Note: All quotations are either from original interviews or from deposition testimony in SoBe Entertainment International, LLC v. Paul Wight, Bess Wight and World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., an ongoing civil lawsuit in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

One day in late October 2007, professional wrestling superstar Paul “The Big Show” Wight found himself growing increasingly terrified by the second. There was nothing unusual about where he was: He was at home in Miami, sitting in his car in front of his house. The problem was that he was parked in the driver’s seat of his Hummer with the keys in the ignition and had no memory of driving there, much less ever stepping foot into his car. The last he remembered, he was at the gym in the middle of a workout.

How did he get home? Why couldn’t he remember? What the hell happened?

When seven-foot tall Wight walked out in front of the crowd at the Joe Louis Arena a dozen years earlier in 1995, almost to the day, it was the beginning of the rest of his life. Dressed like Andre the Giant and billed as his son, to that point he was the most impressive physical specimen in the history of professional wrestling. Stories from the gym had already become the stuff of legend, with fans and wrestlers alike speaking in hushed tones about this kid who was like a young Andre if Andre could do backflips off the top turnbuckle.

“They wanted to make me a player,” Wight later explained. “They said I was the son of Andre The Giant so I had a little bit of credibility with our fans going into it, which was always kind of a rough thing for me because you get some dedicated fans that were very rural that would [say], ‘Oh, I loved your dad,’ and I’m thinking, oh, my dad was an airplane mechanic, but, thanks. But I know who they’re talking about. They’re talking about Andre.”

For all intents and purposes, it was his first real match. He had technically made his debut 10 months earlier in a converted shopping center in Clementon, New Jersey, only to be quickly scooped up by Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) to hone his skills in their Atlanta training center. His lone match against Frank Finnegan at the Route 30 Market didn’t really count. After all, it couldn’t possibly prepare him for what WCW earmarked for his debut: A pay-per-view main event against Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea), who had taken the sizable youngster under his wing. And when the dust cleared that night in Detroit, Wight had defeated Hogan to become the heavyweight champion of the world. The win was designed to be controversial, part of a convoluted storyline that involved Monster Trucks, his “father’s” wardrobe from The Princess Bride, Hogan shoving Wight off the roof of Cobo Hall and a mummy named “The Yeti.”

It was obvious that the man best known these days as Big Show was going to be a big star for a long time. What had taken place was unprecedented. Winning the heavyweight championship of the world in his first real match? From the biggest star in the history of pro wrestling? Wight was made.

Twelve years later, on the fateful day in 2007 when Wight found himself in his Hummer in front of his home with no idea how he had gotten there, it all came full circle. As he tried and failed to rebuild his memories of the day, he eventually would come to realize that this could all be traced to a question that Hogan had asked him about a year earlier.

“Paul, have you ever boxed?”

Wight’s path to the ring can be traced back to when he was nine years old, when the symptoms of acromegaly first manifested. An excess of growth hormone caused by a tumor on the pituitary gland caused Wight to grow to 6’2 tall by the time he was 12 years old. He grew another six inches in the next two years, and by the time he was a college freshman playing basketball at Northern Oklahoma College, he stood 7’1 and had become a cartoonishly big eater: His metabolism was so accelerated that McDonald’s staffers were regularly wowed as Wight downed enough Big Macs and fries for five. Wight was officially diagnosed with acromegaly during his freshman year playing college ball, at which point he learned that he wasn’t “blessed” the way he thought he was. If he didn’t stop growing, he risked enlarged internal organs, spinal problems, diabetes and scads of other medical issues. Although surgery at age 19 stopped his unchecked growth, after transferring to Wichita State, injuries derailed his basketball career

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He floated around doing odd jobs, getting a few offers to box and having a brief flirtation with small-time pro wrestling before settling in Chicago. There, he worked as a phone bank employee by day and a karaoke host by night. The karaoke job led to a friendship with Partridge Family moppet-turned-morning-radio-host Danny Bonaduce, who enlisted him as his secret weapon in charity celebrity basketball games. “I got to meet Hulk Hogan. He took a liking to me, because of my size,” Wight recalled. “He saw that I was a good athlete and could move. He told me at the time, he says, ‘You got a big dollar sign in your forehead, kid,’ and I said, ‘Well, please show it to me, because I’m broke.’” After his debut he rapidly became a major star, a WCW main event mainstay during one of the company’s hottest growth periods. In 1999, he signed what was reported as a “10 year, $10 million” contract with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), WCW’s main competition.

Privately, Vince McMahon had constantly criticized WCW for not presenting Wight as a special attraction the way his father, Vincent James McMahon (a second generation promoter himself) had once used Andre the Giant. Yet when given the opportunity to do so himself, McMahon the younger proceeded to have the newly named “Big Show” lose to Stone Cold Steve Austin on national television in his first match with WWE. That set the tone for the rest of his career: Big Show was someone who could be plugged into main events, but was never made a true “special attraction” like Andre. Why McMahon went back on his plans for Wight have never been made clear. There was also another issue: Big Show’s weight kept yo-yoing, something usually chalked up to not cleaning up his eating habits after the tumor surgery.

By 2006, Big Show was in an odd place. From a skills perspective, he was the best he’d ever been, having evolved into a skilled and accomplished wrestler capable of telling compelling stories in the ring, and he was being properly presented as an unbeatable giant. Yet physically, he was a complete wreck. From 350 pounds at the time of his surgery, he had ballooned up to around 500 pounds, and years of wrestling had taken an increasingly heavy toll on his already overburdened frame. “So that was, what, 11 years straight, 290 days a year,” he later testified. “I just needed a break. I never got vacations. I mean, I would have two, three days off, and that was it. I wanted to step away and take a break and heal. My back was bad, I was smoking, I was taking pain killers, I was grossly overweight. I needed to get healthy.” His mother, Dorothy, shared his concerns, and around this time told The State newspaper in South Carolina that he also had an enlarged heart.

Bobby Lashley, one of Big Show’s regular opponents around that time — now a Bellator MMA fighter — recalls what kind of state the giant was in. “He says, ‘Sometimes my back goes out.’ [I said] ‘What happens when your back goes out?’ He says ‘I can’t feel my arms.’ [or] ‘I can’t feel my legs.’ Something like that. I was like ‘Oh … alright. That’s basically it. And I remember, I think it was sometime during the end of the match [on Dec. 4, 2006, in Charleston, South Carolina] where that happened.” As bad a problem as one half of the match going numb below the waist would be in and of itself, the planned ending to the match called for Lashley to hoist Show over his shoulder and slam him down on the mat, a move difficult enough to accomplish with Wight’s cooperation. When that time came, it was obvious to viewers at home that something was not quite right. “I picked him up for my finish, and hit him for my finish without any help [from him]. I had to lift his enormous body up and throw him down.” Wight was unable to provide any help at all.

The match marked Big Show’s last television appearance in his initial WWE contract, which would expire two months later. As much as he clearly needed to let his injuries heal, strengthen his body and get into shape, his finances were as unhealthy as his physical condition, including an IRS tax bill of $405,068.55 and a lien against his home. What few people knew, either watching at home or even within WWE, was that he had a backup plan in place, one that nobody could have expected.

In the latter part of 2006, Hogan and Big Show were keeping in touch regularly, with Hogan becoming increasingly aware of how beat up and frustrated his protégé had become

And then the Hulkster had an idea.

“I said, ‘Paul, have you ever boxed, you know, have you ever gotten in the ring?’ He was so fast, you know, in the wrestling ring. If you’d try to run away from him, you couldn’t get away from him. He was quick. I thought if he had some heart, you know, and we could get him to get in good shape and if he had the killer instinct, I thought there’d be no stopping him.” Yes, the version of Wight that Hulk Hogan met in 1994 was uncannily athletic for his size, and he even got some boxing offers back then, but all wrestling fans knew Wight wasn’t that guy anymore. Hogan’s notion was almost delusional. Even as a younger wrestler, “The Big Slow” was a common nickname for the giant. True, he still had some explosiveness, but even when he was doing flips in wrestling schools, he was never exactly fast. Besides, how many people, no matter how big they are, take up boxing past the age of 30 and have professional success?

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Wight in 2006.

Those who knew Wight were surprised by and skeptical of the plan, to say the least. WWE executive and performer Stephanie McMahon-Levesque, Vince McMahon’s daughter, bluntly said it didn’t at all fit the man she knew, describing him as “a bit of a gentle giant” who “doesn’t really like to get hit very much.” How did she know this, exactly? “I remember a story line,” she said, “when Trish Stratus, one of our [female wrestlers], slapped Big Show in the mouth; and he was very upset it and complained about it for a long time that it cracked his tooth. So to me, if Trish Stratus’ slap bothered him so much, then it doesn’t seem like he would be cut out to get hit in the face by a professional boxer.”

Hogan, though, was confident, to the point of the absurd. He had Wight’s boxing career all mapped out in his head, including who would finance such a misguided venture: Miami entrepreneur Cecile Barker, founder of SoBe Entertainment. “I said, ‘Cecile, you got to see this guy,’” Hogan recalled. “Can you imagine if — there’s nobody prevalent in boxing. There’s no Tyson, no Foreman. What if we had this guy?” He imagined Wight as a kind of modern-day Toro Moreno, the ersatz contender based on boxer Primo Carnera who served as the protagonist of the classic fight film starring Humphrey Bogart, The Harder They Fall. Except Hogan envisioned Wight somehow earning the title for real — eventually.

Barker was managing the singing career of Hogan’s daughter, Brooke, and while Hulk didn’t know it yet, he also happened to be the father of her boyfriend, rapper Yannique “Stack$” Barker. To most, Cecile Barker is probably known best as the “black billionaire guy” Hogan ranted about on a racially charged 2007 recording, the transcript of which was leaked this past summer, on which Hogan also repeatedly uses a racial epithet and concludes, “I guess we’re all a little racist.”

As far as Cecile knew, though, he and Hulk were “best friends,” nicknaming themselves “Crockett and Tubbs” after the two main characters in Miami Vice. “Hulk introduced me to Cecile,” Wight recalled in a 2012 deposition. “Hulk was talking to me on the phone, ‘[You]’ve got to meet this guy,’ because Hulk was a big promoter of me going to boxing. He said that he knew a guy in Miami that was very interested in helping me start a boxing career and I need to meet him. He had, supposedly, boxing contacts and what not.” Wight just knew what Hogan told him, that Barker was “a mover and a shaker in Miami” financing Brooke’s singing career.

Barker didn’t volunteer much more information himself. Why?

“[I] didn’t have to,” Barker testified. “[Wight] was enamored with SoBe. There was a crazy black man spending millions of dollars on Hulk Hogan’s daughter. And [he] was willing to put up millions of dollars for him to change his profession.” According to Barker’s own testimony, he had put up one million dollars just to fund a Hulk Hogan energy drink, and all told, he lost “probably ten million” on Hogan’s various business ideas. Meanwhile, Wight wasn’t alone in not knowing much about Barker. There’s little information about him to be found online (he claims that’s by design) other than the most barebones biographies: He’s a purported billionaire who worked in aerospace for decades before selling OAO Corporation to Lockheed Martin in October 2001 and eventually forming SoBe Entertainment, making the improbable career move from outer space to recording and promotions. Improbable enough that as of 2012, he couldn’t say whether SoBe had ever been profitable.

At the first powwow between Wight, Hogan and Barker, described as a “sales meeting” by Wight, Hogan laid out the plan to make Wight a boxer so convincingly that the naive giant started to really buy into it. “Hogan was pumping me up to Cecile that I have all this potential because of the hands and hand speed and I believed it too.” Wight said Barker was just as enthusiastic, going on about how “with my size and the fact that I’m white I could be a Great White Hope, and he knew Lennox Lewis and he could give me fights with Klitschko and get me a title shot and all these other ludicrous things.”

Well, in 2012 he knew it was ludicrous. In 2006? “I had no idea what the boxing world was really like.” In the meantime, though, “I was a little leery about this whole thing anyway, but, you know, between the confidences that Hulk, who I trusted very much, and then Cecile seemed very excited and enthusiastic about this.” Hogan was to serve as, if not the actual promoter, as Wight’s mouthpiece and the promotional face of his boxing endeavors. With his celebrity, charisma, speaking ability and overall salesmanship, he was, in theory, the perfect hype man for “The Great Wight” (a name Barker protested was inappropriate in the event Wight faced a black opponent).

Barker then enlisted Miami-based “nightlife baron” Antonio Misuraca and boxing matchmaker Michael Marchionte to find the man who would teach Big Show how to box. Marchionte already had someone in mind, immediately suggesting Artie Artwell, a onetime heavyweight with a career record of 3-3-1 who had stopped working as a trainer several years earlier and was teaching boxing for fitness in Providence, Rhode Island.

Marchionte told Misuraca that if anyone could convert a pro wrestler to a boxer, it would be Artie, and asked Artwell if he could board the next flight to Miami. “The next thing I knew is someone calling me from SoBe Entertainment telling me about dates, flight and car service,” Artwell testified in 2012. He flew out a couple days later. Everyone involved went out to dinner together, where the plan was discussed further.

Artwell was presented to Wight as someone who could not only teach the sweet science, but was capable of training larger fighters and whipping them into shape. During the meeting, Wight’s braggadocio got the better of him, making a statement that came back to haunt him later. He spoke of having an iron jaw, with Barker quoting him as saying, “No man can knock me out. I’ve been hitting my head with steel chairs in the WWE. I’ve never been knocked out in my life. And nobody can knock me out.”

After dinner, the decision was made to take Wight to Miami’s Phantom Gym to work out. At Artwell’s suggestion, he didn’t spar at first, but Artwell did lead him in a basic workout mixing squats, push-ups and rudimentary punching. Before long, Wight was sweating bullets and starting to breathe heavily. The wisecracking giant joked about how he felt as if he had just finished delivering a baby.

Good spirits or not, it certainly seemed like it would take a while to get him into even decent condition, but Artwell was undaunted. “I told him that, you know, he’s probably in shape for wrestling, but it’s — it’s always skill specific. You know, I explained to him how I used to play basketball and I could play basketball all night, but I couldn’t do two minutes [in the boxing ring], and I was wondering what the hell’s wrong with me? I’m in shape, but I was in shape for basketball but not for boxing. I couldn’t do two minutes in the ring and vice versa. And I told him that, you know, we’ll take it slow and work it out.”

As naive as it all sounds, at least Barker, had a backup plan in mind. Artwell recalled, “What he told me was that he just wants to see if I can convert this wrestler into a boxer and if it didn’t work out, maybe it could transition into a reality TV show or something of that nature. He just told me what he wanted to see if I could accomplish in six months with him and then we would re-evaluate and determine whether he could be a boxer or whatever else was in the situation.” Barker’s testimony confirms Artwell’s account that, going in, he had the reality show idea in his back pocket if Wight couldn’t be fast tracked to a pro boxing career. And according to BoxRec, that same year, Marchionte went to work with Mark Burnett Productions and DreamWorks Studios, serving as matchmaker for the boxing reality show The Contender.

That was October. Everything was in place. Three months later, in January 2007, a few weeks after Wight’s final appearance for WWE (but with a month or so left on his contact), he embarked on his new career in Miami.

Like many wrestlers, Wight had settled in the Tampa area, about four hours away from Miami, where Barker, Phantom Boxing and Hogan were based. He planned to commute, stay at Hogan’s house during the week and then return home for the weekend to rest with his wife and dogs. That arrangement only lasted about a month, as “after the Super Bowl, it was apparent that “[Hogan’s then-wife] Linda didn’t want me to stay in the house anymore. It was making Terry’s life crazy. Then it was up to me to find, to get a place.” Barker temporarily put Wight up in a hotel in Miami, while Hogan was constantly in the giant’s ear with incessant requests of “Brother, you got to move down here. Brother, you got to move down here. Brother, you got to move down here.”

There were big problems with that. Wight’s unique size required a home that could be adapted to his needs, rather than a rental. On top of that, even with Barker paying him $84,000 a month to box, he was still deep underwater with the IRS and still had to pay the mortgage on his Tampa home. Barker then offered to advance him $400,000 and procured the assistance of a local realtor to find a new home. Wight settled on a place in South Beach at Barker’s request, but first, Barker drew up a contract to show to the bank so Wight could secure a mortgage. At Wight’s insistence, “Hulk Hogan Promotions, Inc.” was included as a third party to the agreement, which Hogan never signed.

Manuel Velasquez/Jam Media/LatinContent/Getty Images

In the meantime, Big Show tried to learn how to box. Regardless of how plausible this all was, he took it seriously, diligently showing up every morning and working his ass off in training. At first, the goal was primarily weight loss and conditioning while slowly learning the most basic boxing concepts.

Artwell and Wight were well-matched. The trainer, for instance, didn’t believe in the distance running traditionally preferred by coaches and Wight was a terrible candidate for it anyway. The two also hit it off quickly as friends. “I loved him. Loved him,” Artwell testified. “And I told him that our relationship was going to be much different. I said, ‘I don’t care who your manager is, who your trainer is, I mean the trainer/fighter relationship, you’re an extension of me.’” Which isn’t to say that he didn’t get tough with his new pupil: When Wight strayed from Artwell’s prescribed high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet and dined on matzo balls at Jerry’s Deli on South Beach, the coach had to give his gargantuan protégé a very specific list of what he was allowed to eat.

In the ring, Artwell started to lead Wight in “phantom boxing” (his term for back and forth shadow boxing) sessions, which he described as “the closest to boxing that you’re ever going to get without getting hit.” So as Wight started to get into shape, he was building a foundation of boxing concepts that would aid him when he started live sparring. In April, he began highly controlled sparring with Artwell defending himself in pads. Concepts like basic blocking were apparently coming along fine, because, well, he was so oversized it was hard to get a punch through to his chin “He had big enough shoulders, big enough arms that he didn’t need to do the Floyd Mayweather, Muhammad Ali head movement,” Artwell noted. He also shed so much weight Wight joked to his wife, Bess, that she better watch out when she touched him or else she might cut herself.

Later that spring Wight started live sparring with heavyweight contenders Attila Levin and Timur Ibragimov. Former WBC World heavyweight champion Oliver McCall even stopped by to get some rounds in, and sparred with Wight three times a week while he was there. McCall, in fact, did the honors of giving Wight his first black eye, but the experienced fighters knew this was not a normal sparring session. They were all told in advance to take it easy on Wight, to pull their punches.

Most of the time that went fine, but there were some notable exceptions. “He [Wight] really wanted Levin,” recalled Artwell. “He thought Levin … wasn’t following the protocol to take it easy. He thought Levin was pushing it. And Paul said to me that he was going to take care of him. I told him he had my permission to take, you know, take care of him if he gets out of line again.”

If that sounds like an accelerated program for a rookie with zero amateur experience, Artwell disagrees. “I had an expectation of Paul being more aggressive. I was looking, I was really looking for Paul to — because of size, weight, especially Levin, because that’s who he said he had it out for — to give those guys a good, at least him, a good beating. … I didn’t think much of Levin even though he had a good record, but the quality of opponents he fought weren’t anybody.”

That was Atwell’s plan, which he explained not just to Wight, but also to Hogan and Barker. He wanted to bring Wight along slowly, just as had been done with former football players Ed “Too Tall” Jones and Mark Gastineau when they tried to become boxers. Gastineau’s first victim was a well-known regional pro wrestler who took a theatrical spill and later admitted to taking a dive. That said, Artwell wasn’t necessarily talking about fixing fights, and he laid out the age old blueprint to turn Wight into a contender that promotors and trainers boxer have followed for generations. Citing Gerry Cooney and others, Atwell said, “You can line up what’s termed in the business tomato cans, guys that should be able to [be] beat. Every once in a while, that gets thrown out of whack, but yeah, it has happened and that’s how they bring fighters along. … The other term they use for them are ‘opponents’ and ‘opponents’ is code for guys that you should be able to beat.”

On the surface, everything was going well. Artwell was happy with his pupil’s progress and there was a plan in place to protect him. In reality, though? After sparring with McCall and having his eye blackened, Wight started to realize just what he was getting into. “[That] was a little bit of a wakeup call.”

At the six-month mark Barker watched some sparring sessions and was concerned: He felt Wight didn’t have it. Artwell agreed, but tried to reassure him that it didn’t matter. “Even though he hasn’t shown anything in the gym right now, but we can get this thing started with getting him opponents, and sometimes you use sparring partners as your opponents.” That satisfied Barker for the time being, but as the summer went on, Wight started to become more disenchanted as his support system vanished. At first, Hogan was a regular at the gym, but as his marriage began to self-destruct and his son, Nick, was in a car accident that maimed his best friend and landed him in jail, Hogan left Miami. Regardless, Wight kept going. What else was he going to do?

