of saying that he takes no joy in these incidents. He mentions this because he's aware, as he is aware of each Kafkaesque plotline in his post-spill life, that the more shipwrecks and groundings there are, the harder he has to work and (should you desire another level of irony) the larger his year-end bonus will be. When asked if he enjoys his present job, he hesitates and says yes. His desktop calendar, set on December 1995, is thickly brocaded with urgently penciled squares, triangles, circles, and other unidentifiable scratchings so deep that in places the paper is cut through.

“You'd be bored out of your skull watching me work,” he warned me in an early phone conversation. “I know I am.”

Hazelwood has been working at Chalos & Brown, the law firm that has defended him since the spill, for more than five years. Reserved and awkward in formal social situations, he excels in the manly woof and banter of proletarian office life, transmitting the universally comprehended vibe of the Good Guy, that can-do, sports-literate, shoot-the-breeze brand of heartiness that simultaneously draws people close and holds them at a distance. He isn't, he points out, an indentured servant. A reluctant Exxon picks up his legal bills, as it must under employment law in California, where Hazelwood signed on with the Valdez. (Democratically, Exxon also indirectly funds Hazelwood's criminal prosecution, since 85 percent of Alaska state revenues are derived from oil taxes.) Nor is he landlocked: His captain's license has been active since a nine-month Coast Guard suspension ended in 1991. After a brief string of temporary jobs—lobster fisherman, boat transporter—this job has the advantage of providing a staging area where Hazelwood can pursue the only vocation still open to him: defending himself in court. “Nobody in the maritime industry will touch him,” says Michael Chalos, one of his lawyers and a college buddy. “Who could afford to take the PR risk? I mean, bang a dock and it's on the front page—'Hazelwood does it again!'”

In the hallway outside his office, 20 feet from his nameplate, a collage of newspaper clippings is pressed inside a black frame: DRUNK AT SEA…FATEFUL VOYAGE…OIL-SPILL CAPT FIRED…$1M BAIL LANDS OIL CAPT IN BRIG… More clips, hundreds more compiled by the firm, reside in two black scrapbooks inside his office. OFFICER SMELLED LIQUOR ON CAPT OF TANKER… SHIP MAY HAVE BEEN ON AUTOPILOT…OFF TO JAIL…SKIPPER'S RISE AND FALL…

“Good reading, isn't it,” Hazelwood says over my shoulder.

It is, beginning with the trumpet-blare that the captain of the Exxon Valdez was, at the time of the accident, unqualified to drive his car in New York state because of drunken-driving violations. Then comes the New York Times page-one analysis that Hazelwood had probably set the ship on autopilot and gone below while third mate Gregory Cousins and helmsman Robert Kagan “desperately tried” to regain control. Then the stories that after the grounding, Hazelwood foolishly attempted to motor the ship off the reef, risking a possible capsizing and the spillage of millions more gallons of oil. And the dramatic courtroom depiction of the judge who compared the spill to the bombing of Hiroshima, set bail at $1 million, and sent Hazelwood to a night in prison before the bond was reduced.

Hazelwood flips through the binder as if it were a family album. His fingernail taps the page. “There's Kagan…there's Greg…there's a good shot of Mike Chalos…there's me in high school.”

He chuckles. And why not? The world may know his secrets, but he can laugh, because he has found out the world's secret, one that allowed him to endure hatred, ostracism, ridicule, loss, and pain. The secret is this: Keep your mouth shut. Hazelwood believes in silence, believes in it with religious fervor, because it has served him in a way that no religion could or did; it has given him a power no one else had, power he has never relinquished. Aside from his lawyers and his testimony in the civil case, he has spoken to no one about what happened that night. Not reporters, not his best friend, not his brothers, not his wife, not his fighter-pilot father — especially not his father. What happened that night-more precisely, what Joe Hazelwood did, what he didn't do, and how he feels about it-belongs to him and no one else. He keeps his secrets, and for better or worse, they keep him.

On our final visit, he will tell me, “If there's one thing I've learned from this experience, it would be this: If you're ever in any kind of a touchy situation, do not say a word to anyone. Words can only hurt you.”

That face—the shadowy beard, the child's stubborn lip, the brim of the driving cap darkening the already-sinister eyes—sets the tone of spill coverage. There's the usual spate of determinist profiles, in which Hazelwood's life is presented as dully predictable precursor: the 138 IQ, the cocky-ironic college yearbook motto “It Will Never Happen to Me,” the college drinking escapades, the too-quiet manner—even his ship's Exxon Fleet Safety Awards for 1987 and 1988 are knowingly invoked.

Suitably enough, it was Hazelwood's words that sealed his fate, most notably through the spectacularly damning quote he gave the two Coast Guard officers who boarded the ship the night of the spill. In four words, Hazelwood seemed to reveal that the reason for this spreading horror lay not in some mechanical or navigational problem, but rather in something that had broken loose inside him. The officer inquired what the problem was. Hazelwood replied, “You're looking at it.”

“I mean, here they were, called out to a grounded tanker in the middle of the night, oil spewing all over the place, and they walk up and ask me what the problem is?” Hazelwood sweeps his arm grandly. “I said, 'You're looking at it'—as in, 'Hey man, you're standing on it.' It wasn't an admission of guilt, but everybody interpreted it as such.”

The few times that Hazelwood was quoted in the aftermath of the spill, he said nothing to vindicate himself or show remorse. When the judge in his criminal trial asked for an apology, Hazelwood declined. When Connie Chung asked if he could declare his innocence before a national television audience, he said he could say nothing either way about the case. He displayed a clinical detachment from what everybody else was fiercely concerned with: the otters, the salmon, the ecosystem of Prince William Sound, the spill's larger role as harkening call, along with the widening ozone hole and the disappearing rainforests, to the environmental movement's early-decade shift to center stage in the American consciousness.

Hazelwood seemed oblivious to the fact that his silence forever condemned him in the minds of many, oblivious to the proven truth of the political maxim that it's not the accusation, it's how you handle the accusation that matters. Among friends and acquaintances, the silence engendered much speculation. Was it guilt? Pride? Shame? Denial? Was he protecting someone? But to hear Hazelwood tell it, the matter is simpler: There's nothing to say.

“What am I going to do, write a book about a guy missing a turn?” His eyebrows arch cartoonily. “Books have a hero. I'm just a regular guy caught in a situation. There's a perception out there, and all the spin doctors in the world can't fix that perception. I'm not a bubbly person. I don't have an inner child I'm beating up. Go on Oprah? I just don't have it in me. The people who know me know what I'm about.”

Occasionally, however, the shell of equanimity shows a few cracks. Though our time together has its agreed-upon boundaries (no questions about his actions leading up to the spill, no interviews with his wife or college-age daughter, no visits to his home), Hazelwood shows an increasing willingness to broach the accident and his feelings toward it. At those moments, which usually take place during his 20-minute walk from Penn Station to the office, his voice takes on the nasal, syncopated patois of middle-class Long Island. An unabashed bibliophile (another shipboard habit), he tosses off quotes from Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein, Stonewall Jackson, Beryl Markham, and does a passable Bill Murray impression. The rhythm of the walk takes over, he's carried along in the hot swell of humanity, and for once his words flow unencumbered.

