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Featuring beans from Colombia’s Nariño region.

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 10.9.17
Photograph by
Mark Blinch/NHLI/
Getty Images
2017 | VOLUME 127 | NO. 11
On the Cover:
Illustration by Sinelab

HIGH FIVE-HOLE
The No. 1 pick in 2016,
Matthews scored
40 goals last season
and won the Calder
Memorial Trophy.

Features Depar t men t s

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12
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Comp and Pair of Trevor Auston A Football 14 Scorecard
Circumstance Aces Siemian Matthews Town 21 Faces in
The Crowd
Everyone knows the The Nationals have The Broncos’ QB has The 20-year-old Renewing team
NCAA is broken. Here’s two No. 1 starters— the calm and the center is charged bonds decades later, 56 Point After
how to fix it and if the team smarts to impress with delivering Lord and finding the spirit J.J. Barea:
By Andy Staples is finally going to his predecessor, Stanley’s Cup to of a sport in a town The pain,
peril and chaos
• PITINO’S LEGACY advance in the Peyton Manning. Toronto for the first where everything in my native
By Tim Layden postseason, both That can earn you time in 50 years. and nothing has Puerto Rico
• A SCANDAL EXPLAINED will be key respect—and wins No pressure, kid changed
By Michael McCann By Stephanie Apstein By Robert Klemko By Alex Prewitt By Tim Layden
 SI.COM
FOR OC T. 9, 2017

MESSRS. OCTOBER
The MLB playoffs are underway. Three clubs
crossed the 100-win mark this season—the
Dodgers, the Indians and the Astros—but
they’re not locks for the World Series.
Even the wild card teams have a fighting
chance. So who’s in the best position to win
it all? S PORTS ILLUSTRATED ’s baseball crew
will lay out a case for each team, make its
picks and tell you who could be October
x-factors (the Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber? the
Astros’ George Springer?). For predictions,
analysis and coverage throughout the
playoffs, go to si.com/mlb

SIM O N B RU T Y (SPRIN G ER); JE SSE D. GA RR A B R A N T/ N BA E /G E T T Y IM AG E S (EMBIID); J O EL AU ERBAC H /G E T T Y IM AG E S (RI C H T )

HAVE A BALL CANES ARE ABLE
After a wild offseason of drama In its second season under coach
and trades—and dramatic Mark Richt, Miami is 3–0 as it
trades—the 2017–18 NBA season heads to Tallahassee to take on
is upon us. To make sure you’re rival Florida State. Led by junior
ready, The Crossover is launching running back Mark Walton and
its comprehensive preview this a strong defense, the Canes are
week. We’ll have division-by- t
eyeing their first trip to the ACC
division breakdowns and a look champio
championship game and a return
at which teams (like Karl Anthony ny to their gglory days (four national
Towns’s Timberwolves or Joel titles ffrom 1983 to ’91). Is
Embiid’s Sixers) will surprise in The back? This week
The U
a good way and which will flop, Ch Johnson examines
Chris
he
along with our predictions for the ho far the program has
how
season’s most compelling stories. es. c
come—and how much
For all that and much more, head d f
further it has to go—at
to si.com/nba ssi.com/college-football

4 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017

 One Emergen-C every day and you’ll emerge restored, fortified
and replenished. A super fresh formula packed with B vitamins,
electrolytes, antioxidants† and more vitamin C than ten oranges.*
Why not feel this good every day?

†Antioxidants include Vitamin C, Zinc and Manganese.

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LATERAL MOVE
Cowboys running back
Ezekiel Elliott got knocked
over the sideline by Rams
inside linebacker Mark
Barron but still stretched
the ball past the pylon for
a 10-yard TD catch in the
second quarter on Sunday
in Dallas. Los Angeles won
35–30 to improve to 3–1.

PHOTOGRAPH BY
GREG NELSON
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ofOff Off of
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@sportsillustrated

STEADY CAM
Panthers quarterback Cam
Newton let it fly to open
wideout Devin Funchess for
a 10-yard touchdown against
the Patriots on Sunday in
Foxborough. Newton threw
for three touchdowns and
ran for another in a 33–30
Carolina win.

PHOTOGRAPH BY
ERICK W. RASCO
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THE BLOND SIDE

Jaguars running back
Corey Grant jarred the
helmet off Jets cornerback
Buster Skrine during a
five-yard run on Sunday
in East Rutherford, N.J.
New York prevailed in
overtime 23–20.

PHOTOGRAPH BY
ROB TRINGALI
 INBOX
FOR SEPT. 25, 20177 COVER

I am not one
to tempt the
SI cover jinx,
especially as an
Indians fan. But
after witnessing
almost a month of
the most exciting
baseball in years
Lee Jenkins
ki really
ll showed
h d the
h human
h side
id off D
Dwight
i h and a record-
breaking streak,
Howard. Since he left Orlando, I have been a Howard hater, I reached into the
but I swear every time SI runs a feature on an athlete it mailbox expecting
to find a great
makes me fall in love with them. cover photo
Luke Manley, WASHINGTONVILLE, N.Y. of . . . Dwight
Howard? Really?
This article only confirmed my disappointment in Howard. Susan M. Burke
COLUMBUS, OHIO
Five children out of wedlock, no direction . . . He is smart
enough to have changed the trajectory of his life long ago.
Marcus K. Scheel, TEMPLE, TEXAS
PAGE
56 POINT AFTER
Michael
The experts selecting
Rosenberg’s
the Fittest 50 were Billie Jean King essay on streaks
apparently among those (below, right) says reminded me
who did not watch the that in women’s of the unusual
Floyd Mayweather–Conor tennis “we have a ending to Paul
McGregor fight. Otherwise long way to go still” Molitor’s 39-
they would have seen the to gain equality game hitting
glaringly obvious disparity (A Winning Battle). streak in 1987.
in conditioning between But she neglects Hitless against
the winner, Mayweather, to note that in the the Indians on
(unranked on your list) Grand Slam events Aug. 26, the

J EF F ERY A . S A LT ER (COV ER); C A RLOS M . S A AV ED R A (R OSEN B ER G); WA LT ER I O OSS J R. (EM M A S T O N E A N D KIN G);
and McGregor (ninth). today, women Brewers’ DH
Brent J. Mechler
er II actually make more was on deck in
PARKLAND, FLA.
LA. money per set since the bottom of
they play best-of- the 10th when his
three while men play teammate Rick
So, endurance triathlete James
best-of-five. Maybe Manning drove
D RE A M SPAC E PH O TO G R A PH Y/JA S O N SH A M (L AW REN C E); R O B ER T B E C K (M CG RE G O R)
Lawrence—who averaged 26.2 miles
it’s time to ask, in the winning
running, 2.4 miles swimming and 112
Why don’t women run. It was a
miles biking a day, for nearly two
play best-of-five
s t of f iv
ivee at rare instance
months—is less fit than NBA players
the majors
ajors as
as wewell?
wellll?
? of a home
who whine about having games on
back-to-back days? And don’t even get Bob Baron
a ro
r n
ron crowd booing
me started on baseball players. They PHOENIX
NII X a walk-off win.
may be incredibly talented athletes, Karl Svatek
but fitter than Lawrence? No. DENTON, N.C.
Dan Wallin, ROSENBERG, TEXAS

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 ©2017 P&G
® ®
OFFICIAL SHAMPOO OF THE NFL

SHOULDERS WERE
MADE FOR GREATNESS.
NOT DANDRUFF.
 Go WNBA EXTRA Faces in
Figure A SMASHING FINALS
NALS M
MUSTARD The Crowd

16 18 20 21

SCORECARD Edited by ALBERT CHEN + SARAH KWAK

London Calling
There’s a point to all those NFL games in the U.K. this season. The
GLOBAL TRENDSETTER
When, in 2012, the NFL
needed a guinea pig to
see if the U.K. market was
viable, Khan volunteered.
league wants to expand its empire—and one owner in particular seems
keen to launch a reverse British Invasion B Y T IM ROH A N

IT’S 8:30 A.M. on a
Saturday in London when
Shad Khan saunters onto
the deck of the Kismet, his
superyacht, for a morning
yoga session. He looks as
if he’s just woken up, his
Jaguars and Fulham FC, of
the English Championship
League. His yacht is
docked on the Thames
River in Canary Wharf,
near the East London
financial district, because
to develop 70 acres of
land near the St. John’s
River, which would
essentially move downtown
Jacksonville closer to
EverBank Field. The project
is expected to include hotels
prominent and influential
figures. But some people
wonder what his long-term
intentions are, if maybe
he’s planning to move
the Jaguars to London
full-time someday. Given

B O B M A R T IN (K H A N); M A RK G REEN WO O D/ IP S / RE X /SH U T T ERS T O C K (U. K . F L AG); K E VO RK DJA N SE ZI A N /G E T T Y IM AG E S (W N BA)

hair messy and tussled,
his eyes glazed over. Khan
had hosted a party at a club
the night before that lasted
until 1 a.m. “If anybody left
sober, hey, it was their bad
judgment,” he says.
In the 1970s, Khan
developed a new bumper
the Jaguars are in town and restaurants, office space Khan’s London ties and
for their annual London and stores, apartments and considering the size of
game, the fifth consecutive condos. Khan wants the the Jacksonville market,
moving the team to London
might make sense.
Khan viewed regular trips to London The thought alone makes
Jaguars fans and the entire
as a way to generate money for his city of Jacksonville nervous.
franchise. He’s been proved correct.

that revolutionized the
auto industry, and then he
bought Flex-N-Gate, an
auto-parts manufacturer,
and turned it into a
billion-dollar business.
His net worth is now
$7.1 billion, which makes
him, according to Forbes,
the 72nd-richest American.
He used that wealth to buy
two professional sports
teams—the Jacksonville
year they’ve played here.
The NFL owners’ club is
dominated by white men;
Khan, a Pakistan-born
Muslim who immigrated
to the United States
as a teenager to study
engineering at Illinois, was
the league’s first nonwhite
majority owner. Earlier
this year Khan won a bid
buildings to have “a soul,
have character to them,”
he says. “You see that in
Barcelona or in Paris.” This
is all expected to cost him
north of $500 million in
private funding, and Khan
is expected to foot a good
chunk of the bill.
Khan has become one
of Jacksonville’s most
K
HAN’S INTENTIONS
for this day were
more or less clear:
He’d host a party on his
yacht, mingle with business
associates and check in on
his soccer team. When the
party begins, Lenny Curry,
the mayor of Jacksonville,
is in a corner chatting
with his wife and holding
a Bloody Mary. Curry has
heard the rumors that Khan

14 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017


may move the Jaguars
to London, but he’s not
worried. “What he says in
public is what he says in
private,” the mayor says.
“He loves the people there.
He sees the potential.”
Curry points to how
Khan has invested money
back into EverBank Field.
Khan has spent about
R A N DY FA RIS /G E T T Y IM AG E S (A L A M O); R O B ER T M AC H A D O N OA / L I G H T R O C K E T/G E T T Y IM AG E S ( T O R O N T O)
Khan’s Jacksonville-based
lawyer, born and raised
in the city. “He doesn’t do
anything small. He seeks
out the greatest architects
in the world, the greatest
land planners in the world.
He looks at a piece of
property that’s sat there
untouched for 50 years and
sees a great new city.”
and the city’s downtown
development project, Khan
raised his hand in 2012
when the NFL was looking
for a team willing to play
in London on a regular
basis. Before the league
could decide whether it
could move a team here
full-time, it needed to see if
the London market would
throw its support behind
one team. It needed a
guinea pig.
Khan viewed regular
trips to London as a way to
generate more money for
his small-market franchise.
He’s been proved correct.
The London game now
accounts for about 15% of
the Jags’ annual revenue.
But Khan also saw a chance
to expand the Jaguars’
profile beyond north Florida.
He created a London bureau
and moved three Jags
staffers here full-time to
handle local sponsorships
and oversee a number of
community initiatives.
The Great
Expanse
If the NFL were to
grow, which city—
aside from London—
should get a team?
MEXICO CITY
The market is massive,
and the league is in
the second straight
year of regular-season
games there.
SAN ANTONIO
Texas loves its football,
and the city just
invested $60 million to
upgrade the 64,000-
seat Alamodome.
PORTLAND
An oft-discussed locale
for a future MLB or NHL
team, Portland has a
sneaky-big TV market.
And the city’s beer and
food-truck scene would
make for great tailgating.
SALT LAKE CITY
It’s one of America’s
fastest-growing cities,

$175 million renovating the
stadium over the last five
years, splitting the bill with
the city. He’s upgraded the
club seats, he’s added lavish
features like pools and
cabanas, and he’s installed
362-foot-wide video boards.
Adjacent to the field, he just
added a practice facility and
a 5,500-seat amphitheater,
modeled after Radio City
Music Hall. The team plans
to host concerts there.
“Shad has said this is
the one great chance that
Jacksonville has to change
its face,” says Paul Harden,
Still, it’s clear that
within the Jaguars’
offices, there is a focus
on another challenge:
turning the Jaguars into
an international brand.
That was one of the first
jobs Khan gave team
president Mark Lamping,
who has worked as an
executive with Anheuser-
Busch, was president of
the St. Louis Cardinals and
oversaw construction of
MetLife Stadium in East
Rutherford, N.J.
Before the Jacksonville
stadium renovations
They include a flag-football college football is huge
league for middle schoolers, in Utah, and a team
there would fill the NFL’s
a nationwide flag-football
largest regional gap.
tournament and a clinic
where Jags coaches teach TORONTO
English kids American The Rogers
football. Once a month Centre needs
Lamping will travel to modernizing,
London and check in on but a team
would have
the team’s local interests
an entire
in person. country’s fan
The strategy seems to base behind it.
be working. The NFL’s
U.K. office reports that the
Jaguars are the eighth-most-
popular team in London, as
of June 2017, as measured
by jersey sales, despite their

OCTOBER 9, 2017 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / 15

 SCORECARD
15–49 record over the last
four seasons. There also
seems to be the makings
of a solid season-ticket
base among the locals:
40,000 people bought ticket
packages to attend all four
games played in London
this season.
The next step in
the experiment, says
Mark Waller, the NFL
executive vice president of
is targeting 2022 as the
window: The NFL CBA will
be expiring, the league’s TV
contracts will be coming
up, and the league will have
a better understanding of
the logistical challenges of
having a team in London.
“That would appear to be
a logical time where all
three things come together,”
Waller says.
GO
FIGURE
land between Bishop’s Park,
the Thames and a west
London neighborhood. The
cottage was originally used
as a royal hunting lodge in
the late 1700s, and Fulham
played its first match on
this site in 1896.
Khan bought Fulham
56
Average number of
in 2013 for an estimated
wins by the Heat, per
$300 million. He later season, while LeBron
installed his son, Tony, James and Dwyane
as director of football Wade were Miami

international operations,
is to play eight games in
London—simulating a full
regular season—and having
one team play there twice,
Rule, Britannia
The Jags conquered the
U.K., and on Sept. 24 the
Ravens, too, 44–7, with a
TD by Marcedes Lewis.
I
S THERE REALLY a
chance that the Jags will
move here permanently
someday? “I mean, is there
a remote chance that I win
the lottery?” Khan says. He
laughs, as if he’s proved his
point. It is left unsaid that
he is already worth more
than a lottery winner.
operations, and now Shad
is working on developing
the Cottage in a similar way
that he developed EverBank
Field. He wants fans to flock
to the Cottage even when
Fulham is not playing. He
views it as another way to
generate money to put back
into the team. “You’ve got to
have a sustainable model,”
Khan said on a British
sports talk show while he
was in London. “Fulham
was there way before my
time, and it’ll be here way
after I’m gone. What makes
it sustainable shouldn’t
be someone’s bottomless
bank account.”
Now, in the corner of the
yacht party, Lamping is
asked whether the Jaguars
might move to London
someday. He says that
the events, sponsorships
teammates from
2010 to ’14. They were
reunited when Wade
signed a one-year,
$2.3 million deal with
the Cavs last week.
14
Percent chance the
NBA’s bottom three
teams will each have
of winning the draft
lottery in 2019. The
rule change was made
to discourage teams
from tanking. (Odds
of the worst team’s
getting the top pick
had been 25%.)