In late October, super heavyweight T.J. Wilson, a former Olympic alternate just a few days removed from a huge first-round upset win over Travis Walker in only 15 seconds, came in to spar with Wight. A big wrestling fan, he was familiar with Wight going back to his time in WCW. When he first saw the giant sparring, he watched him handle an unknown amateur. “I don’t know the guy’s name, but he was sparring with him, and [Wight] was beating him up pretty bad,” Wilson recalled. “He was hitting the guy with some good combinations.” Wilson felt Wight was coming along fairly well, but with obvious signs that he was a beginner. “He was kind of robotic. He’s a big guy, he wasn’t the fastest, but he had pretty good hand speed, and was moving pretty good.” As for punching power, that was as advertised, Wilson remarking that “You know, he’s a big guy, he hits pretty hard.”

David Leeds /Allsport

Wilson(L) at the U.S Olympic Box-Off, 2000.

So when it came time for Wilson and Wight to spar, Wilson knew what he was getting into; at least as much as he could sparring with someone that big. For Wight, however, it was different: Wilson was the first left-handed fighter he had faced. This not only changed the angles of the punches from what he was accustomed to, but also the distance each is thrown. Even many experienced fighters are troubled by southpaws, and Wight, who at this point had only been sparring for about six months, was completely befuddled.

The two squared off, and after only a few minutes — Wilson can’t recall if it was the first round or the second — he threw an overhand left at his oversized target. He was mindful to pull the punch as he had been instructed by Artwell, but it didn’t matter. The placement was perfect, and it came from an angle that Wight had not expected and never saw coming. They say the punch you don’t see hurts you, and Wight went down, toppling backwards. “He landed face up,” Wilson recalled. “He may have made the count to be on his feet, but I would have stopped it [if I was the referee or his cornerman].”

Wight later recalled, “Artie made it very clear and very apparent to me that it takes one punch to win a fight, one punch to knock you out, one punch to kill you.” And in spite of Wight’s bragging about his iron jaw, Artwell told Wight from the start to get out of that mindset. “I explained to him that for all of his bravado about never being knocked out that you have a nervous system, Big Show.” Artwell gave a colorful example: “I said, ‘If a baby would punch you in the nose right now, you would tear up and feel some pain. So you’re not impervious to that happening.’ I said, ‘I’m glad you had that experience, so now you know that, you know, it can happen.’” That’s what everyone else in the gym told him after the KO: “Welcome to the fraternity.”

Artwell thought it was a flash knockdown, where a fighter gets dropped but quickly recovers and doesn’t seem worse for wear or concussed. Wight seemed fine, but it was enough to stop the training session for the day. When Artwell saw Wight exiting the gym a short time later, he wasn’t concerned and continued working with the other boxers.

Wight was not fine. He later said, “I remember trapping [Wilson] in the comer, him getting out of the corner, and then I remember waking up in my Hummer with the keys in the ignition. Apparently, they had taken my gloves off, called the match, and I had taken my bag and walked out of the gym and was sitting in my car with the car running, when I woke up.”

How did he feel when he came to?

“It scared the shit out of me.”

Wight soon told his wife what happened. “She was worried. She asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no. I told her that I was woefully out of my depth. I remember saying that.” He was done sparring for good. He had never been knocked out in over a decade of wrestling and was ill-prepared for the realities of boxing. Now, it was just a matter of being able to officially end the relationship. “I was trying to get a hold of Mr. Barker to have a meeting with him. I wanted to be done. It wasn’t for me anymore. I was very limited in my lateral movement, because of my bad foot. Standing toe to toe with another fighter I could probably do well, but a smart fighter is not going to stand toe to toe with me and they’re going to move to a weakness. I didn’t want to die. Artie made that very clear to me from day one’s training — one punch to win a fight, one punch to knock you out, and one punch to kill you.” And for Wight, that one punch was one punch too many.

In the meantime, Wight spoke to Hogan, his longtime mentor who got him into this mess in the first place. As much as Wight tried to explain that he had been knocked into a dissociative state and it scared him, it didn’t faze Hogan. “I think [Hulk] thought that I was not aggressive enough. I don’t know how to explain it.” When recounting their talk under oath more than four years later, it was the emotions that stuck with the gentle giant more than the content. “I don’t really remember much of the conversation other than Terry being disappointed and I was embarrassed.”

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“I just couldn’t believe [Wight] quit and walked away.”Hulk Hogan

Hogan remembered the gist of the conversation similarly, though he recalled a lot more detail. “I said, ‘You got to go back. You can’t quit.’ And Mr. Wight says, ‘Well, I can’t do this. My heart’s not in it.’ And, you know, I basically said. ‘Well, you know, Cecile has paid you every month to train and you’ve been asking about fights and we’re trying to get you ready and everything’s going to be set up.’ … I pretty much beat him up, telling him he had to go back.” The next day was more of the same for Hogan. “He had a different attitude, almost like a different persona. He wasn’t even listening when I talked to him.”

Wight also felt like he was talking to a wall, but for different reasons. “I think Terry had a different view of what he thought it was and what it actually was.”

So, what was Wight’s next move? For the moment, he wasn’t considering a return to WWE. “[Paul] told me he — never mentioned wrestling,” Hogan recalled. “You know, he basically told me he was done and he was going to produce this cooking show with Bess. You know, he just told me she was going to be bigger than Rachael Ray, and I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing.” In a 2010 deposition, Bess described her occupation as a “host of a cooking show” seconds before answering the question, “Is that a TV show?” with “I’d like it to be.” Although WWE did survey fans to gauge interest in a similar show featuring both Wights in late 2011, the show never got off the ground

“I just couldn’t believe he quit and walked away,” Hogan continued. “Even if the guy wasn’t a champion, if you had a fight with him, that would be huge, you know. And there would several other fights against normal-sized guys and all of a sudden you’d be fighting for 10, 15, 20 million bucks, is what I told him. I said, ‘You got a lottery ticket in your pocket. You can’t leave, you can’t walk away from this.’” It caused a schism between the two, with Hogan saying they didn’t talk much afterwards. “I mean, he quit and there’s nothing really to talk about.”

Due to health issues that put Barker in the hospital, he and Wight didn’t meet up at the gym to square things away until Nov. 14, more than two weeks after the fateful knockdown. Remembered Barker, “On the assumption that Paul Wight was going to ask for money, because he was always broke, and on the assumption that he was going to ask for money, even though he was already paid a month in advance, I walked in there and had my checkbook and proceeded to write him a check [for December] and handed it to him after we shook hands and sat down. I said, ‘I guess this is what you’re looking for. Here’s your check.’”

Of course, that wasn’t the only reason Wight was there. “Paul Wight then proceeded to tell me that he had been doing some soul searching; that he had, had a long conversation with his wife, Bess; that his wife Bess had become concerned for his safety; and that I was sick and not around in the gym, he had gotten into the ring one night and he had been knocked out.” According to Barker, Wight then broke down. “He started crying; saying one of the most — probably one of the most unexpected events of my life; to see a 7-foot, 450 [pound] man sitting there at a desk crying, telling me that he didn’t know what he was going to do. He had to get on with his life. He knew he owed me money.”

In spite of Wight owing the money advanced towards the purchase of his house (and depending on which of them you ask, his 10 months of salary, which were advances from future earnings), they never spoke again, only exchanging a few emails in the weeks following the meeting. With Wight’s ongoing financial issues now including the monies from Barker for his house, it was time to become The Big Show again.

Alfredo Lopez/Jam Media/LatinContent/Getty Images

Believing he had dissolved his agreement with SoBe at the Nov. 14 meeting with Barker at the gym, four days later Wight met with Vince McMahon and WWE Talent Relations representative John Laurinaitis at a WWE event in Miami. By now, he had decided to return to wrestling. According to Wight, WWE offered the same $1 million annual guarantee he had before, but he asked for $1.25 million plus a $250,000 signing bonus. WWE insisted on a “weight clause” in the contract to protect their investment.

When Barker found out, he eventually tried to stop Wight’s return to WWE, claiming that he had Big Show under contract, but that claim went nowhere until SoBe sued WWE and the Wights more than a year after he had resumed wrestling. That’s the only reason the details of Wight’s flirtation with boxing are accessible. The case has now dragged on for more than six and a half years, with the next hearing scheduled for April 2016.

When Wight, now an ex-boxer, returned as The Big Show on WWE programming in February 2007, he made his surprise comeback in Las Vegas, the boxing capital of the world, flaunting his new, svelte physique end route to setting up his match for that year’s WrestleMania in Orlando. First, he attacked Rey Mysterio, his total opposite, WWE’s smallest star and someone being written off TV due to a legitimate injury.

Rob Loud/Getty Images

As Big Show menaced Mysterio that February night, the fans knew that someone certainly, would come out to make the save and protect Mysterio from the returning giant. What they didn’t expect was that Las Vegas’s own Floyd “Money” Mayweather, considered the best boxer in the world, would come to the rescue, a role in stark contrast to his villainous public persona. Less than a year removed from setting pay-per-view records, he was a perfect “special attraction” for WWE’s Super Bowl of wrestling, a flashy celebrity athlete with a track record of drawing money and attention.

Mayweather, however, was not much bigger than the diminutive Mysterio. As Mayweather stood in the ring, Big Show got down on one knee and dared the champion pugilist to hit him. Mayweather, a defensive fighter hardly known for his power and giving up about 300 pounds, lit the giant up with a combination.

This time, Big Show, already on one knee, didn’t go down. The punch woke something in him, something that had probably been festering since he came to in his car a few months before. As Mayweather and his entourage fled the ring in a panic, Big Show, his nose bloody and broken, rose in hot pursuit, giving chase and moving faster than he’d ever moved before in pro wrestling.

Even when you know they are coming, it seems that punches can still hurt.

I. The Patsy

Super Bowl XXV, January 27, 1991: Tampa Stadium, Tampa Florida.

“Too tough for them, just right for us,” Marv Levy implored his players before his team’s first Super Bowl appearance, just as he had done before all others of vastly less significance all season. Soon enough, it was about to get a whole tougher.

In the blink of a bloodshot eye, we’re 25 years from that moment and 16 since the Buffalo Bills last went to the playoffs, the longest active drought in American professional sports. Buffalo, the beaten down, blue-collar Rust Belt town, gutted of both industry and over half its population since 1950, remains fiercely proud and hasn’t given up on itself or its beloved Bills. What Buffalo continues to prove to America is that when enough people continue to reach out for something, sooner or later they end up finding each other.

Who is the most famous man in American consciousness ever to put foot to ball? It’s not Pele, Maradona, Zidane, Beckham or Messi. The rest of the world has them. For millions of Americans who witnessed the dying moments of Super Bowl 25, it remains Scott Norwood.

If we could hop on a plane and fly back in time to that moment, anyone suffering from a bad case of nerves could still console themselves with a cigarette on a flight back to that January day in 1991, the last year it was legal to smoke on commercial airplanes. The Gulf War began 11 days earlier. Three weeks before, on Christmas Day, the USSR collapsed. Home Alone is atop the box office, Macaulay Culkin-cute. O.J. Simpson is on the sidelines after taking a break from filming The Naked Gun 2 ½: the Smell of Fear andstill a few years away from not killing his wife and Ron Goldman.

And the previous week Joe Montana’s tenure leading the San Francisco 49ers came to an end after being blindsided and flattened by New York Giants linebacker Leonard Marshall, breaking my 11-year-old heart. It was the only time I ever saw my best friend cry. And the week before that, Bo Jackson put on his football uniform for the last time after suffering a career-ending hip injury against the Bengals.

With eight seconds remaining in Super Bowl XXV, standing on the sidelines, there was nothing remote or abstract about Scott Norwood’s potential nightmare, the horror was entirely wedded to both its immediacy and specificity. The defining moment of his life would be witnessed by nearly 100 million people.

How narrow is the boundary separating his dreams from that nightmare? On that day the dimensions and geometry were perfectly clear to everyone watching: a horizontal cross bar elevated 10 feet off the ground, two perpendicular uprights reaching another 20 feet skyward, separated by 18 feet and 6 inches of air.

The New York Giants lead the Buffalo Bills 20-19. In just two minutes and eight seconds worth of playing time in the fourth quarter, quarterback Jim Kelly has marched the Bills nearly two-thirds of the field to the 29-yard line, just in range for a come-from-behind field goal and victory. There have been some missed opportunities for both teams—the Giants gave up a safety and the Bills had a drive stall deep in the Red Zone—but nobody in 59 minutes and 52 seconds of play has done anything so egregious as turn the ball over to the opposition. There have been errors of effort and calculation, not heart.

Now, everything rides on a successfully launched leather ball soaring 47 yards through the humid air delivered somewhere, anywhere between the uprights. Regardless of the contest so far, whatever the outcome of this final event, the role of scapegoat or hero has now irrevocably been cast, and his name is kicker Scott Norwood.

Peter Brouillet/Getty Images

Norwood—his wife and relatives watching in the stands—steps onto the field having successfully kicked a 48-yarder that season—but not on grass. Norwood is in his sixth year playing in the NFL for the Bills. He entered the league in 1982 and was cut by the Atlanta Falcons. After signing with USFL’s Birmingham Stallions he blew out his knee and was let go. He moved back in with his parents but refused to give up. At age 26, the Bills invited him to try out and he made the team. Three years later he made the Pro Bowl and led the league with 125 points. Kickers in the NFL routinely have the lowest average annual salary of any regular player, even less than punters. As Norwood takes center stage at the Super Bowl, an instrument of fate, he has all the physical presence of an earnest high school hall monitor reporting for duty during recess.

Years later, Norwood says of that moment, “I had no doubts in my mind.”

Bill Parcells calls a timeout, presumably so Norwood can ruminate a few moments longer on the implications of missing this kick for the rest of his life. Maybe, if Parcells is lucky, the ghost of Bill Buckner and his error in the 1986 World Series will join the dog pile on Norwood’s psyche along with the millions of people either watching or hiding their eyes all around the country. Three and a half years later, only two weeks after the O.J. Simpson murders, Columbian defender Andres Escobar scored on his own goal during the FIFA World Cup and handed victory over to the United States. Five days after returning to Medellin, on July 1, 1994, he was executed in a parking lot for his folly with six bullets.

Pacing around, head down, brow furrowed, Norwood doesn’t betray much of a reaction. Eventually he clenches his jaw and grinds his teeth into his mouth guard. Like a timid teenager working up the courage to ask a girl out to the prom, his squinty eyes mostly remain on the torn up grass before him.

Doubts or not, for his career, Norwood has only converted one of five field goals beyond 40 yards on grass. Now, 47 yards lie between where Frank Reich will receive the snap and spin it around, holding it upright with a finger of his left hand, and victory for the Buffalo Bills, hovering a long, long way down field between the uprights. Hold your hand out and spread your thumb and forefinger about three inches apart—€”that’s about how far apart the goal posts appear from 47 yards away.

Across both sidelines, hundreds of men, players and staff alike, hold hands as they kneel together, heads bowed, eyes vised in prayer, penitents, their desperate wishes invisibly ascending from the stadium for and against the kick. Nearly 74,000 fans in the stands silently or violently petition the football gods with their pleas. If God wasn’t tied up with other matters—maybe the Gulf War thing or the fate of the Soviet Union after the fall—and was paying attention, all He or She would have received was a mixed message. Nearly 80 million people in America are tuned in for perhaps the zenith of dramatic moments in Super Bowl history. With the Super Bowl continuing to be the most bet on event in American sports, more than a few of those prayers, presumably, belong to people with skin in the game: billions of illicit and legitimate dollars across the country ride on the outcome.

Norwood’s plight only highlights everyone’s helplessness to sway the outcome.

A whistle is blown. Twenty-one men assume their positions on either side of the line of scrimmage.

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

Norwood is the 22^nd. He stands beside a kneeling Reich and reaches down to his left cleat to rid it of some dirt he then tosses away. He goes through the motions of one mock kick. He bows his head while his hands hang down at his sides. The expression on his face oscillates between earnest and stern. After glaring some more at the grass, he mops some sweat off his brow and absentmindedly bumps the ridge of his hand against the edge of his helmet. He matter-of-factly returns to his left cleat to nudge some more dirt loose. Finally, he briefly gazes down field at his remote target, 18 and a half feet reduced to three inches.

Suddenly Norwood seizes an enormous breath just before taking five paces back from his teammate and stepping once to his left. He’s finally alone as the last man back and the last hope for everyone who supports him. Once settled in, he braces himself for the moment at hand and leans forward, arms hanging limp, as unreachable as rescue ladders dangling from a helicopter over a burning home.

Five of Norwood’s teammates on the sidelines, along with their coach, are destined for the Hall of Fame. Together, they brace for the moment, each relieved or frustrated in his own way that the fate of the game lays elsewhere. Whatever games Jim Kelly has given up throwing interceptions, or James Lofton and Andre Reed have lost to dropped passes, or Thurman Thomas squandered fumbling away the ball, or Bruce Smith let slip away with a missed tackle, or coach Marv Levy lost with some failed strategy that cost his team victory—history will only remember their triumphs.

Even if Norwood splits the uprights, he’s probably not getting the games’ MVP trophy—€”that would likely go to Thomas, with 190 all-purpose yards and a touchdown. And Norwood’s not going to the Hall of Fame either. There are very few placekickers in the Hall of Fame and only one, Jan Stenerud, whom Marv Levy reluctantly cut after accepting a coaching position for the Kansas City Chiefs in 1978, exclusively played kicker his entire career . Others, such as Lou Groza and George Blanda, played another positions. No, despite being stranded on a very fragile island in the football universe, kickers are never honored or remembered for the great kicks they make, only the vital ones they miss. Whatever successes they’ve enjoyed, after even one disappointment or failure, no one is on a football roster is more expendable.

The ball is snapped. Norwood’s life, before and after, receives a demarcation point barely a second long.

Scott charges forward to forever leave behind his past identity and embrace his fate…

II. The City of No Illusions

After a couple weeks in a warm place outside the country, on Jan. 2, 2016, I flew home to New York and then took a train from Penn Station eight hours north and west, to catch the Bills’ final regular-season game, this time against their division rival, the New York Jets.

It was yet another losing season for the Bills. They had already been knocked out of playoff contention. The game was another meaningless dead end. For the Jets, 10-5 for the year, a final victory at Ralph Wilson Stadium, named after the Bill’s beloved former owner, was vital to making the playoffs.

The Amtrak train was stuffed with Jets fans making the trek to suburban Orchard Park to support their team. With tens of thousands more fans bussing down south from Canada in virtual motorcades, the game would be a sellout.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

When I arrived the night before at Buffalo’s Exchange Street Station, several inches of snow was on the ground from the first significant snowfall of the year. More was expected the following morning. The county was offering 10 bucks an hour to anyone who wanted to help shovel out the stadium.

I knocked on the passenger side of a cab’s window and startled an older, dozing-off, walrus-mustached driver. He waved me in.

“O.P.?” he asked.

“Come again?”

“Orchard Park,” he said, and turned the engine. “You’re going to the game tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I need to find a place near the stadium and if you have any ideas about finding tickets I’d appreciate it.”

“Buffalo doesn’t roll out any red carpets to welcome outsiders, but we do have the Red Carpet Inn not far from Ralph Wilson. Game’s sold out but I’m sure if you’re willing to cough up some bucks the scalpers will help you out.”

Bon Jovi’s “Living On A Prayer” came on the radio and before I could ask to turn it down, the driver shut off the radio.

“You hear about that asshole trying to buy the Bills and move them?” he said, referencing the singer from New Jersey. “Pissed a lot of people off. Every bar in Buffalo swore off playing that asshole. I even heard on the Twitter they created a hashtag ‘#fuckBonJovi.’ Serves him right.”

“If they black list Billy Joel, too, I might have to move up here in solidarity.”

“Bon Jovi deserved the flack he got. They’re the heart and soul of this city. Really are. I mean, everybody else just comes up here for Niagara Falls. Every time I take a fare over to Niagara Falls, it just makes me wanna take a leak. You’re a Jets fan?”

“I hate the Jets.”

“The Bills aren’t going to the playoffs, so why the hell you come all this way on a train to watch a pointless game in the freezing cold?”

“Working on a story about Buffalo 25 years after Norwood’s kick.”

“I worked security for the Bills during their heyday and all those Super Bowls they went to. When the Cowboys thumped them that second time at the end of their losing run at the Super Bowl was my last year on the job. It’s those damn Canadians that are the real menace at games. Twenty or twenty-five thousand of those jokers come down for most games. They’re a menace.”