“You know, this thing happened the same spring as Tiananmen Square,” he says, stopping to carefully stub out a cigarette. “That was big news for a day—then it was back to our regularly scheduled slamming of Captain Hazelwood. A year later you got Saddam dumping 40 million barrels of oil—150 times what was spilled in Prince William Sound—and he's setting the country on fire, and the guy's still getting better press than me?” On his fingers, he ticks off other accidents and tragedies that received less attention, including many larger oil spills that were virtually ignored by the press. “The way the media handles disasters is out of proportion. Like a friend of mine said after TWA Flight 800 went down: 'Good thing there weren't any fucking otters on board.'”

Then we're outside his building, in the shadow of its steel and smoked glass. “I've learned to keep my emotions out of it,” he says, regaining his equilibrium. “This is a business, and emotions cloud your judgment. This is a technical problem, basically, and it's got to be dealt with in a technical way. Besides, it's like Eddie Murphy said in Trading Places: 'I'm a Karate Man—I bleed on the inside.'” He opens the door and smiles his good-guy smile, and it is utterly unconvincing.

The boxes are everywhere, stacked along walls, bowing bookshelves, and concealing the floor of Hazelwood's office, a tiny fortress of fact and belief. Together they form the bulwark of Hazelwood's legal argument that he was neither drunk nor negligent the night of the Exxon Valdez spill and that the real reason for the accident lies in an unfortunate combination of mundane events, happenstance, and human mistakes-the most significant of which were not made by Hazelwood. With few exceptions—and little fanfare from the media—the courts and Coast Guard have agreed, finding him innocent of criminal mischief, operating a watercraft while intoxicated, reckless endangerment, and misconduct. As he helps prepare the appeal to his civil charge of recklessness and waits for the Alaska Supreme Court to issue a decision on (brace yourself) the state's appeal of the appellate court's second overturning of Hazelwood's Class B misdemeanor conviction for negligent discharge of oil—a decision that will lead to either a new trial or, perhaps, the final dismissal of the criminal case—one would expect a level of anticipation, the heady possibility that one chapter might be coming to a close. But when I mention this, Hazelwood turns dour.

“What court do I go to to get my reputation back?” he says brusquely. “I'm not trying to impress anybody. I just don't want this hanging over my head. The damage is done. I've got to get on with my life.”

Which mostly involves defending himself in court, a well-choreographed piece of tradecraft that Hazelwood and his attorneys know cold: Show how the accident happened, and then show that there is no evidence that Hazelwood's actions or behavior were anything less than normal; in short, let him blend innocuously into the larger context. Now, standing amid the boxes, Hazelwood moves through the key elements of his case with disarming ease. The evidence is all here, right here:

• Stripped to essentials, the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef because it departed the shipping lanes to avoid ice—a maneuver executed by the Brooklyn and the Arco Juneau just hours before—and failed to turn back into the lanes before striking the reef.
• Third mate Gregory Cousins, testifying in the criminal and the civil trials, shouldered much of the blame for failing to execute the turn that Hazelwood had ordered. After outlining the maneuver and asking Cousins twice if he was comfortable making the turn, Hazelwood left the bridge at 11:50 p.m. Cousins phoned Hazelwood at 11:55 to say he was beginning the turn but then failed to check that helmsman Robert Kagan followed his commands, spending precious minutes charting the ship's position. Cousins was on the phone to Hazelwood, saying, “I think we're in serious trouble,” when they felt the first jolt a few minutes after midnight.
• “There was no reason to do what I did that evening,” Cousins testified. “I shouldn't have allowed myself to become inattentive.” Hoping to secure testimony against Hazelwood, the state gave Cousins immunity against prosecution; plaintiffs in the civil suit did not press charges against him lest he complicate their case against Exxon and Hazelwood; the Coast Guard cited him for negligence and suspended his license for nine months.��“To the public and the press, 'third mate' has the ring of 'cabin boy,'” says Hazelwood. “Cousins was a trained, licensed navigational officer, a good man. He's still a good man.”
• Helmsman Kagan, when ordered to make the turn, did not execute it fully. Kagan earned the nickname Rain Man during the criminal trial for mixing up his right and left and for muttering to himself during cross-examination, “Why is he asking me that? I wish he wouldn't ask me that.” Employment records showed that Kagan required “constant supervision.”��“I put a lot of it on Kagan,” says Paul Larson, who led the Coast Guard investigation. “He does his job, and we're talking about something else today.”
• The post-grounding radio transmissions in which Hazelwood said he was trying to “extract the ship from the reef” were misleading. He only called for forward throttle—not reverse, as would have been necessary if he'd wanted to free the vessel. By keeping the ship pressed firmly against the reef, he minimized the spill and the danger to his crew.
• The blood tests that showed Hazelwood to be intoxicated were mishandled. Drawn ten and a half hours after the grounding (because of variance in individual metabolic rates, most states, including Alaska, disallow any test performed more than three hours after an event), the blood was shipped to the lab in tubes without a chemical needed to keep the blood from fermenting, invalidating the results. In addition, the labels on the tubes were switched to make it appear as if they did contain preservative, a switch revealed by discrepancies in laboratory log entries.

Even in the criminal trial, before evidence of the blood mishandling had surfaced, state prosecutors were unable to persuade a jury that Hazelwood was intoxicated at the time of the grounding. By his own admission, Hazelwood drank “two or three vodkas” between 4:30 and 6:30 the night of the grounding. To account for his 0.061 blood-alcohol content ten hours after the accident, however, either (1) his blood-alcohol level upon boarding the ship had been .35, a level he could have achieved only by consuming 16 to 20 drinks in the course of the day, or (2) he had sneaked a few drinks sometime after boarding the ship at 8:25 p.m. With the testimony of 21 witnesses, including Cousins and the Coast Guard officers who first boarded the ship, that Hazelwood's behavior had not been impaired in any way, and with no hard evidence of shipboard drinking beyond two empty bottles of low-alcohol beer in Hazelwood's stateroom, the jury took little time in deliberating the intoxication charge.

As for his widely presumed alcoholism, Hazelwood can refer to records that show his physician had diagnosed him with “dysthymia, a subgrouping of depression, characterized by episodic abuse of alcohol,” he says. “The perception is that I was a drooling idiot, carted off to the dry cleaners. I enrolled myself in a hospital-treatment program back in '85, went to the meetings, and stayed dry for several years. But as has been shown, alcohol had nothing to do with the grounding.”

Other things did, though, and Hazelwood knows them by heart: the Vessel Traffic Service watchstanders, charged with monitoring the vessel's progress through the sound, who failed to spot the missed turn and who later tested positive for marijuana and alcohol; the abysmal state of the Alyeska Pipeline Company's spill-control equipment; the ensuing circus of decision-making by Exxon, Alyeska, and state officials that let a possibly controllable spill get out of control. Accident investigators call it an error chain, and Hazelwood can trace it back as far as you like. What if Cousins had listened to lookout Maureen Jones, who twice brought the Bligh Reef buoy to his attention during the delay in executing the turn? What if Cousins hadn't, as a favor to a friend, offered to work past midnight, when his shift was to have ended? What if the ship hadn't gotten loaded more quickly than anticipated and sailed two hours ahead of schedule? Hazelwood navigates the possibilities as if playing a board game, effortlessly translating chaos into a smooth, inevitable progression. He smiles ruefully, shrugs his shoulders, rolls his eyes to the sky.