in back-to-back weeks. The

Jaguars could be that team.
About a year after
volunteering the Jaguars to
play a game in London, in
2013, Khan went searching
and initiatives in London
are all directed toward
earning money to make
the team sustainable
55 A P/ RE X /SH U T T ERS T O C K (WA D E , A DA M SILV ER); S T E V E M C A L IS T ER /G E T T Y IM AG E S (C HIP S)
J O E T O T H / B PI / RE X /SH U T T ERS TO C K (L E W IS); JA S O N MIL L ER /G E T T Y IM AG E S (L EB R O N);

“We’d listen if it meant
further strengthening the
franchise in Jacksonville,”
Khan says. For now, the
Jaguars are committed to
playing one game a year
here for three more years,
through the 2020 season.
By then, the chatter to
bring a team to London
could really pick up. Waller
for an English soccer
team to buy too. Pairing a
British soccer team with the
Jaguars would only raise
their London profile further.
Fulham’s venue, Craven
Cottage, is unlike any other
in sports. It’s the British
version of Fenway Park,
a bandbox of a stadium
squeezed onto a patch of
in Jacksonville.
“Everything we’re doing
in London is to make us
stronger in Jacksonville,”
he says. It sounds like a
stock answer.
“You understand, I have
to ask the question,” I say.
“And you understand, I
have to dodge the question,”
Lamping says, laughing. ±
Percent off Americans
supporting g legalized
legaliz
sports betting,
according to a new
Washington Post
and UMass-Lowell
poll. It marks the
first time a poll has
found that a national
majority supports
sports gambling.

16 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017

B L A Z E C H U K K A B O O T | F L O R S H E I M . C O M
 SCORECARD

W NB A

view some twosome

The WNBA playoff format gave fans a thrilling Finals

ONE OF THE smartest Minnesota’s 80–69 victory

decisions in the 21-year
history of the WNBA came
in January 2016 when the
league changed its playoff
format to allow the eight
teams with the highest
winning percentages—
regardless of conference—to
qualify for the playoffs and
be seeded based on their
records. The change allowed
the Minnesota Lynx and
the L.A. Sparks, the league’s
two best teams this season,
a clear path to meet in the
Finals despite both residing
in the Western Conference.
The two teams produced
spellbinding basketball in
the 2016 Final (L.A. won
three games to two) and
it has been the same story
in this year’s, which was
tied at two games after
on Sunday night.
The series has given
fans another glimpse of
one of the least appreciated
dynasties in sports. If an
NBA team had reached the
Finals six times in seven
years, placed four of its
members on the Olympic
team and had a playoff
winning percentage of
more than .700 since 2011,
it would be celebrated from
Boston to Boise. Alas, that
is not the case for the Lynx
of the low-profile WNBA.
With four Minnesota
starters over 31, catch this
dominating team while you
can. And if the Lynx stick
together for another year,
and it’s L.A. and Minnesota
in 2018, count us in.
—Richard Deitsch

U.S. squad, and last weekend’s enough to decide the Presidents

GOL F event was two soul-sucking days Cup. Also, reducing the team size
of meaningless golf. Here are four from 12 to 10 would help mask
modest proposals to fix the event. the Internationals’ inferiority. No

A N D RE W D. B ERN S T EIN / N BA E /G E T T Y IM AG E S; PAT RI C K SMI T H /G E T T Y IM AG E S (PRE SID EN T S C U P)

This is the Presidents Cup, so
let’s executive reorder the
teams. Since the rest of the world
is clearly not enough, let’s give the
Internationals two wild-card picks
offense to captain’s pick Emiliano
Grillo of Argentina, but I think the
Cup could survive his absence.
Make it coed. A mixed-team
event should be a no-brainer.

Executive Orders
How to fix the Presidents Cup
WE CAN pretend no longer: The
Presidents Cup is dead. For years
(decades?) it has been a dreary
slog, and this year was the most
boring yet. The Internationals never
had a chance against a powerhouse
from Europe. How much more fun
would this be with Rory McIlroy and
Ian Poulter in the mix? Or what if
the U.S. team could only draw from
the original 13 colonies? The event
was birthed by the same nation that
thought up the electoral college, so
we oughta be able to figure this out.
For the love of Pete, shorten
the event. Two days is more than
Let’s be real: Lexi Thompson and
Michelle Wie bring way more star
power than the likes of Charley
Hoffman and Kevin Chappell.
Have captains play. Let’s have the
Presidents Cup leaders play for
points. Personally, I would rather
watch Nick Price–Ernie Els vs. Steve
Stricker–Tiger Woods than any other
match we saw. —Alan Shipnuck

18 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017

TO DO THIS JOB,
I NEED TO KEEP MY BRAIN
IN HYPERDRIVE.
WE HEAR YOU
That’s why we created
Staying Sharp.
It’s more than brain games. It’s a
personalized 360Â approach to brain
health with assessments and tools
that can help keep your brain sharp.
So if you don’t think “this is right for
me” when you think AARP, then you
don’t know “aarp.”

Real Possibilities

aarp.org/possibilities
 SCORECARD / EXTRA MUSTARD

us. We had a launch party

and actually had legitimate
celebs there. My bosses
knew we needed content
and were like, “Hey, Ronnie,
go interview these celebs.” I
SIGN OF THE
guess I was the most logical APOCALYPSE
person to cover it. So I went,
got a bunch of cool athlete Four soccer
and celebrity interviews, referees in
and from there it grew. Malawi were
SI: It seems as if you’re a banned for
bit of a celebrity now. Do life after they
you ever get recognized? collectively took
$20 from a team
R2K: A few months ago
to fix a game,
this group of kids found $15 of which
NB A out where [Mavericks they paid back to

Face of the franchise

How 2K’s marketing director became an NBA cult hero
RONNIE SINGH is the
digital marketing director
for 2K; among NBA fans,
he’s simply known as Ronnie
R2K: I’ve played 2K since
the original, but I really
started picking up with
2K5. I went on
forward Harrison Barnes’s] the team after
wedding was happening it still lost.
and followed the wedding
party. But they weren’t
looking for Steph [Curry] Deshaun
or Kyrie [Irving]. The Watson
security guard told them In just his third
start the rookie
they couldn’t be there, and quarterback
they said they threw for four

CO U R T E S Y O F R O N NIE SIN G H (SIN G H); T WI T T ER (N BA 2K 18); EN C YC LO PA ED I A B RI TA N NI C A / U I G /G E T (M A L AW I F L AG); B U R A ZIN /G E T T Y IM AG E S (M O N E Y ); C H RIS RYA N /G E T T Y

2K. As the public face of the message were looking TDs and rushed

IM AG E S (S O CC ER BA L L); J O E R O B B INS /G E T T Y IM AG E S (WAT S O N); DY L A N BU EL L /G E T T Y IM AG E S (CO L L INS); DAV ID DAV IE S / PA IM AG E S /G E T T Y IM AG E S (S CO T T BA L DW IN)

the wildly popular video boards and wrote for Ronnie. The for one in the
game series, he’s a target for about the game. security guard Texans’ 57–14 win
players who disagree with The people at 2K was like, “I don’t over the Titans.
the ratings that are assigned noticed and asked know who that is.”
to them each season—and me to come in for SI: So you must
there are many who do. an interview. The get noticed
(After the September job was to run exclusively by
release of NBA 2K18, John their forum. Over guys. Correct?
Wall tweeted at Singh: @ time, social media R2K: I’d say 90,
Ronnie2K u a joke !!!) SI’s developed, and I got my 95%. There are girls who
Andy Gray recently caught first big break. It was 2K11, come up and say, “Hey, my
up with Singh, 34. and we had Michael Jordan boyfriend loves your game.”
SI: How did you end up on the cover. This was a And they joke, “I wish your
at 2K? major cultural move for game didn’t exist.” ±

Terry Collins
THEY SAID IT After a 70–92
season the
Mets’ manager
announced he
“IN FAIRNESS IT [HAD] NOTHING
HING Steve Tandy
will move to the
TO DO WITH THE LION. . . . Coach of the Ospreys, a front office for a
WHEN YOU PUT YOUR HANDD rugby team from Swansea, new challenge:
Wales, explaining the coping with
IN A FENCE WHERE THERE absence of hooker Scott disappointment
IS A LION, THEN YOU Baldwin (left) from a while wearing
WILL GET BITTEN.” game last week. a suit.

20 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017

 SCORECARD
Gabriela Pelogi | Federal Way, Wash. | Soccer
Pelogi, a junior forward at Western Washington, had three goals and
an assist in a 7–1 win over Holy Names; through seven games she has
scored eight times with four assists. Last year Pelogi led the Great
Northwest Athletic Conference in points (29), was second in goals
(11) and scored six times with one assist during the Vikings’ title run.

Jamal Walton | Miramar, Fla. | Track and Field

Jamal, a senior at Miramar High, won the 400-meter dash at the Pan
American Games in Trujillo, Peru, in 44.99, becoming the 16th teenager
to eclipse 45 seconds. A month earlier he broke the 400 meet record
at the Brooks Invitational, running a 46.04. Last spring Jamal took the
Class 4A state titles in the 200 (21.31) and the 400 (46.11).

UPDATE
Al McKeller | Indianapolis | Football
McKeller, a freshman running back at the University of Indianapolis,
ran for 206 yards and one touchdown in his collegiate debut, a
24–20 victory over No. 2 Grand Valley State. It marked the first time
SWINGING LOW
in nine years that a Greyhound has rushed for more than 200 yards. Q Emilee Hoffman made
Through four games McKeller has gained 341 yards with three TDs. Faces in the Crowd
in September 2016 after
breaking a course record

FACES IN THE CROWD

at Sacramento’s Del Paso
Country Club with a
second-round 64 to win
the Big “I” championship
Edited by JEREMY FUCHS shortly after graduating
from Vista del Lago
High in Folsom, Calif.
She kept up her strong
Clark Dean | Sarasota, Fla. | Rowing play last season as a
Clark, a senior at Pine View School in Osprey, won the single sculls freshman at Texas,
at the world junior championships in Trakai, Lithuania, ending a finishing in the top 25
50-year gold medal drought for the U.S. in that event. He finished eight times, including
S T E V E WO LT M A N N / N C A A PH O T OS /G E T T Y IM AG E S (U PDAT E); R A D L E Y M U L L ER / W W U (PELO G I); JA M A L WA LT O N (WA LT O N);

in 7:04.73 to prevail by 3.25 seconds. In June, Clark won the men’s second place at the
ERI C G REU L I C H (M C K EL L ER); U. S . R OWIN G (D E A N); C SI P O R T R A I T G R O U P (CO L L IER); MILWAU K EE AT H L E T I C S (KOSS)

single (7:15.03) at the U.S. U-19 world trials in West Windsor, N.J. Big 12 Championship.
In the first round
of the Lady Paladin
Shelton Collier | Matthews, N.C. | Volleyball Invitational, Hoffman
Collier, 62, the coach of the Division II Wingate (N.C.) University shot a seven-under
women’s team, beat North Greenville 3–1 for his 1,000th victory. He 65, setting the school
is the ninth coach in NCAA history to reach that mark. Collier, who record; in August she
also coached at Pittsburgh and Georgia Tech, has led the Bulldogs helped the U.S. win gold
to 11 straight regular-season South Atlantic Conference titles. at the World University
Games in Taipei. “I like
how challenging golf
Taylor Koss | Green Bay | Track and Field is,” Hoffman says. “It is
Koss, a recent grad of Milwaukee, won bronze at the Deaflympics in almost unconquerable,
Samsun, Turkey, in the 200-meter dash (22.71) and the 400 hurdles but at the same time it
(53.75). At the Eagle Open in May he broke his own national deaf can be so rewarding.”
record in the 400 hurdles with a time of 53.27. Koss won three Horizon —Eden Laase
League titles and was named second-team all-conference four times.

Nominate Now j
To submit a candidate for Faces in the Crowd, email faces@simail.com
For more on outstanding amateur athletes, follow @SI_Faces on Twitter. OCTOBER 9, 2017 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / 21
 $100,000 Amount allegedly funneled to the family of a high school
basketball player to persuade him to sign with Louisville

IN SOME of the finest fantasy writing this side of
Harry Potter, lawyers for the NCAA have argued in
federal court filings in Oakland that antitrust suits
brought by former athletes should be dismissed
because the plaintiffs have not considered the value
of a college education in their claims that NCAA
schools have colluded to arbitrarily cap the value of
the compensation athletes can receive. This educa-
tion market, they claim, has just as much influence
as the market for athlete labor when the players
choose their schools.
We know that isn’t the case after paperwork filed
in another federal courthouse on the other side of
the country last week showed that the most relevant
market for some of the best college basketball recruits
is the black market the NCAA’s rules have created.
On Sept. 26, Joon Kim, the acting U.S. attorney for
the Southern District of New York, announced the
arrests of 10 people in connection with two related
fraud and corruption schemes. Said Kim, “The pic-
ture of college basketball painted by the charges is
not a pretty one—coaches at some of the nation’s top
programs taking cash bribes, managers and advis-
ers circling blue-chip prospects like coyotes, and
employees of a global sportswear company funneling
cash to families of high school recruits.”
While detailing the charges against four major
college assistant coaches, two Adidas employees,
an AAU program director and three others for their
LEGAL BR IEF
SI’s legal analyst answers some
PRESSING QUESTIONS in the wake
of one of the biggest scandals in college
basketball history By Michael McCann
roles in the recruitment of basketball players, investigators
exposed a world practically everyone knew existed. Decades
of whispers from frustrated coaches and hamstrung NCAA
investigators were confirmed thanks to wiretaps, recordings by
undercover agents and the threat of federal prison time. How
did Louisville secure a commitment from star recruit Brian
Bowen? According to the feds, Adidas employees Jim Gatto and
Merl Code agreed to give about $100,000 to Bowen’s family in
exchange for him to come to Louisville, a school Adidas pays
($160 million over 10 years) to wear its uniforms and shoes. The
arrangement, according to the criminal complaints, also assumed
that Bowen would sign with Adidas and work with Christian
Dawkins (a recruiter for a sports management company) and
financial adviser Munish Sood once he turned pro.
Originally a well-meaning set of restrictions intended to
maintain parity in college sports, the NCAA’s rules have become
STOP VILIFYING THE ACT OF PA
LET ATHLETES TAKE MO
a laughingstock as revenue has risen in the marquee sports of
football and men’s basketball. The rules, which failed to create
parity in the first place, wound up creating a need for middlemen
who link apparel companies, schools, coaches and players. The
market wants to give the players what it thinks they’re worth,
but they aren’t supposed to take the money. Some do, though,
and not before those middlemen wet their beaks.
Because the FBI and the Department of Justice won’t always
be there to help the NCAA make its case against coaches and
players who break the rules, how can the NCAA combat the
corruption exposed by the investigation? The simplest way is to
stop vilifying the act of paying people for being good at sports
and let athletes take money from whoever wants to pay them. If

WILL HEAD COACHES FACE
CRIMINAL CHARGES?
They could. Athletic directors and
even university presidents might
also have reason to worry—if you
think of college basketball as a
network of crime families with
syndicates and associations.
As FBI agents continue their
investigation, they may learn of new
entanglements.
If reliable evidence surfaces that
high-ranking university officials
directed, authorized or even
acquiesced to assistant coaches
taking bribes, those administrators
will almost certainly face charges.
If the government wishes to expose
an industry rife with corruption and
also educate Americans on which
acts constitute crimes, taking down
a head coach or athletic director
would produce a more lasting
impression than going after an
assistant coach.
With that in mind, the Justice
Department will most likely engage in
plea bargain discussions with lawyers
for the assistant coaches and the
other named defendants. Emails,
text messages, direct messages on
social media, recordings, documents,
financial statements and other
correspondence could help the
Justice Department prove the guilt
of other people. And it’s worth noting
that an assistant who reaches a
plea deal may be required to testify
against his head coach.