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

“Word around the league is we have the drunkest fans in the country. ”

“They burned down the fucking White House 200 years ago,” I added, keeping my own Canadian heritage under wraps. “Violence is just in Canada’s nature.”

“Unless it’s supporting us in Nam.”

“Gutless.”

“Iraq, too,” he lamented gravely.

“When Trump’s elected, he’ll give Canada what they’ve got coming to them.”

“Oh, they love the tailgate though. They’re drunk out of their minds before sunrise on Sunday. All they come down for is just the action in the parking lot. Word around the league is we have the drunkest fans in the country. I don’t think it’s the Buffalonians so much as the Canadians that drink like that. They just drink until they black out. I hit one of those poor bastards a few years ago with my cab. Just jumped right in front of me on the highway.”

“How’d he make out?”

“Thumped his head right on my windshield. Died a few days later when they took him off life support.”

Time to change the subject.

“I’ve never heard of a team getting a parade for losing.”

“It’s as close as we’ve gotten to a winning team. It’s unfortunate, but you know, I wish we did have a winning team. At least once. Once in my life time would be nice.”

“Think it’ll ever happen?”

“I wouldn’t bet on a better team than we had back then. But you know, Jim Kelly, when he was in his prime, was a total asshole.”

“Why do you say that?”

“There’s a nice café where we’re going in Orchard Park, Danny’s, all the Bills people used to go there. When my boy was 5 years old, my kid went up to him for an autograph and Kelly blew him off. Ever since then I just couldn’t forgive him. Total asshole. He’s gotten religion and had cancer and really mellowed out in his middle age—like we all do—but you don’t do that to little kids unless you’re a world-class asshole. That’s my memory of the guy.”

“You see Norwood around town much?” I asked.

“His wife is from here. So he visits the in-laws.”

Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

Above: Norwood in 2011

“Do you remember what you were doing when he missed that kick?”

“I wasn’t watching, I was at home with the game on prayin’ behind my couch. Forty-seven yards on grass isn’t an easy kick for anybody. He didn’t have a great boot. But goddamnit, he tried. It was wide, but he sure as hell didn’t come up short.”

“How hard was it after he missed?”

“Every year afterwards it was just, the Bills are there again? We just couldn’t get over that hurdle to win. Look outside your window, there’s our stadium. We’ve got a winter storm watch for tomorrow.”

“Will the tailgate still happen?” I asked.

“Those idiots will tailgate in anything. Seriously. Blizzard. They’re like an armed encampment, pretty much. Even the Bill players, from time to time I pick them up from bars and they throw up off the side of my cab. The NFL isn’t the same anymore. There used to be a real camaraderie but now it’s just about the money.”

I saw the ruby-glow of the Red Carpet Inn’s sign glazing the ice along the highway. There was a big sign about having sold out rented spaces in the parking lot for tomorrow’s tailgate.

“Listen, don’t plan on going far out there in this cold, you’ll freeze your nuts off before you end up as road kill with the way people drive around here on the ice. Especially at night, it’s treacherous. There’s always somebody getting hit.

III. Willy Loman

And after one and a half seconds of hang time, even 25 year later we all know Norwood missed. My cabbie was right — the kick was more than long enough, but wide right by about a dozen or so inches.

“A blur,” Norwood recalled of that moment to ESPN cameras last month. In the quarter century since the kick, he’s rarely granted interviews. “I almost relate it to some kind of accident where you try to—it’s almost a shock—the magnitude of it not working out.”

Above his lone crossbar, as he watched his missed kick veer off, behind Norwood’s narrow eyes you could almost see the cruel Gordian knot devilishly being tied inside his heart. Head down, Norwood gravely wanders off and circles free of teammates seeking to console him, unable to acknowledge the pleadings of his friends. He finally removes his mouth guard and lifts off his helmet, exposing the torment on his dejected face. It gives every indication he’s the loneliest man on earth.

“I get choked up thinking about it,” Norwood sighed. “It goes wider—the sidelines, organizational level, to the city. The city of Buffalo is nothing but a winning city and it deserved it.”

Winning city? Buffalo native Harold Arlen, the world-renowned composer most famous for composing “Over the Rainbow”—voted by the Recording Industry Association of America as the 20^th Century’s greatest song—once grimly proclaimed of his hometown, “Suicide in Buffalo would be redundant.” The city once had the eighth largest population in America and thriving industry in both steel and manufacturing. With most major factories shut down, it’s been gutted on all fronts, the population plummeting from 580,000 in the years after the war to only 260,000 today, and still dropping. It makes the news every winter only because it’s buried by an average 110 inches of snow and frigid, wind-driven cold. The Buffalo Bills haven’t won a postseason game since 1995, and last made the playoffs in 1999. They’re the NFL equivalent of a car wreck rusting away by the side of the road, only two seasons over .500 since the millennium.

Winning city? What could Scott Norwood, according to many the patron saint of football losers, possibly be talking about? Wasn’t his entire life ruined by that kick? Isn’t he just a sordid punchline from a tired joke of a battered Rust Belt city?

Maybe. But maybe not …

George Rose/Getty Images

Whatever urge Norwood felt after the game to run and hide, he felt a larger responsibility to his teammates and the city of Buffalo to stand his ground in the locker room. He did so before he even had a chance to be consoled by his family. After all of his teammates had fled the area to mourn their loss, Norwood remained for a couple hours under siege from reporters and cameras, patiently and earnestly answering every last question put to him before taking time for himself to embrace his wife and father. The scene conflicts a great deal with the popular notion—peddled endlessly in the world of sports—that winners show more character than losers. Even the Giants’ victory wilted under the shadow of Norwood’s narrative.

Contrast this defining moment of Norwood’s career with, say, Michael Jordan’s notoriously bitter, tone-deaf, and thankless Hall of Fame acceptance speech, which felt like the ending of a Godfather movie as Jordan opened both barrels on everybody. How could someone like Norwood, branded across the country as the perennial choke artist, demonstrate such decency, character and grace while Jordan—who mesmerized me and everyone I knew growing up with his transcendent ability and resolve—shocked the world with an incredible monument to bitterness despite his legacy of triumph? There are differences in men.

Most of us aren’t aware of the most important moments in our lives ahead of time, or even notice when they actually happen. It’s even more remarkable how little we act at these moments since, so often, there’s no one to perform for. Yet Scott Norwood knew. His entire life was irrevocably going to change and be defined forever with this one action that likely could never be redeemed, at least on the field.

We all lose. There’s no escape. All victories are few and fleeting. Life is a process of enduring loss, one of the more cruel lessons existence imposes on us. The longer we stick around, the more familiar with loss we become. Loss ensnares us with big and small hooks. Whatever dent we leave in the world, the vast majority of us are lost footnotes in history. We’re periphery, faces in a crowd, clutter in a subway or an airport or a supermarket or a line at Starbucks, or even to our neighbors in modern life. Yet we all dream of leaving our mark on the world in some meaningful way, of making a difference or at least mattering after we go.

Scott Norwood, only 30 years old, stepped onto the field with eight seconds left in Super Bowl XXV knowing anonymity and insignificance would never again be an option for himself, his family, or anyone who cared about him. One way or another, he was going to remembered. And while Norwood’s canvass was as large as you can get in American sports, his moment was as personal and intimate as a single brushstroke. All that was required of him was doing what he’d always done so brilliantly since childhood with his father’s assistance and loving devotion: kick a ball.

Instead of kicking the game-winning field goal to win the Super Bowl, he instead booted his narrative into two immensely successful movie scripts: 1998’s Buffalo 66 and 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. In Buffalo-native Vincent Gallo’s indie classic, also featuring Christina Ricci and Anjelica Huston, Norwood became Scott Wood, reimagined as the bloated, shirtless strip club owner of Scott Wood’s Solid Gold Sexotic Dancers. Gallo’s character, after losing a $10,000 bet on the Bills’ Super Bowl loss, then hunts Wood down to kill him. Gallo even approached Norwood to appear in a cameo and offered what he described as a “large sum” of money. Norwood declined.

In Jim Carrey’s star-making vehicle, Norwood was reimagined as a kicker named “Ray Finkle,” institutionalized after missing a Super Bowl winner for the Miami Dolphins. He then murders a woman and assumes her identity, living as a deranged transgendered psychopath hell-bent on exacting on revenge against Dolphin quarterback Dan Marino.

Scott Norwood did none of these things, not even close. Fiction has to make sense, but reality doesn’t. The real Scott Norwood played one more year of professional football and then remained in Buffalo with the wife he’d recently met there. In his last game as a Bill, in the 1992 Super Bowl against Washington, he made the only field goal he tried, this time from 21 yards, to make the score 24-3 in Buffalo’s eventual 37-24 loss. For the playoffs that year, he was a perfect 5-for-5.

He retired after overtaking O.J. Simpson that year as the Bills’ career-scoring leader, and the team went on to run their streak of consecutive Super Bowl losses to four, but never as gallantly or as painfully as in 1991. Yet Norwood wasn’t bitter or vindictive about his career. He never blamed anyone. He quietly left Buffalo, ducked reporters as best he could, then sold life insurance back in his home state of Virginia, close to his family.

But before the Bills and professional football cut him loose to work as a salesman, driving around in a Chevy Prizm with a cracked windshield, cold calling unsuspecting people in his native Virginia, Norwood first had to return to Buffalo immediately after Super Bowl XXV, seemingly in disgrace. The city, buried under snow that froze a million tears, did something so counterintuitive and contrary to American values that the surprise was so overwhelming to Norwood, he could not face it. After the loss, after having their teeth kicked in and their dream denied, Buffalo chose not retribution, but gratitude.

And most of that was reserved for Norwood. At a post-Super Bowl rally in the heart of Buffalo at Lafayette Square, 25,000 people (or maybe twice that according to Marv Levy’s memory) endured the frigid temperatures and snow to reserve their loudest cheers and chants … for Scott Norwood, professional football’s biggest loser.

“Scotty! Scotty! Scotty!” it began, Norwood hiding behind his teammates, out of view from the masses.

But the mob continued with even more ferocity and urgency and finally Norwood relented and peeked out to show his face.

Now, 25,000 Buffalonians roared louder, demanding his brief cameo would not be sufficient under the circumstances. So Norwood gave in and took the stage, snow stinging his face, standing alone before the crowd at the podium. The cheers erupted and the chants altered immediately to “We love Scott! We love Scott!”

“I’ve never felt more love than right now,” Norwood’s voice cracked, wiping the corners of his eyes.

IV. The City of Good Neighbors

What other city in America would stage a parade in the bitter cold to celebrate the losing team? And then reserve the loudest cheer for the man blamed for the loss? It was the closest the Bills ever came to winning and over the next three years were famously blown out of one Super Bowl after another. And they still haven’t won a Super Bowl or, from the looks of things, anything else.

After I checked into the last room available at the motel and navigated through the arriving vehicles that had stocked up on beer, I went in search of a warm meal under a starless night. All the sidewalks were buried under a foot of snow, so I schlepped up the side of the highway to Abbott Road and turned off toward the looming hypothermic mass of Ralph Wilson Stadium opposite the barren, dimly lit winter-scape of parking lots and piles of snow. It was apparent, after a half-mile and being questioned by two separate police cruisers, I was likely the only pedestrian in all of Buffalo.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

A handful of Go Bills! converted “Want some candy?” kidnapper-style vans and rusty school buses were out there in the distance, bonfires illuminating small cabals of fans already pining for game time. “Where else would you rather be?” was written on the back of one vehicle. After the wind kicked up and dismantled any feeling in my body, I finally got to a corner with some habitation and lights on. Just beyond a couple residential houses with ghostly Bills flags fluttering beneath the American flag, the Big Tree Inn bar sat next to three crude totem pole-like carvings of Chris Berman, Jim Kelly and Andre Reed standing guard out front. I kept walking. A little further on was Danny’s South restaurant. Both of these establishments were Buffalo Bill landmarks I’d been told to stake out.

Once you get inside Danny’s foyer you’re greeted by stadium seats pulled out of the WPA-era War Memorial Stadium that was demolished after the Bills moved to Ralph Wilson in 1973. Go a little farther and a shrine dedicated to Jim Kelly—framed autographed photos, cereal box, clippings, the works—is piled up against the wall next to the entrance of the bar. Another sign informs customers of Magic Mike Seege’s weekly magic act, “Buffalo’s best table side magician,” and “Kids eat free.” In the dining area, none of the New Year’s decorations or Christmas trees had been taken down yet. Local sheriffs were clustered by the television eagerly filling their bellies with Danny’s famous Buffalo Chicken Wing soup.

Lumbering over to a table in the corner I took off my gloves and blew some feeling into my hands. The dining room walls were covered with a strange assembly of framed photos of Hollywood celebrities of the 1980s and ’90s in their most famous roles, and Bills players in their prime. The window overlooking the parking lot featured cartoonish illustrations of Bills players frosted onto the glass, including O.J. Simpson beaming in his pads, helmet off, his head gargantuan and a smile frozen on his face.

A wiry, cheerful blond waitress in her 50s wearing a Bills T-shirt rushed over with a smile and a raised pot of coffee. I flipped over the cup on my table.

“You’re shivering love,” she said in an English accent, filling my cup. “Drink this up.”

“What are you grinning at?” she asked, rubbing my shoulder affectionately.

“Just that O.J. Simpson was allowed to stay on your window.”

“Right after the killings, every morning in fact, when we’d come to work and open up, the first thing we’d have to do is remove the knife people would tape into his hand and clean up all the ketchup they splashed against the window.”

Some of the sheriffs looked over from their table and shook their heads.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

“Well,” the waitress said, handing me a menu. “If you walked here at this hour of the night you can’t be from here. Can I get you some of our soup?”

“Sure. I came up from New York City to do a story on Buffalo and the Bills 25 years after Scott Norwood’s missed kick.”

She tensed up and more of the sheriffs looked over to see if something was wrong.

“I’ve got something I’d like you to put in your story. Do you have a notebook?”

“Yep,” I laughed nervously, bracing myself for the set up and punchline. I took out my notebook and pen. “Shoot.”

“I came to Buffalo 25 years ago from England and started a family here with my husband. I’ve worked at Danny’s the whole time. Seven years ago my daughter was hit by a tractor-trailer on Route 63 after she was studying all night for a paper. She was exhausted and stepped onto the road without looking. Lindsay died four days later from brain injuries. It was a terrible accident. I hate the man who did it but we didn’t sue him. We could have, but it was just a horrible accident. She was only 19 and a sophomore at Geneseo College.

“There is no town America that could have supported me through that unspeakable tragedy like this one right here. What this community offered my family after the worst day of our lives still makes me cry. Whatever else you find out about Buffalo, the Matthews family would appreciate if you could include that.”

“You just trivialized anything I could ever find out about Buffalo.”

“They started a benefit to help us with all the medical bills. There’s an annual run in my daughter’s name to raise money for a couple of scholarships in her name. Without this town and the girls I work with in here and everybody, I couldn’t have gotten through that. She was that special. But so are these people right here for what they did.”

I dropped the pen and fell back in my chair.

“Well? Aren’t you going to write that down in your notebook?”

“Yes. I’m just struggling to process what you’ve told me.”

“It’s easy,” she smiled, wiping the mascara from the corners of her eyes. “These are the most decent people on earth. I’ll grab you your soup.”

A couple minutes later the waitress returned with a beautiful older lady, also wearing a Bills T-shirt. Her nametag read “Linda” and she had served at Danny’s for 40 years.

“Karen told me you’re working on a story about our town and the Bills. We used to serve the Super Bowl team here all the time. Bruce Smith and his wife were always such an elegant couple. Thurman Thomas was always Karen’s favorite. But both of us adore Marv Levy.”

Focus on Sport/Getty Images

“Oh my god,” Karen gushed. “I love him. Every time he would come in with his wife they’d request us. One of the finest men you would ever meet. A true gentleman. I have goose bumps right now thinking about him. And his wife. Very fine, refined people.”

“Ralph Wilson used to come here all the time,” Linda laughed. “Always ordered—”

“—the same thing!” Karen elbowed Linda.

“Tuna Melt. We named our Tuna Melt after him, he ordered it so much.”

“I’m from England,” Karen shrugged. “I’m not even a fan of American football. But the camaraderie between those players back then was incredible. And it really infected the town. Maybe the town infected them. It’s that feeling that makes me love football here. I love all of it—except the drunks.”

“Too much alcohol. That’s the only downfall of Sundays in Buffalo. Too much drinking. They spend so much money to go to the game and I simply can’t imagine how you can enjoy anything when you’re that drunk.”

“I work doubles on Sundays here because we serve a brunch,” Karen explained. “The tailgating and everything, it’s too much. We don’t serve alcohol until noon, so if you’re here tomorrow and look out the window with O.J. Simpson smiling and see our parking lot, the drinking is beyond description.”

“It’s one of the reasons all these cops you see here? They all dine here for free. Always have. We look out for them, they look out for us. That’s another thing you can put in your notebook. It’s why our town is known as the City of Good Neighbors.”

V. Game Day

January 3, 2016: Ralph Wilson Stadium, Orchard Park New York

The next morning, before heading over to all the pre-game festivities, just for fun, I called Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada to see if Orenthal James Simpson cared to share any remembrances about his tenure with the Bills. No luck. Maybe he was sleeping in.

Outside my motel room’s front door, pigeon-shit sky above, 25 mph bone-chilling winds howling toward me through the icicles hanging off the roof, the festivities had already been going on for hours, greasy smoke from one of a dozen grills already clogging the air from roasting platters of sausages. Hundreds of people in Jets attire were already finding inventive ways to consume beer in ungodly quantities.

Making my way through the snow toward the stadium, the tribal commitment to alcohol exhibited by thousands of people huddled around bonfires and outside campers made last summer’s week-long bender during the San Fermin festival in Pamplona seem like an effete winetasting. Yet something about the good cheer and camaraderie everywhere I looked felt as if the whole morning was soundtracked by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

Seriously underdressed, I was freezing my ass off and noticed some discount, late-season Bills paraphernalia was being sold out of a tent along the side of Abbott Road—which the police had long since blocked off—so I loaded up for the afternoon at hand—gloves, hat, hoody—in full Go Bills!-carpetbagger mode. The parking lot opposite Ralph Wilson was receiving the last of a convoy of Canadian tourist buses coming in for the game. Next to a Bills school bus a handful of men were trying to knock over bowling pins with a football while others merrily played catch.

I asked someone nearby standing guard by some parked vehicles next to the tent about finding a scalper to buy tickets, and he asked if I wanted the last ticket he had available for the end zone, home of the rabid “Bill’s Mafia.” I took it, asked him a few questions, and then got to Norwood.

“You wanna hear the saddest thing about Norwood you ever heard?” he asked, shaking his head. “I was at Tampa for that Super Bowl when he missed. That was no easy kick. I know a few people who know Scott’s wife. She’s from Buffalo. After that kick he went back to Virginia to the same high school field he was first practicing on with his daddy. The both of them went out there again and in 100 kicks from the same distance he missed in Tampa, he split the uprights each and every time. That next year with the Bills, he hit a couple from over 50. Won that playoff game for us. Hell, he won us some close ones that year leading up to Tampa. Still, he could never shake missing that big one and after the Bills let him go, nobody else bothered to pick him up because of the stink on him. He was a helluva good guy. His dad died in a car wreck some years back. That musta hit him really hard.”

I roamed around the tailgaters for a couple hours reveling in the post-apocalyptic artic splendor of the parking lot. Some jokers practiced beloved WWF maneuvers, suplexing their friends into old furniture. Somebody brought out a can of gas to up the stakes of doing a somersault off the back of a truck into a table set on fire. This in turn set him on fire. Howls and laughter rang out amidst the frigid dystopian backdrop, something like Buffalo’s answer to spring break in Miami Beach.

Over at the sold out Ralph Wilson, not long after kickoff, the Bills, despite 18 players on injured reserve, got off to an early lead against the Jets with a quarterback sneak into the end zone. By the second quarter, they were up by 13 after a second rushing touchdown. The crowd was excited about denying the Jets entry to the playoffs but equally braced for the other shoe to drop.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

Then Buffalo’s kicker, Dan Carpenter, missed an extra point and moped off to the sideline only to slam his helmet with both hands against the ground. It bounced back up and ricocheted off his face. Everybody recognized the bad omen. Soon after the Jets finally scored in the second quarter, a few of their fans sitting a couple rows in front of me jumped up and roared in the direction of the Buffalo Bills marching band that was readying for their halftime show.

“Hey, Mohammad?” someone behind us chimed in. The tone was bizarrely warm and cheerful. A friend of his?

The standing Jets fans incredulously looked back in their direction.