Then conversation turns, as it always must, to the central element in the error chain, Hazelwood's absence from the bridge. Why did he leave? To prepare departure messages to send to Exxon, he famously explained. Why couldn't he have waited? Why didn't he know about Kagan's shortcomings? How could he leave the bridge if there was even the slightest chance of a mistake?

“I left,” he says slowly, staring at the floor, “because there wasn't a compelling reason to stay. I really can't comment further on that.”

Hazelwood's lawyers argue that their client gave Cousins good instructions, that other tanker captains had vacated the bridge at that point in the voyage; that having been told the turn was beginning, Hazelwood had no reason to suspect anything was amiss. It's an argument that might work in court, but not everywhere.

“It all boils down to the fact that Hazelwood wasn't on the bridge,” says J. Samuel Teel, professor of nautical science at Maine Maritime Academy. “I'm sure he's a great guy and a good captain, but he should have been there and he wasn't. He's got to live with that.”

“I say to this day it wasn't his fault. He just put too much trust in certain people,” says Captain John Wilson, an old Hazelwood friend and shipmate. “Joe should have watched his mate a little bit closer.”

“One of the finest tanker men I ever met,” roars Captain Russ Nyborg, a legendary San Francisco Bay skipper who served as a model for young Hazelwood in his early Exxon days. “He left it to somebody else and somebody else screwed up. My wife and I were very worried about him for a long time after it happened. He's so proud, you know, and he's had the shit kicked out of him.” The old captain's voice goes rough with clumsily camouflaged concern. “So how's he doing, anyway?”

Months and years slid past, interest in the spill waned, and still Hazelwood kept to the shadows. He retreated to his wife and daughter and his cadre of Long Island friends, the ones who know him as Jeff, a childhood name that distinguishes him from his father. Never social (hosting one party in 14 years, according to a neighbor), he spent time reading, preparing for his defense, and occasionally sailing the 16-foot Hobie Cat he kept in the backyard. Friends worried about him, said he was quieter, more introspective. But at rare gatherings, they bullshitted and talked sports and shipping just like always, and when they were sailing on Long Island Sound and passed a grounded boat and somebody said, “Little deja vu, Jeffie?” Hazelwood waited through the silence and replied, “Haven't heard that one before,” and everybody laughed loudly.

“Joe was a class act throughout this thing,” says Jerzy Glowacki, chief engineer on the Exxon Valdez and one of Hazelwood's barmates in the hours before. “He's taken the full brunt of this, quietly, with dignity, under great stress, and I think he's able to do it because of his intelligence. He knows what is happening; he understands the reasons. I don't think he's able to shrug it off. I don't think he ever will. Whatever it is, he's carrying it inside, and I'm sure it's very heavy.”

His parents wait and wonder, too. The summer after the grounding, his mother, a proper Georgia-bred Presbyterian, offered to arrange for a pastor to meet with him. When Hazelwood ran into the man at a funeral, the pastor said, “Whatever you did up there, God doesn't judge you.” Hazelwood replied, “Sure as shit sounds like you're judging me,” and walked off.

“I keep hoping Jeff will talk to me,” Margaret Hazelwood tells me in her buttery accent. “I'll sometimes try to start such a conversation. I'll say things like, 'I wonder how I would have reacted in your situation.' But he won't talk.” Hazelwood's 77-year-old mother sits with ankles crossed demurely in her impeccably furnished home in Huntington, where she and her husband raised two lawyers, a symphony conductor, and a tanker captain. Copies of Canterbury Tales, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and the Oxford Companion to English Literature perch near the piano. Three jade monkeys crouch on an end table: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Joe, the eldest, lives a few minutes away, and these days they see him often.

“To be honest,” booms Joe Sr., a magisterial, blunt-spoken man with impressively muscled arms, “I don't think he really has handled it. He's caught up in the legal aspect of it—I mean, he won't go to the bathroom without consulting those fellows.

“Now here's a fact,” he continues, leaning forward. “Somebody took a poll of all the tanker skippers who went in and out of Prince William Sound, and half of them said that they would have gone below at that point.” He sits back and places an arm on the edge of the couch. “It was fate, luck, whatever you want to call it.”

Joe Sr. knows about fate; specifically, how to kick it in the ass. He was a crackerjack pilot, first flying torpedo bombers for the Marine Corps in the western Pacific, then commercial jets for Pan Am's long-distance runs to South America, Cuba, Fairbanks, Tokyo, wherever. Every day was a mission: a 5:30 a.m. run followed by calisthenics followed by one or two hours studying flight manuals, approach patterns, and charts—not because it was mandatory, but because “that's what it took to be a good pilot.” Joe Sr. was good enough to become the first commercial flight engineer to work past the age of 60. At 75, he looks raw and strong, still rising at 5:30 each morning to get his mileage in. His second son, Matthew, remembers his father saying that real accidents happen only to good pilots. What other people call accidents are actually mistakes.

“When Jeff was growing up, his father was flying,” says his mother. “He would see the uniform, and it was something special. He saw his father strive to make every six-month check with everything perfect—and Jeff was the same way. He was so proud of his safety record. He felt he couldn't be less than perfect, ever.”

She smiles in infinite understanding.

“All the children, they always tried to impress their father.”

A brilliantly muggy June Sunday, and Hazelwood pilots his brown 1984 Chevy S-10 van along the jungly byways of Long Island's north shore. Festooned with rust, its starboard headlight housing patched with duct tape, the van cuts an incongruous profile as it chugs past the velvety lawns of towns like Cold Spring Harbor and Oyster Bay. Outfitted in a faded blue T-shirt, jeans, and decrepit flip-flops, he drives carefully, checking three times at a stop sign before proceeding. “Some people find it hard to believe,” he says, “but I am a fairly cautious driver.”

Generous in its concealments and discretions, Long Island is a good home for exiles. To the east stretches the old Gold Coast, Gatsby's East and West Egg. To the south, in Massapequa, resides Mr. Joey Buttafuoco. John Lennon had a house on the north shore, as did former tennis brat John McEnroe. Kerouac lived in Northport, just over the hill from Huntington. There's a palpable sense of refuge in the twisty roads and the Amazonian foliage, of secrets kept, of barriers not to be crossed. Different worlds can coexist, and that, as much as anything, is what Hazelwood enjoys. “You got the WASP thing with the super-rich, you've got the big-hairs with their Mr. T starter sets, and somewhere in the middle you've got schlubs like me.”

After a few quick errands, he steers the van toward West Shore Marina in Huntington, where a childhood friend keeps a 33-foot sailboat. “If the wind's blowing, we'll take her out for a spin,” he says, but when we reach the dock the air hangs thick and still.

He walks down anyway, past the buffed fiberglass haunches of $500,000 motor cruisers, past the blond woman in a jet-black bikini, to a sleek, teak-trimmed craft with a 45-foot mast. He checks the boat, running his hands over the standing rigging and cleated lines. The boat is named Too Slick, a fact that dictates a brief laugh.

Hazelwood comes to the marina often, sometimes to sail, other times just to hang around the boat and keep things shipshape. He's known around here for helping out when newbies need a hand.

“See that guy?” He points to a jowly man in a 42-foot Catalina. “He was having trouble docking that thing, pussyfooting it around, so I hopped aboard and we brought it in. Sometimes docking calls for a bold move.”