24 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017

 $160 million Value of the 10-year deal $7.8 million Amount Pitino earned in 2015, 10 Number of people arrested
Louisville signed with Adidas in August the most among Division I basketball coaches last week in an FBI probe

the MLB amateur draft can hire agents to negotiate

a contract with the team that drafted them without
COACHES sacrificing eligibility should they fail to successfully
REPROACHED agree to a contract.) That sport hasn’t collapsed
Assistants under the weight of corruption, and neither would
(clockwise
basketball or football.
from top left)
Chuck Person Why would bringing the athlete-agent relationship
of Auburn, into the light help players, schools and the NCAA?
Lamont Evans •Players would have the option to be represented by
of Oklahoma agents who choose to follow the rules rather than
State, Tony by ones willing to break them. The biggest agencies
Bland of USC don’t need to slip athletes a few hundred bucks at a
and Emanuel
Richardson time, and the agency and the player would benefit
of Arizona more in the long term by focusing on the player’s
were arrested career. True, schools and coaches would have to deal
last week. with people representing the players’ interests, but
they already do that—those people are called parents.
An agent with multiple clients is far less likely than
YING PEOPLE FOR BEING GOOD AT SPORTS AND a proud mom to harass a coach about playing time.

ONEY FROM WHOEVER WANTS TO PAY THEM.

the market thinks Bowen is worth $100,000 beyond the value of
his scholarship, let him have $100,000. (Or let him pay back his
scholarship and keep any cash that’s left over.) Of course, that’s
S P O R T S W I R E /A P ; D A R R E L L WA L K E R / I CO N S P O R T S W I R E /
• The NCAA would have an opportunity to exert
some authority over a group it hasn’t been able
to control. Agents would have to pay to join an
NCAA registry and agree to cooperate with NCAA
investigations. Any violations of NCAA rules or
lack of cooperation with an investigation would

a bridge too far for most of the guardians of amateurism—many get the agent tossed. Because players would most
of whom have gotten rich thanks to rules that keep more of the likely choose agents in good standing, an agent
C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T: K E N M U R R AY/ I CO N

A P ; M A R K J . T E R R I L L /A P ; J O H N W. M C D O N O U G H

money on the school side.
Still, there are steps that schools and the NCAA could take to
keep athletes away from youth coaches who would sell them to
the highest bidder or college assistants who would peddle them
to shady agents or financial advisers in exchange for kickbacks.
First, as officials in the Power Five conferences have discussed
in recent years, let players have agents. The best college baseball
players effectively have them. (High school players selected in
who broke the rules would risk professional suicide.
That’s a powerful incentive.
Perhaps this is all too much with the news of the
FBI investigation so fresh. Perhaps it will take more
charges against coaches, agents and executives to spur
meaningful change. But this is going to have a long
tail. It’s probably going to get much, much worse. So
maybe now is the time to start seeking solutions. ±

WILL COACHES RECEIVE
ADDITIONAL SCRUTINY?
It’s a myth that coaches operate on
an island cut off from the mainland
university. Athletic departments
employ compliance officers—many
of whom are lawyers—to ensure
that teams, coaches and student-
athletes adhere to NCAA rules. Some
universities also direct senior school
administrators to oversee aspects
of the athletic department. This
should ensure that the president
and provost are informed of athletic
department happenings.
Except when it doesn’t. It’s obvious
that some schools give their coaches
autonomy in return for a winning—and
more lucrative—program. Further, a
compliance officer is not always in
position to confront a coach. Imagine
a twentysomething compliance
officer, fresh out of law school,
reprimanding Rick Pitino. Exactly.
The criminal charges announced
last week change this dynamic. It
is now incumbent that university
leaders oversee athletics. Perhaps
that means a more direct, rather
than dotted, line between the
university’s general counsel and the
athletic director. Or it means some
employees report not to the coach
or AD but to the general counsel or
president.
While approaches will vary by
university, coaches—even prominent
ones—are likely to face more
restrictions and oversight.

OCTOBER 9, 2017 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 25

 CARDINALS’ SINS
Rick Pitino is the biggest name caught
up in college basketball’s latest scandal,
but he won’t be the last giant to fall
By Tim L ayden

ON A winter’s night in 1991, I went on a recruit-

ing trip with Rick Pitino. He was 38, in his second
year as the coach at Kentucky; I was a reporter at
Newsday. He was well-known at that point in his
career, but not yet a celebrity.
Pitino had taken the Kentucky job in the spring of
1989, following a scandal that involved the familiar
sentinels of illegal payments to players and academic
fraud. The Wildcats had been placed on three years’
probation and banned from the NCAA tournament
for two years. On this night, Pitino rode in a van with
me, a team manager and longtime Kentucky equip-
ment manager Bill Keightley. We watched a kid play
at Somerset High, and afterward Pitino asked the rest
of us if we thought he could play for the Wildcats. I
remember waffling. Pitino said, “Not a chance.’’ (He
knew the talent he had coming). On the way back
to Lexington, we stopped at a pizza joint. Our wait-
ress, a middle-aged woman, saw Pitino in his blue,
logo’d windbreaker and timidly asked his name. She
seemed genuinely unsure, or perhaps just fearful.
“Rick Pitino,’’ he said. The woman covered her mouth
in shock. Pitino smiled and signed an autograph.
Pitino had won 14 games in his first probation
year at Kentucky and 22 in his second. In 1992,
Year Three, he took the Wildcats—including four
senior players orphaned by probation, who came to

COULD THE STUDENT-
ATHLETES IMPLICATED IN
THE CORRUPTION SCANDAL
FACE CRIMINAL CHARGES?
Yes, those who knowingly
accepted bribes as part of a
conspiracy that led them to
attend a particular college or sign
with a particular adviser could
face charges for bribery and
conspiracy. They could also be
charged with wire fraud depending
upon how they received the money.
Also, assuming taxes weren’t paid,
tax evasion could become another
charge. Family members involved
in such dealings could face the
same charges.
It’s unlikely, though, that
student-athletes or their families
will face charges—as long as they
cooperate with the FBI. The Justice
Department has given no signals
that it plans on prosecuting these
athletes, possibly because they’re
invaluable witnesses.
COULD THE NCAA DECLINE
TO IMPOSE ELIGIBILITY
PENALTIES ON IMPLICATED
STUDENT-ATHLETES?
The NCAA finds itself in a
strange place, with no control
over a college sports corruption
scandal. On one hand, it can
use findings by the federal
government to sanction various
offenders of amateurism rules.
The NCAA might reason that
it ought to punish student-

26 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017

$22,000 Amount allegedly received by Oklahoma State assistant $91,000 Amount allegedly given to Chuck Person to steer
coach Lamont Evans to steer athletes to agents or financial advisers Auburn players to a financial adviser and a clothing business

be known as the Unforgettables—to the Elite Eight and missed
the Final Four by the length of Grant Hill’s pass and Christian
Laettner’s shot. Dominance would soon follow. But it’s impor-
tant to not forget what those early Pitino Kentucky teams were:
Lovable underdogs (well, except for Jamal Mashburn), scrapping
for respect. His ’87 Providence team, which made an unlikely
Final Four run led by Billy Donovan, was similarly scrappy, well-
coached and motivated. As of the early ’90s, this was Pitino’s
reputation: Builder of underdog overachievers.
College basketball (football, too, but let’s keep our apocalyptic
scandals sport-specific for now) has long demanded a certain
suspension of disbelief. Think of the ecosystem: College and
that the coach “has done nothing wrong and there
is no evidence to suggest otherwise.”) But it is an
ignominious turn in a Hall of Fame career. It’s also
stunning that Pitino is gone, considering that he
pulled off the remarkable feat of retaining his job
through two previous major scandals at Louisville,
the first involving an extortion attempt that resulted
from Pitino’s having sex with a woman who would
later marry his team’s equipment manager, and
the second involved a Louisville assistant coach’s
providing prostitutes for recruits.
It’s possible that Rick Pitino has been cheating the

IT’S STUNNING THAT PITINO IS GONE, CONSIDERING THAT HE RETAINED HIS JOB
THROUGH TWO PREVIOUS MAJOR SCANDALS.
university basketball programs compete for the services of a
finite number of talented teenagers who are needed to win games,
provide March Madness television programming and justify the
expense of paying coaches millions of dollars, building giant
arenas and providing bragging rights for wealthy alumni. Insert
AAU coaches, personal “advisers,” rapacious shoe-and-apparel
companies, and come on, let’s be serious.
It turns out it’s not all clean. On Sept. 26 the Justice Department
announced charges against assistant coaches from four schools
and a further allegation that Adidas employees paid $100,000 or
more to steer recruits to colleges, including one to a university later
reported to be Louisville, where Pitino has coached for 16 years.
One day later Pitino was put on administrative leave, a move that
J O H N W. M C D O N O U G H
system since he was the 26-year-old coach at Boston
University in 1978. It’s possible he was cheating at
Providence and in those early days at Kentucky. It
doesn’t look good for his tenure at Louisville. But
Pitino was, for a long time in his career, representa-
tive of the product that college basketball has long
sold to the public—a mix of passion and purity, shak-
en well and televised almost every damn night from
November until April. Whether that representation
was genuine or a hoax doesn’t really matter.
Last week, the reshaping of college basketball com-
menced. It’s foolish to think it will be transformed
overnight, but it will be transformed. The NCAA has

Pitino’s lawyer said meant that Pitino had been “effectively fired.’’ been pushed aside by the FBI. Stuff got real. There is
Pitino has not been charged with any crime, though some news a symmetry in Pitino’s being the first of the giants to
outlets have reported that he was directly involved in arranging fall. His crime wasn’t just that he participated in the
a payment to a recruit. (A statement issued by his lawyer stated fantasy, but that he sold it so well. ±

athletes who received payments or
whose families received payments.
After all, violations allegedly
occurred.
On the other hand, the NCAA’s
system of amateurism is now under
a new microscope—the FBI’s. The
NCAA might conclude that a more
sensible approach would be to permit
these athletes to play—at least until
the federal cases play out. The NCAA
could withhold judgment until the
courts render a verdict.
WHAT ABOUT
COLLEGE FOOTBALL?
It stands to reason that if bribes
occurred in college basketball,
the same may be true in college
football. Both are big-time, big-
money sports with deep ties to
apparel companies and investment
advisers. But though football is
a larger and more lucrative sport
overall, high school players are
not as interesting to agents
because the NFL’s three-year
rule gives them time to evaluate
the best prospects once they
reach college. The one-and-done
basketball players will be signing
pro contracts—and lucrative shoe
deals—much more quickly.
Also, while one star college football
player can make a difference to his
team, he probably won’t have the
same degree of impact as a star
basketball player. Sure, there are
exceptions, but the incentive to
bribe is just not as powerful.

OCTOBER 9, 2017 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 27

 Most postseason teams have at least
one topline No. 1 starter. The Nation-
als have two. You can shuffle them
and deal them in either order. Ideally,
when the playoff rotation is announced,
Max Scherzer will pitch Game 1 and
Stephen Strasburg Game 2. A hamstring
tweak in his final regular-season start
means Scherzer could be pushed back a
game—and if he is, Strasburg will slide
right in, with better pure stuff than any
other No. 2 starter in the postseason.
MAX FACTOR
Comfortable in the spotlight,
Scherzer (below right) has
helped take pressure off the
media-shy Strasburg.
THE 2012 STR ASBURG SHUTDOWN BECAME THE MAIN TOPIC OF
CONVERSATION FOR FANS IN D.C. “I DON’ T KNOW IF I’M
EVER GOING TO ACCEPT IT,” HE TOLD REPORTERS.
Washington has not won a playoff
series since the franchise relocated from
Montreal in 2005. This year’s team
boasts the best young position player in
the game not named Trout, rightfielder
Bryce Harper; another MVP candidate,
third baseman Anthony Rendon; and
a deep rotation behind Scherzer and
Strasburg, with lefthander Gio González
at No. 3 and Tanner Roark at No. 4.
But whether the Nationals succeed in
October will depend on their two aces.
As they will on the mound, they fol-
low each other across the NL pitcher
30 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017
leader boards: Scherzer, 33, is second
in strikeouts per nine innings, with
12.0; Strasburg, 29, is fifth (10.5); Stras-
burg is first in fielding-independent
pitching, at 2.72, Scherzer is second
(2.90); Scherzer has been worth a
league-best 7.2 wins above replace-
ment, Strasburg is third (6.4).
This is the one-two punch the team
envisioned when it selected Stras-
burg with the first pick of the 2009
draft and signed Scherzer to a seven-
year, $210 million deal before the ’15
season. But the pair’s success wasn’t
always a foregone conclusion.
T
ONY VITELLO liked the lanky
righthander almost immediately.
A few hours into his official re-
cruiting visit to Missouri, in his
senior year of high school, Max cajoled
the coach with the heat-averse palette
into ordering the Diablo pasta at a local
restaurant. “He spent the rest of the
meal laughing at me because I was
sweating like crazy,” says Vitello, now
the head coach at Tennessee and one
of Scherzer’s close friends.
Scherzer does not tread lightly in
unfamiliar surroundings or with
new acquaintances. The July before
the pitcher signed with Washington,
leftfielder Jayson Werth was clocked
driving 105 mph in a 55-mph zone a
few miles northeast of Nationals Park.
He eventually served five days in jail
the following January. Early in spring
training, Scherzer’s first with the team,
Werth was serenaded by his new team-
mate, who had written a rap about
the event. “I had to,” says Scherzer
through peals of laughter.
He quickly inserted himself into the
R O B C A RR /G E T T Y IM AG E S (FA R L EF T ); SIM O N B RU T Y
team culture. He organized a March
Madness pool, a rollicking auction-
based contest that he generally wins.
Werth: “He thinks he’s good at math.”
Scherzer: “I am good at math.
Especially compared to someone
who’s been to jail.”
Scherzer counsels young players and
drives coaches crazy with incessant

