Advantage for health of a turmeric: nutritionists of spice swear

It reduces ignition, relieves pain, and more.

Westend61 / Getty Images

The health benefits of turmeric are numerous, and nutritionists are all about it. A bright yellow Indian spice, it's a key ingredient in golden lattes (a trend you're likely to see blow up in 2017), a primary component in curry, and the secret behind the golden color of mustards, cheeses, and butter—it's even part of Kraft mac and cheese's new all-natural food coloring.

Skier Julia Mancuso: The Odds Are Ever in Her Favor 2014

The Olympic alpine skier takes her three medals to the slopes of Sochi 2014. Her secret to success? Lucky underwear

 

 

Pro tip: Don't ask Julia Mancuso how she won. “It is not a shock to me when I have a good race,” the 29-year-old alpine skier says. “I started to tell people I'd just worn my lucky underwear.” And then, in 2010, she actually designed an underwear line, Kiss My Tiara, so there's truth to the snark. Lucky underwear alone, though, can't account for Mancuso's Olympic gold medal (in the giant slalom at Turin in 2006) or her two silvers (in Vancouver in 2010). Or, for that matter, the strong odds that she'll medal again this year in Sochi 2014.

And, sure: That competitiveness with Lindsey Vonn (Tiger's lady friend!), who beat her to the gold by half a second last time, might make her push a little harder this time. But Mancuso's an equal-opportunity rival. “I'm racing against all sixty people out there,” she says. For the record, we know who we're betting on this time around.
Slip Catsuit by Norma Kamali. Red Jacket by Carmen Marc Valo In the Maximilian Fur Salon at Select Bloomingdale's. Shoes by Christian Louboutin.

Our 8 Favorite Sochi 2014 Olympics Crushes

In the most intensely scrutinized, Internet-y Olympics ever, the female athletes of these Olympics aren't just a bunch of pretty faces: They're also expressive, GIF-able faces. And dancers. And good old-fashioned Olympic ass-kickers. Here are our faves through the week of competition thus far.

Ashley Wagner
From her sultry, bravado-filled performances, to her insta-meme "Bullshit" moment after a disappointing score in the women's short program, Wagner is running away with the McKayla Maroney award for the Internet's favorite Olympian. Girl's got more flair than a Chotchkie's employee of the month.

Julia Mancuso
The lucky underwear paid off: The alpine skier won bronze in her third Olympics, making her the most decorated American female alpine skier ever. Julia 4, Lindsay Vonn 2. Sure they're not keeping score, though.

 

Jackie Chamoun
We're not opposed to a sexy photo shoot or eighty here at GQ, but Chamoun's is less notable for the shoot itself than what happened after: After a behind-the-scenes video showed more risque angles of her topless body than the tastefully obscured originals, the conservative Lebanese government denounced the whole thing, even calling for an IOC investigation just days before the game. The reaction online was predictably swift and endearingly unanimous, with many taking part in a #StripforJackie campaign, calling out Lebanon for such puritan moralizing in the face of violence and conflict at home.

Here's hoping Jackie goes on to put in a solid showing in Sochi2014 — there'd be no hubbub, after all, if she weren't a world-class athlete, there simply to do her job.

Erin Hamlin
They say that in luge, the real winner is whoever finishes first behind the Germans—and in that case, Erin Hamlin's the champion of the Olympics so far. Her bronze in singles luge was the first medal for an American, man or woman, in the event. Well deserved, since she's been training for quite a while.

Jamie Anderson
She won gold in women's slopestyle, and might've also met a cutie or two; the American snowboarder told Us Weekly that the level of Tinder use in the Olympic Village is "next level," and that she had to delete her account to focus on the competition. Now, if you'll excuse us, we're going to go work out. Maybe get some snowboarding in?

Kate Hansen
The American luger is just the latest athlete to capture the world's attention with an endearing pregame warm-up, a pop-and-lock dance routine that's only objectionable if you are absolutely no fun at all. So like with Anastasia Ashley and Michelle Jenneke before her, we're totally behind this.

Dominique Gisin and Tina Maze
The Swiss and Slovenian skiers raced to just a rare tie (or close enough, anyway) in the women's downhill, covering just under two miles of mountain in 1 minute and 41.57 seconds. Where did that extra gold medal come from, anyway? Easy: Sochi organizers are prepared with forty-six extras.

The GQ Cover Story: LeBron James

Welcome to the magical world of King James. It's nice, right? Always sunny. Palm trees. A pair of championships, working on a third. The Decision? That worked out just fine. And at the center of it all, always making and remaking his world exactly as he likes it: the most stylish empire-builder in sports. "This thing is about more than just basketball," he says. Sort of makes you wonder: What will the King conquer next?

After morning practice, after the media session, LeBron James went to the locker room and iced, then got pulled for a random piss test, so now he's late, which he does not like being. Also, he's tired. There's a chef here at the warehouse, where Tupac and Snoop and Jay Z keep the rhythm, and hot lights shine over racks of clothes and shoes to put on, which he loves—he loves this shit—fashion is his candy, just ask Randy, to whom he has handed his phone to take photos. He wants pictures of himself in the outfits, maybe to tweet, which he also loves. But he's tired, that's the thing. Sluggish. And so right in the middle of a sentence about chicken and hot sauce, which the chef just handed him, he switches gears, and his eyes pop wide, and his mouth goes rubbery, and, enunciating perfectly, he booms: You might be deep in this game, but you got the rules missin / Niggaz be actin like they savage, they out to get the cabbage / I got nuthin but love, for my niggaz livin lavish.

People seem used to it. None of his handlers give pause. But it does seem a little...dissociative.

Motherfuck the rest, two of the best from the west side / And I can make you famous / Niggaz been dyin for years, so how could they blame us?

He loves to sing. He refuses to have anything to do with coffee. Singing is his coffee. Rejuvenated, he dances in the outfits for the camera, clowns like he always did back in high school, gets every bored person here happy.

He would like to be an actor. A comedy actor. He's shooting his first movie, Ballers, with Kevin Hart. The other thing he would like is to play in the NFL. "Some days I want to be a singer. But my voice? Then the next day I want to be Picasso." He would like to be a billionaire. "If it happens. It's my biggest milestone. Obviously. I want to maximize my business. And if I happen to get it, if I happen to be a billion-dollar athlete, ho. Hip hip hooray! Oh, my God, I'm gonna be excited."

I'm tight grill when my situation ain't improvin / I'm tryin to murder everything movin.

···

He's ten years into this insane career. Probably ten more to go with the NBA, he figures. So it's about halftime. It's something to think about. "My drive to be the greatest basketball player ever is very high." Everything right now is fantastic. A Miami mansion, a beautiful wife and two sons. Cars. More money than any other American athlete besides Floyd Mayweather, God love him. Sportswriters are having orgasms: The King is going for a three-peat with the Miami Heat, he has won four of the past five NBA MVP awards, his right arm is as fast as a helicopter blade, and he could notch a triple-double every night if he wanted.

Controlled exceptionalism, the most gifted ever? The game seems so easy he's left challenging only his own efficiency. They say he's Michael Jordan for a new generation. Or maybe they'll say Michael Jordan was the LeBron James of his generation, same difference, history will not bother splitting hairs. "Dr. J couldn't do what he does. Magic couldn't do what he does," says Heat president Pat Riley.

Being excellent at absolutely everything like this, it carries responsibility. Off the court, on the court, it weighs on him. All those people wanting more points out of him. They pay to see a superhero, and the superhero should shoot the ball, create lanes into which he can explode into everlasting glory, like Baryshnikov performing consecutive grands jetès, like Pavarotti achieving nine effortless high C's in one aria. (Seventeen curtain calls for that one.) People who pay to see history being made expect history to be made.

"Like, I could average thirty-five points a game if I really wanted to," he says. He is beautifully handsome, solid and smooth as a sycamore. "But then—it wouldn't be me," he says. "So I don't know if I could do it, because of my instincts. I see a teammate open—even if I have a great shot—I see a teammate open for a better shot, I gotta feed him. It's like, my mind sometimes be like 'Shoot it,' but then—my instincts, you know?"

He is thoughtful. He is a man who chews on ideas this way and that, enjoys the texture. The battle between predisposition and will. It's something to think about. "This thing is about more than just basketball," he says. "I can play basketball with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back. The way my mind, my mind starts working, we could probably be here for like...it could be like midnight. Someone will have to turn my switch off."

One of the things that bothers him is when people say, "You've changed." First of all, he hasn't. He still has his instincts. He still has Akron sitting in him like a bag of cement.

···

"Winning is my drug," he says. "Winning is my ice cream. Like my kids. They want more. 'More! More!' They just want more."

Actually, no. Right now Bryce, who is 6, is staring down at a melting bowl of something beige in a shop minutes away from the family's mansion in Miami's Coconut Grove.

"Yo, what's the matter?" says James, six feet eight, 250 pounds collapsed into an itty-bitty ice-cream-parlor chair, motioning to his son, who is not complaining, who is sitting alone, silent, and not easy to notice amid the swirl: customers, cops, some of James's handlers, ice cream scoopers, a floor mopper, and his wife, Savannah, in yoga pants, a yellow tee, eating salad from a Tupperware container she brought, exercising mother power well-wrought. "I said now!" she barks at 9-year-old Bronny, who actually, technically, prefers later. The family is background. James is foreground. Everyone gets it. Daddy is working, tossing out quotes to one enraptured person or another, about this game and that game, to dunk or to pass, to stay in this city or go to that one (no, he has no answer about Miami), to sell a sneaker, a TV, a hamburger. Savannah is not the type to do some wife dance for the enraptured people. She will avoid making eye contact if she can get away with it. She's the serious one. He's the funny one, the charismatic, cool one. They got married last summer, having been together since high school in Akron, since way before he became King James.