Around the docks, Hazelwood finds the kind of moments he seeks, the kind of moments he lives for: to stand tall on some stranger's flying bridge and shoot the breeze about bold moves and Tiger Woods and the goddamn Yanks in complete and blessed anonymity. Anonymity, to Hazelwood, is the point of it all, the state of grace, the reward for his silence; he believes in its redemptive power more than he believes in himself, more than he believes in heaven, even more than he believes in the legal system. At moments like these, Joe Hazelwood does not exist; there are no jokes, no secrets, no history, no coincidences to anticipate. There's only a guy in flip-flops, a regular schlub, a man aware of nothing perhaps but the final crowning irony: In banishing the sins of the past, Joe Hazelwood is also banishing the very things that might set him free.

Gregory Cousins is back at sea, working as a mate for a private carrier. Robert Kagan, the only crew member on the bridge that night to receive no penalties, lives in Louisiana, having negotiated retirement from Exxon. (“He's been an emotional wreck since the spill,” his wife says.) Exxon completed its most profitable year ever, with a net 1996 income of $7.5 billion. Prince William Sound now sports escort tugs, tanker-tracking systems, a variety of radar and radio beacons, and a 60-foot tower anchored to Bligh Reef that rises above the waves like a beckoning finger. The beaches look clean, but dig beneath the surface and you'll find oil.

Joe Hazelwood doesn't think much about the future. He'll get an Exxon pension in a decade or so. Maybe he'll travel. Maybe he'll move south, play golf. He's planning to sell his Hobie Cat. He doesn't use it anymore, and besides, he could use the money.

“It's still day by day for me,” he says. “I can't imagine this ever being over. It's always there, like the albatross on the Ancient Mariner.

“Your watch is never over as captain,” he continues. “Am I angst-ridden with guilt? No. Am I feeling responsible as a professional? Well, whether it's a mechanical failure or anything else that grounds you, it sucks.”

As we walk back to the car, Hazelwood spots a 50-foot cabin cruiser revving clumsily into its slip. A fortyish woman in gold-encrusted sunglasses tweezes a deck line between flamingo-colored nails; her bald and sweating husband spins the wheel aimlessly. Hazelwood moves quickly, grabbing the decklines and snubbing them neatly around the dock cleats, positioning a fender, waving for the captain to back it in, tightening the lines. Then he's shaking hands with the husband, and the flamingo nails are applauding, and everybody's happy.

“How ya doin' today?” Hazelwood says, and then they do what Joe Hazelwood wants them to do, what he wanted all of us to do all along. They smile at him. O

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Next to the soccer field, on a terra-cotta-colored track, two men stand at the top of a straightaway. Dennis Mitchell and Jon Drummond are the top-ranked and third-ranked 100-meter sprinters in the world. A few weeks from his 29th birthday, Mitchell is in the prime of his career; the 26-year-old Drummond is a relative newcomer, having established himself on the world circuit only last year. Their workplace, Ervin C. Drake Stadium, is built along the base of a steep hill, draping them in shadow.

For Mitchell and Drummond, it's just as well: Sunlight might be a distraction. It could blind them momentarily with a glint off the aluminum bleachers, or throw disorienting shadows across the lanes as they accelerate, or require them to don the weight of sunglasses. It could warm the track's rubber compound a few degrees so that it responds differently beneath the calibrated steel teeth of their shoes, so that it feels different beneath the skin of their forefingers and thumbs as they crouch in the blocks, preparing their bodies to undergo the violent physiological event that sprinters and biomechanists alike refer to as “explosion.”

Today's drill–today's only drill–will be starts, timed 20-meter sprints from the blocks. Their coach, John Smith, stands trackside, casually twirling his starter's pistol. “Runners, take your marks,” he says.

Smith pauses, allowing his athletes about 15 seconds to go through their private ritual, the fastidious choreography of stretches and twitches, a brief testing of every vital moving part, accomplished in unfailing sequence: Achilles, ankles, calves, quads, hams, butt, shoulders, neck. Delicately, in stages, they load their bodies into the starting blocks. Then all movement subsides, hands tense and bridge like those of billiard players, and eyes lock on to some predetermined point a few inches in front of the line. In a soft voice, Smith gives the command–set–and they rise.

Seven times the gun fires, and seven times Mitchell and Drummond vault down the track, spikes hammering in frighteningly loud staccato. As they pass the 20-meter mark, an assistant checks a stopwatch and calls out the split times. Hearing the numbers–which vary from the previous sets by a few hundredths of a second, no more–Mitchell and Drummond trundle back to the blocks, brows crinkled, arms swinging in slow-motion pantomime. They're replaying the start in their minds, parsing the explosion into its component forces and arcs.

“My angles were a little off on that one.”

“Stood up too fast, most definitely.”

“First step was out here.” A toe is placed, then replaced, balletlike, two inches to the left. “Not here.”

Though it is impossible for an unschooled observer to tell, the last start is fastest. The assistant calls the splits, and the coach smiles. Drummond, the more ebullient of the two runners, shouts with pleasure and bounds puppylike toward the infield. But Mitchell, the veteran, is dissatisfied.

“I just didn't feel it.” He walks back to the blocks, his handsome face creasing into a scowl, his spikes penetrating the track with a barely audible snick. “I just didn't feel aggressive. When I passed that line, it wasn't there.”

Mitchell's hands, like those of all 100-meter runners, have small calluses on the second joint of the thumb, protective coverings from the friction and heat of the start. His forefingers tap the calluses in quick alternating rhythm. His eyes drop to the track.

“I could've run faster.”

They stride five times a second. Each stride spans more than seven feet. They reach 95 percent maximum velocity in less than three seconds and out-accelerate many sports cars for the first 30 feet. Their top speed is slightly less than 27 miles an hour.

There's an old saying among sports physiologists that 100-meter runners are the only athletes who require neither heart nor lungs to complete their event. During each foot-strike, the sprinter's body must produce nearly a half-ton of vertical force. In one race, a field of eight runners releases enough energy to boil a gallon jug of ice. In ten seconds.

From an actuarial standpoint, their season consists of five or six major races, or less than 60 seconds of performance. For those skilled enough to reach the top of the profession, the sum of a career may be contained in a span of ten minutes, over which medals, glory, and vast sums of money are parceled out to the cadence of a hundredth of a second.

Compressed as a diamond, the 100-meter race cannot properly be defined as a sport. You play football. You don't play sprinting (as Deion Sanders discovered on several occasions in college by observing Dennis Mitchell's rapidly receding backside). The 100 meters is abstract expressionism, athletics distilled to mind-bending purity, a violent act of creation whose roots trace back to the Greek concept of agon–the primal compulsion to seek personal supremacy. Hailed in Europe, lost in the made-for-MTV theatricals of modern American sport, 100-meter runners are human bullets, projectiles agonistes, test pilot and machine twined in a single fragile entity. Unlike the bull-necked hulks of weight lifting who battle gravity, or the spindly divas of gymnastics who conspire toward art, sprinters spar with time itself. Tawny, muscle-cloaked exotics, they are the last cartoon superheroes in sport: fly-waisted dynamos able to catapult themselves into unknown dimensions. Their genius is simply their ability to do what we all know how to do, what we are born wanting to do: They run fast. The appeal of simple foot-speed, one leg in front of the other, a lone figure racing ahead of the pack, hums in our shared psyche, vibrating in some rope of our DNA. A superlative race makes fools of us all; we cannot muster words, only a stammering mind-glow: Him! It's him! No–no–there! Him! Look! Yes! Yes! Yes! As Emily Dickinson said about poetry, you know it's great when it takes the top of your head off.