The Jets fans weren’t white, but that was as close as I could get to their ethnicity. Most of the Bills fans in our section were clearly white. I didn’t like the looks of where this was going.

“Mohammad! Hey, you can sit down now. Sit down Mohammad. Just sit down Mohammad.”

No one joined in and no one spoke up, leaving only a strange, queasy standoff before everyone’s attention turned back to football.

After that uplifting moment in American race relations and a missed field goal by the Jets (wide right) going into halftime, New York came back in the third quarter only to have Ryan Fitzpatrick throw three heartbreaking fourth-quarter interceptions. That sealed the Bills’ 22-17 victory in the final game of their season, and sent the Jets and their fans back home where there would be no parade.

After the game, when Bills receiver Sammy Watkins, the hero of the afternoon, jumped into the loving arms of the Bills Mafia, none other than Vincent Gallo’s mother was there in the flesh to embrace him. Then she went a little further. True to form, Janet Gallo, the basis for his horrifying fictional mother in Buffalo 66, so ferociously devoted to the Bills that she famously laments ever having given birth to her son because it caused her to miss a Bills game, did not let the opportunity pass. Despite now being in her 80s, like a wolverine, she shrewdly seized the moment to peel off one of Sammy’s gloves as a souvenir.

VI. Coda

With my train leaving early the next morning, late that night I returned to Danny’s South and grabbed my last bowl of traffic cone-orange Buffalo Chicken Wing soup. Karen wasn’t working, but Linda, the 40-year veteran waitress, was just finishing her shift. I sat down at the table next to The Juice’s beaming smile frosted against the window.

Photo: Brin-Jonathan Butler

“You’re still here?” she laughed, bringing over the last of the night’s coffee.

“Leave in the morning.”

“Did you have a chance to speak to Marv Levy yet?”

“Over the phone,” I said. “Perfect gentleman, exactly like you and Karen described.”

“What about Norwood?”

“The Bills publicist said he’s not really inclined to talk much anymore.”

“You can understand why,” she smiled consolingly, grabbing a bowl of cream packets from another table and sliding it over. “But if you’re not going to talk to him, I’ll make a guilty confession.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I was working here that Super Bowl night 25 years ago. The place was packed as you could imagine. People were holding their breath when Norwood got on the field with eight seconds left. The entire staff had some money riding on it and the way our pool worked out, by the end of the game, the score being what it was, I stood to make $4,200 if Norwood missed that kick. I felt so terrible about wishing this great guy would miss and our team would lose that I had to go outside in the snow and pray. But I went out there and prayed to God, ‘Please make him miss. Please. Please. Please.’ So when I heard everyone inside gasp and that awful collective moan, I was out there doing a victory dance. I still feel terrible.”

“You kept the money?”

She laughed. “Are you kidding?”

On the second Sunday in January 1997, while his Carolina Panthers teammates bundled up to face a minus-17 wind chill in the NFC Championship in Green Bay, defensive end Shawn King turned on a television set at a rehab facility in Charlotte. He was a force of a man, 6′3 and 290 pounds, and one season earlier he was the 36th pick in the NFL Draft.

His weakness was marijuana.

He failed a drug test within a day of signing his rookie contract in 1995 and landed in the NFL’s substance abuse program. He was forced to take regular drug tests, and he took them honestly until he devised a plan to beat the system. Throughout his rookie year, King stayed sober and filled empty Gatorade jugs with clean urine and stacked them in his garage. That offseason, he started slipping clean samples into the cups when the test administrators weren’t looking. The strategy, gross as it was, worked beautifully for most of the 1996 season. But few acts of mischief ever go unnoticed. Most of the season, the test administrator was a guy who “didn't bother to even look your way once I got the cup,” King says. “He would start filling out labels for the samples and getting ready to get out of there.” But near the end of the year, King ran into a test administrator who wouldn’t look the other way. “He wanted to see you pee in the cup, no ifs, ands, or buts.” He had to take the test legitimately, and when the results came back, he got caught.

Photo: Erik Perel /Allsport

The Panthers were enjoying a dream 12-4 season in their second year of existence. They didn’t need this kind of distraction from a backup defensive lineman. They gave King a choice: He could go to rehab and get clean, or he’d be kicked off the team. They told a different story in public, though. Dom Capers, coach of the year that season, said King was being suspended for being tardy tor workouts and missing weightlifting sessions.

The explanation made the team look great in the eyes of the national media, especially when you compared the Panthers to the Cowboys, their opponent in the NFC Divisional Round. The defending world champions from Dallas had gone through controversy after controversy that season, from future Hall of Fame receiver Michael Irvin’s suspension for cocaine possession to a young woman’s allegations that offensive lineman Erik Williams raped her. The franchise known as “America’s Team” was instead becoming a symbol of everything that was wrong with undisciplined athletes in America in the 1990s, an era when things like gangsta rap and grunge music were also being held up as symbols of what was wrong with America. There were lots of things going wrong with America in the mid-1990s, apparently. But the Panthers? Buddy, they’d boot you for being late to a meeting.

Carolina beat Dallas 26-17 on a sunny, 65-degree January Sunday in North Carolina in that Divisional game. Good beat evil. Discipline beat lawlessness. And Shawn King went to rehab the next week.

He had plenty of time to think there, and he didn’t come up with anything good. He believed, wholeheartedly, that using marijuana wasn’t worth the punishment he received. He’d smoked since he was 14 years old, but he turned down other drugs because he didn’t think they were safe. Weed, though? Hell, that should be legal anyway, he’d tell people. But now it was costing him a chance to participate in some of the biggest moments in an athlete’s life.

He’d watched his teammates win one playoff game without him already. He didn’t know if he could handle another. Within a few hours of entering rehab the week after the Dallas game, he made a deal with himself: If the Panthers lost in the conference championship, he’d finish his stay in the facility. If they won, though, if they somehow knocked off the Packers in that miserably cold bowl of twirling yellow towels and pompoms on his television, if they took a trip to the Super Bowl without him, Shawn King was going to kill himself.

“Tonight is going to be a bad night for the devil in Charlotte, North Carolina!” the bodybuilder on stage shouts. It’s a Sunday night in mid-November at The Praising Place Church of God in east Charlotte. All 200 or so seats are full for tonight’s show of the John Jacobs Next Generation Power Force team.

Jacobs is the man on stage. He’s friends with Chuck Norris. In fact, one of Jacobs’ most impressive claims is that Norris saw one single Power Force performance and accepted Christ right there and then. Jacobs is an evangelist who’s been taking teams of strong men around the country for a quarter-century or so, using them to break boards over their heads and rip phone books in half and chew through license plates, all in the name of God. The idea is to give people a show in hopes that they’ll see His power and accept God into their hearts. And maybe give a few donations to the church and the Power Force.

The team also spends quite a bit of time in schools, delivering a message that focuses more on motivation than religion. In any setting, Jacobs’ team was huge in the 1980s and 1990s, riding a post-Reagan tide of evangelical fervor to sell out arenas around the country. The crowds have dwindled, but the sanctuary is passionate tonight. Many people in the church are wearing Panthers shirts and jerseys, celebrating the team’s victory over the Tennessee Titans earlier in the day, a win that pushed them to 9-0.

The church’s senior pastor is wearing a jean jacket and stonewashed jeans and a T-shirt. He opens the service by telling the attendees that it’s ok to dance and scream and holler tonight. “When I move my feet, when I open my mouth, then the darkness flees,” he shouts. He says that Jacobs’ Power Force has helped 1 million people become accepted by the Lord. “The kingdom of God is expanding,” the senior pastor says.

Jacobs, now 56, limps on stage on shaky knees and delivers the line about it being a bad night for the devil here. Then he asks the attendees a question typical of a preacher, a question that at once empowers people to have their own answer yet leads them all to have the same answer, the only answer: “If God is for you, who can be against you?”

He introduces tonight’s two Power Force team members. He says they’re brothers who were born and raised in Louisiana. The Monday Night Football theme song begins to play in the background. One of tonight’s strongmen played briefly in the Chicago Bears organization. His name is Jerome King, and he’s going to chew through a phone book for them, among other things, praise Jesus. And the other played for the Carolina Panthers. His name is Shawn King.

Was it selfish of King to wish for his teammates to lose that day? Was it weak? Do you think he brought it on himself?

Nineteen winters later, tears spill down King’s cheeks as he remembers what happened while he watched that NFC title game from rehab.

Photo: Michael Hebert/Getty Images

His mentor, undersized linebacker Sam Mills, intercepted Brett Favre in the first quarter and returned the ball to the 3-yard line. Then Kerry Collins hit Howard Griffith for a touchdown. The Panthers, a 12-point underdog, were winning 7-0. The Packers came back with a Favre touchdown, but then Carolina’s John Kasay kicked a field goal. King’s teammates had not only scored first in the game, they’d responded to the Packers’ points, too.

This is one of those “Where were you when …” moments for Panthers fans.

King was in rehab, weighing his suicide options.

“I remember sitting in that room and thinking, ‘This is it. This is it,’” he recalls recently at a restaurant in Charlotte. He bites down on his napkin before continuing. “I was such a coward, I didn’t want to cause any pain to myself. I worried that if I did it with a gun, I would just mess myself up. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I just knew that if they went to the Super Bowl, I didn’t want to be here.”

Thank God for Brett Favre and Chris Jacke.

Favre pumped a 6-yard touchdown to Antonio Freeman to make it 14-10 in the second quarter, and the Packers kept going from there. Jacke added three field goals and an extra point the rest of the way, giving the Packers a 30-13 win.

“I don’t know if I was happy; I don’t really know what I was feeling,” King says. “But I was so glad they didn’t win that game. I wouldn’t still be here if they had.”

Where do you find happiness? Where do you find peace? A child? A God? A drug? A sport? Better yet, if you’ve found happiness and peace at all, does it matter where you found them?

Shawn King trots onto the stage at the Praising Place wearing a tank-top and a weightlifting belt. He’s still ripped, and even at more than 280 pounds he has a V-shaped upper body that many men of 43 could only wish for. He smiles at the crowd. After he and his brother perform a few smaller feats — little stuff like bending a metal rod over his head — he takes an HDX carpenter’s hammer and announces that he’ll break the fiberglass shaft over his leg. He grabs the head of the hammer with his left hand and the handle with his right. He presses it against his thigh. He knows exactly where the breaking point is, but even now, after a decade with the Power Force, it takes him a few minutes. He starts sweating. He pauses, straightens up, and sucks in a breath.

As he makes one more attempt, Jacobs speaks into the mic.

“It is so hard to snap a hammer,” Jacobs tells the congregation of Christians. “I want to dedicate this to anyone who’s going through a tough time. I want this to represent heaven being there for you.”

Everybody stands and cheers for King. The steady beat of the club music and the hands waving and shouting at a muscular man on stage makes this seem, at times, like a scene from a bachelorette party.

Finally, the hammer snaps. The congregation high-fives and points at King to tell him he’s amazing. He points to the sky, then takes the microphone to tell his story.

When he was a young boy, King would wake up on weekday mornings and walk to school in West Monroe, Louisiana. Before he left the house, he’d step into his parents’ bedroom to say goodbye to his father. The old man always watched television from a burgundy-upholstered recliner that sat next to his bed. He’d raise a coffee mug to his boy and tell him to have a good day.

The mug was filled with Seagram’s Seven.

Dad didn’t think his son knew. His son knew.

When King came home from school, he’d hear the results of his dad’s day of drinking. He’d sit in his room and listen to his mother “screaming for her life,” as her husband beat her. Then King and his little brother, Jerome, would take their beatings.

He thought this was normal. In fact, he thought he was lucky. Most of his friends were poor. He grew up in a single-story house on an oak-tree-lined street right near the high school. His mother worked for State Farm. His father somehow held a job with the power company despite being an alcoholic. They were middle class. They had a pool table.

“I grew up around a lot of kids who didn’t have their mom and dad,” King says. “I knew how fortunate I was. I just thought this was the stuff you had to go through to be fortunate. I thought it was normal to watch your dad beat on your mom.”

When King was 11, his father was working on a power pole when a live line crashed down on him. It sent a shock through his left arm and out through his leg. King’s father lost his left arm that day, and he still doesn’t wear shorts because of the way his calf muscle looks after the shock blew it out.

King wasn’t a perfect kid anyway. He remembers his first crime was stealing plums off of neighbors’ trees. Looking back now, the reformed man of God sees the plums as a sign of bad things to come. As he became bulkier and taller, shooting from 5-feet to 6-feet and more, the misdeeds grew.

He graduated from West Monroe High in the same class as Willie Robertson, the star of Duck Dynasty. (King still talks to Robertson every few months or so. “Willie’s the same as he was, man. He just didn’t have that beard back then.”)

Photo: Mike Windle/Getty Images for dcp

“Willie’s the same as he was, man. He just didn’t have that beard back then.”

Playing in a stadium where a water tower with “West Monroe” painted on it overlooks the field, King starred on the football team as a tight end. LSU recruited him. A college freshman basketball player named Shaquille O’Neal showed King around campus on his recruiting visit. He signed early and enrolled early, during what would’ve been the second half of his senior year of high school.

He was a 17-year-old boy and out with football players at a place called the Gator Bar in Baton Rouge when he laid the foundation for a reputation that would follow him for years. He was drinking. The football players were making fun of him for being a kid. He drank more to show them he was a man. He picked up a pack of matches and lit one after the other, flicking them at the bar. A bouncer took the matches away. King was within arm’s reach of a big bowl full of other matchbooks. “But I wanted my matches,” he remembers. He punched the bouncer. Fights broke out all over the bar.

That was the first time King went to jail.

A few weeks later, at the Louisiana state high school all-star game, King decided he was too much of an adult for things like high school curfews. After all, he already had college girlfriends. He went wandering the halls of a dormitory the night before the game. He grabbed a fire extinguisher, shoved the hose under the door of another player’s room, and unloaded it.

He got kicked out of the all-star game for that one. The next day, his father showed up holding a lawn chair, ready to watch his son’s crowning high school athletics achievement. King walked up to him in street clothes. His father asked him what the hell was wrong with him.

“All I knew,” King says now, “was that I was big enough that he couldn’t whip me anymore.”

Have you heard the one about Shawn King punching Shaquille O’Neal?

King and Shaq were friends when he got to college in 1990, King says, “but it didn’t take long for me to notice that me and him liked the same girls.”

By the fall of 1991, most of the reasons King came to LSU were gone. He’d moved from tight end to linebacker as a freshman. He played a few games. Then, after the season, the coach who’d recruited him, Mike Archer, was fired. Archer and his assistants had promised to be like fathers to King. “And just like that they were gone,” King says now. Curley Hallman took over the LSU job before the 1991 season. Hallman and King never got along. By November of that year, King had stopped going to class completely, hoping to fail out so he could transfer elsewhere.

Photo: LSU/Collegiate Images/Getty Images

Someone spread a rumor to Shaq that King wanted to fight him

Nothing in college is more important than relationship status, and what transpired that November sounds like something out of a teen movie. Here goes: King started to hang out with a young woman. Shaq liked her, too. Already on his way to being the biggest star in the history of the campus, Shaq told the young woman he wasn’t happy that she was spending time with King instead of him. Here’s how King remembers it: “She told me that Shaq said he feels ugly because she wanted to talk to me and didn’t talk to him.”

The drama continued. Someone spread a rumor to Shaq that King wanted to fight him for trying to steal the young woman away from him. One night in the fall of 1991, O’Neal walked across campus and into King’s dormitory looking for him. To this day, King believes they would’ve just talked it out. But Shaq went one floor too high. He knocked on a door. It wasn’t King’s room, but that of Anthony Marshall, a football player who would go on to play for the Bears. Marshall didn’t care for Shaq. Someone swung. The other swung back. Within seconds, all the big young men in the residence hall — football players and basketball players — were racing to the room.

Stories form crooked branches in cases like this one. Truth fades into the memories of people who have slanted views. It’s hard to tell what actually happened that night. But what King remembers — after about a quarter-century that included a lot of pot and hard football hits and many broken hammers in the name of God — is seeing one of Shaq’s friends, a basketball player named Clarence Ceasar, running down the hallway. King didn’t like Ceasar, not one bit. In fact King believed Ceasar was the one who spread the rumor that he wanted to fight Shaq in the first place.

King grabbed Ceasar. He beat him pretty good. King was one of four football players arrested that night. No basketball players went to jail. But Hallman and LSU basketball coach Dale Brown got into a shouting match in the hallway. Brown stepped into Hallman’s face and said, “Listen, rookie…” according to a 1994 story published in Sports Illustrated.

Years later, LSU fan message boards still spread rumors from the fight. In one thread from 2008, a poster said King “pulled Shaq’s shirt over his head and beat the tar out of him.”

King says that never happened. But his LSU career was over before the following fall.

The robbery was supposed to be simple. This was after King transferred to Louisiana-Monroe for his junior season. When he arrived, he couldn’t believe how loose the rules were. No curfews. Nobody telling him he couldn’t have women in his dorm room. With all this partying to do, he needed money.

One day he hopped into the driver’s seat of his white Chevrolet Chevette. His friend Lawrence Davis took the passenger’s seat. King handed Davis his .380 pistol. The plan was to have Davis run into the house where known bookies lived, rob the bookies, then run out, and they’d drive off in the Chevette.

The plan worked, right up until Davis opened the door to the house. A few minutes later King saw Davis sprinting out with two people chasing him. King drove the car toward him and pushed open the passenger’s side door. He yelled for his friend to hop in. But Davis looked at him and ran the other way. King couldn’t understand it. He inched forward and watched his friend stop running, watched him put his hands on his knees to try to catch his breath, and watched the men catch him and grab him. They called the cops and King drove off. A few days later, Davis was out on bond when King saw him again. King asked him why he didn’t get in the car.

“I didn’t want to get you in trouble,” Davis said.

Who’s helped you get to where you are? Has anyone ever sacrificed something to allow you have the life you have now? Who didn’t run to your passenger’s side door?

King believes his friend saved his future that day. Davis served 12 years in jail for armed robbery. He died three years ago at 40 years old from an overdose. King, meanwhile, turned his attention to football, and by the end of his senior year, he was projected as a fourth- or fifth-round pick. He was just the fourth Louisiana-Monroe player chosen to play in the Senior Bowl, and after the game experts had him going as high as the first round in the 1995 draft.

That spring, Warren Sapp from the University of Miami was the top defensive line prospect. But Sapp failed a drug test at the NFL combine, sending him down on everybody’s list. He landed 12th overall. Four other defensive linemen went off the board before King was selected with the fourth pick of the second round, 36th overall, by the expansion Carolina Panthers. For all of his transgressions before and after, this will always be true: Shawn King was the first rookie defensive lineman the Panthers ever drafted.

He didn’t know how to write a check when he signed his rookie contract of $750,000 a year, but he knew how to roll a joint. His friends warned him not to smoke before he reported to training camp, but if you’re a guy who’s already escaped an abusive father, survived being run out of your first college, and avoided being arrested in an armed robbery, you start to think you can get away with things.

King lit up the day before his drug test. He took something to cover it up. He doesn’t remember what it was; he’s taken a great many things to cover up marijuana in his life. Either way, it didn’t work. He was placed in the NFL’s drug treatment program before he played a game. At the time the first offense didn’t come with a press release or a public statement. In fact, King’s only penalty was that he was stripped of four game checks.

He bought a house on a lake just over the South Carolina line, not far from Charlotte. It became a party house. Friends came to visit. An old buddy from Louisiana, Rodney Harris, flew up to stay with him. One night, King gave Harris money to go to a strip club. On his way home, Harris was a mile away from the lake house when he ran off the road and hit a tree and died.

One friend in jail and one friend dead, King became a homebody. He wished for the days when he could smoke weed in his house without worrying about tests or suspensions. Throughout his rookie year, he saved clean piss in bottles in his garage, planning for his future.

That offseason, he took up smoking again. Every time he took a mandatory test, he snuck in a cup of the stuff he’d been saving in his garage. He did this into the 1996 season. The Panthers were one of the big stories in the NFL that year. They caught fire late and ran to the NFC West division title. King made a few big plays along the way, including a 12-yard touchdown after a fumble recovery in a shutout victory over Tampa Bay in Week 14. It was part of the Panthers’ season-ending, seven-game winning streak, earning them a 12-4 record and a bye in the playoffs.

After the last game, King showed up for another drug test with a sample of urine he’d saved from the year before. Once again, the enforcement officer that day watched him closely. King was unable to use the clean urine, and had to take the test.