"You don't like your ice cream?" James calls to his son.

Bryce looks down at the melt, up at his dad. Demoralizing. Hard to admit. A dud of a flavor choice. "I don't like it," he says.

"Go get something else!" James says. "Try something else. You ain't got no complaints!"

Fatherhood, he says, is a lot like sports. "Being a leader of my household, a leader of Miami, a leader of Team USA. It's the same exact thing. You can sense when a guy is frustrated—maybe doesn't feel involved enough in the offense. As leader you go over to him, you know, 'How can I help?' Because at the end of the day, we all have one common goal—and that's to be great."



Winning, being great, it's the whole point of life. Is it not? Is there any reason to tiptoe around that fact? Winning, James says, is what a team does, not a person. That notion sits at his core and explains everything. The tattoo across his back, huge, shoulder to shoulder, says chosen 1. It's not simply precocious. It's bigger than that. It's what happened back in Akron, an American allegory. A dirt-poor fatherless nobody alone in his bed at night, hoping for his mom to come home, which she didn't—for a couple of years.

All that, and now all this.

Basketball took hold. In his senior year of high school, averages of 31.6 points, 9.6 rebounds, 4.6 assists, and 3.4 steals per game. Averages. But the thing that really happened back then was a team. A family. You finally get one, you cling. All those guys. Sian, Willie, Dru on the Fighting Irish, of course, but also Maverick and Rich and Randy, all those guys who would come over his place in the projects, where his mom finally landed, $22 a month for a tiny apartment, and everyone wanted to hang there. Like a family reunion every single day, playing video games, goofing around. He says they came there because they loved his mom. They say it was because of him. "His charisma," says Randy Mims, who back then filled the role of big brother and is now his day-to-day manager. "Everyone wanted to be around him. He was born with it. He still has it. It's what fills arenas."

Next thing he's 17 years old, he's on the cover of Sports Illustrated. A Nike contract. First overall pick in the 2003 NBA draft by the Cleveland Cavaliers.

"I go from $10 in my pocket to $100 million. In high school. Yup."

···

So, second of all, regarding change, of course he's changed. "Good! That's like a good thing," he says. "I'm like, 'Thank you.' Shit. I'm 29 years old with a family—I'm married with a family. I—of course I've changed. The problem is, you haven't changed. And that's why you dislike what I do, you know."

He leans forward. He's not going to be interrupted on this point. "As an African-American, we hear it a lot where we grow up. You've changed." He's sick of hearing it used as a criticism. "Because you've tried to better yourself and because you've made it out. 'You're not the same person that we used to know.' Of course I'm not. I'm trying to better myself. Change is not a bad thing. Thinking that it's bad, you know, that's one thing I think is a downfall for African-Americans for sure."

When he was still with the Cavs, he got a tattoo on his right forearm: 330. The Akron area code.

One person he thanks for all his success is his father. Well, it's not actually a thanks. More of a conversation. "Like, 'Wow, Dad, you know what, I don't know you, I have no idea who you are, but because of you is part of the reason who I am today.' The fuel that I use—you not being there—it's part of the reason I grew up to become who I am. It's part of the reason why I want to be hands-on with my endeavors. And be able to put my guys that's with me now in position. Like Maverick Carter, my right-hand guy in my business. Rich Paul, my agent. Randy Mims, my friend—he's my manager, you know. So me in a position allowing people around me to grow, that maybe wouldn't have happened if I had two parents, two sisters, a dog, and a picket fence, you know?"

Change, of course, is exactly what turned James into basketball's most hated villain for a stretch. That story occupies an indelible chapter in pop-culture history. He left Cleveland in 2010 to go play for Miami. The Decision. Over 13 million people watching the big obnoxious reality show, which was, he'll remind you, to benefit the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. But still. Tone-deaf. The guys from Akron had a lot to learn about how to run a multimillion-dollar athlete's career. "Crazy," says Mims. "I don't think any of us had any idea we'd get the reaction we did. I think we were all in shock."

The hissy fit in Cleveland—and across the Midwest, and inside like-minded pockets of America nationwide—was not subtle. People in the streets set fire to LeBron James jerseys. They stabbed LeBron James dolls. Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cavaliers, threw gasoline on the flames. A "shameful display of selfishness and betrayal by one of our very own," he told Cleveland in an open letter. A "shocking act of disloyalty.... The self-declared former 'King' will be taking the 'curse' with him down south....Sleep well, Cleveland."

Poop on him!

The reaction was so strong and childish, a lot of people eventually woke up and looked inward.

···

The Decision show was a flop. He gets that. But the decision itself was just a man having a growth spurt. "The best thing that ever happened to me," he says. "I needed it. It helped me grow as a man. As a professional, as a father. At the time, as a boyfriend. It helped me grow. Being confined, I spent my whole life in Akron, Ohio. For twenty-five years. Even though I played professionally in Cleveland, I still lived in Akron. Everything was comfortable. I knew everything, everybody knew me—everything was comfortable. I needed to become uncomfortable.

"Now I've seen everything on and off the floor this league has to offer," he says. "I got an answer for everything. Winning, losing, being a free agent, staying, leaving, media, media down on you, media big up on you, agents, money, parking it, family, money. All, everything. So whatever your question is, I can deliver."

Former Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel said in an interview that the thing he was most thankful for when getting crushed by the media was James texting him and giving him advice.

"Oh, seriously?" says James, flashing a grin. "He said that?"

What did he tell Manziel?

"My secret words."

How about Pacers swingman Paul George? That hand slap in Game 2 last year? The two were going at it, genius versus genius, George beating James with a hard dunk, James answering with a deep three-pointer. After the horn, James followed George, reached for him, said, "I got you back, young fella," and so they slapped hands, enemies fraternizing. Ever since the slap, George is having the season of his life, and now people act like James put magic Jesus oil on him.

"I'm very good at knowing talent, I guess," he says about his friendship with George. "I knew he could be really, really good. I had a couple of conversations with him. I just see talent in a guy.... I'd do it for anyone. But if someone reaches out to me for advice how to get better, I'm doing it. I can't tell what I said. My secret words."

He has a thing for greatness. "I'm always keepin' on other athletes. I love Tom Brady. I love the comparisons with him and Joe Montana. I love Floyd Mayweather—the comparisons with him and Muhammad Ali. 'Ooo, can Floyd Mayweather be the greatest of all time?' You know. Things like that. Sidney Crosby and the duel between him and Alex Ovechkin and who's the best, you know. Even to a point where, like, Kyle Korver just broke the three-point record for consecutive games. Like, ninety games straight, he's had a three-point. I was like, 'Wow, that's crazy.' You know, I don't even know that stuff about me until, actually, if I'm watching SportsCenter or reading social media. I had no idea that I've gone this long with scoring consecutive double-digit points until I see... I had no idea. I didn't know what number I was at. I was like, 'I don't know.' I was like, 'Oh, for real? I got 500 straight double-digit games?' Like, it's still in counting now, I'm up there with Kareem and Jordan. It's like, sheesh. I've done some pretty good things."

Around the time he won his second NBA championship with Miami in 2013, he got a tattoo high and bold across his right shoulder. akron, it says.

"Miley Cyrus? She has a great voice! She don't need the shenanigans. She can have some of the shenanigans, but not all of the shenanigans, you know? And she can be at peace! She can be at peace.

"Shenanigans."

···

It's safe to say now, three years into life in Miami, that LeBron James's villain persona did not stick. He tops the league's list of best-selling jerseys. His sneakers crush the competition in stores, outselling Kobe, his nearest footwear rival, like six to one. The LeBron 11, for $200, has hyperposite construction—a combination of Foamposite material and performance synthetics—and a new layer of Lunarlon cushioning; and anyway, Nike generates about $300 million off the sneakers.

James did not go on a PR offensive to achieve redemption among the people who were burning the jerseys and stabbing the dolls. People thinking of him as some run-of-the-mill narcissistic asshole would give up, he figured. Keep doing what you do and people eventually figure out there is more to the story.

"The thing is, he hasn't changed," says billionaire Warren Buffett, his friend of six years. They eat hamburgers, go shopping in Omaha together. "He's a solid guy. Fame has not gone to his head. You have to give him credit. I would have been drunk with power. It says a lot about how his mind works."

His mind works by way of Akron. He hosted the whole Miami Heat team for Thanksgiving last year back in Akron. "I'm the biggest voice that my hometown has ever seen," James says. "I'm the biggest figure that my hometown has ever seen. I do know that. I can see that. The responsibility of being the inspiration and the light for my community—it's much greater than hitting a jump shot."

When he talks about his responsibility to his community, he doesn't go into charity-speak. Although there is plenty of that. He talks bigger. His responsibility, he says, is to the people in his community who get those words thrown at them: "You've changed." People in his own community accusing each other. "It's my responsibility to show them it's not a bad thing to be someone who's changed. Keep showing them what I'm doing. That what I'm doing is right. I'm not, obviously, I'm not no guru on life or guru on success or guru on, you know, huge topics in the world or in America. But I am an example. I'm an example that can be used."

When Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert wrote the open letter to Cleveland rallying its people to feel betrayed, the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson decided to respond to it.

"He speaks as an owner of LeBron," he wrote, "and not the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. His feelings of betrayal personify a slave master mentality. He sees LeBron as a runaway slave.... LeBron is not a child, nor is he bound to play on Gilbert's plantation and be demeaned."

It was shocking to people. To associate America's tragic past with modern sports. To make the link. To shine a light on the disproportionate ratio of black athletes to black professionals in ownership positions, or up atop any of the corporate ladders selling the swag. The conversation caught fire for a few days, then blew itself out. Uncomfortable. Buzzkill. One part of a much larger conversation that everyone keeps never having, that the artists hear, and sing songs about, making records that confound half of America trying to understand what's the matter with those people.