DUAL chatter on the bench. “He’s inquisitive
EXHAUSTERS
on every pitch, every swing, every cut-
off man hit,” says pitching coach Mike
The Nationals aren’t the only Maddux. “My ears are tired! Sometimes
division winners with intimidating I walk away and get a drink of water.”
arms at the top of their rotations Scherzer takes pride in creating
an enjoyable atmosphere; the grind
Cleveland Indians
of the season is much more tolerable
COREY if people are having fun. Of course,
KLUBER fun often comes from winning, and
18–4, 2.25 ERA, 11.7 K/9 Scherzer knows that better than most.
F
CARLOS
OR STR ASBURG atmosphere
CARRASCO
18–6, 3.29 ERA, 10.2 K/9 was secondary. At West Hills High
School, he regularly compensated
for the weak defense behind him
by whiffing double-digit batters. If I have
Houston Astros
to do it all myself, I will, he decided. By
JUSTIN his junior year at San Diego State, he
VERLANDER was throwing 102 mph and had the Na-
15–8, 3.36 ERA, 9.6 K/9 tionals—who had the first pick in the
DALLAS draft—salivating. He set attendance
KEUCHEL records nearly everywhere he went in
14–5, 2.90 ERA, 7.7 K/9 the minors, and ESPN broadcast parts
of his Double A debut. He was aghast
when reporters began contacting his
Boston Red Sox family without his permission.
Three hundred sixty-four days after
CHRIS
he was drafted, Strasburg struck out
SALE
17–8, 2.90 ERA, 12.9 K/9 14 batters in his major league debut
against the Pirates. Hungry writers
EL I O T J . S C H E C H T ER / M L B PH O T OS /G E T T Y IM AG E S (K EU C H EL); R O B B IE R O G ERS / M L B PH O T OS /G E T T Y IM AG E S (S A L E , P O M ER A N Z);
DREW begged him to open up, but he described
POMERANZ his debut as “just another week.” For
A L E X T R AU T W I G / M L B PH O TOS /G E T T Y IM AG E S (K LU B ER, C A RR A S CO); CO U R T E S Y O F H O US T O N A S T R OS (V ERL A N D ER);
17–6, 3.32 ERA, 9.0 K/9
D.C. fans Strasmas came every five days
that season—until August, when he un-
derwent Tommy John surgery.
Los Angeles Dodgers He came back a year later, and in
CLAYTON spring training of 2012, GM Mike
KERSHAW Rizzo laid out the team’s plan for
18–4, 2.31 ERA, 10.4 K/9
R O N V E SELY/ M L B PH OTOS/G E T T Y IM AG E S (K ERSH AW, HIL L , A RRIE TA , L E S T ER)
Strasburg: He would pitch on a regular
schedule and throw 160 innings, and
RICH
then he would be done, no matter what.
HILL
12–8, 3.32 ERA, 11.0 K/9 Strasburg spent the season alternat-
ing between tossing gems (28 starts,
197 K’s) and walking upstairs to Rizzo’s
office to plead his case for more action.
Chicago Cubs
I’m fine, he insisted. Let me pitch.
JAKE The 2012 Strasburg Shutdown be-
ARRIETA came the main topic of conversation
14–10, 3.53 ERA, 8.7 K/9 for fans in D.C. Armchair GMs criti-
JON cized the perennial doormat that had
LESTER the temerity to believe this wouldn’t
13–8, 4.33 ERA, 9.0 K/9 be its only shot. Pundits questioned
THE NATIONAL S
Strasburg’s will to win. He began hav-
ing trouble sleeping. In the end the
media coverage became so relentless
that the team shut him down a start
early. “I don’t know if I’m ever going
to accept it, to be honest,” he told re-
porters after his last outing. “You don’t
grow up dreaming of playing in the
big leagues to get shut down when the
games start to matter.” He watched
glumly from the bench as the Cardinals
eliminated Washington in five games
in the division series.
Between the Tommy John surgery
and a series of other, more minor
ailments—a strained lat muscle, a left-
oblique strain, an upper-back strain,
right-elbow soreness, a right-flexor-mass
strain—Strasburg has only pitched one
postseason game, a five-inning battle
in Game 1 of the 2014 NLDS, a 3–2
loss to the Giants. His numbers are
spectacular: His lifetime ERA is 3.07,
and his strikeout rate—10.54—is third
in history, after only Randy Johnson’s
and Chris Sale’s. Yet he has never won
a game that truly mattered.
In high school he would kick the dirt
and throw his glove when he got frus-
trated. Aztecs coaches taught him to
rein himself in, but then they became
concerned that he’d become too cool.
Today the Nats laud his poker face.
But beneath that still surface lurks a
mind that is churning.
“The difference between them is
that Max says it,” Maddux says. “Stras
thinks it.”
S
CHERZER HAS had plenty of
time to think about the low point
of his career. It was not when the
Diamondbacks—the team that
had drafted him with the 11th pick three
years earlier—traded him to the Tigers
in 2009. It was not the next May, when
he was demoted to Triple A Toledo to
rebuild his mechanics. And it was not
even the moment, 18 months later, when
manager Jim Leyland trudged to the
mound to remove him from a decisive
ALCS Game 6 in which he allowed six
runs in 21⁄3 innings against the Rang-
OCTOBER 9, 2017 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 31
 THE NATIONAL S
ers. The worst days of Scherzer’s career
followed that outing, when he reflected
on what he had become.
“I had lost the drive to get better,”
he says. “I thought just being good
was good enough.”
Success on the mound had not come
easily for him. At the University of
Missouri, Scherzer was all potential,
not much polish—high-90s heat but no
control over his body. His hat would
fly off when his front foot landed. “It
was flip a coin if he was gonna have
his delivery under control enough to
throw strikes,” says Vitello, “much less
put it where he wanted to.”
In the majors he relied heavily on
his fastball and a solid slider, but his
secondary pitches were inconsistent.
Some scouts ticketed him for the
bullpen. It wasn’t until late 2010 that
Scherzer finally felt comfortable on the
mound—too comfortable. That was
the season of the ALCS flameout. He
resolved never to let that happen again.
Scherzer spent that offseason poring
over analytics and refining his slider.
He increased his strikeout rate by nearly
50%, to better than 11 per nine, and a
year later added a curveball. In 2013 he
won the AL Cy Young Award.
Now Scherzer tinkers all the time. He
devours Strasburg’s outings too. (“I’ll
never have a curveball like his,” Scherzer
says. “I just try to pay attention to the
little things.”) In one of his final regular-
season starts—with an eye toward the
extended workload he expects in Oc-
tober—Scherzer asked manager Dusty
Baker to leave him in the game for 110
pitches no matter how he was doing. He
gave up seven runs in seven innings, but
declared the outing a success.
“I’ve always said you learn more
about yourself after pitch 100 than you
do in the first 100,” Scherzer said after
the game. “Well, this is time to learn.”
S
CHERZER HIT his first career
home run in August—a three-
run shot against the Marlins
after he pulled back a bunt—
and returned to the dugout to the si-
32 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017
lent treatment. He high-fived the air,
shouted a string of expletives and then
yelled to the position players, “It ain’t
that tough!”
Strasburg has hit three career hom-
ers, two this season. He usually declines
fist bumps. “Do you even enjoy your
own walk-up song?” Roark asked him.
“Don’t know what it is,” Strasburg said.
Strasburg is no robot. But he gener-
ally prefers his punch lines served cold.
The first time he and Scherzer played
STRIKING A BALANCE
The steady Scherzer is a
contender for his third Cy Young
Award—his second in a row—
with a 16–6 mark and 2.51 ERA.
golf together, Scherzer spent much of
the outing teasing Strasburg for using
a neon-green ball—“a putt-putt ball,”
Scherzer calls it. A few days later Scher-
zer opened his locker. Four dozen putt-
putt balls rained down.
Scherzer’s signing could have been
difficult for Strasburg. You can have
more than one ace, but only one man
can start Game 1 of the World Se-
ries. Yet people close to Strasburg say
that he welcomed his new teammate.
Scherzer’s arrival let Strasburg “share
the spotlight,” says Rizzo. During his
first spring training with Washington,
Scherzer posed with Harper on the
cover of this magazine alongside the line
let’s do some damage. Reporters
covering the team now flock to Scherzer.
Strasburg enjoys pressure, but he
does not enjoy attention. This distinc-
tion is crucial. He is deeply private.
“When I first got here, I wasn’t sure
he could talk,” says Baker. Strasburg
does not speak to the media the day
before he starts, and if he could, he
would extend that policy to cover
every other day as well. He declined
to comment for this story. Friends get
his permission before going on the
record—even to praise him. Scherzer’s
presence lets Strasburg stick to what
he likes to do: pitch.
Strasburg has realized, however, that
while he could get away with keeping to
himself as a 21-year-old phenom, he can’t
as a 29-year-old veteran. Prospects have
always followed him around like duck-
lings; these days he initiates conversa-
tions with them. He occasionally cracks
a joke in a press conference. But perhaps
his most significant transformation has
come from understanding he doesn’t have
to do it all alone.
On consecutive days this October, an
ace in Nationals red will stride to the
mound under the glare of flashbulbs. He
will have a long night ahead, between
the game and then the frenzy of atten-
tion that comes after it. He will grip the
ball and prepare to do something that
SIM O N B RU T Y
comes naturally—and something else
that he had to learn. ±
CARBS AND ELECTROLYTES TO HELP
YOU GIVE THAT EXTRA OUNCE.
BE
COOL,
MAN
He was a seventh-round pick with a bum
knee, but Broncos quarterback TREVOR
SIEMIAN had the calm and the smarts to
impress his predecessor, Peyton Manning.
That can earn you respect—and wins

BY ROBE R T K L EMK O
Photographs by David E. Klutho
T
RE VOR SIEMIAN hit rock bottom in a rental car traveling north
on I-65 through pastoral northwest Indiana. Earlier that
November afternoon in 2014, against Purdue, he’d charged
into the fray on a QB sneak and faced that terrifying moment
in football when your feet are stuck in a pile of bodies but
you’re still standing upright. A tackler slammed into his torso,
and his left leg stayed in place. Siemian, in his final season
at Northwestern, wept as trainers helped him off the field.
Now it was dawn, and as he leaned back in the car with
his mother, father and older brother, Todd, he asked the big
question aloud: “I wonder if I’ll ever play again.”
His parents were certain they knew the answer. He’d been
a statistically poor passer on a losing football team. He had a
well-paying job in real estate waiting for him. Still, nobody really
knew what to say. “My husband and I agreed he was pretty
much done—but we didn’t want to tell him that,” says Colleen
Siemian. “Then Todd said, ‘Just give it another try, because in
five years you don’t want to say could’ve, would’ve, should’ve.’ ”
Todd was right, even if Trevor did find out he’d torn his ACL.
Three years later Siemian is the undisputed starter for a Broncos
team that has won three of its first four games. (Denver’s No.
3–ranked run game and No. 1 defense have certainly helped
that cause.) His performance in the first quarter of this season
is the latest turn in an improbable journey from seventh-round
draft pick to Peyton Manning understudy to competitor in a
QB derby he wasn’t supposed to win, but did. Twice.
Now Siemian’s fellow Broncos have joined the chorus of for-
mer Northwestern teammates in issuing superlatives that show
how far the QB has traveled since that anxiety-filled car ride.
“He’s even-keeled,” says receiver Emmanuel Sanders.
“Calm and collected,” says running back C.J. Anderson.
“And cool,” says coach Vance Joseph. “The perfect quarter-
back demeanor.”
“I’ve played with Tom Brady, and I’ve played with Peyton,”
says cornerback Aqib Talib, “and it’s not just the mental side that
makes them great. It’s their calm—that poise, that unwavering
confidence, man. They’re always cool; they never panic. If you
have [those same] traits, you’re on your way.”

IEMIAN’S ROAD to the NFL began in earnest when Greg

S Knapp, then Denver’s QBs coach, visited Evanston, Ill.,
in the spring of 2015 for a post-pro-day workout set up
just for the QB, who was still limping from ACL surgery. Knapp,
the only coach in attendance, had been tasked with identifying
a passer to back up Manning (in what would turn out to be
his final season) and Brock Osweiler (a ’12 second-round pick),
and he came away impressed with Siemian’s football acumen.
Sure, this was a guy who for two years split time with Kain
Colter—Siemian was the pocket passer, Colter the running
threat—and then, in his only season as a full-time starter,
stumbled to seven TDs with 11 interceptions. Still, Knapp went
back to Denver thinking he’d found his man. Coach Gary Kubiak

35
O C T O B E R 9 , 2 0 17 SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED
 and GM John Elway were intrigued too; they liked Siemian’s
play in big games, particularly in narrow wins over 17th-ranked
Wisconsin and, on a windy November day, 18th-ranked Notre
Dame. “He could really throw the football,” says Elway. “There
obviously wasn’t a great team around him. [Knapp] liked his
knowledge of the game, his ability to understand coverages.”
Come draft time, Siemian and his family watched from
their home in Windermere, Fla. On Day 3 they were barbecu-
ing when they began to accept that Trevor was destined for
undrafted free agency. Siemian’s parents say the Browns and
the Texans reached out, express-
ing interest in signing their son
In those early interactions, Knapp saw his instincts affirmed:
“I’m going, ‘I love this. Mr. Manning, you’ve got a bit of a chal-
lenge with this rookie. Trevor doesn’t get intimidated easily.’ ”
Respect earned, Siemian sought out Manning’s tutelage
on every aspect of the position, etiquette included. On
one occasion Siemian asked Manning if, after a game, it
was the younger quarterback’s responsibility to approach
the older quarterback for the traditional handshake. The
future Hall of Famer rejected that premise. The losing QB,
he explained, always approaches the winner.

