The Best American Sports Writing 2014(65)
A week before his death, Dick called Chuck. I don’t know how much longer I can take it, he said.
On May 15, Dick Trickle went to the Duke Heart Center in Durham. This was his best chance to get better. Doctors ran more tests. But it was the same answer. We can’t find anything wrong with you.
On May 16, he was dead.
Kenny thinks everything was done deliberately. Dick Trickle didn’t kill himself at home. He didn’t do it on a piece of property that somebody else could buy sometime. He ended his life at the same cemetery where his granddaughter was buried, where he would be buried. He made sure Darlene and the family had enough money.
The Trickle family is still private. Chad Trickle politely declined to talk about his father. Vicky didn’t return an email. Their racing days are done. But they still know there are a lot of people out there who loved Dick Trickle. Two weeks after the funeral, Kenny got a package in the mail from Darlene. It was an old Dick Trickle T-shirt.
Most of the grave markers at the Forest Lawn Cemetery are flush to the ground, so from a distance, one looks the same as the next. You almost have to know where you’re going to find the spot where Dick Trickle is buried, on the gentle slope of a North Carolina hill. You can barely see a gas station across Highway 150. Beer, coffee, and cigarettes aren’t too far away.
His grave is right in front of Nicole’s. There are a few trinkets on it. A little number 99 checkered flag. A toy John Deere tractor. A Titleist golf ball with the words MISS YOU DAD. Some flowers. There’s an oak tree nearby. It’s sunny. The driveway through the cemetery is a small asphalt oval.
Fitting, really. Dick Trickle always liked a short track best.
STEPHEN RODRICK
Serena the Great
FROM ROLLING STONE
WHO IS THE MOST DOMINANT FIGURE in sports today? LeBron James? Michael Phelps? Please. Get that weak sauce out of here. It is Serena Williams. She runs women’s tennis like Kim Jong-un runs North Korea: ruthlessly, with spare moments of comedy, indolence, and the occasional appearance of a split personality.
Here are the facts. Serena is the number-one tennis player in the world. Maria Sharapova is the number-two tennis player in the world. Sharapova is tall, white, and blond, and, because of that, makes more money in endorsements than Serena, who is black, beautiful, and built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at sports arenas. Sharapova has not beaten Serena in nine years. Think about that for a moment. Nine years ago Matchbox Twenty and John Edwards mattered. The chasm between Serena and the rest of women’s tennis is as vast and broad as the space between Ryan Lochte’s ears. Get back to me when LeBron beats Kevin Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder every time for nine years.
Serena’s dominance has been fueled by not giving a shit what you or anyone else thinks about her methods. Serena has been giving tennis the two-finger salute for more than half her life. Not that she cops to it. “Lots of my friends have been telling me lately that I’m spoiled,” Serena says with a baffled look on her face. “And I’m like, ‘Really? I’m not spoiled.’”
I almost spit Coke through my nose. Serena does what she wants, when she wants. If she’d pulled a Jamesian I’m-taking-my-talents-to-South-Beach event, she would have put it on pay-per-view and hawked her Home Shopping Network all-under-a-hundred-bucks fashion line during the commercial breaks. And she would not have given a flying fuck what you thought. This is a woman who one minute is reading inspirational notes during changeovers and then, in the 2009 U.S. Open semifinals, threatening to personally make a line judge eat a tennis ball.
Tennis ninnies chided Serena for taking months off earlier in her career to flirt with fashion and make cameo TV appearances, you know, like a normal person might do after making tens of millions of dollars. Chris Evert, an icon of the game, questioned Serena’s dedication just 18 months ago.
Evert couldn’t have been more wrong. The players Serena entered the game with are long retired, burned out, and discarded. Meanwhile, Serena came back last year from foot problems and blood clots that could have killed her. Instead, she has gone 74-3 since losing at the 2012 French Open and won three Grand Slams and an Olympic gold medal. After each one, tennis gurus whispered, “That was Serena’s last hurrah.”
Not quite. This year she has won the past four tournaments she’s entered and is on a 31-match winning streak, the longest of her career. If she doesn’t pocket her sixth Wimbledon and her fifth U.S. Open titles this summer, check the ground because the world may have spun off its axis. She’s never been more dominant than now, at the age of 31, which is about 179 in tennis years. (Evert now says Serena is the best of all time.) Hell, even dating Brett Ratner couldn’t stop her. Neither could older sister Venus, merely the second-best tennis player of the past 20 years.