Jealousy is misery, suffering is grief / Better be prepared. When you cowards fuck with me / I bust and flee / These niggaz must be crazy—what??

By 2012, Dan Gilbert was well over his LeBron James-abandonment hissy fit. He opened Cleveland's first casino, with 1,900 slot machines and eighty-nine table games.

···

A customer comes up to him at the ice cream parlor. She can't stand it anymore. King James! She's curly, suburban. "Well—just, thank you," she says clumsily. "Thank you for everything."

"Um," he says. You'd think he'd have more prepared retorts. "Thank you for having me."

It's getting to be time to leave. He's got business back at home. Savannah has the kids over at a chalkboard on the wall, playing hangman, and now the puzzle is for Bryce. Remember he is 6, so this is difficult. "I know the answer!" James says, looking on. "I know it!" Savannah throws him wife eyes. Don't you even.

Savannah: "Give me a letter."

Bryce: "Um."

Savannah: "A letter. Three, two, one—"

Bryce: "M."

James: "M? No."

Savannah draws a noose around the head of the figure on the hangman puzzle.

James: "Draw him a neck. He gets a neck!"

Savannah: "We do the body, and then the arms and legs."

James: "A shirt and tie?"

Bronny: "A suit and tie."

Savannah: "Give me a letter."

Bryce: "D?"

James: "There it is! Yeah, there's a D!"

Savannah: "No, there's not."

James: "Oh, dang."

This goes on and on. Arms, legs, suit, tie, eyes, nose, hat. Little steps for the hanged man to have climbed to his own execution. Bryce has his finger on his lip, thinking. They need to leave. Go home. Important people waiting. Many other American families would have long since bailed. One letter finishes the puzzle: Bryce is coo_!

"C-O-O!" James is saying, his big body now on the edge of his ice-cream-parlor seat, like any fan in any arena late in the fourth. Buzzer time.

Savannah: "Give me a letter, Bryce."

James: "Bryce! It says 'Bryce is C-O-O_!' Coooooo! Coooooo!"

Savannah: "A letter—"

James: "Coooooooooo!"

Bryce: "L!"

"Nailed it!" James says, leaping to his feet. "Bryce is cool!" They high-five, spin, a family in an ice cream parlor, rejoicing.

The tattoo running down his right calf spells: Witness. And down his left: History.

Robert Griffin III GQ Cover Story - September 2013 - The Second Coming of RG3

And the Lord said unto his flock in Washington, "Take this young man, this impossibly gifted quarterback, and watch him hoist your moribund franchise upon his shoulders and into the playoffs." And lo, it was good. Sweet Jesus, was it good. And then RG3's greedy head coach ran him into the ground and blew out his knee. But now the young quarterback has returned, and his followers are ready to rejoice again. But lo, they're terrified. Sweet Jesus, are they terrified. It's the blessing and the curse of Robert Griffin III, the joy that could turn to agony at any moment. People, can we get an amen?

Everyone was crying. RG3 himself got it started, lying there in his hospital bed, totally immobile. Then his fiancée, Rebecca, and his mom welled up. Jackie never wanted her only son to play football in the first place, not really—what mother wants her son to play football?—but she relented when the 11-year-old pinkie-promised her he wouldn't get hurt. And now this. Finally, even the quarterback's military father, Robert Griffin Jr., the retired sergeant, the Iraq vet, "the guy who never cries," according to his son—not even RG2 could choke back the tears.

CK1: Colin Kaepernick biography

He's the backup who took his team to the Super Bowl, the football player with the 95-mph fastball, the guy who ran roughshod over defenses last season but was coached in high school to never run the ball at all. In other words, the most unpredictable and least understood elite QB in the league right now

The statistics are shameless—sixty-mile-per-hour spirals! 181 rushing yards against the Packers in the playoffs! a 38 on that esoteric and lewd-sounding metric known as Wonderlic!—but the most mind-blowing of them isn't gaudy. Just...weird.

"I want you to know," Colin Kaepernick says, "that I had negative running yardage as a high school quarterback. Yes, I was fast. Yes, my coaches knew I was fast. But we had no backup QB." And at six feet five and 170 pounds, Kaepernick seemed like such a fragile emu that his coaches were terrified he'd get injured. "So they told me not to run."

The Violent Life and Sudden Death of Junior Seau

When the legendary NFL linebacker retired for good in 2010, he seemed set for life: supremely wealthy, beloved across the league, a hero in his hometown of San Diego. Two years later, he was dead. On a lonely morning in a big empty house, Seau shot himself through the chest. It's no longer a secret how much damage pro football can do to the men who play it, but never before had we witnessed it destroy a genuine superstar—not until Junior Seau. in this GQ special report, Seau's friends and former teammates try to make sense of how a life so filled with triumph could go so wrong so fast

The average NFL career lasts 3.5 years. Junior Seau, one of the greatest linebackers in the history of the NFL, played for twenty—and San Diego, where he starred most of those years for the Chargers, was his city as much as New York is Derek Jeter's. Seau invested in San Diego both as a businessman and as the head of a foundation serving at-risk kids. But after retiring as a very wealthy man in 2010—he earned more than $50 million over the course of his long career—he began to behave uncharacteristically.

Raider. QB Crusher. Murderer?

Some of his friends and teammates remember Anthony Wayne Smith as a strange and volatile guy, prone to paranoia and outrageous lies. Others recall a gentle giant who gave to charity and mentored kids. None would have predicted that he'd retire from football to a life of arson, torture, and murder—but that's exactly what prosecutors allege. As the former defensive end (57 1/2 career sacks) waits trial for four killings over a nine-year span, Kathy Dobie unravels a life that made his violence on the field seem like child's play

On a cool, drizzly February night in 2003, at one thirty or so in the morning, a police officer cruising down Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica spotted flames shooting horizontally out a window of the Simply Sofas furniture showroom. From overhead he could hear popping sounds as the fire leapt up to eat at the power lines in the street outside. Inside, the blaze spread quickly, engulfing upholstery and wood, roaring up through the roof and melting the metal skin right off the loading dock door.

Paddled

Finding my way in Beijing was tougher than I'd ever imagined. But sharpening my skills at a local youth academy for ping-pong—a game at which I'd dominated friends back home for years—seemed like an opportunity not to suck. So what if it meant beating up on little kids at the school and old men in the park? This would be my key to assimilation. Nice plan—but then I stared down the pre-teen pong machines and got my first real taste of China's national pastime.

On my first day at Shichahai Sports School, the elite athletic academy in Beijing, Coach Chang introduces me to his ping-pong class. "We have a new American student," he says, peering out from behind the prescription sunglasses he wears indoors. As all eyes turn toward me, I feel a rush of nerves. It's like day one of kindergarten again, only this time I have chest hair. "He claims he's been playing for more than ten years," Chang goes on, "but from what I've seen, it looks more like ten days." The class erupts into high-pitched giggles.

We're lined up in one of the school's three basement ping-pong halls, a huge gymnasium with 27 tables, a Chinese flag hanging on the wall, and video cameras mounted everywhere. ("For security," says Coach Chang.) Whereas most students attend Shichahai after distinguishing themselves at smaller regional schools around the country, I just walked in the front door mid-semester and paid the exorbitant $25-a-class foreigners' rate. (Chinese students pay $1,500 to $5,000 a year for morning academic classes and twice-a-day ping-pong lessons, plus room and board.) I enrolled knowing I'd be one of the older students. I didn't realize it'd be by a factor of three. Flanking me are two dozen gangly 9-to-12-year-olds in bright jerseys, hiked-up shorts, and near-identical buzz cuts, yet I'm the one who looks foolish.

You could call it karma. I have a history of cruelty when it comes to ping-pong. As a kid, I'd trounce my little brothers so badly over our family's table that they'd cry. When I lived in a group house in D.C. after college, I'd plant myself at an end of the table my girlfriend bought me for my birthday and pick off challengers one by one. It wasn't their fault. I simply operated at a higher level, unleashing slices and cross-slams and sidespins unfit for social settings. I took it seriously too, chatting away while ahead but getting real quiet and whispering to myself when the score tightened. Eventually, friends stopped accepting my invitations, roommates made excuses. Most people know a ping-pong jerk, and all my life, that was me.

When I left the comfort of D.C. for a job in Beijing last summer, ping-pong seemed like a natural in. The sport was everywhere, and I figured the history of "ping-pong diplomacy" that led to the re-opening of relations with the U.S. in 1971 might lend my presence some much-needed gravitas. It also seemed like a rare opportunity to not suck. Moving to a new country, especially China, is an exercise in crippling humiliation. Hailing a cab, asking directions, ordering food, even attempting to digest that food (with occasional ugly results)—every activity reinforces one's ridiculousness. Even friendly encouragement—Chinese people tend to lavish praise on foreigners for their Mandarin, no matter how shoddy—can feel infantilizing. I especially feared the challenge of making and keeping Chinese friends. Ping-pong would be my salvation. It would not only help me meet Chinese people, it would earn me their respect. Whereas in the U.S. ping-pong enjoys about the same esteem as dodgeball, China puts its champions on prime time. I'd prove I was more than just a big-nosed idiot foreigner—I was a big-nosed idiot foreigner who could excel at a sport they revere. If ping-pong could make Chinese people like Nixon, I just might have a shot, too.

My first opponent at Shichahai, a smiley kid named Wang, stands eye-level with my chest. On the orders of Coach Chang, we edge up to a nearby table and start rallying. Though rallying couldn't be less accurate. Wang serves. The ball bounces over the net and hits my side of the table. I strike it with my paddle, it springs over the net, and does not hit his side of the table. It doesn't hit anything. This must happen 25 times in a row. The physics are all wrong. It's like instead of a paddle I'm holding a pancake.