PASSING JUDGMENT
once the dust settled. (Cleveland,
which has spent decades in search
of a franchise QB, used its two
seventh-round picks on linebacker When it comes to quarterbacking, the Broncos are particularly
Hayes Pullard and cornerback Ifo qualified to identify and manage talent like Siemian (right, center).
Ekpre-Olomu; two years later, nei- FIVE STAFF MEMBERS played the position at least through college.
ther is on its roster.)
PLAYER TEAM GMS COMP ATT YDS TDS INTS
At pick No. 247, Siemian fi-
nally got a call from the Bron- JOHN ELWAY Stanford 42 774 1,246 9,349 77 39
cos’ war room. “Knapp said, General Manager Broncos 234 4,123 7,250 51,475 300 226
‘Trevor, I’m pounding my fist
on the table,’ ” Colleen recalls. VANCE JOSEPH Colorado 30 34 61 454 4 0
Coach
“ ‘I want them to draft you, but
if they don’t, you’re gonna be a
MIKE MCCOY Long Beach St. 8 87 165 938 7 3
preferred free agent with us.’ ”
Offensive Coordinator Utah 29 571 896 7,404 49 23
Elway and Kubiak pulled the
trigger three slots later, with seven BILL MUSGRAVE Oregon 39 634 1,104 8,343 60 40
choices remaining, and Siemian Quarterback Broncos, 49ers 12 43 69 402 1 2
was thrust into a competition with
Zac Dysert (another project passer) GARY KUBIAK Texas A&M 43 314 595 4,078 31 27
for Denver’s third-string job. And Adviser Broncos 119 173 298 1,920 14 16
while Siemian would be limited
by his still-recovering knee in the TOTALS 556 6,753 11,684 84,363 543 376

J O H N I ACO N O (ELWAY ); T IM D EF RIS CO/G E T T Y IM AG E S (J OSEPH); S T EPH EN D U N N /G E T T Y IM AG E S

subsequent rookie minicamp, he
still gave coaches a clue early on

(M CCOY ); O T T O G REU L E /G E T T Y IM AG E S (M US G R AV E); ERI C L A RS BA K K E /A P (K U B I A K)

that he might one day be The Guy.
“I knew Trevor had a little moxie in one of the first QB meet-
ings,” says Knapp. “I’ve been around a couple other guys—college
free agents or late draft picks—in the QB room with Peyton.
And those guys get intimidated. Even for a coach it can be
intimidating to be in a room with Peyton. He’ll challenge you,
and he’s a bulldog about it. Peyton threw a zinger at Trevor, and
it was incredible to hear Trevor spit one back in Peyton’s face.”
Siemian laughs at the memory: “We had a great room and
a good back-and-forth. Maybe a little too much.”
Manning liked to tease Siemian about his Northwestern.edu
email address, telling the young QB that he was an adult now,
and a pro football player. “I eventually folded on that one,” says
Siemian. “[Peyton] has a very dry sense of humor, and I’d try
to be dry with him too. I think it was a shock to him at first.”
IEMIAN BEAT out Dysert that first year and collected a Super
S Bowl 50 ring. The following preseason, after Manning
retired and Osweiler left for Houston as a free agent,
Siemian stole the starting job from first-round pick Paxton Lynch
and went 8–6, just missing the playoffs. Despite completing 59.5%
of his passes for 3,401 yards and 18 TDs (versus 10 picks), he
had to hold off Lynch again deep into this summer. Meanwhile,
Kubiak had stepped down in January, and the Broncos replaced
him with the defensive-minded Vance Joseph, adding former
Chargers coach Mike McCoy as his offensive coordinator.
The new staff worked to build an attack that would give
Siemian and Lynch an equal chance to thrive, and when the
two QBs brought their playbooks home from their second
minicamp, in June, Siemian applied a study technique learned

36
SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED O C T O B E R 9 , 2 0 17

from Manning. “You start with one play,” he says, “and you try
to understand the thought behind it, what defensive weaknesses
it tries to attack. Then you say, What if? for every scenario. What
if I get Cover 1? What if I get Cover 3? You take into account how
the play looks out of different personnel and you draw that up.
Then you move on to the next play. When you get to camp, the
plays kind of come to life.” (Osweiler, who’s back in Denver,
says he now takes the same approach. “No one had ever taught
me that before I met Peyton. We were very fortunate to see the
game he was playing in his head.”)
Siemian ultimately arrived at training camp with an elevated
understanding of the offense, which incorporates some spread
elements he’s familiar with from college. For some teammates,
that new scheme is a welcome departure from an attack that
had grown stale. “The offense was pared down last year,” says
Talib. “If you’re running the ball well, it’ll work great—but if
you’re not, nobody’s gonna go for all that play-action, pop passes
and bootleg. It was kind of one-dimensional.
“In this offense you can line up and do anything. [Trevor]
might check to a run, a screen, anything. This is the offense
Peyton Manning ran. It’s grown-man football.”
While Siemian was learning that offense, he took a noticeably
larger role than Lynch in commanding it. Coaches say Siemian
was calm but aggressive in communicating the intricacies of
certain plays to teammates, tutoring them with a focus on
being accountable to execute their assignments.
“There are days you’re with the [first-team offense], days
you’re with the [second team],” says McCoy, “and he did a good
job of leading in every situation, saying to guys, ‘This is what
we’re expecting on this play. This is where you need to be.’ ”
That’s nothing new, says Northwestern offensive coordinator
Mick McCall, who recalls watching Siemian act like a coach
on the field during practice at Olympia High in Orlando: “He
had everyone’s attention. If he said something, they did what
he said. And he wasn’t demonstrative or anything. His voice
commanded respect.”
TRE VOR SIEMIAN
What drives Siemian, more than the joy of tossing a perfect
touchdown or the ecstacy of victory, is the brotherhood. McCall
remembers his old QB as a social butterfly, dining with various
position groups until eventually the defensive backs talked about
him the way the receivers did. Colleen says her son explained
early on why he preferred football over baseball: Baseball was
an individual sport disguised as a team game, while football
was like “going to war with a bunch of guys.”
“I love the camaraderie of the locker room,” Siemian says. “I
love the huddle. Eleven guys—53 guys—getting on the same
page for a common goal.”
YNCH, WHO is due $9.5 million over the life of his four-
L year contract, was drafted 26th out of Memphis to be
Manning’s successor. Siemian was a low-cost, long-
term project who faced a steep climb to the starting job; his
four-year deal will net roughly $2.3 million, making him the
lowest-paid starting QB in the NFL. And so the decision to
start Siemian over Lynch has been characterized by many
pundits in Denver as a concession by Elway.
Elway doesn’t see it this way. “Trevor did what we were
hoping one of [our QBs] would do: Take control of the posi-
tion,” he says. “I didn’t take any loss there. We wanted the best
quarterback playing, and obviously that’s Trevor.”
Obviously. In victories over the Chargers, Cowboys and
Raiders, Siemian has taken a larger role compared with a
year ago in making on-field, presnap adjustments that give
his offense favorable matchups. Veteran running back Jamaal
Charles points to a third-quarter goal line sequence against
Los Angeles in which the defense offered an unfavorable look
on the edge and Siemian audibled from pass to run, handing
off to Charles for a third-and-one conversion that ended a yard
away from pay dirt. “It was a great decision—I really should
have scored,” Charles says. “He understands the game. These
guys who played with Peyton, they all have high football IQs.”
Manning called Siemian before that opener, and before
several other games last season, to talk football. Siemian likes
to involve his family in his game-day preparation, going over
plays with his father, Walter, in a hotel room. Walter will read a
play call, and Trevor will talk through the scenarios. But when
Manning phones, Dad steps into another room. “[Trevor] is very
private about that. He won’t share what Peyton says, and I don’t
ask,” says Colleen. “I think Peyton respects that about him.”
Manning, in an interview with the NFL Network this
offseason, said he realized Siemian was special when he
saw him visualizing plays without the aid of a playbook or
film. The successful passers, Manning said, can play the
game in their minds.
Siemian’s mother had a hunch long before that. “Trevor sets
goals high for himself,” she says, “and in his mind he has no
choice but to achieve them. I knew, because I was his mother,
that he was not going to give this job up easily.” ±
37
O C T O B E R 9 , 2 0 17 SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED
 NHL Preview

WHEN HIS ROOKIE SEASON was over and he wanted an

escape, Auston Matthews went home. He passed time like
any teenager, lounging poolside and racing go-karts with
buddies in Scottsdale, Ariz., savoring his parents’ shredded
beef tacos, waging war on their new Ping-Pong table. He took
up golf and—surprise—caught on fast, starting in triple digits
and peaking with an 83 at TPC Scottsdale. Once a week he
worked on his flexibility and posture at a local studio called
Simply Pilates with a private instructor who knew nothing
about him until their first 55-minute session in early June. “It
was good to see him free up his brain, no care in the world,”
says his father, Brian. “He got to be Auston for a little bit.”
The past two years would’ve depleted anyone’s Duracells, of
course. On Sept. 17, 2015, his 18th birthday, Matthews officially
became a pro hockey player, when he joined Zurich’s ZSC
Lions, a Swiss league team that he would lead with 24 goals.
He spent his 19th birthday in Toronto at the ’16 World Cup,
where he was the youngest player on the 23-and-under Team
North America, but sparkled nonetheless. In between he paced
Team USA with nine points at the world championships in
Sochi, Russia. Twelve months, three teams, three countries.
“Just crazy,” Matthews says. “I needed to wind down.”

Born near San Francisco and raised in Scottsdale, Ariz., Matthews might be the most
famous face in Canada’s largest market. He at once represents 21st century
Sun Belt expansion and the future of an Original Six franchise.

If only he had the time. After worlds, Matthews became That might be the only thing Matthews can-
the first American chosen No. 1 overall in the NHL draft not achieve. His record-setting, four-goal NHL
S T E V E RUSSEL L / T O R O N TO S TA R /G E T T Y IM AG E S

since Patrick Kane in 2007, and the Maple Leafs’ first No. 1
selection since Wendel Clark in 1985. He was the first top
pick from the Sun Belt and the first of Hispanic descent—his
mother, Ema, was born in Mexico. He realized his life had
changed when he went apartment hunting in Toronto and was
stopped by fans three times on a one-block stretch between a
restaurant and a hotel. “I don’t do too much walking around
[anymore],” he says. “When I do, I try to keep a low profile.”
debut last Oct. 12 inspired a rap song—Auston
Matthews/Auston Matthews/Hit ’em with the four
like Auston Matthews. He broke team rookie marks
for goals (40) and points (69), earned 164 of 167
first-place Calder Trophy votes and led the Leafs
from last place in 2015–16 into the playoffs. Even
his new tattoo fueled offseason chatter in the city
for days. (“Took my family crest and made it more

40 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED OCTOBER 9, 2017

realistic,” Matthews explains of the crowned lion
that sheaths his right shoulder.) “Obviously,” says
Toronto native Zach Hyman, Matthews’s usual
left winger, “everybody in the city loves him.”
As the NHL enters its 101st season and Matthews
his second, youth is blooming all across the league.
Oilers center Connor McDavid claimed his team’s
captaincy and the Hart Trophy even if he still can’t
legally drink on road trips to the U.S. Nineteen-
year-old Winnipeg winger Patrik Laine, the No. 2
pick in ’16, is clubbing stentorian slap shots with the
flare of Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin. In Toronto,
Matthews’s arrival was preceded by sprightly first-
rounders William Nylander (’14) and Mitch Marner
(’15); all three notched 60 points as rookies last sea-
son, only the second time that’s ever happened. (Peter
Rockin’ Auston Stastny, Anton Stastny and Dale Hunter
Matthews led of the 1980–81 Quebec Nordiques were
Toronto in playoff the first.) Yes, 30-year-old Sidney Crosby
scoring with four goals, and Pittsburgh, with consecutive Stanley
including one late in the
Cups, are still seated on the throne, but
first period of Game 3
against the Caps. the kids are storming the castle gates.
Even among his peers, though, Mat-
thews stands out. He is 6' 3" and 216
pounds with steal-your-breath skills,
“a big guy with small-guy hands,” says Clark. He was born
near San Francisco and raised in Scottsdale, and now might
be the most famous face in Canada’s largest market. He at
once represents the grassroots success of 21st century Sun
Belt expansion and the future of a billion-dollar Original Six
franchise that hasn’t won a championship since 1967.
He is the bridge between True North and Southwest.
OCTOBER 9, 2017 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 41
 NHL Preview

HOW
THEY’LL Perennial powerhouses, including Pittsburgh and Chicago, remain contenders,
FINISH but the finals will feature two teams that have never lifted the Cup

Washington Edmonton
Washington Chicago Chicago
N.Y. Rangers

Washington Anaheim

Pittsburgh Anaheim
Columbus Anaheim
Columbus San Jose
WASHINGTON
defeats
Tampa Bay MINNESOTA Minnesota
Ottawa Tampa Bay Minnesota
St. Louis

Toronto Minnesota
Toronto Nashville
Toronto Nashville
Montreal Dallas

CAN’T FORGET IT,” Erik Karlsson says, “because it’s

Toronto defenseman Connor Carrick says. But as GIFs
I on every goddam ad for anything in Canada.” The
pulsed across the hockey world, Matthews stewed. It
ubiquitous scene that Ottawa’s star defenseman—
had been his assignment that night—Senators forward
perhaps the best in the world—is referring to occurred late in
Kyle Turris—who struck the game-winner in overtime.
the first period of the season opener on Oct. 12, 2016. With the
When Brian met his son after the game, he recalls,
Maple Leafs trailing 2–1, Matthews—who had scored the first
“the first words out of Auston’s mouth were, ‘I kind
goal—gained possession at the offensive blue line. Over the
of blew it there and let my man get free.’”
next 10 seconds, he stickhandled through the legs of two Sena-
Auston was raised to be an honest self-eval-
tors skaters; nudged the puck along the left wall toward Karls-
uator. After youth games Brian would ask his
son; shrugged off pressure from behind; surprised the two-time
son to list three areas that needed improvement,
Norris Trophy winner with a swift stick-lift; regained posses-
followed by three that he had done well—in that
sion; and beat goalie Craig Anderson from below the face-off
order. By age 10, Auston was studying VHS tapes
circle. “Going to have to give him that one,” Karlsson says. “I
that Brian had filmed from the stands and calling
didn’t think he was going to get around like that.” his power skating coach, Boris Dorozhenko, for
The hat trick arrived less than 90 seconds into the second
evaluations. “Uncle Boris,” Auston would say,
period, and by the end of two, Matthews had hit ’em with the four.
“tell me what I did wrong and what I did right.”
“You just knew you were watching a kid come out and arrive,”
Growing up, Matthews would spend hours at
DAV ID E . K LU T H O (S TA N L E Y C U P)

Phoenix’s Ozzie Ice study-

ing older and bigger players,
After watching highlights of Kane or Datsyuk, Auston would grab learning to navigate around
them in three-on-three tour-
“He’s always thinking,
his Rollerblades and dash into the street. naments. Brian would show
‘Can I add that to my repertoire?’ ” his father says. him videos of Michael Jordan

42 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED OCTOBER 9, 2017

 R NI N G
BU

pulling up from the free throw line to help his son QU

ES T ION
understand the power of a quick catch-and-shoot
motion. After watching YouTube highlights of the
Blackhawks’ Kane or former Red Wings star Pavel WHO CAN
AN
AN
Datsyuk, Auston would grab his Rollerblades, dash
into the street and drill the same moves until dark.
END THE
E
“He’s always talking, always thinking, ‘Can I add PENGUINS’
IN
INS’
INS
NS’
S’’
that to my repertoire?’ ” Brian says.
W hich is why Mat t hews began training
REIGN?
with Darryl Belfry, a skills coach and player- THE CAPITALS ha have
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on back-to-back
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s’
development consultant for Toronto, last summer. Trophies, re-signed 50-point scorers T.J. Oshie and
Together they mixed a sort of greatest hits album EVGENY KUZNETSOV long-term, and have a Vezina-
of hockey’s best skills—his puck protection tactics caliber workhorse in Braden Holtby. Add in Alex
below the goal line draw from the Islanders’ John Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom, still in their primes,
Tavares, for instance, and his tight turns from and coach Barry Trotz’s ability to develop blueliners,
Colorado’s Matt Duchene. and Washington, SI’s pick to win the Stanley Cup, is
But mostly, Matthews says, “all I did was work due to break through. In the West, don’t discount
on my shot.” This meant rebuilding his basic Dallas. Adding Martin Hanzal, who scored a career-high
mechanics and teaching his feet to operate in- 20 goals last year, gives the Stars the league’s best
dependently of his upper body. The results were depth at center, and with the reliable Ben Bishop now
undeniable: Forty goals, including a league-high in net, they are a more complete squad. —Jeremy Fuchs
32 at even strength, a smorgasbord of redirections,
wristers, mopped rebounds and dropped jaws.
“Some people have hammer and nails, and they
can’t do anything,” Dorozhenko says. “Some people
have a full box of tools, and they can build a house.”
When Matthews and Belfry reconvened in July,
they sought to borrow from a familiar source. Dur-
ing his 21-year playing career, Leafs president R NI N G
BU
Brendan Shanahan developed a two-touch move
that tapped passes into his sweet spot, letting him
swiftly shoot without having to settle the puck, like QU
ES T ION
a volleyball player setting and spiking by herself.
“That is unbelievable,” Matthews said after trying it
once, and every subsequent session included at least WHO IS
R O B C A RR /G E T T Y IM AG E S (K UZNE T S OV ); J O N AT H A N KOZU B/ NHL I /G E T T Y IM AG E S (B O E SER)

five minutes of practicing Shanahan’s technique.