When he learned he would be suspended, he was embarrassed. Then he was mad. As far as he was concerned, most of the league was smoking, and he was paying a price while they were having fun. The NFL’s relationship with drugs at the time was strained, though. In March of that year, Cowboys receiver Michael Irvin had been arrested for cocaine possession. He didn’t fail a drug test, but the league suspended him for five games. In fact, according to the book The Year of the Cat, by Scott Fowler and Charles Chandler, at the end of the 1996 season, six of the most recent 19 players who’d been busted for drugs were Cowboys.

King would’ve been known as the 20th player, but he says the Panthers told him to remain quiet until the investigation was done. They gave him the ultimatum about going to rehab.

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have now passed laws to legalize marijuana in some form, but in the mid-1990s, drugs were drugs, and in NFL terms, marijuana was the same evil as cocaine or heroin.

The difference, though, is that marijuana is easier to detect. King watched several players in the drug program switch to harder drugs that were less likely to show up on tests. That’s right, better to snort coke or shoot heroin or pound a couple 40s and test clean than take a toke and test positive. King was terrified of cocaine. He’s had asthma all his life, and he was just a teen when Maryland basketball player Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose after being taken No. 2 overall in the 1986 NBA draft. He was certain that if he tried cocaine, he’d die after snorting the first line.

Aside from one brush with ecstasy in the late 1990s, King stayed monogamous with marijuana.

“The program either pushes you to drink or to do a drug like cocaine that will get out of your system in 2-3 days,” King says. “I went in with a lot of guys who were in for marijuana, and they came out addicted to cocaine.”

He was suspended for the first six games in the 1997 season. He played the rest of the year. In the preseason in 1998, he says he tore a biceps muscle trying to tackle Jaguars running back Fred Taylor. Other reports have him failing another test. Either way, he missed the whole year. The Colts took him in 1999, and he missed four games because he was late to meetings. Then he failed one more test, and the league put him out for the entire 2000 season.

Tired of the embarrassment, he retired. In six years as an NFL player, he played in only 48 games. Depending on whether you believe the 1998 season was lost due to injury or drugs, he was suspended for either 26 games or 42. Either way, he missed nearly half his career.

That should be the low point, right? Bring on redemption! you might think.

But wait.

When he’s preaching in front of a church group, King slides all of that — LSU and the Panthers and the Colts and the suspensions — into a folder of “troubles.” Or, “I went through some stuff.” He hardly goes into detail at all. He defines those days, though, as the time in his life when he didn’t know God.

One day when he was 17, he tells the wide-eyed church crowd that night in November, a preacher at his Southern Baptist church in West Monroe was talking about heaven and hell and pointed at King and told him he wasn’t holy enough. “These are the words I heard come out of his mouth: You are not good enough for God,” King preaches. “So at 17 years old, I made a decision never to go back to church again.”

The fight with the bouncer over matches? Busting up Clarence Ceasar and getting kicked out of LSU? Driving the getaway car at an armed robbery?

Logan Cyrus / logancyrus.com

“I went through some stuff”

“I had a lot of anger issues,” he preaches. “But when I got to LSU … I knew the anger was out of control because any time I was out with my friends, if anybody pushed the wrong button, I was willing to give up everything I’d worked for and everything I’d dreamed about.”

Stories are kind of like drugs — the narrator is the user, and the more you mess with them, the more they affect your memory. King has told the sanitized version of his story so many times, he’d forgotten many of the details until we talked about them this fall.

The turning-point event in King’s life, though, remains the same every time he tells it.

Jordan King was born two months early in November 2000. Shawn King was at the end of his final year-long suspension in the NFL. After a few weeks in an incubator, the baby came home with his dad and mom to their house in West Monroe. King realized then that football didn’t matter all that much to him — a realization many people around him came to years earlier — and he decided to stay home.

When Jordan was 2 years old, he was lying in bed with his father and breathing hard. King thought it was just a cold. Then Jordan crawled up to his father’s shoulder with tears in his eyes. King took him to the hospital. Doctors said Jordan’s lungs were underdeveloped and that he’d have to stay a few nights. King went home to get clothes for the stay. When he was there, doctors called to say Jordan had gone into cardiac arrest.

King ran back to the hospital, where doctors had stabilized his boy. Soon they told him they’d have to medevac Jordan to another hospital that could better serve him. The hospital was three hours away by car. The helicopter took Jordan, and King went home to pack more clothes. He was digging through his closet, throwing shirts and shoes and cash into the bag, when he made another deal with himself.

“I remember looking up in that closet and turning to a God I didn’t know and saying, ‘This is all I can bear. If he goes, I go. I’m not going to stay here.’”

He drove through the night. When he got to the hospital, doctors met him at the door and told him his boy would survive. They wound up staying in that hospital for four months, and at some point, King decided that the conversation with God in the closet should keep going. Soon he was saved. A few years later, he was on Jacobs’ Power Force team.

As King wraps up the story and sermon at The Praising Place, the congregation shouts “Amen!” back to him. His last words are, “Thank you, God.”

Then he grabs two axes and holds them high above his head. The trick is that he will hold them by the handle and use his wrists and forearms and triceps to tilt the blades toward his face, then back up, over and over. After 10 reps, he starts to groan. After 20, his massive arms start to tremble. He’ll do it 37 times.

The first words spoken on stage after King says, “Thank you, God,” are these, from Jacobs: “If he has one slip, these axes could go plunging through his eye socket.”

One last feat of strength for the night.

It involves handcuffs.

Shawn King walks off stage with his arm around a police officer and opens a door to a hallway that leads to the church offices. The officer, who says he has 27 years of experience in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, was selected from the crowd to help with this trick, because who better to handcuff a man than the law?

In the back, King wraps duct tape around his wrists, and the officer locks him in on the third click of the handcuffs. Click. Click. Click. The officer opens the door and leads King into the church. The congregation rises to its feet. The dance-style music blares. They clap and shout, in rhythm with the beat, Go! Go! Go!

King’s brother, Jerome, shouts, “Break the chains, Shawn! Break the chains, Shawn!”

King grimaces. Veins show like rivers on his bald head. More clapping with the music. More grimacing. More veins.

“Don’t ever give up on Shawn King,” Jerome tells the crowd. “He’ll never give up on you.”

A man in the front row with a bright yellow shirt whips out his cell phone to record the spectacle with his left hand, while pumping his right fist like he’s in an old episode of The Arsenio Hall Show. Jacobs sits in a chair watching. King lets out a deep roar.

The chain snaps. Jerome throws a towel on his brother’s head to wipe the sweat.

The congregation rejoices, hooting and hollering and acting a little crazy. After a few seconds of this, Jerome interrupts and snaps them straight, back to the normal and quiet and virtuous churchgoers they are:

“Bow your heads with me now.”

There’s no trick to this, King insists. It’s not magic. It’s not even the power of God. It’s something more simple: growth.

“Once you’ve broken something once,” he says, “you understand how much pressure you need to put on it to break it without hurting yourself.”

Here’s Shawn King — 43-year-old man of the Lord, survivor of depression and suicidal thoughts, former NFL defensive lineman, fan of marijuana, breaker of chains. Father.

He lives in a brick ranch house on Sharon Amity Road in Charlotte, not far from the main intersection in one of the few middle-class neighborhoods remaining near the center of one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. He’s divorced now, but his ex-wife lives just a few miles away. They’re both raising Jordan, a shy 15-year-old who plays for the Myers Park High School varsity football team. King is an assistant coach for the team, of sorts. He doesn’t call plays or do film sessions, and he doesn’t always make it to the start of practice. But whenever he’s there, he’s the most positive person on the coaching staff, just a big man in a visor and sunglasses, walking the sideline offering encouragement to anybody he can find, coaches or players or cheerleaders or parents or whoever.

Logan Cyrus / logancyrus.com

He never scowls, just smile after smile after smile. Watching him console and celebrate the kids on the team, it’s hard to picture him as the young man with anger problems who pulled Shaq’s shirt over his head and beat the tar out of him — that’s how that story went, right? Or a young man who was going to kill himself if his team made it to the Super Bowl without him.

His number 96 Panthers jersey hangs in a frame on his living room wall. On an afternoon in late December, the Discovery Channel is on the television. A stick of incense is burning in a wooden holder that’s sitting on the hardwood floor. King has just finished raking the yard and filling nine bags with leaves.

“Yeah, man, and Jordan didn’t help me with a single one,” King says, waving his hand at his son. “He just stayed back there playin’ his video games.”

“Man, I was sleepin’,” Jordan says. “Had a long day.”

Today was the last day of school before the Christmas holiday break. “Man, you didn’t even have a full day,” King says, laughing at the next generation of him.

King moved here from Louisiana two years ago to be closer to Jordan, who was living in Charlotte his mother. King is one of several former NFL players who settled in the city to raise children — others include Randy Moss, Dre Bly, and London Fletcher.

King joined a group of plaintiffs in a recent class action lawsuit against the NFL, claiming he suffered mental and physical problems from concussions suffered while in the league. He is still waiting to be tested to see if he has football-related neurological issues. He saw the movie Concussion over the holidays. The most unnerving parts, he says, were the scenes of the former players switching from happy to depressed, almost without warning.

“I’m in pretty good place now,” he says. “That really scared me, man.”

Logan Cyrus / logancyrus.com

Here’s how good a place that is: Sixteen years after that January Sunday when he sat in rehab and vowed to kill himself if his Carolina teammates made it to the Super Bowl, King says he can’t wait to root for this year’s Panthers in Super Bowl 50 this weekend. In fact, he has a Power Force program that morning in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and he plans to hustle back to Charlotte — about a six-hour drive — to watch the game with a few old teammates.

King didn’t watch football for three or four years after he quit, but during that time when he found God, he says he realized he brought most of his problems on himself. “Hate the sin, not the sinner,” he says now.

King’s mother died eight years ago. But just before that, his father got saved and sober. Now the two men talk three or four days a week.

Mostly, though, his life is about the Power Force and Jordan. They grab pizza at the Pizza Peel restaurant near their house so often that the father says they ought to buy stock in the place. King also has a daughter, Rudy, who lives in Alabama. Rudy is the half-sister of Jordan. Her other half-brother, born to a father other than King, is Cam Robinson, an offensive lineman at Alabama.

“They’re the reason I live,” King says of Jordan and Rudy. “I did Shawn King a long time ago. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

King rises up from his couch and picks up the burned-out incense stick and drops it on the end table. He slides the wooden holder behind his framed diploma from Louisiana-Monroe. Although he says his views on marijuana haven’t changed, he won’t admit to smoking. He gives too many speeches to too many kids around the country with the Power Force, he says, to be known as a marijuana user. He worries it would be a distraction from his message, which is that everybody can make his own choices.

Looking at the person he is now, though — the man with the big voice and the beard shouting words of encouragement on the sidelines to kids, the man who makes congregations around the country stand and shout, “Amen!” the man laughing with his sniffling, sleeping, video-game-playing teenage son on a relaxed Friday afternoon just before Christmas — who cares what it is that’s making him content? Whether you think watching strong men break hammers over their knees is a sign of God or a silly sideshow or even just a trick to get you to tithe, whether you believe in the story of Jesus or don’t, whether you’re in favor of legalizing marijuana or not, whether you have kids or never will, here is a former defensive lineman who has twice thought about committing suicide, and he’s now free of chains and happy as hell.

Who are we to be the judge?

Logan Cyrus / logancyrus.com

Carrie Molnar leans forward on the bleachers in the gym at West Holmes High School in Millersburg, Ohio. The manicured nails of her right hand dig into her cheek as she stares at the court, watching her daughter Natalie, a senior, play.

“Oh boy,” she says. “Oh boy. This is way too close.”

It’s early December, and the Knights of West Holmes County are playing the Hiland Hawks of Berlin, in East Holmes. They’re playing in a gym that West Holmes calls “The Dungeon.” Everyone here has already walked through a lobby that features a huge rock with an embedded sword — a replica of Excalibur — and through a doorway to the gym designed to look like it will deposit you into the type of room that holds people against their will. But once you get through, you’re in a 15-year-old gymnasium, a hotbed that seats 3,000 people.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Holmes County, Ohio, is home to the world’s largest Amish settlement, bigger even than that of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Columbus and Cleveland and Pittsburgh are all about the same distance away — too far. There are no movie theaters in the county. The nearest mall is 30 miles away in New Philadelphia and takes about 45 minutes to get there — if you’re driving a car, and this being Amish country, many people neither drive cars nor go to the movies.

It’s also home to just two high schools, two schools with the most storied girls’ basketball programs in the state.

Combine the two schools’ records (Hiland started playing girls’ basketball in 1968, West Holmes in 1975), and you get a remarkable 1,517 wins versus 466 losses, a .765 winning percentage over more than 40 years of basketball. Hiland hasn’t had a losing season since they went 10-11 in 1983-84. West Holmes last losing season was in 1998-99.

Ohio first held a girls’ basketball tournament in 1976 and since then, the two schools have combined for 21 trips to the Final Four of their division, 15 championship game appearances and eight state championships. Hiland won three state championships over the course of four years, from 2005-08. In the 1980s, West Holmes won three state championships, and, in the last four seasons, it’s made the finals three times and won once.

When these two teams play, the game brings out the type of crowd you don’t normally see at a high school girls’ basketball game. It’s the type of game that can fill The Dungeon.

Despite their difference in size — Hiland (Division IV) is one of the smaller schools in the state with just about 400 students in grades 7-12, while West Holmes (Division II), has double that in just grades 9-12 — they play each other just once every year. It’s a game nearly everyone in the county looks forward to. Over the previous 10 years, the series is tied at 5-5. Every year, the game is ridiculously tense. Every year, the game seemingly comes down to the final moments.

This game is shaping up to be no different. On the court, the defense is relentless. Both teams are having trouble making shots, because every shot is contested. Indeed, at the start neither team scored for the first several minutes in the game, until Hiland’s Kennedy Schlabach hit a three with a hand in her face. West Holmes responded as the first quarter grinded on, with two three-pointers by Kacie Leppla. But other shots just weren’t falling, and defenders, emboldened by the fact the referees were not blowing their whistles, got just a little closer to the offensive player they were matched up against.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

In the stands, the fans are also tense. Hiland brought a large group, including about 50 students. Dressed all in white, they stood up at the tip and haven’t sat down since. They’ve been loud, and the West Holmes fans, dressed all in blue behind the team bench, have responded in kind.

“Oh boy,” Molnar says after a West Holmes player misses a free throw. “It’s much easier playing than watching.”

Holmes County is a place where half the farmers still till their land the way many of our ancestors did more than 100 years ago. It’s a county that has tiny villages — Charm, Walnut Creek, Winesburg — where you are more likely to see horse and buggies than cars. Here, in Holmes County, history is not just a thing to know to avoid repeating. History must be known, so it can be repeated. So it can be replicated, because what happened in the past is what was good and what was right.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Above: Mark Losinger

And in that way, in a world where everything is so focused on the present and the future, on technology and ways we can always make things better, many of the people in Holmes County, even those who no longer strictly adhere to their Amish heritage, think otherwise.

“It’s different here,” says Mark Lonsinger of the Voice of Holmes County, a Millersburg-based website that offers all kinds of media content covering the county, including live-streams of West Holmes and Hiland basketball games, both boys and girls.

Lonsinger, who lives in Coshocton County, which is just to the south of Holmes, has been calling basketball games on the radio and the web since the late 1970s. And while none of the girls (or boys, for that matter) who play basketball in Holmes County are Amish — the Amish drop out of public schools by middle school, if they go to public school at all — daily life is different from other places.

“There’s a work ethic, there’s a family life, there’s a community life that is a throwback to the way it used to be in this country,” he says. “Is it all perfect? No. But I’m just saying it’s a different type of raising that the kids get, a different type of community structure than what exists in a lot of places today.”

Take, for instance, Dave Schlabach, the head coach of the Hiland Hawks. He graduated from Hiland in 1984. He’s now been coaching the girls’ team since the 1991-92 season. In all that time, he’s had two players who came from families where the parents were divorced. Two. Out of more than 100 players. The divorce rate in the United States ranges between 40 and 50 percent. For the parents of Schlabach’s players, it’s less than 2 percent.

“High school is challenging enough,” Schlabach says. “This place makes it a little easier, but that’s also why I have to build some toughness too.”

Lisa Patterson, the head coach at West Holmes, graduated from that school in 1988. She played on a championship team, and now coaches the daughters of the girls who were once teammates.

Both Schlabach and Patterson moved back to Holmes County after going to college because that’s what, ultimately, people from Holmes County generally do. Because they like it. And neither coach has ever thought about coaching another team anywhere else.

These are the things that make Holmes County a different kind of place. And maybe it’s that strict adherence to what has happened in the past, or maybe it’s something different. But Lonsinger thinks the past holds the key, especially for the basketball programs.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Indeed, anywhere you go in the county, there are people who are willing to talk about girls’ basketball like they talk about the Packers in Green Bay or the Red Sox in Boston. Invariably, the talk drifts to two coaches — one long-ago retired and moved away and the other dead far too young. Both men are still equally present in their communities. Both are spoken of in reverence. Both have taken on a mythical quality that almost makes one wonder if what they accomplished was real.

Make no mistake. It was real, and that’s one of the things that make these programs so storied. Because it’s the stories each community shares that brings them both together.

Carrie Molnar wasn’t always Carrie Molnar. She was once Carrie Wells. Carrie Molnar is just as tiny as Carrie Wells was, and she still has the same short hair that didn’t need to be put into a ponytail when she played. But now, instead of being down on the court — at the real “Dungeon,” which now is the gym at the middle school — she sits in the stands and remembers what it was like to play while she watches her daughter do what she did so long ago.

Carrie was a scrappy defensive specialist for West Holmes, the type of player who head coach Jack Van Reeth put on the opposing team’s point guard, so she could press all the way down the court, swatting away the ball from the opponent when she had just the tiniest opening.

It was the late fall of 1983, and Van Reeth was a new coach for the girls’ team, although he wasn’t new to West Holmes.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Van Reeth, also the assistant principal, had been coaching the West Holmes boys’ basketball team for nearly a decade. He was known for always dressing with a shirt and tie, for standing on the sidelines with his arms folded, and stomping his feet whenever he wasn’t happy, which was most of the time. He would shout at the referees and growl at his players.

In the 1960s, he’d even coached a team of boys from Dresden to a state title. Before the 1983-84 season, though, several people came to Van Reeth and asked him to switch over to the girls’ team.

One of those men was Herm Cline, the father of a girl named Lisa. Lisa was a junior, and, as far as everyone in Holmes County was concerned, about to change girls’ basketball.

Van Reeth said no.

“I’m too outgoing,” he told Herm Cline. But by outgoing, he didn’t mean welcoming.  He meant just the opposite. He meant too loud, too hard on players, too tough, no nonsense. “They’ll never play for me,” he said.

“Let’s give it a try,” Herm told Van Reeth.

Van Reeth relented. He went to the girls on the team, which included Carrie Wells and Shane Ridenbaugh. Along with Lisa Cline, those three juniors would make up the core of the team — Cline the unstoppable scorer, Ridenbaugh the rugged rebounder and Wells the relentless, always-pesky defender.

“I’ve coached one way for 25 years,” Van Reeth told the girls. “I’m not going to change. You’re going to change.”

While this coaching philosophy might not cut it today, it worked back then. Each girl on an already good team got better. The Knights, coached by a man who coached girls like they were boys, went 28-0. In the championship game, a game played against conference rival Orrville (the home of Bobby Knight), Carrie was guarding the Red Riders’ point guard in overtime. In the final minute, she knocked the ball away and went diving for it, colliding with Lisa Cline who was also going after the loose ball. West Holmes got possession, Cline hit a layup and the Knights won by a single point, taking their first state championship.

They were just getting started.

The next season, the Knights of West Holmes would also go 28-0. In January 1985 against Akron Coventry, Lisa Cline scored 76 points, breaking the state record of 74, set three years before. That is still the record in Ohio, and nobody has really even come near it.

“Jack knew she was getting close,” Molnar says.

“Get her the ball,” Van Reeth told the girls in timeout huddles. “Hells bells, girls. Get her the ball!”

“We wanted her to get the record,” Molnar says, “because we wanted to be a part of that, too.”

With 56 straight wins, everyone thought the streak would end sometime the next season. Cline graduated as the third all-time leading scorer in Ohio and the record-holder for points in a season. She went on to Ohio State, where she played for four years and was named the Big Ten Freshman of the Year and later the Big Ten Player of the Year, leading the Buckeyes to three Big Ten championships. Ridenbaugh, the team’s leading rebounder, went to Ohio State where she was Lisa Cline’s roommate. Molnar graduated and played at Capital in Columbus.