I get ushered off to a side table, where an older coach named Zhang is making like a human ball machine. Standing at one end of the table, he draws balls from a bucket and sends them skimming over the net. Each serve travels at the same speed, same angle, same rhythm. A student, hunched over like a wrestler, returns them in perfect metronomic time. All at once ping-pong looks like a sport.

When it's my turn to rotate in, Zhang begins by correcting my grip. I use the traditional "handshake" hold, same as most Americans, and the paddle hangs loosely in my fingers. I expected to learn the "pen" grip used by many Chinese players (and Americans trying to look cool). No need to switch, Zhang explains, but he moves my thumb in a way that keeps the racket locked against my hand, and bends my wrist sideways to make the paddle an extension of my arm's line. My forehand stroke now looks like a robot ninja salute.

Coach Zhang serves to me. Using my new stroke, I don't hit the ball so much as graze it. The ball topspins its way down, the table exerting its own gravitational pull. Zhang serves until the bowl is empty, and another student steps up to drill. "Good!" Zhang says in English, giving a thumbs up. I feel gleeful, if also condescended to by his big English "Good!" But mostly gleeful.

The floor is littered with hundreds of balls. Drenched in sweat, I get down on my hands and knees to collect them, and as I crawl an errant shot smacks me in the face. I stand up and prepare for the next lesson. Coach Zhang says we're doing forehands again. "What about backhand?" I say. "Maybe after another eight or ten classes," he says. Some of these students have been training since they learned to walk. "No rush."

As the weeks progress, my classroom humiliations don't disappear so much as take on subtler forms. I arrive one morning during my second month to find two kids facing the wall. I ask Coach Zhang why. "They were being stupid," he says. After several minutes, they receive the second part of their punishment: They are forced to drill with me.

Another day, I come to class with a cold. When I line up with the rest of the students, Coach Chang tells me to stand on the other side of the room, lest I contaminate China's future. Most of the students at Shichahai go on to regular high schools and universities, many of which recruit for ping-pong, but the best ones graduate to Beijing's youth squad, the Beijing team, and, in a handful of cases, the national team. It's entirely possible that I've been getting wrecked by a future Olympian.

That thought consoles me when, playing a match against a little guy with a massively out-of-proportion head, I can't seem to score. The old moon gravity is back, and every ball I strike flies over the far edge. Just one point, I tell myself, one point and I'll be happy. I'm losing 10-0, when the kid deliberately serves the ball off the table: A charity point, another student later explains, to give me face. I lose 11-1.

Still, I feel my game improving. Intention and results start to align, at least during drills. Whatever muscles are engaged by bending down for hours while swinging your arm back and forth are getting stronger. But bad habits linger. I plant my feet. I don't twist. I flick my wrist lazily instead of building spin into my stroke. It feels like I need to re-learn everything daily. Try as I might, I'm not a child. "My son is easier to teach than you because he is a blank slate," Coach Chang says, referring to his 6-year-old. "He can't do much, but everything he does, he does right. You try hard, but you do everything wrong." To prove it, he parks his son in front of a table and starts a cross-shot forehand drill. The kid might as well be playing patty cake; he doesn't miss.

Explanations of Chinese ping-pong dominance range from the pseudoscientific to the cultural to the systematic; while Europeans and Americans are big and strong, Asians are quick and nimble, I am frequently told by Chinese ping-pong enthusiasts. (Never mind Yao Ming or the 2012 Olympic gold medal-winning, world record-setting weightlifter Zhou Lulu.) The Chinese also think strategically, says Chang—something he says I would understand if I read classics like The Water Margin or The Art of War. Then there's China's vast ping-pong infrastructure, a network of local, city, provincial, and national training centers that teach players using the same methods and promise their best players a life of wealth (some make close to $1 million a year) and fame (top players like Ma Long and Ma Lin are household names). Since 1988, when table tennis became an Olympic sport, Chinese players have won 24 out of 28 possible gold medals.

But China's greatest strength may be its sheer numbers. Teodor Gheorghe, the coach of the U.S. women's Olympic ping-pong team, remembers visiting China with the Romanian team in 1970 and hearing a Guangdong official lament that the province had "only 5 million players." "You can imagine how we were shocked," Gheorghe says. Unlike soccer or basketball, ping-pong doesn't require much space or equipment—just a table, two paddles, and a net (or lacking that, a row of bricks). Just as no one can throw a baseball quite like an American boy or dribble a soccer ball like a Brazilian kid, your average Chinese child grows up knowing his or her way around the table.

The Shichahai students and I get along, but in the same way they might get along with an intelligent dog. When they demand to see a one-dollar bill, I thumb one from my wallet and point out George Washington. "He's America's Mao," one of them informs the others. They ask me about the U.S.—mostly the prices of things, like iPhones—and I tell them as much as I can before they stop listening and start curiously stroking my arm hair.

One day, I rally with a tiny kid who looks like he's about to fall asleep. He serves lazily, his body limp and his eyes almost fully closed. I start mimicking him, and he laughs. Bingo. I finally have a plan.

We play matches at the end of class in which students rotate from table to table, each facing everyone else at least once. My first opponent is a kid with a bruise on his face where a classmate kicked him the other day. (They're cool now, he assures me.) I serve the first ball normally. On my second serve, though, I suddenly pull in my chin, puff out my cheeks, and bug out my eyes. He panics and hits it into the net. Next serve, I cross my eyes. His return sails off the end of the table. My strategy is working. I keep it up, flashing a goofy yokel overbite, rolling my eyes back into my head, and making farting sounds as I serve. He still wins the game, but I've discovered my secret weapon—my crane kick. The next game, I'm up against a stringy kid who can't stop laughing when I pretend to fall asleep while serving. It's the first match I've won.

This should probably count as cheating, but it feels like a breakthrough. I've turned my disadvantage—my ridiculousness in these kids' eyes—into an edge. I've out-10-year-olded the 10-year-olds. Later, when discussing my progress with Coach Zhang, I guiltily confess my clown strategy. To my surprise, he smiles and nods with approval. "That's wisdom," he says.

···

After several weeks of classes, I'm ready to face my first real-world test: Beijing's pensioners. It's a clear spring day—the sun actually looks like the sun, not a dull yellow moon—so I bike to a park on Houhai, a man-made lake in central Beijing, where I know I can find some pickup pong. The park is strewn with track-suited seniors engaged in a tableau of Chinese exercises. A slack-faced woman glumly rotates a giant yellow wheel, one of many pieces of public exercise equipment installed in the run-up to the Olympics. A man is draped across two railings doing full-torso sit-ups. Another in Coke-bottle glasses and a beanie pads around with his arms frozen in mid-air like he's wearing a pair of invisible water wings.

When I approach the ping-pong tables—two marble slabs resting on blue steel bars—heads turn. I'm not the first foreigner this crowd has seen, but I may be the first with his own racket case and balls. A man in a fake fur hat asks to see my paddle. He holds it by the face and taps the handle against his head, judging the quality of the wood by its sound. "How much did it cost?" he asks. Twenty-five yuan at a supermarket, I say. "The quality isn't good," he says. (A coach at Shichahai was not impressed: "Supermarket—banana, orange, apple," he said, in English. "Not ping pong.") The man in the fur hat shows me his racket. The padding on one side is fresh—he just replaced it himself—the other side is bare wood, with a deep indent where his knuckle has worn it down over three decades. "This one was three-and-a-half yuan," he says. Not only will I crush you, he implies, I will do it affordably.

A husky lady in a pink puffy vest is playing a gray-maned gentleman in orange socks and shiny black sneakers. She insists I take her place. The man, Mr. Jiao (paddle: 500 yuan), serves. He flips the ball into the air with his open-palmed free hand, the sphere nearly grazing the bare branches of the trees above us, and then clips it over the net with a stomp of his foot, perfectly timed to disguise the sound of the ball against the paddle, so I don't know whether he's hitting it with the racket's soft side or its hard side. Sometimes he gets fancy and tosses the serve from behind his back. His moves would seem more ridiculous if they didn't work so well.

Athletes always want to compare their sports to chess—fencing is chess with swords, boxing is chess with concussions. But to a greater extent than any game I know, ping-pong really is like chess, and the reason is spin. Every ball requires a split-second calculation, as the player identifies its spin and responds with the appropriate counter-spin. "In chess, you can predict the next three or four steps," Coach Zhang says. "In ping-pong, the possibilities are endless."

Mr. Jiao's spin jujitsu puts me on the defensive from the start, and he wins the first game. I get more aggressive, trying to fight spin with force, and, with the help of several strong gusts of wind, I win the second. The third is tied 10-10 and goes into extra points. He beats me with a shot that nicks the table, or, in Mandarin, a "scrape-side-ball." After weeks of getting destroyed by children, a close loss to an adult feels like a victory. We shake hands. "You don't speak very fluently," he says. I take the honesty as a compliment.

If there's one thing you learn playing American sports as a kid, it's that everyone gets a trophy. But after three months of ping-pong training, I still have nothing to show for my efforts except a wilted ego and a blister on my thumb. So when I hear there's a local tournament scheduled for early May, I sign up. The site is North Riverside Park, home to one of the city's swankier public ping-pong facilities (i.e. it has real nets). The tournament seems like the perfect chance to prove how far I've come. But first, I undertake a Rocky-style training montage.

The Shichahai classes have raised my game, but don't offer much individual attention. I need a mentor, I tell a ping-pong buddy I met at Houhai. He says he knows just the guy.

When I shake hands with Coach Deng at his ping-pong shop across town, he has just eaten, so we sit and talk—I bring a friend along to help translate—while he digests. He's bald and round and speaks with the rasp of a lifetime smoker, or perhaps just a lifetime Beijing resident. He's not a ping-pong player himself, he explains; he creates ping-pong players. "Any player I stand behind, he will win," he says, lighting a cigarette.