The move had been revived once last season, by
Shanahan himself, wearing his old Red Wings num-
ber 14 and facing his employer, the Leafs—at the out-
door Centennial Classic alumni game on New Year’s
Eve in Toronto. The Hall of Famer’s more impressive
revival, however, has been turning the Maple Leafs
into a playoff team in just three years. But not even
the architect of Toronto’s so-called Shana-plan could
have predicted Matthews’s instant success.
With less than two minutes left in overtime of
the Centennial Classic on Jan. 1, Matthews loft-
ed a no-look backhanded shot over Red Wings
goalie Jared Coreau’s glove for the win. Defense-
man Morgan Rielly ran into the boss later that
night. “That’s just storybook,” Shanahan said.
THE NEXT
BREAKOUT
STAR?
NO ROOKIE will dominate the way Auston Matthews
did last year, but a few could make significant
impacts. After leaving North Dakota last spring,
right wing BROCK BOESER scored four goals in
a nine-game stint with the rebuilding Canucks.
Center Joel Eriksson Ek, who played most of last
season in his native Sweden, showed promise with
seven points in 15 games with the Wild. And Charlie
McAvoy went straight from Boston University to the
playoffs, scoring three points in six games with the
Bruins while eating minutes on the blue line. —J.F.
 NHL Preview

CROSS THE street from the Maple Leafs’ home at

A Air Canada Centre, Wendel Clark dishes wisdom
between bites of a cheeseburger and fries. He is
almost 51 years old now, between Shanahan, 48, and head
coach Mike Babcock, 54. Officially, Clark works in the front
office as a community ambassador; he spent the 2016 draft
with season-ticket holders at a Toronto sports bar and says
everyone roared when the pick was announced. Unofficially,
he’s the only person alive—or dead, for that matter—who
can relate to Matthews’s experiences. “I’m sitting there going,
‘Yep, seen that, done that, been there,’ ” Clark says. “And
he’s handled everything with flying colors.”
Like his predecessor at No. 1 overall, Matthews joined a
young, last-place team and promptly reached the playoffs;
Washington eliminated the Leafs in six games last April,
but he finished the first round with four goals. (Capitals
netminder Braden Holtby was particularly impressed by
the third, a rebound elevated from inside the blue paint:
“So quick. Ninety-nine percent of the time, someone buries
that into my pad.”) Concerning what comes next for Mat-
thews, Clark has a theory. “You don’t learn the personality Quad Goals and Marner entering A ir
of players Year One,” he says. “You learn the skill level, how Two periods into his Canada Centre last winter
good they are as hockey players. Years two, three, four, you NHL career, Matthews in a peacoat-fedora combo
start learning the person.” had already scored that made them look like
four times—an
The most educational moments from his rookie season baby-faced mobsters. And

A N D RE RIN G U E T T E / N H L I /G E T T Y I M AG E S (L E A F S); F L O RI A N
unsustainable pace
came during its lowest points—which, it should be noted, re- even for a No. 1 pick. while Babcock conferred
main higher than they are for most rookies. When Matthews with officials during a game
went goalless for 13 games between Oct. 27 and Nov. 22, it was against Vancouver last No-

the longest scoring drought of his life. His mind flashed to
some advice he overheard Oilers winger Patrick Maroon give
a teammate at the 2016 world championships. “You’re living
the dream,” Matthews told himself. “It sucks going through
slumps like that, but you’ve got to have fun and enjoy it.”
If he ever felt shy about showing his personality in
Toronto few probably noticed. Cameras caught him
P O H L /C I T Y- P RE SS /G E T T Y IM AG E S (L I T T L E)
vember, the pair passed the
time by singing Bon Jovi with the home crowd.
Now, for the first time in years, Toronto isn’t liv-
ing on prayers. Signing veterans Patrick Marleau
and Ron Hainsey signaled Toronto’s intention
to contend in a muddled Eastern Conference,
but these Leafs are still growing. They lost nine

WITH
W
WI I NHL players prohibited from playing in
R NI N G
BU Pye
Py e
PyeongChang, South Korea, Team USA will have to rely
onn a bunch of relative no-names. But those expecting a
Mir
Mi r
Miracle on Ice sequel will be disappointed. Among the few
QU
ES T ION hig
hiig
high-scoring Americans playing abroad are BROC LITTLE,
a fo
former Yale winger who finished second in points in the
WHAT WILLLL
LL Sw
Swedish Elite League last season, and defenseman and
for
fo
or
former Hobey Baker winner Matt Gilroy, who had 38 points
TEAM USA A LOOK
LLO
LOO
OOK
OK
K in tthe KHL. The next potential Jim Craig? Check in on the
LIKE AT THE
HE
HE net
ne
nets
BC
t in Boston, where the goalies at BU (Jake Oettinger),
C (Joseph Woll) and Harvard (Merrick Madsen) will be
OLYMPICS?S?
S? str
sttr
strong Olympic team candidates. —J.F.
 In Year Two, Matthews will inherit more responsibility
in the locker room (the Leafs won’t name a captain this
season, but he’s the obvious choice when they do); in the
media (Matthews was among those unafraid to voice his
opinion about recent protests, saying that kneeling during
the national anthem was “a dishonor” to soldiers); and of
course on the ice (he began 63.1% of his five-on-five shifts
in the offensive zone, a team-high).
“I think I could be . . . ” he says, pausing as he searches
for the right word, “assertive. Demand the puck a little
more, hang onto it and make plays, trust in my skills.”
At the same time Matthews is already making his influ-
ence felt throughout the game, in more than one coun-
try. Last season he cracked the top 10 in jersey sales; by
comparison, former Leafs winger Phil Kessel topped out
at No. 17 in 2013. Back home in Arizona, a young mother
is buying her son’s first hockey stick, when a stranger
remarks, “Take a photo with that. He might be the next
Auston Matthews.”

Upon his arrival, Babcock warned that pain was coming. It doesn’t seem so
bad now. “The light [at the end of the tunnel] has approached pretty fast,” Rielly says.
“It’s great to know you’re on the brink of being a team you want to be.”

overtime games after taking leads into the third Even further south, he’s gaining admirers. Not long ago
period, and nine players made their playoff debuts Dorozhenko received a package from a friend in Mexico
H A RRY H OW/G E T T Y IM AG E S (M C DAV ID)

against Washington last April. Upon his arrival in
May 2015, Babcock warned that pain was coming.
But it doesn’t seem so bad now.
“The light [at the end of the tunnel] has ap-
proached pretty fast,” Rielly says. “It’s great to
know you’re on the brink of being a team you
want to be.”
City, where he coached before moving to Arizona. It con-
tained a custom Mexican national team jersey, red with
green and white stripes, and matthews written on the
back. Included was a note for the first NHL star for all
of North America:
¡Estamos muy orgullosos de ti! (We are so proud of you!)
Follow me on Twitter. ±

AY YEAR
YEA
YE EAARR AFTER
A
AF F the seven Canadian teams were shut out of the
R NI N G
BU post
po
post sts
stse
tse
seas
s eas
postseason, aso
so five made it last spring. So which one has the best
chan
ch ance
an
chance ncee to
to win the country’s first Cup since Montreal in 1993?
Afte
Aff ter
te
After er ma
m
mak k
making it to the second round last spring, Edmonton
QU
ES T ION willll b
wi
w be
e even
eve
evve better as CONNOR MCDAVID enters Year 3.
Calg
Ca lgar
lgar
Calgary aryy bo
b
bolstered a stellar defense with Travis Hamonic, and
WILL CANADA’S
DA’S
DA’S
DA S Mik
Mike
Mi
M ke S
ke
Torro
Toro
To
T
Sm
Smith
ronto
ront
nto To mentor their exceptional youngsters, the Leafs
Toronto.
m brings stability in net. But the best candidate is

24-YEAR add
adde
ad
a dde
ded defenseman Ron Hainsey, 36, and forwards Patrick
ded
added
DROUGHT END?
ND?
ND
ND?? Marrl
Marl
Ma
M r ea
rle
rlea
e 38, and Dominic Moore, 37. Each has played in a
Marleau,
Cup finals
Cup ffii within the last five years. —J.F.

OCTOBER 9, 2017 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 45

5
 Memories are made in the wins, the losses, the postgame parties. BUT D
EXPERIENCE LIES IN BONDS BUILT, RELATIONSHIPS REVIVED AND IN A COMMU

A TOWN, A TE
AND FOOTBALL

KIDS IN
THE ’HALL
The author (15) led
the ’73 Maroons
to a perfect 8–0,
back in a time
when there was no
postseason.

46 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017

ECADES AFTER THE GAMES END, THE MEANING OF A HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS
NITY WHERE everything and nothing has changed

EAM By TIM LAYDEN

Photograph courtesy of A man H A S C OME HOME to learn about football. He

RAY GREENWOOD
stands on a sideline, watching high school boys
play a game in the bright sunshine of a Saturday
afternoon in the part of upstate New York that
is closer to Canada than it is to New York City,
so close to Vermont that you can walk there. It
has been almost five decades since the Man was
last on this field, yet it seems little has changed.
The smell of cut grass mixing with sweat. The
competing sounds of referees’ whistles, adoles-
cent cheerleader chants and angry rebukes from
beyond the fence line. Pads flapping as players run
past. A distant, creeping sensation of fear. The
Man has witnessed hundreds of practices and
games, yet in this place the familiar becomes poi-
gnant. Because there is something about football.
He last stood on this sideline on the first Sat-
urday in November 1973. His team, Whitehall,
defeated Granville, a longtime rival, 11–0 that
day, completing an unbeaten eight-game cam-
paign that was saved from a postseason blemish
because there was no postseason. Memories are
sparse and hazy. It was cold and very windy.
The Man played quarterback and kicked a very
short field goal. There was a party that night,
but he was an altar boy and had to serve the
Saturday-night vigil mass, unbeaten season or
not—that part the Man remembers vividly. The
rest is mostly lost to the fog of time.
All these years later, there is so much uncer-
tainty about football. It is demonstrably unsafe
at its highest level and very much in some sort
of crisis down to its roots. Professional players
are retiring in their 20s. Parents are debating
whether to expose their children to the sport’s
risks. Participation is down, but not everywhere.
The politics of America in 2017 have driven a
wedge into the game. The sport remains our
televised and wagered-upon passion, yet a steady
erosion of trust suggests that in the future, the
game will look very different. Maybe that future is
10 years away. Maybe 50. But change is in the air.
The Man’s experience was hardly different from
that of tens of thousands of others, years older
and years younger. Only the biggest, fastest and
 WHITEHALL HIGH
strongest will play college ball, and a smaller subset of genetic outliers will
play in Division I. Far fewer still will reach the NFL. The vast majority of
former football players are those who competed on their high school teams,
and this is the way in which participation becomes a kind of connective
tissue across the decades. The game they played is scarcely related to the
game they watch on TV now, yet this thinly shared experience makes
them a critical part of the sport’s fan base and its institutional memory.
There were nine senior starters on the Man’s last high school team,
back in 1973. None of them were great players, but they were the best in
one very small town that cared as deeply about the sport as just about
anyplace in Pennsylvania or Texas or Florida. In all of those 44 years the
Man had barely spoken to any of them, but he will seek them out now
and ask about football and life. He will try to understand not only what
keeps the game alive, but what might be lost if football is someday gone,
especially in hundreds of small towns across America. Towns like theirs.
TRY TO UNDERSTAND NOT ONLY WHAT KEEPS THE GAME ALIVE, but what mi
He finds one—and only one—classmate still living in Whitehall. Four
others live in upstate New York, within 90 minutes of their childhood
homes. One lives in Arkansas, another in California and another in
Pennsylvania. The eight of them have a total of nine children (just one
boy) and nine grandchildren. Three have had heart surgeries, one has
had both knees replaced. Two served in the military. Four have earned
college degrees. One is retired, another semiretired. Some have lived
tougher lives than others. One overcame a cocaine addiction that nearly
killed him. All of them pay attention to football, but only a couple are
fanatical about it. They all have memories about the sport they hold close.
First, though, some history.
T
H E V I L L A G E OF W HI T E H A L L , settled in 1759 by British army captain
Philip Skene and initially called Skenesborough, lies 250 miles north
of New York City in a narrow valley between small ranges of the
Adirondack Mountains to the west and the Green Mountains to the
east. Of greater historical significance, it’s also at the northern terminus
of the Champlain Canal, a 60-mile waterway that connects the Hudson
River to the southern end of Lake Champlain. The setting is idyllic, al-
though the village hasn’t been described in such terms for a long time.
A child growing up in Whitehall would learn (and any traveler passing
through on the way to Canada or slicing across into Vermont would read,
on a sign or in a museum) that Whitehall calls itself “the birthplace of the
U.S. Navy.” That assertion is befuddling to many because 1) landlocked
Whitehall is hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean and 2) Philadelphia,
Providence and the Massachusetts towns of Marblehead and Beverly have
made the same claim. What is not in dispute is that in the summer of 1776,
after Skenesborough was captured by American forces, a fleet of ships
assembled in the town’s harbor, sailed north under Benedict Arnold and
engaged the British in the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain,
among the earliest actions by any American maritime force. (The Navy
chooses to punt on this issue, stating, “Perhaps it would be historically
accurate to say that America’s Navy had many ‘birthplaces.’ ”)
Whitehall thrived in the 19th century and through much of the 20th,
48 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017
first with shipbuilding and then with mills along
the canal and as a key railroad center between
New York and Canada. The town still has a
monument to its veterans in a canalside park
downtown. Dozens of boys who came of age in
Whitehall in the 1960s were drafted or enlisted
to serve in Vietnam. Several were killed in ac-
tion, including the 20-year-old son of a deco-
rated World War II veteran. But the teenagers
who would play football in the ’70s were largely
spared Vietnam and the roiling national unrest
that accompanied it. For them, Whitehall was a
nurturing small town, homogenous and blue-
collar, and in many ways still tethered to the
relative simplicity of post–World War II America.
HIGH TIMES
For a teenager in maroon-and-
white, football isn’t all that
different today from ’73 (in white).
The town’s population in those days hovered
around 4,000; graduating classes numbered
on either side of 100 students. The downtown
was vibrant, with one of every kind of store—
clothing, hardware, jewelry, pharmacy—plus four
grocers. In truth, though, Whitehall was already
slowly dying. The mills were gone by then, and
the railroad was on the way out. (Whitehall High
would change its nickname in 1986 from the
soulless Maroons to the organic Railroaders, a
logical shift that was actually decades too late.)
Construction of a major highway from Albany
to Montreal that was completed in the ’60s and
that bypassed Whitehall was proving a crushing
blow. The village’s population peaked at 5,258
in ’20 and had fallen to 3,764 by ’70.
But there was football. A young boy growing
up in Whitehall in the 1960s and ’70s would hear
endless stories of the town’s gridiron tradition.
He would hear about a legendary coach named
Ambrose (Gilly) Gilligan, who still lived in town
and by then was in his 70s and bald, but who
retained a palpable presence. Whitehall began
playing football in 1913; Gilly took over the pro-
gram in ’26 and peaked during a four-year run,
from ’38 through ’41, that included an unbeaten,
unscored-upon season in ’39. In November ’41,
Look magazine, a national photo-driven weekly