The runners' experience is not dissimilar.

“I feel full when I cross that line, full of everything,” says Mitchell. “It's like a tingling sensation from my fingertips to my toenails, like there's no more I can do. Literally, I can do no more. It's like getting the Holy Ghost or something.” He laughs, showing sharp teeth. “I know it sounds strange that somebody would get that feeling from running a straightaway, but I do. I've tried other events, and I always go back to the 100 meters, because that's where I get the feeling.”

“There's a feeling, a vibration that is unique,” says Smith, himself a former world-record holder in the 440-yard dash. “It comes when you've never been in that space before. There's a moment when you feel superhuman–everything's moving fast, but you're in total control. That's when you are the moment.”

And at this particular moment in history, sprinting is graced with a Fab Five of unprecedented talent: Mitchell, Drummond, Leroy Burrell, Carl Lewis, and Britain's Linford Christie. Nine months of the year, they train and race in preparation for a handful of high-stakes summer meets in the United States and Europe. Their first test (Christie excepted) will be this month's National Outdoor Championships, in Sacramento, California; next is August's world championships, in Sweden. Their grail, of course, is the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics.

But with barely a year before Atlanta, no dominant performer has yet emerged. The faster the five run, it seems, the more intense the rivalries become; the more intense the rivalries, the faster they run. In this violent spiral, each race has become a ritualized collision, a treacherous opera holding the possibility of depravity, such as last summer's fistfight between two contenders, and beauty, such as Leroy Burrell's unexpected 9.85-second world-record, set a few weeks earlier. The histrionics are not without justification: Olympic gold is bankable at about one million dollars, say the marketeers, more if accompanied by a world record. Will anyone recall who takes silver? Bronze?

In Homer's Iliad, Odysseus races against the speedy Aias for a prize wine bowl of inestimable value. Falling behind, he prays to the goddess Athena, who facilitates his victory by causing Aias to slip and fall in a pile of ox dung. In a John Maddenlike riff of play-by-play, Homer depicts the unlucky loser: “Aias' mouth / and nose were plastered, plugged with muck… [He] spat / the dung out of his mouth before he said: / 'Damn the luck: she did for me, that goddess / always beside [Odysseus], like a coddling mother!' / At this the crowd laughed at him…”

It's a lesson these five already know: Win or eat shit, and hope the gods are listening when you pray.

“Let me put it like this.” Jon Drummond is seated on a bench in UCLA's weight room, holding forth amid the clangor and grunts. Thus far in the conversation he has been animated and talkative, his lips moving carefully around new braces. But now his manner changes. Drummond pauses and leans forward confidentially, letting a half-beat fall between each word.

“It's good for the media not to know everything that goes on between sprinters.” He tilts back, contented. Asked to elaborate, he will reveal only a Cheshire-cat grin of glinting metal.

Let's see. Is he referring to the trash-talking they engage in before the race? The fact that some sprinters, if seated close to the others on a plane or in a restaurant, will move? The territorial stare-downs during warm-ups? The prerace rituals of intimidation, when each gesture, each word–good luck–is rotated on edge and flicked like a blade? The postrace jawing, the chest-thumping rematch-demanding walk back to the starting area? The much-decried financial one-upmanship, whereby exorbitant appearance fees elevate top-quality fields beyond the grasp of meet budgets? The spitballing waged in the European press, in which each sprinter feigns surprise when asked about his competitors–Carl who? Linford who? Leroy who? Sprinters aren't exactly known for hugging, that's well established. But what are they going to do, try to kill each other?

Well, sort of.

At around 2 A.M. last August 18, in the tastefully appointed lobby of the Hotel Nova-Park in Zurich, a few hours after the richest meet of the season, Dennis Mitchell and Nigerian sprinter Olapade Adeniken started fighting. The incident began with an angry exchange of words, and then, according to the best accounts (the International Amateur Athletic Federation has forbidden Mitchell and Adeniken to discuss what happened), a Van Damme movie broke out.

Mitchell allegedly went toe-to-toe with Adeniken, exchanging a dozen punches before the Nigerian went down, bleeding from cuts to his face. When American hurdler Roger Kingdom grabbed Mitchell, Mitchell's physical therapist, Terry Simes, went after Adeniken, only to be put in a choke hold by a hotel security guard. Trying to help Simes, Jon Drummond leaped onto the security guard's back, and the three collapsed in a pile. Meanwhile, Adeniken regained his feet, head-butted someone (nobody's sure whom), fired a karate kick at Mitchell, and was again knocked to the carpet, where the enraged Mitchell stomped on his neck. Adeniken headed home with a mild concussion and two stitches in his cheek, his season ended. Mitchell, relatively unscathed, continued to run.

Not surprisingly, the motivation for this ugliness might be filed under “testosterone.” Mitchell said Adeniken had cursed his mother and sister to their faces a few days earlier in the Raleigh-Durham airport, whereas Adeniken gamely claimed he was just saying hello. Others pointed to the fact that neither had run particularly well that night, finishing in the pack behind Christie. More revealing perhaps was the sprinting community's blasé reaction. “I'm surprised it wasn't worse,” went the standard response.

Perhaps Linford Christie summed it up when he said that hurdlers get along precisely because they have hurdles, something to distract them from one another. Sprinters, shorn of any distraction, must regard one another as obstacles. They can't reveal a crack, no matter how slight, in the brittle cuticle wrapping the self. Boundaries must be drawn, rules oberserved. As the saying goes, the race is 100 meters long and one lane wide. Explaining the catalyst for the Mitchell-Adeniken brawl, witnesses on both sides reached for the same metaphor: A line was crossed.

Such a sentiment is ironic, because among the Fab Five, fate would seem to have scripted a closeness. The four Americans were raised within 25 miles of one another in the working-class lowlands of Delaware Valley; Christie, in London's rough West End. Their backgrounds, in most cases, are like echoes: close families, talented siblings, caring coaches. They are mature (average age 30), intelligent businessmen, well versed in the ironies of being a successful black man in a predominately white nation. But when race time approaches, commonalities fade.

Top-ranked in the world, Dennis “The Menace” Mitchell is a drill-sergeant's son from Sicklerville, New Jersey. Best known for his prerace routine, an intimidatory mélange of barks, snarls, and karate chops that belies his smiling off-track demeanor, Mitchell's Bruce Lee tendencies sometimes overshadow his steady achievements: two Olympic medals, four consecutive world rankings no lower than fifth; last year, his second under John Smith, he scored the number-one ranking for a second time. The breakthrough race, however, has eluded him. Favored for gold in the Carl Lewis-less 100 meters at the Barcelona Games, Mitchell was called for a false start and was forced to linger in the blocks while Christie, a man he had regularly beaten, vaulted from relative obscurity to stardom with a gold medal.

Perhaps the person most responsible for Mitchell's own leap to fame, however, is Carl Lewis. Growing up a half-hour from Lewis's hometown of Willingboro, New Jersey, Mitchell was naturally drawn into the wake of the burgeoning star: They ran for the same track team and were part of talented brother-sister duos–Carl and Carol, Dennis and Denise. When Lewis hit the big time, teenage Dennis played admiring younger brother, pasting Lewis's picture over his bed, tagging along during the 1984 Olympic trials. But as time passed, the parallels proved too confining. When he was recruited by Lewis's alma mater, the University of Houston, Mitchell chose Florida. When Lewis tried to persuade him to join his Santa Monica Track Club, Mitchell said no thanks. The two friends grew distant, once nearly coming to blows at a 1988 press conference when Mitchell felt Lewis had shown disrespect for him. Even now, toward the end of his daily weight-lifting sessions, Mitchell grunts a name with each rep: Leroy. Jon. Linford. He always saves Carl for last.