Between drags, he dispenses advice for the tournament. First, clothes: Wear a warm shirt for the morning, and a light shirt for the afternoon—if I make it that far. Food: "The night before, eat noodles," he says. "But only eat till you're 60 percent full." The morning of? "Noodles," he says, but this time only till I'm 50 percent full. (After hearing all about China's "Three Represents," "Four Modernizations," and five-year plans, I've gotten used to numerical specificity.) I should also be sure to bring a snack to the tournament, Coach Deng says, preferably two chocolate wafers. For lunch, I should eat noodles, followed by one more chocolate wafer in the afternoon.

I take this down, and we set off for a basement ping-pong club nearby. Inside, it looks like a fallout shelter. A long fluorescent lamp flickers above two tables. Posters of ping-pong greats hang on the walls. This, I tell myself, is where champions are made. We rally. He tests me with some tricky spin and notes my reactions, or lack thereof. Something feels off. I can't concentrate. It's like everything I learned, I've since unlearned. I can tell he's disappointed, and this makes me perform even worse.

After a while, we break and I ask him what he thinks. "Let's start with your strengths," he says. "Your strength is you enjoy yourself." I wait for more. "Your weaknesses," he goes on—and then proceeds to list every aspect of the game: My grip is wrong, my stroke is flimsy, I don't rotate my torso, my feet don't move. The last few months suddenly feel pointless. He gestures to one of his friends, who plays ping-pong like I imagine Bruce Lee would. "He is in the sky," Deng says. "You are on the ground."

I ask what this means for the tournament. "Eighty percent of the people there will be better than you," he says. "You can barely play." Getting to a level where I could compete, he said, would take three years of practice, two sessions a week.

He then inflicts what might be my worst humiliation yet. We play a game, and he lets me win. I don't actually win—he just deliberately loses points, knocking balls way off the table or into the net. I might score points here and there, is the implication, but only because he allows me to. "I wanted to encourage you," he says afterward, grinning. Whatever his intent, the effect is the opposite. After months of being treated like a moron, this—the suggestion that I would celebrate when I know he threw the game, an act that wouldn't fool a pre-schooler—is the final insult. We don't see each other again.

···

The day of the tournament, I get up at 6 a.m. and bike over to the park. An hour before the games begin, the fenced-in ping-pong area is already bustling, each table flanked by competitors warming up. I rally with a man named Su, who used to work in the railway industry. He asks where I'm from, and I tell him the U.S. "You have about 200 hundred years of history, right?" he says. "Right," I say, "a bit more." He seems unimpressed.

I draw a number to see who I face first. When I spot my opponent, I'm encouraged. Phenotype aside, he could be my grandfather. The refs call our number, and we start rallying. His shots are simple, unadorned—a positive sign. Finally it's time to start. The old man serves.

At least I think he's served. My paddle misses the ball completely. Suddenly it's my first day at Shichahai and I'm getting aced. The next shot caromes off my paddle into tomorrow. It takes me several points to understand what's going on. He's got some wacky sidespin I've never encountered, and I'm not sure how to return it. I try working out the geometry in my head—if it's spinning this way, then I have to move my paddle like... By the time I calibrate, he's applying different torque, and I fail to return that shot, too. I don't even think to make a farting noise.

I'd like to say this is where I discover a spiritual reserve deep inside me or bust out some secret move I've been practicing but haven't quite mastered, only to pull ahead in a blazing comeback of furious glory. Because if that's not what happens, why even tell the story? What I actually feel as the points slip away—sorry—is the weight of failure far heavier than any single game of ping-pong deserves. A year of fears and disappointments, from language flailings to job concerns to What am I even doing here? glom together in a stomach-pit of anxiety. Months of training have produced the same results as if I'd spent that time playing Wii Tennis—possibly worse.

At least it's over fast. I lose two games in a row, 11-4 and 11-6. My opponent, victorious, comes over to shake my hand. His name is Han. He's 66. He says he's glad to see young people playing, since most of them just waste hours with video games these days. I ask how playing now is different from when he was younger. "I'm a lot slower now," he says. I empathize.

While we're chatting, the lady in charge of the tournament hands me a blue jersey with the league's acronym: DSBHQYX. (It stands for desheng binhe qiuyou xiehui, or "Victory Riverside Ball Friends Society.") It's supposed to be for the winners, but she says I should wear it anyway because people will want to take photos with me. No matter that I may be the worst player to swing a paddle on this court in its three-year history, I still receive special treatment. I wear it anyway.

···

A few days after the tournament, I take Coach Chang out to dinner at a restaurant that serves Chinese and Western food. He brings his wife and son, who, he reminds me, could thump me at a table. He tells me about the 20-plus years he spent teaching ping-pong in Japan, and the way it opened up Japanese society to him—from professors to politicians to industry leaders. I tell him I'm not sure ping-pong has done the same for me in China. As much as I've played, I still feel as if I'm treated as a combination clown-mascot-business opportunity.

Then again, that's what I am. It seems like an American tendency to insist we're exceptional, but then travel abroad with limited cultural knowledge and language ability and expect to be treated the same as everyone else. This attitude also presumes that the greatest sign of respect from a Chinese person is for him to pretend you're Chinese, too. That idea might make sense in the U.S., where for many—including many Chinese—assimilation is the goal. You can become American. But radical acceptance doesn't exist in China, I found, and to expect it is to misunderstand the place.

I try and articulate all this to Coach Chang. He looks at me through his tinted lenses. "You're white," he says. "Sorry." When he first moved to Japan, he had trouble being accepted. But once he spoke Japanese fluently and had lived there for a few years, he was just like everyone else. That's not going to happen for me, he says. No matter what you do, your accomplishments are always the numerator over the dominator of your foreignness.

There's a phrase among expats in China: LBH, or "loser back home." It refers to someone who gets undue attention here, particularly from Chinese women, but in his native country has no friends. When it comes to ping-pong, I'm the opposite: I was a winner back home. I left home in order to lose. Any self-help guru will tell you losing is instructive: It teaches patience and grace. It puts victory in context. It inspires greater effort next time. And while patience and grace may not be the first words that come to mind when I look back on a year of regular linguistic mishaps, irregular bathroom runs, and being out-ponged by people half my height (including 6-year-olds and 60-year-olds), these small failures have reacquainted me with both. They've also shown that sometimes, when facing long odds, it's not just OK to give up, it's important to. As Coach Deng said when I asked him if I had a chance at becoming a ping-pong champion: "Next life."

Vin Scully Remembers His Greatest Calls

On the second-to-last afternoon of his 61st season, I visited Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium to ask him for a favor. Dodger Stadium sits perched like a crown atop a bald head of asphalt, hovering there above Sunset and Echo Park and Chinatown. It affords a periphery-to-periphery look at downtown L.A., a view obscured only by a shower curtain of fog that had been burning off since noon. It was the first Saturday of last October, and the air was hot—it must've topped out at 95—and the stadium, lit up by a sort of perpetual weekend-morning light, seemed indifferent toward hosting late-season baseball. Elsewhere, the air was chilling—New York and Philadelphia and Minneapolis were gearing up for playoff baseball under marble countertop skies. But here, with nothing much on the line, it was the picture of summer dog days.

Yet readied for another day of work was Vin Scully, the no-contest hands-down greatest announcer in any sport of all time. I heard him coming before I fully registered his presence. The voice—in the form of pleasured chatter with the beat reporters and parking attendants—sort of led him around, its wafer-thin reverb shadowing whatever he said. Scully joined the franchise in 1950, calling games for the Dodgers over the radio and on television ever since. He followed the team from Brooklyn, introducing Angelenos to a game they'd never had the opportunity to treasure, and grew to serve as a sort of national paragon for the way sporting events could be verbally accounted. During 62 seasons with the Dodgers, Scully has witnessed firsthand an unfathomable enormity of baseball. But even if we eschew the taken-for-granted superlatives, it's still remarkable to plumb the depths of that enormity, and draw to the surface the moments that defined his career: Sandy Koufax's perfect game, Henry Aaron's record-breaker, the Bill Buckner blunder, Kirk Gibson, and so forth. They're moments that more or less serve as a highlight-reel of modern baseball. Just two weeks ago, Scully announced that he'd be returning for a 63rd season. Last October, he told me: "I think it's like a pretty good ball player who does things effortlessly—and then it becomes a little more difficult. And eventually he knows, I can't quite do it anymore. I haven't gotten to that stage, but I'm aware that that stage is really just around the corner. Kirk Gibson has teased me, 'You'll never leave. You're like an old player—they're gonna have to cut the uniform off of you.'"

In the press box cafeteria at Dodger Stadium, we grabbed some coffee. He dumped in more sugar than I'd expected, and I told him the favor I had in mind: that, amidst the twilight of his career, I hoped he'd recall the greatest baseball moments he'd seen up close. "That's a lot," he said—robin-egg eyes, that familiar swirl of ginger up top. "That can't be done." But then he proved it could.

Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard Round the World"*
October 3, 1951

The Call: Scully serves as an apprentice in the announcer's box to Dodgers' legends Red Barber and Connie Desmond; Thomson's walk-off homer ends the Dodgers' season and sends the Giants to the World Series (Don DeLillo would forever immortalize the game in his masterwork, Underworld.) *Scully wasn't at the mike for this one, but he witnessed the shot from the booth.

"Fortunately for me—and I say that without any false humility—I wasn't on the air for that game. That might have been an awful lot for a kid. I was only 23 at the time, and I was behind Red Barber and Connie Desmond. We had a wonderful relationship in the booth. Red was certainly a father figure, Connie was like an older brother, and I was the kid. So there we were broadcasting the game. The Polo Grounds was in a horseshoe form, and so was the press box. It was kind of a low-ceiling press box, so I was hunched over, leaning over Red—not touching him, but leaning, watching the home run.