ght be lost if football is someday gone, ESPECIALLY IN SMALL TOWNS.
with immense influence, featured a five-page
spread on “the football-crazy town of White-
hall.” (That issue was published 19 days before
the attack on Pearl Harbor, and many of the boys
pictured would be in uniform within months.)
ERI C K W. R A S CO (2017 ); CO U R T E S Y O F R AY G REEN WO O D (19 7 3)
Whitehall’s performance waxed and waned
through the 1950s and ’60s, but a reputation
for toughness and a certain type of physical
abandon lingered. Even today’s coach, 45-year-
old Rich Gould, refers to his roster as having
“a few Whitehall-type players—tough kids.”
In 1966, Whitehall named 33-year-old John
Millett as its coach, and a year later 52-year-old
Gordon Foote joined as his top assistant. To-
gether they would be the twin beating hearts of
the program for two decades, memorable figures
in the lives and memories of the teenagers who
played for them. Both men were Whitehall natives.
Millett’s father had been on that first Whitehall
football team in ’13, and Millett himself was a
star Maroons running back in the late ’40s before
he did a hitch in the Marines. Foote had played
for Gilligan in the early ’30s and was a decorated
World War II vet—twice wounded, once in the
belly by machine gun fire.
They were a terrific match, both different and
alike. Millett was a tactician: His hybrid T-formation
offense, with its unbalanced line, terrorized foes
with power running and sprint-out passing. Foote
was a lover of poetry and opera who wore a small,
neat bow tie in the classroom—but he was all blood-
and-guts on the football field. More than one of his
old charges can remember hearing his baritone
instructing some downed player, “Get up! I’ll tell
you when you’re hurt!” Millett was a hunter, and
also a driver’s-ed teacher, and there’s an old story
that he would bring his deer rifle along on class rides
into the countryside, just in case he saw something
worth taking down. That story isn’t true, but it gets
to the heart of how he is remembered. Foote was a
professional rattlesnake hunter. “After World War II,
he rarely found anything that could match the
adrenaline of that experience,” says his daughter,
Sally Douglas. “Until he started hunting snakes.”
Together Millett and Foote restored legitimacy
to a program that had enjoyed just two winning
seasons in a decade. Kids in town began flocking
to games again; high school players were heroes
as much as were NFL players. (One of their first
stars was Al Fredette, Jimmer’s dad.) In the coaches’
fourth season together, in 1970, Whitehall went 8–0 and defeated Granville,
which also was unbeaten, 32–7 in the final game of the year. Newspapers
reported that 5,000-plus people attended that game, more than the popu-
lation of either town. (In legend, attendance has risen beyond 10,000.)
The Man and his buddies were freshmen that fall. One of them played
a few snaps against Granville. The others waited for a chance to play in
such a game, someday, wearing maroon-and-white.
T
H E M A N ’ S MO T HER, gone three years now, kept a scrapbook. When
the Man and his brother and sister eventually cleaned out the
family house, the book was sitting on a basement shelf, beaten but
readable. From that 1973 season it depicts eight games and eight
victories, only two of which were close. It was, in truth, a relatively easy
8–0. Whitehall scored 249 points, gave up only 91 and finished ranked
No. 2 among New York State’s small schools, a piece of suspicious vot-
 WHITEHALL HIGH
ing by sportswriters who couldn’t have had any idea how a team from
Whitehall might compare with a team from, say, Binghamton. Still, it
sounds very impressive. (One year later, New York would commence the
beginnings of what has become a multiclass state tournament. Just one
other Whitehall team since, in ’77, has finished unbeaten.)
It is important here to put the institution of football into histori-
cal perspective. In 1973 the game was unambiguously celebrated.
Monday Night Football had launched in ’70 and was a national phe-
nomenon. The Dolphins went unbeaten in ’72, and O.J. Simpson ran
for 2,000 yards in ’73. There was John Madden, coach of the Raiders,
but there was no Madden; fantasy football was still in its infancy.
There was little discussion of player safety. At all levels, concussions
“THAT TEAM WAS SO MUCH FUN,” SAYS SHOVAH. “NO DISTRACTIONS, NO PHON
were something to be shaken off; players took pride in the war marks
on their helmets. It was in his seminal 1927 book, Football for Coaches
and Players, that Pop Warner wrote, “Football requires and develops
courage, co-operation, loyalty, obedience and self-sacrifice. It develops
cool-headedness under stress; it promotes clean living and habits.” This
kind of thinking had changed little in four decades.
This is the world in which nine seniors played for Whitehall
in the fall of 1973. They remember little of scores, statistics or
rankings. (They all, however, remember the score of the Granville
game.) They remember friendships and family. And moments. Nine
seniors, old men now, football far in their past, mortality a daily
presence. Nine men, nine stories.
MARTY GORDON A 5' 7", 215-pound running back and linebacker,
Marty was thick and strong, with curly red hair and shockingly quick
feet, a grown man at 14 and a nightmare for undersized, small-town
defensive backs. He was the only member of the 1973 team to play all
four years on the varsity, and he was one of eight children who lived in
a small two-bedroom house next to a bridge over the canal. His father
worked a grueling job in the boiler room at a folding-furniture factory
in Granville; his mother made dinners for the team.
AFTER WHITEHALL: “I was not prepared to play college football,” says Gordon,
62, who spent one year on the freshman team at Norwich (Vt.) Univer-
sity. “It was a big step up, and I was not ready.” He stayed at Norwich,
graduated with a degree in physical education and then did 20 years in
the U.S. Army, retiring early as a major following the first gulf war. He
has manned the pro desk at a Queensbury, N.Y., Home Depot, working
with contractors, for the last 14 years.
Gordon: “The whole town was behind us, and I needed all the recognition
and support I could get. I wasn’t book smart and I didn’t study. It was nice
to win, but we were tight, I remember that. You [the Man] and I didn’t hang
out in school, but we were brothers on the field. That team concept helped
me in the military. . . . In school they taught us to tackle by aiming with the
crown of the helmet; that doesn’t happen now. . . . Hey, you remember that
swing pass we had? I had such a hard time catching that thing—couldn’t
get my head around. But then you threw it to me in Corinth [Week 6, a
night game], and it went for a touchdown. That was fun.”
50 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017
BILL GRECO The best athlete and football
player on the team—a 6' 3", 225-pound running
back and linebacker—he was also an excellent
basketball player and state-level discus thrower.
As so often happens with the best players, Bill
was selfless but also demanding of his team-
mates. His father, a tall, serious man, was one
of the many Whitehall dads who worked as cor-
rections officers at Great Meadow Correctional
Facility, the cheerily named maximum security
prison seven miles away in Comstock, N.Y. Great
Meadow harbored serious, violent offenders.
The men who worked there had an edge to them
24/7, as if it was difficult to leave work behind.
AFTER WHITEHALL: Recruited to D-III Union College in
Schenectady, N.Y., Greco started at tight end his
freshman year, then quit altogether. “I was drink-
ing heavily and I almost flunked out,” he says.
“So I quit and went to the library, and my grades
went up. It was probably more the drinking than
the football, honestly.” Greco, now 61, graduated
with a computer science degree and has spent
his career working as an IT specialist. In 2013
he experienced severe chest pains on a morning
walk and thought to himself, Maybe this is it.
Quadruple-bypass surgery has kept him going.
Greco: “Football was the sport that taught me to be
W HI T EH A L L HI G H S C H O O L
a we person more than an I person. That’s been
helpful in building teams professionally. I wish I’d
stayed with the game in college; I quit too early
and I missed out on having those friendships like
 I had in high school. . . . All the talk about con-
cussions now—I got one in the Cambridge game
[Week 2]. You had to call a timeout and walk me
over to the sideline. I didn’t know where I was.”
RAY GREENWOOD A 5' 10", 170-pound
tight end and linebacker—one of two boys who
shuffled calls in from the sideline—Ray played
with one bad wheel, the result of knee cartilage
torn as a sophomore plus the primitive clean-out
surgery that followed. (He broke his left arm on
the same play, which cannot have happened often.)
ES OR VIDEO GAMES. It was just football, and we were serious about it.”
AFTER WHITEHALL: Greenwood, too, graduated from
Union College with a computer science degree,
and worked 20 years for a Minneapolis tech outfit
before following his wife to Australia, and then
to California, where he worked in disaster relief
with the Red Cross, including during Hurricane
Katrina. At 60 he’s a consultant in emergency
management. He has had both knees replaced
and underwent a mitral-valve repair on his heart.
Greenwood: “Football’s not a defining thing in
my life, but the team concept has carried over
into other things. [At Whitehall] we had kids
who wanted to go to good colleges and kids who
wanted to be prison guards or farmers—but we
got along. . . . Do you remember the Queensbury
game [Week 7]? You threw me a touchdown pass.
It was the only one I ever caught. I was completely
wide open and all I could think was, I’m going to
drop this.” (Greco: “He juggled it a few times.”)
JIM MCKEE The team was relatively short on nicknames, but Jim,
a defensive tackle, was known almost since birth as Moose, and that
stuck despite his being only 6 feet, 165 pounds. In pictures he looks half
a decade older than the rest of the team: full black beard, hair to his
shoulders. He was one of eight kids—“Back then if you didn’t have at
least four or five, you weren’t trying, right?”—and his father, a Whitehall
native, was also a corrections officer.
AFTER WHITEHALL: Hired to work on the railroad at 19, he learned welding
from an older guy and spent 30 years helping secure track from Albany
to Montreal. (“Continuous welds,” he says. “You ride that train, you won’t
hear that clack-clack-clack because the welds are so good.”) McKee retired
at 50 and today, at 61, is the only one of the nine seniors from 1973 who
still lives in Whitehall, in a house on Third Avenue. His grandson Daw-
son Procella is a senior on this year’s Railroaders, a lanky, 6' 3" receiver.
McKee: “Football was a big deal back then in Whitehall. . . . Billy Greco
and Marty Gordon were the linebackers,
and they were way bigger than I was. They
hit me harder than most of the guys on
WHITEHALL the other teams.”
MAROONS, 1973
87 Marc Nichols MARC NICHOLS The Man threw a
15 Tim Layden few dozen touchdown passes in four years
85 Jim McKee of football, and Marc caught the majority
66 Steve Toben of them. He was 6' 2", 165 pounds and ran
18 Marty Gordon with a loping stride that looked slow but
35 Bill Greco wasn’t. Of all the seniors, he was the only
59 Tim Nichols one named to any kind of all-star team,
42 Ray Greenwood a very big deal in those days. Marc’s dad
19 Bob Shovah
had died three days before his 12th birth-
day, taken by a cerebral hemorrhage while
working on the railroad in the Adirondacks.
AFTER WHITEHALL: Nichols, 62, is retired following two careers with the
New York Department of Corrections, first as a corrections officer and
later as a counselor. In between, in his mid-30s, he fought a cocaine addic-
tion. “I almost destroyed my life,” he says. “I was one day away from the
streets when I sought help. God gave me another chance.” He married at
51 and in 2012 moved to a retirement community in Arkansas. He’s a rabid
Alabama football fan and makes at least one trip every year to Tuscaloosa.
Nichols: “One game you threw me a pass, and it was cold and it skipped
off my fingers and it really hurt. I ran off the field yelling for the coaches
to put somebody else in, and Coach Foote shoved me right back out
there. . . . I wish my father could have seen me play. My mom and my
sisters were there for every game—but, you know, it’s your dad. . . .”
TIM NICHOLS The other tight end/linebacker who shared time and
play-messengering duties with Ray Greenwood, Tim (Marc’s cousin) was
skinny as a dry reed at 6 feet, 146 pounds, but he was a vicious tackler.
His father, a Whitehall native, worked in a nearby chemical plant and
was chief of the local volunteer fire department.
 WHITEHALL HIGH
AFTER WHITEHALL: Nichols served 17 years in the Air Force, then worked
six as a commercial airline mechanic and 18 as a conductor for the
Canadian-Pacific Railroad in upstate New York. At 62 he’s married
with a daughter who just started college.
Nichols: “I loved the game. I loved the hitting. I don’t remember
being told to lead with the head. They told us to tuck the head in,
I think. . . . In the Granville game, Billy Greco and I hit a guy and
cracked a vertebrae in his back. . . . I follow the Giants now. I still
love football. I really love it.”
BOB SHOVAH Every high school team needs a fast running back.
Bob was that guy: 5' 9", 174 pounds, with open-field speed. (He was
also a defensive back and left-footed punter.) Taken in at birth by an
aunt and uncle, his adopted father died when Bob was a Whitehall
“FOR MANY YEARS, IT WAS A FAMILY THING,” SAYS PRENEVOST. “Your grandf
freshman. The day before graduation, he delivered an invitation to
his birth father. Did he attend? “Nope.” Bob still hasn’t seen him.
AFTER WHITEHALL: Married 36 years now, with three children and four
grandchildren, Shovah worked in the paper mills for nearly two de-
cades, ran a girls’ softball league in nearby Fort Edward for 14 years
and today is a construction laborer. After having quintuple-bypass
surgery nine years ago, he says, at age 63, “I feel like a 35-year-old.
I’ve got no complaints, man.”
Shovah:“[That team] was so much fun. We had no distractions, no phones
or video games. It was just football, and we were serious about it. . . .
I remember the Fort Edward game our senior year [Week 5]. I ran a
sweep and raked my hand on a piece of glass on the field. I got back to
the huddle and somebody said, ‘You might want to get that looked at.’ I
looked down and there was blood all over my white pants. I went to the
hospital, missed the rest of the game. I’ve still got the scar.”
STEVE TOBEN A classic Whitehall lineman—5' 11", 147 pounds and
lots of fury—Steve was a fourth-generation Whitehall boy. His grand-
father Clayton grew up with Coach Foote, so Foote always addressed
Steve as “Clayt.” Steve’s dad was an electrical engineer for the railroad,
and he would sometimes take his son on the weekends to work, where
Steve would drive the locomotive a few miles down the track from the
big roundhouse in Whitehall. Steve raced snowmobiles in the winter.
AFTER WHITEHALL: Having graduated from Clarkson University (in Potsdam,
N.Y.) with an engineering degree, Toben has worked his adult life as an
engineer and manufacturing manager and now lives in northwest Mary-
land, where he has Ravens season tickets. (After the protests of Sept. 24 he
said he is considering getting rid of them.) His wife, a neuropsychologist,
has studied brain injuries in football players. “I love the NFL games,” he
says, “but you wonder sometimes how they survive those hits.”
Toben: “The St. Mary’s game—they’d beaten us as freshmen, and we
really wanted to win that game. They had a big running back, and I
remember hitting him all day, and it just beat the tar out of me. What a
long day. But we won. And then Granville. My dad wore a sport coat to
that game and met me in the end zone to shake my hand.”
52 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017
F
O R M E R F O O T B A L L P L AY E R S are relevant to
the ongoing popularity of their sport not
because they played well or because they
played poorly, but because they played at
all. The records show that in the fall of 1973,
I threw 13 touchdown passes and 10 intercep-
tions—hideous inefficiency. Years later I played
catch with Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers
for a story in Sports Illustrated. I prided
myself on throwing tight spirals and began up-
ping the intensity until Rivers returned fire with
such velocity that I tipped my head to the side
before catching each ball, fearing it might tear
through my hands and hit me in the face. There
DO THE TIME WARP
Better equipment, a better
sense of safety . . . fewer farms.
Otherwise, it’s still Whitehall.
is no physical correlation between them and us.
I was one of only four Whitehall seniors
who didn’t play on both offense and defense,
because my fragile 6-foot, 170-pound body,
better suited to basketball and middle-distance
running, was already breaking down at age 17.
(Still, I was stubborn enough to play a year on
the freshman team at D-III Williams College,
where my mediocrity was further exposed. I’ve
since had neck surgery and will soon be get-
ting a knee replaced; eventually, I’ll have the
other one done too.) But I’m much the same as
my old teammates: Random moments bubble
to the surface and bring a smile or a tear. The
experience is measured by those pearls more
than by achievements or plaudits.
In my junior year I was the backup quarter-
back, and in the second game of the season the
starter was having a rough day. I was inserted
to complete a basic sideline pattern. Nervous
to the point of blurred vision, I short-armed a
throw that was intercepted and run back nearly
for a touchdown, sealing our defeat that day and
ruining the seniors’ year before the leaves began
falling. I returned to the bench, and one of my
friends asked if I’d bet on our opponent—it sure
looked like it. I was crestfallen, but afterward
a senior teammate—the receiver for whom my
ill-fated pass had been intended—sat down next