They weren’t supposed to keep winning, and yet they kept winning. Even as the lineup changed, the approach and the results, did not. Another 28-0 record in the 1985-86 season. Another championship.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

It wasn’t until the team’s 23^rd game of the 1986-87 season that the streak came to an end, at the hands of Wellsville in a regional final game played at Muskingum College.

The team had won 108 straight games, still the record in Ohio. One girl who played on the third championship team, and who was also on the team that saw the streak end, was Lisa Straits. Lisa Straits would one day become head coach Lisa Patterson.

While there may be many ways in which Patterson is similar to the man who coached her, there is one difference: Unlike Van Reeth, Lisa isn’t overly concerned with getting lots of media attention. She doesn’t offer a lot of comments after games and she doesn’t make bold predictions about what her team will do next. Instead, she stands on the sideline, wearing West Holmes’ blue and red, pacing back and forth. She lets her team do all the talking, and it’s done a lot of that over the last few years.

Every November, anyone associated with basketball, girls or boys, in the East Holmes School District, gathers at the Der Dutchman Restaurant in Walnut Creek for the Perry Reese Jr. Tip-Off Banquet. The Der Dutchman serves honest to goodness Amish cooking — pan-fried chicken, mashed potatoes, noodles, green beans and pie — lots and lots of pie, apple, Dutch apple, blackberry, cherry, peach and more. It’s the type of cooking these families, or most of them anyway, have grown up on.

The banquet kicks off the high school basketball season for Hiland High School. All of the players and coaches, all of their parents and families, all of the boosters, they all gather in the banquet room to eat and visit.

But really, they gather to hear stories about Perry Reese Jr.

You may recognize Reese’s name. In 2001, Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated wrote an epic story on how Reese, a black man, ended up in Holmes County, which at the time, was 99.9 percent white. In the eastern part of the county, that number was actually 100 percent, with most of that population being either Amish or Mennonite. Both religions come from the Protestant tradition known as Anabaptism and are often confused by outsiders. While both groups believe in simple living, Mennonites express that belief differently from Amish, who believe one must remove him or herself from contemporary society as much as possible.

Smith wrote the piece after Reese died in 2000 of a brain tumor, a death that devastated the community. Reese had such an impact on the county that Dave Schlabach estimates there are about 50 kids running around the area with Reese as a first or middle name.

Reese however, coached boys’ basketball. Smith’s story details the magical season of 1991-92, one that started with four boys being caught stealing from local businesses and ended with the team winning the state championship.

Schlabach took over the girls’ varsity team that same season.

“It really encouraged me to build a good program and to provide the opportunity for our kids to play in a state championship,” he says, “so they could see what it was all about.”

In 2001, one year after Reese’s death, Schlabach, whose brother Mark coaches the boys’ team at Hiland, started the annual banquet. The sole purpose of the banquet was to keep the memory of Reese alive in Eastern Holmes County, to tell the younger generations about the man who meant so much to them, not just on the basketball court, but off it as well.

“At least my players get to hear, once a year, stories about Coach Reese,” Schlabach says. “But it’s harder and harder. You tell the story, but the kids don’t feel the effect. I don’t know what’s going to happen as the years pass by.”

Over the years, Schlabach has brought in 10 former players to tell stories about Reese. He’s also brought in other people from outside the district, people nobody in Holmes County likely had ever heard of, and yet everyone who talks was deeply affected by Reese. Every year, there’s someone else coming from somewhere around the country — from North Carolina, Atlanta, Canton — to sit and tell stories about how Perry Reese Jr. changed their life.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Many of those stories center on how much Reese screamed at his players, but they’re told with a knowing laugh and a smile, as if it’s obvious now why everything Reese was doing was for their own good, even if it might not have been so clear then. And all the stories always end in a one-on-one talk with Reese, where hearts are opened and lessons are learned and love, real love, is felt. If it sounds like a cheesy sitcom, so be it. Everyone who experienced Reese is still moved as they retell the stories.

In 2011, one of the people doing the storytelling was Junior Raber, the star of the 1992 state champions. Raber was part of the magic of 1992 as much as Reese was. In the state semifinals, the Hawks were down by two with just seconds to go. Hiland had to bring the ball up the court, and Raber heaved a shot from half-court at the buzzer. It missed, but he was fouled. Raber knocked down all three free throws and sent Hiland to the championship game, which they won handily.

But at the Tip-Off banquet, he told all those younger players, boys and girls alike, not about the last-second shot, but about the time Coach Reese sent him to the locker room with three minutes left in a game because the coach didn’t like the way he was acting. Raber, after all, had kicked a chair after being taken out of the game. The chair went flying, and Reese looked at him and said “Get into the locker room.”

After the game, which Hiland won, Reese came storming into the locker room and went right after his star.

“He comes straight at me and laid into me,” Raber said.

Then, after everyone had showered up and was ready to leave, Reese approached Raber again.

“Junior, you’re riding home with me,” the coach said.

“It was a heart-to-heart that we had on that drive,” Raber said at the banquet. “He taught me a whole heck of a lot more than how to play basketball.”

That’s what Schlabach wants his girls to hear. He wants them to hear about Reese, and to know that he strives every single day to be as much like Reese as he can be.

He’s hard on his girls. He’ll yank them out of games if they’re not playing hard enough. He’ll take away their iPhones if he’s not happy with practice. He’ll yell and scream at them at halftime or after a game. He’ll make them practice at 11 p.m. after a really bad game, and then he’ll kick them out of practice if they’re still not working hard enough. He’ll do anything it takes to get the absolute most out of every girl on his team. These stories about Reese show the girls why their coach acts the way he does, lets them know that once you get beyond that bluster, there is someone who cares so incredibly much about the girls on that team that he would do anything for them. And then they will do anything for him.

Because that’s how Coach Reese was.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

On the basketball court, it seems to have worked. Hiland has been to more Final Fours in Ohio than any other school in all divisions. They’ve won four state championships. Forty-three players from this tiny little school in the hills of Holmes County have gone on to play all levels of college basketball, including more than a few in Division I.

“I can probably do things here that I couldn’t do everywhere,” Schlabach says. “But our parents understand that we have 100 percent their best interest at heart. We’re not just trying to produce a good player or athlete, but great kids who are now business leaders in our community. Our kids need to be challenged and disciplined, and that buy-in really creates a strong bond. I doubt that happens at other schools.”

There’s another story about Reese that Schlabach likes to tell.

In 1994-95, Hiland was poised to have a great year. But then, as can often happen in sports, the Hawks’ two best guards both tore their ACLs about halfway through the season. The day Schlabach heard about the second tear, he was sitting in his office right before practice, moping.

Reese walked in and hit him upside the head.

“He reminded me that I still had 15 kids out there waiting on me to come to practice,” Schlabach says, “and how I walk out and approach that practice was going to determine the rest of our year.”

And, Schlabach says, “He reminded me that it wasn’t about me.”

“I finally figured it out,” he says now. “The year was never about you as the coach. It was always about your players and getting them to where they needed to be.”

Throughout the second quarter, Hiland runs a full-court press against the Knights. Natalie Molnar, Carrie’s daughter, finds herself guarding Kennedy Schlabach — Dave’s daughter — and attaches herself to the three-point shooter like her mom used to attach herself to point guards. West Holmes turns the ball over 10 times in the quarter. There are traveling calls and bad passes, all caused by how the Hawks fly to the ball. Hiland gets few points out of these turnovers, though, because every time they go to shoot, there is a hand, or multiple hands, in the shooter’s face.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Above: Natalie Molnar

At halftime of the West Holmes-Hiland game, the score looks like one from the 1980s. West Holmes leads 15-13. The Knights have two players who have already committed to playing college basketball. Hannah Clark, whose mother, Julie, played on the West Holmes team that made it to state in the mid-1990s, will be playing at Division I Northern Kentucky. Brittleigh Macaulay will be playing at Division II Ohio Dominican. Combined, they have two points in the game.

Fans mill about in the stands, talking. Molnar talks with Randy Martin. Martin, 51, has attended just about every West Holmes girls’ basketball game that’s been played, going back to when he was a student in the late-1970s and early-80s. Now he drives a semi, delivering lumber around the county. He graduated from West Holmes in 1981, and in the mid-80s, he was one of several men who Jack Van Reeth brought in to practice against the girls’ team.

Martin is a burly guy, and while he may not have been as burly just after graduating from high school, he certainly would have seemed burly to a teenage girl, at least on the basketball court.

“He said he wanted us to rough ‘em up a little,” Martin says of Van Reeth over the din of the pep band.

That’s the general consensus: John Coakley, the official scorekeeper for West Holmes, Van Reeth and Molnar, they all say those practices were designed to create toughness in the girls.

“Sometimes they complained,” Van Reeth says, “but they soon learned that they didn’t complain.”

If anybody had a right to complain, it may have been the men who were brought in to practice.

“Shane (Ridenbaugh) and Lisa Cline were so freakishly strong, they roughed us up,” Martin says.

Today, the West Holmes defense is roughing up the Hiland offense. Unfortunately, the same thing is happening on the other end of the court.

“Hannah is getting past that first defender and thinking she is open,” Martin says.

“They need to take advantage of their size,” Molnar says.

“They haven’t done that all season,” Martin says.

Basketball, more than any other sport, is one where excellent teamwork can beat pure athleticism. With ball movement and player movement and a keen understanding of what every single person on the floor will do in any given second, and with the energy and stamina to play harder than you’ve ever played before, a team of short girls from the relative middle of nowhere can beat any city or parochial team with super-athletic guards and towering post players in the paint.

In Holmes County, they get this idea of teamwork. And it starts with the Amish and Mennonite communities that call the county home.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

During the last census, 42 percent of Holmes County residents were Amish. There are even predictions that the county could be the first in the country to be majority Amish, and that it could happen by 2030.

You only need to watch a barn-raising to understand how the Amish, and their less conservative brethren, the Mennonite, work as a team. Last May in Wayne County, the county directly to the north of Holmes, a fire destroyed the workshop of an Amish shed and swing-set builder.

Two days later, while the rubble was still smoldering, the local Amish community already had a new and bigger workshop framed. Less than two weeks after the fire, the building was done.

Or consider healthcare. The Amish do not buy health insurance. If someone gets sick, everyone in the community chips in to pay the bills.

How does this translate to basketball success? Well, on the East Holmes side of the county, where the vast majority of the Amish and Mennonite live, Schlabach says that half his players speak Pennsylvania Dutch, which means they have Amish relatives. Even Schlabach’s dad was born and raised Amish. In fact, there’s a huge population in Holmes County of former Amish, folks who felt they could live simply and maintain that mindset while participating in other parts of society. Nearly all of those former Amish now attend one of the more than a dozen Mennonite churches in the county. The sect shares a similar philosophy but is not so strict.  Mennonites, for example, can wear regular clothing, drive cars … and play basketball.  Generally speaking, the Amish don’t play organized sports because they believe they promote competitiveness and immodesty.

Still, that work ethic and that desire to help one another and play as a team translates well into basketball, and has made its way to the other side of the county as well. When Carrie Molnar talked about why the teams from the 1980s were so good, she kept talking about how everyone knew their role and nobody ever tried to step outside of it.

Mark Lonsinger likes to talk about the fact that the county has no incorporated cities, and virtually no heavy industry. What it does have is independent villages with a lot of mom-and-pop businesses. You have, essentially, people taking care of themselves, until they need to come together. And then they do.

“It’s a really interesting dynamic,” Lonsinger says. “I can’t explain it. We’re not all Amish. We’re from completely different cultures, and yet we find ways, when we need to, to come together and do whatever we need to do.”

Lonsinger thinks that attitude has obviously been passed down, from generation to generation, to today’s basketball players. And that, he says, starts to explain why they’re so successful.

After halftime, the Hiland students pulled off their white T-shirts to reveal black shirts. Now, the whiteout behind the Hawks’ bench has been replaced by a black hole.

Offensively, both teams are able to make a few more shots. This includes one possession where Hannah Clark dribbles past a Hiland defender into the paint and lays a shot off the backboard, almost uncontested, a rare occurrence in the game.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

By the end of the third quarter, on the back of Clark who scored 10 in the quarter, West Holmes leads Hiland 29-20.

Lisa Patterson continues to pace to and fro in front of her bench. She’s not loud, at least not while play is ongoing. If she is loud, if she yells at her players during timeouts, it’s drowned out by the fans and the band.

At first, Patterson didn’t want to be the head coach of the Knights. But she’s been in that position for 10 years now. In each of the last four seasons, West Holmes has made it to the Final Four. They’ve been to three championship games and, in 2012-13, the team went 29-0 and won it all.

The last time a team from West Holmes had finished a season unbeaten, Patterson had been a sophomore.

After high school, she went and played basketball at Walsh College. She got a teaching degree and moved back to Holmes County, to Killbuck, where she grew up. She took a job at West Holmes Middle School as an intervention specialist and started coaching middle school volleyball and basketball.

Then the head coach position opened up, and not a lot of people applied. There was too much pressure to be great, it seemed.

“The athletic director at the time sought me out,” Patterson says. “He said, ‘I think you should do this.’ I said ‘No.’”

The athletic director asked three times, and like her coach, Jack Van Reeth, she finally relented.

“I did it because I knew what it felt like to win a state championship,” she says. “I wanted these kids who are so very talented, who are going through here now, I wanted them to experience that. I sat and watched some teams who I felt could have gotten there, and for some reason, there was something missing.”

What was missing, she thought, was that connection to the past.

“I felt like I could make that connection.”

Photo: Halee Heironimus

There were other connections, too.

One girl on those early teams of Patterson’s was Lindsy Snyder. She was the daughter of Shane Ridenbaugh, now Shane Snyder, from the first two state championships.

Then came Shane’s other daughter, Laina, and Carrie’s daughter, Emily. They were the core of the team that went 29-0. And the connections didn’t end there. In 2012, Lee Ann Race took over the athletic director position at the school. She played on the championship teams of the 1980s. And the school’s superintendent at the time, Kris Pipes-Perone, was a point guard on all three teams that won state championships.

When Shane Snyder talks about West Holmes basketball, it’s often hard to tell which team she is talking about, her teams or her daughters’ teams. It doesn’t really matter, because the same could be said for both.

“We expected to win,” she says. “That was a lot of pressure. They expected us to win. The drive that class had. They were workhorses. They know what it means to work.”

All of those connections have added up to 221 wins and just 37 losses in Patterson’s coaching career. In fact, the only West Holmes coach who has won more games than Patterson for the school is Van Reeth, with 321.

And while Patterson will say she’s very different from the man who coached her — she says if she coached like Van Reeth, she wouldn’t have a job for long — others aren’t so sure.

“She a good bit reminds me of Jack,” says Coakley, the long-time scorekeeper at West Holmes, who also grew up and lives in Killbuck and knew Lisa when she was just a little girl. “She’s the boss. You can have all the assistants you want, but she’s the boss. And them girls know it. Lisa is a good bit like him.”

Patterson, like Van Reeth, is quiet at first, giving just short answers to questions. But once you get both of them going, they open up. And Coakley, who accompanies Patterson on scouting trips and rides home with her after games just like he did with Van Reeth, says she’s just as friendly as the old coach, but like Jack, you have to get to know her.

Carrie Molnar knew that when Patterson took over, the program was going back to where it had been for so many years.

“It got intense,” she says. “She has expectations, and a plan in her mind. Everyone knew she had been around the program, and we figured she’s gonna wanna keep some tradition.”

One of those traditions was Coakley. He had stopped being the official scorekeeper when Van Reeth left in 1998. But when Patterson took over in 2007, she called him. She wanted Coakley to be her scorekeeper because she saw him as a good luck charm.

He hedged, until Patterson put her foot down.

“John,” she said, “you kept score when I played, and you can keep score when I coach.”

Coakley said OK. He said there was no doubt who was in charge. It was just like the days of Van Reeth.

In Hiland’s previous three games, the team has averaged 79 points per game. They won those games by an average of 60 points. But tonight, nothing is falling. The West Holmes defense is suffocating.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

Schlabach stands on the sideline and watches, quietly. He’s changed over the last 25 years. If he has to yell, he’ll do it in the locker room, which he will do loudly and often when this game is over.

In the stands, Molnar continues to dig her fingernails into her cheek.

“The girls are tired,” she says. “The emotions are too much, and the game is just too physical.”

Hiland pulls within five points — 34-29 — with less than three minutes to go, and has the ball. Senior guard Brittany Miller misses an open three-pointer and West Holmes gets the rebound. On the next possession, Hiland misses an open shot but gets an offensive board, only to miss an open put-back. They get the rebound again and miss another open layup. And then again. They shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and can’t get anything to fall, as if the openness, something that was so foreign to this game, has thrown them off.

That series ultimately determined the game. West Holmes made a few free throws near the end and put the game away.

“I can breathe a little bit now,” Molnar says.

The final score: West Holmes 39, Hiland 31. Hiland made just 10 out of its 46 shots on the night.

It’s the lowest scoring game in Schlabach’s 25-year coaching career.

Before Schlabach built his home just northeast of Millersburg about 10 years ago, he first built a gym. He jokes that his wife says he’s just like an Amish man, who builds the barn before the house. The gym is a large brick building back behind the house, which itself is at the back of a long driveway. A separate drive leads to the gym, with enough parking for a dozen or so cars. Inside, there’s a full court, albeit a little shorter than regulation, and high ceilings. The floor is a rubberized surface, not a great as hardwood, but better than the tile on concrete you find in places like church gyms and elementary schools.

This building is almost always unlocked, and if it’s not unlocked, everyone knows where Schlabach hides the key.

Anyone from Hiland (or really anywhere, mostly) can sign in and work out in the gym. It’s a place where teenagers hang out in Holmes County, because, well, there isn’t much else to do.

“When I was growing up,” Schlabach says, “I was always looking for places to play.”

During the summer, anywhere between 50 and 75 kids will sign into the gym and shoot or workout on a given day.

In Gary Smith’s story on Perry Reese, a central theme was the fact that the coach’s door was always open. Players hung out at his house playing cards or video games all the time. It was a way for Reese to build relationships.

For Schlabach, that’s another reason he built the gym. It’s just one more way for him to show his players that he’s there for them. And as if the gym isn’t enough, he’s putting in an in-ground pool right beside it, so in the summer players can cool off after a hard workout.

Often times, he says, after a rough game, he will get home and sit down to figure stats, look out the window into the dark and see the lights pop on in the gym. It doesn’t always happen — Schlabach’s career coaching record is 552-87 — but it does often enough that he is not surprised. And when it does, he’ll look at a clock and see that it is 10:30 or 11 at night. Then he’ll check the video feed from the gym to see who is in there. Invariably, it will be one of his best players.

“When I was a player, the last thing I wanted to do was go home and listen to mom and dad talk about how I played. As a kid, that’s the last thing you want to do.”

The gym, he says, is kind of a sanctuary.

Photo: Halee Heironimus

In March 1984, the year West Holmes won its first state title, more than 7,000 people from Holmes County drove over an hour south to Columbus to watch the championship game. Less than 30,000 people lived in the county at the time, which meant just about a quarter of the entire county was in Columbus that night.

Molnar remembers the announcer at that game saying that he hoped the last person out of Holmes County had turned the lights off.

The thing about Holmes County, though, is that the light will always be burning, lit from the successes of years past. There will always be a light on, and it will usually be in a gym, as some girl heads out late at night to shoot baskets.

When Schlabach got home from the game against West Holmes, the light in the gym was already on. His daughter, Kennedy, walked down to the gym and joined three other girls as they shot and shot and shot. They went to work in that gym late at night, because that’s what so many girls in the past have done after a hard game, because that’s the right thing to do, to work harder, to get better, to shoot until you feel like you can’t shoot anymore, and then shoot some more, building something better, all together, after every loss.

OAKLAND — The Golden State Warriors were going over a play when Draymond Green remembered something. This happens a lot. Some people who have come into contact with Green say he is a basketball savant. Others suggest that he has a natural, almost telepathic feel for the game. Both of those things are true, but there’s another reason: Draymond Green has a photographic memory.

“I remember everything,” Green told me following a Warriors shootaround at their practice facility in late January. “Ever since I was a little kid.”

What Green remembered in this particular instance was that when the Pistons ran that action against them last year it resulted in a pair of corner threes for Kentavious-Caldwell Pope. Never one to keep things to himself, Green relayed that bit of information to quizzical looks from his coaches and teammates.

Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images

“Everyone we spoke to talked about his maturity, his professionalism, his basketball IQ, so we didn’t try to overthink it. We just thought, let’s get this guy and see what happens.”Warriors GM Bob Myers

“Everybody looked at me like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Green said. “I’m like, just listen. ‘You can’t shoot the gap on this play because if you do they got us last year twice with corner threes.’ They put it on the film and they were like, ‘Hey, he was right.’ Yeah, I remember everything.”