Red had always said to me 'Never get close to the players, because it psychologically might alter your judgment. You don't want to criticize a good friend and then it makes your description less clear and honest.' Of all the fellas on the team—and I was virtually as young as most of them—Ralph Branca [who gave up the home run] was my closest friend. His wife-to-be was Ann Mulvey, and a couple of times I dated her roommate, and the four of us would just go out to dinner, that kind of thing. So I remember watching the home run, seeing Ralph, that big body just slump over and walk off. I knew where Ann was sitting, and I remember seeing her with a handkerchief up over her face. It was very hard. I remember going into the clubhouse. In the old Polo Grounds, you were in the press box behind home and the clubhouse was in centerfield; that's about 480 feet or so, and you walked on the field all the way across, and then you went up a flight of stairs—one to the Giants's side and one to the visitors. When I went up to ours, Ralph was spread-eagle on the stairs with his face down—there's a classic picture of that—and I looked, horrified, and I kind of tiptoed around him and went over into the trainer's room. Now, it was deathly quiet in our clubhouse, not a sound, but just across a very short hallway was the Giants clubhouse, and I mean, they were going wild! It's bad enough to lose, but to hear the guys who have just beaten you, it really added to the atmosphere. I remember Pee Wee Reese was sitting on a rubbing table—Jackie Robinson was on another—and they were both quiet. I came in and I sat over in the corner. All of a sudden Pee Wee said, 'You know Jackie, what's always amazed me?' And Jackie said, 'What Pee Wee?' And he said, 'After all these years that this game hasn't driven me crazy.' I'll always remember that. The impact was so great. The Dodgers were 13 and a half games in front in August and they wind up losing. So here I am, my first two years, and I've got so much heartache—not so much for me, I was kind of in shock—but for them, my friends, to see them all suffering so much. Wow. I guess I thought, 'I'll never see anything like that again.' "

1953 World Series, Game 1
September 30, 1953

The Call: At age 25, Scully becomes the youngest ever to call a World Series.

"There was a labor disagreement: Red felt that he had done a lot of World Series games and they were still paying—believe it or not—just $200 a game. So Red appealed, and they said, 'No that's what you're gonna get.' So he said, 'I'm not gonna do it.' Well out of the blue I got a phone call saying, 'We want you to do the World Series.' I thought, 'Well, whoa whoa whoa.' So I call Red and I said, 'Look, I've been doing this four years, I don't wanna do a World Series over your labor negotiation.' He said, 'Vinny, what's going on with me, it's not gonna change, and if you don't do it, they'll get somebody else to do it. So I'm giving you my blessing. Do it.'

So the morning of the first game—and they were all day games back then—I was living at home with my mother and father and sister. And for my mother, a typical Irish mother, breakfast was the most important meal of the day. So we had the whole thing—the orange juice, the bacon and eggs, the toast. Everything was fine, but when I went upstairs I threw everything up. Because I'd only ever done just a little tiny bit of television and all of a sudden I'm going to be working with the great [Yankees announcer] Mel Allen. Mel and I had been slight friends, but when I got to the park he said, 'I just talked to your boss'—that was Walter O'Malley—and Mel was kind enough to say this: 'Walter said to me, 'Mel, take care of my boy.'' Well that made me feel kind of extra warm and good, so I got through the World Series. That was really an impactful time, 1953. I was 25 years old. That's a big job for a kid."

Don Larsen's Perfect Game
1956 World Series, Game 5 (October 8, 1956)

The Call: Scully is at the mike for the first and only perfect game in World Series history.

"When Major League Baseball opened up its own channel, they began by showing the Larsen perfect game. Now, it was a Saturday afternoon. I was watching football and I knew at a certain hour that MLB network was going to come on and they were going to show that thing. I admit I thought, Well, Mel did the first half, so I'll wait a while. Eventually, I switched back and it was Mel doing the top of the 5th inning. Then he introduced me. I sat there, I was just so disappointed in the telecast. First of all, we didn't have the equipment that we have now, but more than that, the announcing was so dull. TV was vastly different than radio. In those days, you were intimidated by the cottage industry of television columnists. They loved to whack the announcers saying, 'They talked too much,' and so forth. When we got on the air doing that perfect game, what Mel did during that first half—and part of it must've been the baseball superstitions—he would say: 'That's the ninth man he's retired. That's the tenth man he's retired.' Today, I would say, 'He's pitching a no-hitter.' But not back then. By the time he got to the top of the fifth, you'd say 'And that's the 15th man he's retired.' Whoa, I'm thinking, The great Allen has laid it out for me. So I picked right up, 'That's the 16th man, that's the 18th, that's the 20th.' Today I would say, 'Call your friends, this fella is pitching a perfect game!' Anyway, it was just, 'Foul ball, ball two,' because we were intimidated by the idea we were talking too much. So I can't watch it. I was just so dull professionally, and so different from what I would've done under the same circumstances today. I've never watched it again. Never."

Sandy Koufax's Perfect Game
September 9, 1965

The Call: Scully's ninth inning has been described as not only among the best calls of all time, but among the best baseball writing of all time. Read it in its entirety here. Or alternatively, here's a taste.
"And you can almost taste the pressure now. Koufax lifted his cap, ran his fingers through his black hair, then pulled the cap back down, fussing at the bill. Krug must feel it too as he backs out, heaves a sigh, took off his helmet, put it back on and steps back up to the plate. ... Sandy back of the rubber, now toes it. All the boys in the bullpen straining to get a better look as they look through the wire fence in left field.... A lot of people in the ballpark now are starting to see the pitches with their hearts.... The time on the scoreboard is 9:44. The date, September the 9th, 1965, and Koufax working on veteran Harvey Kuenn.... Two and two to Harvey Kuenn, one strike away. Sandy into his windup, here's the pitch: Swung on and missed, a perfect game!... On the scoreboard in right field it is 9:46 p.m. in the City of the Angels, Los Angeles, California. And a crowd of 29,139 just sitting in to see the only pitcher in baseball history to hurl four no-hit, no-run games. He has done it four straight years, and now he caps it: On his fourth no-hitter he made it a perfect game. And Sandy Koufax, whose name will always remind you of strikeouts, did it with a flurry. He struck out the last six consecutive batters. So when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record books, that "K" stands out even more than the O-U-F-A-X."

"On radio, you're in your own little world. Every time I'd be doing a possible no-hitter—I think I've done something like 25 no-hitters and a couple of perfect games —I would always put the date on the tape. Not for me, but for the player, so that 25 or 30 years later when he's playing it for his kids or grandkids, you have that date. 'And so on this May 25th when he walks out to the mound...' Well, with Sandy, I'd already done that three times! And I'm thinking as the game is going on, 'cause Sandy was a good pal, and I'm thinking, What can I do to just make it a little special for Sandy? I came up with the idea—which is the worst idea in the whole world because it doesn't mean anything in baseball—I started putting the time on the tape. Well, I put it on just for Sandy, figuring he'd be sitting there with his grandchildren and he'd hear the exact same time: 'Strike two and it's 9:38.' When the game was over, the biggest impact in the city was that they thought it was the most dramatic, theatrical calling of a game they'd ever heard because I'd put the time on it. And it was purely for him, not for anybody else! Because as we all know time doesn't mean anything. In the old days sure, there were curfews and blue laws, but not anymore. That was just one of those nights, and I'll be honest, it was pretty well done on my part, but I lucked out. It's kinda like Sandy pitching a perfect game—everything has to happen and that particular night it was pretty good. It could've been another night where I was stepping on my tongue and all that stuff. I just always thought God helped me through that, and I'm glad for Sandy. That's all."

Henry Aaron's 715th Home Run
April 8, 1974

The Call: After permitting the crowd's cheers to shower the airwaves for several minutes, Scully returned to the microphone to weigh in on the magnitude of the feat.
"What a marvelous moment for baseball; what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia; what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron...And for the first time in a long time, that poker face of Aaron's shows the tremendous strain and relief of what it must have been like to live with for the past several months. It is over."

"We were in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and Al Downing was going to pitch for the Dodgers—left-hander, black, soft-spoken, beautiful guy. I put the nickname on him 'Gentleman Al' because there was something about him, and I used to say he might as well wear a bowler hat and carry an umbrella when he goes out to the mound. So Al was pitching... But let me lead in to the home run with another story first: When I was very small, when I was eight years old, I wrote a composition for the nuns saying I wanted to be a sports announcer. Nowadays that would be commonplace, but when I was eight years old, which was shortly after the discovery of fire, I wrote I wanted to be a sports announcer. Well, nobody ever thought about that. Boys wanted to be a fireman, policeman, soldier, whatever. The girls wanted to be ballet dancers and nurses. And here's this kid saying, 'I want to be a sports announcer.' The reason was, and I've told this a million times, but we had a big old radio in the apartment for my mother, father, sister and myself. The only thing we had was Saturday afternoon football games. I used to take a pillow and a little box of saltine crackers and a glass of milk, and I would crawl under the radio and put a pillow in there and my head was directly under the loudspeaker. It could've been Georgia-Georgia Tech or Alabama-Mississippi. And yet here's a kid from Washington Heights in New York, but that wasn't the important thing. I didn't know anything about the players, but when someone did something and the crowd roared, and that noise came down out of that speaker, it just washed all over my body. I got goosebumps. I'd think 'Oh would I love to be there.' And then I started thinking 'I'd love to be that fella doing that game.' And that's where it started. It just kept growing and growing, and finally it came to be.