ather and your father played here. NOW PEOPLE MOVE AWAY.”
to me in the locker room, put his hand on my
back and promised that things would get better.
It was my first real exposure to the meaning
of teammates. Things did get better. (The boy
who comforted me died in 2001; he was 46.)
Months later, in the summer before the 1973
season, seven of us seniors drove 90 minutes
south to Albany, where my uncle Joe operated
a sporting goods store. We all bought white
ERI C K W. R A S CO (2017 ); CO U R T E S Y O F R AY G REEN WO O D (19 7 3)
cleats that we’d reserve strictly for games—a
very bold fashion statement in that era. I was
proud to bring all my buddies and get them
outfitted. “White shoes,” Ray Greenwood says
today, laughing about the memory. “We must
have thought we were so cool.”
And the parents. They truly loved it all more
than we did, a phenomenon I wouldn’t under-
stand until my own two kids played sports or
took on other things at which they could publicly
succeed or fail. My father was a lawyer; he and his
brother handled real estate closings and wills for most of the families
in Whitehall, but they also built a successful practice representing
major corporations with factories or offices in the area. (We were
the wealthy ones in town, even if it wasn’t real wealth.) My dad
had served in the Navy in World War II and then played football
at Union College on the GI Bill. He was a New York Giants fan and
took me to several games in the old Yankee Stadium. He loved to
tell me how Y.A. Tittle would pull the ball out of his running back’s
belly on fourth-and-one and then throw deep to Del Shofner. Late
in my senior season I pulled the ball out of Marty Gordon’s belly,
without telling him or anybody else I was going to do it, and ran
alone for a touchdown under the dim lights at Corinth, our only
night game. My father loved that play, and I loved that he loved
it. It’s my favorite personal sports moment for that reason alone.
In 1991, long after I was gone, Whitehall canceled its football
season after just four games, beset by injuries and dwindling
numbers. By then my parents had moved to a home that overlooked
the football field from a distant hillside. In the evenings they
could see and hear practices. When that season was called off,
my mother sent me a note and a newspaper clipping with all the
details. “Hard to believe, Whitehall without football,” she wrote
in her pristine Catholic-school cursive. “I look out the kitchen
window, and, no practice. I miss seeing the kids down there.”
My mother died 23 years later; we had a viewing at a funeral
home near Albany. Before the prayer service the priest ap-
proached me, holding a missal against his chest, and asked,
“Did you play quarterback for Whitehall?” I was gobsmacked.
It turned out he’d been a linebacker for Cambridge; we played
each other four times. We shared a long handshake and a
short, quiet laugh, football memories providing a soothing moment
on a terrible night.
T
IME H A S BEEN HARD on the village. The population has fallen steadily
for nearly a century, down to 2,614 in the 2010 census and esti-
mated at slightly less than that today. The most recent high school
graduating class was just 52 students. (My class graduated 94.)
Unlike many communities in upstate New York and Vermont, Whitehall
failed to refashion itself as a tourist destination for skiers and foliage
watchers. It was left behind. Broadway and Williams Street, two of the
busiest thoroughfares, are now lined with a succession of dilapidated
houses, many of them former single-family residences carved up into
apartments and left to rot. The once quaint and vibrant downtown,
where my father kept his law office, has been gutted. Thirty percent of
the town’s residents now live below the poverty level, more than double
the national average of 14.9%. “It’s depressed,” says Jim McKee, the lone
senior to stick around Whitehall. “No other way to say it.”
There is, meanwhile, a new golf course and health club, and the canal-
side eatery that serves boats at the Lock 12 entry to Lake Champlain
is under new ownership. School officials say class-size numbers are
 WHITEHALL HIGH
stable into the lower grades, and 50-year-old Whitehall High (with an
addition in 2006) is pristine and appears much younger. Classrooms
have whiteboards, and every student has a laptop. So there is hope.
But it’s a long climb back.
Predictably, football—a sport of numbers—has been tossed about in
all of this demographic shifting. The Railroaders started this year’s fall
practice with 30 players in uniform, and that was the entire popula-
tion of the program, grades nine through 12. (The good news: They
began this summer with only 23 kids and slowly ticked upward.)
Whitehall now competes in the smallest classification against the
smallest schools. (Granville has held its population better, hence the
two teams did not meet for a decade; the rivalry was resumed just last
year.) But the problem is not just a shrinking population—it’s also a
changing population. Most of the fathers and mothers of the seniors
(and sophomores and juniors) on my high school team were born in
Whitehall. Most of their grandparents, too. “For many years, when you
played football at Whitehall, it was a family thing,” says 71-year-old
Bob Prenevost, who taught at Whitehall High for 25 years and coached
the football team from 2000 through ’07. “Your grandfather and your
father played here. Your uncle played here. Now people move away.”
It’s true. One of the best players on my
senior-year team was Mike Terry, a 6' 1",
180-pound sophomore lineman with a
mean streak. (“Whitehall football taught
me to be a man,” he says.) My father had
been a groomsman in Mike’s dad’s wed-
ding a quarter-century earlier. When Mike
graduated, he left Whitehall and moved to
Queensbury, a growing town 30 miles away,
a place with more industry and recreation,
within driving distance of state government
MY FATHER LOVED THAT PLAY, AND I LOVED THAT HE LOVED IT.
IT’S MY FAVORITE PERSONAL SPORTS MOMENT for that reason alone.
jobs in Albany. His two boys played football there, and the youngest,
Adam, grew to 6' 8", 330 pounds and played five years in the NFL. Al
and Kay Fredette moved to Glens Falls, where Jimmer was not only a
basketball star but also a wide receiver who was recruited by D-I schools.
Gould, Whitehall’s current coach, played for the Railroaders in the
late 1980s. “All the guys I played with left Whitehall,” he says. “There’s
nothing to keep a middle-class family in town. If I had it to do over
again, I might have left too.”
It’s not just about families and personnel. Two decades ago Whitehall
had at least two dozen working farms, and farm boys tend to be hellacious
football players. There are fewer farms now. Specialization, a nationwide
issue, can be deadly where numbers are critical. The quarterback Gould
planned to start this season—whom he groomed last year—decided instead
to concentrate on baseball alone. And, of course, there are concussion
fears. “I think we do a good job with player safety,” says Keith Redmond,
who played for Whitehall in the 1980s and now is the school’s athletic
director. “But if we lose one or two families, it’s disastrous.”
54 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / OCTOBER 9, 2017
Through all of this, somehow a tradition en-
dures and breathes some life into the village.
Whitehall has reached the sectional champion-
ship game three consecutive seasons and even
made the state quarterfinals in 2015. And a
connection remains. “We hear the stories, the
history,” says senior lineman Andrew Genier.
“The rivalry with Granville, the big crowds
and smashmouth football. That’s Whitehall.”
Phelony West, a senior defensive back and re-
ceiver, says he grew up dreaming of wearing
the maroon-and-white. Linebacker Brandon
Bolster, a four-year varsity player, goes further:
“You tell people around here you play football
for Whitehall, that means something,” he says.
“People—40, 50, 60 years old—tell you stories.
It’s not just the past. It’s the present.”
On the night of Friday, Sept. 22, there is a
milelong homecoming parade, starting at Putor-
ti’s convenience store on Broadway and ending
at the recreation center on Williams Street. Little
kids wearing maroon flag football jerseys reach
up to shake hands with varsity players riding
on a flatbed. “This is one place the community
comes together,” says 63-year-old Keith Whiting,
a good football player in the class before mine
who married his high school sweetheart and
who has spent his entire life in the village. The
parade ends with a giant bonfire, tall flames
licking the night sky as cheerleaders and football
players perform skits and dances. Allow yourself
a moment of reverie and it might be 1941 again,
with Look magazine taking pictures.
The next afternoon, under a blazing early-
autumn sun, unbeaten Whitehall is trounced
50–0 by defending state champion Cambridge,
a small-school powerhouse. Most of the several
hundred people who attended the parade and
bonfire are at the game, staying nearly to the
end. From the sideline of his distant youth the
Man thinks: It’s true that football will change,
and someday perhaps be gone altogether. Justifi-
ably so. Yet it is inescapable that here the game
stubbornly endures while the town around it
slowly dies. There is something about football.
T RI - CO U N T Y N E WS
On the field, young boys play as the warm
sun falls, racing toward another game on
another weekend. ±
Consistency
beats the
occasional
flash of
brilliance.

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 POINT AFTER

The Plight of
Puerto Rico
´ B Y J . J . B A RE A
( A S T OL D T O CHRIS B A L L A RD )

IT WAS LIKE a bomb had gone off. That’s the only On Sunday, four days after the
way I can describe it.
The Puerto Rico where I grew up was an island of beauty.
“I’d never storm, I finally heard from my parents,
who called from a neighbor’s house.
Clear, blue water; golden sand; always green. But when seen the They were a little shaken but O.K.
our flight touched down in San Juan on Sept. 26, I hardly country On Tuesday, at 5:30 a.m, we took off,
recognized my home. The sand was gone. The trees flattened. like this. carrying 32 generators, 14,000 pounds
The water an ugly brownish-green. While I saw of water, 10,000 pounds of food and
As Puerto Ricans, we grow up with hurricanes. Our houses
are made of concrete, even the roofs. When a storm comes, we
signs of U.S. 3,000 pounds of medical supplies. We
also brought diapers, pet food, clothing,
stock up on food and water, then board up the windows and assistance, cleaning supplies and one of life’s
hunker down. I still remember when Hurricane Georges hit in let me tell necessities: toilet paper. With me were
1998, when I was in ninth grade. I was with my parents and you: It isn’t my wife and 10 of my best friends from
my two brothers at our house in Mayagüez, 21⁄2 hours west of
San Juan. It was crazy. It felt as if the windows were going to fly
enough.” Dallas, almost all Puerto Ricans. That
way we’d have the manpower to unload
off our house. We lost power and water for three or four weeks. the plane ourselves if we needed to.
In times like that, you become best friends with your neighbors. We arrived, and I’d never seen the
Everyone pitches in, cleaning up and trying to get water, food country like this. San Juan was chaos. We
and ice. But last week was different. Even before Hurricane did our best to spread out the supplies.
Maria hit, I knew it would be disastrous. In Puerto Rico a little While I saw signs of U.S. assistance—
rainstorm could mean you lose electricity for 24 hours. the Army, a flight full of N.Y.C. fire-
I was in Dallas for the start of training camp with the department personnel—let me tell you: It
Mavericks when the Category 4 storm made landfall on isn’t enough. People won’t go back to work
Sept. 20. It was tough to be that far away, and I couldn’t reach for six months, maybe a year. Half the
anybody for days. Not my parents, not my friends. people don’t have clean water. Plenty don’t
I needed to do something. Mavs owner Mark Cuban had have homes. Sick people can’t get medical
texted me after the storm, asking about my family. Mark and I assistance. Crime is rising. One of my
have a great relationship. So I sent him a text: “Crazy idea here friends said every day is like a bad movie.
any way we can get a plane to take a lot of stuff to PR?” So here’s what I’d like to say to anyone
He responded right away: “I’ll check on the Mavs plane.” reading this story: Every little bit helps.
Thirty minutes later my phone beeped again. I couldn’t Any contacts you have. Any packages you
believe it: Mark had already contacted his aviation team. He can get to Puerto Rico right now. By mail.
What can you
said they could make a run as early as Monday. It’s hard for me By water or boat. It doesn’t matter. Donate
do to help
to express how grateful I was. money to one of the nonprofits working to
relief efforts
R O N A L D M A R T IN E Z /G E T T Y IM AG E S; DA N N Y B O L L IN G ER ( T O P RI G H T )

My wife, Viviana Ortiz, and I set to work right away. We provide aid. It’s all appreciated.
in Puerto Rico?
knew that food, water and basic supplies were the most Join the discussion Last Friday the plane went back. Same
important things, as well as electrical generators. We have an on Twitter by using flight plan, another load. I couldn’t go this
amazing community of Puerto Ricans and Latinos in Dallas, #SIPointAfter time—I can’t leave the team. But my wife
and following
and they were already gathering donations. We collected @jjbareapr and my friends went, because we can’t just
enough supplies to fill six or seven 18-wheelers. stand by. We need to lift each other up. ±

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