The Best American Sports Writing 2015 by Wright Thompson

Author:Wright Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In 1999, Baltimore rapper SisQó put out his first solo album, Release the Dragon. Its sales were moderate until January 2000, when the novelty single “Thong Song” was released. Propelled by its catchy, goofy refrain—“Let me see that thong!”—it shot up to number three on the Billboard charts. By that spring, it had reached terra firma of American mainstream tastes: the major league baseball clubhouse.

Under late manager Johnny Oates, the Texas Rangers of the era had a policy that children were welcomed in the clubhouse. The administration of that policy was hands-off: Oates trusted his players to sort out the particulars of etiquette. Until one day in April, when Royce Clayton, the team’s African American shortstop, was playing the song, and Curtis walked over to the stereo and turned it off. Clayton turned it back on; Curtis turned it back off. The two got in each other’s faces and nearly came to blows.

“This shit happens 20 times a year in a major league clubhouse,” Clayton told me recently. The difference this time, he said, was that reporters saw the confrontation and took an interest—and Curtis took an interest in explaining his side.

“He decided to keep talking about it,” Clayton said. “He decided to go to the media and self-promote about how good a Christian he is. And the media bought into it, and I knew why: it was because we’re in the Bible Belt, and here was a black dude he could go after, saying, ‘He was listening to profanity in front of kids.’”

The incident was one of many during a career in which Curtis was known more for his aggressive proselytizing and capacity for moral reprobation than anything he did on the field. In Texas, his teammates complained that he’d turn off Jerry Springer when they watched it in the clubhouse before games: “We’d be like, ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’ And he’d be like, ‘This isn’t good for you to watch,’” former teammate Frank Catalanotto said.

In New York, Curtis would throw away the porn some players kept stashed in the bathroom. When management suggested that Curtis keep an eye on second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who they feared was partying too hard, Curtis took the assignment to its mall-cop extreme, yelling and banging on Knoblauch’s hotel room door to make sure he was there. He clashed with Derek Jeter, chastising him in front of reporters for fraternizing with then-friend Alex Rodriguez during a bench-clearing brawl between the Yankees and Mariners, and offending him by persistently soliciting him to attend chapel after Jeter had already turned him down.

“Chad just couldn’t stay around any longer because that act gets tired,” one Yankees official told author Ian O’Connor. “Once he became comfortable here, he became a preacher, and it ran its course.”

For his part, Curtis told ESPN’s Outside the Lines, “If I have something that I believe is the truth and it’s necessary for other people to come to some type of a recognition or grip of that truth, then I want to share it.

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