And so the biggest thing, when the ball was hit, was that I got this tremendous rush of goosebumps for this marvelous accomplishment, and the place went bananas, I mean just crazy. So I didn't want to say anything; the crowd noise to me was like a symphony, and I took the headset off and I walked to the back of the booth. I stood back there and just watched it, and loved listening. There I was, the eight-year old boy—I was under the radio again, just listening to this crowd. When I came back again, I just said what I felt, and what I felt was that it was great for Henry and his family; it was great for the team and the city and the state. But eventually, my mind kept saying, This is bigger than that. This is huge. This is a great sociological thing because a black man is being honored in the Deep South. I mean you've got yourself a monumental moment. So all of that came out. That was it. When Henry hit the home run, I guarantee you that's the longest uninterrupted crowd noise, maybe in the history of sports because there was nothing else to say. Everybody tuning in knew where he was, what happened, what it meant. There was nothing else to say—just that roar of the crowd.

George Plimpton actually wrote a small book about Aaron and the chase. He came up to me the night of that game and said, 'Did you prepare anything to say on the home run?' I said 'Oh noooo.' And he said 'Why? Milo Hamilton said he had it all prepared.' I said 'No, I'd be frightened to do that.' He said 'Frightened? Why do you say that?' I said, 'Well, if I'm going to write it out, then I'm thinking, This is my priceless statement. And if you remember, George, it wasn't for sure; Buckner climbed the little fence and reached up. He didn't catch it but he could've caught it.' And George, not knowing anything about baseball, he said 'Is he good at that?' I said 'No George, no one's good at climbing a fence!'"

Kirk Gibson's Home Run
1988 World Series, Game 1 (October 15, 1988)

The Call: Scully relays the blow-by-blow of the bottom of the ninth, culminating with what he considers to be "the most theatrical home run" he's seen in his career. Check out a clip of the home run here.
"In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."

"If I categorized home runs that I've seen, without a doubt the monumental one is Henry's... but I've seen a lot of classic, great home runs. Gibson's was probably the most theatrical home run I've ever seen. In the ninth, after the outs were made, we went into commercial, so I talked to the truck, which I rarely do, and I said 'Fellas, when we come out of commercial, stay with me.' So the first shot out of commercial was the dirigible floating above, so I said, 'If you're here in the ballpark, and if you have a pair of binoculars, the first thing you'd do is look in the Dodger dugout'—and wham! there was a shot of the dugout. And I said, 'If you look the length of the dugout to see where Kirk Gibson is...'—and they panned the whole dugout—'...obviously, if he's not in the dugout, he's not gonna play tonight.' Meanwhile, Kirk is sitting in the dressing room, he's got bad legs, can't play. He's got two huge sacks of ice, one on each leg, and he's sitting there by himself looking at the TV monitor at that dramatic sweep of the dugout, and listening to my 'He won't play,' and all that stuff. It did something to him, and so he yells out, 'Bullshit Vinny!' and throws the ice down. And he said to the kid in the locker room, 'Tell Tommy [Lasorda] I'll be right down.' Now, as the inning progressed, we had Mike Davis up there—outfielder, aggressive hitter, didn't walk that much. But fate had it so that Mike walked, and while he's heading to first, the camera [snaps] takes a shot of the dugout, and I said something like, 'Guessss whooo's comin'...' And here he comes, with a bat as his cane, hobbling, and then of course, fouling off those little pitches, any one of which if stays fair he's dead 'cause he can't run, and I kept saying, almost praying, please don't let him strikeout. He's had such a great year that on this national stage, just let him hit a ball hard. So when he hits the home run, the whole building... from the empty dugout to the walk, to him suddenly using the bat as a cane... it was just the most theatrical home run. And the place went crazy. I don't know where it came from, but out came a line that later on I thought only could've come from The Boss. That line, 'In a year of the improbable, the impossible has happened'—which, I must admit, is a pretty good line—it just totally came out of nowhere. My heart, that's where it came from, and God helped me out."

Bill Buckner's Blunder
1986 World Series, Game 6 (October 25, 1986)

The Call: Scully deviates from his Dodgers duties to call the '86 World Series.
"A little roller up along first.... Behind the bag.... It gets through Buckner! Here comes [Ray] Knight, and the Mets win it!"

You know the story: the Red Sox and the Mets, and what looked like an easy ground ball... It was the shock of it, more than anything. You just don't expect a big leaguer to have it happen. Home runs are thrilling, but the shock of this little ground ball going through his legs, I don't know how else to describe it. It was a lightning bolt. That's probably what I would call it. Here the game is progressing nicely, and then suddenly: hit by lightning. When it was all over, I felt badly because Billy had played with the Dodgers. To this day, if I saw it I'd be startled. It's what makes this game so great, you just can't take anything for granted."

The Legend of the Crime Stopper

Aquille Carr strode into the gym two hours before Baltimore's Patterson High School took the floor for a fall league game at St. Frances Academy. All 5'6" of him. Patterson's point-guard phenom smiled as he climbed the bleachers, grabbing a seat beside Coach Harry Martin. Carr sits at #26 on the influential Rivals150 prospect rankings, and when asked about the recruiting process, he rattled off scholarship offers nonchalantly, like memorized moons of Jupiter for a quiz. The University of Maryland. Baylor. Kentucky. Out they came.

"I started playing basketball when I was four years old," Carr says. "When I was seven or eight, that's when I realized I had to take it seriously."

So much for a learning curve. Carr exudes an extraordinary charisma. His ego's been bolstered by a city fawning over his talent, and he's still very much a teenager, prone to immaturity and outbursts. But he's magnetic, whether dressed in Patterson blues or a plain black tee and slacks. Always smiling, his body continually exhibits a lightness, a positivity. It's no wonder the gym, relatively empty when I arrived, begins to fill up an hour before Patterson takes the floor.

In the fall league game—just an exhibition, though that didn't stop organizers from selling "courtside seats" for $15—Carr got off to a rough shooting start. But he flashed scintillating bursts of ability, both in his capacity to weave through the lane as well as bolt downcourt so quickly that expectant defenders couldn't react quickly enough to defend the basket. The only thing I can compare it to is watching shifty New Orleans Saints running back Darren Sproles, then a senior at my high school's conference rival Olathe North High, when he'd slalom into a secondary that knew he was coming, but couldn't twist their hips fast enough to drag him down. (Sproles has made a habit of this in the NFL, too.) Carr, who typically glides into the lane, head down and fearlessly flying into the trees, is rarely blocked—his shot was swatted just twice last year, by Coach Martin's estimation.

"He has a phenomenal way of angling his body and getting his shots up without anybody blocking him," Martin says. I can see what he means almost immediately. Defending is all about anticipation and reaction, and when you can't anticipate what someone is going to do, there's not much chance you'll be able to react to it.

Given that this was a fall league game, the refereeing was lackadaisical, more attentive to ensuring the game ran on schedule than to calling every violation, and Carr, a player who relies on getting to the stripe, didn't get many breaks. A staunch competitor with an impetuous streak, Carr became frustrated, which manifested in his play—scattered and reckless. Relaying this story to Oklahoma City Thunder superstar small forward Kevin Durant, whose Facebook fan page is where I first discovered Carr, he regarded it a familiar struggle, something you have to learn to cope with.

"You wanna win so much, but you don't want to look like you're not coachable or you don't respect the game," says Durant, who's considered one of the NBA's calmest players. "It happens, you lose your cool. Everything isn't going to go the right way."

Carr's learning about the right way this year. His team will play a national schedule, traveling up and down the East Coast to face some of the nation's top prep competition. Patterson is fully outfitted by Under Armour, and the night before I arrived in Baltimore, the Minnesota Timberwolves' newly drafted forward Derrick Williams and Milwaukee Bucks point guard Brandon Jennings shot a commercial for the brand at Patterson. (Jennings, apparently, paid a local barber hundreds of dollars to hang out in case he needed a touchup, a quirk that had the Patterson coaches snickering). This year's Patterson team includes Shakir Brown, a budding star who transferred to link up with Carr, and Leonard Livingston, an athletic 6'10'' prospect. Patterson, after years of non-contention, is now expected to make a run at the historic trifecta: a City Championship, a Regional Championship, and a State Championship. During a recent visit to Baltimore, a fall league game revealed a team just beginning to gel, hustling to prepare for a demanding travel schedule and high expectations, as well as the scrutiny that comes with increased exposure.

But amidst great expectations for its season, Patterson was taking a beating at the hands of rival St. Frances. Carr fumed. A whistle blew, and Carr, already frayed thanks to a number of no-calls on the other end, stomped back toward the foul stripe from under the basket, leering at the official. A family friend walked onto the floor to escort Carr to the locker room. It's unclear if he was officially ejected, but he was certainly asked to leave the game. Carr eventually returned to the bench, but not to the game, his head hung low, a towel draped over his neck, obscuring his face. After the game, a sullen-looking Patterson squad sat in a darkened hallway, still in their uniforms, looking a little lost, adrift as the team's coaches berated them.

"I let y'all do today your way," said Coach Darrick Oliver, father of backup point guard Dereck. "And look what happened. Now we're gonna do it my way." Theodoric Bell, one of Patterson's assistants during the regular season, followed Oliver. "Y'all are playing a national schedule this season! A national schedule."

The Patterson players sat together in silence, Aquille drooped over in a chair looking at his feet. It was the look of a team acknowledging just how much pressure was on them, and simultaneously realizing the potent, real threat of failure.

No one in Baltimore is quite sure when Aquille Carr became known as "The Crime Stopper."

Maybe it was during his freshman season, when he scored 39 points and dished 19 assists against powerhouse Lake Clifton and Josh Selby, the nation's top recruit.

Maybe it was that same season, when Carr dunked over Baltimore City College High's Nick Faust on a play that Baltimore Sun beatwriter Glenn Graham christened "The dunk heard 'round Baltimore." At the time, Faust was 6'3''. Carr was 5'5".

"He had very little help around him that first year," says Graham, a 20-year veteran at the Sun who's been on the basketball beat for the last four. "You were just thinking he was going to lay it up strong off of the backboard, but he just kept going and going. Before you know it, he slammed it. And it was just about the most incredible thing I've ever seen, as far as anything I've ever covered."