Ranked second is Linford Christie, the defending Olympic champion. At age 35, the hard-eyed Brit has perfected his on- and off-track role as the Impervious ���ϳԹ���r–avoiding the Americans' squabble to become the 1993 world and European champion and 1994's second-ranked sprinter. Starting the sport full-time at the late age of 25, Christie has come to be worshipped in Britain, where his family's gritty story (his father is a lowly BBC porter, his brother is a convict, Christie himself was wrongfully jailed for possession of a stolen car and subsequently awarded a small settlement) has provided regular tabloid fodder. Christie will run in Atlanta, he has declared, only if he knows he can win the gold.

One of several runners standing between Christie and more Olympic glory is third-ranked Jon Drummond, for whom the 1994 season served as a coming-out party. Hazel-eyed and eminently quotable, he is alluring enough to have been featured in a British teen magazine and fast enough to have beaten Christie twice last year, a feat no one else accomplished. Drummond irritates competitors with his prerace routine of yelping, dancing, and working the crowd, but he's young and smart enough not to care. (Case in point: He accidentally ran a relay leg with a comb stuck in his hair two years ago; he now brandishes a comb before races. “The Europeans go crazy,” he says.) The son of a Philadelphia minister, Drummond preached sermons as a child and now serves as booking agent and backup singer for Kirk Franklin & The Family, a popular gospel troupe. The charisma translates. “He did a solo one time,” says Franklin, “and the ladies were going crazy. He brought the house down…and I mean down.”

Next is Leroy Burrell, who would be overlooked in such raucous company were he not the current holder of the world record. Like Mitchell, this soft-spoken 28-year-old from Landsdowne, Pennsylvania, was compared to Lewis at an early age. Unlike Mitchell, Burrell liked it: He followed in Lewis's footsteps to Houston and then to the Santa Monica Track Club. The most powerful runner of the group, he can sometimes be erratic, a fact that observers attribute to his fluctuating weight (“One year he's lean, the next he's the Pillsbury Dough Boy,” says one coach) and a slight tendency to get distracted–a variable that assumes new importance with the recent birth of Cameron Malik, his first child. Still, Burrell has made a habit of overcoming setbacks and distractions. Legally blind in his right eye, a result of an untreated childhood eye disorder, and with a left knee scarred from 1986 reconstructive surgery, Burrell has quietly built a remarkable sprinting career in Lewis's shadow. It remains to be seen whether he can succeed with the spotlight squarely on him.

Finally, haunting each race, there's Carl Lewis–or more accurately, the specter of Carl Lewis. The corporeal Lewis will turn 34 in July and hasn't gone sub-ten in the 100 meters since 1991. But when you're the finest track and field athlete in history, you can win in other ways. Lewis, still by far the largest drawing card on the circuit, is known to agitate fellow runners to anger with his stare. With eight gold medals, Lewis is gunning for his fourth Olympics (without the 1980 boycott, it would be his fifth), and he is not being underestimated. “People have written him off before, and they've always been wrong,” says John Smith. “Carl can still inconvenience a career.”

Complicating matters more, the top four Americans are divided into two competitive mini-cartels, corporate tribes with radically different styles, that regard each other with wariness, if not dislike. On one hand, there's the powerful and exclusive Santa Monica Track Club, home of Lewis and Burrell, whose decade-plus domination of the track business is best symbolized by the dark-windowed limousines that it demands from meet promoters rich enough to afford its runners. Masonic, exclusive, and protective of its members, Santa Monica was the first organization to successfully apply a corporate approach to track. But as its prize asset teeters on the verge of retirement, its long-term future is subject to question.

“What makes Santa Monica tick is Carl Lewis,” says Tony Campbell, a prominent sports agent and manager. “Once he retires, they're going to drop a few notches–that's the general consensus.”

In the opposing camp is John Smith, a 44-year-old, six-foot-two embodiment of street wit and Hollywood charm who, together with Vector Sports Management, represents Mitchell and Drummond. A Santa Monica coach who broke away in 1990, Smith is an eclectic, flamboyant teacher who carries a cassette of Sun Tzu's The Art of War in his Lexus and, not too surprisingly, has created a niche in a track world weary of Santa Monica's cold-blooded success.

And yet, as one discovers in talking to Santa Monica founder Joe Douglas, the rivalry between Santa Monica and Smith cuts deeper than mere business. Like the race itself, competition has become personal.

“If you're talking to Smith, we don't want to be in the story,” Douglas says briskly. “I don't want to legitimize those people. I know they're going to attack us. Dennis Mitchell's going to trash-talk, Drummond's going to pump himself up–they're like Dennis Rodman, nothing but red and green hair. Some folks like that. We don't, and we're not going to cooperate.” (On Douglas's advice, Lewis and Burrell declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Smith, who says he harbors no resentment toward his former colleague, has his own theory for the bad blood. “Somebody came out of school and is now kicking the teacher's ass.” He smiles dazzlingly. “And the teacher doesn't like it very much.”

It's hot. Incandescently hot. He looks around, and sees a washed-out sky, a white sun, and a red track that burns to the touch. He can't tell what country he's in or what year it is. The air is still. A disembodied voice issues the command. Runners, take your marks. He loads himself into the blocks and notices without surprise that the other seven lanes are empty. Set. The gun blasts, and everything goes black. He feels the perfect, flowing sensation of moving fast, faster than he's ever run, like he's being pulled down the track, like he's running downhill. As he breaks the tape, he regains his vision, and a number flashes. 9.83. The crowd screams. A world record.

“I throw up my hands at the line, and the dream cuts off,” says Dennis Mitchell. “It drove me crazy–I wanted to celebrate.”

The day after his 1992 dream, Mitchell graffitied his house with the number, scribing it on pieces of paper that he taped to his television, microwave, refrigerator, car dashboard, bathroom mirror, front door, gear bag, kitchen table, toilet. He named his infant music company 9.83 Records. He wanted the number everywhere, a mantra by which to live.

Most runners and coaches agree that the perfect race has not yet been run. Even when setting world records, as Lewis and Burrell have each done twice, there is invariably some aspect of the race that could have been tighter, cleaner, faster–such as the exhausted, near-staggering finish to Burrell's 9.90 in 1991. Even in the much-heralded Tokyo race later that year, when Lewis's 9.86 led four runners under 9.92, observers could nitpick Lewis's start. The perfect race, as in Mitchell's dream, functions as a Platonic ideal. It's fundamentally not of this world.

And perhaps that's the point. An unattainable goal allows the athletes, like Trappists, to build a life around the paradox of the never-ending search. Training only a few hours a day, sprinters are often derided by other track athletes as experts at wasting time. More accurately, they are experts at clearing space in their lives so they can focus on the few seconds that matter. Lying around the house is an art form: Drummond is a feared Sega Genesis player; Burrell, a pasta gourmet; most everyone is a card sharpie. Mitchell loves cartoons and programs his VCR to turn on at seven each morning so he doesn't miss Spiderman and The Fantastic Four. (“The eighties was a rough time for me,” he says, shaking his head. “All that Smurf bullshit. Now it's better–they got some action.”)