If you were to construct the perfect basketball player on paper, it would look nothing like Draymond Green. Too small to handle bigger frontcourt players and not quick enough to stay with more agile wings, Green was the 35th player chosen in his draft class. It’s not that everyone missed on Green, it’s just that his résumé seemed so familiar. Undersized collegiate forwards are a dime a dozen come draft time.

“We saw a guy that could help us win basketball games,” Warriors GM Bob Myers says. “Didn’t fit the perfect profile of really any position, but he had succeeded at a really high level in college. Everyone we spoke to talked about his maturity, his professionalism, his basketball IQ, so we didn’t try to overthink it. We just thought, let’s get this guy and see what happens. What’s happened has been more than we thought. It’s been very interesting.”

In less than four years, Green has progressed from the end of the rotation to a spot on the All-Star team. He’ll be an All-Defensive team mainstay for years to come and will likely be an All-NBA performer, as well. He’s prominently mentioned among the best power forwards of the day, if you can even call him a power forward, which you probably can’t since relegating him to a position is what caused people to overlook him in the first place.

Of course, there are many reasons why he is such an anomaly. Green has an enormous wingspan and an incredibly strong core that allow him to play much bigger than his size. While not a great athlete in a traditional sense, he has excellent lateral movement and a quick second jump. All that combined with his instant recall, superior intelligence and a rare feel for the rhythms of the game makes him a truly unique player. There’s also the matter of his competitiveness.

“He will rip your throat out,” Golden State coach Steve Kerr says. “There’s a lot of great players who want to win, but it truly matters to him. Everything is about winning.”

No one saw this coming. Myers laughed at the notion. Kerr reminds you that he wasn’t even going to start Green until an injury to David Lee changed the equation forever.

“I knew Draymond was a jack of all trades. I was worried that he was going to be a master of none,” Kerr says. “What does he do really well? It turns out that he does everything really well.”

Famously confident and sure of himself, known as one of the premier trash talkers in the sport, even Green shakes his head at what he’s been able to accomplish.

“I’ve always had faith in myself, and I wouldn’t necessarily say I didn’t know,” Green says. “I didn’t expect it to play out like this. I’ve always believed in my abilities and my work ethic that I’d continue to get better, but I didn’t know it would play out like this. You get the opportunity that I got, the fit, you just never know.”

Green didn’t just break the mold, he invented a new model: A hybrid frontcourt player who can guard multiple positions, switch on screens and knock down jump shots. He’s also a gifted passer, a skill that has elevated him beyond the ranks of role players into the realm of the truly elite. Who would have guessed that everyone would be looking for the next Draymond Green?

“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately and it’s funny to me because two years ago, a year ago, no one was saying that,” Green says. “No one was looking for Draymond Green. That type of stuff just blows my mind.”

Good luck finding another player like him. In many ways, Green is a true original.

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

The Golden State offensive system is a wonderful amalgam of styles that includes elements of Mike D’Antoni’s Seven Seconds or Less, Gregg Popovich’s pace-and-space, Jerry Sloan’s flex actions and Tex Winter’s read-and-react principles. What makes the Warriors unique is that they are influenced by all of those things and defined by none of them. What makes them special is the players they have on the roster. They are all skilled, savvy and smart.

Draymond Green fits this system perfectly, but it’s not fair to label him a system player. Put him on any team and that team would be better immediately. But put him on a team with Stephen Curry and you have the backbone of not only a championship team, but also one of the greatest of all time.

“Somebody would say he fits into our system or he fits into our system with Steph,” Myers said. “I would say he helped make this system. He’s part of the reason the system developed. As much as he benefits from Steph, Steph benefits from him. So he’s cultivated a system on his own with his work ethic and his ability to play that we’ve embraced. In some ways he’s pioneered the concept of a playmaking four.”

While Curry is a wondrous shooter who can make even the most hardened league observer double over in laughter with his shot making, the beauty of the Warriors’ play is in its simplicity.

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

“Once we realized that Draymond was a playmaker it was, ‘Oh wait. Now we’re on to something. Now we can cause some real problems for teams.’”Steve Kerr

With so much attention paid to Curry, the Warriors need players who can complement his talent. They have shooters, passers, cutters and screeners. What they needed to complete the puzzle was someone who could make opponents pay for double teams.

“Everybody commits two (defenders) to Steph on the high screen,” Kerr says. “You have to. You have to try to get the ball out of his hands. Once we realized that Draymond was a playmaker it was, ‘Oh wait. Now we’re on to something. Now we can cause some real problems for teams.’”

To illustrate the point, Kerr nods toward the midcourt logo on the team’s practice court while referencing a recent game against the Cavaliers.

“See where that ‘S’ is in Warriors?” Kerr says. “Draymond set the screen right there, a good 10 or 12 feet beyond the three-point line. Cleveland jumped out. Kevin Love showed. (Matthew) Dellavedova went over the top. Nobody does that 40 feet from the basket, but it actually makes sense against Steph because he can literally pull up and make a shot from there. That’s what Steph forces. He forces defenses to do things they’re not used to doing and it creates all this space. He gets it to Draymond and it’s 4-on-3 from there because the other guys are so far away from the hoop.”

As a first-year starter, Green averaged 11.7 points and 3.7 assists per game. Solid numbers, but hardly the stuff of All-Star nods or All-NBA talk. This season, he’s doubled his assists and increased his scoring and rebounding while shooting over 40 percent from behind the three-point line. When he gets the ball in space at the top of the key with a numbers advantage, it’s simply a matter of making the right read.

“Our offense is based on ball movement, player movement, cutting, never letting the defense relax,” Green says. “You catch the ball and don’t get a shot, move the ball along. Don’t be a ball stopper.”

Green’s passing ability would be uncanny if it hadn’t been drilled into him at an early age. Back when he was in elementary school, his uncle Bennie Babers taught him the game. Before the kids could play, they had to know how to play and Babers made sure his nephew was well-versed in the art of playing point guard.

“Growing up as kids we used to be mad about it,” Green says. “He never rolled the balls out to us and said, ‘Go play.’ He actually taught us the game, made us read situations, made us learn about the game of basketball.”

Green continued to hone those skills as a high school player in Saginaw, Mich., and later at Michigan State under Tom Izzo. It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that Green is merely a product of good coaching and strong fundamentals. While certainly a part of his story, coaching and drills alone can’t properly explain the way he sees the court.

“As I’ve grown at different levels I’ve had help along on the way in growing my basketball IQ and knowing what you look for,” Green says. “Michigan State coaches used to tell me if you feel a guy here, the next man to that side is probably open. Having great coaches along the way has helped me out and polished that skill. But I honestly feel it’s just God-given ability. It’s one of my God-given strengths.”

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

It’s on defense where Draymond Green first made his reputation and it’s on defense where he has become one of the defining players of the moment. Green was a runner-up to Kawhi Leonard for Defensive Player of the Year and is constantly mentioned among the handful of contenders for the award this season. He’s a very good one-on-one defender, but he’s an even better team defender and that’s what really matters in today’s NBA.

The concept of switching has been around for as long as people have been running the pick-and-roll, but it was typically seen as a last resort, even a surrender. Giving up your man to a teammate was an acknowledgement that you couldn’t stay with him and the practice invites mismatches, in terms of either size or speed.

For the Warriors, switching is less an act of compliance than an act of aggression. Make it past one defender and there’s another waiting to cut off your path. Green is hardly the only Golden State player who excels in Ron Adams’ defensive system, but he may be the most extreme example.

“What position does he play was the big thing,” Myers says. “He’s taken that and turned it on his head and now the model is position-less basketball. Draymond is a trend setter in that capacity as far as not having to fit the perfect prototype of a power forward or a small forward.”

Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images

The keyword now is versatility and there are few players who can cover as much ground and as many positions as Green. His shape-shifting defensive abilities are perfect for this era in which zone defenses are legal and strategies have evolved away from the post-up, isolation game of the past. Few teams understand that better than Golden State.

Take the Lineup of Death, for example. The Warriors love to go small with Andre Iguodala replacing Andrew Bogut and Green playing the five, although positions are essentially meaningless in this formation. They are almost impossible to guard, but if they couldn’t stop anyone there wouldn’t be much of a point. The lack of a rim protector anchoring the middle is an open invitation to the basket for many teams, but the Warriors don’t let you get that far.

They’ve used this lineup to great effect in closing games and while it also helped them win a championship, they still employ traditional alignments the majority of the time. Green typically begins by guarding opposing fours and what he gives away in height, he makes up for in length and lower-body strength.

In their much-anticipated showdown with San Antonio, Green drew LaMarcus Aldridge. On paper that’s an easy mismatch for Aldridge who should have been able to catch and shoot right over the top. But Green bodied him out of prime low-post position and got in his space on the perimeter. Aldridge was a non-factor in a 30-point rout. Green loves this kind of thing.

“People still try to go at me but I enjoy it,” he says. “I’ll continue to enjoy it and I’ll continue to do what I do. I don’t think people go at me as much as they used to, but I think they think they have a mismatch there. I’ll continue to relish that moment.”

Kerr believes there is still more room for Green to improve. He’d like to see him add a low-post game à la Boris Diaw and Green is still coming into his own as a leader and locker room force. His true impact on the game may not be known for several more years when players of all shapes and sizes tailor their games to be more like Draymond Green.

“There aren’t that many, but maybe there will be more in five or 10 years,” Myers says. “I hope. It’s good for the game, honestly. When they kick me out of here I want to watch some Draymond Greens.”

While the world waits for imitators, the original hybrid playmaking four has designs on crafting his own legacy. Such talk would have been unthinkable four years ago, but when you get the right player in the right system and combine all the elements that Draymond Green brings to the table, well, you never know.

“I want to be great,” Green says. “I want to be a Hall of Famer. I want to be a multiple-time All-Star. I want to win multiple championships. I want to be an Olympic gold medalist. I want to do all those things that everybody said I could never do and that people sometimes made me believe that it was impossible to do. I want to do all those things.”

Credits

Lead Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Editor: Elena Bergeron

Design & Development: Graham MacAree

Isaiah Thomas was lying on the ground and he wasn’t in much of a hurry to get back up. He had landed hard on his elbow after taking a foul from Miami’s Dwyane Wade and also suffered what a team doctor later suggested was the deepest back bruise he had ever seen. That diagnosis, along with two weeks of forced rest and eight DNPs, would come later, but in the moment all Thomas knew was pain. Then he heard the voice of Jae Crowder.

Get up IT. We need you.

It was early March of last season and Thomas had been a Celtic for barely a month. There was already an understanding between him and his new teammates. They had an admirable spirit of togetherness, but they lacked playmakers like Thomas, whose ability to score had been a godsend. Be aggressive, they had told him, and we’ll feed off you. Thomas rolled those words around in his mind in the hotel room where he had set up a temporary home and thought to himself that his time had finally come.

Still, he was wary. His career had always been defined by the perceptions of others. Undersized to the point of absurdity, the very last pick in his draft class, Thomas had carved out a niche for himself as a scoring point guard. There was no shot he wouldn’t take and no defender he couldn’t shake, but not everyone agreed with his hellbent style.

The Sacramento Kings let him walk after three years and made a big show of signing a replacement in Darren Collison who they insisted was a better passer. The Phoenix Suns signed him late in free agency with visions of Thomas becoming the third member of a lead guard troika that also included Eric Bledsoe and Goran Dragic. That sounded good in theory but Thomas wanted to be a starter and the chemistry was never right. All of that was how he wound up in Boston less than one season into a four-year deal.

His first few weeks with his new team had been a revelation. Thomas was piling up points (21 points per game since landing in Boston) and the Celtics had become competitive, winning five of their nine games with him in the lineup. It was all going so well and now here he was on the ground in Miami, writhing in pain with Crowder’s words echoing in his brain.

Get up IT. We need you.

Thomas got up. He made his free throw and a few minutes later he drained a huge 3-pointer that put the game out of reach. Thomas tacked on a couple more free throws for good measure to finish with 25 points and a satisfying victory. It was more than that for Thomas; it was validation that he was finally in a place where he could be himself.

“If Jae hadn’t said that I wouldn’t have got up,” Thomas says now, almost a year to the day later. “That’s how bad I was hurting. It was like, ‘They really want me to finish this game.’ It’s something I can’t explain. It’s something I’ve always wanted.”

What he wanted was to be appreciated. To be allowed the freedom to score and create, but also to be empowered to lead. Now that he has been, the Celtics have emerged as one of the better teams in the conference and Thomas is an All-Star, thriving in the embrace of his teammates and playing in a city that respects his tough-minded approach.

“Being the guy in arguably the best sports city there is, you can’t ask for anything more. It’s like a dream,” he says. “You couldn’t tell anybody my story from the streets and they’d believe that this is really happening.”

It’s been an incredible basketball odyssey that has taken him from the Pacific Northwest to New England and back across the country again. One wonders, in the wake of all this success and validation, if that legendary chip on his shoulder might be dissolving ever so slightly.

“Nooooo,” Thomas says. “It’s honestly getting bigger. For some reason people think this is a fluke. I’ve never been given anything. I’ve earned everything. I’m going to make sure my team continues to win and the next thing is trying to lead a team to a championship. It sounds far-fetched right now but making the All-Star Game sounded far-fetched to some people.”

Thomas is listed at 5′9, which is a touch small even by normal human standards. Compared to the genetic freaks in his profession, it’s almost laughable. Thomas’ pat answer when questioned about his size is to calmly say he’s always been this tall, or short, and so he’s always played this way.

That underplays his impact. Only a handful of players his size have even made the NBA and most of them were change-of-pace specialists like Spud Webb and Earl Boykins. The only player who has made a comparable impact on the game at all is Calvin Murphy, who averaged 18 points per game during his Hall of Fame career. Murphy didn’t play with a 3-point line, but you can make the case that Thomas is enjoying the greatest season ever for a player his size. Regardless, what Thomas is doing this season is historic in any context.

With his stature came a need for creativity that Thomas fed by studying the game. As a child he would rush home from church and sneak into his grandparents’ house to watch the Sunday afternoon games on NBC. As he got older, he deconstructed the greats, learning a two-leg floater from Tony Parker and a one-leg variation from Steve Nash. Thomas adapted them to his game, which is full of stop-time hesitation moves, directional feints and sheer bravado. One of his favorite tactics is to attack big men by getting up into their body, thus cutting their leverage out from beneath them.

“I just go off what the defense gives me,” Thomas says. “I know that’s so cliche, but now when I’m in there, things are starting to slow down where I’m like, ‘Ok shot-blocking guy. I want to get to his body so I can knock him off balance, but if I can’t get too deep then I’ll shoot a floater.’ I’m learning I can’t always go in there and bang with the bigs. Sometimes I’ve got to give them the hesitation. Get ‘em up and then go finish under them.”

Thomas started working on his moves as far back as the fourth grade when he played on his first organized team back in Tacoma, and he’s been honing them ever since. The remarkable thing about his moves is they are essentially the same from when he was a kid. He used that bag of tricks in high school and later at the University of Washington, where he lit up the Pac-10.

“If you go look at my sixth-grade highlight tape, it’s on YouTube, you’ll see the same moves,” Thomas says. “Everybody that’s seen me play, they laugh about how good I’m doing. Even (Washington) Coach (Lorenzo) Romar, he’ll call me and be like, ‘Bro you’re doing the same move at the highest level possible.’ And it’s working.”

Thomas carries his Pacific Northwest background with him wherever he goes. In high school he made the difficult decision to move cross-country and attend a prep school in Connecticut. His grades had to improve to earn a scholarship so he wound up repeating his senior year. With the perspective of time, Thomas now says being away from home was one of the best things that ever happened to him. But in the moment, separated from family and friends, Thomas called it, “One of the most difficult times in my life.”

Celtics Blog

The numbers behind Isaiah Thomas’ dominant March

Fortunately, the comforts of home were only a train ride away. Seattle native Jamal Crawford was playing for the Knicks at the time. He had first encountered Thomas working out at the University of Washington as a high school junior and he invited him to play in his summer pro-am tournament. They struck a friendship and Crawford told Thomas’ parents he’d look out for their son on the East Coast.

Whenever he had the chance, Thomas boarded the train to White Plains, N.Y., to visit Crawford and fellow Seattleite Nate Robinson. He attended Knicks games and went out to dinner in the city, but mostly Thomas hung out at Crawford’s house, which provided a familiar oasis and a sympathetic ear.

The two have remained close. When Thomas got to the league, Crawford counseled him to stay patient and work hard. When he was traded to the Celtics, Crawford told him he had finally found the perfect place. “I had that vision for him, maybe even before he did,” Crawford says.

“Jamal is like family,” Thomas says. “He’s a big brother to me. That’s the difference between us and everybody else.”

The Seattle-area players are an unusually close-knit bunch. As Crawford put it, “If Isaiah has something he knows we’re all going to support him. If I have a basketball camp I know everybody’s going to support me. We totally stick together and it will always be like that.”

It goes beyond mere hometown support. They are advocates and evangelists for one another. Jason Terry stumped for Thomas’ All-Star candidacy and Jazz coach Quin Snyder was quick to counter the widely held opinion that the Celtics are a team lacking in star power. “I was surprised when I saw him play in college and shortly thereafter not very surprised,” Snyder says. “I don’t think he’s ever surprised. That’s the main thing.”

The list of Seattle-area players is growing in influence, from Snyder through Terry and Crawford to Robinson and Brandon Roy. Now it’s Thomas who is carrying the lead. There’s an individual flair to their game that’s grounded in substance and they all look out for one another.

“We’re inventing (our style),” Thomas says. “We’re laid-back but we’ve got that killer instinct. Put us on any court: YMCA, LA Fitness and we’re going to go out and play. We’ll play anywhere.”

A few days earlier, Thomas worked his way through the classrooms of the King Open School in Cambridge, charming students, delighting faculty and distributing school supplies. He settled into a desk and felt right at home with the awestruck middle school kids. Thomas does a lot of these events and he packed so many around the Christmas holiday that even the team staffers who coordinate them were amazed at his schedule.

“I love this,” he says, pulling on his Celtics hat before entering yet another classroom. “This is what it’s all about.”

Thomas had just returned from Cleveland where he had absorbed a tough loss in a close, physical contest. It was early March, the last dogged stretch of the regular season, and there was practice in a few hours and another event the next day in downtown Boston. Thomas doesn’t just want the accolades that come with his new-found notoriety. He wants all of the other responsibilities that come with it

“They expect a lot out of me, on and off the court,” Thomas says. “I’m ready for that.”

Few suspected that the Celtics had acquired a cornerstone piece of their evolving puzzle when Danny Ainge acquired Thomas at the trade deadline last February. After a hectic month that saw Rajon Rondo and Jeff Green traded out of town, all that was left were young players and future draft picks on a team that was more than 10 games under .500. The way forward seemed clear, but then Thomas became available and Ainge had a decision to make.

On the one hand, it was an easy choice. Ainge had always been interested in the guard and the cost was a mere first-round pick by way of the Cavaliers. Given Ainge’s stockpile of draft treasures, that pick was very much expendable.

On the other, adding Thomas meant they would likely improve in the standings and mess with their draft position. His acquisition was a signal that the Celtics wanted to compete in defiance of the NBA maxim that the worst place to be is not last, but somewhere in the vast middle.

The Celtics didn’t just improve, they made the playoffs despite not having much practice time to integrate their new best player. Thomas simply ran pick-and-rolls and everyone followed his lead. That got them into the postseason where they were swept by the Cavaliers, which reinforced concerns over the team’s ceiling. That skepticism has been one of the defining traits of this Celtics team, and they have turned it into a rallying cry of sorts.

“When we bring somebody in we look at all the great things they can do,” Brad Stevens says. “There’s a reason they’re here. A lot of them have also been nitpicked, and probably unfairly. You can go through our entire group and find out all the things at one point in time people thought they couldn’t do. Guys with a chip on their shoulder that want to work that have that ability, we want them to be themselves.”

In other words, the Celtics have become a team full of Isaiah Thomases. They returned for this season largely intact and have progressed from the playoff fringes to competing for home-court in the first round. With youth on their side, an enjoyable up-tempo style and an enviable locker room camaraderie, there’s a collegial atmosphere that surrounds them. They eat together on the road and group texts become epic ball-busting sessions. As Thomas puts it, “There’s no ego. There’s no beef.”

That has been aided by a subtle shift in Thomas’ play this season. He came into the season intent on becoming more of a playmaker. His style has not changed much — there is still an edge to his dashes to the basket — but it’s a controlled aggression.