Maybe it was the 57 points he hung on Forest Park, the 11th-ranked team in the city last year, breaking a Patterson record that stood for 50 years. Carr hit seven threes in that game.

Or maybe it wasn't even on the basketball court. When Bell coached Carr in Pop Warner, Carr missed the first two games. But like Allen Iverson, another diminutive basketball talent with surprising football skills, missing a couple games didn't stop him from scoring 33 touchdowns that season.

Or, maybe it was the time a regional All-Star game was called with a minute and a half left after a spectacular play by Carr.

"He takes the ball down the right side and is getting a little physical with the guy who's guarding him, and he just crosses him over—the most ridiculous crossover I've ever seen—and the kid literally falls on the floor. [Carr] steps back and drains a long-range jumper," says Sun writer Matt Bracken, who runs the sports section's web site. "The place just erupts. And the guy at the scorer's table stands up and is like, 'That's it! I'm calling it.' There's time on the clock left and he was like, 'There's no topping that.'"

In the third season of HBO's byzantine crime drama The Wire, police officers accuse Police Chief Ervin Burrell of "juking the stats," essentially finding ways to manufacture statistics that would make crime appear to be decrease in the city to help crooked Mayor Royce get re-elected. Burrell could have used Aquille Carr. His singular nickname, The Crime Stopper, stems from the notion that so many people are coming out to the phenom's games that illegal activity in America's most infamously crime-ridden city pauses. It's a weighty name for an 18-year-old, but even Aquille's father, Alan, acknowledges that some of his son's biggest fans are, in fact, criminals.

"I know a lot of guys, a lot of guys that sell drugs," the elder Carr, 49, says. "A lot of them stop for two hours just to go see him play. There's a lot of guys that do that—that's why they named him that. He's just a well-liked kid."

While Aquille's dazzling floor game demands a kind of reverence — envision a small, agile guard pinballing around the floor on both ends, finishing drives with a jaw-dropping leap—he's already put together a staggering resumé for a player entering his junior year. After a freshman year that re-established dormant Patterson as a player in city hoops, Carr led the school to a City Championship, and then the state title game against North Point, where they lost 76–72. In a recent All-Star game, the Boost Mobile Elite 24 played in Venice, CA, a game he almost didn't play in due to some waffling from the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association, Carr posted a 21-point, 10-assist, 7-rebound performance that further established his big-game prowess.

You don't have to stay in Baltimore to hear a good Aquille Carr story. As the starting point guard for U.S.A. Basketball's U-19 team in an international tournament, Carr went for 45 points—he averaged an even 40 for the tourney in a gold-medal effort—and was carried off the court by Italian supporters, who like their heroes diminutive and fiery. Lottomatica Virtus Roma, the same team that signed Milwaukee Bucks point guard Brandon Jennings to a million-dollar deal out of high school, was rumored to have offered Carr a contract worth $750,000 this spring, when he was still a sophomore. (According to the Carrs, Lottomatica Virtus Roma's $750,000 offer is still on the table. Virtus Roma's manager, Bogdan Tanjevic, has denied this claim.)

But in a city that stakes its civic pride on its impressive roster of basketball stars, Aquille Carr isn't built physically like previous metro-area hoops legends Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant. He weighs 140 pounds. Though he's listed at 5'8'', locals know he measures in at least two inches shorter. His small stature has been an advantage at times; it's branded him an unlikely hero, a role Carr seems to relish.

"Whatever you say he can't do, he does," his father says. "He blocks it out. That's how Aquille takes a lot of stuff. He likes to be the underdog."

It's easy for both purists and casual fans to get behind Carr's game, which consists of blinding slashes to the bucket and deft, patient dribble breakdowns of a defense's weaknesses. He's a Wow player. Though many more in College Park or Lexington or Waco will be singing the Crime Stopper's praises, Baltimore has stood behind him as long as he's been playing, including men's league games where a not-yet-teenage Carr held his own against his father and his friends.

"When someone rises to the level that Carr has, [Baltimore's] basketball community, which is extremely tight-knit, completely rallies and gets behind that person," Bracken says. "I think certainly he's had a lot of support in that regard."

In fact, Carr has already won over many of the same players he looks up to—some dote on the pride of Baltimore.

"I first heard about him on Twitter, someone sent me a link about Carr and how good he was," says Brandon Jennings, who got to know from workouts at St. Frances Academy. "The things he does on the court are amazing for a player his size."

Durant, a long, rangy player, already sees the advantages—tangible and not—of Carr's size.

"When we were growing up we were surrounded by five projects," Bogues says. "It was a grind, it was tough. Everybody had that swagger going on in that city. Even as a kid, being my size, I had to just be among the rest of the guys. And that's where my attitude and my confidence and my ability to learn the game came from. In Baltimore, you gotta have that swagger. And that's what Aquille has."

Though Carr, as one might expect from a teenager fish-hooked from Phys Ed to talk to a reporter, was somewhat short with his responses when we talked, he was still cheerful and direct.

"People overlook me because I'm little," Carr says. "They'll be like, you can't do this, you can't do that. I just prove 'em wrong."

He comes from a tight family, which includes his older brother Alan Jr., a former football star at Lake Clifton, his sister Ashley, who just graduated from Towson University, and his parents, Alan Sr. and mother, Tammy. In an environment consisting of so many broken homes, the Carrs routinely hang together, hitting the movies, bowling, and dining out together on special occasions.

"Family means everything to him," Alan Sr. says. "All we got is us."

It's no coincidence that Baltimore has been a breeding ground for Division I basketball players—according to Martin, approximately 20 D-I players come out of the Baltimore metro area each year.

But it's not all love; since all players in Baltimore play with an edge hardened by the environment and high competitive level of city hoops, people in the community can also grow to resent Aquille's successes.

"Just coming out of that city prepares you for a lot of levels," Bogues says. "A kid walking around in that city, they think they're better than Aquille. That's the crazy thing about it. That's just how the attitude is around there."

In a sense, Carr is a sheltered player; while his family makes the final decision, all things recruitment or press-related are routed through Coach Martin. Though he coexists in this famously rough environment, he's built a functional mechanism around him that increases his odds of success. Given that trouble teems in many corners of Baltimore, common knowledge suggests that if you just keep your head down and focus on basketball, like so many others have done, you'll be able to break out of the city limits. Staying in Baltimore is still a risk, however; many top-tier recruits elect to spend a year or two at basketball prep-school powerhouses like New Hampshire's Brewster Academy (Baltimore's Will Barton, Selby's cousin, elected for this path and now stars at Memphis) or Virginia's Oak Hill Academy.

"A lot of people leaving the city altogether and going to prep school," Bracken says. "It's so extraordinarily rare for someone of his level to not only stay in Baltimore, but to stay at a public school that was completely off the radar before he got there."
The day after being tossed from the exhibition game, I met a photographer for a photo shoot on an outdoor court in Carr's neighborhood in East Baltimore—where it quickly became clear that the 18-year-old casts a long shadow. While preparing the lighting, a neighborhood kid approached and asked what was happening. When told about an Aquille Carr photo shoot, the kid's eyes went wide and he bolted home.

An hour later, in front of half the neighborhood, Carr showed up with a cluster of friends in a pair of Elite 24 shorts, smiling. Some of his friends sported matching "Most Wanted" tattoos. He immediately apologized for the kerfuffle at last night's game.

"I'm sorry that was the one you had to come to," he said, smiling.

The yard that day was packed with ballplayers on two freshly paved courts, thick triple rims adorning ivory squares of plaster that created a glare. A man holding a can of Steel Reserve walked down and commented on how great it was that these courts were here. "Think about what else these kids would be doing if there weren't these courts here," he said, before sauntering off.

Three Under Armour reps showed up with Patterson's new practice apparel, including custom gear printed up with "Crime Stopper" emblazoned on the front. His brother's attempts at merchandising—a gray hoodie with "Crime Stopper" on the front and a reproduction of one of Aquille's tattoos on the back—hung on a nearby chain-link fence. When Alan told him to put it on, Aquille feigned disgust. A few older guys from the neighborhood leaned on a fence near an embankment 10 feet above the courts; one yelled, "Don't forget where you came up, Aquille!" as Carr repeated crossover after crossover in front of the camera.

That unseasonably warm afternoon drove neighborhood teens across two full courts, and as the throngs packed the playground, the crowd grew restless. On the other court, a five-on-five game bounded up and down, the roster ranging from middle school might-bes to middle-aged never-was-es. One baller took a pull off a Swisher Sweet while receiving passes with his other hand, effortlessly balancing both.

Baltimore's legacy as a hoops city is permanently defined by a long line of undersized, supernaturally tough guards. Before Aquille came Juan Dixon, who took the University of Maryland to a national title. Before Dixon came Sam Cassell. Before Cassell came Muggsy Bogues, and before Bogues came Skip Wise, maybe the best of them all. But right now, Aquille Carr is the one who makes the city stop when he moves with the ball, a focal point in a town banking on his every move.

"He can break you down," says Durant. "He's small, but he can score on anybody. He has amazing athletic ability and he has heart. You gotta respect a player like that, no matter how small he is."

Though recently drafted Memphis Grizzlies guard and former Kansas star Josh Selby refuted the fact that Carr outscored him in their famous matchup—Selby should probably revisit that box score—he sees big things for a player that he refers to as his little brother.

"The first time I met Aquille he was probably 12. I said, that's a small version of me!" Selby says. "So I fell in love with the kid's game from there. He has the talent to play in the NBA. As long as he continues to grow I can't see how he's not lottery."

Muggsy Bogues, the beloved Baltimore-bred 5'3'' former Charlotte Hornets guard that Carr regularly cites as a player he looks up to, relates to the young player's circumstances.