Overheard in casual conversation, a sprinter might be mistaken for a member of a quilting circle. Sample topics: how well one's been sleeping, how much weight one's lost, where one might find a good muffin. Away from the track, sprinters exchange vitamin tips. They speak admiringly of those who can travel without jet lag and offer cutting reviews of one another's warm-up suits. They appreciate low-cal chicken recipes. As their earnings reach the mid-six figures (meet appearance fees plus shoe-company sponsorships), they also discuss BMWs, investments, and Napa wines. But always, beneath the surface, the race is there. Sitting at a stoplight, Drummond visualizes himself in the blocks. When the light turns, his foot hits the gas pedal. “I try to get up front most of the time,” he explains.

At big meets, sprinters will travel with a masseur, a physical therapist, an agent, occasionally a lawyer, and assorted family members. Some bring their own starting blocks. If a gear bag is heavy, an associate will shoulder it from the hotel to the track to ensure that the runner doesn't become imbalanced.

Their training is a continuous cycle of suffering and recovery. Hard day is followed by easy day; strength work is followed by speed work. The objective is to stress the muscle fibers and connective tissues and then to rest, allowing the body to perform its unique brand of alchemical voodoo, in which it rebuilds itself stronger than before. Rarely will they run 100 meters in practice, preferring to divide the race into its key segments–reaction, block clearance, acceleration, maintenance–and hone their ability in each.

But the sprinter's cycle of exhilaration and pain plays out most fully in the race itself. A good start, it is said, should look like syrup coming out of a bottle–smooth, short steps lengthening as the sprinter gradually straightens up. By ten or 15 meters, strides are evening out and the athlete is in what is referred to as the acceleration phase of his race. Here, some sprinters visualize gear changes, gradually reaching maximum velocity at around 60 meters. The point is to hold that speed as long as possible–around ten meters, maybe 20. Then, as Jon Drummond says, “It's time to pray.”

The last ten to 15 meters of the race, everyone is decelerating. It can't be helped. Rigor mortis, the runners call it, the time when the muscles stop obeying, the limbs start slowing and seizing up, causing the runner to lurch drunkenly, angrily toward the tape. The only cure is counterintuitive–the sprinter must stop trying so hard. He must relax and concentrate on form. The late-race surge that defined Lewis in his prime was in fact no surge at all. He simply had more control over his deceleration. “Try to run hard, and you won't,” says Tom Tellez, Santa Monica's head coach and guru. “You have to stay smooth to the finish.”

If trained properly over a season, a sprinter can eventually reach the Edge, the Peak, the Zone–coaching shorthand for the sprinter's nirvana, the realm where the body feels pulled along by a force greater than itself. Such peak form can't be held for long–a few weeks, longer if a runner is careful. The trick is to reach it at precisely the right time and to avoid mistakes. Because the Edge can be a dangerous place.

“Good sprinters can feel when they're getting close,” says Curtis Frye, a member of USA Track & Field's sprint development committee and assistant track coach at the University of North Carolina. “It's like a car–the human body acts strange when it's going at absolute top speed. You've got to get to a certain point and try to hold on to it. If you get fired up and go past it, you'll get major injuries. Something just snaps.”

Mark Witherspoon, Barcelona Olympics, 100-meter semifinal: torn Achilles tendon. Hasley Crawford, 1976 Montreal Olympics, 100 meters: pulled hamstring. Don Quarrie, 1972 Munich Olympics, 200-meter final: a hamstring torn so violently that the pop could be heard from the stands. A few weeks after setting his world record last summer, still in peak form, Leroy Burrell injured the arch of his foot and sat out the rest of the year. The image of the sprinter crumpled in agony, fists pounding the track, flickers in the sport's consciousness. When your job is to push the envelope of human limits, the center cannot always hold. Things break apart.

In a small, plainly furnished laboratory in the resort community of Grand Cypress in Orlando, Florida, the world's finest sprinter does most of his workouts. Actually, it is unclear whether this individual should be referred to by the masculine or feminine pronoun, since the world's finest sprinter is a computer-generated line drawing with an alarmingly long proboscis.

“I don't call it much of anything,” says Ralph Mann, a lanky biomechanist who at 45 looks not much older than when he won the silver in the 400-meter hurdles at the Munich Games. “But people who come to see it mostly call it Stick Man.”

Fifteen years ago, Mann began gathering slow-motion film of sprint performances. Projecting the image of a sprinter in motion upon a digitizer, a desk-size tablet with an embedded grid, he recorded and tracked the exact coordinates of specific body points–wrist, arm, elbow, shoulder, hip, knee, ankle, ear, and nose–through several strides, creating a biomechanically accurate, if artistically lacking, image of that sprinter's performance.

After collecting data from 150 or so top performances of all time, Mann was able to merge the best of each digitized race. The result is sprinting's version of the ghost in the machine, the spectral embodiment of the modern era's greatest racers at their peaks–Burrell's 9.90 in New York, Lewis's 1984 Olympic gold, Ben Johnson's disallowed 9.79 at the Seoul Olympics. (Mann chuckles at his inclusion of the steroid-banned Johnson, whose attempted 1993 comeback ended when he tested positive for human growth hormone: “He's in there because his performance is something you'd like to do, not necessarily something you can do.”) Most important, Mann enabled Stick Man's dimensions to be adjusted to match those of any runner.

A testimonial: Five years ago, Dennis Mitchell was analyzed using Stick Man. It was concluded that, if he could improve his power, he could add four inches to his stride and run a 9.91. After a year of concentrated work, Mitchell lengthened his stride and ran a 9.91. “He was right on,” says Mann admiringly, leaving one to wonder whether he's referring to Mitchell or his model.

Running may be inborn in humans, but watching Stick Man move across a black screen–spine upright, knees high and proud, hands snapping chinward–it is difficult to recognize anything of flesh and bone. What one sees instead is a stark illustration of the perilous physics at the heart of the sprinting motion: a body arcing through the air, rescued from disaster at the last possible moment by a flashing limb, and then launched again. Watching Stick Man, it becomes clear what Mann means when he says, “Great sprinters excel in minimizing ground time.” They are not running, one gradually understands, as much as they are flying.

When on form, sprinters speak of “clawing,” “tipping,” or “pawing” the track. A look at the numbers shows why: an improvement of 0.01 second per stride in ground time can subtract, over a 45-stride race, nearly a half-second. A half-second accounts for the difference between a mediocre college runner and the olympic gold-medal winner. How long is that precious 0.01 second? it takes three times as long for a honeybee to beat its wings once.

No one's sure how fast a human can run. One hundred and fifty years ago, the title of the World's Fastest Man was held by the legendary George Seward, an intense Connecticut barnstormer with a Prince Valiant haircut. At Hammersmith, England, on September 30, 1844, from a standing start in unspiked shoes, he was hand-timed at 9.25 seconds in the 100 yards. Eyewitnesses said that, given a few steps, the five-foot-seven Seward could leap over the back of a standing horse.