Some of that is familiarity with Stevens’ system — the coach raves about Thomas’ practice habits — and how the game has slowed down for the guard. A lot of it is trust. The Celtics believe in Thomas and he no longer has to prove his worth every minute he’s on the court. Given the support he’s always craved, Thomas recognizes the responsibility that comes with it.

“If I can score every time down, I’m gonna do it. Trust me,” Thomas says. “But if the pass is there and the right play is to make a pass to somebody else, as the point guard you’ve got to learn how to do that and I think I’ve gotten a lot better at it.”

Illustration: @nbaayy

Over the summer Thomas became fascinated with Bruce Lee, who also attended the University of Washington. He visited Lee’s gravesite in Seattle and began to absorb the master’s lessons, both physical and spiritual. There’s a duality to Lee that Thomas appreciates: forceful and strong, yet thoughtful and aware. “Everything he did, he saw it before it happens,” Thomas says.

You can see the influence during games. Thomas is demonstrative on the court, which belies the clear-eyed coolness with which he carries himself and the fact that he’s often a calming influence on others in the heat of competition. He has a better understanding of when to attack and when to be patient. He’s a vocal force in the locker room — his postgame quotes tend to cut through the normal cliches — but he also emits a positive energy.

“He’s not afraid of conflict or confrontation and at the same time he’s going to put his arm around you.” Stevens says. “He’s got a nice balance in that regard.”

No one play personified Thomas’ evolution with the Celtics as much as the brilliant over-the-shoulder pass he made to Crowder in the corner for a game-winning three against Milwaukee this February. It was quite literally a no-look pass, as Thomas closed his eyes just before drawing contact knowing that Crowder was waiting in the corner.

“That was the definition of our team,” Thomas says. “That play.”

If this were happening in just about any other NBA city, the Celtics’ revival would be greeted with joy, but here in Boston there is doubt. This is the franchise that flies 17 championship banners and there’s not a single one for such prosaic accomplishments as conference titles or division winners, let alone markers saluting gritty overachievers.

To many fans and commentators, the Celtics are at least one superstar player away from being taken seriously. Not surprisingly, that sentiment doesn’t sit well with Thomas, but then, what good is a challenge without critics?

“Why are they so worried about that other player? Just let us try and figure it out,” Thomas says. “See where we go this year. See what Danny does (over the summer) and then we go from there. Right now we’re not worried about that one player. We don’t put no expectations on ourselves and we don’t put no ceiling on anything. Let’s stay in the now. Don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about the past. Just go out and play.”

The Celtics are what Thomas always wanted and he is exactly what they needed. There’s more than enough room for everyone else to jump on his back.

Credits

Lead Animation:@nbaayy

Editors: Elena Bergeron, Mike Prada

Design & Development: Graham MacAree

Johnny Weir has already spent 20 minutes in hair and makeup, getting foundation applied and strands of foreign hair woven into his own, when Tara Lipinski bursts into the room — late, of course, because her driver can somehow never find the NBC Sports studios.

She literally skips around the corner, sticks a dramatic landing and sings “HELLOOOOOOO,” at the highest reaches of her vocal range.

John Berry/Getty Images

Weir whips his head around, even though he tweaked the hell out of his neck during a recent show at Bryant Park in New York City, performing in a flimsy onesie in the cold.

“HELLOOOOOOO,” he crows back while convulsing into spasms of excitement, kicking his feet and waving his arms, immediately halting the hair and makeup works. Just as soon as he’s released from his chair, they rush to each other and their tiny bodies collide violently - at 5′9, the waifish Weir towers over the 5′1 Lipinski. They hug and hop and everything is glitter and sparkles.

The jaded makeup artists try to get their work done while co­-commentator Terry Gannon looks on bemused. Some PR people don’t quite know what to do with themselves. It’s a drizzly and grey December morning. But in here, a compound along the choked I­-95, it’s all fabulous — because Johnny and Tara are together again, and it had been a while.

Within minutes, Weir’s and Lipinski’s televised gay­/straight figure skating lovefest/­high fashion show proved authentic. That dynamic between the sport’s most fabulously attired and entertainingly honest duo has reinvigorated NBC’s broadcasts and hooked viewers during the Games. But can Weir and Lipinski make people care about figure skating, a sport that’s two decades past its peak, for those other 206 weeks out of the four-­year Olympic cycle?

­­­­­In Johnny and Tara’s telling, “Johnny and Tara” was Johnny and Tara’s idea.

They didn’t know each other very well before they began working the 2014 Olympic figure skating broadcast booth together in Sochi. Although aged 31 and 33, both were part of very different skating generations. Lipinski was a prodigy who, at 15, became the youngest champion ever at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. She’d come and gone by the time the late-blooming Weir, who didn’t even take up skating until he was 12, had arrived on the scene in 2001 at the World Junior Championships.

They quickly connected waiting outside a studio on their first day. “We both had Céline bags,” Lipinski recalled. NBC had committed to showing the entire Olympic figure skating competition live on its NBC Sports Network. That meant it needed a second broadcasting team to supplement the one that would be calling the prime time re­airings. But the initial plan was for Weir to do color commentary on the men’s side and Lipinski on the ladies’. They wondered if they should do both together in a three-person booth with Gannon. “We kind of mentioned it to our producers and they looked at us like we had two heads,” Lipinski said.

But NBC agreed, even though putting them together was risky. They were fairly green broadcasters and would be on air live for many hours. But then, it was a time for risks.

John Berry/Getty Images

Reluctant as those in the sport are to concede it, figure skating is in desperate need of saving. “It has kind of not been enjoying the popularity that it had in the 90s and the early 2000s,” Weir said. “And I attribute that a lot to the judging scandal at the Salt Lake City Olympics, the change in scoring systems and the fact that the US hasn’t had a really big standout female star since Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan. Figure skating’s success has a lot to do with the current woman that’s in charge of the world. And we just haven’t had it.”

Once there were Debi Thomas and Katarina Witt. And then Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, followed by Kwan and Lipinski. And then nobody. The sport has slowly slipped from relevance ever since it had its last mononymous female stars, caught in some bitter rivalry.

In Sochi, the Americans failed to medal in both the men’s and women’s singles for the first time since 1948. The men have won the annual World Championships just twice since Brian Boitano did in 1988 and have claimed no medals at all since 2009. Curiously, though, the United States Figure Skating Association has reported rising participation in the sport since the late-90s.

“The most recent household names are [ice dancer] Meryl Davis — because she was [an] Olympic champion and Dancing with the Stars champion — and myself,” Weir continued. “The amount of times that I get congratulated on winning the Olympic gold medal because people don’t remember that Evan Lysacek actually won [in Vancouver in 2010] and that I got sixth place, because I was more visible after the Olympics — I think that’s pretty sad.”

Harry How/Getty Images

Then there’s the judging. At the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, the pairs event was stained by scandal. A judge admitted she had caved to political pressure and scored the Russian team above the Canadian one in an apparent vote­-trading scheme that swayed the gold medal. The upshot of this ugly episode was that figure skating got a new scoring system to root out the subjectivity that had marred the sport at all its levels.

But the new system has stifled the artistry in favor of arithmetic. If the old system was prone to corruption and favoritism, the new one produces nearly identical programs, choking off creativity as the skaters run through a checklist of mandatory jumps and moves at the expense of choreography.

“Skating has definitely become a lot more predictable,” Weir said, adding that the scoring readouts are now also incomprehensibly complicated. “They’re even hard for Tara and I to read at times.”

The National Championships don’t sell out anymore. Broadcasts revenues are a fraction of what they used to be. The major tours are dead or dying, and ratings are way down from their Super Bowl­-sized numbers in 1994, when Kerrigan and Harding finally met in Lillehammer.

Three-­time US champion Ashley Wagner has called her sport “a dinosaur.” Boitano once declared it “close to death.”

In a sport once known as much for its theatre as its triple loops, the skating has become fairly robotic. And so the personality now has to come from the booth.

It’s ironic for Johnny and Tara to have become the faces of American figure skating, since they were also some of its biggest rebels.

David Madison/Getty Images

Figure skating is a hierarchical sport. You await your turn. In Nagano, it wasn’t Lipinski’s turn. “She was not the person that was supposed to take it all at that time,” explained Gannon, who covered her career. “She crashed the party and took home all the goods and she wasn’t supposed to. It was supposed to be someone else.” Neither he nor Lipinski will utter Kwan’s name, which is so figure skating. Lipinski did things her way and on her own time, before walking away and denying US Figure Skating a star and a blossoming rivalry.

Weir, meanwhile, butted heads with the USFSA throughout his career. “In the years he was competing, some people — including some inside the organization — may have felt uncomfortable with his flamboyance,” conceded David Raith, US Figure Skating’s executive director, “But his talent and longevity in the sport could not be denied.”

Now, Weir, once treated as the sport’s Antichrist, is both its salvation and redemption. “I’m kind of laughing last,” he said.

Gannon remembers going out to dinner with Weir and Lipinski the night before their first broadcast from Sochi and telling them, “‘Hey, let’s not do TV. Let’s do Johnny and Tara with me as the guy who keeps it all together.’ We had no real structure. We had no plan. The only plan was not to have a plan.”

For their totally over­-the-­top wardrobe and all the posing for elaborately orchestrated selfies on social media, Weir’s and Lipinski’s witty repartee on TV is consciously unscripted. “I provide the ice,” Gannon said, “and they create art and entertainment on it.” The audience responded to a novel way of covering figure skating. They were fresh and off ­the cuff in a stodgy sport.

Jim Bell, NBC’s executive producer for the Olympics, used to work on The Today Show. He understands chemistry and how elusive it can be. “It’s a little bit like the old Supreme Court judge who said ‘I can’t define pornography but I know what it is when I see it,’” he said. “You see it even when you’re just in a room with Johnny and Tara. They’re kind of like brother and sister. They finish each other’s sentences. They’re the real deal.”

They filled hour after hour of television, learning their trade and then perfecting it, often covering for each other as one of them made a mad dash to the bathrooms on the opposite end of the arena during commercial breaks — “Because we were both in heels,” Weir said. “Obviously.”

John Barry/Getty Images

Slate called them “One of the Olympics’ truly transcendent pairings — not to mention its very best fashion show.” Soon enough, they were appearing on every NBC studio show from the Olympics, upstaging the prime time team of Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic. Since those Olympics, NBC has not only made them the top figure skating team but used them at the Oscars and the Super Bowl — when Weir wore a sequined, football-shaped yarmulke, sparkly eye black and sequined pad. NBC also used them at the National Dog Show and the Kentucky Derby, when Weir’s hat was a bouquet of roses with a mint julep in it.

Forming that partnership, however, took a leap of faith. Figure skaters, for all the doe-eyes made in the kiss­-and­-cry after their performances, fundamentally mistrust each other. Things seldom get so savage as when Harding’s henchmen clubbed Kerrigan in the knee, but theirs is a cutthroat sport. Only one person can win. “Skating is such a small world,” Weir said. “It’s very dog ­eat­ dog, it’s very behind­ the ­back. Anything you tell somebody can come back and bite you. It was really hard for me, and I’m sure hard for her, to really just let your walls come down and trust somebody with this sector of your work life.”

Yet, they built an organic relationship. “Well, I mean, I’m a gay dude and she’s a girl,” Weir said. “That is, through nature, the strongest bond that you’ll have aside from your mother. There’s no competition between us. It’s not two beautiful ice-­skating women. It’s not me Betta­-fishing with another gay guy.”

Betta­-fishing?

“We don’t have a rivalry,” Weir continued after explaining about Siamese fighting fish that puff up to intimidate each other. “We don’t have an inner competition. That’s very rare for our world.”

They’re likable in person, too. Lipinksi’s energy is uncontainable and her sweetness disarming. Weir has a healthy ego, but he’s also frightfully smart, funny and self-deprecating, poking fun at his receding hairline.

Below the sequins there is substance. When the music starts and the skaters swoop and swing into their programs, it’s just about the skating. Johnny and Tara work hard, staying up until 3 a.m. to study up on the next day’s skaters. They try to provide insight into the rigors of a pitiless sport, which is physically demanding yet requires a beauty queen’s grace and composure. “It’s not all sparkly costumes,” Weir said. “It’s ice baths. It’s getting injured. It’s not eating. It’s having no personal life. It’s dedicating your entire life to six minutes under the bright lights.”

They don’t baby the skaters. “We do the same things that daughters and their moms do, sitting at home watching our broadcast, talking about the people that they see on TV,” Weir said. “We just have a bigger mouthpiece. If we don’t like something, you’ll know about it. Figure skating is subjective, so the joy in covering this sport is everyone can have their own opinion.”

John Barry/Getty Images

“We’re going to call it like we see it,” Lipinski echoed. “Someone watching who doesn’t know the ins and outs of our sport might find that funny. Our banter about it, or maybe they’re learning something they didn’t know before, or maybe there’s a little shade being thrown.

“There’s just a younger approach,” she continued. “We need to remind people how fun skating is, how quirky skating is. If we went on TV and overlooked the cold, hard truths and the quirkiness, I don’t think that’s bringing anything to the fans. “

“And sometimes,” Weir added, “we’re a little bit catty.”

But for all their appeal to the TV viewer, underscored by ratings that are sloping gently upwards with Johnny and Tara in the booth, the sport will still need to produce new stars on the ice. “Tara and I can only do so much with one minute on the air, on camera with our outfits, and the rest just talking through a poor performance,” Weir said. “We’ve brought attention to our sport. But the skaters themselves have to start winning international titles for the American public to be super interested again.”

­­­­If figure skating needs Johnny and Tara, they also need figure skating.

They retain an enduring love for a sport which gave them a lot but also devoured their childhoods. Like in any sport dominated by teenagers, figure skating throws family dynamics off their axis. But both of them feel that their careers weren’t all they could have been. They have unfinished business with figure skating.

Lipinski, like Weir, was an accidental star. Neither of their careers were the product of some grand design by their parents. Lipinski’s weren’t interested in her skating. She only tried it because a local rink gave out free Care Bears.

By 1998, she’d been a household name for several years, becoming the youngest woman — girl, really — ever to win Nationals and Worlds. And when she became the youngest gold medalist ever at the Winter Olympics, as well, she was probably also the youngest person ever to retire. From competitive skating anyway, moving on to the then-­thriving professional tour of shows and competitions.

Elsa/Getty Images

Her early retirement was, in many ways, analogous to Jordan quitting after his first NBA title, or Jeter after his first World Series ring. “If I was skating now, I can tell you, 110 percent, I would still be in it for four more Olympics,” she says. “I’d probably still be skating now.”

But it was a different time. She’d grown up idolizing Kristi Yamaguchi and Witt. She wanted to measure herself against them, having won everything there was to win in the amateur competitions, and they were on the pro circuit. “Those stars were not competing,” she said. “They were on Stars on Ice, on a 100-­city tour. They had so much money in these productions that you could actually feel like you were in a Broadway show. Once I’d won, I realized this is my time to tour for 10 years just like they did. Most people didn’t stay in. You won your medal and you went to Stars on Ice. There was a very different plan for skaters back then.” But soon enough, the limos and hotel suites went away and the pro tours dwindled.

Weir’s family was solidly middle class. They moved twice and worked several jobs to accommodate his passions. Riding horses at first, and then figure skating, which he’d discovered on second­hand skates atop a frozen cornfield behind his childhood home in Quarryville, Penn., deep in Amish country.

Before he’d even competed in his first Grand Prix, he’d run afoul of the USFSA. They were aghast at the blonde, red and brown dye job he’d applied to his hair and told him he was to turn it black or brown before leaving the country. He said he’d dye it red. They told him to “butch it up.” “It’s men’s figure skating,” Weir would respond. “How butch can you get?” There would be friction for the remainder of his 10 seasons on the senior circuit, in spite of his three national titles. And he only ever got flashier, to the chagrin of the officials.

“It’s been pretty widely documented that while I was skating, there were lots of political shenanigans, skeptical judging,” Weir said. He claims he overheard a US Figure Skating official tell his coach after Vancouver that if they’d known he would skate so well, they would have given him more backing. Weir is convinced that his endless strife with the federation cost him more titles.

When he reached the top, the golden age Lipinski had known was over and the sport, as he puts it, was “kind of in the tubes a bit.” The endorsements were largely gone, and there was no prospect of retiring into the lucrative tour circuit after you became a star.

Brad Barket/Getty Images

Whereas Lipinski had gotten so much attention that she sought to contain the publicity, and gave away very little of her private life — it wasn’t until after she stopped competing that she made a series of TV cameos, in an attempt to launch an acting career - Weir badly needed to scoop up whatever attention might be paid to him. He embraced celebrity, flaunting his boldness and brashness.

If he was going to avoid living a regular life, Weir had no choice but to put himself out there. “Towards the end of my skating career I really understood that I probably wouldn’t become the Olympic champion for political reasons, no matter how good I was,” Weir said. “So I went, ‘Okay, what else can I do?’”

He made himself three-­dimensional, taking every interview, agreeing to all appearances and accepting just about any opportunity outside the rink, like walking in New York Fashion Week. He was public and very candid. He once told New York magazine that he didn’t “need anyone for anything. I can have sex with myself, I can love myself, I can do all those things myself.”

Weir took an offer for a reality show — “It was me, butt­ ass naked, mounting a leg massager” — and he recorded a song, Dirty Love, which went No. 1 in Japan. He turned down an offer to star in a porno.

“When Tara won, Friends was probably the number one show on television,” Weir explains. “When I was doing very well, shows like The Kardashians were starting to really become popular. It’s just different eras. Every sport is affected by what’s currently hot and hip in the country. Tara won when the country was a bit more wholesome.”

But all that publicity came with a downside. He filed for divorce from Victor Voronov in Feb. 2014, after less than 2 1⁄2 years of marriage. Their ugly separation — the lawsuits and the accusations of rape, violence, the wrangling over a Fabergé egg, expensive furs, bags and the dog — was splayed all over the tabloids. But he has no regrets. He sees himself as a performer. “As long as people will have me and care what’s going on in my world and my life, I’m happy to share,” Weir said. “I’ll probably be Instagramming until I’m old and decrepit and laying in a golden, filigree coffin.”

Yet for both Weir and Lipinski, their second life in skating is also an exercise in personal rebranding. Lipinski previously didn’t have much of a public identity. She never lived as large a life as Weir did. She didn’t drink until she was 23 and has never touched a cigarette or tried drugs. Searching her name turns up almost nothing that’s personal — although she divulges on diet, decorating and yoga routines. Until her recent engagement to Todd Kapostasy, a sports TV producer, a Google search for Lipinski’s “boyfriend” or “husband” only turned up pictures of Weir. (When this was pointed out to them, Weir and Lipinski both laughed uproariously.)

Weir had the opposite problem. “There was just a lot that was going on around me that made me look like a swirl of divadom,” he said. “Even now, people that don’t really know me think I’m an asshole. That I’m this diva bitch that is so self­-interested and so vain. I’m not actually this crazy gay guy that cares only about fur coats and handbags. I’m a lot deeper. I like to Windex things, too.” He chuckles at this, as he often does when he cracks a joke.

It’s now been two hours. They’re almost ready to record their segment. A producer comes in to talk through the content of their hit, a brief introduction to the highlights of the Grand Prix of Barcelona. Weir has hoisted himself into what can most easily be described as a black bullfighter suit. His boots have heels that look like ice cubes. “It’s conservative for me,” he says, before doing a little Flamenco step and asking someone to snap a picture for his Instagram.

Lipinski wears a white knit dress and tall boots. They’re both in black and white. “Amish,” Weir figured. This, naturally, is no coincidence.

“At Nationals we’ll have like 17 suitcases,” Weir told me. “That’s where you can do the real sports journalism.”

When, at length, they’re finally ready to shoot, they march down the dimly lit hallways holding hands. On set, they stand on their marks and Weir notes that the camera angle makes them look like “mini people” next to Terry, whom he always calls Terrence.

Everybody ready? Weir puckers his face, puts his arm on his hip and lifts a heel off the ground. Lipinski flashes her widest smile. Terry begins the segment. They record two crisp 90-­second breakdowns of the action that will follow their talk. The wardrobe people fuss over them between takes, as they tap dance a few steps and put their arms around each other.

They’re polished, yet loose and chatty. Profound but fluffy. Everybody’s happy, but Lipinski feels she can do better and they do another take, in which Weir does a little Flamenco dance. Done. The whole thing takes less than 10 minutes. This will air and maybe people will watch it. And then perhaps they’ll switch on their TVs the next time figure skating is on.

Back in the corridors, on their way to record some voiceovers, Johnny and Tara hold hands again. And then, with nobody else around, he gracefully spins her.

Credits

Editors: Elena Bergeron, Spencer Hall

Design & Development: Graham MacAree