After Seward departed the scene, the World's Fastest Man title passed duly to Henry Perritt of Georgia, then to John Day of Kentucky, and then to the famed John Wesley Cozad, aka the Plow Boy of California, who was actually from Iowa. Then the mantle was assumed by Englishman Henry Hutchens and, nearing the turn of the century, by Georgetown's Bernard J. Wefers, a handsome lad who rewrote the record book at distances up to 300 yards. From there, the title was passed along a parade of more than 50 runners who broke the record, on the average, every two years, lowering it a steady 0.1 second per decade in the process.

Given potential advancements in training and technology, as well as humankind's general trend toward increased size and strength, most coaches and scientists shy away from forecasting barriers. “I could see a point in the distant future where some [chemically] enhanced kid is running sub-nine,” says Bill Carson, head of sprint development for USAT&F and track coach at East Carolina University. But a natural runner? Carson is more circumspect. “Limits apply to individuals.”

To satisfy his curiosity, Ralph Mann once boosted the talents of Stick Man slightly beyond those of the world's best runners. The resulting model–built, one is interested to discover, along the same long-legged dimensions as Lewis–would cover 100 meters in 9.58 seconds, nearly three-tenths of a second beneath the current world mark, a span of time equal to humankind's improvement in the event over the last 41 years.

But in the real world, the latest glimpse of near-perfection occurred last summer, on a warm July evening in Lausanne, Switzerland. The videotape shows it all: Leroy Burrell gets out of the blocks behind the field but then finds a rhythm. He accelerates past everyone at 50 meters, breaks into a smile at 80, and crosses the line with arms held wide, tilting like a fighter jet. Nine-eight-five, 0.01 second faster than Lewis's 1991 run, a new world record. Burrell turns an uncharacteristically exuberant cartwheel, and the celebration begins.

More revealing, however, is a photograph taken by Frenchman Jean-Bernard Sieber at the finish. At first we are drawn to the intensity of the other racers' struggle–their grimaced faces, grinding jaws, vein-corded thighs. But then the eye moves to Burrell's face. His mouth and eyes are wide open, his skin creaseless, relaxed. It is a face of unadorned surprise, of childlike astonishment beyond exhaustion or ego. If you were to see his face out of context, it would be impossible to tell whether this person was happy or sad, fearless or scared, in pleasure or in pain. You only would know that he is experiencing something powerful.

While most of these sprinters are religious, none comes off as a prude or is prone to spout the “Jesus won, not me” prattle of some athletes. Their spirituality is carried low and tight; it functions beyond decorative purpose. Perhaps, in attempting to compress their lives onto the proverbial head of a pin, they have earned what many of us lack: intimate knowledge of their limitations, the place where the self ends and something else begins.

“Look into the eyes of somebody who runs a fast time,” says John Smith. “They have this blankness–like an aura. Fear is released; they've walked into the unknown and let go. Maybe that's where the body understands what the speed of light is, what absolute zero is, what infinity is.” He pauses. “I know, I sound euphoric. But to me, that perfection is beyond logic.”

A full moon hangs over the Cuyahoga River on a brilliantly cold February night. Inside the limestone-and-steel ovum of Cleveland's Gund Arena, however, the temperature is a comfortable 70 degrees, and the seats are beginning to fill with the 11,000 spectators who will witness the KeyCorp Track and Field Classic. The Singing Angels, a sequined battalion of perky teens, are midway into their “Achy Breaky Heart / America the Beautiful / You Are My Sunshine” medley, and Dennis Mitchell is under the bleachers, staring at the concrete floor.

“He's not too bad today, but you can't even talk to him the day of a big meet,” says his manager, Charlie Wells. “I'll call him on the phone and it's like, 'Fuck you, take care of it, get out of my face.'”

As an early-season 60-meter race, KeyCorp doesn't qualify as a particularly big meet–more like a baseball spring-training game. Accordingly, not everyone is here: Christie is traveling on the more lucrative European indoor circuit, and Burrell and Lewis are at home in Houston, as usual forgoing the indoor season's shorter distances to train for the outdoor. Drummond, who signed to compete, is at home in Los Angeles nursing a groin injury.

“He stepped out of the blocks a little funny last week,” Smith said last night in the hotel bar, putting down his snifter of Courvoisier to demonstrate. “Tweaked something. We're going to give it a rest.”

All of which leaves Mitchell, never particularly strong indoors, as the race's sole marquee name. His primary opponent is a diminutive, cartoonishly muscular Texan named Henry Neal, an indoor specialist who has won the circuit's first two races. Neal, along with the spectacular but uneven Andre Cason, Nigeria's Adeniken and Davidson Ezinwa, and Namibia's Frank Fredericks, form a second tier of contenders that coaches sometime refer to as Brand X. As the race approaches, Mitchell's mood is light but tempered by concern. Burdened by increased strength work, he hasn't yet performed on par with previous indoor seasons. “I haven't been feeling it yet,” he said early in the day. “But I can feel myself coming on.”

Now, as he walks onto the track a few minutes before the race, Mitchell passes Neal and the others without acknowledgment. They retreat to the starting area and begin their final warm-ups. Mitchell is wearing black pants, black top, black gloves. He takes a run down his lane, flurries the air with karate chops, then freezes for a long moment in midstep–one leg held up, arms hovering weaponlike–then nods, barks, does a quick about-face, and strides rhythmically back to his blocks. A ripple of noise goes through the arena. A group of Singing Angels squeals with pleasure–a real-life Power Ranger.

Four or five more runs, each one a variation on the samurai theme, and it's time. Sitting trackside, John Smith nervously bounces his leg. Smith's father has just passed away, but he has not told Mitchell for fear it would distract him. “I don't need him trying to win this race for me or anybody else,” he says.

With great ceremony, five runners load themselves into the blocks. Mitchell begins his routine: crouch, put hands on line, hop backward into the blocks. Shake legs, kneel, look up once. Wipe hands on shorts–left hand first, then right. Set hands. The crowd quiets. The sprinters rise.

Then it is only color and sound coming too fast to be distinctly comprehended, a glistening pack accelerating in rhythm, a wooden track shaking with their effort, a crowd howling not for an individual's success, but for the human spectacle. Then Neal is in front, his thick body cresting the tape, raising his arms high. Mitchell finishes in the pack, fourth at 6.75 seconds. He works his way through the crowd to his coach.

“Shit, John–6.75?” Mitchell almost spits the words. He is breathing hard.

Gauging his runner, Smith waits before replying. “How'd it feel?” he says finally.

“Like I was jogging.” Mitchell glares at the track. A pearl-drop of sweat forms on his chin. “Felt slow…I don't know…like there was no aggressiveness there.”

“I didn't see the boom-boom-boom.” Smith snaps his fingers in quick rhythm. “I didn't see the explosion.”

Mitchell exhales. “It ain't there. I ain't gonna lie to you.”

Hurrying to interview the victor of a subsequent race, NBC commentator Carol Lewis walks by. Tall and statuesque, she bears a striking resemblance to her brother, Carl. Passing Mitchell and Smith, microphone in hand, Lewis gives them a friendly hello. Smith returns the greeting. Mitchell stares forward, his face stony. Perhaps he didn't see her. Perhaps he did.

Anyway, there are more important things to do right now. A new training schedule to work on. Another indoor meet next week, in Fairfax, Virginia. A birthday to celebrate–his 29th. And later in the summer, when the weather gets hot, there are little pieces of paper to hang in his house, like prayer flags, to help him run faster.

Daniel Coyle, a former senior editor of ���ϳԹ���, is the author of �� (G. P. Putnam's Sons).

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